Quotulatiousness

September 7, 2019

Mark Steyn – “So the Remainer leaves, putting a question mark over whether the Leaver can remain”

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

Despite the lovely scenery outside his cabin window … I guess that should be “porthole” … Mark Steyn still finds time to comment on the circus at Westminster:

Greetings from the Mark Steyn Cruise, currently sailing the beautiful Inside Passage of Alaska. Across the continent and an ocean, Westminster continues to be roiled by Brexiteers and Remoaners locked, like the latter seasons of Dynasty, locked in ever more demented plot twists. Today Her Majesty’s Government suffered its first resignation since Boris Johnson took over as Prime Minister. The Minister for Universities and Science quit, and is leaving Parliament. His name is Jo Johnson. Any relation? Why, yes. He’s Boris’ brother. In the normal course of events, no normal person knows who the Minister for Universities is, or indeed that such a post exists, or, if aware of this grand office, what the chap who holds it does all day long: He ain’t a heavy, he’s his brother — that’s all. But the junior Johnson, a Remainer, has walked out on the senior Johnson, a Leaver, so it’s the biggest thing since Cain fired his Secretary of State for Sheep-Herding. Boris was his brother’s keeper, but he couldn’t keep him. So the Remainer leaves, putting a question mark over whether the Leaver can remain.

~All sides are throwing around media accusations of “constitutional outrage”, ever since Boris got the Queen to prorogue Parliament and was instantly ungraded from PM to Caudillo of the new dictatorship. I am more sympathetic to the charges against his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, has been claiming for months to want a general election. Indeed, there is no reason not to have one. On Tuesday the Prime Minister formally lost his majority, when some Tory nobody I’d never heard of crossed the floor and became a Liberal. So Boris and his team cannot govern. Indeed, even their minority is shrinking by the hour, as he removes the whip, expels and deselects those who vote against him on Brexit.

And yet Corbyn voted down Boris’ motion for a general election — because the Opposition Leader is determined to force the Government to enact not its own but the Opposition’s policy, by making Boris go to Brussels, grovel, and beg for another extension of Britain’s zombie membership in the European Union. To put it in American terms, the legislative branch wants to maintain the executive branch in power purely as its dead-eyed sock puppet. That is certainly a constitutional abomination, and, cautious as she is in such matters, I have no doubt the Queen regards it as such.

~Why is Corbyn doing this? Isn’t an Opposition Leader supposed to bring down the Prime Minister so he can force an election and replace the bloke? Yes, but Corbyn would lose that election, and Boris would likely win. The guff about the will of Parliament and the people’s representatives obscures the reality — that this situation exists because of the ever wider chasm between the people and their representatives, between a citizenry that voted to leave the European Union and the fanatically Remainer Liberal Democrats, openly Remainer Celtic nationalists, covertly Remainer Labour Opposition, and semi-Remainer Tory backbench all determined to subvert the will of the people. You can dress that up in all kinds of parliamentary flimflam, but, when politicians who’ve been bleating about a “people’s vote” for over a year refuse to let the people vote, you know these tribunes of the masses have gone rogue and left the masses far behind.

QotD: The affections of the voters

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

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop-bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.

Orson Scott Card, quoted at Samizdata. (Reposted from the old blog, 2004-08-31).

September 5, 2019

The “Stop the Coup” movement and the chances for a British general election

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

Brendan O’Neill on the recent political upheavals in the Mother of Parliaments as Boris Johnson lost his parliamentary majority and the “Stop the Coup” activists celebrate by backing away from the election they claimed they wanted all along:

The ridiculousness of the “Stop the Coup” movement is now starkly exposed. For the past week a few thousand members of the obsessively anti-Brexit urban elites have taken to the streets to accuse Boris Johnson of behaving like a dictator by suspending parliament for a few more days than is normal. “It’s a coup d’état!”, they hysterically cry. And yet now our supposed dictator, the author of this foul, anti-democratic coup, is offering people a General Election, and how have the “Stop the Coup” saps responded? By saying they don’t want one.

What a momentous self-own. They have literally traipsed through the streets saying “Britain is a dictatorship” and “Boris has stolen our democracy”. Now, Boris hasn’t only disproven this claptrap (dictators don’t usually suggest holding an election). He has also helped to expose the fact that if anyone is agitated and even disgusted by the idea of democracy right now, it isn’t the imaginary jackbooted generals of Downing Street – it’s the pseudo-democratic Remainer elite.

All of them are running scared from the idea of a General Election. Labour has made clear that it will not be backing the call for an election, at least not until No Deal Brexit has been legally taken off the table. “We are not going to dance to Boris Johnson’s tune”, said Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer this morning when asked if the party would back Boris’s General Election proposal in parliament later today. An election on Boris’s terms would be a “trap” for Labour, he said.

Jo Swinson, leader of the Lib Dems, is against an election too. And her justification is very revealing indeed. In the Commons she said “It is vital that this House acts with responsibility and does not tip our country into an election at a point when there is any risk that we will crash out of the European Union during that election campaign or immediately after.” With added emphasis she declared: “We must act responsibly.”

… but not democratically. After all, elected MPs know far better what’s good for the country than the majority of Britons who voted in favour of Brexit.

Phony Trudeaumania has bitten the dust

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

Nico Johnson discusses the dangers of family dynasties in democratic countries:

When future political historians look back at the 21st century, Justin Trudeau’s election as a Liberal leader may be regarded as a bland footnote. Despite all the hope Trudeau brought Canadians in his once seemingly eternal, post-election honeymoon, his leadership inevitably toppled into a swamp of sticky scandals and hurried apologies.

Justin Trudeau may still be re-elected. However, the Conservatives can rest easy in the knowledge that Trudeaumania, at least for this current Trudeau, is well and truly dead.

What is noteworthy, however, is the atmosphere of surprise and confusion that has clouded commentators’ judgements surrounding the downfall of Trudeau. In the corridors of Ottawa’s broadcasters, it may have appeared absurd that natural political decline should apply to their darling Prime Minister; the leader of the “woke world.”

Trudeau’s appearance of invincibility, which still makes these commentators swoon (note the SNC-Lavalin coverage) was first created in those blue-skied months following his leadership election in 2013.

Perhaps Justin, with his charisma and handsomeness, seemed like a breath of fresh air to Canadian progressives. Gone were those days of Ignatieff, the drooling philosopher, who rather spectacularly (considering his semi-illiterate predecessor) lost 43 seats forcing the Liberals into third-party status.

With Trudeau’s leadership, the Liberal party would have a candidate who seemed so perfect for Canadian political life that even a eugenicist would struggle to replicate it. With his status as an Anglophone-Quebecois, which managed to pacify the sensibilities of English Canada, whilst having his Quebecois heritage to maintain seat-rich Quebec—Trudeau must have seemed like a divine gift.

Yet even in those early days, Trudeau lacked noticeably in the fundamental requirements that statesmanship should necessitate. He had no political experience after being almost casually elected to the House of Commons. Nor did he possess any working experience, and had been entirely unknown to the Canadian public until the eulogy at his father’s funeral. To put it quite simply, Justin Trudeau would have never become Prime Minister of Canada if his father, Pierre, had not been one too.

September 4, 2019

Poor Greta Thunberg

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

Theodore Dalrymple on the grim-visaged child star of the environmental movement:

Greta Thunberg at the EU Parliament, 16 April, 2019.
European Parliament photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Poor Greta Thunberg! She is to self-righteousness and self-satisfaction what Mozart was to music, namely an astonishing youthful prodigy. Unlike Mozart, however, she is a very unattractive child, her unattractiveness arising not from her natural physical endowment but from the sheer grimness of her humourless puritanism which is inscribed on her face for all to see. She has succeeded in adding a new vision of hell to the many that I already have, namely being preached at by her for all eternity without intermission.

It is said that she suffers from a psychiatric condition, but whether or not this is so, her awfulness (of which, of course, she is blithely unaware) is not really her fault. Her transformation into a celebrity is the work of adults. It is they who have turned her into the Ayatollah Thunberg, the Khomeini of climate change.

In the days when reaching old age was exceptional, almost implying some kind of personal virtue, it was the elderly who were accorded respect and regarded as the repositories of wisdom. But as the old begin to outnumber the young, it is the young to whom falls the mantle. This is because we value the rare. No only does little Greta belong to a minority, but to a minority of that minority, for no one can deny that she is articulate, however monotonous, programmed or lacking in spontaneity her lines might be.

Adolescence in particular is now regarded as the acme of human existence, from which only decline is possible (and Greta exudes an air of permanent adolescence). I still have not quite made up my mind whether our age is the first of the geriatric adolescent or that of the adolescent geriatric, but I not infrequently notice around me seventy- and even eighty-year-olds who try to dress and comport themselves as if they were still about eighteen or nineteen. I find it sad, for of course the march of time is inexorable in its effects, albeit that it is true that it has slowed somewhat and people now age more slowly than they once did thanks, ultimately, to the material prosperity brought about by the creative destruction of capitalism. Nevertheless, the pretence that we have not aged is futile, though it is not futile only: it is both sad and shallow, in that it implies that life subsequent to adolescence has not brought its own rewards, and moreover that one has in effect learned nothing in the meantime, that the very best that can be hoped for is that one’s knowledge and wisdom, which plateaued at the age of eighteen, have maintained that elevated level ever since.

Based upon my experience of the elderly, I view the arrival of the adolescent geriatric, or the geriatric adolescent, with some consternation or trepidation. From a very early age I have had a liking for the elderly, often preferring them to the young, especially the young of my own and subsequent generations, but I have to admit that when an old person is nasty or querulous, he or she tends to be very nasty or querulous indeed, and exceedingly difficult to handle. In so far as adolescence is an age of egoistic querulousness, therefore, the prospect is daunting of an increase in bad-tempered geriatrics, angry that, despite their wish that they should remain adolescent forever (a wish that they are likely to confuse with a right because they have lived through a period when wishes rapidly transformed themselves into rights), they continue to age and will one day die. The Bible might tell us that there is a time and place for everything, but in the worldview of the geriatric adolescent, there is no time or place for old age.

September 3, 2019

When “raising awareness” works too well

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

Dylan Gibbons reports on a recent finding from the Harvard Business Review:

A new study published by the Harvard Business Review shows that in addition to men’s growing fears about women in the workforce and potentially being falsely accused, women are becoming more aware of the backlash and are actually less likely to hire certain women, specifically attractive women.

“Most of the reaction to #MeToo was celebratory; it assumed women were really going to benefit,” said Leanne Atwater, a management professor at the University of Houston. However, Atwater was skeptical. Rather than seeing an endless trail of steps forward before her, she and her colleagues forecasted a backlash.

“We said, ‘We aren’t sure this is going to go as positively as people think — there may be some fallout.'” And so, they tested their hypothesis.

The study began in early 2018. Two surveys were created, one for men and one for women. These surveys were then distributed to workers in various professional fields. In the end, they collected a large amount of data from 152 male and 303 female responders.

According to the study, 74% of women now say they are more willing now to speak out against harassment, while 77% of men anticipated being more careful about potentially inappropriate behaviour.

As for the idea that men do not know what constitutes harassment, the researchers found the opposite was true. Both genders appear to both know what constitutes harassment, and women may be more lenient with some of their own definitions of what constitutes harassment.

According to the report, “The surveys described 19 behaviors — for instance, continuing to ask a female subordinate out after she has said no, emailing sexual jokes to a female subordinate, and commenting on a female subordinate’s looks — and asked people whether they amounted to harassment.”

“Most men know what sexual harassment is, and most women know what it is,” Atwater says. “The idea that men don’t know their behavior is bad and that women are making a mountain out of a molehill is largely untrue. If anything, women are more lenient in defining harassment.”

Another recent action intended to increase the number of women in STEM subjects at an Australian university — by selectively lowering academic standards for admission — will almost certainly not achieve its stated goals, but will work to increase negative views of those women in the working world:

[A female engineer] also rightly points out that this lowering the bar for women is unfair to men losing the university places to women with lesser qualifications.

She points out that male students will notice that women are struggling more with the course material — the women allowed in because the bar was lowered.

She feels this is a net negative for women in the engineering sector in general, and I have to agree.

How, she asks, can employers be expected to see a woman’s engineering degree the same as a man’s if the employer knows the women got a break getting into the program?

She uses the term “positive discrimination” to describe the leg-up practices, and I really prefer that to “affirmative action” to describe it because the word “discrimination” is plain in it. And that’s exactly what it is. Discrimination against qualified people that will ultimately harm women who are qualified.

As she puts it, the only way to ensure that a woman’s qualifications mean as much as a man’s is to have equal hurdles for women.

I’m completely with her.

September 2, 2019

The economics of climate change policies

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

Tim Worstall explains the economic implications for the various demands that we consume less in order to fight climate change:

A major contention from economists is that if we decide to fight global heating in the wrong manner then we’ll make ourselves poorer than we need be. A major contention from the same economists is that if we don’t fight global heating at all then we’ll make ourselves poorer than we need be. That being the economic point about all of this, we must fight global heating in the correct manner.

The correct manner not being vast plans by bureaucracies. Instead, change market prices with the one intervention – a crowbar into the system just the once with a carbon tax – and then let the economy itself chew through the implications of that.

Do note that the argument is not “poorer than we are now”, it’s poorer in the future than we need to be in that future.

And then we’ve got the varied Green, New Deal, unsoaped hippies and socialist idiots whose demand is rather different. They are insisting that we must be poorer, now, than we are, now. These people really do have to be told to bugger off:

    A sustainable environment means consuming less, not differently.

The only useful measure of how rich you are is “What are you able to consume?” Insisting that you consume less is therefore insisting upon being poorer.

It’s also entirely wrong that consuming differently won’t make a difference. Because again those economists. The thing we consume is value. That’s also the thing that we produce. That Gross Domestic Product, GDP, that is so bewailed as a societal target is nothing but the value added in the economy. GNP is the value which accrues to the people in the economy. NNI is the net value that goes as income to those in the economy. And so on through the different possible combinations of net and gross, national and domestic, production and income.

They’re all measures of value added. Not of resources consumed at all. So, if we face resource constraints all we need to do is change the value we’re producing by using fewer of those scarce resources to do so. Then we can carry on consuming ever greater quantities of value that we’ve gone and created. This must obviously be so – we do quite obviously face resource constraints currently. All economic resources are scarce, that’s what makes them economic resources in the first place, their scarcity. We don’t actually have an economics of atmospheric nitrogen because it’s not scarce. We do have an economics of soil nitrogen because it is scarce. The conversion of one to the other comes at a price – many prices in fact. The conversion itself, the algal blooms from having done so and so on. But the doing also adds value – which is then what humans consume, the value added.

So, the idea that consuming differently won’t make a difference is dribble. Plus, the idea that we must all be poorer in order to sustain that environment is drivel. Simple observation tells us that places with poor people have worse environments than places with rich.

September 1, 2019

QotD: Wonks inside the Beltway

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

There are few words that stir the blood of a Beltway wonk like “the Commission has issued its report.” That means that those in the government must now react, importantly, and those in the media must now react as well — dissect, digest, explain to the benighted groundlings what it means, and issue Important Recommendations by way of reasoned editorials aimed at the corridors of power, but more likely received by a schoolteacher in Iowa who photocopies it off and puts it on the bulletin board in the staff lounge with yellow highlight-lines through the better parts.

The commission has issued its report! Mo better, the commission has issued recommendations! And the Washington press corps open their beaks, spindly necks trembling, waiting for the savory worm to be dropped from the blue-ribbon mother bird.

Unless you’ve spent some time in DC you can’t imagine the tremendous self-importance that possesses the people who feed off the government. They’re like people who live in the same town where NASA has a tracking station, and think that it makes them all astronauts.

James Lileks, Bleat, 2004-07-23.

August 30, 2019

Communist Revolution in America? – The Red Scare 1919 I THE GREAT WAR 1919

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 29 Aug 2019

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The American intervention in the Russian Civil War, the economic hardships of workers and returning veterans and the strikes all over the US in 1919 created a hysteria that we know as Red Scare today. But how realistic was the idea of a Bolshevist revolution in America really?

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» SOURCES
US Congress. Senate. Bolshevik Propaganda: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary. 65th Cong., 3rd sess., February 11, 1919, to March 10, 1919
Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Revised edition. South End Press, 1997.
Hanson, Ole. Americanism versus Bolshevism. New York and London: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1920.
United States Department of Justice. Red Radicalism as Described by Its Own Leaders, Exhibits Collected by A. Mitchell Palmer, Including Various Communist Manifestos, Constitutions, Plans, and Purposes of the Proletariat Revolution, and Its Seditious Propaganda. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920.
Cocks, Catherine, Peter C. Holloran, Alan Lessloff. The A to Z of the Progressive Era. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009.
Dick, William M. Labor and Socialism in America. New York: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Gould, Lewis L. The Progressive Era. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1974.
Hagedorn, Ann. Hope and Fear in America: 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Jaffe, Julian F. Crusade Against Radicalism: New York During the Red Scare, 1914-1924. New York: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Kornweibel, Jr., Theodore. “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. Indianapolis: Indiana Press University, 1998.
Hawley, Ellis W. The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933. New York St Martin’s Press, 1979.
Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study of National Hysteria, 1919-1920. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.
Powers, Richard Gid. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. Yale University Press, 1998.

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August 29, 2019

QotD: Imagining a world made up only of women

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

If enough women decide to mob on some unfortunate outside their group, they may well turn physically violent and the beating will not stop once the point is made. It will stop when the target of their wrath is dead or nearly dead. Women don’t really have much of an “off switch” when we move into physical violence out of anger.

So what would a world made up totally of women really be like? It would be tyrannical beyond belief. No one would be willing to speak against the accepted narrative unless they were willing to be unpersoned or killed. Think of a mix between 1984, the very worst social aspects of socialist regimes, and the Borg. There would be constant pushing for position, usually by starting whisper campaigns or setting someone above oneself up to be badly embarrassed. Look at the SJWs of today’s world and see how they operate. That’s what it would look like, writ large across the entire planet. They attack anyone outside the group who doesn’t comply with their demands, and if someone inside the group says a single word out of line according to the ever-shifting standards the entire group turns on them without mercy. The only way to get back in their good graces is to loudly proclaim your “sin” and accept their abuse until they get bored of you. Even afterward, you’ll forever be “tainted” with the sin of noncompliance.

When you write your books and send them out into the world, please stop writing women as soft, cuddly pacifists. We aren’t. Kipling was completely right about the female of the species being the more dangerous sex. He was also right about the price of letting women control society. If any thinking individualist finds themselves in a society run by women, may God have mercy on their souls because those women will have none at all.

“outofthedarkness”, guest posting at According to Hoyt, 2017-08-09.

August 28, 2019

The political football of “mass” immigration in the Canadian federal election campaign

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

Recently a registered third-party (under Canadian election rules) paid to have billboards put up in major cities that appeared to be from Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada:

A billboard in Toronto, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province – https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434c

Colby Cosh discusses the issues raised:

I offer sarcastic congratulations to everyone who gave Maxime Bernier the stupid controversy he wanted over the “Say NO to mass immigration” billboard, bearing his image, that briefly appeared in a few Canadian cities and was taken down in a hurry Monday morning. The billboards were purchased from Pattison Outdoor Advertising by a third-party supporter of Bernier’s People’s Party. The company’s initial response to the resulting outcry was to observe that the message of the billboard complied with advertising standards; it did not contain any hateful, disparaging, or discriminatory language.

“We take a neutral position on ads that comply with the ASC (Advertising Standards Canada) Code as we believe Canadians do not want us to be the judge or arbiter of what the public can or cannot see,” was Pattison’s original statement in the face of controversy. (Most everybody, including the company, seems to have missed the point that election advertising is explicitly “excluded from the application” of the Code on the grounds that political expression deserves the highest degree of deference; the Code does say, for what it’s worth, that “Canadians are entitled to expect” that such advertising respects the underlying principles.)

[…]

The question I have for objectors and denouncers of the billboard is how they think it could have been rewritten, expressing the same underlying idea, so as to be acceptable. If the unpleasant-sounding word “mass” were replaced with “large-scale,” would there have been less of a ruction? Maybe any objection to prospective levels of immigration to Canada is to be regarded as inherently racist and hateful, even when no racist or hateful language is used.

If that is the case, it is perfectly predictable that the People’s Party will exploit this and cry “mob censorship,” and public polls on immigration suggest they will have some success, in case recent history everywhere didn’t offer enough of a hint. Moreover, we are left with an awkward question how any limit upon or criteria for immigration, any government immigration policy per se, can be justified at all. What, indeed, can be the objection to “mass immigration”? Who will have the courage to put up a “Say YES to mass immigration” billboard?

QotD: The secret power of Quebec separatists that Western separatists lack

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

Even back in the day Western or Alberta separatism could never pass the Tebbit cricket test: Albertans have always kept cheering for Canadians at the Olympics or the hockey worlds, even at times when we were convinced intellectually that Confederation was a swindle. Much less would Westerners ever consider rooting against Canada, or hoping for its humiliation, or sabotaging it in a context of warfare or geopolitical struggle. Reform intellectuals like Hill have always wanted to create a sort of Western Canadian nationalism; that the necessary basis for nationalism is a nation, or something even slightly like one, has always escaped them. This is the super-secret advantage that Quebec has when using the blackmail tactics Hill and others are trying to imitate. Quebeckers have a genuine alternative loyalty to their extended Quebecois family, and Westerners have no equivalent. If we did, we wouldn’t have to advertise for secessionist generalissimos in the papers.

Colby Cosh, “Advice on Western separatism: don’t take it any more seriously than it takes itself”, National Post, 2019-07-26.

August 27, 2019

So much for nil nisi bonum

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

The old Latin phrase De mortuis nihil nisi bonum encourages us to only speak well of the dead. The recent death of libertarian billionaire David Koch has brought forth a torrent of vituperation from many people in media and politics, as James Piereson and Naomi Schafer Riley record:

David Koch speaking at the Defending the American Dream Summit in Columbus, Ohio, 21 August 2015.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

“Yesterday David Koch of the zillionaire Koch brothers died … of prostate cancer. I guess I’m going to have to reevaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer.” That was Bill Maher last Friday night, joking before his approving audience. Maher went on to say, “The Amazon is burning up. I’m glad he’s dead.” Maher is not known for his kindness toward those with whom he disagrees. In that sense, he reflects the thinking of a growing number of progressives and leftists who openly despise conservatives and libertarians. David Koch, along with his brother Charles, have for decades been targets of harsh rhetoric from the far Left.

What is it about David Koch that inspired such hatred? “We live in the world that he helped build, and it is on fire,” wrote Sarah Jones in New York, denouncing Koch’s “monstrous legacy.” In Esquire, Charles Pierce writes: “Except for his surviving brother, Charles, no man had a worse effect on American politics since the death of John C. Calhoun. Every malignancy currently afflicting us can be traced in one way or another into their wallets, and that’s not even to mention the lasting damage they’ve done to the planet as a whole.”

This is the kind of language that religious cults reserve for heretics and apostates — and in many ways, David and Charles Koch were blasphemers to the liberal orthodoxy. They believed in smaller government and thus criticized the welfare state, excessive taxation, and a great deal of government regulation. At the same time, they criticized America’s wars abroad, along with high levels of defense spending, and were sympathetic to the causes of gay rights and gay marriage. They were consistent in their views across a range of issues, antagonizing liberals but also vexing conservatives. The claim that David Koch was a reflexive right-winger is a caricature of his beliefs.

The Kochs believed in smaller government. Whether it was gay marriage or land wars in Asia, they consistently argued that less government intervention would produce freer and happier people. Their support for drug legalization and abortion rights irked plenty of conservatives, but it drove few over the edge as their support for lower taxes and greater school choice did for liberals. Perhaps nothing irked liberals more, though, than the Kochs’ fight for less environmental regulation. Blaming Charles and David Koch for singlehandedly destroying the rainforests or raising the temperature of the earth seems to be a common theme among critics — an attribution of immense power beyond the capacity of any man or family or company.

August 24, 2019

Remy: All My Loving (Beatles Parody)

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 23 Aug 2019

Remy discovers the hysterical, shrieking crowds are here for the entitlements.

Written and Performed by Remy
Produced and Edited by Austin Bragg
Music tracks and mastering by Ben Karlstrom
——————

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

—————-

LYRICS:

Does adulthood dismay you?
Vote me and I’ll pay you
You won’t have to grow up it’s true
All your bills will be paid
Your adulthood delayed
And I’ll give all this money to you

Bob commuted to college
For discounted knowledge
So large debts he would not accrue
Lived at home, did some chores
Now he’ll also pay yours
Cuz I’ll give all his money to you

All this money
You will get from Bob
All this money
If I get this job

All your work wages risen
Your debts all forgiven
Your childcare will be paid for too
Want free parental leave
Just takes one vote for me
And I’ll give all this money to you

All Bob’s money
I will give to you
All Bob’s money
If I win it’s true
All Bob’s money
All Bob’s money
All Bob’s money
I will give to you

Prime Minister Dressup versus the Milk Dud

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

Barbara Kay on the most recent pre-campaign attack by the federal Liberals on Andrew “The Milk Dud” Scheer:

Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.

The Liberals know they are going into the coming federal election with their leader, Justin Trudeau, weighed down by the heavy baggage of the SNC-Lavalin debacle and the India Tickle Trunk Tour, amongst many other embarrassments. So the Conservatives had to expect some desperation moves to cast their leader, Andrew Scheer, in what the Libs consider an equally bad light.

And right on cue, the Libs unearthed a 2005 video of Andrew Scheer explaining to the House of Commons why he was personally opposed to the legalization of gay marriage.

We would do well to remember that the words Scheer spoke then constituted the belief system of 99% of the planet earth, including Barack Obama, who flipped on the issue when it became politically safe to do so. Gay marriage wasn’t even on the horizon of most countries in the West, nor is it legal yet in many western countries. (And as former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair pointed out in a CTV interview, Canadians would also do well to remember that in 1995 Ralph Goodale didn’t believe gays should even have the right to civil unions, let alone marriage.)

Scheer has no intention of revisiting gay marriage politically. It’s settled law, and he has given no indication that he considers it less than settled. Bringing up what he had to say in 2005 may be politically advantageous as a distraction, but it is unfair, while Conservative attacks on Trudeau for gaffes he has made and is still making as prime minister are perfectly fair comment.

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