Quotulatiousness

February 27, 2020

Tuesday night’s Democratic debacle debate

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

Mark Steyn reports on the casualties from the latest Democratic presidential debate:

Henry Kissinger’s famous line on the Iran/Iraq war was that it’s a shame they can’t both lose. In Tuesday night’s primary debate they somehow contrived for everyone to lose, including both the Democrat Party and the media. It reached its peak of perfection early on when all seven candidates began shrieking over each other and, as with some hideous atonal aleatoric modernist cacophonous symphony, its very unlistenability seemed an impressive feat of organization.

Five insipid moderators sat there like dowagers declining to catch the eye of the shrieking nutter on the Piccadilly Line as Elizabeth Warren ate up all the opening airtime with charges that Michael Bloomberg would make you kill your babies (she’s not concerned about the baby-killing, only that it shouldn’t be Bloomberg ordering the hit). Realizing that the show was in danger of degenerating into Screech White and the Six Dwarves, her comrades belatedly began screaming along, shredding the alleged “rules” even as the hopelessly inept moderators gamely persisted with all the usual bland over-formatted props of leaden telly debates – like making a big deal about interactively selecting random Twitter-submitted questions about the besieged Syrian city of Idlib.

Mayor Pete looked earnestly into the camera and declared, “I stand with the people of Idlib.” Which, translated out of of Demoblather, means: You guys are screwed. Still, the ability to adlib a line about Idlib is not to be disdained.

In other news, Joe Biden got tough with China: “They must play by the rules. Period. Period. Period.” Actually, I think “period period period” is an ellipsis… Which is oddly Bidenesque. But he was assessed by the experts to have delivered a killer performance – if only because he appeared to know what state he was in and which office he was running for, and did not claim to have been arrested on the streets of Soweto while trying to see a South African prisoner in a gaol cell nine hundred miles away. Great job, Joe!

On the other hand, he did assert that, thanks to Bernie’s crazy pro-gun Second Amendment absolutism, 150 million people had been killed since 2007. Which would be half the population of America. And is 149,997,230 people more than the coronavirus, and roughly a thousand times the entire population of Idlib, so you’d think somebody would have noticed it.

February 25, 2020

“Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking”

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

David Solway outlines some of the serious issues Canada needs to tackle … but many of which are issues that the current federal government is striving to avoid tackling:

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc — and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a weak swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity — although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations,” based on two founding peoples, the French and the English, which novelist Hugh MacLennan famously described as “two solitudes” in his book of that title. But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

Quebec separatists don’t need to do much more than sit back, put their feet up, crack a few beers, and watch Justin Trudeau drive the country toward dissolution. Their job is so much easier now…

It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite, the breakdown is more like 95-5. This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe — North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.

Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble. And there we find the proof that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

February 24, 2020

Bidding farewell to the rule of law in Canada?

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

John Carpay on the importance of the rule of law in civil society and why we’re at risk of losing it here in Canada:

The rule of law is one of the most important legal principles on which Canada is based. Along with the supremacy of God, it is mentioned in the very first words of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”

The rule of law means that we are ruled by laws, not by the whims of a King, or the clamouring of a mob. The rule of law also means that the law applies to everyone, even the King; there can be no exemptions for the King or his favourites.

Countries which practice and uphold the rule of law tend to thrive economically, socially, politically and culturally. Countries which uphold the rule of law become wealthy because people can work, buy, sell and trade in the knowledge that their property and their person are protected by law. Economies thrive when people know that the law will be enforced, and that the law will be applied to everyone, even to the King and his favourites. The rule of law provides investors, foreign and domestic, with confidence to invest their money in business projects.

Conversely, when a country condones law-breaking, investors will put their money elsewhere, and quickly. The world’s poorest and most violent countries are those where politicians are above the law, and the law is not applied equally to all.

The decisions of Canada’s politicians and police to condone – for three weeks or longer – the blockading of railway lines by aggrieved protesters violate the rule of law in at least two ways.

First, our politicians are effectively stating that individuals with strongly held political opinions are entitled to engage in illegal activities, in this case shutting down railway lines. Second, law-breaking is permitted because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other politicians sympathize with the protesters’ ideology and demands: the law does not apply to the King’s favourites.

February 23, 2020

Benjamin Griveaux discovers that “privacy” is an outdated 20th century concept

Filed under: France, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At The Register, Alistair Dabbs describes the descent of formerly ascendent French politician Benjamin Griveaux:

Previously a key spokesman for president Emmanuel Macron, he was flying high in the polls to be elected mayor of Paris next month … until the electorate got a good look at his knob.

Benjamin Griveaux on 11 October 2018.
Photo by Jacques Paquier via Wikimedia Commons.

In a case of political revenge porn that is gripping the French nation almost as tightly as Griveaux was gripping himself, videos of him buffing the aubergine appeared on a short-lived satirical website apparently focusing on “political pornography” (don’t bother asking) and promptly went viral.

These were private, first-person videos he’d taken himself spiralising the old courgette and sent to the object of his amour who, unfortunately for his wife, was not his wife. Predictably, neither woman was impressed with the, er, outcome.

Cue an embarrassed press conference with lots of deliberately posed shots of him looking downwards and contrite, during which he announced he would stand down from the imminent elections and pass the, er, baton to someone else. Taking their example from Griveaux himself, Macron’s party La République en Marche (since redubbed “La République en Main“) did a bit of frenzied reshuffling to find a replacement.

Put aside the political, moral and human issues: these are being thoroughly argued out in the media as you read this. As for nudey selfies, come on, most of us have tried it for a laugh – albeit most probably when we were students. What I want to know is how an intelligent, well-connected and tech-savvy party executive like this could allow his personal instruction video on the subject of unclothed self-taming to get into the wild in the first place.

Griveaux’s official statement to the police claims that he sent the video person-to-person via a certain private messenging system – press reports do not name which one, unfortunately – that would delete the video after one minute. If this is true, it strengthens his case for “invasion of personal privacy”, which has massive punitive outcomes in France thanks to Jacques Chirac who as president beefed up the privacy laws to protect his illegal financial dealings from media scrutiny.

What messaging app was he using? And is he being all that tech-savvy in his belief that his video would self-destruct after 60 seconds, like in some ’70s episode of Mission Impossible? Even in WhatsApp, you have to remember to delete it yourself.

Perhaps he was using a business-focused porn-selfie messenger: a kind of doing-the-business sharing app. It’s the innovative new way of engaging with your contacts. Norbert Spankmoney wants to connect with you! Yes, I bet he does.

Come on, Ben, surely you know that for every ultra-secure, ultra-private, ultra-personal video messaging app, there are a dozen freebie video-grabbing utilities out there. Even if you code it up to prevent screen capture, someone could always video your video, just like they can photograph an onscreen secret document.

Give it up. Nothing is private any more.

Justin’s hidden victory – “… in the fight against global warming, this has to have been Canada’s best two weeks EVER”

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

As Rex Murphy points out, the nattering nabobs of negativity (okay, he didn’t call ’em that) miss the key benefits of Justin Trudeau’s tour de force of ingenious diplomacy and inaction:

It was at the very heart of Justin Trudeau’s triumph in his first election, that having vanquished the Mordor orcs of Harperland, that the country was going to be served by new thinking and fresh approaches, that anger and conflict would be no more. In an era marked by respectful thinking, exquisitely careful language, above all by the ability to listen, protests would be no more. Concord would reign, all would be sweetness and light.

What few and feeble disputes that might emerge would be defused with a waving of the diversity wand, and a choir drawn from the Liberal backbenches intoning solemnly “this is not who we are as Canadians” before the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill.

As an ultimate fillip every month a kitten and a ball of wool would be sent to every Canadian household (and Lo, a zen-like tranquillity would settle over the land). To be clear, these would be very progressive kittens, and the wood fair-trade down to the last twisted fibre.

[…]

Looked at in the cool light of reason, in the fight against global warming, this has to have been Canada’s best two weeks EVER. Keep it up and Canada, the whole wide, cold country, can soon declare itself one half-a-continent carbon-emission-free zone. Apocalypse deferred.

How do you spell Hallelujah? Greta Thunberg — Canada has heard you. Find a bamboo raft and come visit us again.

February 22, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on the “inconvenient pioneers”

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

Along with a mandatory worry piece on Trump and some positive news on the British economy under Boris Johnson, Andrew Sullivan noted the dog that didn’t bark about either Republican or Democratic pioneers:

Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaking with supporters at a town hall at the State Historical Museum in Des Moines, Iowa, 12 January 2020.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

Every now and again, I take a moment to take stock of how deep gay integration has gotten in my adult lifetime. This past week, our politics featured two relatively young men, on both sides of the political divide, whose sexual orientation is both clear and irrelevant. Pete Buttigieg has been at the top of the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, one of seven remaining candidates, and in the circular flamethrower squad of Wednesday’s debate, he once again held his own. More than that: He was relentless in his attacks on Amy Klobuchar and more than a little blunt about Bernie Sanders’s plans to take private health insurance away from everyone (something that doesn’t even happen in socialized health care in Britain). There was not the slightest whiff of defensiveness about him.

His moderate politics (on most subjects) is filtered through a seemingly brutal, calculating Rhodes Scholar–style ambition. And why can’t gays as well as straights harbor that? It’s fantastic also that he is a man of Christian faith — like countless other gays and lesbians in America. Who would have imagined that the pioneering gay figure of 2020 would be a married Christian who got a standing ovation in a Fox News town hall? But that’s old news now.

It’s also fantastic that, for the most part, his sexual orientation is ignored. Yes, the queer left hates him — but they hate a lot of gay success in public life if it doesn’t exactly fit their ideological niche. And Rush Limbaugh indeed took a slightly homophobic dig the other day. But I doubt Trump would openly use Pete’s orientation as a way to demean him. And that’s not just because Trump is not personally homophobic but because he knows it would look ugly, and be counterproductive. That’s how far we’ve come.

Richard Grenell has not subjected himself to getting elected anywhere, but, like Buttigieg, he’s a classic careerist D.C. meritocrat (and why the fuck not?). From the heartland, he got a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School and then attached himself to Republican pols — notably George Pataki and George W. Bush, who made him communications director for the U.S. seat at the U.N., a post he held for seven years. Launching his own communications shop, Grenell subsequently worked Fox News gigs even as he was a signatory to an amicus brief in defense of the right of gay couples to marry. By all accounts he has been a disaster as ambassador to Germany, trolling the E.U. and German elites, although I doubt Trump sees his regular Twitter provocations as a liability.

But check out a simple video of Grenell being sworn in for the Germany job. Mike Pence, of all people, officiates as Grenell’s longtime partner, Matt Lashey, holds the family Bible. This week his appointment as acting director of National Intelligence was widely panned — and is not expected to last long. But he nonetheless became the first-ever openly gay member of the Cabinet in U.S. history. You missed that? All the better. But for some of us, it’s a quiet landmark tarred only by the fact that most gay groups won’t even acknowledge it. The Human Rights Campaign’s Twitter feed has made no mention at all — even as they are rightly touting the first lesbian mother in Congress. Why is the first openly gay Cabinet member a nonevent? Because he’s a conservative. And to the activist left and too many of the Establishment liberals in the gay movement, that means he’s not really gay.

My politics tilt more toward Buttigieg than Grenell — but a moment like this should not be filtered entirely through ideology. History matters too. When I was a very lonely openly gay figure in Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, the idea that I would live to see an openly gay and successful presidential candidate and an openly gay Cabinet member at the same time would have been preposterous. And now it’s virtually normal. I’ll take that.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell speaking with attendees at the 2019 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in West Palm Beach, Florida on 20 December 2019.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

Update: Inconvenient typo in the headline fixed.

Buffexit NOW!

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

The poor and downtrodden peons in the economically ravaged area of Buffalo are moving towards separation from their colonial imperialist masters in Toronto and Montreal:

I read yesterday’s “Buffalo Declaration” signed by four Alberta Members of Parliament with the serious and consuming interest natural to an Albertan. I see, however, that the revolution it is intended to provoke in my mind, and in the minds of my compatriots, is not yet complete. I am still instinctively using the outdated terminology imposed upon me by the black iron prison that is the Laurentian empire.

The declaration commences with a long explanation of how “Alberta” was created by central Canadian Liberals against the expressed political will of the residents. The territorial government would have preferred one great province called Buffalo to have been created on the soil which the Canadian wolf decided to cleave into “Alberta” and “Saskatchewan.” Divide and conquer: the oldest trick in the imperialist playbook!

The natural conclusion would seem to be that to make any use of “Alberta” as a conceptual category is to play the game by the empire’s rules. And, in fact, the third of the 17 (!) demands in the declaration is that prospective adherents (who may or may not be contenders for the leadership of the federal Conservative party, wink wink) “recognize Alberta — or Buffalo — as a culturally distinct region within Confederation.”

Alberta or Buffalo? Choose your own adventure? I suppose the revolution is still incomplete in the minds of the authors, too: they have begat a manifesto, but have not quite figured out on whose behalf, precisely, they are speaking. Forgive us, we’re all kind of new at this game of soft nationalism. (Or, rather, at the game of creating a Quebec-style spectrum of nationalisms, ranging from paranoid cranks to grouchy-but-devoted three-quarter federalists.)

It is definitely a logical problem that so much of the declaration is devoted to the proposition that Alberta is culturally distinct from its neighbours — so much so as to permit the sort of political claims and considerations that would ordinarily pertain to a nation. The East, we are told, is full of the descendants of “bankers, lawyers and other capitalists.” Meanwhile, Alberta was being peopled by the wretched of the Earth. “Settlers like the Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Dutch, Germans, Scots, Chinese, and Icelanders immigrated to Alberta because of poverty, overpopulation and unemployment in their homelands.”

You have to admit that Quebec’s plan of “soft sovereignty” has worked very well to keep Quebec’s concerns fully front-and-centre no matter which party controls Ottawa. In some ways it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for anyone to consciously copy it.

February 21, 2020

Justin Trudeau, Prime Empathizer of Canada

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

The Prime Minstrel channels his inner Bill Clinton, although he just manages to avoid saying that he “feels our pain”:

A strange thing happened Tuesday morning. That strange thing was … an important and interesting exchange on the floor of the House of Commons. It happened during routine proceedings, and not in the Punch-and-Judy exchange of question period. The leaders of the various parties in the House stood and outlined positions on the rail blockades being conducted around the country in support of Wet’suwet’en opponents of B.C.’s Coastal GasLink pipeline.

First came the prime minister. “People are troubled by what they have been witnessing this past week,” he said. Our empathizer-in-chief, the emotional mascot of Confederation, was about to go to work. “Young, old, Indigenous and newcomers are asking themselves what is happening in the country … On all sides, people are upset and frustrated.”

The next three words out of his mouth were: “I get it.” Huh. Is that the sort of thing you say when you’ve actually gotten it? If a friend called you up in a shattered emotional state because he had just lost his job, as people are starting to lose jobs to the Wet’suwet’en solidarity protests, would you say “I get it”?

Beyond this tin-eared reassurance, Trudeau did not have much specific to say, and what there was seemed to contradict itself. “Our government’s priority is to resolve this situation peacefully, but also to protect the rule of law in our country,” he promised. “That is a principle we will always stand up for.” One would have thought the role of a prime minister was to apply the law rather than to “stand up for” it. He gave his usual spiel about the myriad of ways in which the federal government has failed First Nations, again speaking as though someone else were in charge. Certainly very little of it is his own fault: the government he leads has “invested more than any other … to right historic wrongs.”

Trudeau worried aloud that Canada might become “a country where people think they can tamper with rail lines and endanger lives,” but he seemingly renounced the use of force (it’s not “helpful”) against protesters who openly discuss sabotage. What the prime minister means when he talks of the “rule” of something called “law” has been left imperfectly clear.

Chris Selley suggests the government’s fecklessness will continue to prevent any solutions being implemented:

The stupefying weightlessness of Justin Trudeau’s government has never been more evident than in recent days, as it tries to arrange an end to the Mohawk blockade of CN’s main line near Belleville, Ont. At times it seems as if it might just float away, like an improperly tethered bouncy castle in a thunderstorm.

This week has been particularly windy.

[…]

The situation is ludicrous: Because Ontario’s independent provincial police won’t enforce a court injunction, the federal public safety minister seems to be in discussions with B.C.’s solicitor general about whether B.C.’s independent provincial police might back off enforcing a different injunction.

And the worst part of this absurdist theatre festival is how difficult it is to imagine a better alternative. Conservatives continue to call on Trudeau to somehow fix the problem, but the way Canada is set up, it’s really not a federal issue. The RCMP might have some jurisdiction over the railway as federally regulated infrastructure, said University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach, but that hasn’t happened in past cases. It wouldn’t even be up to Trudeau to send in troops: under the Emergencies Act, Roach said, a provincial solicitor-general has to request it.

These are structural issues that any PM will face. Indeed, the biggest difference between the Liberals’ approach to this blockade and the Conservatives’ approach to the 2013 Idle No More protests, which included a 13-day blockade of a CN line in southwestern Ontario, has been one of rhetoric and engagement. The Conservatives talked tougher, but Aboriginal Affairs rebuffed CN’s request to intervene. (Those protesters eventually obeyed a court injunction and left.) The Liberals needlessly tie themselves in knots and insult our intelligence — they know no other way — but they clearly believe it’s their job to broker some kind of resolution.

It’s tough to say which approach is likelier to work. At this point odds seem to favour “neither.” If you have a better, workable idea to get the trains moving, for God’s sake get on the horn to Ottawa.

February 19, 2020

Enoch Powell

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

Theodore Dalrymple reviews a recent book by Paul Corthorn on Powell’s career and the concerns that animated him:

Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.

It does not pretend to be a biography, or even an intellectual biography. Rather, it chronicles, scrupulously but somewhat drily, Powell’s varying attitudes toward the main subjects of his political concerns: international relations, economics, immigration, Britain’s relations with Europe, and the status of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. Powell’s wider intellectual interests and religious views are scarcely touched upon, though it is mentioned that he went from being a believer to being (under the influence of Nietzsche) an atheist, to then returning to Christian belief. There is no description of his character in this book, not even by implication, and with this book as a guide, one would not recognise him if one met him. It is not possible to tell whether the author admires or detests his subject. This neutrality creates confidence in the accuracy of his scholarship, but also makes his book less than a pleasurable or exciting read. Perhaps it is the sign of a frivolous mind, but I prefer even histories of ideas to be spiced with a little biography (or, more truthfully, gossip).

The author does, however, offer a unifying interpretation of Powell’s various political concerns, namely that they were all responses to Britain’s precipitous national decline, the steepest part of which occurred in his lifetime, but which is continuing apace to the extent that Britain might even cease to be a nation at all. Powell was born in a great power and died in an enfeebled country with no industrial or military might, with precious little patriotism, and with no sense either of grandeur or collective purpose.

That this decline – relative rather than absolute, except in such fields as the maintenance of law and order — was inevitable given the conjunctures of the age, was evident to Powell (though not at first). This relative decline was already implicit in Disraeli’s dictum that “the Continent [of Europe] will not suffer England to be the workshop of the world.”

Powell’s concerns, then, were how to manage Britain’s decline and how to find it a new place in the world. He had not always been perceptive about the scale of its decline. He clung, for example, to the illusion that the Empire might still count for something even after the Second World War. Thereafter, however, he became a devotee of a kind of Realpolitik, to the extent of wanting a rapprochement or even alliance with the Soviet Union to balance the power of the United States, whose aims he had long distrusted. He discounted ideology, including communism, as a force in international politics, which is odd in a man who was by far the most intellectual and intellectually accomplished of all British politicians of the 20th century, being both a classical scholar and a brilliant linguist. He seemed to think that Soviet ambition was merely that of any large power in the great game. Those countries that fell into its grip knew otherwise.

On economics, Powell was an early devotee of the superiority of the market over state planning at a time when the intellectual tide was running the other way. There was one important subject, however, on which he was a confirmed statist, namely that of health care. He was for a time Minister of Health in the British government, during which he fiercely defended the NHS. He believed that the government had an ethical duty to provide health care for its citizenry, and it never seemed to occur to him that the centralised NHS was not the only possible way of doing so. He was often highly suspicious of international comparison, but it is difficult to see how judgment of the merits of a system could be made without it. It was clear, moreover, that in this, as in other fields, Britain was at best very mediocre. Perhaps Powell was blind to the NHS’s mediocre performance because of the benevolence of its stated intentions (an occupational hazard among intellectuals, even — or perhaps especially — among brilliant ones). At any rate, he never satisfactorily explained why health care should be different from other spheres of service provision in the superiority of private over public organization.

Christopher Hitchens – Why Orwell Matters

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TheHitchensArchive
Published 24 Apr 2013

October 21, 2002. Christopher Hitchens giving a speech based on his book about George Orwell at The Commonwealth Club.

February 17, 2020

Justin Trudeau and the UN Security Council

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

Although I’m much less a fan of the United Nations than Ted Campbell is, I agree that Prime Minister Trudeau’s grip-and-grin-and-bribe world tour in support of Canada’s bid for a temporary seat on the UN Security Council is probably doomed to failure:

The United Nations Security Council Chamber in New York, also known as the Norwegian Room.
Photo by Patrick Gruban via Wikimedia Commons.

He has seemed oblivious to the fact that he’s bragging about Canada’s “human rights” and “equality” to politicians who are happy to have laws that criminalize homosexual behaviour and that he’s willing to enter a “partnership” in Africa’s oils and gas sectors even as his cabinet tries to shut down Western Canada’s energy industries and as his own country is in a political and economic crisis over pipelines. And then he bowed and scraped to the foreign minister of the mass-murdering Iranian regime, only a month after it shot down a civilian airliner, killing 57 Canadians.

This is all in pursuit of the ambitions of a few Laurential Elite insiders who are still campaigning against Stephen Harper. They remember that Prime Minister Harper’s government’s bid for a UNSC seat was rejected (2010) largely because Canada was perceived to be too close to Israel and because Prime Minister Harper was perceived to be too different from superstar US President Barack Obama, and not serious enough about climate change. Team Trudeau is hell-bent on proving that it is “better” than Team Harper by winning that seat (the other contestants are Ireland and Norway).

My guess is that Canada will fail again because the few hundred million dollars in bribes aid it has promised to spread around Africa is not going to make much of a dent in the anti-Canada campaign that I suspect China is waging to continue to punish us for the Meng affair, amongst other things. China is, I believe, using Canada as a bit of a whipping boy to send a message to the rest of the world about the benefits and costs of dealing with China … on its terms.

In fact, I rather hope Canada loses. Not because I enjoy seeing my country rejected. Not even because I would enjoy seeing Justin Trudeau humiliated, but I admit that would be nice. I think that losing the bid for the worthless, second class Security Councils seat might persuade our diplomats that we need to rethink our role in the UN.

The United Nations is a marvellous idea and it’s an important institution. But it is also a deeply troubled organization. It is corrupt. It is badly managed. It is poorly led. It is badly organized. It is in dire need of reform.

The bad leadership and poor organization begin at the Security Council.

“The rails to hell are laid with good intentions”

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

In the National Post, Jonathan Kay explains how Canadian governments find themselves in the situation where the basic laws of the land can be flouted at will by a small extremist faction and the police are unwilling to do more than bare peacekeeping duties:

“Vancouver Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en” by jencastrotakespictures is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

If you find yourself astounded by the current situation in Canada, whereby protesters have been allowed to shut down a rail network that remains a backbone of passenger travel and industrial transport (and whose coast-to-coast completion in 1885 became a symbol of national unity), it’s useful to revisit the accumulation of symbolic gestures that have steadily destroyed the moral authority of our governments to push back at any assertion of Indigenous rights and grievances. For years, our leaders offered reflexive acquiescence to increasingly expansive claims that Canada remains a white supremacist dystopia, culminating in last year’s campaign to convince us not only that modern Canada is a “genocide” state, but that even the act of expressing disagreement with this description makes you a sort of metaphorical train conductor on the rails to Canadian Dachau. Having publicly tattooed their guilty settler souls with every imaginable hashtag, our leaders now apparently find themselves stopped from restoring the rule of law.

The rails to hell are laid with good intentions. And there is nothing that now signals goodness in Canadian public life more than the land acknowledgment. Certainly, no one can argue with the historical truth that Indigenous peoples populated Canada for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. But words have meaning. And the well-understood meaning of these acknowledgments is that Indigenous peoples exercise a sort of broad, vaguely defined moral sovereignty over lands “owned” by Canadian governments, corporations and private citizens — including the lands on which we have constructed roads, rails, ports and legislatures. And since this sovereignty apparently now may be asserted at any time, for pretty much any reason, we have effectively lost the ability to enforce the systematic organization of property rights on which every functional society, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, depends.

The push to recognize Indigenous sovereignty over ancestral lands stretches back generations, an effort rooted in very real constitutional and treaty rights. But what I am describing here is not this formally bounded legal campaign, but rather the more general insistence that the entire country remains stained by original sin, and so must be purified by an open-ended, quasi-spiritual process of “decolonization.” This project began in earnest in 2017 as a counter-reaction to the perceived jingoism of the Canada 150 celebrations. Within the rarified corners of the literary and arts milieus (in which I found myself embedded at the time), decolonization quickly became a sort of state religion, complete with decolonization-themed sensitivity training and confession rituals.

[…]

The people doing the protesting are led by dissidents within one of the affected Indigenous communities, amplified by a critical mass of white environmentalists who are perfectly happy to cherry-pick Indigenous causes based on how well they line up with their own Anti-Racism/Critical Studies term-project requirements. Indeed, there is a certain type of very self-satisfied white Canadian leftist who sees himself as a real-life Lorax. Drawing on antiquated noble-savage stereotypes from the past, these decolonization super-allies cast Indigenous people as their little bar-ba-loot bears. And it just ruins their day when Indigenous leaders refuse to grab their tummies, moan for the CBC cameras, or read their bar-ba-loot scripts.

There is a larger hypocrisy at play here, too. Justin Trudeau and his entourage — currently on world tour, hoping to convince African and Caribbean leaders to hand him the shiny trophy of a UN Security Council seat — don’t take the train much. They fly. So, too, do the provincial politicians passing the buck in equal measure, not to mention the national broadcast journalists offering maudlin profiles of the demonstrators. Forcing ordinary travellers to bear the burden of upholding officially sanctioned upper-middle-class social-justice pieties isn’t “progressive.” It’s reactionary, snobbish elitism with a progressive façade.

QotD: Hitchens’ rule of morality

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

Whenever I heard some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.

Christopher Hitchens, quoted by Douglas Murray in “Beware the creepy male feminist: ‘White knights’ like Robert De Niro often turn out to be less than chivalrous”, Unherd, 2019-11-15.

February 16, 2020

The Canadian economy taken hostage while the PM swans around the world schmoozing for a temporary Security Council seat

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

Chris Selley on the state of play in the stand-off between (some) First Nations protesters and their temporary fellow travellers of the various permanent protest class:

“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

The majority of Wet’suwet’en First Nation members support the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline project, and they are in an objectively peculiar situation. On the one hand, the RCMP is doing its best to clear away the protesters and let construction proceed. On the other hand, anti-pipeline protesters claiming solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en have created chaos in their name — most notably the total shutdown of CN Rail’s eastern Canadian network, the cancellation of nearly every Canadian passenger train, and the layoffs and untold economic costs that go with that.

If protesters acknowledge the diversity of opinion among the Wet’suwet’en at all, they will defer to the authority of five hereditary chiefs who oppose the project, or observe that the five elected Wet’suwet’en band councils — all of which have signed community benefits agreements — represent a form of settler democracy imposed by the Indian Act.

[…]

Clearly the Wet’suwet’en are a divided community, including on the most basic questions of how they should be governed. It’s a mess. Mind you, look at the state of Canada as a whole.

Just as the RCMP have court authorization to clear protesters and encampments along the pipeline route, the Ontario Provincial Police have court authorization to clear the Mohawk rail blockade near Belleville, Ont. Unlike the RCMP, the OPP refuses to exercise its authority. And we just have to live with that. Conservative politicians are barking at Justin Trudeau to “enforce the law,” but he doesn’t give orders to the OPP, and neither does Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and nor should we want them to.

Still, you might expect senior ministers to have moderately stern words for folks illegally causing economic harm. You might expect the prime minister, at minimum, to be in the country. Instead, Trudeau spent the week swanning around Africa drumming up support for the UN Security Council seat with which he remains unaccountably obsessed, then decamped for the Munich Security Conference, where he was photographed warmly embracing Iranian foreign affairs minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, five weeks after Iran blew an airliner full of Canadians out of the sky over Tehran.

The Little Potato is probably doubly happy to have a valid (in his own mind) excuse for not being in the country at this particular time. He loves being the centre of attention … as long as that attention is friendly. He doesn’t handle situations well if the tempers are higher and the hostility is rising … like much of Canada right now.

The pipeline is a provincial project, not a federal one, but if the OPP won’t end the blockade and the feds aren’t willing to take truly extraordinary measures, then at some point in the foreseeable future it may well make short-term economic sense to give in to their demands. Maybe the feds can buy the pipeline from Coastal GasLink and shut it down.

And what if the Mohawks do lose interest, or are somehow induced to stand down? That now counts as the best-case scenario, and it will have involved shutting down the CN railway for at least a week — maybe two, maybe three — with enormous consequences for people’s livelihoods and the economy as a whole, all in the name of killing a project supported by the vast majority of Indigenous people affected by it. And it will happen again, as many times as any group wants it to, on whatever issue they want it to, for as long as they want it to. Unless someone in power does something unusually bold and concrete in the very near future – and it’s not even clear what that thing would be — we are well on the road as a country to being terminally screwed. In the meantime, we certainly have no lessons on accountable government to give the Wet’suwet’en.

QotD: Immigration and diversity

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

Let me be clear that I think immigration and diversity are good things, overall. The economists seem to agree that immigration brings large economic benefits. The complete dominance of America in Nobel prizes, music, and the arts, and now the technology sector, would not have happened if we had not been open to immigrants. But as a social psychologist, I must point out that immigration and diversity have many sociological effects, some of which are negative. The main one is that they reduce social capital — the bonds of trust that exist between individuals. The political scientist Robert Putnam found this in a paper titled “E Pluribus Unum,” in which he followed his data to a conclusion he clearly did not relish: “In the short run, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”

In short, despite its other benefits, diversity is a centrifugal force, something the Founders were well aware of. In Federalist 2, John Jay wrote that we should count it as a blessing that America possessed “one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, the same language, professing the same religion.” I repeat that diversity has many good effects too, and I am grateful that America took in my grandparents from Russia and Poland, and my wife’s parents from Korea. But Putnam’s findings make it clear that those who want more diversity should be even more attentive to strengthening centripetal forces.

Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities”, City Journal, 2017-12-17.

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