Quotulatiousness

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”

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 21, 2024

German democracy tottering on the brink (again) after latest attack by Elon Musk!

Germany is, yet again, convulsed with political unrest as politicians react strongly to foreign interference in German affairs by … dun-dun-duuuuuun … Elon Musk:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

German democracy, which has existed undeterred since 1949 but is somehow always shaken to its foundations whenever anybody sings the wrong song or holds a televised debate with the wrong person, is once again on life support.

Christian Lindner, head of the market-liberal Free Democrats, did much to trigger the present catastrophe on 1 December, when said that the Free Republic should “dare more Milei and more Musk“. Because there is little distinction between praising Milei and Musk and demanding the return of National Socialism, there ensued a brief period of establishment hyperventilation.

Less than a week later, CDU chief and probable future German chancellor Friedrich Merz, did his part to denounce Lindner’s political wrongthink in a statement to Deutschlandfunk:

    So neither the Argentinian president nor, how shall I put it, the American entrepreneur Elon Musk – let’s put it plainly – are role models for German politics in my view. I don’t see where we can find similarities in German politics. What Christian Lindner meant will probably remain his secret.

The next day, Merz repeated the same denunciations, only more harshly, explaining to one of our extremely adult and far-sighted pantsuit talkshow hosts that “To be honest, I was completely appalled that Christian Lindner made that comparison“. Milei, Merz said, is “really trampling on the people there”.

Yesterday, all of this came to the notice of the (honestly rather tiresome) influencer Naomi Seibt, who posted a video statement to X rehearsing all of this old news to her largely American audience:

Elon Musk then brought down the hammer on the German democratic order, retweeting Seibt’s video and remarking that “Only the AfD can save Germany“.

Today a lot of very important and influential people got out of bed and took to their keyboards to denounce Musk’s election interference. His statement might be illegal, at any rate it is very likely fascist and certainly it is beyond the pale for an American to voice an opinion about German politics. Germans absolutely never, ever, utter the slightest word about American politics and certainly would never advance negative opinions about the American president in the middle of an election campaign. Our Foreign Office would never try to fact-check an American presidential debate! Our journalists would never depict President Donald Trump dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member or offering the Hitler salute or decapitating the Statue of Liberty! That’s just not done!

Like a great stream of green diarrhoea, the outrage is pouring fourth. Matthias Gebauer, who writes for Der Spiegel, observes that “Elon Musk … is openly promoting the AfD” and concludes that “Putin is not the only one who loves this party”. Erik Marquardt, head of the Green faction in the European Parliament, says that “The EU Commission and EU member states should no longer stand by and watch as billionaires misuse media and algorithms to influence elections and strengthen and normalise right-wing extremists”. This “is an attack on democracy”, and “has nothing to do with freedom of expression”. Dennis Radtke, CDU representative in the European Parliament, concludes that “Musk … is declaring war on democracy” and that “the man is a menace”. We are also under siege via “interference from Putin”; “the erosion of our democracy is being fuelled from both within and without”. Julian Röpcke, who writes for BILD, believes that “This is interference in the German election campaign by a tech billionaire who uses algorithms to decide what gets heard”. If Germany does not “respond with penalties, there will be no help for our eroding democracy”.

The Canadian Armed Forces are doing great on diversity … but not much else

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper reports on the amazing progress in anti-racist activism, diversity, equity, inclusion and — for all I know — drag queen story times in the officers’ messes but too bad about all the other stuff, eh?

A new report finds that while the Department of Defence is making steady progress on all its new “equity and diversity” goals, morale is plummeting and the Canadian military has reached new lows in terms of its ability to actually deploy forces.

For the first time, more than half of Canada’s naval and air fleets were marked as being unfit to “meet training and readiness requirements”, according to the military’s latest Departmental Results Report, published Tuesday.

Only 45.7 per cent of Royal Canadian Navy ships are fit to be used for “training and operations”, and the same is true for just 48.9 per cent of RCAF “aerospace fleets”.

And the figures weren’t much better in the army. The report wrote that the serviceability of Canadian Army equipment remained in a “persistent downward trend”, with army personnel forced to rely on “aging and increasingly obsolete fleets”.

One example was the BV 206, a tracked snow carrier that is ostensibly the main form of transportation at the Nunavut-based Arctic Training Centre. The vehicle now has an incredible 80 per cent failure rate, with the report saying that it can’t be safely used for “essential” tasks.

Morale is also hitting new lows. In a survey, just 30.4 per cent of military personnel said that the armed forces provide a “reasonable quality of life” — that’s far less than the official target of 85 per cent.

And among full-time personnel, just 53.5 per cent said they felt “positive” about their job.

Some of the few figures in the document that weren’t in decline were in the realm of “equity and diversity”.

The Canadian Armed Forces slightly increased the share of personnel who “self-identify as a visible minority” (from 11.1 per cent in 2023 to 12.2 per cent in 2024).

There was also a moderate uptick in the number of civilian employees “who self-identify as a woman” (from 42.4 to 43 per cent).

The report boasted of a new system of military promotions that does not “disadvantage the intersections of diverse groups of women, men and non-binary people”.

It also announced that “Gender Advisors” were now being routinely deployed on overseas operations, including on Operation Unifier, Canada’s mission to provide combat training to Ukrainian soldiers engaged in their ongoing war with Russia. “The Task Force Gender Advisor was involved in all aspects of this training mission”, it read.

December 20, 2024

Imagine if Chrystia Freeland had done as well as finance minister as she did emasculating the Prime Minister

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

I was no fan of Chystia Freeland but like Mitch Heimpel, I have to admire how artistically she sliced off the Prime Minister’s balls on her way out of cabinet:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in 2022.

One thing that is obvious from the former finance minister’s now infamous Monday morning letter is that she internalized the lessons of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau. If you do not immediately put out your version of your demotion or dismissal, it will be done through anonymous leaks to the Parliament Hill Toronto Star or CBC bureau. Ottawa will wonder what really happened. There will be murmurs and whispers about whether you were ever much of a “team player.”

[…]

She left no doubt about what happened, how it happened, or how she feels about it.

In doing so, she did something remarkable. She made it impossible for the PMO’s spinners and issues managers to put the prime minister out to address the media after her letter. He couldn’t answer for anything in the letter without having to answer for everything in the letter. Trudeau may be the most impressive communicator the Liberal party has produced since his father. And he was of no use to the PMO to try and counter Freeland’s narrative on Monday. He could only make matters worse. His one public appearance was in front of a big money Liberal fundraising event, with a pool camera. A bit like an Eastern-bloc gymnast performing before the East German judge.

Even when TIME magazine had him in full blackface, he still addressed the press from the plane. But not Monday.

Never in his almost 10 years as prime minister has Justin Trudeau had a day like that. Supposedly, nominally, the Liberal’s party’s best campaign and communications asset was rendered functionally useless to a television audience. To mix sports metaphors, she beat him in the paint. She drove the lane on him, and he could do nothing. And he did nothing. As of this writing, the prime minister has still not addressed either the media or the country, and is, in fact, cancelling previously scheduled interviews.

And then, Freeland went to the caucus meeting. Anything he wanted to say there, he had to say it to a crowd that could get her version by simply looking over to gauge her reaction. She sank a three pointer on him at the end of the day, just to prove she could.

We can debate her record as finance minister later. Lord knows I have my own qualms with it. But this isn’t about that. Everything else on Monday, the $62-billion deficit and the tanking loonie, are about that.

But her resignation was something unexpected. She bested Justin Trudeau in an air war. She didn’t just beat him, she ran him over. She silenced him.

She may have ended him. That much we still don’t know yet. But she ensured she won’t be remembered for either Disney+ or the “vibecession.”

The first line of her political history is now Chrystia’s Version. And we’ll remember it all too well.

The legacy “mainstream” media is not going to be replaced with a new monolithic competitor

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

Ted Gioia says the transition is almost complete and what used to be the mainstream is rapidly becoming a fringe to the new, much more chaotic mainstream:

Last week, a cable news pundit struggled to understand the new media landscape. So he sought advice from his teenage son.

He asked the youngster to name the most influential people in the world today.

Can you guess the names he picked?

Here’s what happened:

    I’m thinking to myself he’s going to say Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z.

    He says Kai Cenat, Adin Ross, Jynxzi, and Sketch. I don’t know who he is talking about.

    I said ‘What platforms are you on?’

    He said ‘I’m on Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.’

    I said ‘That sounds like you need to go to the hospital’.

    What are these platforms? I’m telling you guys, the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream …

    There are people out there that are getting 14 million streams. And we are on cable news getting one or two million.


This is the new reality. The future of media has arrived — but people above a certain age won’t even recognize the names.

Check out the list below of the most watched streamers in the US and Canada.

Jynxzi? Zackrawrr? Summit1g?

A few days ago, I’d have told you these are passwords, not people.

Now I know better. I’ve watched videos from each of these individuals—and it’s shocking how different they are from mainstream media fare.

Media empires are getting defeated, but not by their corporate competitors. They’re finding themselves replaced by a ragtag assortment of podcasters, pranksters, pundits, gamers, gadflies, and influencers.

Who would have believed these headlines just a few months ago?

December 19, 2024

Paul Wells – “I found myself telling La Presse, ‘”What the f—k?” has replaced “Hello” as the standard greeting in Ottawa since Monday'”

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

Paul Wells shares some thoughts on the unsettled waters of normally placid (if not catatonic) Ottawa in the wake of Chrystia Freeland’s dramatic resignation on Monday:

Image from Blazing Cat Fur

I want to write 5,000 words of narrative in the wake of Chrystia Freeland’s resignation, but we’re still in the middle of the story. Thoughts kind of pour out. I found myself telling La Presse, “‘What the f—k?’ has replaced ‘Hello’ as the standard greeting in Ottawa since Monday.” We’ll see whether they use that quote.

Here are some thoughts, from different angles. I don’t know whether Freeland’s resignation will blow over, the way Justin Trudeau’s last 20 messes did, because I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think Justin Trudeau hopes it’ll blow over. Because he always hopes it’ll blow over. I hear, as you do, rumours that the PM will resign.

[…]

I resist biography as an analytical tool. People outgrow their backgrounds all the time.

But just about everybody who follows politics has been wondering how Trudeau could fire his most loyal lieutenant by a Zoom call three days before he needed her to deliver a crucial fall economic statement. If the Globe‘s latest story is true, and he told her Mark Carney would take the job without knowing whether Carney will take the job, that’s even wilder. Who does that?

The short answer is, somebody who is used to getting his way. Then you look at Trudeau’s life and you think, why wouldn’t he expect to get his way?

The rich kid always knows the normies will cover for him. If he needs a ride, some kid with stars in his eyes will wave his keys and volunteer. If he’s hung over he can borrow the lecture notes. He shows up in racist makeup to yet another party — forcing every other person in the venue to decide how to respond — and once again nobody stands up to him or makes a fuss. Indeed, when the record of that behaviour threatens his political career decades later, there’ll be plenty of volunteers to criticize anyone who mentions the record, rather than criticizing the guy who acted like that.

He runs for the leadership of a national political party on a platform of “I’ll tell you what I stand for after I win”. He mentions carbon pricing precisely one time at his first national leaders’ debate. He dumps his electoral-reform promise at the first hurdle, and later, when asked about it, he blames the person who asks. He gaslights Canada’s first Indigenous attorney-general for months, but he is not particularly kinder to her replacement, who is ejected from Cabinet because, I don’t know, it’s Wednesday or whatever. He lets a 72-year-old man run for re-election and only after it’s over does he let the guy know he’s getting dumped from Cabinet.

He fires the Clerk of the Privy Council by news release while travelling.

In particular, if there’s anyone in the world he might have expected to tolerate the kind of high-handedness we’re hearing about Friday’s Zoom call, it’s Chrystia Freeland. Her eagerness to endorse him in the immediate aftermath of his latest cockup has been such a reliable feature of Canadian public life it’s devolved into a kind of shtick. SNC-Lavalin, 2019: “she has absolute confidence“. Blackface, six months later: “tremendous confidence“. WE Charity, 10 months after that: “The prime minister has my complete confidence“.

Perhaps only Jagmeet Singh has shown more confidence than Freeland, over the years, in Trudeau’s leadership. Given that record — and his own much longer record of taking advantage of others’ generosity — it’s not too much of a stretch to think that at some point he decided his deputy prime minister was just another easy mark.

Turns out that’s the kind of mistake he only needed to make once.

QotD: Replacing the outdated “left” and “right” with more accurate terms

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Keeping the simple spectrum approach of “Left” and “Right”, I’d divide the world into the fundamentally incompatible camps of “Theory” people and “Reality” people. We all know all about the Theory People, so just one quick example: J.B.S. Haldane. Indisputably a great scientist, and not just a great scientist, a great evolutionary biologist. If there’s anyone on this earth who should’ve been convinced, right down to the very marrow of his bones, that human beings are NOT blank slates, it was J.B.S. Haldane. And yet, he was a Marxist — and not just a Marxist, a really loopy one, even by the standards of the early 20th century.

It was guys like Haldane who caused Stove to write a great essay about “The Ishmael Effect”. He said something like (from memory) it’s a striking fact about powerful minds, that even though they know better than everyone else some fact about the physical world — the conservation of energy, say — their powerful minds cause them to get caught up in all the fascinating implications of their pet theory, such that they fail to see their pet theory requires energy not to be conserved. Thus (said Stove), a guy like Kant: After telling us that no human mind can access the Thing-in-Itself, he gives us four hundred pages of extremely detailed information about the Thing-in-Itself. Or Karl Marx, who was able to soar so far above his own economic class situation as to tell us, with oracular certainty, that no one is able to transcend the cognitive limits of his economic class situation. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that “the Ishmael Effect” pretty much IS 19th century philosophy … and thanks to entropy, 20th century politics, and now 21st century culture.

Such are the Theory People who, however many raw IQ points they have, will really see five lights if The Party tells them to, because The Party controls the Theory and the Theory is never wrong, facts be damned. Call them Rubashovs if you like (and are feeling literary), but let’s move on to the Reality People. If Rubashov is the ultimate Theory Person — marching willingly off to his destiny in the dreaded Lubyanka, because The Party requires it and The Party is never wrong — so the ultimate Reality Person is Niccolo Machiavelli.

Much hooey has been written about The Prince, that it’s ACK-shully a biting satire (you could call the Rubashovs’ junior varsity the ACK-shully kids), but Ol’ Nick meant every fucking word. Politics was a contact sport in his day — he picked the wrong side of a political dispute, and got the strappado for it. He knew exactly what he was talking about, and had the disjointed shoulders to prove it.

Machiavelli is often called a cynic, but just as everything in Clown World always turns out faker and gayer than the most jaded can imagine, so even the hardest-bitten cynic can’t touch Ol’ Nick. The Prince is beautifully written, but it’s one of the toughest reads you’ll ever have, because surely he can’t mean what he just wrote … he just can’t. But he does, and it’s true — that for example a man will more quickly get over the murder of his father than the loss of his patrimony. And you know it’s true, if only in the darkest watches of the night when you toss and turn in the coldest of cold sweats. There aren’t more than a handful of sentences in The Prince that won’t give you insomnia, if you really start thinking them through …

But just as (one hopes) even Rubashov would balk at shooting his children on The Party’s orders, so even Machiavelli marvels at the truth that no one is thoroughly, consciously evil, even when it’s in his obvious best interest to be. A man will always convince himself he’s doing good, even when he’s obviously, objectively doing the most heinous evil, and that — Nick implies — is the way to manage a tyrant. Even when doing X is the obviously advantageous thing to do, and doing Y is obviously disadvantageous, you can convince someone to do Y by changing the moral frame.

There’s obviously a spectrum here, which like all human behavior bends in on itself at the extremes. One imagines Rubashov, for instance, going through an “if only Comrade Stalin knew!” type thought process if The Party ordered him to shoot his infant children. Yes, The Party is never wrong … but even though Comrade Stalin IS The Party, The Party is, finally, the historical manifestation of a metaphysical necessity, and therefore, in the light of the Highest Truth, Comrade Stalin — though never wrong!! — is perhaps misinformed in this case … Just as Francesco Sforza or whomever balks at murdering those infants in their cribs, though it’s clearly the very best course of action, politically.

Rubashov vs. Machiavelli. That’s the best I can do.

Severian, “Mail / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-10.

December 18, 2024

Justin Trudeau at bay

However much you may dislike the man — and there’s just so much to dislike — it’s impossible to write him off no matter how bad the situation may look. In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains to non-Canadian audiences what has been going on in the Deranged Dominion lately:

Justin Trudeau’s government could be at the point of collapse. And a social media post from Donald Trump about tariffs may have set off the latest in a chain of dominoes for Canada’s prime minister.

On November 25, Trump posted on his platform Truth Social that, as one of his first executive orders, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders”. Four days later, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump for dinner. Although the content of their discussion has not been made public, Trump’s tariff threat may have landed a death blow to Trudeau’s cabinet.

On Monday morning, Trudeau’s most important ally — his number two, finance minister Chrystia Freeland — resigned in a fiery letter directed at her boss, which she posted on X.

“Our country today faces a grave challenge,” she wrote. “The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 percent tariffs. We need to take that threat extremely seriously.” She continued: “That means pushing back against ‘America First’ economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring”.

The same morning, Trudeau’s housing minister Sean Fraser also announced his departure, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. This brings the total number of cabinet members who’ve resigned under Trudeau in 2024 to nine. But a walkout from Freeland, his most trusted lieutenant, who was expected to release her fall economic statement Monday, is by far the biggest. That such a loyal servant who has worked for Trudeau since 2015 would resign so publicly shows just how deep the rot is these days. Freeland stood by the prime minister as his popularity began to tank in February 2022 when Canadian truckers protested his harsh Covid vaccine mandates. She even authorized the debanking of those protesters, freezing their bank accounts as a means of punishment [NR: with no legal authority, it must be noted].

Now, her resignation is feeding feverish speculation that the longtime progressive darling could finally be on his way out, amid his sinking popularity and the country’s economic slump. By Monday night, a prominent member of Trudeau’s Liberal Party, Anthony Housefather, went on TV to say the prime minister is “past his shelf life“.

The modern Furies

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Greek mythology, the Erinyes (the Furies) — euphemized as the Eumenides (the “Gracious ones”) were the goddesses of vengeance. You may dismiss the ancient Greeks and their beliefs, yet they often encapsulate hidden wisdom for those who know how to interpret their stories. Today, as Janice Fiamengo points out, we have no need for mythological Furies, as they’re frequently embodied in otherwise ordinary women:

The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies
Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862, in the Chrysler Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Feminist uproar over Trump’s election was easy to predict, and not long in coming. Within ten days of the election, Clara Jeffery wrote in Mother Jones that “Women are furious — in a Greek mythology sort of way“. Taking examples from TikTok, Jeffery chronicled abundant “sorrow, disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage”, which many women vowed to exorcise on men: “‘If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue‘”, she quoted one.

In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.

No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.

At least one group of women gathered physically in Wisconsin to shout their angst and anger at Lake Michigan, and there have already been tentative (though apparently less enthusiastic than formerly) plans for a revival of the anti-Trump Women’s March protests, in which women with vulgar placards and pink hats exhibited their “collective rage“.

Women’s rage is all the rage.

It is not enough, it seems, for these women to say that they are disappointed by Trump’s win, and certainly inadequate for them to state strong disagreement with his policies or style. Expressing evidence-based positions is the sort of thing a rational person would do, and significant groups of women appear increasingly uninterested in rational talk or behavior. Instead, they reach for the most extreme language, tone of voice, postures and actions to express what feminist journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called the “visceral” “body horror” produced by the Trump victory, including the “profound physical revulsion” Cosslett and many of her sisters allegedly feel simply as a result of seeing one of Trump’s tweets (talk about fragility!).

Like so many feminist pundits telling us of women’s “horror” and “fury“, the emphasis is squarely on feeling and the female body, as if to bypass the intellect and the will altogether. The idea some feminists once scorned — that women are less reasonable and self-controlled than men — seems to have become a feminist axiom.

December 17, 2024

The rejection-in-advance of Bovaer as a “climate-friendly” “solution” to the “problem” of climate change

At Watts Up With That?, Charles Rotter documents yet another imposed-from-above bright idea that consumers are already eager to reject:

When global elites and bureaucrats decide they must “fix” the world, the results often speak for themselves. Take the latest technocratic debacle: Bovaer, a feed additive designed to reduce methane emissions from cows, marketed as a “climate-friendly” solution. It’s now being shelved by Norwegian dairy producer Q-Meieriene after consumers flatly rejected its so-called “climate milk”.

This is more than a simple story of market rejection. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when governments, corporations, and globalists push policies and products that tamper with the food supply to address a problem that may not even exist.

The Quest to Solve a “Crisis”

Bovaer, developed by DSM-Firmenich, has been touted as a game-changer in the fight against methane emissions — a major target of climate policies. The additive is said to suppress a key enzyme in the cow’s digestive process, reducing methane emissions by up to 30%. Regulatory bodies in over 68 countries, including the EU, Australia, and the U.S., have approved its use.

But let’s step back for a moment. Why are we targeting cow burps and farts in the first place? Methane is indeed a greenhouse gas, but it’s also a short-lived one that breaks down in the atmosphere within about a decade. Moreover, cows and bison have been emitting methane for millennia without triggering apocalyptic climate shifts. Yet suddenly, livestock emissions are treated as a planetary emergency demanding immediate action.

This myopic focus on cow methane is a prime example of how climate zealotry warps priorities. Rather than addressing real and immediate issues — like the energy crises their own policies create — governments and globalists have decided to micromanage how your milk is produced, all to reduce emissions by an imperceptible fraction of a percentage point.

Consumer Rebellion

The backlash against Bovaer has been swift and fierce. In Norway, Q-Meieriene began using the additive in 2023, branding the resulting product as “climate milk”. The response? Consumers overwhelmingly rejected it, leaving supermarket shelves stocked with unsold cartons while Bovaer-free milk flew off the shelves.

Facing dismal sales, Q-Meieriene recently announced it would discontinue the use of Bovaer, stating:

This is not merely a marketing failure. It reflects a broader consumer revolt against the technocratic imposition of “solutions” no one asked for. People are increasingly skeptical of being told that their daily choices — what they eat, how they travel, how they heat their homes — must be sacrificed on the altar of climate orthodoxy.

Canada’s deputy prime minister heads for the exits

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

After being informed by Justin Trudeau that he no longer wanted her to be the finance minister on Friday, but still apparently expecting her to present the fall economic statement on Monday, Chrystia Freeland instead submitted her resignation from cabinet:

In the National Post, John Ivison calls it her “gangster move” against Trudeau:

Who saw Chrystia Freeland pulling a gun, after Justin Trudeau unsheathed a knife?

The finance minister is an unlikely champion of the Chicago Way, but she has just pulled off a coup that may end up toppling this government.

Just hours before she was due to give her fall economic statement, she quit.

Despite the widespread media speculation about a falling out between Freeland and Trudeau, it’s a good bet that no one was more surprised at the finance minister’s gangster move than the prime minister.

Her resignation letter was savage. She said that on Friday, Trudeau had told her he no longer wanted her as finance minister and offered her another job in cabinet.

She said that she concluded she had no option but to resign because she had lost the prime minister’s confidence.

The casus belli was the multi-billion-dollar affordability package that included a two-month GST holiday and mailing $250 cheques to nearly 19 million working Canadians.

As the National Post reported late Sunday, Freeland had already reversed the government’s position on the rebate cheques that would have cost an estimated $4.68 billion. One person with knowledge of the plans said that the measure will not be in the fiscal update but the government hopes to take another look in the new year, if it can find another party to support it.

Oh, and the financial update Freeland was still expected to deliver after being underbussed by Trudeau? It apparently did get released:

You can always count on the Babylon Bee to find the most accurate and tasteful way to present the news:

December 16, 2024

The academic battle over the legacy of the British Empire

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, India, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Washington Examiner, Yuan Yi Zhu reviews The Truth About Empire: Real histories of British Colonialism edited by Alan Lester:

… the story fitted awkwardly with the new dominant historical narrative in Britain, according to which the British Empire was an unequivocally evil institution whose lingering miasma still corrupts not only its former territories but also modern-day Britain.

When Kipling lamented, “What do they know of England, who only England know?” he was not being elegiac as much as describing a statistical fact. Contrary to modern caricatures, apart from episodic busts of enthusiasm, Britons were never very interested in their empire. At its Victorian peak, the great public controversies were more likely to be liturgical than imperial. In 1948, 51% of the British public could not name a single British colony; three years later, the figure had risen to 59%. Admittedly, this was after Indian independence, but it should not have been that hard. Proponents of the “imperial miasma” theory are right in saying that British people are woefully ignorant about their imperial past; but that was the case even when much of the world was colored red.

The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism is a collection of essays edited by Alan Lester, an academic at the University of Sussex who has been at the forefront of the cultural conflict over British imperialism on the “miasma” side — though, like all combatants, he denies being a participant. Indeed, one of the book’s declared aims is to show that its contributors are not engaged in cultural warring.

Their nemesis, whose name appears 376 times in this book (more often than the word “Britain”) is Nigel Biggar, a retired theologian and priest at the University of Oxford. In 2017, Biggar began a project to study the ethics of empire alongside John Darwin, a distinguished imperial historian. The now-familiar academic denunciations then came along, and Darwin, on the cusp of a quiet retirement, withdrew from the project.

Lester was not part of the initial assault on Biggar but has since then emerged as his most voluble critic. He disclaims any political aims, protesting that he and his colleagues are engaged in a purely scholarly enterprise, based on facts and the study of the evidence.

Yet some of Lester’s public interventions — he recently described a poll showing that British people are less proud of their history than before as an “encouraging sign” — are hard to square with this denial. Biggar, by contrast, is refreshingly honest that his aims are both intellectual and political. I must add that both men are serious scholars, which is perhaps why neither has been able to decisively bloody the other in their jousts.

[…]

“What about slavery?” asks Dubow’s Cambridge colleague Bronwen Everill. Unfortunately, her four pages, which read like a last-minute student essay, do not enlighten us. The most she can manage is to point to an 18th-century African monarch abolishing the slave trade as evidence that the British do not deserve any plaudits for their abolitionist efforts across the world, whose cost has been estimated at 1.8% of its gross domestic product over a period of 60 years.

Meanwhile, Abd al Qadir Kane, Everill’s abolitionist monarch, only objected to the enslavement of Muslims but not to slavery generally, his progressive reputation resting mainly on the misunderstandings of Thomas Clarkson, an overenthusiastic English abolitionist. (Either cleverly or lazily, Everill quotes Clarkson’s misleading account, thus avoiding the need to engage with the historiography on Islamic slavery in Africa.)

Everill’s central argument is that abolitionism allowed Britain to rove the world as a moral policeman and to overthrow rulers who refused to abolish slavery. It is never clear, however, why this was morally bad. If anything, Britain did not go far enough: Well into the 1960s, British representatives still manumitted slaves on an ad hoc basis in its Gulf protectorates, when the moral thing would have been to force their rulers to abolish slavery, at gunpoint if necessary.

December 15, 2024

QotD: Elite luxury beliefs – cultivated non-disgust

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

Then there is the acceptance of what can only be described as unconventional lifestyles. Gay rainbow gender-bending madness is one thing. It seems progressive. Sodomites used to get ten years of hard labour. Look how advanced we have become.

But now they’ve moved on to the kids. It is easy to believe a listless, drug-addled elite might indulge in sexual degeneracy just for the hell of it. But how do we explain kindergarten teachers teaching their pupils about pronouns? Doctors emotionally blackmailing parents by insisting that the alternative to mutilating their children is their suicides? Or civil servants quietly putting gender-neutral bathrooms in public spaces?

How do we explain any of this? How do we even explain the emergence of transgenderism at all? There have been transexuals and gender dysphorics throughout history. They were typically understood as an offshoot of homosexuality, the extreme end of the effeminacy spectrum, and a vanishingly small fraction of the population.

But the current contagion is unusual and is clearly artificial. Its scale can only be a result of active promotion. Much of that is accomplished via the media and fellow travellers who champion these activities. But it is helped along by a collection of other professionals, and any attempt to question it is met with energetic pushback.

It is apparent that much of this comes from on-high, a literal top-down initiative. In less than twenty years we have witnessed a journey that began with gay rights and now includes active promotion of sexual deviancy to children, none of it natural or wanted by the majority. There is lots of speculation as to why this may be, including the part it may play in a comprehensive depopulation agenda.

What is apparent is that the professional class who endorse and promote this perceive it as an exercise in tolerance.

The notion of tolerance has typically been invoked for the distasteful, a last line of defence when direct measures fail, not a behavioural response indicating sophistication.

We rely on tolerance for things we dislike but cannot avoid. We learn to tolerate a persistent whine from an air conditioning unit, a noisy neighbour, or a noxious smell. But our goal is always to remove the source of the problem. Tolerance is a stopgap only when more permanent solutions are absent.

Their belief that tolerance is a virtue is one of the greatest shortcomings of today’s chattering classes. It is exactly the kind of signal error that exemplifies the disconnect between globalist elites and their obedient cheerleaders. The mechanism here seems to be a kind of learned override to natural disgust or discomfort. When others then object to whatever letter they have just added to the LGBTQWERTY+ community on the basis that it can’t be healthy or normal to endorse this stuff, that learned response includes the flare of superiority at your obvious backwardness.

How satisfying it must feel to have your natural inclination toward superiority endorsed in this way. Like whole food vegans at a Medieval banquet, it must provide an irresistible sense of smugness to know that you are the one-eyed man in the rainbow-decked land of the blind, with the uneducated hopelessly lost in their backward understanding of the benefits of sexual liberation.

While elites and their public relations machine happily endorse this misplaced emphasis on tolerance, all evidence suggests the elites themselves are not tolerating anything, despite what their obedient minions may think. They really are indulging in the cocaine-fuelled all-star human sacrifice orgies for real because they are cosmically bored and rich.

They aren’t rising above intrinsic disgust responses, they have sexualized them. They seem to have fetishized everything we consider unacceptable. Trafficked kids, femboys, chicks with dicks, gangbangs, farmyard orgies, human sacrifice, the lot.

They may even experience a thrill in seeing just how far they can push public morality as many have suggested, and especially how far they can get otherwise normal middle-class people to champion deviancy and hedonism most cultures find distasteful enough to ban.

The excessive promotion of tolerance is a defence against unnatural practices bored elites are rumoured to engage in. The professional class, for all their faults, probably aren’t into human sacrifice or animal orgies. So their response is to elevate the importance of visible acceptance of alternative lifestyles, hence gay kids, castrated boys, invented genders and other absurdities they cannot possibly believe themselves, and all of it instantly conveyed to one’s peers with nothing more than a multicoloured flag.

To top it all when they see how normals react, those unmoved by inept calls to be more understanding about sexual abuse, when they see parents reach for the shotgun at the very idea of sexually mutilating children, they get to invoke the conjoined twin of their cultivated tolerance, namely artificial superiority. The deep belief that they see further than the yokels with their primitive instinct to actually protect the vulnerable and embrace some basic sense of public morality.

These absurd beliefs can be observed in our educated classes because they ostentatiously demonstrate tolerance and its newfound position as the supreme virtue of the post-Christian age, one of the most successful public relations campaigns ever run by elites.

Spaceman Spiff (guest-post) “Praying to Absent Gods”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2024-07-16.

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