Quotulatiousness

June 26, 2020

Progressive hate for nuclear power

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

In Quillette, Michael Shellenberger discusses the demands of some climate activists who also reject the best solutions to the problems they foresee:

For the last decade I have been obsessed with a question: Why are the people who are the most alarmist about environmental issues also opposed to all of the obvious solutions?

Those who raise the alarm about food shortages oppose expanding the use of chemical fertilizers, tractors, and GMOs. Those who raise the alarm about Amazon deforestation promote policies that fragment the forest. And those who raise the alarm about climate change oppose nuclear energy, the largest source of zero-emissions energy in developed nations. Why is that?

It is not an academic question for me. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an energy expert for 10 of them. I was adamantly against nuclear energy until about a decade ago when it became clear renewables couldn’t replace fossil fuels. After educating myself about the facts, I came to support the technology.

Over the last five years, I have campaigned, as founder and president of my small and independent nonprofit research organization, Environmental Progress, to expand the use of nuclear energy. During that time our main opponents have not been climate skeptics or even the fossil fuel industry but rather other climate activists.

This is the case around the world. It is climate alarmist Democrats and Greens who are seeking to shut down nuclear plants in the US and Europe. Greta Thunberg last year condemned the technology as “extremely dangerous, expensive, & time-consuming,” which is false. And Green New Deal architect Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has advocated closing the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York, which is now being replaced with natural gas.

In nearly every situation around the world, support for nuclear energy from climate activists like Thunberg and AOC would make the difference between nuclear plants staying open or closing, and being built or not being built. Had Thunberg spoken out in defense of nuclear power she likely could have prevented two reactors in her home nation of Sweden from being closed. Had AOC advocated for Indian Point rather than condemned it as dangerous, it could likely keep operating, for at least 40 years longer.

That’s because the main problem facing nuclear energy is that it’s unpopular — and far more among progressives than conservatives, and far more among women than men. There are no good technical or economic reasons that nations from the US and Japan to Sweden and Germany are closing their nuclear plants. Center-left governments are closing them early in response to the demands of progressives and Greens — the very same people who are claiming climate change will kill billions of people.

Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington, Ontario.
Photo by Óðinn via Wikimedia Commons.

Some prominent environmental groups have a pecuniary interest in replacing existing nuclear generating stations with natural gas and “renewable” energy sources, but money isn’t the only reason for the widespread opposition to nuclear power:

Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF have worked to shut down nuclear plants and replace them with fossil fuels and a smattering of renewables since the 1970s. They have created detailed reports for policymakers, journalists, and the public purporting to show that neither nuclear plants nor fossil fuels are needed to meet electricity demand, thanks to energy efficiency and renewables. And yet, as we have seen, almost everywhere nuclear plants are closed, or not built, fossil fuels are burned instead.

Thomas Malthus.
Portrait by John Linnell, 1834, via Wikimedia Commons

But it’s not just about money. It’s also about ideology. Anti-nuclear groups have long had a deeply ideological motivation to kill off nuclear energy.

Policymakers, journalists, conservationists, and other educated elites in the ’50s and ’60s knew that nuclear was unlimited energy and that unlimited energy meant unlimited food and water.

We could use desalination to convert ocean water into freshwater. We could create fertilizer without fossil fuels, by harvesting nitrogen from the air, and hydrogen from water, and combining them. We could create transportation fuels without fossil fuels, by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to make artificial hydrocarbons, or by splitting water to make pure hydrogen gas.

Nuclear energy thus created a serious problem for Malthusians — followers of widely-debunked 18th-century economist, Thomas Robert Malthus — who argued that the world was on the brink of ecological collapse and resource scarcity. Nuclear energy not only meant infinite fertilizer, freshwater, and food but also zero pollution and a radically reduced environmental footprint.

In reaction, Malthusians attacked nuclear energy as dangerous, mostly by suggesting that it would lead to nuclear war, but also by spreading misinformation about nuclear “waste” — the tiny quantity of used fuel rods — and the rapidly decaying radiation that escapes from nuclear plants during their worst accidents.

There is a pattern: Malthusians raise the alarm about resource depletion or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. In the late 1700s, Thomas Malthus had to reject birth control to predict overpopulation. In the 1960s, Malthusians had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And today, climate activists reject nuclear energy in order to declare a coming climate apocalypse.

June 25, 2020

What is the purpose of public art?

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

In his latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes engages with a topic that is in the headlines today as we find ourselves in the midst of an unexpected outbreak of iconoclasm:

The John Cassidy (1860-1939) statue of Edward Colston, which stood in Bristol from 1895-2020 before being taken down and thrown into Bristol harbour during the protests after the death of George Floyd.
Photo by William Avery via Wikimedia Commons.

… public art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used to be about inculcating virtue, which is something we seem to have forgotten. Public art was explicitly moralising, and not in the subversive way so often seen today, which leads us to question ourselves but rarely gives us answers. Back then, public art was instead meant to inspire. In painting, for example, the most prestigious and public-facing genre was history painting. History painting showed allegorical, mythological, and religious scenes, as well as those from actual history, in order to illustrate the exploits of the great and good, setting an example to us of integrity and public-spiritedness.

Importantly, the subjects of history paintings were taken from classical Greek or Roman history, or from mythology or religion, because such figures were generally uncontroversial — they could be upheld as paragons of virtue in a way that more recent and local historical figures could not. And the same went for statues, which became the main mediums of public art because the spaces available for history paintings were lacking. (The great room of the Society of Arts, by the way, has some of the few major history paintings in the country, all executed by the troubled self-proclaimed genius James Barry — the fastest riser in the Royal Academy’s history, and also, as far as I know, the only person to ever be expelled from it)

So, if some public statues have become controversial, that’s a clear sign of their failure. To the Victorians who put up the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in 1895, he must have seemed a distant and uncontroversial paragon of philanthropy. But today, he is mostly remembered for his murderous avarice. As such, he doesn’t deserve space on our streets or squares, for much the same reason that people in the eighteenth century avoided putting up statues of Oliver Cromwell — depending on your politics, he was either an ambitious and fanatical tyrant, or a selfless promoter of parliamentary liberties. Either way, it was the controversy itself that made him unsuitable: controversy got in the way of moral education. (Funnily enough, Cromwell seems to have got his public statues in the 1890s, too, just like Colston — maybe it was a low-point for the quality of history-teaching?)

I’m worried, however, that we’ve lost the self-confidence to replace them with statues that uncontroversially inculcate virtue (and in more than just a subversive or critical way). I suspect it take the delusions of grandeur of a James Barry to pull it off — someone who thought the history painter akin to a poet, like Shakespeare. But, as Tim Almond pointed out to me on twitter, perhaps we already do have such forms of virtue-promoting public art, and that all that has changed is the medium. Thus, rather than gazing upon statues or history paintings, we instead watch blockbuster superhero movies.

QotD: Cultural appropriation

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

In the ever-widening gyre of what cannot be appropriated without causing offense, now even American heroes are off limits. Apparently, Caucasians are no longer allowed to quote Martin Luther King. While I almost sympathize with the view that too many people of all colors tend to only quote King’s more saccharine words, it is surreal that some African-Americans would be outraged that others quote such an admirable American: “MLK belongs to us. Do not dare to quote my MLK. My Martin Luther King Jr., was not here for white people. Keep his name out your thin-lipped mouth. Y’all banned forever.” Belongs? Like a possession? Is the bitter irony of talking about King as a possession — mere chattel, the private property of a particular group — lost on some members of the current generation of African Americans? I had thought that, at least since the passage of the 13th Amendment, people could not be owned.

Joseph Mussomeli, “Victim Privilege, Cultural Appropriation, & the New Enslavement”, The Imaginative Conservative, 2018-02-09.

June 22, 2020

According to the tenets of Critical Race Theory, it is impossible to be “non-racist”

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

A fascinating — and depressing — explanation of the core beliefs of those who subscribe to Critical Race Theory:

Haha, yes. “Non-racist” means racist.

You have to understand that one of the primary axioms of this worldview is that everyone with racial privilege of any kind (including light-skinned black people, non-black people of color, etc.) is by definition always and constantly racist.

This is because they have defined “systemic racism” to mean more or less everything that happens, and, so long as there are any differences on average in racial outcomes, the system must be racist (privilege hierarchy noted: Asians and Jews doing well doesn’t count for anything).

You will have noticed that this means “systemic racism” in practice creates a state of perpetual victimhood for the “racially oppressed.” Anything that happens at all that isn’t to some complainer’s liking must have been the result of racism, and it’s their job to find it.

As we hear from Robin DiAngelo and her colleagues: “The question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but ‘how did racism manifest in this situation?'” The racism is absolutely certain to have taken place somewhere, according to this Woke worldview.

This is what “understanding race” and “racism” means when the Woke say it. What you have to understand is that everything contains racism, and a sufficiently skilled complainer can find it and leverage it against you. So, maybe they’re right. You have to understand race/racism.

Thus, more specifically, if you think you are “non-racist” or “less racist,” you’re not just racist, you’re the worst kind of racist. Robin DiAngelo says that in White Fragility explicitly. No exaggeration. That’s her definition for a white progressive or a “good white person.”

A lot of the relevant literature rails on “good white people” (there’s even a completely mental book by this title), “white liberals,” and “white progressives,” who are identified as the worst kinds of racists because they believe they’re not.

Good White: Translations From The Wokish

This entry in ‘Translations from the Wokish’ is an explanation of the term “Good White.” https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-good-white/

So, everyone under this insane rubric has to accept that they are racist and then decide how “anti-racist” they want to be. So, you can be a racist who is a little “anti-racist,” a lot “anti-racist,” or not “anti-racist,” but you cannot be “not racist” or “less racist.”

No matter how “anti-racist” you are, it will not make you not-racist in the end, even if you do it perfectly (impossible, explicitly) for your entire lives (required minimum time commitment, again, explicitly). And these people say their goal is to end racism. Seems odd.

You can’t even become “less racist” in this ideology. There’s no such thing, and to believe you are that is to make yourself more racist because you’re less aware of your need to constantly acknowledge your racism and try to dismantle the system in which it’s embedded.

Robin DiAngelo tells us that the goal is to become “less white,” not “less racist.” I’m not making that up. It’s right there in White Fragility, which millions of people are reading (and being forced to read) right now. Whiteness is the racist system, so that’s the goal.

Of course, all the literature also points out that it’s not possible to avoid benefiting from racial privilege (including white skin or white-passing appearance or light skin or white adjacency), so being “less white” is also impossible. It’s a self-shaming project instead.

Go back and read that like five times. It’s really the theory.

So when you take up “anti-racism,” you’re just signing on to a program they’ve outlined that has absolutely nothing to do with making people less racist, which is impossible. It’s crucial to understand this. “Social Justice” explicitly says it’s only about groups and systems.

Quote: “If democracy is about individual rights (justice for individuals), then social justice is about group rights (justice for groups). And for me there is a fundamental difference between the general notion of justice and the notion of social justice.”

Social Justice
This entry in ‘Translations from the Wokish’ is an explanation of the term “Social Justice.” https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-social-justice/

So, “Social Justice” and thus “anti-racism” in that context is about making *the system* less racist, which is also impossible because the advocates of this Theory only measure by examining outcomes while looking for any and all problems in it.

Since “interest convergence” is one such problem, it’s sure to be found. This is the problem that makes it racist even for a racially privileged person to take up anti-racism. So, even being “anti-racist” increases one’s “racism” and the amount of “systemic racism” in the system.

Interest convergence is core Theory — mainstream Critical Race Theory, not fringe stuff. It says that racially privileged people only “do the right thing” by racially oppressed groups when it is also in their own self-interests. This is cynical in the extreme. Also, useless.

Interest convergence always moves the discussion of racism into hidden, terrible motivations and thus is an impediment to solving any problems of racism. Such impediments, though, are the fault of the racism in the system, not the terrible Theory, according to Theory.

So, even by trying ON THEIR (rather sadistic) TERMS you’re guaranteed not to be able to fix the racist system because fixing it is in the interests of racially dominant people which automatically perpetuates the racism in the system.

You’re also sure to notice that trying to fix a system is always guaranteed to leave out many, sometimes most, of the actual human beings within the system, at least if you still have a bit of your cortex outside of this paranoid way of thinking.

Why? The amount of knowledge and information processing necessary to perfect complex human systems vastly exceeds the processing power of any existing supercomputer, for starters. It just can’t be done.

Of course, our supercomputers vastly exceed the processing power of people who went to college to learn how critical thinking and systematic organization are features of white supremacy and not to be learned. So… there’s that.

So, even “anti-racism” is “racism,” and the whole thing is a giant fraud that’s being used to shake-down our institutions and corporations for the power and grift of the hustlers pushing it. Good people should be livid at this.

Have a nice day.

H/T to Aaron M. on MeWe for the link.

QotD: Victimhood

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

Victimhood bestows upon its legions a certain cloak of inviolability. One must remember that those who wear their victimhood like a badge of honor (and their liberal enablers) only want “one” thing: to be treated the same as everyone else is treated and to be treated special. This profound cognitive dissonance pervades their lives and defines them. They are allowed to say or believe things that would cause outrage if one of the oppressor groups said or thought the same thing. The best, most famous instance of this is Muhammed Ali’s virulent opposition to mixing the races. Ali, a man of great athletic and intellectual skills and one who had enormous courage in standing up for his principles regarding the Vietnam War, was also an appalling racist for much of his adult life. But he was insulated by his victimhood and so his odious views on miscegenation were rarely ever mentioned, let alone condemned. A more recent example was Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s award during the 2009 MTV awards. Rude and inexcusable, but no one dared to chastise him for his actions even though everyone knew that no white singer could ever interrupt a ceremony giving an award to a black singer and ever hope for continuing his career.

The irony of all this, of course, is the reluctance to hold everyone to the same standard of conduct and the same rules of discourse proves that racism is still alive and well in America. We still, as a society, refuse to treat everyone equally. It is, in fact, an insult to Ali and West that no one thought them equal enough to be chastised and condemned. In our society’s own peculiarly paternalistic and condescending way, we are saying that some people must be handled differently because they are not yet quite equal.

Joseph Mussomeli, “Victim Privilege, Cultural Appropriation, & the New Enslavement”, The Imaginative Conservative, 2018-02-09.

June 21, 2020

Jagmeet Singh’s social media moment in the sun

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

Most Canadians seem to have forgotten about federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, so this parliamentary kerfuffle — perfectly timed for maximum social media attention — is a great boost to his political visibility.

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.

In this woebegotten year of 2020, blessed is the politician who can stumble into a scandal perfectly tailored to the tyranny of Twitter.

As protests, riots, and rage make their mark across the world in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh got himself ejected from the House of Commons for calling Bloc MP Alain Therrien a “racist.”

It was an act of civil disobedience, well suited to the passions of the moment, that generated overwhelming support for Singh.

“Only in a racist country does a brown man get ejected from parliament for insisting that the denial of systemic racism is racist,” was a fairly typical, and popular, example on Twitter.

I’m not interested in disputing the point, but rather deconstructing it. So let’s start, for a moment, with the prim prohibitions on unparliamentary language.

In keeping with the long-standing “tradition of respect for the integrity of all Members,” elected officials are barred from using personal attacks, obscenities and insults while in the House of Commons.

And, yes, I’m mentioning this point mostly for the joy of listing off some of the language that has been deemed “unparliamentary” in the past, including, my favourite; “Honourable only by courtesy” (ruled against in 1880), “Coming into the world by accident,” (1886) and “The political sewer pipe from Carleton County” (1917).

Whatever else we can say about the state of our political culture, the quality of our insults has declined alarmingly.

There are a few examples in the parliamentary record of the term “racist” being used in the House. In several instances, the record can’t identify who said it. Or the subject of the insult failed to call a point of order on the matter.

June 20, 2020

Opposition to home schooling is merely a side-issue for those who want government to control everything

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

Kerry McDonald recently took part in a debate with a Harvard academic who has called upon governments to ban homeschooling. She’s written up some of the things she took away from the discussion and from the many questions submitted before the event:

While this event was framed as a discussion about homeschooling, including whether and how to regulate the practice, it is clear that homeschooling is just a strawman. The real issue focuses on the role of government in people’s lives, and in particular in the lives of families and children. In her 80-page Arizona Law Review article that sparked this controversy, Professor Bartholet makes it clear that she is seeking a reinterpretation of the US Constitution, which she calls “outdated and inadequate,” to move from its existing focus on negative rights, or individuals being free from state intervention, to positive rights where the state takes a much more active role in citizens’ lives.

During Monday’s discussion, Professor Bartholet explained that “some parents can’t be trusted to not abuse and neglect their children,” and that is why “kids are going to be way better off if both parent and state are involved.” She said her argument focuses on “the state having the right to assert the rights of the child to both education and protection.” Finally, Professor Bartholet said that it’s important to “have the state have some say in protecting children and in trying to raise them so that the children have a decent chance at a future and also are likely to participate in some positive, meaningful ways in the larger society.”

It’s true that the state has a role in protecting children from harm, but does it really have a role in “trying to raise them”? And if the state does have a role in raising children to be competent adults, then the fact that two-thirds of US schoolchildren are not reading proficiently, and more than three-quarters are not proficient in civics, should cause us to be skeptical about the state’s ability to ensure competence.

I made the point on Monday that we already have an established government system to protect children from abuse and neglect. The mission of Child Protective Services (CPS) is to investigate suspected child abuse and punish perpetrators. CPS is plagued with problems and must be dramatically reformed, but the key is to improve the current government system meant to protect children rather than singling out homeschoolers for additional regulation and government oversight. This is particularly true when there is no compelling evidence that homeschooling parents are more likely to abuse their children than non-homeschooling parents, and some research to suggest that homeschooling parents are actually less likely to abuse their children.

Additionally, and perhaps most disturbingly, this argument for more state involvement in the lives of homeschoolers ignores the fact that children are routinely abused in government schools by government educators, as well as by school peers. If the government can’t even protect children enrolled in its own heavily regulated and surveilled schools, then how can it possibly argue for the right to regulate and monitor those families who opt out?

June 18, 2020

The origins of Antifa

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

Kyle Shideler outlines the history of Antifa from the Weimar Republic to the streets of cities all over the western world:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

With riots and civil unrest metastasizing across the United States, the president declared he intends to designate Antifa as a terrorist group. Predictably, the talking heads rushed out to declare that Antifa doesn’t really exist, and even if it did the president couldn’t possibly target it using that legal designation. They argue Antifa is an amorphous blob of discontents, not a functioning organization, and certainly not one which could be designated and targeted for concentrated counterterrorism enforcement.

As usual, the Twitterati don’t know what they are talking about. Reality is both simpler and more complex.

To begin at the beginning: Antifa — real name: Antifaschisitsche Aktion — was born during the street-fights of the 1932 Weimar Republic. It was founded by the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD), although various Communist “anti-fascist defense” units were associated with the KPD much earlier.

Anti-fascist Action’s sole purpose was to help the KPD combat other political parties for control of the streets in the revolutionary politics of the rapidly failing Weimar Republic.

And yes, they fought the Nazis.

But they also fought liberal parties, conservative parties, and anyone and everyone who got in their way. While these early antecedents were short-lived, it is useful to view Antifa in this context. More than anything, Antifa exists to serve as a tool of revolutionary politics in a failed (or failing) state.

Antifa would reestablish itself in the early 1980s, also in Germany, out of Autonomism. Autonomism is an anti-authoritarian anarcho-Marxist ideology associated with the Communist urban guerilla organizations of 1970s and ’80s Europe like Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade. Autonomism would find a home among the young punks of Germany’s squatters’ rights movement. Around this time, Antifa tactics like the “black block,” where large numbers of rioters dress in black and move together in formation as part of a larger protest, were developed.

H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.

The fall of olde timey “liberalism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren on the way “liberalism” was dissected, consumed, digested, and excreted by progressivism:

From different angles, from Tocqueville to Schumpeter to a thousand reporters on the ground, it has been observed that liberalism defeats itself. I mean by this real liberalism, not the poison candy version that is offered to children by our academic Left. The real thing celebrates liberty as the central political good, and equality of opportunity versus equality of result. It frees up economies and societies, by cancelling hidebound rules and regulations. When much younger and under the influence of my father and his war-veteran generation (his was World War II), I considered myself a “liberal,” for views that activist mobs would now consider to be deeply “conservative,” or as they say, “fascist.”

Opposition to totalitarianism was a key to that generation. They weren’t shy about using arms. A true liberal was an enthusiast for the War in Vietnam, and other global initiatives. Liberals were “open society” in an explicitly anti-communist, 1950s way. They loved “civil rights,” and opposed the Nanny State, although incoherently. They wished to accommodate the women’s movement. Their instinctive suspicion of social programmes, and revulsion for “ideology,” were slipping away; or had already slipped, to a longer historical view.

To be tediously economic, they were intoxicated by the view that, “now we are rich we can afford to have some fun.” They had long been bored with the absolute moral judgements that their ancestors (to whom neither divorce nor contraception were thinkable) took for granted — based on a Protestant Christianity that had been abandoned by sophisticated intellectuals a century before. “Church versus State” was no longer an issue, and because it wasn’t, morality became a statist “construct,” even without action from the Marxists.

When Ross Douthat writes a book on “decadence,” he is treating it as a temporal trend: something that comes and goes through the decades. His arguments are themselves decadent: something for the chattering classes to play, in the spirit of badminton. It is a topic for upmarket wit; no horror lurks beneath it. The old Gibbonesque “decline and fall” narrative has evaporated with classical culture, and been replaced by a dry happyface from which the wrinkles of serious history are botoxed. The “whig view of history” survives, but only by cliché.

What isn’t defended, is soon killed off, in nature but also in metaphysics. Leftism flourishes today, not because it has won any argument, but by eating everything on the liberal side. Even the word, “liberal,” went down with a soft burp. It now represents the denial, or reversal, of everything that liberals once stood for. Gentle reader may prove this to himself, by reading old magazines.

June 17, 2020

Alcibiades, the first recorded iconoclast, but far from the last

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

James Heartfield on the modern day resurgence of iconoclasm:

“Drunken Alcibiades interrupting the Symposium”, an engraving from 1648 by Pietro Testa (1611-1650)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

… far more often, the attacks on public symbols are indicative of a breakdown in social solidarity — often with alarming consequences. For activists seeking to win popular support, knocking down statues is a high-risk strategy that can provoke the opposite sentiments to those hoped for. The futurist Marinetti’s proposal to fill in the canals of Venice with concrete to make modern roads is a witty way to make a point, but not a sound policy.

Alcibiades was perhaps the first recorded statue vandal. One night in 415 BC he knocked all the stone cocks off the statues of Hermes in Athens. In 1497, the friar Girolamo Savonarola launched a Bonfire of the Vanities in which artworks, books and statues were destroyed out of a fear they would tempt people away from God. As any lover of old English churches knows, the furies of the Puritan revolution led to the destruction and defacing of Catholic saints’ statues and paintings.

In the modern era, the temptation to destroy monuments has been strong. In the First World War, Britain’s local authorities changed German-sounding names of streets like Bismarck Road — now Waterlow Road — while bully boys attacked German-owned shops. In 1933, Nazi students in Germany organised bonfires of subversive books, while the Reich organised an exhibition of “degenerate” modernist art. The burning of books only served as a trial run for the extermination of people, as the symbolic slaughter failed to yield the results of a “cleansed” Germany.

People often make the point that there are no statues of Hitler in Germany — though those were not taken down by Germans, but by the Allied occupiers. You can still see Albert Speer’s Zeppelinfeld and grandstand in Nuremberg, where many of Hitler’s rallies took place, though not much else of his Nazi architecture survives. Mussolini’s architects, Giuseppe Terragni and Marcello Piacentini, did better — much of their absurdly grandiose work survives. The model of an Allied-led “denazification” was in the minds of the US-led forces that overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003. The destruction of his statue in Baghdad was largely staged by the allies.

Under the Maoist regimes in China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, some of the worst atrocities after the Nazis were carried out. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” against the “four olds” led to the destruction of books and artworks. Later, there were showtrials and the politically incorrect were battered by the mob. In the wreckage of Cambodia, Pol Pot led a terrifying war on alleged capitalist-roaders and even intellectuals — who could be handily identified by the fact they wore glasses — that led to millions being killed. Pol Pot declared a “year zero” — that all civilisation before the Khmer Rouge took power would be cancelled. Tragically, the wholesale wiping out of Cambodian culture was only a prelude to the extermination of much of its population. The sentiment of wiping out the wrong history was repeated in the war that al-Qaeda-inspired regimes in Afghanistan and Mali conducted against books and statues that did not match their own Islamist views.

In Soviet Russia, when the communist-allied artists of the Proletkult organisation argued that all Tsarist culture should be expunged, the Bolshevik leader Lenin took them to task for “rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch”. Instead, he said, they should assimilate and re-work “everything of value in the more than 2,000 years of the development of human thought and culture”. Sadly, Lenin’s wise advice was lost on the Stalinist regimes that followed, during which the policy oscillated between futurist iconoclasm and maudlin Russian sentimentality. History got its revenge in eastern Europe when most of the ubiquitous Lenin and Marx statues came down in the 1990s.

“We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”

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

Theodore Dalrymple on the use of badges within the NHS to virtue signal and compel compliance in the unwilling:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

In Britain’s highly-centralized, almost Soviet-style healthcare system, the National Health Service, staff are being encouraged all over the country to wear little rainbow-coloured metal badges to show that they are homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual-friendly, and do not discriminate against them. The wearing of these badges is voluntary, but about 3,000 of the staff of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals, for example, now wear them. The self-congratulatory website of those ancient hospitals — St. Thomas’ is over 800 years old and Guy’s was founded in 1721, now combined into one administrative unit — says:

    The badges are just one way to show that Guy’s and St Thomas’ is an open, non-judgmental and inclusive place for people that identify as LGBT+ [which] stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender). The + simply means we are inclusive of all identities, regardless of how people identify themselves.

This language, which combines the unctuous with the bureaucratic, is typical of the way British hospital administrators express themselves nowadays. And if, as Buffon said, the style is the man himself, we may justly fear for a semi-totalitarian future.

By implication, the badges bully the staff, for if any of them refuse to wear one, their refusal is likely to be taken to mean that their minds are closed, judgmental (in the sense of being censorious, for even the attempt to avoid making judgments is itself based on a judgment), and exclusionary. It is to imply that they would deliberately treat any patients in the above mentioned categories differently and worse from all other patients. Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.

This is an insult to all those people who worked before the advent of the badges (or who now refuse to wear them) who strove and continue to strive always to treat patients to the best of their ability, irrespective of the many categories into which any individual patient falls. In my experience, the great majority of doctors have always tried to do this.

Let me give an example. Working as I did as a doctor in prison, I met many men who had done terrible things. I treated them, as a matter of course, to the best of my ability. I remember, for example, a man who had strangled three children and then impaled them on railings. Though I did not think he was a good man, and in that sense passed a judgment on him within the privacy of my mind, I treated him for his bronchitis exactly as I would have treated anyone else with bronchitis. I did not find this difficult in the least and do not claim any special merit for having done so, for it is only what all my colleagues in the profession did — as a matter not only of course, but of principle.

A couple of years ago, I read the diary of one of Marshal Pétain’s doctors during the latter’s imprisonment after World War II. The doctor had been a member of the Resistance and had no reason to love Pétain, to say the least: Pétain’s supporters would have had not a second thought about killing him if he had fallen into their power. Yet, as the diary makes clear, the doctor treated Pétain, who by then was demented, with the greatest humanity. Moreover, the doctor refused to publish his diary, despite the financial advantage of doing so, because he thought that publishing it would be to break patient confidentiality. It was only after his death, and more than half a century after Pétain’s, that the diary was published. The doctor’s adherence to his medical ethics was impressive, and he needed no badge to proclaim his virtue.

June 16, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on Puritanism in the Current Year

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

Andrew Sullivan wonders if there’s any room for debate any more:

Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.

In the last couple of weeks, as the purges of alleged racists have intensified in every sphere, and as so many corporations, associations, and all manner of civic institutions have openly pledged allegiance to anti-racism, with all the workshops, books, and lectures that come with it, I’m reminded of a Václav Havel essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

It’s about the dilemma of living in a world where adherence to a particular ideology becomes mandatory. In Communist Czechoslovakia, this orthodoxy, with its tired slogans, and abuse of language, had to be enforced brutally by the state, its spies, and its informers. In America, of course, with the First Amendment, this is impossible. But perhaps for that very reason, Americans have always been good at policing uniformity by and among themselves. The puritanical streak of shaming and stigmatizing and threatening runs deep. This is the country of extraordinary political and cultural freedom, but it is also the country of religious fanaticism, moral panics, and crusades against vice. It’s the country of The Scarlet Letter and Prohibition and the Hollywood blacklist and the Lavender Scare. The kind of stifling, suffocating, and nerve-racking atmosphere that Havel evokes is chillingly recognizable in American history and increasingly in the American present.

The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the “successor ideology” to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” He told Times media columnist Ben Smith this week that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be). And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity? That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, “the justice system — in fact, the entire American experiment — was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.” (Wesley Lowery objected to this characterization of his beliefs — read his Twitter thread about it here.)

This is an argument that deserves to be aired openly in a liberal society, especially one with such racial terror and darkness in its past and inequality in the present. But it is an argument that equally deserves to be engaged, challenged, questioned, interrogated. There is truth in it, truth that it’s incumbent on us to understand more deeply and empathize with more thoroughly. But there is also an awful amount of truth it ignores or elides or simply denies.

It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression. It argues, in fact, that all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race. It wasn’t that these values competed with the poison of slavery, and eventually overcame it, in an epic, bloody civil war whose casualties were overwhelmingly white. It’s that the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy — which is why racial inequality endures and why liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled.

This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric. No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency. No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged. And we are not defined by black and white any longer; we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.

June 15, 2020

Wokepocalypse Now

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

In Spiked, Andrew Doyle takes a very brief moment to say “I told you so” about Antifa and the other woke entities haunting the headlines these days:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

Those of us who have urged vigilance when it comes to the rise of identity politics and the cult of Social Justice have now been fully vindicated. For years we have warned about the ways in which the culture war had the potential to infect all public and political discourse. But we were dismissed as railing against niche politics confined to campus common rooms and the dark recesses of the internet. Now the culture war has exploded on to the streets of the UK. If that sounds like a fancy way to say “I told you so”, then so be it.

If we are to have any chance of preserving the liberal values upon which our society depends, we need to find a way to navigate the binary thinking that comes with ideologically driven movements. The first step is to acknowledge common ground. In all my life I have never met a single person who would not agree with the proposition that “black lives matter”, so that seems like a good place to start. It’s been many years since racism has been in any way tolerated by polite society, one of the undeniably positive outcomes of the political-correctness campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. A further point on which we can surely all agree is that racism exists and should be resisted wherever it occurs. This may seem obvious, but since any opposition to the cult of Social Justice is automatically taken as a denial of the fact of racism, it is worth making the point explicitly.

Those who would deny the existence of racism, or do not agree that black lives matter, or do not accept that racism is an evil that must always be confronted, are already beyond the scope of rational adult conversation. The vast majority of the population believe in our shared values of equality and fairness, although many Social Justice activists prefer to ignore this reality in favour of a fantasy Britain awash with fascists. We saw this in the way that Brexit voters were consistently smeared as xenophobic, even though such a label could only possibly apply to a tiny minority. We saw this in the myth that those who voted Leave were nostalgic for a colonial past, a virtually non-existent mindset that was assumed to be commonplace on the basis of no evidence at all. These kinds of prejudices, largely levelled against working-class people by bourgeois commentators, in turn generated the kind of resentment that almost certainly tipped the scales in favour of Brexit and ultimately led to the collapse of Labour’s “red wall”. These outcomes were in themselves taken as proof of Britain’s inherent racism, and so we find ourselves caught in this perpetual square dance of straw men.

All of which has been a boon for the intersectional, identity-based Social Justice movement, which is sustained on a view of society that bears little resemblance to reality. The latest protests have been infiltrated, and often stoked, by the presence of various groups who unite under the banner of “Antifa”. Like “Black Lives Matter”, these groups rely on the good nature of a public who are likely to interpret their name literally. After all, only a fascist would complain about anti-fascism. Even Mara Liasson, national political correspondent for NPR, fell for this basic rhetorical trick when she described the Normandy landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops as the “biggest Antifa rally in history”. Activist singer Billy Bragg posted an image of Winston Churchill captioned simply with “ANTIFA”. That protesters this week defaced the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square and branded him a “racist” shows the incoherence of much of what is going on.

To return to our common ground: not only is fascism vanishingly rare in the UK, but you would be hard pushed to find anyone who isn’t wholeheartedly opposed to fascism. We are all anti-fascist, which makes Antifa’s claim to be resisting a popular tyrannous force seem about 80 years out of date. The difference is that most of us understand that pepper-spraying a Trump supporter, or striking a UKIP voter over the head with a bike lock, doesn’t put us in the same bracket as those who fought actual fascists at Cable Street in 1936.

As I have argued in Standpoint, our failure to instil critical thinking in our educational systems has led to many of the problems we face in today’s society. To make the case for measured and reasonable discussion of these sensitive issues is to open oneself up to entirely unfounded charges of racism. In such circumstances, most people would rather acquiesce for the sake of an easy life. We have even seen those who have raised questions about the wisdom of permitting mobs to destroy public landmarks being accused of endorsing the slave trade. “How you feel about that statue is how you feel about slavery”, tweeted LBC presenter James O’Brien. “Don’t let anyone pretend otherwise”, he said. But the chances of finding anyone in the UK who would defend slavery are infinitesimal, and it is surely inconceivable that anyone making these allegations sincerely believes otherwise.

Canada’s ongoing experiment with Justin Trudeau’s “basic dictatorship”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell outlines the development of the concept of “rights” from Saxon England through Magna Carta and how a bad king finally triggered a rebellion that forced him to grant the Great Charter which still acts as a foundation for British (and Canadian) law. Justin Trudeau may be the modern day version of the bad king:

A few hundred years later, one of liberalism‘s and democracy’s greatest voices told us that we have three absolutely fundamental, natural rights: to life, to liberty and to property. These rights were not and still are not unlimited. There were and are ways to lawfully and properly deprive a person of his property and his liberty and, in some countries, even his life. A few centuries after John Locke another philosopher wanted to do away with the right to property: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” Karl Marx wrote, and many, far too many, believed. The only real problem with Marx’s notion is that it requires that humans are perfect … and most of us know how rare that is. Here in Canada, especially since the early years of the 20th century, we have had far too much Marx and far too little Locke.

Now, in 2020, we even have a new version of King John: a vain and foolish prime minister who seems to believe that he has been sent to rule over us. Justin Trudeau is profoundly ignorant about both liberalism and democracy. He is, actually, more of a puppet than a ruler but it is less easy than it should be to determine just who is pulling on which strings. He does not appear to have the mental capacity to pull more than a couple of ideas together at any one time.

Because we have been panicked by the coronavirus pandemic we have decided accepted that more government is the best least bad answer. To give us more and more government, Justin Trudeau’s handlers suspended parliament until September … they wanted to have that “basic dictatorship” thing.

Democracy is in peril in Canada … it’s not because Justin Trudeau is an evil dictator, it’s because we, as a people, are too complacent. We have come to believe that democracy is, somehow, automatic, that it is natural. It’s not. It needed to be carefully built, brick-by-brick, over many centuries. We needed to fight for democracy: we needed to win it and then defend it, too. It doesn’t renew itself, it is not the natural order of things, and, In Canada, in 2020, it is in peril. Parliament needs to be recalled, soon, before September. Parliament needs to tend to its ancient rights, duties and powers. The Trudeau regime needs to be called to account and then replaced by a new, better, government.

June 14, 2020

The cat’s in the bag … once. Twice is a different matter altogether

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Warren discusses some specific cats and bags:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

You can get a cat into a bag twice, as someone said (I think it was me); but the second time it has to be dead. This would be the reasoning behind my prediction that a second general lockdown will not even be attempted; but it must be qualified. For many of the people who imposed the first one were demonstrably insane, and they haven’t yet been removed from public office.

The same could be said about our impending “summer of love,” or hot season of race riots, already endured a half-century ago. That cat has been put into that bag before. This time is bound to be a different story.

It is fairly strictly a party question, now. The “theory” behind the lockdowns — to avoid overloading the hospitals in Manhattan — proved a crock, but there is a more cogent alternative theory. The Democrats in Natted States Merica guessed that destroying the “Trump economy,” and encouraging “peaceful” riots in the cities, was the only way they could defeat Trump, having tried other methods to remove him. And for a party of convinced abortionists, defeating Trump takes priority over mere human lives. We’ll see in November whether their Caracas strategy is the final winner.

To be fair, as they say at Instapundit, the Repubs have historically played along with this, and agreed to take responsibility and blame for almost purely Democrat measures. A good example is race, where the party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, eugenic birth control to reduce the black population, and Jim Crow laws, presents itself to captive media as the champion of the black man against “systemic racism”; while the party of Lincoln apologizes for itself. That the devil is at large in American politics is, to my mind, an irresistible hypothesis.

The refusal of this Trump fellow to play this game, as his predecessors did, drives Democrats berserk. He actually fights back, to their consternation. It didn’t help that they were so proximate to berserk already.

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