Quotulatiousness

March 16, 2021

Mumford & [REDACTED]

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

Jack Stacey on the group-mandated self-cancellation of Winston Marshall by his band mates in Mumford & Sons at the behest of a social media mob for the mortal sin of complimenting a book publicly:

As the band’s most famous lyric goes, he really fucked it up this time. For while the book in question does describe the left’s penchant for totalitarian control disguised as benevolence, it was not the above classic [Nineteen Eighty-Four] (yet to be deemed problematic), but Unmasked by journalist Andy Ngo, which gets Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy in the name of social justice.

Following this transgression against the militant arm of wokery and pressure from the rest of the group for his “increasingly right-wing views”, Marshall the banjoist has pushed his entire Twitter feed down the memory hole leaving only a mea culpa pinned to the start. It states: “Over the past few days I have come to better understand the pain caused by the book I endorsed. I have offended not only a lot of people I don’t know, but also those closest to me, including my bandmates, and for that I am truly sorry.”

He adds in his adopted Newspeak that he will use his absence “to examine my blindspots”, and concludes: “For now, please know that I realise how my endorsements have the potential to be viewed as approvals of hateful, divisive behaviour. I apologise, as this was not at all my intention.”

You would have thought he’d had rats caged to his face to become so repentant. But no, it appears that, as ever, some people got angry on social media, after which his partners at the tweed and ‘tache firm he’d helped set up have made him genuinely believe he deserved it for mucking around in politically incorrect prole territory.

For don’t let the & Sons bit fool you. Like the band’s resulting output, their name was chosen to add an earthy patina to bely the fact that they were, as Bo’ Selecta!’s Mel B might have it, “posh as fook”, rather than as they would have you think: “common as mook”.

March 14, 2021

QotD: “Logomachia” – the use of language as a culture war weapon

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

During the Summer of Floyd, I commented to an American friend that this is the first time in my adult life that I am more optimistic about France than about America. The mass derangement of wokeness has been astonishing to watch. And the response from the right has been pathetic. Now, America has driven itself into ditches before, and found deep reservoirs of self-confidence from which to draw. I would never write off America completely. But the rapidity and fanaticism with which American elites have committed themselves to a course of what can only be called civilizational suicide — a kind of anti-American jihad — has been astonishing. Certainly I hope the Europeans take the right lessons from it and, as I mentioned, it seems that French elites aren’t buying it.

One of the left’s key weapons is what the philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist called “logomachia”, or language warfare. They invent all these words and use it to shape the ideaspace in their favor. It should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t have brainworms — at this point it is even obvious to many normies — that in contemporary American discourse a word like “racism” has as much connection to phenomena in the real world as “Trotskyite” had in Russia under Stalin. So if someone says “You’re a racist!” and you respond “I’m not a racist because X and Y and Z” you have already lost because you have implicitly conceded that there is this thing out there called “racism” which is really big and bad and scary, and one that your enemies get to define for you. And it doesn’t matter that your X or Y or Z may be absolutely correct. You still lose by dignifying the accusation e.g. (“I am not part of the Trotskyite conspiracy!”). The entire thing is transparently preposterous and should be responded to appropriately, with laughter and derision.

And let’s face it, we are so eager to say “I’m not a racist!” because we’re afraid of what will happen to us if we don’t. And people can smell fear, and it’s unattractive. Be not afraid!

Niccolo Soldo, “The Zürich Interviews – Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Unrepentant Baguette Merchant”, Fisted by Foucault, 2020-12-02.

March 11, 2021

Boris as a latter-day Prince Rupert of the Rhine?

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Graham Stewart portrays the British Prime Minister and Sir Keir Starmer, leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition in the House of Commons as English Civil War combatants:

King Charles I and Prince Rupert before the Battle of Naseby 14th June 1645 during the English Civil War.
19th century artist unknown, from Wikimedia Commons.

Prime Minister’s Questions distils into a single gladiatorial contest what thousands of enthusiasts in a charitable organisation called the Sealed Knot perform across the country most summers – namely the re-enactment of battles of the English Civil War.

Unsmiling, relentless, serious to the point of bringing despair to his foot-soldiers as much as his opponents, Sir Keir Starmer is a Roundhead general for our times. Nobody believes better than he that virtue and providence are his shield. This faith sustains him whilst the fickle and ungodly court of popular opinion fails to rally to his command. He believes that holding firm, doggedly probing the enemy with the long pike and short-sword will eventually prevail, no matter how long the march to victory may prove.

Facing him, the generous girth of the nation’s leading Cavalier occupies his command-post. His long, uncut hair resembling a thatch on a half-timbered cottage, Boris Johnson lands at the despatch box as if he has just fallen from his place of concealment in an oak tree, bleary and under-prepared, but confident in assertion. It might be said of him, as Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton once said of the parliamentary style of a previous Tory prime minister, Lord Derby, that Johnson is “irregularly great, frank, haughty, bold – the Rupert of debate.”

Today was one of those occasions when the prime minister did indeed resemble the dashing Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Unfortunately, it was the moment during the decisive civil war battle of Naseby when the great Cavalier commander charged his horsemen through the parliamentary lines with such momentum that they kept going and ended up spending the rest of the day plundering a distant baggage train rather than returning to determine the result of the battle.

Women’s Vote Leads to Bolshevism and Welfare | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.13 – Harvest 1921

Filed under: Health, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 10 Mar 2021

This season not only marks the birth of the American welfare state, but it will also see women make great strides towards universal suffrage. But as you can imagine, none of these things come without significant opposition.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory​

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Michał Zbojna
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…​
Mikołaj Uchman
Klimbim

Sources:
Some images from the Library of Congress

Icons from The Noun Project:
Birth by Adrien Coquet
dead by AomAm
mother by Fahmihorizon
United States Capitol by József Balázs-Hegedüs
noun_House of Representatives
House of Representatives Full by Sarah Lawrence

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
“Epic Adventure Theme 3” – Håkan Eriksson
“You’re Trouble” – Rich in Rags
“I’d Rather Be Alone” – Franz Gordon
“Redefine” – Megan Wofford
“Age Of Men” – Jo Wandrini

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com​.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago
America has so far been a pretty big topic in this season, and it again takes center stage in this episode. Considering its monumental role in twentieth-century history, this is only natural. Still, we like to give an international history as possible, so it’s exciting to also introduce Sweden here. It is a small country but historically significant for a number of reasons. It is a pioneer in social democracy, a country that has consistently stayed neutral in world affairs since 1814, and last but not least, the home of Indy Neidell.

March 10, 2021

How wide is the gap between extreme partisanship and sectarian violence?

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

Sarah Hoyt says she really didn’t want to write this post, and I completely understand why she feels that way:

The next American Civil War will be fought in a lot of places, in sudden flare ups and unexpected bursts of rage. But where most casualties will occur is in the home.

America’s civil war will be fougnt many places, but mostly in living rooms: siblings against each other, parents against children, children against parents, husband against wife, wife against husband.

If you live with a convinced leftist, how safe is your life, should the balloon go up?

And before you say “The first civil war was also between brothers!”

Sure, it was. There were mixed families. Mostly upper crust mixed families. But the war was largely a regional war, the country riven on regional lines.

Now? Bah. Now it’s a war of ideology. A war of beliefs.

And a lot of people are sleeping with the enemy, hanging out on weekends with the enemy. Visiting the enemy. Having lunch with the enemy.

At this moment a lot of you are sitting back there and going “My wife/husband/elementary school friend is not an enemy. Sure, he/she/it drank the Marxist koolaid from a hose but in every day life, in our normal interactions, in non-political things, we are very close, the best of friends.”

And maybe you are. Maybe you can trust them with your life.

But I will remind you we live in a nation where the capital is surrounded with razor wire to defend themselves from people who voted for the guy. I will remind you there are troops occupying our capital and that our secret services have so far been corrupted they keep inventing internet conspiracies (or probably referring to their very own black ops) to justify it.

I will remind you that your favorite progressive has allowed himself to be moved from “strong welfare net” to “we need full on communism, with favored races” within the last 12 years (or was indoctrinated into that state in schools.) I will remind you — and the conversations related back to me don’t help me think otherwise — that your favorite leftist thinks you’re racist/homophobic/evil. NO MATTER HOW MANY indications to the contrary.

And I can hear you sniffling: “But I love him/her/it/fuzzy.” Well, yes, and ten years ago that would have been me. I had very good friends I just classed as political idiots. I don’t wish the last 10 years on anyone, but at least they’re not living with me, 90% of them don’t know where I live. And I’ll be out of here in hopefully no more than 4 but maybe ten months, and maybe we have that long. Also, most of my close friends/acquaintances aren’t likely to cause any damage, being … not the type. On the other hand two dozen of them (easy) are friends with people who WILL.

Now to be clear: do I expect all of you in mixed political families to be in danger?

No. Any number of your spouses, relatives and friends are leftist because that’s “what good people are.” And they will turn on a dime, too, if half the crap about what the left has been doing for the last couple of decades comes out unvarnished and unspun. (The left knows it too. They’re perhaps more scared of these people than they are of us.)

Others are leftist and might hate your guts if things go hot, but simply don’t have it in them to hurt anyone. These are the “slippery” ones, because if you had asked me, even two years ago, if the media and the left (BIRM) could spin these people into wishing death on someone for not wearing a mask, when the person is not sick; there’s no proof of asymptomatic transmission (there’s reports from China but NOWHERE ELSE); and the actual disease (it’s not hard to find) might be a little more lethal than the flu but only at ages past about 80, I’d have said “no. They’re politically insane, but not stupid.” However they are “group oriented.” Turns out the type of gaslighting we’ve been enduring works really well on people who live for others’ opinions. (Which explains whey Southern Europe is still mired in the fricking crazy. Uniformly. And why women in general are more susceptible to the completely irrational gaslighting than men.) And they already believe a bunch of crazy crap. The reason that they think QANON is right main stream, it’s because it’s the mirror image of their actual main stream.

Are you sure they’ll remain inoffensive if the ballon goes up and the gaslighting switches to “If you know a Trump voter, he/she is dangerous?” How about “Turn them in, so they can be sent somewhere nice for their own protection?”

Look, guys, I hope none of this is ever needed. I still have friends on the other side, I’m just not in touch and we work on the very long finger. And there are people I no longer consider friends but whom I like very much who are buying into the entire insane bull excreta of “attempted coup” and evil “white nationalists.”

But like Peter Grant, I think we’re way past the ballot box, and just waiting for a precipitating incident.

I desperately hope she’s wrong about this, because an actual shooting war in the United States would be a disaster for western civilization.

Update: It’s apparently time to Immanentize the Eschaton!

I’m of the firm opinion that the Progressive Left believed that once Obama won his second term they were set. The eschaton night not be immanent, but it was imminent. Hillary was going to be another “great leap forward” towards the heaven on Earth promised by Karl Marx. […]

“Politics” it is said, “is the art of compromise.” “War,” said von Clausewitz, “is politics by other means.” I have repeated and repeated the observation that has made itself manifest in the nearly 18 years I’ve been writing this blog: Charles Krauthammer noted in 2002 that “To understand the workings of American politics you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”

You don’t debate with evil. You don’t negotiate with evil. You don’t compromise with evil. You don’t tolerate evil. You DESTROY evil. You pat it on the head until you can find a rock big enough to bash its skull in.

And control of the culture, education, and the government makes for a big damned rock.

Here’s the tinfoil yarmulke part of this essay: The preparations are underway. When debate and compromise are no longer possible, then force is the only thing left. They know it, and they’re projecting it on their enemy, us.

The Progressive Left has created and exercised its Sturmabteilung (yes, I know I risk Godwinization, and they loathe such comparisons, but this one’s apt. Their outfits are black instead of brown, but the actions are the same.) They’ve been set loose in the Pacific Northwest and some other cities and have been allowed to riot, commit arson, loot and occasionally murder with little to no legal consequence (violence, after all, being free speech you know.) Andy Ngo has studied Antifa, itself with roots in radical Socialism, in depth, and says that they are preparing for war, generously supported by the more mainstream Progressive Left. Black Lives Matter, an organization founded by two open Marxists, is also part of the preparations, but these are in my opinion just the Progressive Left’s “useful idiot” shock troops – the first to go against the wall after the Revolution.

March 9, 2021

QotD: Canadian culture

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

Everywhere one turns one sees a tendency toward mimesis — we tend to copy rather than invent — qualified by intellectual emptiness. In other words, it may be that the vacancy of the Canadian mind reflects the vacancy of the Canadian landscape. Of course, much of the land is variegated — lakes, rivers, forests, the impressive mountain ranges running down the length of “beautiful British Columbia” — in the same way, metaphorically speaking, that we can boast a number of resonating exceptions to the staple of tepid cultural and intellectual sameness.

One thinks of novelist Mordecai Richler, poet Irving Layton, critical minds Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, musicians Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot. Our founding father, Sir John A. Macdonald, was the ne plus ultra of our political class; there has been none like him since, which may explain why he is now on posthumous trial for war crimes and a hue and cry has gone up to remove his statues and rename eponymous schools.

The constitutive factor, however, exceptions aside, is the “howling emptiness” of a vast landmass that may partially account for the emptiness of our intellectual topography — if, as Jared Diamond had argued in Guns, Germs and Steel, geography governs the development of culture and spirit.

Any nation the preponderance of whose citizens regularly elects left-wing political parties; accepts single-payer healthcare; believes in the efficacy of the welfare state; endorses the hoax of global warming; accommodates swarms of third-world immigrants and refugees who have no love for or understanding of a country becoming an open-to-all multicultural tombola with the highest proportionate rate of immigrants in the Western world; has allowed its educational industry, from pre-school to graduate school, to be corrupted possibly beyond retrieval by lockstep Leftism, “diversity and inclusion,” and “social justice” claptrap; has caved to the feminist and campus-rape fable; dutifully takes CBC Leftist propaganda as gospel; has fallen for the 16th Century meme of the “Noble Savage” in its dealings with the aboriginal peoples; extravagantly celebrates a second-rate rock band like The Tragically Hip and names a street after it; reads (when it does read) tedious scribblers like the acclaimed Joseph Boyden and Ann-Marie MacDonald; and gives a complete ignoramus like Justin Trudeau a majority government on the strength of name and coiffure, cannot be regarded as informed, well-educated or in any way distinguished. Unlike the U.S., there are no cracks, to quote Leonard Cohen, where the light gets in. The Canadian political, cultural and academic spectrum has gone dark from end to end.

David Solway, “The Canadian Mind: A Culture So Open, Its ‘Brains Fall Out'”, PJ Media, 2018-10-10.

March 8, 2021

Despite the rhetoric, judging by their actions the Democrats really hate the “gig economy”

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

Along with all the giveaways to favoured groups in the US government’s huge “relief” bill, there was a late change that will take the gig economy into a back alley and rough it up to the tune of about $1 billion in new taxes:

UBER 4U by afagen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

When the economy is struggling to recover from a pandemic and crushing government lockdowns, that’s probably the worst time to impose $1 billion in new annual taxes on the working class. But that’s exactly what a new provision quietly slipped into the Democrats’ sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID legislation would do.

“A last-minute insert by Democrats looking to offset the cost of their coronavirus aid package would send tax collectors into the gig economy, eventually costing Uber and DoorDash drivers, Airbnb hosts and others about $1 billion annually,” Roll Call reports.

Under current tax law, earnings data for gig economy workers only needs to be reported to the IRS once it reaches $20,000. This means that small earners pursuing gig work to supplement their income aren’t hit by crushing federal taxes. However, the Democrats’ provision would nearly eliminate this benchmark, and instead require all income above $600 to be reported to the IRS.

“The stiffer tax burden would be imposed while 10 million Americans are unemployed and more and more have turned to freelance and gig economy work to make ends meet,” Roll Call notes.

Indeed it would, and this would be disastrous for both workers and the economy.

This tax hike “adds a significant burden to gig economy and small business workers at the worst possible time,” according to TechNet spokesman Steve Kidera. One tax expert warned Roll Call that many struggling gig economy workers won’t be able to pay the higher taxes, and that IRS penalties “can destroy a person’s life.”

March 5, 2021

Schools told they need to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views”

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

No wonder I had trouble with math back in grade school: Math is a racist tool of White Supremacists!

“Math Class” by attercop311 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Mandatory teaching standards that focus on critical theory and identity politics to the detriment of liberalism and individualism are already working their way through state legislatures.

Now, math education itself has been deemed “racist.” A group of educators just released a document calling for a transformation of math education that focuses on “dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”

Among the educators’ recommendations, which officials in some states are promoting, are calls to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views,” “provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance,” and “encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in [STEM] fields.”

Beyond activism, these recommendations also argue that traditional approaches to math education promote racism and white supremacy, such as requiring students to show their work or prioritizing correct answers to math problems. The document claims that current math teaching is problematic because it focuses on “reinforcing objectivity and the idea that there is only one right way” while it “also reinforces paternalism.”

March 1, 2021

In the 2020 US federal election, “Each side felt that the stakes were existential”

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

Michael Anton discusses what he calls the “Continuing Crisis” in the Claremont Review of Books:

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

A full understanding of what happened that Wednesday would begin with the ruling class’s decades-long betrayal and despoliation of what would eventually come to be called Red or Deplorable or Flyover America. But the more proximate cause was the 2020 election — easily the highest intensity such contest of my lifetime. Each side felt that the stakes were existential. The accuracy of those feelings doesn’t matter; their existence was enough to drive events.

As an incumbent seeking a second term, President Trump — even after the COVID lockdowns had tanked America’s previously supercharged economy — seemed to have a lot of things going for him: near-unanimous support from the base, high primary turnout even though he faced no opposition, a seemingly unified party, approval ratings not far from Barack Obama’s in 2012. According to Gallup, in September 2020 56% of Americans reported doing better than they had four years prior — a level that, in ordinary times, would all but guarantee an incumbent’s re-election.

But these were not ordinary times. It was also easy to see — and many friends and supporters of the president did see, and warned about — shoals ahead. The Democrats used the pandemic as an excuse to accelerate and intensify their decades-long effort to loosen and change American election practices in ways that favor their party. In the spring, they began openly talking about staging a coup: literally using the military to yank Trump from power. It’s one thing to hold a “war game” and plot in secret about a president’s ouster, but why leak the result? Only if you want the public prepared for what otherwise would look like outrageous interference in “our democracy.” Democrats and their media allies also, and for the same reason, assiduously pushed the so-called “Red Mirage” narrative: the story that, while you are likely to see Trump way ahead on election night, he will certainly lose as all the votes are counted. This was less a prediction than preemptive explanation: what you see might look funny, but let us assure you in advance that it’s all on the up-and-up.

In response (or lack thereof) to the other side’s assiduous preparations, the president, his staff, his campaign, and his party committed four serious errors of omission. First, they made hardly any attempt to work with Republican state officials — governors, legislatures, and secretaries of state — to oppose and amend rule changes that would disadvantage them and favor their opponents. As far back as the 2016 election, Trump had complained that Hillary Clinton’s popular vote total had been padded by several million votes by illegal immigrants. Yet he and the GOP did very little to tighten state election procedures. Second, after having failed adequately to oppose those changes, they mounted far too few legal challenges to get them overturned or modified. Third, having declined to challenge the changes, they barely even tried to ramp up their own mail-in voting operation to rival the Democrats’. Fourth, despite numerous loud predictions — both as boasts and warnings — that the election outcome would be unclear and disputed in several states, no team was assembled in advance to investigate and, if necessary, litigate the results. Florida 2000 came as a surprise to candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush. Nonetheless the Bush campaign was able to field almost immediately an army of lawyers, including experts on election law, headed by a former secretary of state, the wily James Baker. The Trump team had at least six months’ warning and, as far as I can see, did nothing to prepare.

H/T to “currencylad” at Catallaxy Files for the link.

February 28, 2021

Should the Republicans embrace “class warfare”?

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

Scott Alexander proffers some advice to the US Republican Party in its post-Trump doldrums, even though he admits that “I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn’t suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything.”

So here’s my recommendation: use the word “class”. Pivot from mindless populist rage to a thoughtful campaign to fight classism.

Yeah, yeah, “class” sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you’re supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn’t a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture. You’re already doing class warfare, you’re just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words “class” and “classism”.

Trump didn’t win on a platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever. He won on a platform of being anti-establishment. But which establishment? Not rich people. Trump is rich, lots of his Cabinet picks were rich, practically the first thing he did was cut taxes on the rich. Some people thought that contradicted his anti-establishment message, but those people were wrong. Powerful people? Getting warmer, but Mike Pence is a powerful person and Trump wasn’t against Mike Pence. Smart people? Now you’re burning hot.

Trump stood against the upper class. He might define them as: people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa. Who eat Thai food and Ethiopian food and anything fusion, think they would gain 200 lbs if they ever stepped in a McDonalds, and won’t even speak the name Chick-Fil-A. Who usually go to Ivy League colleges, though Amherst or Berkeley is acceptable if absolutely necessary. Who conspicuously love Broadway (especially Hamilton), LGBT, education, “expertise”, mass transit, and foreign anything. They conspicuously hate NASCAR, wrestling, football, “fast food”, SUVs, FOX, guns, the South, evangelicals, and reality TV. Who would never get married before age 25 and have cutesy pins about how cats are better than children. Who get jobs in journalism, academia, government, consulting, or anything else with no time-card where you never have to use your hands. Who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too.

(full disclosure: I fit like 2/3 of these descriptors)

Aren’t I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, grad students, and starving artists may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class. The upper class is a cultural phenomenon.

Aren’t I just describing Democrats? No. The Democrats are a coalition of the upper class, various poor minorities, union labor, and lots of other groups. It’s an easy mistake to make, because you Republicans absolutely loathe the upper class, and whenever you’re talking about Democrats you focus on this group and how much you hate them. But you make the mistake of saying you hate Democrats, and then it looks like boring old partisanship. Or saying you hate the elites, and then it looks like boring old populism. Or saying you hate rootless cosmopolitans, and then it looks like boring old anti-Semitism. Or saying you hate the government, and then it looks like boring old libertarianism.

Instead, just use the words “class” and “classism”. Say “Hey, we Republicans want to be the party of the working class. We are concerned about the rising power of the upper class, and we are dedicated to stamping out classism.”

This is what happens when nobody uses the word “class”!

QotD: The essential role of writers like Twain and Mencken

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

Mencken lived in horror of the American people, “who put the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding beside Friedrich Barbarossa and Charlemagne, and hold the Supreme Court to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and belong ardently to every Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Saloon League, and choke with emotion when the band plays ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.'” Much of that horror was imaginary, and still is. But we must have horror, especially in politics. How else to justify present and familiar horror except but by reference to a greater horror? In this year’s election, each candidate’s partisans already have been reduced to making the argument that while their own candidate might be awful, the other candidate is literally akin to Adolf Hitler. Yesterday, I heard both from Clinton supporters and Trump supporters that the other one would usher in Third Reich U.S.A. “Don’t tell yourself that it can’t happen here,” one wrote.

A nation needs its Twains and Menckens. (We could have got by without Molly Ivins.) The excrement and sentimentality piles up high and thick in a democratic society, and it’s sometimes easier to burn it away rather than try to shovel it. But they are only counterpoints: They cannot be the leading voice, or the dominant spirit of the age. That is because this is a republic, and in a republic, a politics based on one half of the population hating the other half is a politics that loses even if it wins. The same holds true for one that relies on half of us seeing the other half as useless, wicked, moronic, deluded, or “prehensile morons.” (I know, I know, and you can save your keystrokes: I myself am not running for office.) If you happen to be Mark Twain, that sort of thing is good for a laugh, and maybe for more than a laugh. But it isn’t enough. “We must not be enemies,” President Lincoln declared, and he saw the republic through a good deal worse than weak GDP growth and the sack of a Libyan consulate.

Kevin D. Williamson, “Bitter Laughter: Humor and the politics of hate”, National Review, 2016-08-11.

February 27, 2021

Profiles in Cowardice — Justin Trudeau

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

Matt Gurney on how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest act of moral cowardice probably won’t hurt him at all in the polls:

Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”

It has been fascinating to watch the reaction to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s profile in non-courage this week, after he and most of his cabinet skipped a vote on a Tory motion seeking to declare China’s brutal campaign against the Uyghur people a genocide. (Marc Garneau, who was probably desperately wishing he was back in low-Earth orbit, showed up to abstain … because that’s a good use of an astronaut.) If there is anything close to a consensus on the matter, it’s that the PM was in a difficult spot and found a way to slither out of it at the cost of some dignity, but no other real loss.

Kaveh Shahrooz, in a piece here at The Line on Thursday, made that case well. He savaged Trudeau for his hypocrisy — “when the chips were down, the [gender-based analysis], the intersectional lens and the feminist foreign policy were tossed aside in favour of appeasing China,” he wrote — but he also noted that the entire affair won’t really hurt the PM. “Sadly, the worst that will happen to Trudeau because of the hypocrisy and incompetence displayed is some angry tweets and a few articles like this one,” said Shahrooz.

Maybe. But maybe not. Shahrooz and others are certainly right that the prime minister won’t pay an electoral price, and probably won’t see his polling waver. But history makes its own judgments. And I suspect this prime minister is more aware of that than most.

It seems a long time ago now, but in his first term, Trudeau made a habit of apologizing. Only rarely for stuff that he was actually himself responsible for — he’s kinda averse to doing that. But formal and public apologies for past failures? He was all over those. In 2018, the BBC even ran a piece noting the PM’s habit, and asked in the headline, “Does Justin Trudeau apologize too much?”

It’s not that there weren’t things worth apologizing for. In 2016, he apologized for Canada turning back the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying mostly Sikhs that was then forced to return to India, where 20 of them were killed in a riot. The next year, he apologized to survivors of residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador, and to LGBT Canadians for discrimination they faced at the hands of the federal government. The next year, Jews and members of the Tsilhqot’in Nation received apologies for historical wrongs inflicted on them. And so on. It was a thing.

A man who so clearly adores taking a stage to shed a few tears while acknowledging wrongs committed by someone else, long ago, probably can’t avoid wondering who, in a hundred years, will be apologizing to Uyghurs for his refusal to clearly state that what is happening to them is a genocide.

February 24, 2021

Solzhenitsyn was far from the first to warn about the evils of Soviet rule

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple had a discussion recently with a Marxist professor:

Krushchev, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders review the Revolution parade in Red Square, 1962.
LIFE magazine photo by Stan Wayman.

The professor was an intelligent man, and probably cultivated too. How was it possible, in the Year of Our Lord 2021, for such a person still to believe that, until the advent of Stalin, the Russian revolution was a good thing, to be emulated or repeated elsewhere?

How could anyone of his intelligence fail to realise that, though as ever there was much wrong with the world, attempts to put everything right at once by the implementation of petty intellectual schemes are fraught with danger, and have a history of mass slaughter behind them?

I think the answer must lie in the psychology of religion: when religious faith is replaced by a philosophy that prides itself on its rationality, it soon turns religious in the worst possible sense. it becomes an atheist theocracy.

Everything was known about the Soviet Union from the first. It is simply not true that Solzhenitsyn revealed anything to the West that, in essence, was not, or could not have been, known before.

I have, in desultory fashion for a number of decades, been collecting books about Russia and the Soviet Union from just before the Revolution until the Second World War, and while it is true that many of them are laudatory, with titles that now seem hilarious to us such as The Soviet Union Fights Neurosis, a very large number books of various genres, from essays to histories to memoirs to novels and short stories, were published that exposed the viciousness of Bolshevism from the very first — a viciousness that anyone with any imagination could have anticipated from Lenin’s literary style alone.

Leninist viciousness was viciousness of a new and more thoroughgoing type that acted on the mind as a virus acts on a computer (viciousness, both actual and potential, is, alas, a constant of human history because of our flawed nature).

Solzhenitsyn was right about the difference between Macbeth, who from personal ambition killed people, but only a few, and the ideologically-motivated mass-killings of the Soviet Union and elsewhere — the difference being precisely in the effect of ideology.
But what was really different about Solzhenitsyn, apart from his literary talent, was that Western intellectuals were now prepared to believe what he said, whereas shortly before they had rejected as mere propaganda evidence of a very similar nature produced by others.

It was so startling to meet someone who still believed that a “pure” revolution could take place, and that such a person was teaching history of all things, in a reputable, or at any rate reputed, university, that, like Karl Kraus confronted by Hitler, I could think of nothing to say.

I had no idea whether he still taught undergraduates, or whether in doing so he suppressed at least some of his views (as a judge is supposed to suppress his own private opinions): but I confess that the charge against Socrates, that of corrupting youth, came into my mind.

Disney’s Best Propaganda Cartoon

Filed under: Education, Germany, History, Politics, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 21 Nov 2020

A review of Education for Death, a WW2 propaganda film. This video was sponsored by the Great Courses Plus! Start your free trial today by clicking here: http://ow.ly/az9m30rkCKF

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During the World War II, Disney made a number of cartoons to boost public support for the Allies and denounce Germany. This one, about Little Hans, has always been my favorite.

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QotD: Margaret Thatcher

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

I know I’m supposed to hate Margaret Thatcher. I know that someone with my politics is meant to detest her as a union-busting, milk-snatching, women’s-lib-baiting, Belgrano-sinking, Section-28-devising, society-destroying nightmare. I know that when Gillian Anderson was cast as Thatcher in series four of The Crown, I should have played up a shudder of disgust at Gillian Anderson, who is good, playing Thatcher, who is bad.

But here’s the thing: I don’t hate Thatcher. It’s not that I’m a huge fan of her legacy or anything (although anyone who thinks that industrial relations were doing fine before her or that the Falklands were some kind of unjustified expedition is clearly a fantasist), it simply doesn’t matter whether I like her or not because she is just too interesting.

Thatcher wasn’t the first woman to lead a country, but unlike her predecessors, Indira Gandhi in India or Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina, she didn’t arrive sanctified by a political dynasty. She was, as Prince Phillip snobbily points out to the Queen in The Crown, a grocer’s daughter. In real life, such condescension came strongly from the Left. The Blow Monkeys, one of the bands involved in the Red Wedge tour to support Labour, released an album called She was only a Grocer’s Daughter in 1987; and even though several pop songs fantasised about her death, that never seemed quite as ugly as supposed defenders of the working class announcing that Thatcher was just too common to rule.

Sarah Ditum, “How Thatcher rejected feminism”, UnHerd, 2020-11-15.

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