As noted here many times, it helps if you think of Antifa not as a political movement but as a metastasising personality disorder, a Cluster B contagion. An attempt to dominate by deranged and spiteful egos, rendered in shattered glass and burning livelihoods. They will never be satisfied and can never be appeased, merely encouraged and emboldened by any concession, any excuse, any hesitation.
They destroy and burn and intimidate, and beat people senseless, because they enjoy it. It’s something they wish to do, and choose to do, repeatedly. It makes them feel powerful. Everything else is a pretext, a rationalisation, a lie:
This is us taking the high road. This is us trying to create a world filled with love.
David Thompson, commenting on “Files of the Severely Educated”, DavidThompson, 2021-04-18.
July 19, 2021
QotD: Antifa
July 18, 2021
A different kind of “tone policing”
John McWhorter on a recent study on interactions between the police and the general population:
“Police stop” by San Diego Shooter is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
A fascinating, and depressing, new study will be celebrated as revealing the subtle but powerful operations of racism. It also reveals, however, the pitfalls in the way we are taught to address that racism these days.
The study shows that police officers tend to talk in a less friendly way to black people they stop than white ones. People were played slivers of body-cam audio of the officers talking to citizens, with the content of the exchange disguised. People could tell with dismaying regularity what color person the officer was speaking to simply by the tone of voice. It wasn’t that officers outright sneer at black people. Rather, their tone with whites tends to be more pleasant, to have a hint of cheer, whereas with black people it is more impersonal, flat, unwarm.
The study also shows how these things fashion a vicious cycle. People tested who had negative experiences with cops and/or less trust in them processed even the exchanges the cops had with white citizens as less positive than other people tested did. That is, their life experience has implanted in them a distrust of the cops, that can anticipate actual interactions with them – and certainly, of course, unintentionally pollute them.
* * *
This study reminds me of something else that goes in the other direction. To whites, subtle things about black communication, including vocal tone, can come off as threatening when no threat is intended.
I once happened to hear two 30-something black men talking about a misunderstanding one of them had had at work. They were just unwinding, but there was what many might process as a tinge of impending battle in their voices, inflections and gestures. “Man, I wanted to ‘Mmmph!’ [jab of the arm, click of the tongue] Gimme a break! An’ I was like … [putting on a challenging glare] don’t even start.”
No black listener would assume these guys actually meant the hints at violence literally. However, outside listeners can hear this way of talking as edgy. Kelefa Sanneh’s term for this twenty years ago, writing about rap and its lyrics, was perfect: a certain “confrontational cadence”.
Yes, all people trash-talk. But this particular way of talking has a special place in black American culture. No, that’s not stereotyping: sympathetic black academics have documented it. CUNY’s Arthur Spears, today one of the deans of the academic study of black American speech, has written about what he calls “directness”. Speech “that may appear to outsiders to be abusive or insulting is not necessarily intended to be nor is it taken that way by audiences and addressees,” Spears noted. He then quoted a father-child exchange: Father: “Go to bed!” Little boy: “Aw, Daddy, we’re playing dominoes.” Father: “I’m gonna domino your ass if you don’t go to bed now.” Notice how awkwardly this, or Eddie Murphy’s routine about the mother throwing the shoe in Delirious, would translate into the world of Modern Family.
This “confrontational cadence” can inflect even casual exchanges between black and white people. Aspects of black intonation, steeped in a lifetime’s experience in a language culture that values performative aggression as a kind of communal élan, can sound cranky, disrepectful, and even aggressive to a white person. It is all but impossible that this does not color encounters between black people and white cops; I highly suspect a study like the first one I mentioned would reveal it.
July 17, 2021
“Now I am become Twitter, the destroyer of worlds”
In UnHerd, Douglas Murray remembers what it was like before Twitter ruined everything:
Fifteen years ago today, an innovation was unveiled that has probably changed our lives as much as any other this century. It was on 15 July 2006 that software developer Jack Dorsey and his team launched an online platform where text messages of 140 characters could be shared in a group; six days later Dorsey sent his first tweet, launching a new age of reasoned debate and engagement.
There are some who want to celebrate today — principally Dorsey, along with the small number of other people who have become unimaginably rich off the platform. But for everybody else on the planet, I suspect we should welcome the anniversary with roughly the same enthusiasm that we would the emergence of the Ebola virus. For the further away we have come from Twitter’s birth, the clearer it has become that the platform is a source of unimaginable harm to almost every aspect of society.
In the early days, it didn’t feel like this. Like Facebook, Amazon, Google and the other Big Tech monoliths, it all started out so well. Twitter was actually fun back then. People said whacky things. There were cat videos. There was Follow Friday and friendships were made. As professional and amateur newshounds took to the platform, it became the fastest way to learn about any developing story.
If something was going on, Twitter was there first, certainly ahead of the BBC or any of the other news establishments who had to lumber through the old legal and editorial hurdles, rather than enjoying the lightning-quick response time of social media. Politics is a drug, and the most successful drugs provide an instant hit. But they are also the most dangerous, and the downsides soon started to assert themselves.
Soon many started using the site in a game of competitive grievance, or competitive sanctimony. They took obvious glee in targeting victims who had transgressed some moral code; the obvious righteousness of these online crusaders meant they rarely recognised themselves as the aggressors or bullies.
And soon it became apparent that, while everyone was on the site, everyone also hated it. Those on the ideological Left began to turn against the platform when it became clear that it allowed their opponents on the Right to spread “hate”, a scourge which they defined generously. Just as they used it themselves to spread their message.
This all reached its nadir with Donald Trump, whose presidency is to many people the most concrete result of Twitter. The world watched aghast as Trump was able to say often the craziest of things to millions upon millions of followers, speaking unfiltered and directly — in a way the old news media would never have allowed. When he won the presidency and then thanked Twitter for the helping him to get it, many of these natural Twitter followers lost their faith in the platform. How could they have let it happen? It was their platform, after all, this noisy minority of the American and British electorate. Indeed, if you had read UK Twitter ahead of the 2019 election, you would have been absolute certain of a Jeremy Corbyn landslide. Where were these millions of Tory voters who didn’t like Jeremy?
July 16, 2021
Do US intelligence agencies only work on domestic surveillance these days?
Matt Taibbi discusses the (recent?) US intelligence agencies’ apparent concentration on domestic “enemies” like Republicans, Jewish organizations, conservative broadcasters, and US Presidents and their appointed officials:
The scene was perfectly representative of what the erstwhile “liberal” press has become: collections of current and former enforcement types, masquerading as journalists, engaged in patriotic denunciations of critics and rote recitals of quasi-official statements.
Not that it matters to [Fox TV host Tucker] Carlson’s critics, but odds favor the NSA scandal being true. An extraordinarily rich recent history of illegal, politically-directed leaks has gone mostly uncovered, in another glaring recent press failure that itself is part of this story.
It’s admitted. Go back to December, 2015, and you’ll find a Wall Street Journal story by Adam Entous and Danny Yadron quoting senior government officials copping to the fact that the Obama White House reviewed intercepts of conversations between “U.S lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”
The White House in that case was anxious to know what congressional opponents to Obama’s Iran deal were thinking, and peeked in the electronic cookie jar to get an advance preview at such “incidentally” collected info. This prompted what one official called an “Oh, shit” moment, when they realized that what they’d done might result in “the executive branch being accused of spying.”
After Obama left office, illegal leaks of classified intercepts became commonplace. Many, including the famed January, 2017 leak of conversations between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, were key elements of major, news-cycle-dominating bombshells. Others, like “Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin,” or news that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials in foreign intercepts, were openly violative of the prohibition against disclosing the existence of such surveillance, let alone the contents.
These leaks tended to go to the same small coterie of reporters at outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN, and not one prompted blowback. This was a major forgotten element of the Reality Winner story. Winner, a relatively low-level contractor acting on her own, was caught, charged, and jailed with extraordinary speed after leaking an NSA document about Russian interference to the Intercept. But these dozens of similar violations by senior intelligence officials, mainly in leaks about Trump, went not just unpunished but un-investigated. As Winner’s lawyer, Titus Nichols, told me years ago, his client’s case was “about low-hanging fruit.”
July 13, 2021
Is the PRC really a paper dragon?
Sarah Hoyt is tired of finding posts on MeWe that fluff up the ChiComs as a way of “conservatives” scoring points against “progressives” in the US political context:
“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought”, 1969.
A poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao, published by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
What bilge? Oh, memes extolling the Chinese in relation to us. And all conservatives pick this crap up and echo it, because it happens to “side rail” against things they hate (and which it’s valid to hate.)
But the memes are crap. The aggrandizing of the Chinese bastards is crap. They’re either outright lies or laughable lies. And the memes, somehow, never hit the Chinese where it hurts: the fact their economy is so f*cked most of their people live like Medieval peasants; the fact their army of little emperors cried when they went up against India; the fact that they are having trouble feeding their own population; the crumbling empty cities they think are “investments”; their population collapse; Xi’s pretensions to world leadership; their slave camps. Which you know, tells you exactly where the meme factory is and who is propagating it.
The problem being when conservatives seize the memes and distribute, they are actively collaborating in the aggrandizing of China and putting down the US. They are also convincing the Chinese their victory over us will be easy. (This is good and bad, but if you have friends and relatives in large cities, think about the chances of it ending up with one of those catching a nuke because the idiots get cocky, okay?)
Chinese are masters of propaganda and psychological warfare, while Americans are so bad at it that it hurts. If you loved 2020 keep collaborating with the enemy.
If not, listen up:
Yeah, sure, the fact that the usurpers of our governmental institutions are making our armed forces participate in inclusivity and CRT training, and prioritizing bullshit SJW goals over preparedness IS a problem. But that doesn’t mean we’re not still the best fighting force in the world. Sure, it’s damning with faint praise, but comparing us to China and saying they’re “prepared for war” and “will win” is bullshit. You know it’s bullshit, I know it’s bullshit. It’s bullshit so rank I can smell it through the internet.
The Chinese have Little Emperors — single descendants of multiple families — who are no more prepared to risk themselves in war than I’m prepared to fly unassisted. Their army is bullshit.Why is it bullshit? Because they don’t have a fighting force. The only fighting strength they ever had was the ability to submerge any enemy in a wave of people. But they can’t. Because the communists destroyed that too.
Their weapons are bullshit. I’d like independent confirmation of their “achievements in space”. Why? Because, well, the USSR achievement in space was a) what they could steal from us b) flimsy and c) mostly trumped up. In the sense that they only publicized their wins, while it might be one in ten that succeeded.
Look, by definition an authoritarian regime sucks at tech. I’m not saying anything about “capabilities of the people” (duh) but seriously? If you can’t report failed experiments, failed assemblies or builds that need to be improved, you’re going to have crappy tech. And you can’t report any of that, because in a centralized authoritarian regime you’ll be punished for failure, even if it’s not your fault. And you might get accused of doing it on purpose.
When nothing less than 100% success is allowed, the process is corrupt and the result is excrement. (Look at our “science” right now. No, seriously. We’re sliding that way.)
So, no matter how made you are at what the army and our government is doing, stop echoing Xi’s bullshit. And counter it every time you see it. This is war by other means, or in the ancient Chinese tradition, softening the enemy so they’ll surrender at first attack.
July 11, 2021
An “ongoing moral panic against the specter of ‘white supremacy’, which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history”
From Andrew Sullivan‘s Weekly Dish free excerpt:
“What happened to you?”
It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.
The real question is: what happened to you?
The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.
But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.
Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?
What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy”, which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.
We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.
Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.
This is the media hub of the “social justice movement”. And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy”, designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.
July 9, 2021
QotD: Woke fanaticism
Whether they realize it or not, Wokists themselves combine the lunatic loyalty of the Manson family with the hollow pseudo-joy of Jonestown residents, the racism of National Socialists, the inhumanity of Mao Tse-Tung, the bratty tantrums of Veruca Salt, the nihilism of Bakunin-style anarchists, the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Soviet Union, the child torture and sacrifice of the Mayans, the derangement of Heaven’s Gate followers, the sadistic violence of the Jacobins, and the ruthless control-freakism of the current Chinese Communist Party.
Now add to that noxious syncretic blend the Wokist use of powerful communication technologies to shape narratives and meta-narratives, destroy opponents, and recruit new converts, and you’ve got yourself a thing.
Through it all, a counterfeit moral imperative with a deceptively appealing name (“social justice”) drives the cult. That counterfeit imperative casts all existence as one great battle between Good (Wokism) and Evil (everything that is not Woke). It denies any constraints on efforts to win that battle. It entails an obsessive totalitarianism. It forbids critical self-examination of itself. Adherents of the cult are Knowers of the One True Truth. They are crusaders in righteous battle. Only victory matters. Anyone so much as questioning the One True Truth, inside or out, must be destroyed.
Tal Bachman, “We Have Met the Enemy”, Steyn Online, 2021-04-06.
July 7, 2021
“Emptied of its resident apparatchiks, Washington would become ‘The Museum State'”
In the latest edition of his newsletter (newsletter@mightyheaton.com), Andrew Heaton considers the pro and con arguments for D.C. statehood:
The western front of the United States Capitol. The Neoclassical style building is located in Washington, D.C., on top of Capitol Hill at the east end of the National Mall. The Capitol was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
The rhetorical pros and cons of DC statehood go like this:
PRO: If we truly believe in “no taxation without representation” and representative government, how can we deprive Washingtonians of their own voting representatives? Bla bla bla racism
CON: The power of the federal government is derived from and balanced by that of the states. To make the federal seat a state in its own right is to create an imperial capital, with too much concentrated power. Bla bla bla dead white guy, Dr. Seuss, veterans
I actually happen to agree with both of these positions. Thus I am an advocate of DC statehood, but predicated on the condition that every federal agency is redistributed to other states — possibly even to Canadian provinces. Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court can all stay — it’s heavy to lug stacks of marble to Cleveland. The Departments of Education, Commerce, High School Reunions, and so on should be redistributed throughout the country so that every state gets access to cushy, air-conditioned federal pensions.
A similar idea has previously been floated by Mitch Daniels (one of America’s six remaining sane Republicans) and more recently by Josh Hawley and Martha Blackburn (who are not). The biggest Democratic counter to the proposal is that the relocation expenses would be astronomical, making agency redistribution impractical.
While I am always pleasantly startled by a Democrat decrying a massive federal spending hike, redistribution of resources, and a national job creation program on the grounds of practicality and balanced budgets, I think the criticism is less valid in a post-Covid remote worker world. If 90% of the federal government operated remotely in 2020, is there any reason we couldn’t just buy some air conditioned warehouses in Iowa to plop the Department of Agriculture into? While the up-front costs would be considerable, the long-term savings would balance out. Buying a townhouse in Georgetown is roughly as expensive as buying a stadium in Idaho. Redistribute the federal agencies, and we can adjust budgets and the salaries of new hires to reflect that.
Emptied of its resident apparatchiks, Washington would become “The Museum State”. All the cavernous federal agencies could be converted into historical exhibits, art galleries — and if we ever ran out of stuff to display — paintball galleries. (Maybe both?) Two new senators, and Elizabeth Holmes Norton can start voting on stuff.
July 6, 2021
Conspiracies within conspiracies within conspiracies
In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb considers the evolving nature of Wuhan Coronavirus conspiracy theories:
“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
We have, for the past eighteen months, lived through a fantasy pandemic. If unpleasant, the Virus is not particularly deadly. The number of cases is a product of testing, the number of deaths a statistical fraud. We have had much worse infections in living memory. We never responded to those by locking down whole populations and making hysterical fear an object of state policy. What is happening?
The most likely answer is stupidity. The quality of the people who rule Britain and America has dropped through the floor since about 1990, and it was not that high then. Sadly, though, the rest of the world still believes Britain and America are the pinnacle of civilisation, and so, whatever madness is decided in London and Washington is copied without question almost everywhere else. Take stupidity, add short-term advantage to the usual suspects in politics and business, and we have the Coronavirus Panic.
But arguments from stupidity are boring. They are the equivalent of denying the existence of ghosts and second sight — worthy and true, but unentertaining. Much better is to begin from the assumption that the idiots in charge are not really in charge, but are only front men for the supremely intelligent and supremely effective and supremely wicked Ones-on-High. Do this, and explaining the panic becomes an argument over which conspiracy theory best fits the observed facts.
Until a few weeks ago, my favourite was that the Virus was a bioweapon that had somehow leaked from a Chinese laboratory. It was spotted by the main governments, because they were all working in secret on something similar. This would explain the initial panic. As for the piffling number of deaths, bioweapons are still at the experimental stage, and no one realised until it was too late that modified viruses lose their potency almost at once in the wild. This was my favourite conspiracy theory for over a year. I only went off it when the authorities stopped denouncing it and punishing anyone important who said it was true, and instead announced on television that it might be true. Since the hacks in the mainstream media are just bright enough not to tell the truth even by accident, it was half a minute to give up on a year of enjoyable speculation.
There are other conspiracy theories. Regrettably, most of these border on the respectable. For example, the panic is a cover for clawing back some of the manufacturing outsourced to China since the 1990s. Or it is an excuse for ending the unwise monetary policies of the past decade and inflating away the resulting national debts. These all have an appearance of the probable, and are therefore dull before the first paragraph is read. But, looming over all the others, is the merger of scepticism about vaccines and the Agenda 21 conspiracy.
For those unaware of it, Agenda 21 is boring drivel from the United Nations about not cutting down trees. Behind this, though, is an alleged conspiracy to reduce the human population from seven billion to half a billion. Doing this, apparently, will end all the fanciful scares about global warming, and leave the lucky survivors free to use all the electricity they want without feeling guilty.
The latest version of this theory is that the Virus is a fraud, but justifies injecting people with a vaccine that will make most of them fall down dead, or in some degree sterilise them. There are passionate advocates of the revised theory, all of them begging us to keep away from any of the vaccines on offer. I have so far kept away from the vaccines.
July 3, 2021
QotD: Canada’s Liberal Party
As countries modernize, they tend to leave brokerage parties behind. Very belatedly, that moment of maturity may now be arriving in Canada. Americans may lose their illusions about my native country; Canadians will gain true multiparty democracy and accountability in government. It’s an exchange that is long past due.
David Frum, “Woe Canada”, New York Times, 2005-04-19.
June 30, 2021
Questions the dying media daren’t ask Biden
Kurt Schlichter offers a few questions that an American media with any credibility would already have been asking after Biden’s ramble about F-15 aircraft and nuclear weapons:
“2-35 Infantry Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division” by The U.S. Army is licensed under CC BY 2.0
“Are you saying that you would use bombers like F-15s against Americans? Would you ever use nuclear weapons against Americans?”
That seems like an important coule of threshold queries. Say “No” and you look like a fool. Say “Yes” and you’re a fool and a psycho.
“Mr. President, since using force against American citizens is on the table, can you tell us how many BCTs the American military has currently deployable within the United States? Do you know how many troops are in a brigade combat team? Do you understand the logistical needs of a BCT and its vulnerabilities in an insurgency environment?”
A “BCT” is a brigade combat team, 4,000-5,000 troops and the basic ground combat unit. Now, if you are going to pick a fight with 165 million Americans, specifically the half who like America and who own a whole bunch of those accursed AR-15s, you might wanna know how many dudes you have on your side first (I estimate about 80 active and reserve BCTs and equivalents in the whole active and reserve force, including the Marines). One might also want to understand why you would have problems using them here at home.
“How many BCTs do you think you would need to secure an urban area the size of Los Angeles. Didn’t it take three divisions, about 12 brigades, to secure it during the Riots? How long could you logistically support that?”
It did take three divisions (approximately 12 BCTs) to quell the riot in LA in 1992. I was there. Now, that was largely idiots burning and looting. What if the next time it is guys shooting back with evil AR-15s? And America is a zillion times bigger than Los Angeles. How do you hold all that ground? You don’t.
“Have your generals staffed exactly how many American military personnel they could count on to attack American citizens if you ordered it? What percentage do you believe would comply and why?”
Oh, awkward. I was informed – by them, the geniuses in the Pentagon – that “extremists in the ranks” are our gravest threat (except for the weather, of course), so I assume they will have analyzed the number of “extremists” in the ranks who would be averse to killing their own friends and family at the behest of coastal elitists and who would desert or go full Niedermeyer on the guys urging them to wage war on the American people. This would be a good number to have as a planning factor, since when 50% of his troops go *poof* overnight, it would mean a significant reduction in the *’s combat power.
“You mentioned F-15s. How many bombers of all types does the United States have deployable within the continental US? How many are operational? How many sorties could the military fly a day against American citizens? Can you explain how you would employ bombers to hold territory, like a city?”
Bombers are nice. But if they were decisive, you could walk around Kabul without a dozen guys with AKs keeping your Schumer safe. We bombed Afghanistan back into the Stone Age – albeit, it was not much of a trip, but the point remains. You control dirt by having a guy with a rifle standing on it, not plinking at targets from 30,000 feet. And speaking of targeting …
June 27, 2021
QotD: Being right at the wrong time
There was never a good time, for example, to be anti-communist. Those who early warned of the dangers of bolshevism were regarded as lacking in compassion for the suffering of the masses under tsarism, as well as lacking the necessary imagination to “build” a better world. Then came the phase of denial of the crimes of communism, when to base one’s anti-communism on such phenomena as organised famine and the murder of millions was regarded as the malicious acceptance of ideologically-inspired lies and calumnies. When finally the catastrophic failure of communism could no longer be disguised, and all the supposed lies were acknowledged to have been true, to be anti-communist became tasteless in a different way: it was harping on pointlessly about what everyone had always known to be the case. The only good anti-communist was a mute anti-communist.
Anthony Daniels, “Authoritarianism in Cement and Steel”, Quadrant, 2018-11-04.
June 26, 2021
QotD: Surfing the waves of resentment as a political career
This is to the great advantage of political entrepreneurs who surf resentment as surfers ride waves in Hawaii; and such resentment, the most damaging of all emotions, can easily become a self-reinforcing loop. It is not that past oppression or crime should be forgotten, much less denied, but that past achievements and change for the better must also be recognised, lest oppression and crime come to occupy minds entirely and distort decisions.
It is the same with injustice. It is important to oppose injustice, but just as important not to see it everywhere. To ascribe everything that you think undesirable to injustice may blind you to its real causes.
Theodore Dalrymple, “History and Self-Perpetuating Resentment”, The Iconoclast, 2021-03-20.
June 24, 2021
“[M]any of the woke genuinely do not understand why anyone finds their politics, or their political tactics, threatening”
In The Line, Joseph Heath tries to explain why many adherents of the wokist ideology fail to understand why anyone could possibly be against their policies or their tactics:
Godfrey Elfwick’s disturbingly accurate summary of free speech support among the woke.
After several years of creeping illiberalism under the guise of progressive politics, American liberals are finally getting their act together. They are pushing back, creating several organizations committed to combating the influence of “woke” politics and ideology. They have momentum, not just because many woke mantras like “defund the police” have proven spectacularly unpopular, but also because there is genuine growing alarm about the intolerant and authoritarian brand of politics that has become associated with the woke left.
Unfortunately, many of the woke genuinely do not understand why anyone finds their politics, or their political tactics, threatening. In particular, the accusation that they are being authoritarian, or that “cancel culture” is a threat to freedom of expression, is one that they are simply unable to process.
There is a reason for this — and one that’s worth understanding. There are several key phrases that play an enormously important role in woke politics (e.g. “safety”, “mental health”, “microaggression”, “bullying” and even “human rights”) which they use to deflect the accusation of authoritarianism. If you adopt the right words, it’s easier to convince yourself that you’re the good guys even as you’re acting like the bad ones.
I want to take a shot at explaining how this works.
The most important thing to understand about woke politics is that it is not a conventional form of illiberalism, it is better thought of as a type of “illiberal liberalism”. It involves making a set of political demands that are fundamentally illiberal, but then articulating them in a way that fits the conventional structure of liberal political discourse. Because of the way that their complaints are packaged, the woke are able to brush off criticism of their tactics.
Take an issue like freedom of speech. There are various versions of this traditionally liberal virtue; predominant among them, is that those who hold this belief are opposed to content-based restrictions on speech. In the old days, lots of politicians didn’t really believe in freedom of speech, as many among the ruling class maintained straightforwardly illiberal views.
June 21, 2021
“The public are getting a little bit fed up of virtue-signalling police officers when they’d really rather we just locked up burglars”
Gawain Towler on the sudden, unexpected — and undoubtedly unwelcome to self-appointed guardians of the official narrative — appearance of what sounds surprisingly like common sense from a top police officer in Britain:
“A Safe Escort” by Harry Payne (1858-1927), first published in August 1911 but possibly painted a few years earlier. From the back of the card: “Among the hundred and one duties of the London Policeman he is here depicted as a kindly protector, halting the traffic as he escorts a Lady across the congested streets. This is essentially a London incident, and has no parallel in any other Police Force in the world.”
Photo of the Tuck’s Oilette by Leonard Bentley via Wikimedia Commons.
Has Robert Peel been reincarnated as the Chief Constable for Manchester?
“But officer, if you are not on your knee, and wearing a rainbow lanyard, how do we know that you are on the side of the oppressed, the intersectional, the poor, downtrodden graduates of minor universities?”
“I’m sorry madam, may I call you madam? I am on the side of the law.”
The promotion of Stephen Watson as the new Chief Constable for Manchester comes as a shaft of light cutting through the murk of muddled thinking. He has said two things that will resonate with millions and will cause consternation amongst thousands:
I would probably kneel before the Queen, God and Mrs Watson, that’s it … The public are getting a little bit fed up of virtue-signalling police officers when they’d really rather we just locked up burglars.
It sounds like the first blast of the trumpet, but not only does it strike an astonishingly different note than the honky tonk tunes played by other constabularies. Stentorian and self confident it also marks a huge departure in that he makes a very public statement that he would kneel before God. A very courageous statement in the current climate in itself. But it is his approach to policing that strikes the eye.
One almost feels that as was once the case, each new officer in the Manchester Metropolitan Area will be issued with Sir Robert Peel’s 1829 Nine Principles of Policing. It is worth our while looking at those principles and deciding whether or not to accept that they should remain at the core of policing, or be junked as impossibly dated.
What is clearly apparent is that Peel’s principles are at heart about consent. Famously it described the police as merely the citizens in uniform, or that “the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence”.
Underlying this basic thought is an understanding that the police rely, entirely on the goodwill of the populace, if they wish to carry out their basic duties. In order to fulfil their functions and duties they are “dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect”.
