Quotulatiousness

January 5, 2025

German democracy hanging by a thread after vicious attacks by Elon Musk

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

German politicians are growing ever more desperate as evildoers like Elon Musk continue to undermine the political stage by calling for antidemocratic things like free speech:

Alice Weidel, the federal leader of Germany’s “far-right” AfD, has approximately the same policy prescriptions as Donald Trump. Chiefly they are to return to the bourgeois habits that used to make free market states prosperous. But she subscribes to these in mainland Europe, which has been easily spooked since the Nazis offered policies that were not bourgeois.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” as the far-right poet, T. S. Eliot, wrote in Burnt Norton, now the better part of a century ago. (He was arguably plagiarizing the far-right German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.)

One could recommend that my readers look her up on YouBoob, or better search for print, and form their own opinion on this Frau Weidel. (Who speaks English, and Chinese, fluently.)

Compare her, for instance, to the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who rose to power as the prosecutor protecting Muslim “grooming gangs”, and now puts people in gaol who protest on behalf of their rape and murder victims. The idea that Mr Starmer should have a rôle in the government of a civilized country, is as absurd as the idea that the 14-year-old narcissist who has ruled Canada, or the 82-year-old senescent who has ruled the United States, are respectable members of the human race.

And closer to the scene of crisis, eugyppius reports on the latest Muskian outrage against peace-loving German politicians:

For days, the German establishment have been in an absolute uproar over Elon Musk’s profoundly antidemocratic election interference. You cannot turn on the television or open any newspaper without enduring all manner of wailing about the grave danger Musk poses to German democracy.

The naive and the simpleminded will say that all of this is crazy and that the Federal Republic has become an open-air insane asylum – a strange playground of political hysterics the likes of which the Western world has never seen before. That is because they don’t understand what’s at stake here. Musk did not just say the odd nice thing about Alternative für Deutschland, oh no. He also said various German politicians were fools and traitors, he called for resignations and he published an untoward newspaper editorial. It is amazing the German democracy has not yet collapsed in the face of this unrelenting campaign, and still the absolute madman shows no signs of stopping.

Elon Musk’s frontal assault on the German constitution began on 7 November, when he tweeted four antidemocratic words – “Olaf ist ein Narr” (“Olaf [Scholz] is a fool”) – in response to news that the German government had collapsed. Three days later, he tweeted the same thing about Green Economics Minister and chancellor candidate Robert Habeck, after Habeck gave a speech calling for widespread internet censorship.

Thereafter, all was quiet for a time. German democrats allowed themselves to hope these were but isolated indiscretions and that Musk would allow them to get back to their arcane business of promoting feminism abroad, changing the weather and eliminating “the extreme right”. Lamentably, the peace turned out to be a false one. Musk renewed his campaign against democracy with a vengeance on 20 December, tweeting in the wake of the Magdeburg Christmas market attack that “Scholz should resign immediately” and that he is an “incompetent fool”. That very same day, Musk tweeted for the first time that “Only the AfD can save Germany”, a sentiment he repeated also on 21 December and on 22 December, delighted at the nationwide freakout his casual remarks had incited.

In the course of this freakout, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier hinted darkly that “outside influence” constitutes “a danger for democracy”:

    Outside influence is a danger for democracy – whether it is covert, as was recently apparent in the elections in Romania, or open and blatant, as is currently being practised with particular intensity on the platform X. I strongly oppose all external attempts at influence. The decision on the election is made solely by the eligible citizens in Germany.

The indefatigable Naomi Seibt, who appears to be Musk’s primary informant about German politics, brought these remarks to the evil fascist billionaire’s attention, and he promptly responded that “Steinmeier is an anti-democratic tyrant”. Musk then delivered his coup-de-grace the next day, with an editorial in Welt am Sonntag – the most devastating piece of political prose that Germany has witnessed since Hitler penned Mein Kampf.

By my count, Musk may have directed as many as 700 words against the noble if surprisingly rickety edifice of German democracy – an assault few political systems could withstand. The self-appointed guardians of our liberal order accordingly declared a five-alarm fire, and they have betaken themselves to their keyboards to defend what remains of our free and eminently democratic political system, where anybody can say anything he likes and vote for any party he wishes, so long as what he likes and those for whom he votes have nothing to do with major political parties supported by millions of Germans like Alternative für Deutschland.

January 4, 2025

More on the “Boomers and Year Zero” thing

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

I sent the link I posted yesterday to Severian and asked for his reaction, saying that “Eric is three years older than me, so I’m on a cultural time-delay both for that and for not being American, but I still felt he was much more right than wrong here”. Sev’s thoughts as posted at FQ in the weekly mailbag post:

The upshot is that it isn’t the Boomers’ fault — they got tricked into it by Marxists, for whatever value of “it” is foremost in your mind, every time you’re tempted to say “OK, Boomer.”

I largely agree, with the caveat that “tricked” is a bit strong. There were conscious, indeed State-directed, attempts at outright cultural subversion — Raymond cites Yuri Bezmenov, and we’re all familiar with that. But there’s a limit to how much damage that kind of thing can do. What mostly happened, I think, circles back to that “excess calories” bit, above. That’s overly reductive — it’s a springboard for discussion, not a categorical statement — but the fact is, you need a certain baseline of physical security before Chesterton’s Fence becomes a thing. Or, as Confucius (or whoever) said, “The man with an empty belly has one problem, but the man with a full belly has a thousand”.

By 1960, at least in AINO, you had a critical mass of people who had never gone to bed hungry. Ever. And so it never crossed their minds that “going to bed hungry” is a thing people have to worry about. That had profound effects, that we’re still working through. It was never the case, ever, in the entire history of mankind, that the average person didn’t have to put some thought into where his next meal was coming from.

The entire human organism — physically, mentally, culturally — is oriented around the problem of caloric supply. Again, I acknowledge that’s overly reductive, but roll with me here: Our biochemistry has been profoundly fucked up by high fructose corn syrup, for the simple reason that a teaspoon of that shit has more, and more highly bioavailable, energy than an entire feast for our Paleolithic ancestors. At the risk of looking like a fool for using an engineering, especially an automotive, metaphor with this crowd, it’s like trying to run rocket fuel through a Model T.

You cannot blame the Boomers for fumbling a situation that has never before been seen, in the history of mankind.

And it’s even hard to blame them for not getting it, even now. One’s mental habits ossify, like one’s tastes, sometime in one’s twenties. It is very, very hard to break the conditioning of a lifetime, and it gets exponentially harder the older you get. I myself thought Ace of Normies was just crazy edgy — how can that maniac say these things?!? — when I first started reading him …

… back around 2004. That’s because I was in my 30s, which means my worldview was stuck a decade earlier. Even now, all my go-to cultural touchpoints are in the 1990s — Alanis, obviously, but pretty much all of them; the 21st century might as well not exist for me, culturally, if you go just by what I’ve written here. Which means that my own worldview tends to be kinda Boomerish, thanks to that weird telescoping effect TV had on the culture. The Boomers grew up watching TV, and then they made TV, such that you can ask anyone who was there — your typical college campus in 1994 was all but indistinguishable from a “liberal” campus in 1968 (your typical college campus in 1968 would’ve had sex-segregated dorms, a whole bunch of “married student housing”, and so on).

I got over it, obviously — and just as obviously tend to go a little overboard with my getting over it — but it takes tremendous effort. As I like to say, the Red Pill is really a suppository, usually administered by jackhammer. To expect a Donald Trump (born 1946), to say nothing of a million lesser lights, to fundamentally grok that it’s not 1968 anymore, is asking an awful lot. It is what it is.

January 3, 2025

The Boomers and “reset to Year Zero”

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

On Twit-, er, I mean “X”, ESR responds to a post from Devon Eriksen decrying the Baby Boomers for effectively destroying the culture of the postwar “American Dream”:

… I’m a late Boomer, born in ’57. I can dimly remember the day JFK was shot. I watched the moon landing. My teens and early twenties coincided with the 1970s. I was there for it all.

And even then, even in the 1970s, feeling a sense of subtle disintegration all around me, I already dimly grasped that we weren’t just falling. We were being pushed.

But I was very young then; I wouldn’t come to fully understand why, and by whom, for almost another 30 years

We Boomers didn’t burn down our heritage in a fit of thoughtless hedonism. I mean, we did some thoughtless hedonism, yeah, but that’s not where the real damage came from.

If you want to know where the damage came from, look up Yuri Bezmenov. Listen to him explain “demoralization” and the long game of Soviet culture-jamming against the West in general and the U.S. in particular.

Reset to year zero was a Marxist idea. It was part of a suite of memetic weapons, infectious propaganda bombs deployed against the social and cultural cohesion of the “main enemy”.

Often, they were successful in damaging us by leveraging not our vices but our virtues. Valorizing tolerance and liberality until they became helplessness in the face of more and more extreme forms of deviance was one of their attacks.

We didn’t fall on our own. We were pushed. The Boomer fault wasn’t that we were hedonists or nihilists, it’s that we didn’t have sufficient cultural immune defenses against what was being done to us.

Why that is exactly is a long sad story that I’m still not sure I completely understand. But I can hit some highlights.

One is that religion failed us. This is nobody’s fault and I don’t think it could have gone differently; it’s a failure that had been on the cards ever since the mechanistic worldview reached effective completion by Darwin. One of the things the Marxists did was work to accelerate the inevitable decay of religious authority.

Secular conservatives failed us, too. They had one job — just one job — which was to explain why all those Chesterton’s fences shouldn’t be torn down. They utterly flubbed that on all three levels of awareness, analysis, and persuasion. That could have gone differently.

It didn’t help that after the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 conservatives developed a severe case of cowardice about calling out Communist subversion.

That may have been their single greatest dereliction of duty. The result was that over the next 50 years Communist institutional capture of academia and other institutions went almost unopposed. Which is why today we struggle with “woke”.

Most of us Boomers weren’t wreckers, even by accident. Most of us were duped. It’s easy to say in hindsight we should have done better, but the enemy was very clever and determined.

Try not to judge us too harshly, kids. It’s nice to think that a later generation might have done better, but … I haven’t seen it happen yet.

January 2, 2025

QotD: Sincerity

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

“… in the ’90s, the human spirit was alive and free. And that’s the vibe that resonates with me.”

This is what the French call le horse pucky. If we may be so bold as to speak of “the human spirit” — which is pretty heavy for a column starting with a professional wrestler — the 90s killed it stone cold dead. The human spirit can flourish in the most awful situations, but one indispensable requirement is: Sincerity. You just can’t be snarky about the “Ode to Joy” or ironic about the Sistine Chapel. If you do, then there really is no difference between Beethoven and MC Funetik Spelyn, nothing to choose between Michelangelo and a dog turd on the sidewalk — someone placed them there intentionally, which is the only distinguishing characteristic of “art” possible in a world overrun by Postmodernists and Deconstructionists.

Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.

December 31, 2024

No matter what Poilievre does, it’s still Trudeau’s decision to stay or go

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

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has been doing a masterful job of staying on top of the Canadian news cycle even through the normally dormant holiday period, but he does not have a way to eject Justin Trudeau ahead of the inauguration of US President Donald Trump or for many weeks afterwards:

During a time of year when Canadian politics typically descend into a semi-coma, the Conservatives are leading an all-out drive to bring down the Liberal government before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a chance to save it.

Whatever they do, though, Trudeau continues to hold all the cards. The Tories can shame him, they can rally the opposition against him and they can call for the intervention of the Governor General. But – as per every available constitutional precedent – this only ends when Trudeau says it does.

Just before Christmas, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called on Governor General Mary Simon to recall Parliament before New Year’s Eve in order to hold a vote of non-confidence in the Liberal government.

When that didn’t work, the Conservatives announced an early recall of the Public Accounts Committee. It’s one of the more influential House of Commons committees headed by a Conservative, New Brunswick MP John Williamson, and it’s thus one of the only organs of state that the Conservatives can order back to work.

The committee obviously has no power to decide the Liberal government’s future, but the idea is to have them draft a shovel-ready non-confidence motion that can be fast-tracked to the House of Commons when it reconvenes on Jan. 27.

This campaign all makes political sense: Just as NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is finally signalling a willingness to bring down the Trudeau government, the Conservatives are hammering on him to actually make good on the pledge.

“Conservatives are now presenting the NDP with this first opportunity to bring down the Liberal Government and force an election,” reads a Friday statement outlining the Conservatives’ Public Accounts Committee plan.

But whatever else the Tories do between now and Jan. 27, Trudeau’s ability to head them off is virtually absolute.

There was never any realistic chance of Governor General Mary Simon calling Parliament back to work. And if Trudeau ultimately decides to prorogue Parliament past Jan. 27 to prevent a confidence vote, it’s extremely unlikely that she or any other occupant of Rideau Hall would stop him.

December 28, 2024

How the H1B visa argument follows an earlier political struggle

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

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, ESR points out that the arguments over US work permits for foreigners might well have been prefigured by the now-receding tide of attempts to gut the second amendment:

    alexandriabrown @alexthechick
    It is difficult to overstate how caustic this is to public debate and public acceptance of legislation. If you give us X, we will accept restriction Y is the basis of all compromise. When a party gets X on the basis of accepting Y, then immediately undermines Y, the deal is void.

This was part of a thread about H1B abuse, correctly pointing out that the companies who lobbied for H1B didn’t hold up their end of the deal, leaving many Americans feeling betrayed — especially tech workers who were fired in favor of an imported hire, then told their severance pay would be denied if they didn’t train their replacements.

I am, however, irresistibly reminded of another betrayal. One I’ve written about before — but maybe at least part of this story needs to be told again.

Today in the 21st century most of the American gun culture is bitterly, even fanatically opposed to more “gun control” laws, and howling for all of them clear back to the National Firearms Act of 1934 to be repealed. Donald Trump earned huge support with his promise to get national concealed-carry reciprocity pushed through Congress.

We weren’t always like that. Long ago, before 1990, many of us were less resistant to new gun control measures. Sometimes major gun-rights organizations would even help lawmakers draft legislative language.

(Yes, I was a gun owner then. So I’m not going by legends, but by lived experience.)

What changed?

The quid-quo-pros we were offered were many variations of “If you will accept this specific restriction X, we will stop pushing. We will stop trying to undermine your Second Amendment rights in general. Help us save the chilllldren!”

That promise was never kept. Gradually, we noticed this. It always turned out that the minority of angry suspicious people who said “This won’t be enough, they’ll come back for another bite!” were right.

Eventually, some documents leaked out of one of the major graboid organizations that revealed a conscious strategy of salami-slicing — instead of challenging gun rights directly, they intended to gradually make owning personal weapons less useful and more onerous until the culture around them collapsed.

So nowadays we’re pretty much all angry and suspicious. Even restrictions that do little harm and might be objectively reasonable (bump stocks, anyone?) touch off tsunamis of protest.

People offering us more “deals” (just give up this one little thing, mmmkay?) now have negative credibility.

Are you paying attention, Big Tech? (Particularly you, @elonmusk, and you, @VivekGRamaswamy.) Because you’re almost there, now. Too many people see that H1B has become an indentured-servitude fraud that victimizes both the workers it imports and the Americans it displaces.

You credibility isn’t as shot as the gun-banners’ yet. You still have some room for recovery on “high-skilled immigation” in general, but it’s decreasing.

Your smart move would be to sacrifice H1B so you can keep the O-1 “genius” visas. I advise you to take it, because if you dig in your heels I think you are likely to lose both.

And on the reason so many Americans have become angry about blatant and exploitive H1B visa abuse:

Today’s big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don’t want to pay competitive wages to Americans.

To be honest, I think both sides are making some sound points. But I’d rather focus on a different aspect of the problem.

When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn’t have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I’m a straight white male.

I also didn’t have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets.

It’s a bit much to complain that today’s American students won’t grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago. Nothing disincentivizes working your ass off to excel more than a justified belief that it’s futile.

Right now we’re in and everybody-loses situation. Employers aren’t getting the talent they desperately need, and talent is being wasted. That mismatch is the first problem that needs solving.

You want excellence? Fire the goddamn HR drones and the nepotists. Scrap DEI. Find all the underemployed white male STEM majors out there who gave up on what they really wanted to do because the hiring system repeatedly punched them in the face, and bring them in.

Don’t forget the part about paying competitive wages. This whole H-1B indentured-servitude thing? It stinks, and the stench pollutes your entire case for “high-skill” immigration. You might actually have a case, but until you clean up that mess Americans will be justified in dismissing it.

These measures should get you through the next five years or so, while the signal that straight white men are allowed to be in the game again propagates.

I’m not going to overclaim here. This will probably solve your need for top 10% coders and engineers, but not your need for the top 0.1%. For those you probably do have to recruit worldwide.

But if you stop overtly discriminating against the Americans who could fill your top 10% jobs, your talent problem will greatly ease. And you’ll no longer get huge political pushback from aggrieved MAGA types against measures that could solve the rest of it.

Doesn’t that seem like it’s worth a try?

December 26, 2024

Historian Reviews the Best and Worst Depictions of the Roman Empire in Film and TV

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

History Hit
Published 9 Sept 2024

Tristan Hughes, host of “The Ancients” podcast, reviews scenes from famous movies and TV shows set in the Roman period.

00:00 Intro
00:58 HBO Rome
12:54 The Last Legion
15:55 Monty Python’s Life of Brian
24:32 Centurion
31:40 Doctor Who
(more…)

QotD: The essence of journalism

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

Journalism is the craft of filling in the white bits between the advertisements.

It’s not a profession, it’s not a calling and it has no public purpose. Trial and error has shown that peeps out there just won’t go out and buy booklets of adverts. They won’t even pay all that much attention to free books of them stuffed through their letterboxes as local freesheets show.

In order to get people to see the piccies of fine cavalry twill trousers (an ad that has been running beside the Telegraph crossword for at least four decades), or to drool over offers of lushly organic bath salts, experience has indicated that someone needs to be employed to write about the footie – see that parrot bein’ sick? – or the weather – cloudy with a chance of meatballs – or the thespian who should only have been stepped out with – Meghan Steals Our Prince! – or you know what they’re doing with your money – Tax Rise Shocker! – to fill in the blanks between the commercial offers.

And that’s it. That’s what we do.

We can even prove this. The editorial line of absolutely every publication is one that follows the prejudices of its readers. When setting up a new one the big question is, well, who are we going to appeal to? Not what truths are we going to tell but who will look at the ads based upon the truths we decide to tell.

All that speaking truth to power, interrogation of structures and inequalities, that’s for the awards season. It has as much to do with reality as calling politicians statesmen – entirely irrelevant to the working day and something more suited to those dead.

Entirely true that journalism comes in flavours, even layers, styles and stratified along socioeconomic lines. But then so do restaurants come in manners that appeal to different audiences despite their output all ending up in the same place – the U-bend – some limited number of hours after consumption.

Journalism is simply entertainment that is, journalists just those who do so with words. There is a market for that truth-telling to power stuff, just as there is one for vegan meals. But they’re both limited to those who are entertained by such which is why Maccy D’s bestrides the world and the Mail and The Sun outsell Tribune, Counterpunch and Salon.

Tim Worstall, “The Grandiosity Of Modern Journalism”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-05-02.

December 25, 2024

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

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

Time:

“Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

Drinker’s Christmas Crackers – It’s a Wonderful Life

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

The Critical Drinker
Published 17 Dec 2020

Join me as I review what may be the ultimate Christmas movie — the 1946 classic starring James Stewart and Donna Reed … It’s a Wonderful Life.

December 24, 2024

QotD: The real hero of It’s A Wonderful Life

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

@BillyJingo
I get the feeling you’re the kind of guy who secretly rooted for Mr Potter.

@Iowahawkblog
George Bailey: whines for a public bailout of his grossly mismanaged financial institution

Mr Potter: reinvigorates boring small town by developing exciting nightlife district

David Burge (@Iowahawkblog), Twitter, 2022-11-16.

December 23, 2024

Mark Steyn – “…the German state’s message to voters is: It’s all your fault and nothing’s gonna change”

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

At SteynOnline, Mark discusses the media reactions to the terror attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg:

Say what you like about Germany but their crack police investigators are second to none:

    Prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens said on Saturday that the investigation was ongoing but suggested one potential motive for the attack “could have been disgruntlement with the way Saudi Arabian refugees are treated in Germany“.

Gotcha. So, two months before the federal election, the German state’s message to voters is: It’s all your fault and nothing’s gonna change. Nothing against the nine-year-old boy who’s dead or the four ladies – aged 75, 67, 52 and 45 – but that’s just the way it is. There will be a few empty chairs at the Christmas table, but diversity is our strength and a well-integrated psychiatrist driving a BMW is just the kind of high-skilled newcomer Mutti Merkel promised us. He could have gone to Canada or Ireland. To modify George W Bush, we need immigrants to do the jobs that Germans won’t do … like, er, psychiatry.

Are they putting this kind of bollocks in the Covid boosters? Not so long ago the most famous terrorist killer on the planet was a high-value German immigrant. At least a few readers I’ve had occasional email exchanges with over the decades may recall him flying through the window of their office building on a Tuesday morning in September: Mohammed Atta, the man who pulled off what they used to call “the day the world changed” … and a postgraduate student of the Hamburg Institute of Technology.

If you’ve been enjoying the expert class’s bewilderment at the citizenship and professional status of the perp, well, way back when, the grandparents of the current crop of media experts were all over the airwaves explaining why the real threat came from well-travelled middle-class westernised Muslims and that Mr Atta had become “radicalised” when he moved to Hamburg.

It certainly was “the day the world changed” — if by “changed” you mean accelerated Islamic migration to the west: Twenty years ago there were half-a-million Muslims in Canada; now there are two million. As to the “disgruntlement” of Saudis at the way they’re treated in the west, seventeen of Mohammed Atta’s accomplices were Saudi nationals who’d been admitted to flight school in America, where they told their instructors that they didn’t need to do the bit about learning how to land. Which raised not an eyebrow. To channel P G Wodehouse, few people have so much cause to be gruntled.

By the way, how did Mr Atta wind up at the Hamburg University of Technology? Because a nice tourist couple from Germany were visiting Cairo and, at a restaurant one night, struck up a conversation with Mohammed’s dad and said they ran an exchange programme for foreign students back in der Vaterland and would Mo like to come and live with them. Aw, that’s heart-warming. And, despite the three thousand deaths directly arising from that virtue-signalling, I’m sure they’d do it all over again.

In other words, this is where we came in: all the elements the cable experts profess to find “puzzling” we knew back on Day One of the soi-disant “War on Terror”. Even the allegedly newest wrinkle is not new:

“I am trying hard to think of a major national story in the MSM over the last few years that wasn’t a lie”

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

Chris Bray with a link-filled post about the modern malaise of western society:

We’re getting there. We can all see it, especially as it gets ready to die.

But a more and more widely shared diagnosis is still producing explanations that don’t quite fit together. Take some time over the holidays, or just over this weekend, to read two remarkable new essays that offer different explanations for the same sickness:

At Tablet, David Samuels describes the creation of a messaging system designed to advance untruth and herd people into compliance — and he discusses “Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above”. In this telling, the system of social manipulation is a party instrument. Democrats did it.

At the same time, on his Substack page, Lorenzo Warby has just posted a deeply argued essay concluding that “we in the West do not live in Party-States. We increasingly live in activist-network states.” In this formulation, our descent into a societal atmosphere of enforced untruth is distributed, not centralized — through “networks and (interactive) signalling”.

What you’ll find striking about these two essays is how much they overlap in description while offering different explanations. We live in an atmosphere of dishonesty and manipulation — an age of psychic warfare — but we’re not quite sure who to blame for it.

However it works, whatever force or system or personality is driving, the social illness caused by the cultural compliance exercise has been obvious for years. Samuels: “The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia.”

An argument against Obama did it is that the “it” is global, and more obviously horrible in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK, and nearing its grotesque apogee in Germany. The pandemic-era narrative enforcement efforts of people like Daniel Andrews, Jacinda Ardern, and Canadian Prime Minister Derek Zoolander surely make American commissars swoon with jealousy. Another argument against the claim that Obama created a new compliance system is the behavior of Václav Havel’s greengrocer, which suggests the use of new media tools for an old job.

An argument against socially guided networks that aren’t top-down party-state systems is the astonishing degree to which the US government is now known to have weaponized the corporate-state coordination of narrative control.

Trump’s second term – “The counterrevolution begins now”

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

A few weeks back in City Journal, Christopher Rufo provided a blueprint for President-elect Donald Trump’s second term with emphasis on “dewokification” of the executive branch:

The second election of Donald Trump, along with Republican victories in both houses of Congress, sets the stage in the United States for a confrontation between democracy, which depends on representative institutions to form a government, and the rule of unelected elites, which relies on claims of expertise to control the state.

Already, internal opposition to Trump is organizing within the federal agencies. CNN reports that Pentagon officials are discussing disobeying official policy. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has declared that he would refuse if Trump asked for his resignation. Some would like to see a reprise of the orchestrated counteractions against Trump, from the Russia collusion hoax to the Hunter Biden laptop censorship to the political prosecutions that led to his arrest and felony convictions.

The coming political confrontation is unusual because the specific antagonist is hard to identify. Trump is not contending against Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, or even the Democratic minority in Congress. Instead, the president-elect’s post-electoral opposition comes from inside the executive branch itself, in defiance of Article II of the Constitution, which opens with the unqualified statement: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”.

In recent years, phrases like “the deep state” have arisen in American political discourse to describe this phenomenon, in which administrators, bureaucrats, and unelected officials seem to wield a kind of power that we still lack appropriate language to describe. Part of the motivation is self-interest — bureaucrats want to protect their positions — but another is ideological: the federal government is steeped in left-wing race and gender ideology, and its adherents see Trump as an existential threat.

By rights, he should be. The incoming president has, under the Constitution, every right to bend the administration to his vision, which is contrary to the tenets of left-wing racialism. But those ideologies, which the Biden administration has entrenched through its “whole-of-government” diversity agenda, have long ruled the agencies that control the details of federal policymaking. Hence, the conflict: the president, who has formal authority, versus the ideological bureaucracy, which has real power.

At the end of his first term, Trump attempted to correct this problem through actions such as an executive order banning critical race theory in the federal government. The second Trump administration must go further and dedicate itself to a process that Vice President–elect J. D. Vance has described as “dewokeification”. This is the most urgent policy problem facing the administration, because without representative institutions and a restoration of constitutional authority, it is not possible to govern America.

The Trump administration has a unique opportunity to take decisive action on Day One, through executive orders that can serve as the opening salvo in a counterrevolution. The basic premise: the U.S. should strip left-wing racialism from the federal government and recommit the country to the principle of color-blind equality. Through an aggressive campaign, Trump and his cabinet can put an end to forms of discrimination disguised under the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and make government work again.

The process of ideological capture has taken decades. But the counterrevolution can, and must, quickly retake those institutions in the name of the people and reorient them toward the enduring principles of liberty and equality. Bureaucrats abusing the public trust to advance their own ideologies should be put on notice: they will be shut down, their departments abolished, and their employment terminated. The administration will work to rid America of this ideological corruption before it further rots our institutions, demoralizes our citizens, and renders the government totally incompetent.

The counterrevolution begins now.

December 22, 2024

“It’s a major award!”

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

We’ve been fans of the movie A Christmas Story for many years, but I hadn’t heard this particular detail from winery owner Martin Malivoire’s end-of-year newsletter:

The Legacy of the Lamp!

As you may already know, in the years before I put my name on a winery, my profession was related to the motion picture industry.

In a pursuit spanning forty years, I collaborated with many great people. Few were as rewarding to work with as the late Bob Clark.

He was a seasoned and visionary film director, and it was at Bob’s suggestion that I undertook an unlikely project, one whose memory became the most enduring of my pre-winery career: the leg lamp made famous by the holiday film, A Christmas Story.

Why do I say “unlikely”? My expertise was in Special Effects, which I designed and executed for motion pictures, television and stage. Frequently these were loud and dramatic; I engineered fires, explosions, crashes and the like. Prop-making was a little outside my usual practice, but I happily agreed to build this one for my friend.

With a jolly demeanor and a sly smile, Bob handed me a napkin, bearing a sketch of a flamboyant light fixture. The rest is history.

A suitably proportioned young woman was hastily recruited to model for a leg mold, which was no small task, as it required immersing her entire leg, from big toe to navel, in quick-setting plaster.

From the mold, we cast a series of translucent plastic lamps. Each had to be individually crafted to the specific requirements of a scene and uniquely, meticulously illuminated by our Director of Photography. Accordingly, not one of the fixtures was a complete, C.S.A. anointed, “plug-in, switch-on”, and as Ralphie reminisces, “bask in the soft glow of electric sex” lamp.

Nonetheless, the illusion was a success. The presence of the lamp brought elements of levity, the ridiculous, fantasy and nostalgia to the film, magnified by the Director himself. Bob, as narrator, gave his own warm voice to Ralphie’s childhood memories, and made them ours.

When production wrapped, the lamps had nowhere to go. I stored them in Toronto, and for years they adorned the windows of my studio. However, the film company still owned them and when I was told to dispose of these props, I complied, leaving nothing behind.

As movies go, A Christmas Story was what we call “a sleeper”. It drew modestly on release, but grew in popularity year after year, to join the ranks of modern Christmas Classics.

We did not foresee this, nor did we foresee that of all the images generated by this now-iconic movie, the leg lamp would become its most-remembered, most-cherished, and most-copied Christmas symbol, launching a huge industry of luminous celebrations and decorative reproductions.

If we had known … well, I’m certain I’m not the only one who would have rushed back to rescue those fishnet stocking-clad plastic leg lamps from a Cherry Street dumpster.

No, I do not receive any royalties, but it gives me pleasure to see how many folks today own a modern copy of our original creation.

If you’re among them, may it light this Christmas and many more to come … and if you don’t have a leg lamp of your own, I hope that by sharing this story I’ve left you with a smile.

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