Quotulatiousness

July 7, 2022

Coping with the excesses of ideologists

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

In New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers how best to cope with fanatics bearing ideology and demanding your compliance and self-abasement:

Theodore Dalrymple on 24 September 2007.
Photo by jaapstronks at Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.

Ideologists are inherently totalitarian, especially when a still small voice tells them that their opinions are vulnerable to criticism. Shrillness then becomes the mental white noise with which they drown out their own doubts. They can’t allow any corner of the world to escape their attention. Uniformity will both demonstrate their correctness and, if it lasts long enough, make criticism unthinkable. Just as the white noise of shrillness once did, so will perpetual silence eventually allay their doubts.

Surrender is wrought by cowardice and, slightly less dishonorably, by boredom. What intelligent person wants to spend his life disputing evident absurdity? […]

There are one of two possible responses (other than outright opposition) to the Augean stable of ideological folly.

The easiest thing to do in both cases is to give in to the monomaniacs; but the first response is to go into what Germans in the time of Hitler called “inner emigration”, that is to say, to try to find a niche in which to get on with one’s life undisturbed by the surrounding idiocy and viciousness, for example by laying low and taking up an interest that flies below the ideological radar.

This method can’t be a hundred percent successful, because the ideological monomaniacs demand not merely the absence of dissent from their ideology, but also some proof of positive adherence to it: for example, by signing up to policies on equality, inclusion, and diversity.

By signing up to such self-contradictory nonsense, of course, the person who seeks inner emigration feels soiled; he has undermined his own probity. But at least, or so he hopes, he will then be free of interference. This hope is usually dashed because, to quote another poem:

    … that is called paying the Dane-geld;
    But we’ve proved it again and again,
    That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
    You never get rid of the Dane.

In other words, the ideologist always comes back for more self-abasement: Today it’s transgenderism, tomorrow it will be — what? The glories of incest, the social necessity and benefit of infanticide? It doesn’t matter: The aim is not improvement, it’s the exertion of power, for one of the cultural or psychological characteristics of the age, at least among the educated, is the belief that, in human relations, everything is a matter of power and therefore that only power counts or is to be trusted.

Another way of dealing with the ideologists is to obey the old slogan that if you can’t beat them, join them. People therefore join up to what is, in effect, a new secular religion, and since most people who do so are not out-and-out villains or opportunists, they have to persuade themselves that they actually do believe the tenets of the new religion; and, as is often the way with converts, they become fanatics, not merely to persuade themselves, but to expunge their wicked past in which they were not believers and were quite possibly mockers.

“Boris was the latest incarnation of the slippery mountebank in politics”

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

As I’m writing this, Boris Johnson seems to be losing a cabinet minister every couple of hours, and there’s a finite number of them so at some point soon he’s likely to resign — or in Tory tradition, be knifed by a former trusted colleague. Ed West gets in an early political obituary for Boris:

However bad Boris Johnson’s career ends, it will surely be a better finale than that of his great-grandfather, the Turkish journalist, editor and liberal politician Ali Kemal. Almost exactly a century ago, following the trauma of defeat and the end of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was attacked by a mob of soldiers, hanged from a tree, his head smashed in with cudgels before being beaten to death. I can’t imagine that the Tory backbenchers will go that far.

There is something charming and colourful about Johnson’s background, the mixture of Turkish, Russian, Jewish and even a Circassian slave just a few generations back (according to Boris himself, and if you can’t trust his version of events, who can you trust?). Just like David Cameron, he is also descended (via a mistress) from George II, the last king of England to fight in battle.

As Rod Liddle once put it, Boris is “the esoteric product of millennia of Eurasian toff miscegenation”, and that’s part of the attraction. It explains his ease with people of different backgrounds, and his liberal persona as London Mayor, which felt like the real him, more than his later populist act. It’s why the charges of racism never stuck; he has his faults, but racial prejudice isn’t one of them.

It’s often been noted that Boris was the latest incarnation of the slippery mountebank in politics while his opponents, both Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn, came from that other British political archetype, the do-gooding Puritan. Disraeli and Gladstone were the Platonic examples of these contrast, but the division dates back further to the Civil War, and there could be no doubt which side Boris would have fought for at Marston Moor.

In fact he is almost more like an oriental potentate, a benevolent and cosmopolitan sultan, hampered by court intrigue and presiding over a crumbling empire. At the time of his ascension to Downing Street, Wikipedia listed Johnson’s de jure and de facto spouses, making Boris the first polygamous ruler of England since King Canute. Since coming to power his rule has been marked by unprecedented court drama, with quite obvious parallels to the reign of Henry VIII, with Carrie Symonds as Anne Boleyn and Dominic Cummings playing Thomas Cromwell.

And on his political legacy, such as it might be:

There’s a whole new generation out there who hate progressivism, who don’t want social norms dictated by dysfunctional, miserable people, and yet the Tories have nothing to offer them. Everywhere there is a sense of overwhelming gloom about the state of the country and its lack of future. Boris Johnson, one of the funniest men to inhabit Number 10, has left his audience with a feeling of dread and sadness, a lesson perhaps in allowing newspaper columnists too much of a say.

As Johnson’s rule nears it end, it feels like everything is collapsing, from the health service to the police, even a shared faith in institutions — and as a Conservative voter I’ve got no “buts” to give in response, except perhaps that Corbyn would have been worse.

In clear expectation of the smash, Mark Steyn reposted what he wrote when Boris took possession of Number 10 Downing Street:

Boris Johnson, it seems, is determined to hang on. Tonight I chanced to see, on the one hand, his father, apparently breezy and unperturbed. On the other hand, a senior Tory backbencher told me that, were another confidence vote to be held, Boris would win the support of fewer than sixty Conservative MPs, with over three hundred voting against him.

I don’t really have anything new to say about this failed prime minister because, in the third of a century since I first met him, he has been, in the turbulence of a constantly changing world, eternally unchanging. Here is what I wrote about him upon the occasion of him taking office as PM:

Is he a nice person? Well, he’s left an awful lot of human wreckage in his wake. Some of the women he’s used and discarded seem to me, without naming names, to be sad and profoundly damaged from their brief intersection with his wandering zipper. His latest squeeze seems likely to be moving into Number Ten without benefit of clergy — a first for the Tories and a sign of how desperate they are after years of letting all the sober, serious, earnest types turn their party into a laughingstock.

What does he believe in? Other than himself, not terribly much. About a decade ago, I was in London for a couple of days and had lunch with him and Stuart Reid at a favorite Italian restaurant. Stuart was the deputy editor who did all the hard grind at the Speccie, while Boris was the great fizzing impresario fronting the operation — a business model he transferred successfully into his mayoral regime, and will no doubt be trying again in Downing Street. He was going on the BBC’s Question Time that night and was worried that he didn’t have anything sufficiently arresting to say, so asked if I had any tips. I gave him a few thoughts on the passing scene, and he considered them not in terms of his own public-policy positions (if any) but in terms of attitudinal cachet. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you really stir them up and put in a word for social conservatism?”

“You mean abortion and all that? Oh, God …” he sighed, and ordered dessert.

If that seems to be (for self-interested reasons) his most firmly drawn red line, don’t nevertheless overstate his ideological flexibility. Like Boris, Theresa May schemed and maneuvered for decades to reach the top spot … and, by the time she pulled it off, she’d spent so much time and effort on the scheming and maneuvering that she had no idea of what to do once she got there. Boris is likewise invested in himself, but, having reached the finial of Disraeli’s greasy pole, he doesn’t intend to be just the latest seat-filler. Mrs May wanted to be prime minister; Johnson wants to be a great and consequential prime minister.

So much for that. That was July 2019. Six weeks later came the first of what would become an avalanche of ministerial resignations …

July 6, 2022

The ongoing protests by Dutch farmers demand your attention

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Protests in many countries in the western world can get violent and even be claimed (by the targets of the protest) to be “insurrections”, but protests in the Netherlands always have more of an edge to them than elsewhere, because when the Dutch really get angry they have, in the past, gone so far as to kill AND EAT their prime minister. The current protests haven’t gone that far yet, but politicians should keep in mind that Dutch farmers can react primally to being treated in the way the Soviets treated the kulaks:

This is really important – you know, on the level of “pay attention or your food supply is next”.

We reported last week that Dutch farmers were attacking government vehicles, blocking roads, and dumping manure on government buildings in response to a new “climate” policy that shut down numerous family farms because their cows were farting too much.

These farmers are now banned from working their own land to feed their families.

Let me explain what’s happening and why it is of the utmost importance as I randomly drop in videos of what the Dutch farmers are doing to keep your attention.

Unelected elites at the World Economic Forum, World Bank, United Nations, and BlackRock think us little people are rodents that are polluting the Earth, and that it’s their job to cull us and tame us so we can follow their smartypants amazingness into what is obviously a glorious future.

These elites get corporations to fall in line by promoting “Environmental-Social-Governance” metrics (a scorecard, if you will) that shows how many woke policies a company is adopting. Do they have a climate pledge? Are they hiring based on skin color, gender, and sexual fetish? Do they fly a rainbow flag over their headquarters? Do they have at least a few dozen “equity” executives to make sure everyone is a good little Marxist?

Companies lose customers by joining this radical, perverse cult, but they get access to the trillions of dollars represented by the elites and the corrupt organizations, from the WEF to the WHO to the mega-investment firms. They don’t care if you boycott them because they are expecting to simply outlast you.

The elites then get governments to fall in line by lobbying, pushing big money into local elections, and taking over school boards and classrooms to ensure good little disciples are being churned out to vote for the right people. They get young people riled up, telling them the planet is burning and that unarmed black men are yelling “Hands up, don’t shoot!” while being gunned down by racist white cops in the streets. Good people watch as their cities burn and politicians bail out the rioters.

QotD: Like Communism, “true” Social Credit has never been attempted

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

Brands die hard, in politics as in a grocery store. When Alberta Social Credit made its astonishing conquest of the Alberta legislature 84 years ago, the party was immediately accused by the crank inventor of the Social Credit economic doctrine, C.H. Douglas, of having gotten the theory all wrong. One suspects that Douglas, whose writings are incomprehensible when they are not preaching patent lunacy, would have said this as a matter of self-defence to any organized group that tried to use his theories as a basis for actual governing. Still, it technically means that no political manifestation of “Social Credit” was ever really Social Credit at all.

The bits of Social Credit that people in Alberta liked, amid the misery of the 1930s, were the hatred of high finance and the promise of an unearned monetary dividend. Alberta Social Credit tried to govern on this general basis, even after Douglas came to Edmonton personally and informed the cabinet that it had failed to comprehend his genius. Despite this, “Douglasite” true believers remained prominent in the party until shortly after the war, when premier E.C. Manning purged them from the Social Credit electoral apparatus. (Many were vague but obvious anti-Semites, like Douglas himself.)

Colby Cosh, “Social Credit may be dead. Long live Social Credit!”, National Post, 2019-04-22.

July 3, 2022

David Warren waves the flag

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

As noted the other day, the official period of mourning sickness that enveloped Canada last year after the blockbuster revelations about residential schools has not been followed-up by any substantive proof of any of the sensational claims that Prime Minister Trudeau seized upon to lecture Canadians about our historical guilt (the “genocideal nation” that he claimed we were) and to haul the national flag down to half-staff for half a year. David Warren chooses to wave the flag instead:

Justin Trudeau has always had a strong affinity for the symbolic gesture, especially when the media are around to record it.

The latest trick in what we might call “eco-commie-perv agitprop”, emerged while shaming Canadian history and traditions. I’ll touch on it in a moment. It is a product chiefly of the Indian Wars of the last few years. The White Man, and more specifically when Catholic, has been accused of massacring the Native People in 20th-century residential schools, just as he did upon coming to the continent. He then ploughs the anonymous victims into mass graves, showing his affinity to, exempli gratia, the Nazis.

This propaganda campaign, which quickly reached the tedious stage, was founded on a series of oft-repeated unambiguous lies, driven into our susceptible children in our compulsory public schools, and throughout life by such agencies as the CBC. (All our significant media are now under government control, subsidy, and watch.) White men, especially the Catholics, contaminate Canadian history by their Satanic essence, according to this malicious fantasy. Goodness and innocence can be found only in their victims, the “visible minorities” (or majorities, as the case may be). Shame is inculcated among persons exhibiting the wrong race.

I write of Canada, but something similar is happening in the United States, and has been carried to Europe on the sails of Hollywood and popular “music”. Canada is, however, an extreme example — of brazen idiocy — and even to underprivileged (all-white) rural places the message is piped in. Disharmonious voices must expect state interference, and eventual arrest.

For Canada now has political prisoners, including many who participated in the Freedom Convoy of truck drivers. Tamara Lich, a prominent organizer of this demonstration, has been gratuitously jailed, though she didn’t even try to commit a plausible crime. This week she was gaoled again, apparently for receiving a freedom medal. (Persons it was in her bail conditions not to meet may have been in the audience.) She was put out of sight for “Canada Day” (the former Dominion celebration, yesterday). This manipulation of Canadian law is, sadly, no longer unprecedented. It seems to be ordered directly from the Prime Minister’s Office.

More evidence produced against RCMP Commissioner … how long can she hang on now?

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

In the free-to-cheapskates cut-down edition of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors look at another confirmation that RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki really ought to resign, and soon:

Another document has been released that addresses the controversial teleconference between Lucki and local commanders and officials in Nova Scotia on April 28, 2020. This document is an email (which has been published by the Mass Casualty Commission in full), written by Lia Scanlan, a civilian who was working with the Nova Scotia RCMP as a communications advisor. She was a participant in the teleconference that is the source of the controversy. In an email sent to Lucki in 2021, well after the events in question but well before the recent controversy erupted, Scanlan harshly criticized Lucki’s conduct.

The bulk of Scanlan’s email relates to Lucki’s insensitivity to the officers and civilian staff in Nova Scotia in the aftermath of the shooting. (Lucki, for her part, has already acknowledged that she behaved badly in the meeting and regrets it.) What’s interesting for the purposes of the broader story, however, is that Scanlan’s email repeats the primary allegation contained in the earlier explosive document: that Lucki told the local commanders and officials that she was under political pressure to accelerate the release of information about the crime prior to a forthcoming gun-control announcement by the Trudeau Liberal government.

Specifically, Scanlan wrote: “Eventually, you informed us of the pressures and conversation with Minister Blair, which we clearly understood was related to the upcoming passing of the gun legislation. and there it was. I remember a feeling of disgust as I realized this was the catalyst for the conversation and perhaps a justification for what you were saying about us.”

This is interesting for two big reasons. The first is obvious: it is verification, from a new source also present at the controversial meeting, of the primary allegation that has been made against Lucki, and which she has not explicitly denied, though she has now put out two vague statements denying any intention to interfere. The second interesting thing is that one of the immediate lines of defence that miraculously sprung into being last week — just kidding, these were clearly PMO talking points — was that criticisms of Lucki’s conduct simply reflected the old-guard, all-male club mentality of the RCMP seeing an opportunity to put a hatchet into the uppity lady boss they’ve been saddled with by the Trudeau government.

Your Line editors weren’t born yesterday. We’re sure there’s plenty of good ole boys in the RCMP who do indeed feel exactly that way about Lucki. Scanlan, though, doesn’t reflect that. She’s a young woman, and a civilian. Further, even if the allegations were 100 per cent coming from an old-boys club, that doesn’t mean the allegations aren’t true. There have been many, many examples of pissed-off, agenda-driven people with axes to grind striking back at their rivals and opponents by … telling the truth about them.

As we said last week, Lucki is probably finished. If she doesn’t have the good judgment to resign, she should be fired. We don’t honestly know if this problem goes any higher up the chain of command than her. That’s why we repeat what we said last week: we need an investigation into this.

We will note that the government’s tone has slightly changed this week. It’s hard to read too much into government statements. And we want to be careful to avoid simply projecting our own views onto bland bureaucratese. But it does seem to us that the government’s position has evolved slightly, from “There’s no truth to these allegations and we stand by the commissioner” to something more akin to, “Hey, if she did this, it wasn’t because we asked her to. Don’t blame us!”

Commissioner Lucki? That sound you hear is the big red bus you will soon be thrown under pulling up to the curb you are standing beside. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

QotD: The US media when Donald Trump “happened”

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

[The 2008 election was] where the split between Party and Media really became obvious — the Party desperately wanted the only “adult” (by 21st century Democratic Party standards) in the room to be the nominee, but The Media wouldn’t hear of it. It seemed as though the struggle for the whip hand was finally over …

But then Donald Trump happened, as my students would’ve written. Though it’s only a few years in the past, we’ve already forgotten just how much The Media loved Bernie Sanders when the Republican nomination was still in doubt. Trump, of course, made The Media lose their shit so egregiously that what they did to W. looked like the happy ending to an Oriental massage, but virtually nobody was cheerleading for Hillary qua Hillary. It took the specter of The Donald as president to get them all on the same page.

Which brings us to now. The Democratic Party can read a poli-sci textbook. They know how difficult it is to beat an incumbent president in a good economy. Hell, it’s almost impossible to beat an incumbent president in a bad economy — see 2004 and 2012. It takes a major systemic shock to turf out an incumbent in the modern era — a catastrophe on the magnitude of a serious third party challenge (Ross Perot in ’92), or the incumbent being Jimmy Carter. The poli-sci textbooks say that the Dems’ only hope is to run the closest thing to the Antimatter Donald Trump they can find. That is to say: the blandest, SWPL-iest Goodwhite on their roster.

Alas for them, The Media will be having none of that. Trump somehow triggers them even more than he did in 2016 — don’t ask me how; it violates several important laws of thermodynamics — so they’re going all-in on goofballs like AOC and her “Squad.” The Media loves “the Squad,” and since The Media have convinced themselves that theirs is the whip hand, they’re ordering us to love “the Squad” too. To which Trump replies with a version of “lol get fucked,” and since “you’re free to leave this country if you hate it so much” seems forehead-slappingly obvious to anyone without a journalism degree, Trump’s poll numbers rise. Which prompts another stern lecture from The Media, which receives another “lol get fucked,” and around and around and around we go …

But here’s the thing: The battle for the whip is a battle royale. There are more than just two combatants. The Party still thinks it’s in charge. The Media, with 2008, 2012, and 2016 in its pocket, think they’re in charge. Nobody bothered to ask “the Squad,” though, and that’s the truly terrifying thing: “The Squad” thinks they’re in charge, and they might actually be right.

We’ve already got Congress voting to condemn Trump’s tweets. Set aside how brain-bogglingly infantile that is — and how petty and retarded it appears to the American public. Consider just how badly Nancy Pelosi et al, aka The Party, had to screw up to find themselves in this situation.

Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.

July 2, 2022

The “preferred pronoun” problem

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

Jim Treacher is having pronoun problems … not choosing the ones he wants to use or for others to use for him, but the whole “preferred pronoun” imposition on the rest of society to learn, remember, and use properly the bespoke pronoun choices for all the extra, extra-special snowflakes:

Remember when you could just use the pronouns that self-evidently described a person? If you were talking about a fella, you’d say stuff like, “He did this” and “Here’s what I said to him.” Or if you were talking about a lady, you’d say things like, “The 19th Amendment says she can vote now, good for her.” It was a simpler time.

Now pronouns are a frickin’ minefield. You put one little tippy-toe on the wrong pronoun and … BOOM!! A heedless “misgendering” can get you in big trouble. You can get banned from the internet and/or lose your job. For some reason, you’re expected to enable the delusions of any person with trendy mental health issues. It’s not enough for a trans person to call him-, her-, or themselves whatever he, she, or they want. The rest of us are all obligated to go along.

Even if he’s a scumbag criminal like Ezra Miller.

And what’s even worse, this bizarre phenomenon renders news stories about “nonbinary” people almost indecipherable. Just look at this latest story about the ex-Flash actor going around the world being a violent lunatic:

    The actor — best known for playing the DC superhero the Flash in several films for Warner Bros. — was set to start filming the studio’s latest entry in the “Harry Potter” franchise, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, in London when the shoot was halted on March 15, 2020, due to COVID. In the weeks after, Miller, who identifies as nonbinary and uses “they/them” pronouns, became a regular at bars in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, where locals came to know and even befriend them. Many recognized Miller from their earliest breakout movies, 2012’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, where they played a troubled teen who brought a bow and arrow to school and murdered his classmates.

It’s a grammatical nightmare. “Many recognized Miller from their earliest breakout movies.” Oh, so those Icelanders worked with Miller on those movies? No, you see, “their” is supposed to refer to him.

And this part is just madness: “They played a troubled teen who brought a bow and arrow to school and murdered his classmates.” So it’s not “They murdered their classmates,” because the character he was playing wasn’t nonbinary? What is this gibberish?

Tom Hanks recently said he regrets playing a gay man in Philadelphia because he’s not gay. I always thought that was just called “acting”, but what do I know. If that’s the case, though, why should a nonbinary person be allowed to play a normal person?

June 30, 2022

What’s the military version of the saying “Get woke, go broke”?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the largely self-inflicted damage suffered by the US Army during the last few years, leading to (among other things) significant recruiting shortfalls:

The American military is running a social trust test for the larger society, and the results are remarkably clear.

Remember that the Biden administration opened with an ideological assault on the armed forces, ordering a training stand-down to harangue servicemembers about politics.

[…]

While the public framing was vague, the training wasn’t: It ran in a single direction. Servicemembers reporting on their “extremism” training to members of Congress described sessions in which the military warned them against white nationalism and the dangers of far-right sentiment, but didn’t mention Antifa (or ISIS, but whatever), hammering the January 6 narrative but deflecting questions about riots and arson in the summer of 2020. In uniform, troops did “privilege walks” and unpacked their white privilege in supervised discussions. Extremism, it turns out, is only one kind of thing, on a single end of the political spectrum.

Pursuing the theme of politically purified armed forces, three retired US Army generals published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a political commissariat in the American military: “In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.” More domestic political spying will make our institutions healthy, they explained.

[…]

The result of woke leadership, politicized military service, Covid vaccine mandates that decline to take safety concerns and religious objections into account, and wars fought for no point or objective:

[…]

And a generation shrugs.

The military is only the most obvious, most centralized example of a burgeoning withdrawal from institutions crippled by lost trust. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment declined by 662,000 in a single year. Meanwhile, public school enrollment in California is imploding. The LAUSD, which was closing in on 800,000 students twenty years ago, is now moving in the other direction, and closing in on 400,000.

Institutions can shit on people, and push them past their limits, and make absurd and unkind demands of them. Until they can’t.

There will be more of this.

2020’s spike in homicides in the United States

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

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander looks at the rapid rise in murders across the United States in early 2020, and considers the common explanation for the phenomenon:

In my review of San Fransicko, I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco’s local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent police pullback.

Several people in the comments questioned my attribution, saying that they’d read news articles saying the homicide spike was because of the pandemic, or that nobody knew what was causing the spike. I agree there are many articles like that, but I disagree with them. Here’s why:

Timing

When exactly did the spike start? The nation shut down for the pandemic in mid-March 2020, but the BLM protests didn’t start until after George Floyd’s death in late May 2020. So did the homicide spike start in March, or May?

Let’s check in with the Council on Criminal Justice:

It very clearly started in late May, not mid-March. The months of March, April, and early May had the same number of homicides as usual.

[…]

Police Pullback

My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas. This could be because of any of:

  • Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied.
  • Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less in order to show everybody how much they needed them.
  • Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake that they made during policing that they were less willing to take the risk.
  • The “Defund The Police” movement actually resulted in police being defunded, either of literal funds or political capital, and that made it harder for them to police.

I don’t want to speculate on which of these factors was most decisive, only to say that at least one of them must be true, and that police did in fact pull back.

[…]

Victims

Who is being targeted in these extra murders?

The 2020 homicide spike primarily targeted blacks.

(there also seems to be a much smaller spike for Native Americans, but there are so few Natives that I think this might be random, or unrelated).

Most violent crime is within a racial community, and there was no corresponding rise in hate crimes the way I would expect if this was whites targeting blacks, so I think the perpetrators were most likely also black. This was a rise in the level of violence within black communities.

A priori there’s no reason to expect lockdowns and “cabin fever” to hit blacks much harder than every other ethnic group. But there are lots of reasons to expect that the Black Lives Matter protests would cause police to pull back from black communities in particular. I think this is independent evidence that the homicide spike was because of the protests and not the pandemic.

June 29, 2022

COVID Exposed the Truth About the CDC

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 28 Jun 2022

The agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from politics.
——————-
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was once widely viewed as the gold standard in public health, considered an apolitical, science-driven bulwark against all pathogen threats, foreign and domestic.

Today, trust in the agency has plummeted because COVID-19 exposed the truth: The CDC is thoroughly corruptible, and federal regulators will never be impartial experts. They respond to political incentives just like everyone else, and a fact-driven, purely technocratic state is an impossible dream.

The Trump administration pressured the CDC to narrow the scope of testing so case counts would drop, blocked officials from doing interviews, and edited its flagship scientific reports. The CDC provided a scientifically dubious public health rationale for rejecting migrants at the southern border. President Joe Biden continued that policy, and under his purview, CDC guidance on school closures was surreptitiously written by leaders of the country’s second-largest teachers union.

Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, co-authored a 2021 op-ed with three other former agency heads expressing hope that Biden’s incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky would “restore the public’s confidence in the CDC’s scientific objectivity,” with its reputation “a shadow of what it once was.” Yet, Frieden endorsed large-scale protests against racial injustice two months after writing in The Washington Post that “the faucet of everyday activities needs to be turned on slowly. We cannot open the floodgates.” Meanwhile, public health officials were keeping people from attending the funerals of their loved ones.

And could it be pure coincidence that the CDC chose the Friday before President Biden’s State of the Union address to drop its indoor mask recommendation for the majority of Americans, even though the supporting data were months old?

In other words, it doesn’t matter who occupies the White House — political incentives mean that, no matter how dedicated or competent the career scientists who work at the CDC are, the agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from the “hurry and strife of politics,” as Woodrow Wilson wrote. After decades of mission creep, the CDC’s role should be strictly narrowed, limited to surveillance and coordination, leaving the heavy lifting to local officials and private and academic researchers who are more reactive to direct feedback from their communities.

Written and produced by Justin Monticello. Edited by Isaac Reese. Graphics by Reese, Tomasz Kaye, and Nodehaus. Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music: “Robotic Butterflies” by Evgeny Bardyuzha; “We Fall” by Stanley Gurvich; “Free Radicals” by Stanley Gurvich.

Photos: BSIP/Newscom; BSIP/Newscom; Sarah Silbiger/UPI/Newscom; Shawn Thew – Pool via CNP/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Alex Edelman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; SMG/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Simon Shin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Adam Schultz/White House/Newscom; Brazil Photo Press / SplashNews/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Polaris/Newscom; Jonathan Alpeyrie/Polaris/Newscom; Aimee Melo/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/Newscom

It’s not your imagination: young women are becoming more liberal

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

Daniel Cox looks at the noted shift in political opinions among young women (aged 18-29) compared to their male counterparts, and not just on the current hot-button topic of abortion rights:

… In fact, young women have become significantly more liberal over the past decade whereas the political identity of young men has remained largely unchanged over time.

Rise of Unmarried Women

There are a few reasons for the increasingly liberal politics of young women. One explanation may lie in their marital status. Compared to previous generations of young women, far more women under the age of 30 today are unmarried. Only 15 percent of young women today are married compared to more than one-third of young women two decades ago.

Why does this matter? Research has shown that unmarried women feel more connected than their married counterparts to other women — a phenomenon known as “linked fate” — and it can lead them to support more liberal policies. In their fascinating 2017 study, Christopher T. Stout, Kelsy Kretschmer, and Leah Ruppanner argue that “women consistently earn less money and hold less power, which fosters women’s economic dependency on men. Thus, it is within married women’s interests to support policies and politicians who protect their husbands and improve their status.” This phenomenon of “linked fate” was not found to be evident among men, so even though young men are also less likely to be married compared to older generations, their marital status may have less of an impact on their politics than for women.

The Growing Education Divide

Over the past several decades, women’s educational attainment has far outpaced that of men’s; “Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s”, writes Derek Thompson in the Atlantic.

    American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider.

The education divide between men and women has become more politically relevant because of the stronger connection between educational attainment and political behavior. In recent elections, college graduates have become a much more loyal Democratic constituency. And on a range of issues, college-educated Americans are more liberal than those without a Bachelor’s degree.

QotD: How Cadet Che shows that West Point isn’t West Point anymore

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

… but that’s the thing: West Point isn’t West Point, and hasn’t been for at least thirty years now. This kid went to Ranger school, did a tour in Afghanistan, and was commissioned in the 10th Mountain division after graduating from West Point. In case you don’t feel like clicking, he’s the kid who took selfies with a Che Guevara shirt under his cadet grays and “communism will win” scribbled on the inside of his hat. Note the timeline: the kid was commissioned after those selfies made the Internet rounds. He still graduated, and for a time was an active-duty officer in the United States Army.

Bad as that is, there’s much worse. Notice the passivity of it all. What were any of the parties involved trying to accomplish? If Cadet Che had wanted to get kicked out of the service (as it seems finally happened, according to the linked article), there are a million easier ways. In fact, cadets at West Point are volunteers. The Army makes a big production out of this: If you can’t hack it at the Point, you’re simply not officer material. All it takes is a letter to the commandant, and you’re out — Cadet Che could’ve been drinking beer with his fraternal socialist comrades at Big State 24 hours after turning in his resignation.

Even the kid’s form of “protest” was passive. There’d be a certain utility, I suppose, for the Revolution if the kid had written “I’m a Communist sleeper agent” on the inside of his hat — evidently our standards are so lax that we don’t do basic background checks on our potential military officers. But he didn’t write that. Instead, he wrote “Communism will win,” a passive, bloodless statement … and that’s it.

The passivity is the truly terrifying part. A West Point graduate is among the elite if anyone is — he has command of at least a platoon of heavily armed trained killers, and the radio one of them carries has the power to call in armor, air strikes, cruise missiles … and yet, not “I’m a communist,” not “¡Viva la Revolución!,” not even “Lenin lives!” Just … “communism will win.” How, comrade?

Severian, “The Man of the Hour”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-22.

June 28, 2022

Pierre Poilievre … not the Canadian Trump?

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

Allan Stratton points out to sheltered central Canadian urban voters that populism has a long history in Canadian politics, and didn’t need to be imported from the US:

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre is oft accused of importing divisive American right-wing populism to our politics. His endorsement of the trucker protest against vaccine mandates — though not the legal violations of its organizers — has been portrayed as a play for Christian nationalists, racists and fascists. Likewise, his attacks on Davos and the World Economic Forum are said to welcome Trumpian conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and Great Replacement nativists.

Common wisdom suggests that this strategy may win Poilievre the Conservative party leadership, but will render his party toxic to respectable, mainstream Canadian voters.

There’s a lot of smoke and at least some fire to this critique: The People’s Party of Canada will find it hard to tag Poilievre as a centrist squish.

But thanks to our constitution, the Supreme Court and our general political culture, all more liberal than their American counterparts, social conservative attacks on abortion and LGBT rights seem off the table.

Further, far from a Trumpian nativist, Poilievre is in favour of immigration and wants to cut the red tape that blocks immigrants from employment in their fields, something the current federal government has failed to accomplish into its third mandate.

My fear, as someone who shares many concerns about the prospect of a Poilievre government, is that commentators are misreading the broad appeal of his populism, leading Liberals to unwarranted overconfidence.

Sure, Poilievre’s strategy shares some Trumpian elements, but it’s equally rooted in a progressive Canadian tradition that dates back to the early 19th century and was prominent in the last half of the 20th.

If the Liberals don’t course correct, they may discover that while they are attacking Poilievre as a far-right extremist, he is eating their traditional liberal, working-class lunch.

In broad strokes, I imagine Poilievre channelling Louis-Joseph Papineau and William Lyon Mackenzie during the Rebellions of 1837-38. Instead of the Château Clique and the Family Compact, I see him fighting the Laurentian Consensus, another powerful, unelected group, this time composed of academics, bureaucrats, media apparatchiks and Central Canada think-tankers who dominate our culture and financial establishment — and who arrogate to themselves the right to determine Canadian values and the ways in which we are allowed to describe and think about ourselves as a nation.

For those of us who grew up on the left under Mike Pearson, Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau and David Lewis, it is hard to stomach the recent illiberal turn in elite liberal discourse. It once assumed the importance of free speech, understanding that censorship has always been used by the powerful to suppress the powerless. Yet today, in academia and the arts, free speech has been recast as “hate speech”, and our Liberal government is passing C-11, which seeks to regulate what we read and how we express ourselves online.

June 25, 2022

QotD: The Left’s long march through the institutions

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

Old-school Commies were consummate players of the long game. They knew they’d have to completely undermine bourgeois society before they could carry off The Revolution, so they did. Antonio Gramsci laid it all out theoretically, if you feel like slogging through that gunk, but the Commies had been doing it in practice for decades before that. Starting with the educational “reformers” surrounding John Dewey at the turn of the 20th century, they took over our grade schools. Then they took over the universities, working their way up from the community colleges (often Commie fronts from the get-go; there’s a reason the number of jucos nationwide went from 20 to 170 in just ten years, from 1909 to 1919).

Once they were in, they of course credentialized everything, such that the cultural-transmission professions — journalism, education, even art and music — suddenly required college training … and all the trainers were Reds. Ever wonder why you seemingly have to have a fucking Master’s Degree to get your lit-wank novel published? Seriously: read the author bio of any of the flavor-of-the-minute wunderkinder that get their painfully quirky dreck blurbed in the New York Times Review of Books — every blessed one of them has some kind of advanced degree in “creative writing”. All those graduate-level “creative writing” programs aren’t just make-work for otherwise unemployable Eng-Lit PhDs, in other words. They’re what the Union of Soviet Writers was in the USSR: The guarantors of politically-reliable content.

That’s the setup. Ready for the twist?

They won, but they don’t know it. Not only was the Revolution televised, it’s still being televised, 24 hours a day, on 587+ satellite cable channels and umpteen digital streaming services. Eugene V. Debs’s wettest wet dream couldn’t compare to Current Year America. The SJWs are like the Seekers, out there desperately trying to prepare the world for the UFOs … but the UFO already landed in their backyard, and they were too busy trying to save the world to see it.

That’s why widespread political violence is inevitable, and damn soon. Nancy Pelosi may be the nastiest evil old bitch to ever slime through the halls of Congress, but she’s not stupid. She’s just in an impossible situation. She’s the leader of an organization that didn’t manage its True Believers, and now she’s fucked either way. […]

That’s what the old-school Commies didn’t see coming. Those poor deluded fools really thought that “intellectual” was an adjective. The Russian word for the noun version is intelligentsia, and they gave the Soviet Union no end of trouble — Stalin had to send boxcars of them to Siberia fairly regularly to keep them in line. In the West, though, they really thought that you can have an “intellectual” steelworker, or dockhand, or farmer, and the like. They were counting on it, in fact — see “community colleges were all Red fronts”, above.

Instead, “intellectual” is the True Believer’s self-chosen job description. You can meet some fearsomely learned people in your day-to-day, but the only people you’ll ever meet who use the word “intellectual” without sneering are Media types and their panty-sniffers in the ivory tower. They’re extremely useful idiots, which is why none of Palsy Pelosi’s predecessors sent them to Siberia like they should’ve. And now it’s too late.

Severian, “If the UFO Actually Comes, Part II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-26.

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