Our forefathers, the Boomers, competed for social status the old fashioned way — bigger houses, fancier cars, trendier job titles, younger / hotter / tighter trophy wives, that kind of thing. When Gen X entered the workforce, we couldn’t compete with that, and not (just) because of Boomer narcissism; there were just too few of us. So we invented the “lifestyle striver” method of social competition. We made fun of the corporate ladder-climbers (anyone else remember “die yuppie scum” from the late 80s?) and embraced “authentic” experience.
That’s why everything was suddenly so Xxxtreeeeem!!! in the early 90s through the Naughts. We can’t afford to fly to Gstaad for a ski weekend, but we can buy a snowboard. Dad might be on Wife 3.0 at that point, and she’s younger than us, but our girlfriends — marriage is for squares — are so much more environmentally friendly. We can’t compete with their high-end clothes, so we’ll push for “business casual” in the office, homeless-casual in our personal lives (everyone can afford thrift store flannel). And so on.
The Millennials and Gen Z, lacking the wherewithal to do even that (what with the six figure college debt and all), invented the “persona striver” as their means of intra-group social competition. For the low low price of a smartphone and a data plan, you too can pretend to be The Most Interesting Persyn in the World online. I’m told there are entire subcultures online, “cottagecore” and the like, revolving around aping the style and mannerisms of prior eras. “Anonymous” seems to think that these kids are actually, physically doing this stuff — that the “cottagecore” lesbians really are moving into little houses on the prairie to bake bread by hand — but it’s obvious that’s not necessary, as this is an entirely online thing and Photoshop exists.
Either way, it’s sufficient for our purposes to note that the cost of entry keeps dropping, while the “totalization” (for lack of a better word) of the lifestyle keeps growing. An old-fashioned, conspicuous-consumption style striver was free to be an individual. Yeah, sure, they were all “yuppies”, but there were Protestant yuppies and Catholic yuppies (and atheist yuppies and everything in between). There were Liberal yuppies and Conservative yuppies (and Libertarian yuppies and everything in between). You might find the same few standard books on all their shelves — management meatball crap; the novels of Danielle Steele and Sydney Sheldon — the same way you’d find the same basic kinds of clothes in their closets, but there was still a lot of individual variety within those broad constraints. You could predict a few broad, superficial things about a yuppie from his business card, but there were no safe bets on anything else.
The lifestyle and persona strivers, on the other hand, are much more narrow. While the yuppie might go to Molokai this summer on vacation, next summer to Italy, because why not?, the lifestyle striver was pretty much trapped in his niche — it’s trail hiking or bust. And the persona striver can’t afford to go anywhere, so xzhey have to make up elaborate justifications for it (“by staying home and baking these muffins from an original 18th century recipe, I’m being completely carbon neutral”). It’s no accident, in the Marxist sense, that marathons and Crossfit and all that shit really took off after the turn of the century, as well as the whole “animal rescue” deal — it’s both a lifestyle and a persona, and it costs next to nothing, and you can, indeed must, do it all day every day.
Severian, “Striving for Revolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-11.
January 8, 2025
January 7, 2025
Justin Trudeau announces his resignation … and a nation rejoices!
Rather than letting Canadians have an election, Justin Trudeau announced that he is resigning as Liberal party leader but that Parliament will be prorogued for long enough for the Liberals to run a full leadership campaign. This means that Trudeau’s replacement will likely be prime minister for roughly as long as it takes for Parliament to come to order after prorogation and not a minute longer. Nice work, Justin!
Full credit to the Babylon Bee for their coverage:
It’s impossible not to feel that Trudeau’s ego has been the biggest player in our national psychodrama over the last few months (years, actually), as it seems inevitable that Trudeau’s hapless successor is going to be the Liberal Party’s version of former PM Kim Campbell, although probably not being reduced to a caucus of two seats in a landslide, as Campbell endured.
The Line‘s immediate response quite properly describes Trudeau as “an absolute Muppet”, and I think that’s pretty unkind … to Muppets:
There was only one major thought that crossed your Line editors’ minds when watching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation speech on the porch of Rideau Cottage on Monday morning: “Jesus Christ, the absolute self regard of this fucking Muppet.”
Yes, that’s harsh. We’re even almost sorry about it. And we’ll touch on the humanity of it all in a moment. But for now, like, gosh. This isn’t good.
We are well aware that much of the media will be replete with mopey paeans to the decade-long service of this prime minister, even as he announces his entirely hypocritical plan to prorogue Parliament until March 24 in order to enable his party to assemble a chaotic and hasty leadership race. You’ll get none of that from us here at The Line. Trudeau deserves no such consideration — at least not at the top. From where we sit today, the sheer arrogance of this man, and the party that has enabled him, has just locked the nation into months of parliamentary paralysis in the midst of what is likely to shortly become an economic trade war and a broader international geopolitical realignment.
While we fully expect news of Trudeau’s resignation to lead many of our readers to sound the bells, we share none of their relief. The decision he announced on Monday demonstrates a total lack of respect for voters, an utter disregard for the good of the nation, and a profound obliviousness to the realities of the international environment we are about to find ourselves in.
And while we’d like to give Trudeau some credit for demonstrating an ounce of genuine humility in his resignation speech, too much of it was crammed with statements of breathtaking, overweening egotism; he pegged his decision to leave squarely on internal divisions — a fantastic parting “fuck you” to his caucus that abrogates any attempt at accountability for his own policy or leadership failures.
Trudeau repeatedly justified his decision to ask for the house to be prorogued by noting that Parliament had become dysfunctional, the opposition parties had stalled business of the house on process questions, and the government was in need of a “reset”.
This blithely ignores a few points, including the fact that part of the reason Parliament has been stuck in a procedural quagmire is because Trudeau’s own government has refused to hand over a potentially incriminating dossier that may demonstrate thwacks of taxpayer cash being siphoned off to well-connected businesses and insiders via what the opposition has deemed a “green slush fund”.
This is a matter upon which the Commons’ Liberal speaker ruled against his own party. The Liberals could have stopped the pseudo-filibuster by turning over to Parliament the documents that they are required to turn over. They didn’t.
The very foundations of the Westminster parliamentary system are rooted in the concept of confidence: if you can’t maintain the confidence of the house, you cannot rule Parliament. Prorogation is a procedural tool intended to govern ordinary logistics. It should never be used to circumvent a matter of confidence — and while it was delicious to watch Trudeau squirm on this point during his resignation speech, defending Stephen Harper’s 2008 use of it in order to justify his own, the fact remains that both leaders have now set and affirmed a dangerous norm that undermines one of the foundational democratic concepts of our democracy and how it functions.
When a government finds itself this battered and unpopular, and when a long-serving leader has announced that he’ll step down, while prorogation may be legal, there’s only one politically and even morally right thing to do. There is only one way to “reset” parliament. Only one.
Call an election.
Paul Wells says “The Liberals give themselves three months to save the furniture”:
He was late as usual. He sounded sad. The wind blew his script away. He said more or less what you expected. When his time in office ends at the end of March, he’ll have been prime minister for a few months less than Stephen Harper was. His party has very little chance of recovering, but more than it had yesterday. It would have been so easy to pick his own time, maybe at the end of 2022, but apparently these decisions are hard to make.
Things happen fast. It’s been six weeks, Monday to Monday, since Donald Trump threatened 25-per-cent tariffs on everything Canadian. Three weeks since Chrystia Freeland resigned from cabinet. In two weeks Donald Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States. Justin Trudeau’s resignation is a pure product of this crisis.
I see a straight line from Trump’s Truth Social outburst of Nov. 25 to this week’s events. Trudeau’s circle once thought a second Trump victory would help them make the case against Pierre Poilievre. It’s fair to say the results are not up to their hopes. With Elon Musk continuing his hobby kibbitzing in the politics of countries around the world, Canada will now stand as a warning to governments elsewhere: Trump and his crew can take you down.
Having stalled until he ran out of options, Trudeau will now become incidental to events. There’s a lot going on. Wistful tribute speeches in the House of Commons will have to wait. The Trudeau succession will play out quickly, in four arenas at once: Parliament; the Liberal Party; the electorate; and Canada’s national security. Events in each venue will influence the others.
Some people accuse Trudeau of doubling the national debt during his time in office — from C$612B in 2015 to C$1.2 trillion currently — but as mathematically inclined commentators have noted, Trudeau also successfully engineered the decline of the value of the Canadian dollar so that the actual increase in national debt is less than 55%! Success!
At Spiked, Tom Slater bids farewell to “Canada’s first black prime minister”:
Yes, Justin Trudeau – the man who proved that in these topsy-turvy political times you can be a liberal and an authoritarian, and painfully woke while also having spent much of your youth in black face – has finally resigned.
The writing’s been on the wall for some time now. After historically low poll ratings, came the resignation before Christmas of his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, who clashed with Trudeau about how to tackle president-elect Donald Trump’s imperious threats of a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods. In the end, Justin jumped before he was pushed.
After almost a decade in power, he will step down as prime minister and Liberal leader as soon as a successor can be found. Polls suggest that, such is the hole he has left his party in, whoever replaces him will likely face a shellacking in the upcoming election.
Where did it all go wrong? When Trudeau took the reins of his nation back in 2015 – following in the footsteps of his father, Fide … sorry, Pierre – he rode on a wave of popular support and corporate-media swooning.
With the election of another pampered rich kid south of the border a year later, Trudeau was praised in the international media as the anti-Trump – progressive, pro-migration and drop-dead gorgeous, to boot!
Indeed, the next time an establishment scribe slurs Trump supporters as doe-eyed dolts dazzled by celebrity, point them in the direction of the gushing coverage of “hunky” Trudeau, who seemed to govern as if he was in a budget version of The West Wing.
Soon enough, he began carrying on like an unsubtle caricature of a cringe, establishment liberal, chiding women for saying “mankind”, instead of “peoplekind”, and declaring that he was insisting on a 50:50 male-to-female cabinet “because it’s 2015“.
Trudeau is the apotheosis of a hectoring style of politics that assumes voters are terrible bigots in need of lecturing, and women and minorities are perennial victims in need of his paternalistic assistance.
I’m frankly amazed it took the good people of Canada almost 10 years to wipe that smug look off his face.
January 6, 2025
The rape gangs in Britain were enabled and protected by “good people” who didn’t want to be accused of racism
Tom at The Last Ditch confesses his early complicity with the official culture of silence that protected and encouraged the exploitation of girls and young women in Britain for decades:
Everyone who ever participated in the leftist orthodoxy of identity-politics is to blame for the near-total impunity of the Muslim rape gangs in Britain. As I reported here, when I was a young solicitor in Nottingham, a police sergeant told me I was “part of the problem.” I had a choice between believing what he told me about “honour killings” in that city or preserving my good standing as an anti-racist liberal. I chose the latter. I feared my career prospects and social standing would be jeopardised (they would have been) if I accepted his honest account. I called a good man a racist (mentally equating him with the likes of Nick Griffin and recoiling in fear from the association) when he was just horrified (as any decent human should be) by young women being murdered.
In that moment, I very much was “part of the problem” and I am profoundly ashamed of that. It is fortunate that – unlike the politicians, local councillors, social-workers and police officers who should have brought the rape gangs or the “honour” killers to justice (or prevented both phenomena altogether) – I had no occasion ever to make any real life choices on the matter. I believe – faced with actual evidence – I would have made better ones, but the way I failed the good sergeant’s test that long-ago day in the early 1980s proves I would have wanted to look the other way, just as they actually did.
I am not still playing the stupid rainbows and unicorns game of cultural moral equivalence (still less the foul Critical Race Theory game of cultural moral hierarchy) when I make the point that the young white working class girls in our cities have not been the only victims of multiculturalism. Those murdered Muslim girls who (so the sergeant told me) had paraffin poured over them and were burned to death were victims too. It was racist to refuse to consider that their Muslim dads, uncles and brothers might murder them because of their primitive religious and cultural notions. It was racist for our authorities to treat Muslim men who gang-raped white girls differently than they would have treated others. It was racist to cover up these horrors in order to protect the myth – shamefully repeated just days ago in his annual Christmas message by His Majesty the King – that multiculturalism has been an overall benefit to Britain.
Some of us have been making these points as best we can for a long time. Many of us had given up, if we’re honest. It was clear that the official narrative that we were racists and that these stories were disinformation – a “moral panic” as Wikipedia puts it – was going to prevail. Until recently the key social media market of ideas – Twitter – was controlled by the Left and attempts to raise the issue were likely to be memory-holed by their private sector woke equivalent of Orwell’s MiniTru.
Miraculously, Elon Musk – a modern Edison, with plenty to occupy him besides our concerns about free speech – bought Twitter and (in one of history’s greatest acts of philanthropy) set it free at his own personal expense. He told advertisers who sought to maintain its old Newspeak regime to “go fuck themselves.” Miraculously he got involved in the issue not just in America (where the Constitution gives him some basis for hope) but in Britain too.
My British Constitution textbook at law school illustrated the supremacy of our Parliament by jokingly saying that it could – in law – make a man into a woman. Little did its authors know that dimwit politicians would later prove the educational point of their joke by making it real. Our constitution – as a result of centuries of struggle with the monarchy, which Parliament decisively won – can be summarised in just three words – “Parliament is supreme”
January 5, 2025
German democracy hanging by a thread after vicious attacks by Elon Musk
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
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”
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
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
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
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
History Hit
Published 9 Sept 2024Tristan 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
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”
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
The Critical Drinker
Published 17 Dec 2020Join 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
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 institutionMr 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”
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:
