No totalitarian regime has ever successfully solved what you might call the Emmanuel Goldstein Problem. They just can’t exist without some kind of existential threat to rally around; it’s their nature. In 1984, the Party simply created Goldstein out of whole cloth, but they seemed to believe this was just another temporary expedient — they were counting on technology to do all the heavy lifting of mass mind control, so they wouldn’t have to resort to things like Goldstein and MiniTrue.
Obviously that ain’t gonna work in Clown World, Cthulhuvious and Sasqueetchia being notso hotso on the STEM. They’ll always need a Goldstein, then, and that’s a real problem, because whatever else Bad Orange Man is, he’s also pushing 80 years old. How long would he have, even in a sane world? 10 more years, tops? And the candidates for Replacement BOM are generally a sorry lot … but even if they weren’t, they’re about to get purged, too. The WARG is already going negative …
For overseas readers (and those not conversant with “Moneyball”: Baseball has these weird “sabermetric” stats that purport to compare players from different teams and eras in terms of absolute value. It’s acronymed (it’s a word) WAR, Wins Above Replacement; “replacement” being an absolutely average player. Like all baseball “sabermetrics” it quickly gets ridiculous, but see here. According to this guy, then, Babe Ruth has a per-season WAR of 10.48 in right field. That means Babe Ruth, himself, personally, alone, was worth 10 and a half wins above your “average” player. If Ruth goes down for the season in a tragic Spring Training beer mishap, you can go ahead and take 10 wins off the Yankees’ record that season (assuming they replace the Bambino with some scrub just off the bus, which back then is what would’ve happened).
WARG, then, is Wins Above Replacement Goldstein. I’d say that Orange Man set the bar for Goldsteins, but that’s not statistically useful, since Trump Derangement Syndrome is so far the apex of liberal lunacy. To make statistical comparisons useful — to find a “replacement Goldstein,” as it were — we have to have someone the Left considered an existential enemy at the time, but who didn’t really do much in the grand scheme of things. So I nominate George W. Bush. If Bush is the “Replacement Goldstein,” then his WARG is a nice round zero. Trump would have a Babe Ruth-ian WARG.
This gives us a convenient measurement for looking at various Republicans, both current and historical. Richard Nixon would have a pretty high WARG — he drove them even more nuts than W. did — and Ronnie Raygun would be up there, too. Gerald Ford would have a slightly negative WARG, since not even the New York Times could pretend Gerald fucking Ford was a threat to the Progressive takeover. Your steeply negative WARGs would be those “Republicans” actively working with the opposition, like Bitch McConnell.
I’d argue that Ron DeSantis and maybe Greg Abbott still have positive WARGs … for now. But they’re going to get gulaged here in pretty short order. Who’s the next guy on the bench? Your Marjorie Taylor Greenes and whatnot drive certain segments of the Left insane, but she’s just too ludicrous to have a positive WARG. And then things start getting really pathetic …
The Law of Diminishing Returns makes the WARG problem even more acute. Freakout fatigue is a real thing. The Media will give it the old college try, of course, but you really just can’t convince people that a goof like Greene is some kind of existential threat to Our Democracy. Her WARG goes negative every time she opens her mouth.
Severian, “Salon Roundup”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-20.
August 26, 2022
QotD: The WARG rating – “Wins Above Replacement Goldstein”
August 25, 2022
Liz Cheney “got smashed worse than a wine aunt who just lost a national championship cat show”
Theophilus Chilton indulges in a bit of gloating over Liz Cheney’s Republican primary loss to a Trump-supported challenger:
Liz Cheney with Robert Aderholt and former Vice President Dick Cheney, 14 November, 2018.
Photo from the office of Robert Aderholt via Wikimedia Commons.
The biggest news in domestic American politics in the past week was the absolutely shattering upset of Liz Cheney by Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman in Wyoming’s Republican primary for its at-large House seat. I mean, she got smashed worse than a wine aunt who just lost a national championship cat show. In a race that should have been hers for the taking, she was instead defeated by 37 points in one of the worst primary losses suffered by a sitting politician in recent history. If I sound like I’m vicariously gloating, it’s because I am.
Yet, if you were to listen to what the world of Never Trump is saying, you’d think that rather than an ignoble defeat caused by poor political decision-making, Cheney’s self-immolation was a glorious act of martyrdom for the cause of our sacred norms. Seriously, their cope for her loss is that she was too brave and too principled to do anything as tawdry as give the actual voters what they want. Cheney and the rest of Never Trump have seemed kind of bitter, like they’re angry at the voters for not getting with the program. At the same time, the current buzz involves Never Trump trying to gin up enthusiasm for a Cheney 2024 presidential run.
So yeah, there are a ton of Never Trumpers out there running with the line that Liz Cheney will be a serious contender to challenge Trump in the 2024 GOP primaries. “Now,” you might be thinking to yourself, “what on earth makes them think that she has a snowball’s chance in the great perdition of breaking even the low single digits?” And you would be correct. There is, in fact, zero chance that “she’s gonna get him next time!” Yet, why are a bunch of people who are supposedly savvy politicos and insiders trotting out such obvious nonsense?
What’s going on here is that these people are being put through a humiliation ritual, a peculiar kind of loyalty test that the Regime will often impose on its enemies, both potential and actual. These savvy politicos don’t really believe that Liz Cheney has any chance at all — but they have to say so if they want to remain in the good graces of the powers that be. Indeed, once you start paying attention to modern politics and culture, it’s amazing to see just how much of what goes on is basically this kind of loyalty test. Are you a Goodthinker who goes along with the sociocultural programming or are you a Badthinker who questions or rejects elements of the Regime’s playbook?
A few years ago, I wrote about the distinction between narratives and reality. There is a great gulf between what the Left says it believes and what actually is. What you see on the news and on social media has no bearing on reality or vice versa. But the thing to keep in mind is that none of this matters to the Left. They don’t actually want to convince or be convinced. The public face of their ideology and their policy decisions most often are not determined by some Rockwellesque ideal of public debate, but by social force.
August 23, 2022
Progressives and the (always just-over-the-horizon) promise of fusion power
I was busy over the weekend, so I didn’t get a chance to post this from Severian at Founding Questions, but it’s still one of those things I wish I’d written:
Nuclear fusion breakthrough as “ignition” finally achieved
Woohoo. They’ve been promising us fusion power my entire life. I can’t even tell how many “breakthroughs” ago I stopped believing it. But since God has a sense of humor, this might actually be it. Wouldn’t that be hilarious? Finally we have pretty much limitless energy, for free… and there’s no fucking way the Left would ever allow it to come online. Because that would result in a massively increased standard of living for the average person, and that’s one thing the Left simply will not allow.
That was really the point of that “if I were rich” post the other day. I will admit up front that Envy has never really been a problem for me (for me, all the hit points that would’ve gone into Envy have been allocated to Gluttony, Sloth, and Lust). Nonetheless, I’ve never been able to understand the sheer pettiness of the Left. It doesn’t bother me that some people have more. Even if they don’t “deserve” it. Hey, them’s the breaks. And in fact, I even largely agree with the very old school Liberal idea of “progressive” taxation — the rich can afford to front their communities a little bit more money, provided it actually goes to the community.
But the PoMo Left is all-in on Envy. But it’s a weird kind of envy — like everything else in Clown World, it’s inverted. They don’t want to have more, themselves, personally — they want you to have less.
To the PoMo Leftist, the only possible point of being rich is to keep other people from having stuff. They don’t want you to eat the bugs because it’s better for the Earth. They want you to eat the bugs to keep you from eating steak. See what I mean? It’s not “you must eat bugs in order that they can have steak,” because of course they can already have steak. Rather: you also can have steak, and that’s bad. You shouldn’t be able to, you filthy prole. You don’t deserve to eat steak, because you’re not Enlightened like they are.
So with fossil fuels and all the rest. You don’t deserve to be able to fly places. If you must travel — you know, if they need your labor somewhere else — you should be down there in steerage. And so on, because that’s what you deserve, peasant. Free, limitless, clean energy would be nice … in the abstract. But since you people would just use it to run your air conditioners and whatnot, we’re going to store the Mr. Fusion machine in that big warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant.
When the Great Reset turns into the Great Resignation, unexpectedly
Elizabeth Nickson is enjoying the spectacle of the Klaus Schwabs of the world being undermined by the rational actions of ordinary people:
Klaus Schwab’s slaves are quietly vanishing.
In the US, 52 million quit their jobs in 2022, which only added to the flood of 2021. 41% of the work force, when interviewed stated they were quitting, and another 38% were planning to. Mostly mid-career. That’s the ball game, baby, that is almost 80%. ABC Corp will be left with oldsters too tired to change and a bunch of kids looking to cash in and cash out as fast as possible.
Corporatists are in a bit of a flap, which is delicious to watch. Their Bible, the Harvard Business Review is scrambling to explain, to deconstruct, to propose ways to get them back, more money, more time off, more benefits. All of which would thrill trade unionists except that they won’t be getting their cut, their vig, their power base. No one is coming back, btw, Klaus, the UN and the CCP screwed the pooch, everyone knows about it, no censorship can hide the fact that their plans for us include pinning us in our matchboxes, hypnotizing us via screens and farming us like sheep with monthly allowances and Prime delivery of cricket paste.
HBR has therefore re-named this The Great Exploration, as a sop to the rapid individuation of the people they tried to turn into machines. Yeah, that’s not going to work either. No workshops from Tony Robbins, no retreats with Oprah, no courses, no sabbaticals, no Five Second Rule gal or Brene Brown explaining that investigating insurance claims is somehow spiritual, especially if you “fight” for the “rights” of the marginal, and give your next promotion to a person of color, preferably other sexed. Nope nope nope. It is over.
Target missed its earnings projections by 90%. Ninety percent. Ninety percent. The thing about being enmeshed in corporate culture is that you need a lot of stuff to be comfort yourself after the brutalism of your days. You can go home and wallow on your green mattress and lots of pillows with your achingly lonely pets. But when you’ve quit, and maybe sold your house and moved to a cheaper location and started farming, you don’t need more stuff, you have tasted freedom and a pox on all your big box stores. Instead of competitive co-workers, you have your dog, your family and friends, and an open road.
Bye-bye Black Rock. It looks like the hail Mary of ESG and DEI failed. In fact, it acted as a repellant. So obviously dishonest and a play to shame employees into submission, added to the manipulations of Covid, the lock-downs, the forced injections, the obvious sickening of your friends and family, bye bye.
I personally could not be more delighted, since I quit almost 20 years ago, reasoning that working in newsrooms was like entering a bee hive without protection. I look around my home place and there are a lot of eager new faces, young and thrilled, and loaded for bear.
August 21, 2022
The pandemic lockdowns heralded the “worldwide end of the Nuremburg code”
At Samizdata, Perry de Havilland considers how British culture has been impacted by many of the worst notions coming out of American culture in the last few years:
… support for Brexit, by no means confined to the lumpenproletariat of Guardian reader’s imagination, might not indicate what purveyors of the high status opinion fondly imagine. The conflation of Brexit with the “Trump phenomenon” was always overblown, given the deep social and structural differences between UK and USA. Yes, we are influenced by America, but we are not the same in oh so many ways.
But western civilisation, not just Britain, is undeniably going through a very strange phase. The insane and demonstrably pointless covid lockdowns seem to have had a pressure cooker effect, with every -ism being dialled up several notches. The mainstreaming of transsexuality, a largely harmless hobby until a lunatic fringe grabbed hold of it, indicates the world is not running in well-oiled grooves. An inability to define “what is a woman?”, by sages and politicians who nevertheless expect to be treated as serious people, would have seemed implausible just a few years ago.
But the covid lockdowns, that is the “biggie”: an egregious abridgement of liberty & common sense that placed the global economy into repeated bouts of cardiac arrest. The worldwide end of the Nuremburg code.
The lockdowns were an even more polarising issue that Brexit or Trump or indeed anything else. Why? Because there was no opt-out, you could not just go to work, or visit granny, no ability to ignore the whole thing and just head down the pub or retire for a macha latte in some café. The effects of that will be enduring. That was the issue that taught a lot of people to fear what other people believe to be true, and people always hate what they fear.
Now just wait to see what happens when the green lunacy that stopped investment in reliable power supply and new reservoirs means we start running out of power and water. I suspect that will be what makes the cork finally blow off.
August 20, 2022
Yes, you will end up owing your conspiracy theorist friend an apology at this rate …
Chris Bray re-enacts a few of the minor erasures, walk-backs, and out-and-out lies coming from organizations who’ve spent the last two-plus years spreading a line of medical “truth” that, day-by-day, appears a bit less “truth-y” all the time:
I can’t get this attack on Dr. Ryan Cole out of my head:
What’s becoming very clear is that the narrative is going to shift by inches, eventually ending up at the place where mRNA dissenters started, but. Let’s get through the first part, and I’ll get to that but in just a moment. Look at, for example, the recent stealth-edit on the CDC website that quietly removed the assurance about the spike protein from mRNA injection leaving your body in a hurry. So on Monday it’s disinformation to falsely claim that the spike protein lingers in your body, and you’re a dangerous extremist if you say it; on Tuesday, the simple fact of lingering spike protein was always known and never contested. That’s DISINFORMA— hold on, I’ve just been handed a new memo.
This is going to keep happening, in little pieces that move toward reality. There are ZERO mRNA deaths, you lying idiots, and you need to stop spreading disin— uh, hold on, it says here that, uh …
In a year, or in five years, the things that Ryan Cole and Clare Craig and Peter McCullough and Tracy Beth Hoeg and Robert Malone and all the other MONSTERS have been saying will be validated and acknowledged. We’ll know that the mRNA injections caused heart damage and a cancer spike, and we’ll know that mRNA-injected people get sick more often than the dirty unvaccinated. Look at the matter-of-factness with which Deborah Birx says that oh yeah, I always knew these vaccines — vaccines! — weren’t going to prevent infection. A year before she shrugged and said she’d always known that, you would have lost your social media accounts for saying exactly what she just said. Yesterday’s idiotic conspiracy theory disinformation nonsense is today’s “yeah, we always knew that”.
Now, here’s my big but: The narrative is going to turn, in a long series of tiny and unacknowledged shifts, until it matches what the heretics have always been saying — but my bet is that the heretics will not be rehabilitated. Ryan Cole, to stick with the opening example, will be proven correct, but he will not be vindicated. The YOU CAN’T SAY THAT, IT’S DISINFORMATION oh wait it’s totally true maneuver doesn’t rehabilitate the crimethinkers. You can think X when it’s time to think X; if you think X too early, you remain a thought criminal.
The truthtellers in medicine will be proved correct, but they’ll still be resented and excluded.
August 18, 2022
The acute lack of numbers in every climate debate
The Grumpy Economist notes that every discussion of laws and regulations “to tackle climate change” only ever seem to cover one side of the issue — how much your taxes will go up and how much more your life “needs” to be regulated to “save the planet”. The almost universally lacking numbers are the expected benefits of the law or regulation in climate terms:
Most legislation or regulation that spends hundreds of billions of dollars aimed at a purpose is extensively analyzed or scored to that purpose. OK, the numbers are often, er, a bit unreliable, but at least proponents go through the motions and lay out assumptions one can examine and calculate differently. Tax and spending laws come with extensive analysis of just how much the government will make or spend. This is especially true when environment is concerned. Building anything requires detailed environmental assessments. An environmental review typically takes 4.5 years before the lawsuits begin.
In this context, I’m amazed that climate policy typically comes with no numbers, or at least none that I can find readily available in major media. We’re going to spend an additional $250 billion or so on climate policies in the humorously titled “inflation reduction act”. OK, how much carbon will that remove, on net, all things included, how much will that lower the temperature and when, how much and when will it quiet the rise of the oceans?
Finally, I have seen one number, advertised in the Wall Street Journal,
Our contributor Bjorn Lomborg looked at the Rhodium Group estimate for CO2 emissions reductions from Schumer-Manchin policies. He then plugged them into the United Nations climate model to measure the impact on global temperature by 2100. He finds the bill will reduce the estimated global temperature rise at the end of this century by all of 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit in the optimistic case. In the pessimistic case, the temperature difference will be 0.0009 degrees Fahrenheit.
Bjorn’s twitter stream on the calculation.
Maybe you don’t like Bjorn’s numbers and the IPCC model. (Not exactly a right-wing operation). Maybe you don’t like the Rhodium group’s analysis. A quick reading left me the impression its thumb might be on the wildly over-optimistic side of what this rathole of pork can produce, and of experience with what the similar past ratholes have produced:
Our preliminary estimate is that the IRA can cut US net greenhouse gas emissions down to 31% to 44% below 2005 levels in 2030—with a central estimate of 40% below 2005 levels — compared to 24% to 35% under current policy. The range reflects uncertainty around future fossil fuel prices, economic growth, and technology costs. It will also meaningfully reduce consumer energy costs and bolster US energy security over the medium-term,
10% of 2005 levels is a lot. Subsidies reduce consumer costs, but not the cost to society overall. Clever. How one can claim that clamping down on fossil fuels and subsidizing windmills and solar panels helps energy security with the German example before us is a good question. Bjorn’s point is that even with this immense thumb on the scale, the actual climate benefit is tiny. If you disagree, fine, produce some alternates.
(BTW, politicians who tell you we need to do something about climate to turn off heat waves and stop forest fires are either lying or profoundly ignorant. Nothing even Greta Thunberg proposes will actually lower temperatures in our great grandchildren’s lifetimes. Read carefully, “reduce the temperature rise“. Not “reduce temperatures”.)
QotD: Nostalgie de la boue
Nostalgie de la boue (French: “nostalgia for mud”) is the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements … Tom Wolfe described a party in New York in 1970: “It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano — there was also a south piano — in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future in which, after the revolution, there would no longer be any such thing as a two-story, thirteen-room apartment on Park Avenue, with twin grand pianos in the living room, for one family.”
I think TWS is right:
It explains everything from those parties where they pretend to eat people and the Podesta brothers love of pedo-murder art to the Jersey Shore and all rap music. People of Wal-Mart and people who enjoy mocking them. The idea covers everything happening.
Back in the days, they called all that “authenticity”. The Working Man ™ was supposed to have an “authenticity”, a raw experience of life, that the Intelligentsia did not, so the Intelligentsia made it their mission to ape “authentic” proletarian manners and mores. That’s why every self-styled “Intellectual” since Marx has carried on like an unbathed schizophrenic hobo — they think they’re being “authentic”.
It never occurs to them that this is grossly insulting to The Workers they’re supposedly helping, because of course they never ever meet any Workers — they imagine how they think a longshoreman would act, and then go do that.
I have far more respect for “the People of Walmart” than I do for those who make fun of them, because “the People of Walmart” have been beaten down and brutalized by the dominant culture. They’ve had all their self-respect kicked out of them by little college snots with Gender Studies degrees. It’s like the peasantry in pre-Revolution Russia: Everything the intellectuals said about the nobility was true … but everything the nobility said about the serfs was also true. It was a chicken-and-egg problem with no solution save one.
I also have some respect for Walmart as an institution. Yeah, I know, it’s cheap Chinese shit, but trust me: Though I didn’t grow up poor, you could see “poor” from my house for a lot of my childhood. I don’t recall having Walmart back then, but K-Mart’s Blue Light Specials improved our day to day quality of life enormously. And when I first got out on my own, I decorated my entire first apartment in Walmart — it wasn’t fancy, but it worked, and I had a hell of a lot more stuff that I could actually use than I ever could’ve afforded any other way.
You want to make fun of Walmart, and the people who shop there? Ok, fine, motherfucker, but first try living in a trailer where your couch is patched up with duct tape, and go to school wearing your California cousins’ hand me down clothes, so that you’re dressed like a surfer when you’re 500 miles from the nearest ocean.
I will never, ever understand this. You can choose to be ugly, and to surround yourself with ugliness. Or you can choose NOT to do that. Why would anyone pick the former?
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-13.
August 17, 2022
“It’s weird what happens when you choke off people’s ability to make a living”
Elizabeth Nickson offers to decode the latest war cry from the great and the good, the well-meaning, the deluded, and the modern-day fellow travellers (who are still useful idiots):
The political circus is gripping, the play before us hypnotic. Audience members drop in, forswear the brutalism of it and go back to their lives, refusing engagement, refusing to look. That’s what it’s for, to alienate you from the real stuff that goes on in the middle of nowhere, where I live.
[…]
This is a slogan that has been picked up by every operative in every western democracy. State legislators appear on MSNBC frantic with fear, wall-eyed, saying the right is stealing democracy.
Expect to hear this ceaselessly for the next three years. Every hour of every day.
This is what they really mean:
When I moved to the middle of nowhere twenty years ago, I became fascinated with local politics. It seemed that there were a lot of little groups, attached like sucker fish to the giant tax eating behemoth that slid through our lives. Their aims were simple and seemingly good hearted, more waterbird protection, more water protection, more tree protection, more protection of the other sexed, more goodness towards and immigration of the huddled masses in South and Central America, more legislated feminist demands, endless demands of the schools by advocacy groups funded by teachers unions, and of course, stopping all development and industrial production because of climate change. They all had groups, they all lived on little bits of money, they were always harried and despairing. They fought a tight game. Small advances, lots of setbacks. Mostly innocent, though the enviro people had deep-buried terrorist groups who created lovely fires for any developer who particularly crossed them. But otherwise, you could invite them to tea with the Queen.
Twenty years on, they flourish with budgets of seven or eight figures, most of which they receive from the various governments they lobby, but also from the world’s greatest foundations, not to mention substantial funding from the EU, the WEF and the UN. And they are in every capital, waking up every morning for one reason: to force the government to cave to their needs. They are always attached to the bigger of the left-wing parties, who fund them big time. In the US it is the Democrats. In Canada, the Liberal Party. They are paid to act as political action committees, while posturing as neutral advocacy groups. They write legislation. And boy, have they written legislation. They developed a thousand, thousand committees which have methodically re-written laws from the extreme local to national.
The ones I met were upper-middle-class, from nominally Christian households, who had been captured by the socialist dream. They called what they did a new iteration: participatory democracy. Leaders were from Britain or the US. Those seemed the most aggressive. More connected. Very little work has been done on their unnerving connectedness. Most reporters agree with their task, don’t want to dig.
The reason they called it participatory democracy was because they were participating. It seemed no one else was, other than business needing a rule change or permit, so they had free rein. And, to give them credit, they did change the culture. It is rare to find a soul who does not support equality of the sexes, the protection of the environment, acceptance of the other-sexed, pity for the huddled masses in the south and an anxious wish for people of colour to do well.
But then … the German Malthusian Eugenicists at the WEF realized they could fund them and bend them to their purpose. With 100x the power, the good kids went rogue. The goal was to break the power of the American middle class in order to save the climate. To disenfranchise them, to de-legitimize them, to identify them as racist, sexist, homophobic and patriarchal. To de-pluralize them. To drive them to the margins. It was, frankly, an adoption of evil, an adoption of kill-to-save.
To understand Justin Trudeau, you need to look at his relationship with his mother
Janice Fiamengo on how a lot of Justin Trudeau’s personal quirks may be directly traced to his upbringing and particularly his relationship with Margaret Trudeau:
Malia and Sasha Obama talk with Prime Minister Trudeau and his mother Margaret Trudeau during a reception on the Truman Balcony, 10 March, 2016.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons.
Cue the popularity of Justin Trudeau, who at first seemed all sincerity, even to the point of public spectacles of tearfulness and child-like ebullience. He was the first Canadian leader to march in the Gay Pride Parade as if it were his natural milieu, not merely a vote-seeking opportunity. His enthusiasm for Bollywood-style gyving, Hindu fancy dress, and participation in Islamic prayer, though heavily criticized, seemed genuine, at least in a high-school drama teacher way.
When he refused to give a real answer to the question of why it was necessary to appoint a gender-equal cabinet as one of his first actions upon assuming office in 2015, his insouciant quip “Because it’s 2015” suggested an unstudied feminist commitment. His comments after the Boston bombings emphasized that empathy rather than harshness was the appropriate response to murderous acts of terror.
But there has always been a harsher side to Trudeau, a fondness for dictators, an attraction to brute power, and an inability (or unwillingness) to hide his contempt for political opponents. Perhaps his empathy for the Boston bombers was respect or even admiration for their willingness to use violence. Many were shocked by his open admission that one of the countries he most admired was the “basic dictatorship” of China. When churches burned across Canada in the summer of 2021 in response to the alleged discovery of “mass” graves at a residential school (a discovery that has not yet yielded a single body), Trudeau condemned the arson but hastened to say it was “understandable”. About Canadians who chose not to take the Covid-19 vaccines, he could not control his impatience, unleashing a volley of stigmatizing, scapegoating rhetoric. For the truckers who camped out in Ottawa amid a sea of Canadian flags and bouncy castles demanding vaccine mandates be revoked, he had a brutal contempt.
Which is he: the soft feminist with the fancy socks, joy in Gay Pride, and empathy for the marginalized? Or the hard, contemptuous leader who could oversee without flinching a violent RCMP crackdown on the Convoy protest that saw an Indigenous woman trampled under the hoofs of a police horse?
The answer is: both. A clue to his doubleness may be found in his relationship with his mother.
I recently watched an old interview with Margaret Trudeau that offers some illuminating glimpses into the character of the woman who mothered Justin. The interview took place in 1979, after Margaret had left Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, who was Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 until 1982. Pierre had primary custody of their three young children.
The interview shows a very beautiful woman whose consciousness of her attractiveness is a paramount part of her identity. She is not, as has sometimes been claimed, stupid; many of her answers to the interviewer are clever in the manner of a wayward adolescent convinced she can get away with nearly anything so long as she charms. At times she flirts openly, smiling suggestively, tongue protruding through her lips, confident in her sexual power.
The overall impact of her answers is horrifying for a viewer who fails to be enchanted. This is a woman who takes herself seriously but evidently does not take seriously her position as a mother to three young sons (all of them under 10 years old at the time) — and certainly not her position as estranged wife to the leader of the country.
She boasts girlishly about smoking marijuana, listening to psychedelic music, and giving up guilt over failing to meet others’ expectations. Spouting feminist rhetoric about being true to herself, she makes clear that she is more interested in having lovers than in looking after her children. She dismisses her husband’s shock at her unfaithfulness as owing to “old-fashioned principles of fidelity”, and indicates that Canadian society would be better off if more people heeded their “feelings” rather than stodgy moral precepts.
I cringe to think of Justin Trudeau, even today, watching this interview. The woman who presented herself therein — self-preoccupied, proudly promiscuous — must also have been evident to the son who watched her flamboyantly “find herself”, feminist-style, as his parents’ marriage crumbled.
H/T to Brian Peckford for the URL.
QotD: Larry Correia’s proposal for a DoFYJS
Depending on the department you could fire a ton of them and all it would do is free up parking spaces.
Now, there are some government employees who work their asses off. Good. There are some government functions which are necessary. Great.
A great many don’t work, or the work they do is utterly pointless.
Ask any honest gov employee. They will admit this to you in private.
If they say no, everything we do is vital and everyone here is vital, they’re a liar protecting their budget, or one of the useless ones.
Most places, if there are 5 employees, 2 do 90% of the work.
Pournelle’s Iron Law says that as it grows over time any bureaucracy’s purpose will change from its original mission, to a new mission of protecting and growing the bureaucracy.
So now our Department of Labor by itself is bigger than LBJ’s entire federal government. This stuff never shrinks. It only grows. It’s an endless Leviathan.
The Leviathan needs to grow and protect itself against all threats, which is how you get super evil shit like the CIA and FBI meddling in US elections …
Or constantly expanding its powers into new places, like the #MinistryOfTruth
This Leviathan will find allies which help it expand in size and power. The more power/money you give it, the more it can bribe and co-opt other institutions. Academia, media, corporations, etc.
Whichever political philosophy is the most unprincipled will rock this arrangement
As the Leviathan grows in power, it will become more malicious, spiteful, and controlling. Dissent is crushed. Freedom dies.
@elonmusk is currently a speed bump in this, which is why the control freak contingent is super pissed at him.
The big question is, do the people own their government, or does the government own its people? If we are just assets of the gov, we can be spent freely, and bad assets get eliminated.The Leviathan is compelled to own EVERYTHING.
Slowing the Leviathan down isn’t enough. If you concentrate on stopping one part, others keep growing. Then when our bipolar country elects a new leader, those parts start growing again. Repeat forever. And it just keeps getting bigger.
So we’ve got to shrink the whole thing
If the GOP had a brain/spine (lol) they’d slash the shit out of everything. They’d starve the beast. They usually don’t, because they are total chickenshits. They’ll pay lip service to this, do nothing, or feed their favorite parts.
The DNC gleefully feeds the whole thing.
Trump’s biggest weakness was he surrounded himself with people who loved government, and loved expanding government. Of course all of those fucked him at every opportunity.
We need somebody who actively HATES the government to run it.
If I was President (ha!) I would only create a single new executive branch entity. The Department of Fuck Your Job Security.
The DoFYJS would consist of surly auditors, and their only job would be to go into other government agencies to figure out-
A. do you fuckers do anything worth a shit?
B. which of you fuckers actually get shit done?Then fire everyone else.
Right now it is pretty much impossible to fire government employees. The process is asinine. It is so bad that the worst government employees, who nobody else can stand, don’t get fired. They get PROMOTED. It’s easier, and then it’s somebody else’s problem.
But the DoFYJS don’t care. If your job is making taxpayers fill out mandatory paperwork and then filing it somewhere nobody will ever read it?
Fuck you. Gone. Clean out your desk.
We need to get rid of entire agencies. Gone. WTF does the Department of Education improve? NOTHING.
Gone. Fire them all. Sell the assets.
Any agency that survives this purge, move it out of DC to an area more appropriate to its mission. Do we need a Dept of Agriculture? Okay. Go to Kansas.
This will also cause all the DC/NOVA powermonger set to resign so I don’t have to waste time firing them
Oh, and right wing pet causes, you’re not safe. I worked for the Air Force. We all know that we could fire 1/3 of the GS employees tomorrow and the only noticeable difference would be more parking available on base.
Cut everything. We never do, because somebody might cry. Too bad. They’re called budget cuts because they’re supposed to hurt. Not budget tickles. Fuck you. Cut.
Shutting off the money faucet will also destroy the unholy alliance between gov/media/academia/tech.
Right now there is a revolving door, government job, university job, corporate board, think tank, the same crowd who goes to the same parties and went to the same schools and all that other incestuous shit just take turns in the different chairs.
Sell the fucking chairs.
Every entity that gets tax money inevitably turns into a pig trough for these people. Cut it all off. All of these money faucets ALWAYS cause some kind of financial crisis later anyway.
See the student loan crisis caused by the government, here is free money, oh college has become expensive and useless, so now we need more government to solve it. You dummies get to pay for it. Have some inflation.
It’s all bullshit.
Quit pretending any of this makes sense.
The only way the Leviathan shrinks is we elect people who actively hate the government to the government, and then only let them stay there long enough to fuck the government without getting corrupted by it.
The instant you see the small government crusader you sent to DC going “Oh, well maybe an unholy alliance between the state and OmniGlobalMegaCorp to develop a mind control ray is a good thing” FIRE HIM.
So there you have it. That’s my platform if you elect me president. Fire fucking everybody. And only give me one term. Thank you.
Larry Correia, portion of a Twitter thread reposted at Monster Hunter Nation, 2022-05-11.
August 16, 2022
QotD: The first casualty of political campaigns
Walking in Paris just before the French election, I was handed some leaflets and stickers by partisans of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the demagogic left-wing candidate. “The rich pollute,” said one of them, “the people pay.”
Am I one of the rich, I wonder? Or one of the people? What about the customers chatting over lunch in the nearby café? Are they rich or are they of the people? Mélanchon’s slogan is founded on the old lie, as Wilfred Owen calls Dulce et decorum, etc., that society is divided neatly into two distinct categories with interests diametrically opposed.
No lie appeals more to the dissatisfied than this, offering as it does the illusory hope of a confiscatory solution to life’s little problems. The best that can be said of it is that it permits the dissatisfied an access of hatred and moral outrage, which is always enjoyable and gratifying to experience.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Election bumf”, The Critic, 2022-04-29.
August 14, 2022
QotD: The 2016 US election was a rejection of the media
The rise in support isn’t the surprising part. The surprising part is that the Media still find this surprising.
Not to toot my own horn too much here, but I’ve been writing about this since 2015 … “Make America Great Again” was the Trump campaign’s official slogan, but unofficially — and much, much more effectively — it was: “Fuck the Media”. The 2016 election is known far and wide as “The Great Fuck You”, but somehow, some way, almost everyone still fails to grasp that it wasn’t the Democrats who got told to fuck off. It wasn’t even the “Progressives”. It was The Media. The Great Fuck You was aimed entirely at the Media.
Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.
August 13, 2022
Tired – Orange Man Bad. Inspired – Orange Man Radioactive!
Jim Treacher isn’t a Trump fan, didn’t vote for him, and even he is being coerced into very grudging support of the man, thanks to the incredibly ham-handed things the US federal government has been doing:
Our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters are now scolding us for referring to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago as a raid. We’re not supposed to call it a raid. Which means, of course, it was definitely a raid.
We still don’t know what they were looking for during this raid. Or do we?
Oh.
Wait.
What?
Nuclear documents? What, like launch codes? Schematics? Locations? What are we talking about here?
What did they think the guy was going to do with this stuff? Is any of it even current? Don’t they change the launch codes every day? And nobody missed these documents for 18 months? What’s the danger here?
Call me a RINO cuck turncoat all you want, but I don’t trust the government, no matter who’s running it. I had to learn that the hard way when the State Department crippled me for life and then lied their asses off about it. That’s what bureaucracies do. They protect themselves at all costs, and the truth is the first thing to go by the wayside.
Sounds like that’s what’s happening here. They really screwed up this time, and now they’re panicking.
It’s been seven years since You-Know-Who rode down that escalator and threw his hat into the ring, and the Democrats have learned absolutely nothing. The more they try to hurt this guy, the more they end up helping him. Now they’re galvanizing the right behind him. Even traitors like me, who think 1/6 was bad and probably wanted Hillary to win, are incredulous that they’re abusing their power like this.
It’s already backfiring, but at least the libs can still air out their bloodthirsty fantasies:
They really do believe that’s what he did. They really do believe that’s what will happen to him. Or at least they’re willing to pander to their insane followers on social media.
August 12, 2022
Testing the old saying about those who believe in nothing will believe anything
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander considers the old saying — often mis-attributed to G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis:
There’s a popular saying among religious apologists:
Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.
Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis, neither of whom actually said it. If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote.
Still, it’s worth examining as a hypothesis. Are the irreligious really more likely to fall prey to woo and conspiracy theories?
This Economist article examined the question and concluded the opposite. See especially this graph:
“White evangelicals” are more likely to believe most measured conspiracy theories, and churchgoers were more likely to believe in QAnon in particular.
There’s an obvious confounder here: the authors are doing the usual trick where they cherry-pick right-wing examples of something bad, show that more right-wingers are in favor of them, then conclude that Science Has Proven Right-Wingers Are Bad. QAnon, illegal votes, and COVID microchips are inherently right wing conspiracy theories; vaccines/autism has probably become right-coded post-COVID. Only the moon landing seems politically neutral, and it’s hard to tell if there’s a real difference on that one. So this just tells us that white evangelical church-goers are further right than other people, which we already know.
These data still deflate some more extreme claims about religion being absolutely protective against conspiracy theories. But I was interested in seeing how people of different faiths related to politically neutral conspiracies.
