Quotulatiousness

September 7, 2021

L. Neil Smith, 12 May 1946 – 27 August 2021

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From what might be the penultimate issue of the Libertarian Enterprise, Neil’s daughter Rylla Smith says farewell to her father:

Lester Neil Smith III, novelist and political commentator, gunsmith and musician, visionary and futurist, passed away on Friday, August 27th at Poudre Valley Hospital after a lengthy battle with heart and kidney disease. He was 75 years old.

A long-time resident of Fort Collins, Colorado, Neil was born on May 12th, 1946 at Mercy Hospital in Denver, Colorado to Maj. Lester N. Smith II and Marie L. Coveleskie Smith.

Neil, known in the world of science fiction as L. Neil Smith or, affectionately, “El Neil”, is survived by his beloved wife, Cathy L.Z. Smith, his daughter, Rylla C. Smith, his brother Roger L. Smith, his nephews Nolan and Travis, and his aunt, Barbara Ohlwiler, as well as countless friends and brothers-in-arms. He was preceded in death by his mother and father.

Neil’s life was one spent perpetually looking forward — toward the future of freedom, of technology, of the continuation of the evolution of the human body, mind, and spirit, and toward the endless sea of stars. As a child, he wanted to be a marine biologist, to discover the unknown in the depths of the seas; this translated naturally in his young adulthood to a thirst for knowledge of the far greater unknown beyond the shores of this world.

Neil had an avid interest in the politics of personal liberty and always stood for what he believed to be right. He had a passion for friendly debate and never shied away from speaking his mind.

In the late 1970s, he wrote the first of his many novels, The Probability Broach, which began a long and prolific career in the burgeoning world of liberty-oriented science fiction, and was the creator of the Prometheus Award, as well as the recipient of the 2016 Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Memorial services will be held in Fort Collins, Colorado on a date yet to be determined; for more information, please follow Neil’s memorial page on EverLoved.com or contact Rylla Smith at ryllacat@gmail.com.

“And yet, what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and supress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do.” — L. Neil Smith

September 6, 2021

QotD: Torturing the English language for “antiracist” ends

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

I caught a glimpse of Ibram X. Kendi’s recent appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the annual woke, oxygen-deprived hajj for the left-media elites. He was asked to define racism — something you’d think he’d have thought a bit about. This was his response: “Racism is a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.” He does this a lot. He repeats Yoda-stye formulae: “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy … If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.” These maxims pepper his tomes like deep thoughts in a self-help book. When he proposes specific action to counter racism, for example, he suggests: “Deploy antiracist power to compel or drive from power the unsympathetic racist policymakers in order to institute the antiracist policy.” “Always vote for the leftist” is a bit blunter.

Orwell had Kendi’s number: “The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.” And that conformity is proven by the gawking, moneyed, largely white, Atlantic subscribers hanging on every one of this lightweight’s meaningless words — as if they really were in church.

The most dedicated abusers of the English language, of course, are the alphabet people. They have long since abandoned any pretense at speaking English and instead bombard us with new words: “cisheteropatriarchy”, “homonormativity”, “fraysexuality”, “neutrois”, “transmasculine”, “transmisogynoir”, and on and on. To give you a sense of the completely abstract bullshit involved here, take a style guide given out to journalists by trans activists, instructing them on how to cover transgender questions. (I’m wondering how Orwell would respond if given such a sheet of words he can and cannot use. Let’s just say: not like reporters for the Washington Post.) Here’s the guide’s definition of “gender nonconforming”: “[it] refers to gender presentations outside typical gendered expectations. Note that gender nonconforming is not a synonym for non-binary. While many non-binary people are gender nonconforming, many gender nonconforming people are also cisgender.”

This is a kind of bewildering, private language. But the whole point of the guide is to make it our public language, to force other people to use these invented words, to make the entire society learn and repeat the equivalent of their own post-modern sanskrit. This is our contemporary version of what Orwell went on to describe as “newspeak” in Nineteen Eighty-Four: a vocabulary designed to make certain ideas literally unthinkable because woke language has banished them from use. Repeat the words “structural racism” and “white supremacy” and “cisheteropatriarchy” often enough, and people come to believe these things exist unquestioningly. Talk about the LGBTQIA2S+ community and eventually, people will believe it exists (spoiler alert: it doesn’t).

Andrew Sullivan, “Our Politics and the English Language”, The Weekly Dish, 2021-06-04.

September 3, 2021

“Watching our feminist prime minister uncomfortably defend and explain away decidedly unfeminist behaviour has become an evergreen moment for our nation”

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

The NP Platformed newsletter is in the hands of Kathryn Marshall while Colby Cosh is on vacation, and she offers yet another golden moment of hypocrisy on the part of Justin Trudeau:

Standing in the fenced-in corner of a backyard during a press conference this Tuesday, Justin Trudeau was cornered in more ways than one.

Faced with questions from the media as to why he was allowing an incumbent Liberal candidate who had been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment to run for his party, an exasperated Trudeau was once again faced with his hypocrisy when it comes to his feminist credentials.

Only the day before, Trudeau was touting the Liberals “zero-tolerance” policy for sexual harassment. Of course, that was in the context of a Conservative candidate who had been accused of sexual misconduct. Notably, that candidate was very swiftly given the boot by leader Erin O’Toole, which was the correct response.

Now Trudeau finds himself in the exact same position that the Conservative leader was in. Following a CBC report, it has come to light that one of the Liberal candidates, two-term MP Raj Saini, has been the subject of numerous sexual harassment allegations from a number of staff going all the way back to 2015. I have no idea if these allegations are true, but they are deeply disturbing and should be taken seriously. As reported by the CBC, there are seven different sources who “described four different cases where Saini allegedly made unwanted sexual advances or inappropriate comments.” One of the allegations involves a former staff member who filed a human rights complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and tried to end her own life.

It should be a ludicrously easy call for Trudeau. The Liberal party has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, right? Obviously, Saini needs to go and an individual who is facing allegations of this nature is in no position to be running for public office, period.

Except for one small hiccup. The allegations have come to public light after the candidate cut-off date for the election, which was Monday. So if Trudeau gets rid of Saini, it means they can’t replace him with someone else, and the result is no Liberal candidate on the ballot in a safe Liberal seat. Call me cynical, but if I had to guess, I would say this likely has something to do with the fact that overnight, the Liberal’s “zero-tolerance” policy appears to have evaporated into thin air.

September 1, 2021

Larry Elder’s campaign for governor hit with accusations of “white supremacism”

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

In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald looks at the recent hysterical attacks on gubernatorial hopeful Larry Elder based on the notion that he is somehow a kind of stalking horse for white supremacists:

Larry Elder at Camp Pendleton for the ceremony presenting the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to his father, Staff Sergeant Randolph Elder, U.S.M.C., 16 August, 2013.
US Government photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.

The media have focused particularly on Elder’s views about crime and policing. The self-described “Sage from South-Central” maintains that criminals, not the police, are the biggest threat in the black community. According to Elder, the false narrative about lethal police racism has only led to more black homicide deaths. “When you reduce the possibility of a bad guy getting caught, getting convicted and getting incarcerated, guess what? Crime goes up,” he said recently at a campaign event in Orange County.

Elder also rejects the charge that white civilians are gunning down blacks, as LeBron James maintained in a tweet during the George Floyd riots: “We are literally hunted everyday, every time we step outside the comfort of our homes.” Elder has a different take. If a “young black man is eight times more likely to be killed by another young black man than [by] a young white man,” Elder told the Orange County Republicans, then “systemic racism is not the problem.”

Such statements are anathema to the establishment Left, deeply invested as it is in the idea that blacks have little agency in the face of ubiquitous white racism. Few subjects are more taboo in elite discourse than the elevated rate of crime among blacks, as it suggests cultural pathologies that — at the very least — complicate the victim narrative. To the Left, black crime is little more than a racist fiction. Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero claims that the crime statistics Elder has cited “over the decades to support his views and policy proposals are misleading, if not outright false, casting Black people as unusually crime-prone.” Black people are not “more inclined toward violent crimes,” nor do blacks “disproportionately victimize whites,” Guerrero wrote, citing Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan and other criminal experts. (Fagan was the plaintiff’s expert in a trilogy of lawsuits against the New York Police Department in the 2010s.) Fellow Times columnist Erika Smith sneered that Elder “keeps trotting out statistics that purport to show that Black people are particularly prone to murdering one another.”

Unfortunately for Elder’s critics, the statistics showing vastly disproportionate rates of black crime and victimization come from some of the Left’s favorite sources. CDC data show that in 2015, for example, the homicide victimization rate for blacks aged 10–34 (37.5 per 100,000) was 13 times the rate for whites (2.9 per 100,000). That disparity is undoubtedly much greater now, given the record-breaking increase in homicides since the George Floyd riots — an increase disproportionately affecting blacks.

Those black victims of homicide are not being killed by cops or whites. They are being killed by other blacks. In Los Angeles, blacks this year have committed 46 percent of homicides whose offender is known, even though they are just 9 percent of the Los Angeles population. Whites make up 28 percent of the Los Angeles population but have committed 4 percent of homicides, mostly involving domestic violence. These data, reported by the Los Angeles Times, mean that a black Angeleno is 35 times more likely to commit a homicide than a white Angeleno. Homicide data are the gold standard for crime statistics. Alas for Jeffrey Fagan and the Los Angeles Times‘s other experts, the statistical conclusion that blacks are “more inclined toward violent crimes” is indisputable.

August 31, 2021

The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 2

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

Yes, it’s time to publish some of the silliest political bullshit our “leaders” and their parties are slinging around in the federal “she-lection”:

Let’s start with an interesting one.

We’d recommend watching the whole clip (and we’d also note that there’s a second video clip further down in the thread; technical limitations broke one long clip into two shorter ones). But there’s two piles of dung here, and it’s worth breaking them out separately.

The first is, of course, the patented non-answer to a direct question. Glen McGregor asked Trudeau about our people in Afghanistan who were in that very moment in immediate danger. Trudeau talked about something nice he did in 2015. We understand that this is a campaign, but imagine you or someone you love is stuck Afghanistan in now, and the leader of the country is asked about you/them, and that’s the answer? Really?

The second pile of scat is more nuanced. Check out the part of the clip starting at 1:25. Trudeau says that O’Toole and the Conservatives are “promising to end the very program that brought in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, the very program we’re using to bring in tens of thousands of Afghans fleeing to [safety] in Canada. That doesn’t make sense.”

Well, we mean … it doesn’t make sense because it’s not true.

The Tories are proposing changes to how Canada accepts refugees. Specifically, they want to shift to more heavily rely on privately sponsored refugees, citing research that shows these refugees more easily and more quickly settle into Canada. There would be both government-sponsored and private-sponsored refugees under what the CPC is calling a “joint model” model. This is broken out in the CPC’s campaign platform on page 129.

This seems … pretty reasonable? The Tories are not only promising to maintain current funding levels and numbers of accepted refugees, they just want to structure it differently. Not even very differently, at that: of the 62,000 Syrian refugees that Canada has resettled since Trudeau came to office, half were privately sponsored. The CPC platform also very specifically notes that this wouldn’t apply in “cases of emergency”, which the fall of Afghanistan clearly is. You can criticize that as policy, or even doubt they’ll follow through. Just saying they’ll cancel the program, though, is nonsense.

Of course, Trudeau isn’t the only bullshitter on the campaign trail, so RTWT for the rest of the antics that The Line felt were bullshitty enough to register this week.

QotD: “It’s not news, it’s irritainment”

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

“Did you watch the news last night?”

“Yeah, I watched [Tucker Carlson/Rachel Maddow].”

Except that’s not the news. That’s an editorial program where a person gets performatively angry about their opinion of selected bits of news so that you get angry about it along with them … righteously angry enough to sit through an hour’s worth of commercials.

It’s not news, it’s irritainment.

Tamara Keel, “It makes me so mad!”, View From The Porch, 2021-05-25.

August 30, 2021

Mark Steyn on chocolate soldiers, tutti-frutti generals, and the ice-cream commander-in-chief

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

When all that matters is not performance but performance art:

On the day that twelve US Marines and some 150 civilians were blown apart by suicide bombers, it was heartening to learn what real heroism is.

Until January 6th, the highlight of Michael Byrd’s “law-enforcement” career was leaving his loaded Glock in a congressional men’s room and paying no price. He “serves” with the grotesquely misnamed “Capitol Police”, which is not a police department but a praetorian guard – a personal security team for the praetors of Congress. Lieutenant Byrd shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, a 5’2″ unarmed woman, because “she was posing a threat to the US House of Representatives”.

All that has been known for months by anyone who wanted to know. The only real news in NBC’s Byrd exclusive was the level of his self-congratulation:

    I believe I showed the utmost courage on January 6.

His interviewer, Lester Holt, did not respond: “Er, hang on, isn’t that the kind of thing you’re meant to leave for someone else to say about you?”

And did he have to say “utmost”? Even in as unutterably vulgar an age as ours, is even Michael Byrd incapable of imagining any “courage” greater than his own?

Ah, well, don’t over-think it; it’s just one of those phrases, half-remembered by Byrd from some Rose Garden medal ceremony he caught on TV: “utmost” goes with “courage” like “white” goes with “supremacist” and “domestic” goes with “terrorist”.

America is a land that tends to the utmost in all things. At the end of the nineteenth century, Bernard Shaw popularized the term “chocolate soldier” — the dashing hussar who is useless in battle but looks good in a uniform. We have the tutti-frutti generals: Thoroughly Modern Milley and his chums, whose diversity ribbons from shoulder to scrotum advertise their own utmostness even as they explain why everything going wrong merely demonstrates how everything is going right.

The tutti-frutti generals report to the ice-cream commander-in-chief melting all over the lectern every afternoon. His predecessor was on telly all day every day; Mr Biden was sold to head-in-the-sand Americans as the quiet-life guy who wouldn’t be in your face. Unfortunately, when your countrymen get blown up by government blunders, the citizenry expects him to be in their faces at least every now and then. Across the Atlantic, Boris and the EU chaps were on the screen responding to an all too predictable atrocity. But in the White House Joe Biden’s meds hadn’t yet kicked in — or, conversely, they’d shot him the juice too early and it had worn off. So, as has become familiar, the melting waffle cone was hours late in tottering across the room, squinting into the camera and reading with woozy and wooden defiance. This time he gave it the full Corn Pop:

    To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget.

But Joe, a man who cannot reliably name his own Defense Secretary, has already forgotten.

August 29, 2021

Justin Trudeau discovers for himself the truth of Harold Macmillan’s dictum on the most difficult thing about being Prime Minister

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

Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what was the most difficult thing about his job and is reported to have said, “Events, my dear boy, events.” Justin Trudeau had everything he wanted in the Canadian political situation in early August so he put his early election plans into action … and along came those unpredictable events:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

What would have happened in the election of 2021 if Afghanistan hadn’t fallen? If the writ had been drawn up just a few weeks before, or a few weeks after August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban?

This is the sort of question political science nerds will debate over weak beer for decades to come. It’s no great mystery why the Liberals went forward with the election even as armed fighters began to stream into the capital city of a country in which Canadians have sacrificed so much time, blood and treasure.

But I can picture the scene in the war room now and the logic is inescapable. The meeting with the governor general had been set, the news leaked, the campaign messaging laid out, the suits pressed and the planes booked. Besides, as we all know: “nobody cares about foreign affairs.” That old cant, repeated, like a charm.

Most of the time, it’s true.

Canadians hadn’t thought about Afghanistan for a decade. We’d all stopped paying any mind to some poor nation on the dark side of the world, that disputed chunk of mountain and desert besieged by misery and war since the time of Alexander the Great.

Nobody cares about such things. Until they do.

And what’s the difference between a foreign affair that we care about, and one that we do not? The answer is not flattering. We are selfish and solipsistic creatures. We care about current events abroad when what’s happening has some connection to ourselves or our interests — or when the news reflects something about ourselves.

I would not be the first pundit to point out the parallel between the fall of Kabul and the death of Alan Kurdi, the three-year old Syrian refugee boy whose body washed ashore after drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in September of 2015, in the midst of the federal election that brought Justin Trudeau to power. That child’s doll-like body, face-down on a beach, destroyed us, and the tragedy was made more pointed with the discovery that his family had been trying to reach Canada. And that his asylum application had been rejected by officials in Stephen Harper’s government.

In our own bureaucratic nightmare, and Harper’s dispassionate response, we saw reflected our own lack of compassion.

What we are confronting now in Kabul is our lack of competence.

August 28, 2021

Flagging enthusiasm

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

In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh considers the suddenly politically relevant position of the Canadian flag:

The other day, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole made mention of the fact that the Canadian flag atop the Peace tower in Ottawa has been flying at half-staff for almost three months and that as prime minister he would put it back up — countermanding the specific order Justin Trudeau gave on May 30. O’Toole’s remark was a brief one dropped in at the end of a longer statement, but he did say we should be proud of our flag, which some people still think of as a Liberal contrivance, and he made the point that being proud of Canada goes hand in hand with wishing to improve it.

I saw this the other day and commented on social media that “I expect the Canadian dying media to be All. Over. This. — Conservative leader Erin O’Toole just called for the Canadian flag to be raised (they’ve been at half-staff officially since the end of May). If the media have their way, this will guarantee a huge majority government for their crush, Justin Trudeau.”

I admit, this was a bit glib, and not all the Canadian media are in the tank for Justin, but (as the old joke about lawyers had it) the 90% give the other 10% a bad name.

First of all, if sticking up for the proper display of the flag counts as wrapping oneself in it, doesn’t using it for gestures of regret (or the dreaded “virtue signalling”) really qualify as the mirror image of this? Trudeau made a point of making sure we knew the lowering of the flag was his own initiative. Liberals have spent a couple of generations working their asses off to constantly remind us that it’s a Liberal flag, which is precisely why conservatives in Ontario towns starting with “B” love the Red Ensign. It is natural to wonder whether, given the apparent Liberal sensitivity about our blood-soaked banner, we won’t get a third national flag before everyone’s finished adapting to the second one. […]

Canada is a place where literal Conservatives can’t “wrap themselves” too tightly in the literal flag: this isn’t the United States, where the positioning and context of the flag in ads or on stage will let you know instantly whether you’re at a Republican or a Democratic event. (The presence of an eagle is always a good clue.) Yet our Liberals have manoeuvred themselves into a position, somehow, in which it is awkward to fly the flag too high.

Can Trudeau now set a date for the raising of the flag to its position of respect and dignity, having plumb forgotten to do so in the first place? And if he is the renewed choice of the Canadian people as prime minister, will he be able to hoist the thing back up? Will this happen the day after the election? The first week? After prolonged consultations with First Nations, perhaps involving a royal commission?

You see, there is an aspect to this that goes beyond politicians battering at one another with flagpoles and other national paraphernalia. O’Toole’s comment didn’t just remind us that we’re Canadians and we should like our flag. It reminded us that we have a government that often seems to have a big problem thinking 30 seconds ahead, let alone six months.

August 27, 2021

QotD: Music corporations, musicians, and hypocrisy

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

“A good song should make you wanna tap your feet and get with your girl. A great song should destroy cops and set fire to the suburbs. I’m only interested in writing great songs.”

So says Tom Morello, guitarist for the Los Angeles-based band Rage Against the Machine. He and his bandmates are not simply against cops and the suburbs, of course. They also stand for the Zapatistas and the Shining Path, for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, for giving California back to Mexico, and for destroying stores where rich people like themselves shop.

That’s pretty strong stuff coming from work-for-hire employees of one of the great cogs in the global capitalist machine, the megaconglomerate Sony, which wholly owns and distributes Rage’s music and even is a co-owner of the group’s publishing. Since 1992, Rage has sold nearly 7 million records, and it’s safe to say that nobody has benefitted more from that commerce than the band’s unabashedly capitalist paymaster.

Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason, 2000-10.

August 26, 2021

Rigging the rules to exclude Maxime Bernier from the leaders’ debate

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

Jamie Clinton asks why Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier’s People’s Party is being excluded at the same time as the self-destructing Green Party is included by the Leaders’ Debate Commission:

However, before the commission came out with their announcement, the People’s Party had polled at or above four per cent in 13 out of 20 polls. It has only looked worse for the commission since the decision was made. The PPC has averaged five per cent in the six polls done since then. Including one poll that had them at 6.6 per cent, exactly double the floundering Green Party’s numbers.

It is very likely that if the Leaders’ Debates Commission had made their decision a few days later they would have allowed Maxime Bernier to be at the debates. Or, at least, they would have using the criteria they ultimately settled on.

For reference, in the 2008 federal election, Elizabeth May, then leader of the Green party, was allowed to participate in the debates even though her party did not have a seat. And yes, this time the rules are different. But it’s not as if MP’s voted on the debates’ rules or anything. The rules are completely arbitrary decisions that change every election cycle based on the whims of the Leaders’ Debates Commission.

In the 2019 federal election, with a different set of rules, the commission gave Bernier the benefit of the doubt and allowed him to participate in the debates. This time around, that is no longer needed.

Even if the PPC is technically under the four per cent threshold, the fact that they are outpolling both the Green party and Bloc Québécois in an increasing number of polls should be enough. Or at should at least raise the question as to whether or not the Greens and Bloc should remain in the debates.

The Bloc’s position is unique, on the basis of their geographically efficient vote. The Greens are another matter. Often, when an election rolls around, the media and Debates’ Commission go out of their way to distinguish the Green party as a major party. This has been true even when the GPC is polling at and receives under four per cent of the national vote. This happened in 2011 and 2015.

By this consideration, the People’s Party should definitely be allowed at the debates. It seems there are two different sets of rules, one concerning the Greens and the other for the PPC.

August 24, 2021

Tracking the bullshit in the ongoing “she-lection”

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

Ever watchful of opportunities, the folks at The Line quickly realized that there was a critical tracking metric going un-reported in the 2021 federal election and They. Are. On. It.

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

At The Line, we’ll be continuing to send out our weekly dispatches for the duration of the campaign. Columnist Jen Gerson will also be doing a weekly recap of major events. We’ll be running articles by other contributors as they come in — not all will be about the election, but many will. And we’re happy to do this. But we felt that something — something we couldn’t quite put our finger on — was missing from our plan. We felt there was more that we could do.

It was our friend over at The Hub, a new media startup, that set us on the right course. The Hub is going to be doing “Policy Pulse”, which they describe as “tracking all the policy announcements from the major parties, with instant analysis from our crew of experts.” Great idea! But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that, you know, that doesn’t quite catch it all. There’s something else that needs to be carefully tracked and analyzed. So we at The Line are proud to bring you our first Bullshit Bulletin, where we’ll note and mock all the incredibly dumb stuff that crops up along the way. This will be an evolving process, and we don’t pretend to see everything, so if you want to send us suggestions, tweet us at @the_lineca, and add #bullshitbulletin, or drop us a note at lineeditor@protonmail.com, with Bullshit Bulletin in the subject field.

And to be clear, all you smart asses out there, no, don’t just tag the entire campaign or every statement made by every member of a party you’re not voting for and write it off as bullshit. There’s degrees of wiggle room and salesmanship and base-mobilizing in every election. We’re not going to worry about that. We’re looking for the egregious examples, and the really weird stuff that comes tumbling out of the partisan mind.

On that note, let’s get started.

Note that although they’re careful to exclude bullshit reports on comments “made by every member of a party you’re not voting for” — which is fair and sensible — they are (one assumes) open to bullshit reports on comments made by members of the party you are planning to vote for … because if it’s enough to set off your partisan-biased bullshit meter when it comes from your “side”, then it’s got to be prime quality bullshit.

August 23, 2021

The dying media’s strange obsession with the Green Party

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

The Green Party gets far more media attention in Canada than their vote totals or influence on goverment policy could possibly justify. Their ongoing attempts to commit media character assassination of their own leader might be the first time in living memory that the party’s antics might — might — justify it. The Line explains some of the dramedy in Greentopia:

“Annamie Paul with Green Party of Canada supporters” by Annamie Paul is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

One of us, just a couple of days ago, was standing around in our increasingly tattered casual wear and making a sandwich with the TV on in the background. A local news channel was showing Green party leader Annamie Paul speaking. So we changed the channel, because the Greens are irrelevant. But the next channel was also showing the same feed. We tried two others. It was all the same goddamned feed. And two of those networks were national. Viewers from coast to coast had a chance to hear, for an extended period, from a woman so thoroughly doomed that she’s not even pretending to run a national campaign. All she can muster is an attempt to win her seat in downtown Toronto.

Look, we don’t know who needs to hear this, but at the national level, the Greens are zeroes. Sorry, not sorry. Frankly, the Greens have long gotten too much attention in Canadian politics, which is a result of a few quirky things all aligning in their favour: Elizabeth May’s admittedly effective relentless self-promotion, the coffer-stuffing effect of the per-vote-wage subsidy, and, the politeness of Canadian media leaders who felt awkward saying no to Lizzie.

This is not to say that there are not serious Greens, nor that the Green party has not put forward some serious policy proposals. There are, and they have. The issue is that under our electoral system, the Greens don’t matter. And their strident complaining about their irrelevancy doesn’t actually make them relevant.

We glanced at recent vote tallies. The Greens generally get around five per cent or so, sometimes a point or two higher, sometimes a point or two lower. That ain’t nothing. But it is not enough to make them a meaningful electoral force in anything but a tiny handful of seats — or in really weird, bizarre vote-splitting scenarios, and those are very rare. We don’t believe there’s some magic level of popular support at which a party deserves serious consideration or not, it all depends on the context. The Bloc doesn’t get a ton of votes, either (though never less than the Greens), but since they only run candidates in Quebec, their efficient vote means they have a pretty consistently good chance of winning enough seats to matter in parliament. The Greens … don’t.

And that is in normal times. These aren’t normal times. Annamie Paul is a perfectly serious, credible person. The fact that her party is trying to back a cement truck over her in full view of 38 million witnesses simply confirms our instinct to ignore the party she leads. Most elections, you could argue that it’s a shame that the Greens don’t have an actual chance. This election, we’re thanking God for it.

Deciding how much attention to give a candidate or party is usually pretty easy. Outside Quebec, the big three — Tories, Liberals and NDP — get proper coverage, within the context of local circumstances and the dynamics of individual campaigns (ignoring a CPC also-ran in deepest Toronto isn’t going to break any hearts, nor the sacrificial Liberal in rural Alberta). The gamut of weirdo fringe parties are basically ignored. In Quebec, the Bloc warrants consideration alongside the big three.

What screws all this up, though, are the Greens and the People’s Party. They don’t warrant serious consideration, per se, but they will draw a fair number of voters. What to do with these?

August 20, 2021

QotD: First Ministers Conferences

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

What is the point of a First Ministers Conference?

There is no actual necessity for them, you understand. The federal and provincial governments are quite able to function within their respective jurisdictions without their leaders dashing off across the country at regular intervals to quiver their jowls at each other. The first such meeting was not held until 1906. Just 10 more “dominion-provincial conferences” occurred over the next 40 years. Not until the 1950s did they become the semi-annual affairs we know today. That this was also when the TV cameras arrived is possibly not coincidental.

If there were actual business to transact, it could just as easily be arranged by subordinates, or over the phone, or via video-conference. Or if an issue were so thorny that it genuinely required a fleshly first-ministerial encounter, the prime minister could always meet bilaterally with the premier or premiers involved, as Stephen Harper did.

But a full-on, capital-F First Ministers Conference, official cars, flag-backed lecterns and all? There is invariably but one purpose to these: for the 10 premiers to corner and harass the prime minister, using the imbalance in their numbers to depict the feds as the outlier. Sometimes this is in furtherance of the premiers’ perennial campaign for more federal cash. Sometimes, as in the current exercise, the point seems to be conflict for conflict’s sake. But always — always — it is theatre.

Only it is theatre of a peculiar kind: with the curtains drawn and the sound down, the audience being instead entertained by periodic reports from agents for each of the actors about who said what. Thus the breathless dispatches from reporters orbiting the conference — they are kept well away from the actual meeting room — every line of it originating from sources, federal or provincial, with a professional interest in puffing one leader or the other.

Andrew Coyne, “A semi-annual opportunity for premiers to strut and preen and accomplish nothing”, National Post, 2018-12-07.

August 18, 2021

Historically, empires have fallen over decades or centuries …

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

… today, however, everything seems to move much faster than it used to:

The War on Terror began with men plunging to their deaths from the highest floors of skyscrapers hit by airplanes; it ended with men plunging to their deaths from the undercarriage of a US airplane taking off from what’s left of “Hamid Karzai International Airport” (the signs will be coming down even as you read this).

America is a global laughingstock right now, but that’s no reason not to give Chairman Xi and Putin and every up-country village headman in Helmand a few more yuks. Step forward, State Department spokeswanker Ned Price:

    State Department calls for Taliban to include women in its government

The United States is dead as a global power because of this kind of indestructible stupidity. You’ve lost, you blew it, it’s over: The goatherds just decapitated you; could you at least have the self-respect not to run around like a headless chicken too stupid to know it’s nogginless? Or like a broken doll lying on its back with its mechanism jammed on the same simpleton phrases: “Diversity is our strength… diversity is our strength…”

Contrast the Washington presser with that in Kabul:

    Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid says ‘We have defeated a great power.’

Hmm. Ned Price vs Zabiullah Mujahid: tough call. The mountain of non-existent dollar bills that the bloated husk of federal government blows through every minute surely should buy sufficient self-awareness to know that, whatever else it may be, this is not a day for wankery as usual. Even CNN has a more proximate relationship to reality. Here is their Kabul correspondent, Clarissa Ward, reporting on Sunday:

And here is the same Miss Ward reporting on Monday:

Gee, did anyone back at the anchor desk ask her what’s with the wardrobe switcheroo?

Just for the record, the Kingdom of Afghanistan introduced votes for women in 1964 – whereas Switzerland did not get even a very limited female franchise until 1971, and full suffrage not until the Nineties.

Yet, oddly, every Pushtun warlord prefers to keep his retirement account in Zurich.

Maybe, after taking twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser, you State Department arses might have enough humility to recognize that that that big messy world is subtler than your one-size-fits-all clichés.

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