Quotulatiousness

July 3, 2020

Back to the Future Middle Ages

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

At Spiked, Dominic Frisby takes us back to a time when today’s progressive temper tantrums would fit in perfectly with accepted behaviours of the age … the Middle Ages:

A social media heretic faces trial

How much of what went on in the Middle Ages and early-modern periods do we look back on with abhorrence and a certain amount of perplexity? Burning witches at the stake, lynch mobs, self-flagellation – what possessed people to do such things, we wonder.

But take a step back, look about and you see many of these practices are still flourishing today, though they go by different names.

Here are just some of them.

Let’s start with excommunication. Excommunication meant so much more than being banned from taking communion. It involved you being shunned, shamed, spiritually condemned, even banished. Only through some kind of heavy penance – often a very public, lengthy and humiliating contrition – could you and your reputation be redeemed.

Excommunication became a powerful political weapon. It was dished out to enemies of the faith to destroy their legitimacy. Often it was used as a punishment for sins as minor as uttering the wrong opinion.

What are No Platforming and cancel culture if not a modern form of excommunication? Qualified, competent professionals are hounded out of their jobs and publicly shamed just for uttering the wrong opinion, often simply for a misjudged choice of words. Even just the wrong pronouns.

As often as not, their employer wants a quiet life, so he bows to activist pressure and sacks the target of the witch hunt. Cancel culture is excommunication.

Today’s religions, however, are not the many sects of Christianity that once perforated Europe, but climate change, education, the NHS, gay rights, trans rights, the European Union and multiculturalism. Even coronavirus and the lockdown have become sacrosanct.

Intellectuals of the right and left, from Polly Toynbee to Nigel Lawson, have described the NHS as Britain’s religion. It has replaced the Virgin Mary as the divine matriarch. Why this worship? I suggest it goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the state began to replace the church as the main provider of education, welfare and healthcare. After 1945, it was just a matter of time before the welfare state achieved altar status.

July 1, 2020

Parler, pro and con

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The latest social media challenger to Twitter has been getting a fair bit of attention over the last couple of weeks, as many British and American conservative Twitter users have announced they’ll be relocating to the newer service due to their concerns over Twitter’s progressive bias and very uneven-handed moderation. In The Critic, David Scullion points out that Parler may not be the dream social network for the unwoke:

The avowedly “unbiased” social media site based in Nevada has been around for two years but has rapidly gained traction amongst Trump supporters in the US, Brexit and Conservative supporters in the UK, and pro-monarchists in Saudi Arabia. (Yes really).

The raison d’être is free speech and in its “Declaration of Independence” Parler outlined the injustices, as they see it, of the existing big tech firms:

    They manipulate their platform to hide information. They shadow ban, trick and deceive. They have become enablers, and often leaders, of the vicious cancel-culture mob who goose-step through our online communities and scream down those who dare to disagree.

The document ends by calling on users to “#Twexit to Parler” – i.e. leave Twitter and join them.

But will they succeed?

[…]

It seems like Parler’s popularity is a symptom of censorship in big tech, but building a rival “free speech” network has its own problems.

For a start, Parler will throw you to the wolves if they get sued over your posts.

Parler requires users to “agree to defend and indemnify Parler, as well as any of its officers, directors, employees, and agents, from and against any and all claims, actions, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to all attorneys fees) arising from or relating to your access to and use of the Services.”

And in order to use Parler, individuals must also forfeit their right to sue it in court or join a class-action claim. Instead they must settle disputes in arbitration.

It’s also worth pointing out that Twitter once branded itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party” and said it took a “neutral” view of tweets posted by users because of the company’s founding principles. Those principles are now gone, gradually removed in response to a need to protect their bottom line.

QotD: The Quebec play (that never works) (for long)

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

Certain things recur eternally, in time with the rhythm of the seasons. Flowers bloom in spring. The swallows return to Capistrano. And the federal Conservatives prostitute themselves for the Quebec-nationalist vote.

Well, that’s a bit strong. Prostitutes, after all, expect to be paid. Whereas the Conservatives’ periodic efforts to sell themselves, their principles and their country to people with a proven lack of interest in all three are as notable for their unremunerativeness as they are for their self-abasement.

The Conservatives have been trying this same act now for several decades, most notably — and destructively, to both country and party — under Brian Mulroney, but in their different ways under Robert Stanfield (“deux nations“), Joe Clark (“community of communities”) and even Stephen Harper (“the Québécois nation” resolution).

Occasionally, they manage to attract some attention in the province that has remained largely indifferent to them since 1891. If they are particularly extravagant in their offerings, as under Mulroney, they may even win their votes — but only for as long as it takes to sink in that there is no support in the rest of Canada for what they are proposing, and no possibility of their being implemented.

At which point the whole exercise sinks in a heap of dashed expectations and accusations of bad faith, leaving the country divided and the Tories in ashes. Until, inevitably, some genius gets it into his head to launch the whole routine again.

Andrew Coyne, “It’s that time again, when Conservatives say anything to woo Quebecers”, National Post, 2018-05-16.

June 30, 2020

“It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless”

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

Most Canadians, reading that headline, will assume that Sean Gabb is talking about the Conservative Party of Canada (and he’d be 100% correct in that case), but he’s actually talking about Britain’s equally useless equivalent under Boris Johnson:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

According to The Daily Mail, Madeline Odent is the Curator of the Royston Museum in Hertfordshire. This museum is funded by Royston Council. In the past few days, Mrs Odent has taken to Twitter, giving expert advice on how to use household chemicals to cause irreparable harm to statues she dislikes.

It is, she says, “extremely difficult” to remove the chemicals once they have been applied. She adds that “it can be done, but the chemical needed is super carcinogenic, so it rarely is.” Again, she says: “We haven’t found a way to restore artefacts that this happens to.” Her last reported tweet features a picture of Winton Churchill’s defaced statue in Parliament Square, and says: “Stay tuned for our next edition, where we’ll be talking about marble memorials of racists.”

The newspaper and various people are calling for the woman to be sacked. It is, I allow, surprising for someone to hold a job that involves conserving the past, and then to advise an insurrectionary mob on how to destroy the past. This being said, and assuming the story is substantially true, Mrs Odent is less to be blamed for giving her advice than those who employed her as an expert on conservation and its opposite.

We have had a Conservative Government since 2010. We have had a Conservative Government with a working majority since 2015. For the past six months, we have had a Conservative Government with a crushing majority. It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless.

Political power is not purely, nor mainly, a matter of being able to make laws. It is far more a matter of choosing reliable servants. Before 1997, we could suppose, within reason, that these servants were politically neutral. They often had their own agenda. They could use their status as experts to influence, and sometimes to frustrate, laws and policies with which they disagreed. But there were not self-consciously an order of people devoted to a transformative revolution. The Blair Government broke with convention by stuffing the public sector with its own creatures, loyal only to itself. This is to be deplored. On the other hand, the Blair Government did have a mandate for sweeping change, and it is reasonable that it should have given preference to employing those who could be trusted to further both the letter and spirit of this mandate. The Conservatives have had enough time to make the public sector into at least an obedient servant of those the people keep electing. Instead of this, they have spent this time employing and promoting people whom Tony Blair would have sacked on the spot as malicious lunatics.

June 29, 2020

Today on NeoNaziHuntingExpeditions, we track down Neo Nazi Bronies

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

In Quillette, Daniel Friedman examines the claims made in a recent Atlantic investigation into Nazis in the My Little Pony community (that is, adult fans of the show, not little girls … I think):

Image found by searching for “Neo Nazi Bronies”, listed URL – http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014960111

The evidence of this Nazi problem in the My Little Pony fandom is that, on a My Little Pony imageboard called Derpibooru, over 900 images were tagged as “racist,” and images mocking Black Lives Matter were upvoted by users while images supporting the movement were downvoted, even as the site’s administrators made a statement of support for the protests. After much controversy, the imageboard banned uploading images “created for no reason other than to incite controversy” and removed the 926 images tagged “racism” or “racist.” This move was extremely controversial within the Derpibooru community, many members of which oppose any moderation.

Atlantic reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany suggests that the strong free-speech norms of the Derpibooru boards stem from its origins on 4Chan, which Tiffany describes as “the largest den of chaos and toxic beliefs available on the Internet.” She describes the Brony community as being divided between those who “genuinely enjoy My Little Pony and the wholesome escapism it provides” and trolls who think it is “edgy and provocative to be an adult obsessed with cartoon ponies.” This frames the Derpibooru imageboard as a place where innocent cartoon fans are unknowingly subjected to subversive, racist memes and images that may send people down a rabbit hole of far-right content.

However, claims that a significant portion of the Brony community are Nazis, or that a significant amount of the content on Brony imageboards is right-wing propaganda or racist memes has to be put in the proper context. First of all, the 926 images tagged “racist” exist on a board that hosts over two million images. If you order all the site’s various tags by how many images fall within their categories, there are 12 full pages of other, more popular tags you have to scroll through to find the “racism” tag. One thousand two hundred and seventy-five images are tagged “politics” and include images both supporting and opposing Black Lives Matter. Discussion of these issues is a tiny fraction of one percent of the content on the My Little Pony imageboard.

By contrast, 315,867 images on the Derpibooru forum are tagged as sexually explicit, a further 127,414 images are tagged as sexually suggestive and 105,521 images are tagged as containing “questionable” sexual content. The truth is that Derpibooru’s lax moderation norms and anti-censorship culture don’t exist to protect objectionable political content; this imageboard is unmoderated because it is an enormous repository of fan-made My Little Pony pornography.

The Atlantic article fails to place the 926 racist images in the context of the larger scope of the two million images hosted by the Derpibooru board, because less than one-quarter of one percent of the site’s content is of a political nature. And the Atlantic article avoids mentioning the half-million pornographic images the site hosts, because doing so reveals that the community’s widespread opposition to content moderation on their imageboard is about protecting sexually explicit content rather than creating a space for hateful politics to flourish, and it further reveals that the Bronies are 500 times more interested in having sex with My Little Pony characters than they are in spreading racist pony memes.

The article creates an impression that the alt-Right is using seemingly-innocent cartoon fandoms as a Trojan horse to conceal and spread a sinister ideology, but the truth is that the only thing these guys are interested in hiding inside a horse is their dicks.

June 27, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on revolution in the current year

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

The people involved in the protests — some of them would-be revolutionaries — may not know about prior revolutionary movements, and if they succeed then they’ll ensure that nobody will be able to remember what life was like before their longed-for Year Zero moment:

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

Revolutions also encourage individuals to take matters in their own hands. The distinguished liberal philosopher Michael Walzer recently noted how mutual social policing has a long and not-so-lovely history — particularly in post–Reformation Europe, in what he has called “the revolution of the saints.” “The ‘saints’ were very strong on the work of neighborhood committees. In Calvin’s Geneva, law and order were maintained through ‘mutual surveillance.’ Church members (ideally all Genevans were church members) ‘watched, investigated, and chastised’ each other.” Imagine what these Puritans could have done with cell phones and Twitter histories.

Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today. The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute. The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.” The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school. The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.

And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible. You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is Translations From the Wokish.) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.

So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment. It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment. Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality. But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.

The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.

But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” We are not there yet. But unless we recognize the illiberal malignancy of some of what we face, and stand up to it with courage and candor, we soon will be.

Canada’s “Gang of 19” urges abject surrender and hostage exchange with China

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

As Canadian political life continues to revolve more and more around the Chinese model, we now have our very own political “gang”, just like China did!

“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.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

A former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. A former Conservative foreign minister. Two former Liberal foreign ministers. Four former Canadian ambassadors to the United Nations, under Liberal and Tory governments. Two former Canadian ambassadors to the United States, under Liberal and Tory governments. A former Supreme Court justice. A former Liberal justice minister. A former Conservative senator. A flock of name-brand diplomats. Former CBC host Don Newman, for some reason.

This is the panoply of 19 elite opinion-makers that gathered in the Laurentian Boardroom at an online hotel and drafted a letter, released Wednesday, calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to intervene in the extradition process, set Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou free, and thereby secure the release of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

China, last seen denying the two men’s detention had anything to do with Meng, had changed its tune just hours earlier on Wednesday: Freeing her might “open up space for resolution to the situation of the two Canadians,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

And who stands in the way? A prime minister who was perfectly happy to stick his thumb on the scales of justice to save a cherished member of Quebec Inc. from the indignity of prosecution for rather flamboyant alleged corporate malfeasance in and concerning Gaddafi-era Libya (or to “save jobs,” if you prefer, although it emerged no one in Justin Trudeau’s government had bothered to inquire how many jobs might actually be lost if SNC-Lavalin were convicted).

You can hardly blame China for noting the precedent. And it’s sorely fitting that the Gang of 19 addressed their letter to Trudeau rather than to the fellow who would actually have to give the order: Justice Minister David Lametti. We all know who calls the shots in that particular relationship. Perhaps it’s best we just admit it.

Colby Cosh also finds the advice proffered to the Prime Minister to be … less than admirable:

Screen capture of a BBC News report on Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor facing espionage charges in China.

I wanted to discuss the letter written by the 19 geriatric Canadian worthies who encouraged the Prime Minister to trade Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, in Canadian custody fighting extradition to the U.S., for the “two (Canadian) Michaels” detained on ill-defined espionage charges in China. Colleague Chris Selley has gone over the ground, but that’s show biz for you. Selley concluded his overview by pointing out that the letter argues perversely for “surrender, then victory.” With the Meng-Michaels standoff out of the way, the various ex-diplomats and superannuated politicians argued, Canada could use the opportunity for a fresh foreign-policy start, deciding what “tough steps” ought to be taken against China. If any.

The letter, part of a campaign on the two Michaels’ behalf led by ex-Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour and ex-justice minister Allan Rock, is self-refuting in parts. Yielding “to bullying or blackmail” is “repugnant,” the authors admit, while advising just that. But “resisting China’s pressure is no guarantee that it will never be applied again in the future … China might well decide that next time it will need to escalate by detaining more than two Canadians.”

The implication, if this argument is to have any force, is that actively rewarding China’s abduction of our citizens is a jim-dandy way of making sure it never happens again. The problem with this reasoning is obvious, but the authors are also careful not to define victory too precisely. They say that letting Meng go and getting Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor back would permit Canada to “declare its position on Huawei’s involvement in the deployment of 5G technology in Canada,” a decision “that has been postponed time and again.”

Sooo … the authors think we should slam the door on Huawei, whose CEO is Meng’s father? They don’t say so! They only say that settling this quarrel would make it easier for us to decide. And they are only slightly clearer on issues of human rights in China and Hong Kong, which our current government and foreign service are allegedly being shy about “so as not to make the situation worse for the Canadian prisoners.”

June 26, 2020

The rise of the Karenfinder General

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

Brendan O’Neill on the recent phenomena of the Karens and the anti-Karens:

The most important thing here is the question of where the Karenfinder Generals derive their power from. It comes from the insatiable appetite among identitarian reactionaries for mis-speakers or wrongthinkers they can ritualistically denounce and destroy. It is this warped social-media appetite for spectacles of shaming, for being part of a virtual mob that takes to task an allegedly evil person, that bolsters and empowers people like Karlos Dillard. It is reported that he has a strange obsession with Karens and he is even selling anti-Karen t-shirts through his Instagram page. This speaks to the extent to which Karen-shaming has become a kind of industry. There are memes, there is branded clothing, and there are of course the videos of exposed and shattered Karens which are watched and shared millions of times. Dillard was able to reduce Leah to a weeping wreck desperately trying to remain anonymous because of this broader, entrenched and increasingly misogynistic culture of seeking out white women to revile and tear down.

One of the great ironies of the witch-hunting of Karens is that the people doing the filming and public shaming are far more Karen-like than the women they humiliate. The Karen prejudice is built on a view of certain middle-class, often middle-aged, white women as uncouth and arrogant and given to complaining. They always want to “speak with the manager”. But no one wants to “speak with the manager” as gleefully as the Karenfinder Generals. Their entire mission is to report on “problematic” people to the managers of acceptable thought, to the bosses of correct-think: the new PC elites. Their thirst for tearing people down for doing or saying something wrong utterly overshadows the instinct to complain that any middle-class white woman might have.

Consider the recent Central Park incident in which a woman called Amy Cooper called the cops on a black man called Christian Cooper (no relation) and claimed that he was harassing her when in truth he was reprimanding her for letting her dog off its leash in a part of the park where you’re not meant to do that. Amy behaved badly in this incident. But as Robert A George argued in the New York Daily News: “[Christian] is the ‘Karen’ in this encounter, deciding to enforce park rules unilaterally and to punish ‘intransigence’ ruthlessly.” Amy Cooper’s life has been shattered by this Karen-shaming incident: she lost her job and her dog.

Or consider the case of Lisa Alexander, the CEO of a San Francisco-based cosmetics company who was recently filmed by a Filipino man after she asked him why he was writing “Black Lives Matter” on the wall outside a private residential property. Alexander may have been wrong to presume that this Filipino man couldn’t possibly live in one of these plush private residences, but she is polite, patient and not remotely racist during their encounter. At one point the man even suggests that she call the police and she looks shocked and says: “I don’t want to call the police.” And yet she was put online, shamed across the world, lost business as a result, and then issued a self-denouncing confession in which she accepts, essentially, that she is a witch. “I did not realise at the time that my actions were racist”, she said. “I am taking a hard look at the meaning behind white privilege and am committed to growing from this experience.”

It all gets more Salem-like by the day. Just as accused witches of old could never deny the accusations against them – denial often carried a greater penalty than confession – so Karens today must immediately confess to the sin of racism if they want any hope of at least partially saving their reputations and their futures. As in earlier outbreaks of witch-hunting, Karen-hunting puts women into a bind. If they deny the charge of racism, that is held up as proof of just how racist they are. If they confess to the charge of racism, that is of course also proof of their foul, evil minds, of their possession by the demon of race-hatred. Lisa Alexander’s confession of wickedness and promise to re-educate herself on the evils of white privilege sums up how religious the identitarian outlook has become. She is in essence on her knees begging for salvation, pleading for redemption, offering to do the intellectual penance of learning the horrible truth about her “white privilege” – that is, her sinful state, her fallen nature.

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?

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