Quotulatiousness

January 15, 2023

“Zoomers and Millennials are further to the left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving rightward as they age”

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

Andrew Sullivan on the significant leftward orientation of younger Millennials and Gen Z’ers which does not track to historical models of political belief:

“Millennials” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

It’s dawning on many on the political center and right that the current younger generation in America is not like previous younger generations. They’re immaturing with age. Zoomers and Millennials are further to the left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving rightward as they age. A recent, viral piece in the FT added a new spark to the conversation, arguing that if Millennials matured like previous generations, then by the age of 35, they

    should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history … millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.

And the key experiences, it seems to me, are: entering the job market in the wake of the financial crisis; being poorer than your parents when they were the same age; lacking access to affordable housing and childcare; growing up in a far more multiracial and multicultural world than anyone before them; seeing gay equality come to marriage and the military; experiencing the first black president and nearly the first woman; and the psychological and cultural impact of Trump and Brexit.

These are all 21st century phenomena — and simply not experienced by the generations immediately before them. Socially and culturally more diverse, the young are also understandably down on the catastrophic success of neoliberal economics. So of course they are going to be different. When it was their turn on the wealth escalator, it essentially stopped.

Sometimes we forget that these deep factors are what are most seriously in play. And the biggest mistake many of us on the center or right tend to make is assuming that all of the young’s stickier leftiness — especially the most irritating varieties of it — are entirely a function of woke brainwashing, and not related to genuinely unique challenges. A lot is — the indoctrination is real and relentless — but a lot isn’t. And it’s vital to distinguish the two.

The left’s advantage is that they have directly addressed this generation’s challenges, and the right simply hasn’t. The woke, however misguided, are addressing the inevitable cultural and social challenges of a majority-minority generation; and the socialists have long been addressing the soaring inequality that neoliberalism has created. Meanwhile, the right has too often ducked these substantive issues or rested on cheap culture-war populism as a diversionary response. I don’t believe that the young are inherently as left as they currently are. It’s just that the right hasn’t offered them an appealing enough alternative that is actually relevant to them.

That doesn’t mean cringe pandering. It means smarter policies. Some obvious options: encourage much more house-building with YIMBY-style deregulation; expand access to childcare for young, struggling families; tout entrepreneurial and scientific innovation to tackle climate change; expand maternity and paternity leave; redistribute wealth from the super-rich to working Americans to stabilize society and prevent capitalism from undoing itself; and, above all, celebrate a diverse society — and the unique individuals and interactions that make it so dynamic and life-giving.

January 14, 2023

QotD: What would it be like to always believe you’re right?

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

I think I’m starting to see it now. The weird disconnect between [progressives’] personal behavior and their collective behavior has always baffled me. We all had great fun with that journalist who called Barack Obama “sort of God”, but it was so funny, in part, because all Leftists present themselves as “sort of God” — I have never been so certain in my judgment, so secure in my righteousness, about anything as the typical Leftist is about everything. I’m pretty comfortable saying “I don’t know” when I really don’t know …

This is not because I’m such a humble guy. If anything, it’s the reverse — it’s because “being right” is such an important part of my self-concept that if I’m going to put my reputation on the line, I need to really BE right. And as we all know, 99% of being right comes from acknowledging all the times you were wrong. Admitting I don’t know when I really don’t know is painless. Admitting I was wrong when I thought I was right stings, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as my own inner self-knowledge of being wrong. That really stings, and so I’d rather take the pain of admitting I was wrong any number of times to the much greater pain of actually being wrong on something fundamental.

To the Leftist, none of that computes. They’re always right. About everything. They literally can’t be wrong. And if what they were right about yesterday is 180 degrees from what they’re right about today, well, that’s just Reality reconfiguring itself. The Earth is stable; it’s the sun and stars that are moving around it. And if that leaves you with deferents and epicycles and retrograde motion and all that, well, so be it. See above, re: the physical impossibility of them being wrong …

… at least as individuals. But get them in a group, and all of a sudden a whole roomful of sort-of-Gods turns into a persecuted minority, even when everyone in the group agrees with everyone else. Even when the group, collectively, controls everything. If you think it’s bad in politics, y’all, go to a faculty meeting at the nearest college. To hear them tell it, the wolf is always at the door. Donald Trump and his jackbooted stormtroopers really are lurking behind every bush, waiting to jump out and pour bleach on them while yelling “This is MAGA country, bitch!” They’re afraid of their own students, because they just know those kids are out there thinking Unapproved Thoughts, and somehow those Unapproved Thoughts can physically harm them … even though they control the grade book, and can — and of course do — punish Unapproved Thought with extreme prejudice.

[…]

If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the answer might be as simple as: They can’t abstract, so they’re literally physically incapable of Reality-testing their heuristics. The Experts have given them the TORAH (that’s The One Right Answer, H8rz!), and since they can only evaluate individual cases as they come into view — they can only micro-focus on each parked car in the lot, to return to the earlier metaphor — they can’t draw the really-obvious-to-non-autists conclusion that they are not a persecuted minority, but in fact control everything.

Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.

January 13, 2023

“Forced teaming”

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay provides us with our new term of the week:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

I learned a new term this week: “Forced teaming“. It describes what happens when a group of people — say, gay men and lesbian women — are forbidden from breaking ranks with some larger constituency, such as (in this case) the LGBT movement.

The example I’m discussing here is one that Quillette writers have been exploring for several years now. As author Allan Stratton noted last year, the central ideological fixation of many transgender-rights activists is the negation of biological sex as a meaningful marker of human identity. The true source of sexual attraction, they will insist, isn’t the reality of sexed male and female bodies; but rather an abstract gender spirit lodged within our souls, which somehow broadcasts itself in a way that prospective romantic partners are able to sense and interpret. As Stratton notes, this mythology isn’t just flagrantly wrong. It’s also homophobic to such extent that it denies the sexually defined nature of gay identity. Moreover, this homophobic element can’t be excised from gender ideology without fatally undercutting the (typically unspoken) mission of many biologically male trans activists, since giving up this claim “would be to admit that a lesbian isn’t going to be attracted to a male body, no matter how many times she is assured that the body in question belongs to someone who identifies as a woman.”

On Wednesday, Montreal-based Substacker Eliza Mondegreen provided an eyewitness report that helps illustrate what the “forced teaming” of ideologically non-compliant LGB men and women now looks like. The Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (CHRLP) at McGill University had planned to host a January 9th talk about the tension between sex and gender identity, to be delivered by Robert Wintemute, a professor of Human Rights Law at King’s College London. According to the event page, he was to discuss “whether or not the law should be changed to make it easier for a transgender individual to change their legal sex from their birth sex, and about exceptional situations, such as women-only spaces and sports, in which the individual’s birth sex should take priority over their gender identity, regardless of their legal sex.”

Though Wintemute seems the furthest thing from a bigot (or even a conservative), he is loathed by many trans activists due to what they see as an act of unforgivable apostasy. In 2006, Wintemute co-authored something called the “Yogyakarta Principles“, an international manifesto demanding that unfettered self-identification be recognized as the one and only means of distinguishing men from women. But he later recanted, declaring that “a key factor in my change of opinion has been listening to women”. Needless to say, many of Wintemute’s former activist friends then began treating him like Lord Voldemort. And Montreal’s Gazette newspaper, echoing such denunciations, darkly warned readers that the visiting human-rights professor had “ties to LGB Alliance, an advocacy group described by various LGBTQ2+ organizations and activists as a transphobic hate group”. (In truth, the LGB Alliance is simply a British charity that, as its name suggests, signal-boosts lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals who believe that the interests of L, G, and B are now sometimes at cross-purposes with T.)

British feminists, who by now are well used to progressive mobs shutting down speaking events in the name of trans solidarity, may guess the rough contours of what happened next. A self-described “transfeminist sapphic activist” named Celeste Trianon compared Wintemute to a “cannibal”, and announced a protest, suggesting that followers should “bring out the pitchforks”.

QotD: Hillary Clinton

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

Misogyny played no significant role whatever in Hillary Clinton’s two defeats as a presidential candidate. This claim is such a crock! What a gross exploitation of feminism — in the service of an unaccomplished woman whose entire career was spent attached to her husband’s coat tails. Hillary was handed job after job but produced no tangible results in any of them — except of course for her destabilization of North Africa during her rocky tenure as secretary of state. And for all her lip service to women and children, what program serving their needs did Hillary ever conceive and promote? She routinely signed on to other people’s programs or legislative bills but spent the bulk of her time in fundraising and networking for her own personal ambitions. Beyond that, I fail to see how authentic feminism can ever be ascribed to a woman who turned a blind eye to the victims of her husband’s serial abuse and workplace seductions. The hypocrisy of feminist leaders was on full display during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which incontrovertibly demonstrated Bill Clinton’s gross violation of basic sexual harassment policy. Although I had voted for him twice, I was the only feminist at the time who publicly condemned Clinton for his squalid and unethical behavior with an intern whose life (it is now clear) he ruined. Gloria Steinem’s slick casuistry during that shocking episode did severe damage to feminism, from which it has never fully recovered.

Camille Paglia, “Prominent Democratic Feminist Camille Paglia Says Hillary Clinton ‘Exploits Feminism’”, Washington Free Beacon, 2017-05-15.

January 12, 2023

How the New York Times describes the Congressional Republican dissidents

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

It’s not the news, it’s the substitution of opinion for reporting:

Here’s the political journalist Mara Gay — currently of the New York Times, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic — explaining what the twenty Republican holdouts were up to in their maneuvering over the selection of a Speaker of the House:

It’s leftie Twitter in human form, with all of the slogans. Angry, hateful voters, disturbed by “diversity”, sent some dumb atavists to represent them in D.C., because they hate government and want to “burn it to the ground”. (“And really, that’s what these people were sent to do.”)

Time magazine, which apparently still exists, comes to much the same conclusion, in a piece that I tragically can’t read in full without creating an account, which I wouldn’t do for a free steak dinner or a blanket future pardon from the governor of my choice:

So the twenty GOP holdouts hate government and want to sow chaos and burn democratic norms to the ground, mainstream political journalists calmly explain. Now, via RedState, here’s a letter from seven of the holdouts listing their actual demands as conditions for their vote. Sample demand:

So the monsters who hate government and want to burn it all down were demanding clearly written legislation that every legislator has time to read and fully debate before casting their vote on it.

    Subject of Journalism: We want bills that are focused and readable

    Journalist: They want to destroy all government because of racism

It’s not even sort of an interpretation or an argument about the thing being discussed — it’s just a wholesale invention, completely severed from the thing that’s allegedly being analyzed. It’s like you ordered a tuna melt, so the waitress broke into your house and mailed your couch to Finland. “There’s your tuna melt,” she says, handing you the receipt from the post office. It’s so aggressive a non-sequitur that it would usually suggest the need for a neurology consult. Have you recently suffered a serious fall, Ms. Gay? Have you experienced dizziness or unexplained nause— oh, wait, I see from your chart that you’re just a political journalist.

QotD: Describing the CBC to Americans

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

    an audience of any size has yet to be found

So far so CBC, then.

I’m not sure how to describe the CBC to American viewers. The BBC routinely produces content that’s quite entertaining (deliberately, I mean) so it’s not a good analogy. I suppose the best analog would be if NPR and PBS merged and were run by the CPUSA with $20 billion dollars of taxpayer money, and still managed to produce nothing anyone wanted to watch.

Daniel Ream, commenting on David Thompson, “The Giant Testicles Told Me”, DavidThompson, 2022-10-10.

January 11, 2023

“The PM and the public safety minister were lying to the public. That should matter.”

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

The editors of The Line regretfully return from holidays to start a new year, and the federal government’s gun confiscation bill (not called that, of course) gets both barrels:

The first item worth mentioning: remember how back in November and December the prime minister and the public safety minister, Messrs. Trudeau and Mendicino, were dismissing any suggestion that they were banning hunting rifles as hype? Or Conservation misinformation? When they were saying that the suggestions were false, and those making them were sowing confusion?

Well! Funny thing happened over the break. The PM, in his year-end interviews, is now admitting that the suggestions were, in fact, right. 

Take this, for example, from his sit down with CTV News (our emphasis added): 

    “Our focus now is on saying okay, there are some guns, yes, that we’re going to have to take away from people who were using them to hunt,” Trudeau said. “But, we’re going to also make sure that you’re able to buy other guns from a long list of guns that are accepted that are fine for hunting, whether it’s rifles or shotguns. We’re not going at the right to hunt in this country. We are going at some of the guns used to do it that are too dangerous in other contexts.”

We’ll skip much analysis here. We think this is dumb policy, and we’ve explained why before, but it’s at least an acknowledgement of what their policy actually is, and very obviously was since the very time it was announced back in November. There’s no room for any confusion or doubt here. The Liberals spent weeks crying LIES! and MISINFORMATION! at people who were accurately describing what they were doing.

You can support the policy being proposed — again, we don’t, but that’s fine — but you can’t excuse this. The PM and the public safety minister were lying to the public. That should matter.

We’ll have more to say on this later. But for now, that’s the update: The Liberals now admit they’re trying to do the dumb thing they spent weeks insisting they weren’t doing.

This is, incredibly, a kind of progress.

Related somewhat to the above: a smart friend of The Line, who cannot be named as this stuff is their day job, told us weeks ago to watch for a schism in the NDP over this issue. For the Liberals, their dumb policy proposal still makes political sense. Well, it probably does — we have some suspicion that the LPC has maxed out the electoral utility of hammering on guns, and may now face more blowback than benefit, but time will tell. Still, the proposal may make sense for the Liberals: they are utterly dependent on urban and suburban women to survive, and the dumb gun proposal apparently resonates with them. And that’s true for part of the NDP’s base, too, but, critically, our friend reminded us, not for all of it.

The federal NDP of today is a strange creature. It’s partly very much a party of the deepest, wokest downtown ridings, but there’s also a big contingent of Dipper MPs from places like northern Ontario and rural parts of Manitoba and British Columbia. Cracking down on guns just plays differently there. When the policy was first announced, this division among NDP MPs didn’t take long to come into public view. Jagmeet Singh, himself very much of the NDP’s woke urban contingent, was quiet for a few days before very clearly and obviously pivoting to oppose the proposed expansion of the banned firearms. The Liberals can afford to write off their last remaining rural, non-urban MPs. The NDP simply can’t.

And, our friend told us — again, this was weeks ago, right at the outset — if Singh didn’t get the message pronto, the party would fracture over this … and that Wab Kinew, leader of the Manitoba NDP, would be the leader of the rebels.

We aren’t experts on Kinew, or in internal NDP power dynamics, so we simply thanked our friend for the tip and analysis, and assured them we’d keep an eye on it. And we did.

And wouldja look at that.

Interesting, eh?

Anyway. As of now the Liberals are still talking tough on the amendment. But they need at least one party to work with them to push it forward. We can’t say for sure, but we wonder if the Liberals are comfortable talking tough about it because they now accept they can’t push it forward — at least not any time soon. The Bloc seems wary of getting saddled with this and the NDP, indeed, might split over this issue if Singh were to try.

So we’ll keep watching this, and particularly Mr. Kinew, who may indeed covet Mr. Singh’s job.

To our friend: you were right. Thanks for the tip.

“[T]o the ordinary American, those values [diversity, equity, and inclusion] sound virtuous and unobjectionable”

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

John Sailer writes in The Free Press on the rapid rise of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy in American higher education:

Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The principles commonly known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are meant to sound like a promise to provide welcome and opportunity to all on campus. And to the ordinary American, those values sound virtuous and unobjectionable.

But many working in academia increasingly understand that they instead imply a set of controversial political and social views. And that in order to advance in their careers, they must demonstrate fealty to vague and ever-expanding DEI demands and to the people who enforce them. Failing to comply, or expressing doubt or concern, means risking career ruin. 

In a short time, DEI imperatives have spawned a growing bureaucracy that holds enormous power within universities. The ranks of DEI vice presidents, deans, and officers are ever-growing — Princeton has more than 70 administrators devoted to DEI; Ohio State has 132. They now take part in dictating things like hiring, promotion, tenure, and research funding.

More significantly, the concepts of DEI have become guiding principles in higher education, valued as equal to or even more important than the basic function of the university: the rigorous pursuit of truth. Summarizing its hiring practices, for example, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering declared that “excellence in advancing equity and inclusion must be considered on par with excellence in research and teaching”. Likewise, in an article describing their “cultural change initiative”, several deans at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine declared: “There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias.” 

DEI has also become a priority for many of the organizations that accredit universities. Last year, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, along with several other university accrediting bodies, adopted its own DEI statement, proclaiming that “the rich values of diversity, equity and inclusion are inextricably linked to quality assurance in higher education”. These accreditors, in turn, pressure universities and schools into adopting DEI measures.

Much of this happened by fiat, with little discussion. While interviewing more than two dozen professors for this article, I was told repeatedly that few within academia dare express their skepticism about DEI. Many professors who are privately critical of DEI declined to speak even anonymously for fear of professional consequences. 

The Invention of DEI

How has this fundamental shift taken place? Gradually, then all at once.

For decades, university administrators have emphasized their commitment to racial diversity. In 1978, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell delivered the court’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, taking up the question of racial preferences in higher education. Powell argued that racial preferences in admissions — in other words, affirmative action — could be justified on the basis of diversity, broadly defined. Colleges and universities were happy to adopt his reasoning, and by the 1980s, diversity was a popular rallying cry among university administrators.

By the 2010s, as the number of college administrators ballooned, this commitment to diversity was often backed by bureaucracies that bore such titles as “Inclusive Excellence” or “Diversity and Belonging”. Around 2013, the University of California system — which governs six of the nation’s top 50 ranked universities — began to experiment with mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements became a standard requirement in the system by the end of the decade. The University of Texas at Austin in 2018 published a University Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, which began to embed diversity committees throughout the university. 

Then came the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. The response on campus was a virtual Cambrian explosion of DEI policies. Any institution that hadn’t previously been on board was pressured to make large-scale commitments to DEI. Those already committed redoubled their efforts. UT Austin created a Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, calling for consideration of faculty members’ contributions to DEI when considering merit raises and promotion.

White Coats For Black Lives, a medical student organization that calls for the dismantling of prisons, police, capitalism, and patent law, successfully petitioned medical schools around the country to adopt similar plans, including at UNC–Chapel Hill, Oregon Health & Science University, and Columbia University. In some cases, administrators even asked White Coats For Black Lives members to help craft the new plans. 

All at once, policies that previously seemed extreme — like DEI requirements for tenure and mandatory education in Critical Race Theory — became widespread.

January 10, 2023

Repent, wrongthinker!

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

Neeraja Deshpande outlines the demands of the College of Psychologists of Ontario to send heretic wrongthinker Jordan Peterson to the re-education camp:

Jordan Peterson speaking at an event in Dallas, Texas on 15 June, 2018.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

Have you seen the “men will literally do X instead of going to therapy” meme? It’s funny: Men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy. Men will literally teach you how to open a can of beans for 6 hours instead of going to therapy. You get the drift.

Canada’s most famous public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, brought that meme to real life this week when he announced he’d rather never work again than be forced onto the couch. 

I don’t blame him.

The College of Psychologists of Ontario has told Peterson that if he doesn’t go to therapy — sorry, a board-mandated “Coaching Program” with a board-issued therapist — it may revoke his license to practice psychology. 

What warranted this ultimatum? A few tweets and a podcast.

According to Peterson, about “a dozen people” from around the world complained to the college about comments he had made on Twitter and on Joe Rogan’s podcast, claiming that those statements had caused “harm”.

In March, the college began investigating these complaints. Then, in November, the college informed Peterson: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.” 

Among those comments: Calling an advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “prik”. Snarking at environmentalists for promoting energy policies that hurt children in developing countries. Using female pronouns in reference to the transgender actor Elliot Page. Declaring a plus-sized model on the cover of Sports Illustrated “not beautiful”. (This Wall Street Journal editorial has a good rundown.)

With perhaps one exception — a comment Peterson made calling a former, unnamed client “vindictive” — the public statements that triggered this whole affair are political snipes that have nothing to do with his capacity as a psychologist. Nevertheless, the College is demanding that Peterson not only go through a re-education program, but also that he sign off on the following statement: “I may have lacked professionalism in public statements and during a January 25, 2022 podcast appearance.”

Now, no one who has followed Peterson — presumably including the higher-ups at the College of Psychologists of Ontario — seriously believes he would agree to such a request. He has confirmed as much on Twitter. (This is a guy who burst onto the scene in 2016 after refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns.) And Peterson is famous enough at this point to be inoculated against the financial consequences of refusing to submit, which the college must know. 

The college’s statement, then, is not a message to Peterson, but a message to other would-be dissenters: Comply with our politics, or risk losing your livelihood. 

QotD: A useful life lesson

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

… it reemphasizes a life lesson that, like all truly useful life lessons, is lethally easy to forget. I’m not a gambling man, but you can bet the farm and the kids’ college fund on the phrase “surely they’d never be dumb enough to ____.” The very fact that you find yourself thinking “they’d never be dumb enough to ____” is a guarantee that they are, right now, at this very instant, ____.

Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.

January 8, 2023

Conservatives “vote harder”, progressives take advantage of “procedural outcome manipulations”

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

Theophilus Chilton on a key difference between progressives and conservatives in how they address perceived problems with “the system”:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Over the past decade or so, many folks on the broad Right have noticed that practically all of our institutions don’t really work as they should. The natural tendency on the part of normie conservatives is to chalk this up to incompetence and corruption. Granted, those do come into play – and will continue to do so increasingly. Yet structurally speaking, our institutional dysfunctionality runs a lot deeper than a little graft or some skimming off the top. Our institutional failures are both purposeful and towards a specific end.

Normies can perhaps be forgiven for not immediately coming to this conclusion. After all, as the name suggests, they’re the norm. They’re the mainstream. They’re not out on the “fringe” somewhere, for better or for worse. These are conservatives who have been conditioned by decades of playing by the rules to trust the rules and the processes under which government and institutions operate (even if they think they “distrust government” or whatever). They’re the ones who believe we have to keep voting harder because voting is the only “proper” way to act in our system. And yet, many times they end up being mystified that not only do the institutions and procedures not “work right” but that nobody in power (even their own so-called representatives) seems the least bit bothered by this.

Yet, purposeful it truly is. There is a concept about our institutions that I wish every conservative understood, which is that of “manipulating procedure outcomes”. Basically, what this refers to is the process by which bad actors will take an established procedure — a rule or statute, an institution inside or outside of government, a social or political norm — and subvert it to their own use while still “technically” adhering to procedure. However, the process of doing so completely warps the results from those which “should” happen had the procedure been played straight. This intentionality explains why our institutional failures always seem to tend in one direction — Cthulhu always seems to swim left, so to speak. The American Left are masters at manipulating procedural outcomes, while the American Right rigidly tries to adhere to “the way things oughta be” and end up getting outmanoeuvered every time.

Allow me to give some examples of this; seeing them will start to train the eye towards recognising other instances of this process.

Let’s take, for example, the recent revelations of government censorship of dissident ideas and individuals that we saw in the Twitter files. Now, we all know that the government can’t censor speech and ideas because of the First Amendment. So this means that they’d never do so … right? (LOL) Well, as the Twitter files revealed — and which absolutely assuredly applies to every other major tech company in the field — FedGov and the alphabet agencies simply use companies like Twitter as a way to work around the 1A. They can’t censor directly, but they can rely upon a combination of selective pressure on tech companies and ideologically friendly personnel within these companies to censor and gather information about right-leaning, and especially dissident Right, users all the same. And technically, none of this is illegal, because muh private company and all that. So a functional illegality nevertheless remains within the boundaries of “procedure”.

The same type of manipulation is underway with regards to the Second Amendment, too. Again, the plain wording of the 2A, as well as a long train of prior judicial interpretive precedence, militates against federal and state governments really being able to restrict the gun rights of Americans (not that they don’t try anywise). They can’t make it illegal to buy or own guns. Schemes like prohibitively taxing ammo won’t pass muster either. So if you’re a left-wing fruitcake who hates the Constitution and badly wants to disarm your fellow Americans for further nefarious purposes, what do you do?

Well, you make it too legally dangerous for gun owners to actually use their guns for anything beyond target shooting. You install a bunch of Soros-funded prosecutors in all the jurisdictions that you can so that you can go light on criminals but throw the book at gun owners who defend themselves from criminals. You creatively interpret laws to mean that harming someone while defending yourself is a crime or, barring that, open up self-defenders to civil attack from the criminal’s family. From a self-defence perspective you set up an anarchotyrannical regimen that can be used against ideological enemies. This is basically the same thing the Bolsheviks did when they were consolidating their power as “Russia” transitioned to “the Soviet Union”, as recorded by Solzhenitsin in The Gulag Archipelago. They used administrative courts and ideological judges to punish people who legitimately defended themselves against criminals. If you injured someone who was attacking or robbing you, you went to the gulag. Of course, as we’re also seeing today, these criminals were functionally agents of the Regime by that point.

January 5, 2023

The injustices inherent in “asymmetrical multiculturalism”

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

Ed West traces the start of “asymmetrical multiculturalism” to a 1916 article in The Atlantic by Greenwich Village intellectual Randolph Bourne and traces the damage that resulted from widespread adoption of the policy:

“Asymmetrical multiculturalism” was first coined by demographer Eric Kaufmann in his 2004 book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, and later developed in his more recent Whiteshift, in a chapter charting Bourne’s circle, the “first recognisably modern left-liberal open borders movement”. 

Kaufmann wrote how asymmetrical multiculturalism “may be precisely dated” to the article where Bourne, “a member of the left-wing modernist Young Intellectuals of Greenwich Village and an avatar of the new bohemian youth culture,” declared “that immigrants should retain their ethnicity while Anglo-Saxons should forsake their uptight heritage for cosmopolitanism.”

Kaufmann suggested that: “Bourne’s desire to see the majority slough off its poisoned heritage while minorities retained theirs blossomed into an ideology that slowly grew in popularity. From the Lost Generation in the 1920s to the Beats in the ’50s, ostensibly ‘exotic’ immigrants and black jazz were held up as expressive and liberating contrasts to a puritanical, square WASPdom. So began the dehumanizing de-culturation of the ethnic majority that has culminated in the sentiment behind, among other things, the viral hashtag #cancelwhitepeople.”

The hope, as John Dewey said of his New England congregationalist denomination around the same time as Bourne, was that America’s Anglo-Saxon core population would “universalise itself out of existence” while leading the world towards universal civilisation.

These ideas certainly didn’t remain in New England or even the United States, as Britain has certainly seen just how destructive they can be recently:

Late last year I wrote about the tragedy of Telford, a town in the English midlands where huge numbers of young girls had been sexually abused. Telford, along with Rotherham in South Yorkshire, had become synonymous with this form of sexual abuse, mostly committed by men of Kashmiri origin against girls who were poor, white and English. 

This is the subject of an upcoming GB News documentary by journalist Charlie Peters, and it is quite clear, from all the various reports, that grooming had been allowed to carry on in part because of the different ways the system treats different groups.

Had the races of the perpetrators and victims been reversed, this tragedy would almost certainly be the subject of countless documentaries, plays, films and even official days of commemoration. But it wouldn’t have come to that, because the authorities would have intervened earlier, and more journalists would have been on the case.

Sex crime is perhaps the most explosive source of conflict between communities, and most recently the 2005 Lozells riots began over such a rumour. It is understandable why journalists and reporters were nervous about this subject; less forgivable is the way that, away from the public eye, those in charge signal how gravely they view what happened.

Until Peters revealed the story, Labour had planned to make the former head of Rotherham council its candidate for Rother Valley; this week Peters revealed that one of the councillors named in a report into the town’s failures to deal with the grooming gangs scandal has gone onto become a senior Diversity & Inclusion Manager working for the NHS. Presumably the people who hired Mahroof Hussain knew about his previous job, and still felt that it was appropriate to have him in a “diversity and inclusion” position. Again, were things different, would a Mr Smith whose council had been condemned for its handling of the gang rape of Asian girls have landed that job? The whole thing seems as morbidly comic as Rotherham becoming Children’s Capital of Culture.

Such a clear inconsistency can only exist because of socially-enforced taboos and norms which have developed over race. In Whiteshift, Kaufmann cited sociologist Kai Erikson’s description of norms as the “accumulation of decisions made by the community over a long time” and that “each time the community censures some act of deviance … it sharpens the authority of the violated norm and re-establishes the boundaries of the group”. Every time an individual is punished for violating the anti-racism norm, it strengthens society’s taboo around the subject, to the point where it begins to overwhelm other moral imperatives.

Then there is regalisation, the name for the process “in which adherents of an ideology use moralistic politics to entrench new social norms and punish deviance”, in Kaufmann’s words. This has proved incredibly effective; after paedophilia or sexual abuse, racism is perhaps the most damaging allegation that can be made.

Few people wish to be accused of deviance, which perhaps explains why Peters’s story has received so little coverage in the press this week. Again, were the roles reversed, it’s not wild speculation to suggest that it would feature on the Today programme, seen as clear evidence of racism at the heart of Britain. When the Telford story broke, it did not even feature on the BBC’s Shropshire home page.

January 4, 2023

QotD: Hate speech

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Since it is often the progenitor of evil, and since the appetite for it sometimes grows with the feeding, public expression of hatred might seem a suitable case for prohibition. Do away with hate-speech, that is to say speech that is intended to bring designated protected groups into hatred, ridicule or contempt, and you do away with hatred.

However he who will attend to the motions of his own mind (to use Doctor Johnson’s wonderful, but sadly disregarded, formula for real and searching self-examination) will discover that hatred is by far the most powerful and durable of political emotions. One’s feelings for one’s political enemies are warm and lively, while those for one’s political friends are cool and torpid. It is obvious that the rich and the foreigner are in general hated much more than the poor and the fellow-countryman are loved; while hatred of oppression is much stronger than love of freedom, especially when it is other people’s freedom. To hate injustice is easy, to love justice, or even to know what it is, is difficult. Hatred, in short, makes politics, and much else besides, go round; and while Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, he might just as well have spoken of the hatred caused by small differences.

Nor is hatred exhaustible. On the contrary, it is indefinitely expandable. It often increases with its own expression, becoming more virulent with every word uttered; it is not a fixed quantity like fluid in a bottle. It is very easy, as most people must surely know, to work oneself up into a fury of indignation and insensate rage merely by dwelling on some slight or humiliation. Above all, hatred is fun: it gives a meaning to life to those who otherwise lack one.

The idea therefore that hate speech can be banned, is of course, is a sign of impatience with the intractability of the human condition. It wants to legislate people into kindness, decency and fellow-feeling. It appeals to the sort of people who forget (or never knew) that supposed solutions to human problems frequently throw up further problems that are greater than that which the solution is designed to solve. For its protagonists, it has the advantage of creating a bureaucracy of virtue with pension arrangements to match.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Hating the Truth”, The Salisbury Review, 2011-06.

January 2, 2023

QotD: Academic incentives and the Bobo lifestyle

Filed under: Economics, Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The road to tenure takes only left turns, you’ll recall, because only “original” “research” gets published, and since Shakespeare ain’t writing no more sonnets, the only way to be “original” is through radical politics. As above, so below — since nobody’s going to upvote or retweet a sentiment like “Things are pretty much ok the way they are,” social media becomes little more than competitive #wokeness.

[…]

Here again, academia provides the answer. But first, let’s talk about David Brooks, the “conservative” infamously aroused by Obama’s perfectly creased pants. There are few sillier people than David Brooks, but “take wisdom where you find it” is my motto (well, that and “mihi dare vinum“), and he really knocked it out of the park with Bobos in Paradise. No, seriously. […] A Bobo, in other words, is a Gen Xer who could compete with the Boomers on their turf … but since he also took the Boomers at their word when they went on (and on and on and on and on) about Sticking It to the Man (an all too common generational failing), the Bobo sees the Boomer’s luxury car / vacation home / trophy wife conspicuous consumption as unbearably gauche. So instead, the Bobo spends $500 on a can opener because it’s good for the environment or is handcrafted by paraplegic Brazilian Eskimos or something, anything, so long as it a) obviously costs a shitload, and b) has some kind of Save-the-World rationale attached to it.

Academia reinforces this. Lots of Gen Xers went into the ivory tower for precisely that reason. Y’all know that the average professor hauls in nearly $200 large, right? The median income for an American worker in 2019 was approximately $46,800. I was in History, not math, but even I can see that the eggheads take home over four times what the average Joe makes. Which sets up another lifestyle contest. When you’re a) richer than sin, b) surrounded by a caste on slave wages, and c) ideologically committed to seeing yourself as The People’s Champion, the only way out is to live Bobo-style. Sure, sure, I have a $500 can opener … but Maricela the cook is really empowered by using it, because it was made by transgendered aborigines Of Color.

And since those Bobos are middle aged now, they’ve indoctrinated two generations of students with this garbage. And those two generations also came up with social media, so now you’ve got the heady combination of lifestyle and persona striving. That’s why the DC crew do what they do. Competitive #wokeness is the only way to go … and since they’ve got their $400-manicured mitts on the levers of power, we all get to be the bit players and stagehands in the big Broadway show that is their special unique wonderfulness.

Severian, “Why So #Woke?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-07.

December 31, 2022

The Twitter Files – “Let’s at least try to stop lying for a while, see what happens. How bad can it be?”

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

Matt Taibbi on the continuing revelations about Twitter’s deep entanglements with agencies of the US (and probably many other) government:

In the coming days you’ll find a new thread on Twitter, along with a two-part article here at TK explaining the latest #TwitterFiles findings. Even as someone in the middle of it, naturally jazzed by everything I’m reading, I feel the necessity of explaining why it’s important to keep hammering at this.

Any lawyer who’s ever sifted though a large discovery file will report the task is like archaeology. You dig a little, find a bit of a claw, dust some more and find a tooth, then hours later it’s the outline of a pelvis bone, and so on. After a while you think you’re looking at something that was alive once, but what?

Who knows? At the moment, all we can do is show a few pieces of what we think might be a larger story. I believe the broader picture will eventually describe a company that was directly or indirectly blamed for allowing Donald Trump to get elected, and whose subjugation and takeover by a furious combination of politicians, enforcement officials, and media then became a priority as soon as Trump took office.

These next few pieces are the result of looking at two discrete data sets, one ranging from mid-2017 to early 2018, and the other spanning from roughly March 2020 through the present. In the first piece focused on that late 2017 period, you see how Washington politicians learned that Twitter could be trained quickly to cooperate and cede control over its moderation process through a combination of threatened legislation and bad press.

In the second, you see how the cycle of threats and bad media that first emerged in 2017 became institutionalized, to the point where a long list of government enforcement agencies essentially got to operate Twitter as an involuntary contractor, heading into the 2020 election. Requests for moderation were funneled mainly through the FBI, the self-described “belly button” of the federal government (not a joke, an agent really calls it that).

The company leadership knew as far back as 2017 that giving in to even one request to suspend this or that set of accused “hostile foreign accounts” would lead to an endless cycle of such demands. “Will work to contain that”, offered one comms official, without much enthusiasm, after the company caved for the first time that year. By 2020, Twitter was living the hell its leaders created for themselves.

What does it all mean? I haven’t really had time to think it over. Surely, though, it means something. I’ve been amused by the accusation that these stories are “cherry-picked”. As opposed to what, the perfectly representative sample of the human experience you normally read in news? Former baseball analytics whiz Nate Silver chimed in on this front:

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