Quotulatiousness

June 13, 2019

Americans “don’t really believe in foreigners”

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

A few days back, Sarah Hoyt wrote a long post about the actual differences between American culture and the many different cultures that most Americans have difficulty understanding:

I don’t think anyone who hasn’t actually acculturated between two countries understands how different cultures can be, deep down, at the bone level and the most basic reactions level, let alone what causes the difference, from inherited influences to just deep built in assumptions about climate/physical plant/fauna.

And some of the people who have acculturated, at that, might not be self-aware enough to see the difference, and just replace one set of assumptions with another and roll with it. (Or get caught somewhere between. Well, to some extent we all get caught somewhere between. The question is, what percentage is in the new country. I’d say for me, after being in Portugal recently, probably 95% American. There are things trained in before the age of 3 which I’ll never let go of, though some got truly weird with the acculturation, like how I react to “shame.”)

That experience this weekend was the “clicking in” of something that’s been bothering me for a long time. In our writers’ group I used to run across people who projected modern AMERICAN female back into the time of pharaohs. One of my best friends refused to believe me when I told her there was zero chance of an alien race having the same university system as the US since even Portugal (avowedly human) doesn’t. There were other things. You guys have heard me rant about several “historical” books that make the past exactly like the future only with different tech. The fact that they don’t understand that tech affects not just how people live but how they think, feel and react is another of those things I don’t get, as I think even within living memory we should be able to see how different things have gotten. See for instance not wearing of aprons, because the clothes are cheap enough and abundant enough that ruining a shirt is not a big deal, unless it’s a very good shirt.

Technological shifts in living memory have made ordinary life from before the new technology (like cheap, dependable cell phones) almost unimaginable. How many movies and TV shows from before the mobile phone became widely available depended as a plot point on the characters being unable to communicate with one another at key moments? Many mystery novels of the pre-mobile-phone era probably make no sense at all to modern readers because instant communication has become “baked in” to our world.

The clothing aspect has been less obviously important, yet only a couple of generations back, most people owned perhaps three changes of clothing, including one “good” suit/dress for church-going or special occasions. We’ve become so wealthy as a culture that almost everyone has more than enough clothes for any imagined need … although church-going has become almost exotic to urban and even suburban folks, and formal attire is becoming more and more rare. (But everyone has more T-shirts and shorts than they know what to do with.)

But until this weekend I didn’t realize how prevalent and universal it is, since the clash took place between two people from native anglophone cultures, both of which are denizens of the net and contact people of other countries, regularly. Okay, one of them didn’t know she was dealing with a foreigner […] This weekend I realized people don’t really believe in foreign countries either. They’re willing to accept that some things (and those usually conform to their mental picture of the generic “culture” or “region”) are different, but that the fundamentals and the cherished unexamined assumptions might be different is unthinkable — literally. And if we can think of them, we still assume the other country is somehow “wrong” or worse “pretending” to be different to be contrary.

This means, ultimately, that even an era of instant all over the world communication, human tribalism still wins. And with it, I suppose, nationalism.

The wave of populism in the west that has taken the establishment and the mainstream media by surprise is a predictable response to the globalist attitudes of the elites. If you work hard enough at it, you can provoke unpleasant responses from those who don’t agree with your worldview, and the transnational elites have been working very hard indeed.

There are other implications: since it’s virtually impossible to avoid faster communication and more widespread travel in the future, this is going to make the next couple/three centuries a series of epic clashes, until either some sort of understanding emerges or polarized cultures can immigrate to the stars and far far away from each other.

Mass immigration is a REALLY bad idea (‘mkay) not that this is a surprise to any of you. People inhabiting enclaves of “their kind” are slow to acculturate (three generations, if it happens at all.) And the number of people coming over the Southern border is like nothing we’ve ever experienced before. And trust me, in terms of functionality, you do NOT want to import any culture descended from 17th century Spain. There is a reason that the American countries South of us are in crisis on a more or less permanent basis, and that Brazil, screwed up though it is, is more functional than the others. No, just no.

I’m certainly not against immigration, but I strongly believe it is possible to have too much immigration, as Europe and the United States are being forced to confront. When people leave their native land to go somewhere else, be it for economic or political reasons, there’s a natural expectation that they will at least attempt to acculturate to their new country. To western elites, this is wrong (or at least, misguided) and “we” should encourage new immigrants to avoid acculturation and to embrace and celebrate the culture they came from. Because reasons. And a lot of immigrants are happy to avoid the hard work of learning how to fit in to the foreign culture they find themselves in — and it is hard work — leading to second or third generations who still can’t or won’t fit in and adapt to the culture.

Let me just say that is one more proof of “people don’t really believe in foreigners.”

Sure, a lot of American culture is triumphant and imitated. Only it’s more “spoofed” because what they imitate is what they see in movies, and proving that humans prefer narrative to lack there of, even when it makes no sense, the bad parts are often picked up first. And they’re often bad parts only seen in movies, btw. Like certain underclass behaviors being seen as glamorous.

But it’s an overlay. At a deep down level, these people dressing in jeans and t-shirts are still foreign and — THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT — don’t believe Americans software-in-the-head is different, which leads to cargo-cultish attempts to import American successes without getting what brings them about, from innovation, to social mobility to freedom of speech. Not really, not at a deep level.

[…]

This means the left’s project of “fighting nationalism” is not just doomed, but it’s stupid as eating rocks, and will cause only unending misery suffering and war. (So, SOP for Marxists. In fact, chalk this whole internationalism bullshit as something else Marx was wrong about. Workers of the world unite, my little sore feet.)

QotD: Justice and Social Justice

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

It bears repeating: actual justice holds you responsible for the actions you take. “Social justice” holds you responsible for actions taken, without your knowledge or consent, by people you do not know and have never met. It’s guilt by association, and a perversion of true justice.

Sam Duncan, in a comment posted to “Elsewhere (234)”, DavidThompson, 2017-06-01.

June 12, 2019

Men’s mental health and the conflicting demands they face

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

In Psychology Today, Rob Whitley explains the paradoxical demands that men make active efforts to talk about mental health issues and to “check their privilege” and shut up:

Men, Please Talk More

Men experience elevated rates of numerous mental health issues including suicide and substance use disorder while showing low rates of mental health service utilization and a tendency to bottle-up. This has led many scholars to posit a silent crisis of men’s mental health.

Consequently, many mental health organizations and high-profile individuals are sending out an insistent message that men must talk more about their mental health.

Even royalty has endorsed this message, with HRH Prince William stating in a recent documentary that we need to “pass the message onto men everywhere that it’s okay to talk about mental health… and be able to talk about our emotions.”

Fine words indeed.

Men, Please Shut Up

However, other individuals and organizations are sending out a completely different message, namely that men as a group need to remain silent and “check their privilege.” As wryly noted by Bloomberg journalist Ramesh Ponnuru “check your privilege means shut your mouth.”

Such messages can be seen all over the Internet, with pleas for men to shut-up or stop whining. Of note, these pleas come from both men and women. These echo comments men often hear in face-to-face interactions, even from their intimates and their employers.

Indeed, such perspectives can emanate from high places, including the U.S. Senate, with Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono recently stating, “I just want to say to the men in this country: just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change.” For some, male silence is a sign of moral rectitude.

This situation creates a men’s mental health double-bind. On the one hand, men are being told to talk more and open-up; on the other hand, men are being told to check their privilege and be silent. This can only create cognitive and emotional distress.

Interestingly, the men’s mental health double-bind manifests itself beyond the borders of the U.S. As such, examples from the U.K and Canada are given below to illustrate its global nature.

The fantastic notion that Donald Trump is “at heart really a free trader”

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

Guest-posting at Catallaxy Files, Don Boudreaux explodes the farcical notion that President Trump is using protectionist tools with an eventual free trade goal:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

In the case of Donald Trump, the claim that he is at heart really a free trader who raises tariffs today with the aim of bringing about lower tariffs tomorrow — and all because he is committed to achieving free traders’ ideal goal of maximum possible expansion of the international division of labor — is especially preposterous.

Trump has pontificated on trade for decades, and every word out of his mouth clearly reveals a man who knows nothing about the economics of trade and who is as clichéd an economic nationalist as can be imagined.

Behold this line from a 1990 interview he did in Playboy: “The Japanese double-screw the US, a real trick: First they take all our money with their consumer goods, then they put it back in buying all of Manhattan. So either way, we lose.”

Let’s examine this unalloyed gem of economic witlessness.

Overlooking Trump’s outrageous exaggerations, such as his claim that the Japanese buy up “all” of Manhattan, we start by stating an obvious truth: the voluntary purchase of a good is not a transaction in which the buyer is “screwed” or has his or her money “taken.” Instead, the buyer’s money is voluntarily spent. While every person of good sense sees a foreign seller who makes attractive offers to domestic buyers as someone who improves the well-being of each buyer who accepts the offer, Trump sees this seller as a con artist or thief.

And so Trump ignores the value to Americans of the imports we purchase. In typical mercantilist fashion, he believes that the ultimate purpose of trade is to send out as many exports as possible in exchange for as much money as possible — money that in Trump’s ideal world is never spent on imports. His view on this matter is even more bizarre than that of ordinary mercantilists. For Trump, imports are not merely costs that we endure in order to export, they are actual losses. (Although it goes without saying, I’ll say it nevertheless: Trump does not understand that imports are benefits and that exports are costs.)

Furthermore, by describing the money spent on imports as “our money,” Trump reveals his belief that money earned by each American does not belong to that individual but, instead, to the collective.

Also in the fashion of the typical mercantilist, the presumption is that the nation is akin to a gigantic household whose members all share in and collectively own its money. And just as Dad justly superintends little Emma’s and Bobby’s spending to ensure that they don’t dissipate the family’s wealth, Uncle Sam must superintend his subjects’ spending in order to ensure that we don’t dissipate the nation’s wealth.

One other flaw in the above quotation from Trump’s Playboy interview is notable: he believes that foreign investments in America inflict losses on us. He doesn’t pause to consider that when we Americans sell assets to foreigners we regain ownership of some of the dollars that Trump, in his previous sentence, lamented are lost to Americans when we bought imports.

Nor does he ask what the American sellers of these assets do with the sales proceeds. Perhaps we invest some or even all of them. And if so, perhaps these new American investments will prove to be more profitable than are the investments made in America by foreigners. (By the way, contrary to another mercantilist myth, Americans are not made better off when foreigners’ investments in America fail. Quite the contrary.)

An even deeper error infects Trump’s “understanding” of foreign investment: he implicitly — and, once again, like all mercantilists — assumes that the amount of capital in the world is fixed. Only then would it be true that each American sale of assets to foreigners necessarily reduces Americans’ net financial worth (which is presumably what Trump means when he says that “we lose” when the Japanese purchase Manhattan real estate).

June 11, 2019

Actually, this explains so much about the British Tory party

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

Mark Steyn:

Image by Peter Reynolds
https://peter-reynolds.co.uk/2019/06/01/which-conservative-leadership-candidate-has-the-intelligence-and-courage-to-legalise-cannabis/

I look at the race to succeed Theresa May as Tory leader and I wonder, to modify our Sunday Poem, where are the squares of yesteryear? No Conservative seeking to maintain political viability wants to seem too disconnected from the debauchery of contemporary Britain. So it has become the habit to confess to “youthful indiscretions”, “youthful” being a term of art stretching easily into late middle age.

This time round the craze is for drug-fiend Tories. Of this week’s crop of alleged leadership contenders, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt says he had a cannabis lassi while backpacking in India; International Development Secretary Rory Stewart admits he puffed on an opium pipe at an Iranian wedding; my old boss Boris Johnson claims to have snorted icing sugar at Oxford; former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab discloses he’s tried cannabis but never any “Class A drugs”; and, just to put the hallucinogenic icing on the psychotropic trifle, the Environment Secretary Michael Gove reveals he only does “Class A drugs”.

Mr Gove purports to have taken cocaine as a “young journalist” twenty years ago – that’s to say, when he was in his thirties and working for The Times. He applied for a job round about that time at a publication for which I then wrote, and the chum of mine who took the interview reported back that Gove was one of the most boring men he’d ever had the misfortune to sit through lunch with. If he was snorting in the bog between the soup and fish, it evidently didn’t add any sparkle to his repartee. For American readers, the notion of Michael Gove as a cokehead is roughly analogous to discovering Mike Pence spends his weekends in a gay leather bar: It renders the very concept of transgression pointless. Given what he’s like on his face, the idea of Gove off his face is too surreal to contemplate.

June 10, 2019

The intended message of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

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

There are few novels which have been so enthusiastically claimed by partisans of both the right and the left — sometimes simultaneously — for misunderstood reasons. Orwell wasn’t warning us about technology (although he brilliantly illustrated how technology can be harnessed in service of the state), nor was he somehow warning us about the evils of current or recent politicans (Reagan, Bush, Trump). Orwell, a dedicated life-long socialist, was warning us of the dangers of totalitarianism, particularly the communist style of totalitarianism:

June 8, 2019, marks the 70th anniversary of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. There will be no shortage of think pieces that will misinterpret its legacy. They will focus on social media, security cameras, data collection, and “fake news.” The problem? The novel was not a commentary on the downside of technology. It was meant to warn against the growing spread of communism.

In the decades since the time of its publication, the context of Orwell’s magnum opus has been lost. What remains in the cultural memory are simply fragments of the larger picture: government censorship, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, and Orwell’s clever neologisms (Newspeak, doublethink, and thoughtcrime, among others). This selective recall has led to a widespread misreading of the book’s original warning.

[…]

From the left, most present-day articles and blog posts project the character “Big Brother” onto President Donald Trump, like Eliot Namay’s column in the May 6 edition of the Charleston Gazette-Mail. They typically focus on Trump’s fevered populism and his penchant for impulsive speech, which can lead him to play fast and loose with facts.

Sales of 1984 spiked dramatically after his inauguration in 2017 when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (incorrectly) touted the “largest audience ever to witness an inauguration.” Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway later defended the claim on Meet the Press, blurting out the now infamous phrase, “alternative facts.” Scores of news stories compared her gaffe to Orwell’s “Newspeak” and “doublethink.” It’s also fairly common to read comparisons of Trump’s rallies to the “Two Minutes Hate” depicted in 1984.

Comparisons from the right, on the other hand, generally focus on the politically correct speech codes of colleges and universities or on the massive data gathering of big tech companies like Facebook and Google, warning readers that “Big Brother is Watching You.” Kalev Leetaru explores both of these issues in his May 6 column in Forbes, where he compares the social media de-platforming trend to Orwell’s “unperson” status. Notably, sales of 1984 also spiked in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked details of the NSA’s mass collection of internet and phone records. A slew of articles followed, asserting that 1984 had arrived.

A certain amount of hyperbole is a characteristic of today’s reporting and commentary, but current comparisons to 1984 are inappropriate. Again, George Orwell was writing about a specific regime. Big Brother was an obvious reference to “Uncle Joe” Stalin, a uniquely evil dictator. Trump has his shortcomings, but he is no Stalin. A president who is prone to exaggeration does not equal a government-controlled press (which the Soviet Union had). The “Two Minutes Hate” recalled Stalin’s public demonization of Trotzky, who dared to criticize Stalin’s tactics. Data collection is a growing concern, to be sure, but it doesn’t precede a terrifying knock on the door from the KGB.

June 9, 2019

People who call for higher taxes are almost always hypocrites

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

And the numbers prove it:

There are many people who tell us that taxation in the UK is too low. Just think of all the gorgeously bureaucratic things that could be done if only the government had more money! Then there’s the number of people who actually do pay more tax on the basis that they think the government should have more money. The second being a rather smaller number than the first.

Which does bring us to that basic point that economists do insist upon making. Revealed preferences are a much better guide to what people do in fact believe than are expressed. Or, as folk wisdom has it, talk is cheap. That many shout that taxes should be higher – usually to insist that them over there should be taxed more – is interesting and amusing. But the actual number of people who really believe taxes should be higher is the number of people who voluntarily offer up more of their own hard earned to the government.

Which means that, according to the aggregate views and actions of the population of Britain taxes last year were too low by exactly the amount of £11,069. Everyone else is just virtue signalling:

    Donations to the Treasury have dwindled in recent years, however, even as the country’s debt remains relatively high. There were just 14 donations and bequests to reduce the national debt in the 2018-19 tax year, totalling £11,069, the UK Debt Management Office said.

That is the revealed preference of us all in aggregate.

It’s not just the UK where the number of people demanding higher taxes don’t actually put their own money where their mouths are — it’s true in Norway, the USA, and even the City of Toronto.

For ultra generous Canadians, Her Majesty will happily accept your donations here. To prove that you’re even more devoted to the challenge, you can even forego the tax credit, too!

June 8, 2019

QotD: Labour’s celebration at Thatcher’s death

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

A few hours after Margaret Thatcher’s death on Monday, the snarling deadbeats of the British underclass were gleefully rampaging through the streets of Brixton in South London, scaling the marquee of the local fleapit and hanging a banner announcing “THE BITCH IS DEAD”. Amazingly, they managed to spell all four words correctly. By Friday, “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead”, from The Wizard of Oz, was the Number One download at Amazon UK.

Mrs Thatcher would have enjoyed all this. Her former speechwriter John O’Sullivan recalls how, some years after leaving office, she arrived to address a small group at an English seaside resort to be greeted by enraged lefties chanting “Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher! Fascist fascist fascist!” She turned to her aide and cooed, “Oh, doesn’t it make you feel nostalgic?” She was said to be delighted to hear that a concession stand at last year’s Trades Union Congress was doing a brisk business in “Thatcher Death Party Packs” – almost a quarter-century after her departure from office.

Of course, it would have been asking too much of Britain’s torpid left to rouse themselves to do anything more than sing a few songs and smash a few windows. In The Wizard of Oz, the witch is struck down at the height of her powers by Dorothy’s shack descending from Kansas to relieve the Munchkins of their torments. By comparison, Britain’s Moochkins were unable to bring the house down: Mrs Thatcher died in her bed at the Ritz at a grand old age. Useless as they are, British socialists were at one point capable of writing their own anti-Thatcher singalongs rather than lazily appropriating Judy Garland blockbusters from MGM’s back catalogue. I recall in the late Eighties being at the National Theatre in London and watching the crowd go wild over Adrian Mitchell’s showstopper, “F**k-Off Friday”, a song about union workers getting their redundancy notices at the end of the week, culminating with the lines:

    I can’t wait for That great day when F**k-Off Friday
    Comes to Number Ten.

You should have heard the cheers.

Mark Steyn, “The Uncowardly Lioness”, SteynOnline.com, 2019-05-05.

June 6, 2019

New paper on minimum wage effects is bound to be mis-used

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

In the Washington Examiner, Tim Worstall explains why a new well-researched paper on the minimum wage will be misunderstood and then used to “prove” things it doesn’t actually say:

None of this changes the standard intuition that when there’s a heavy such bite then there will be ill effects. What it does do is then lead us to trying to calculate what is a wage that does have that snarl, that bite? What is a minimum wage that is “too high” in the sense of having an excess of those ill effects upon employment? This is where I predict — no, not fear, not posit, nor surmise, but predict — this paper will be misused.

Our thinking is that the effects come from the relationship between the minimum and median wages. If we insist that wages cannot be lower than more than we already pay half the people, then we really are going to have problems. A minimum wage of 100% of the median wage isn’t going to work, that is. That ratio is called the Kaitz Index. This paper shows us that there are few to no such bad things happening up to 0.59 on that Kaitz measure. We can have the minimum wage at 59% of the median wage and know that we’ll have the good effects and only trivial amounts, at worst, of the bad.

You can see what’s going to happen next, can’t you? The Economic Policy Institute tells us that the median wage is about $22 this year, and 59% of that is $13. A bit of rounding and some aspiration, and why not go for a $15 minimum wage?

Except there are two median wages. Part-time and seasonal wages tend to be lower than full-year and full-time ones. The Economic Policy Institute is using that higher full-time one. The one for all jobs is quite a bit lower, $18.58 per hour. Take 59% of that and you get a rather lower level of $10.95 an hour. That’s around and about what McDonald’s, Walmart, and similar establishments pay as entry-level wages, which does seem about right, doesn’t it?

So, the new research paper, from esteemed researchers, published in the world’s top English language economics journal, tells us that minimum wages up to a certain level cause few to no problems. They’ve shown this for up to 59% of median wages. But which median do they mean? Dube himself told me they mean that lower one — specifically, the “median wage of all workers, not just for full time.”

But we all know how this is going to be used, don’t we? As proof that $15 an hour won’t cause any problems — which isn’t what the paper shows at all. Rather, it says that a $10.95 an hour minimum wage shouldn’t cause any problems of note.

The new paper is good empirical work. The fault is in what people will argue it says, not what it does.

June 3, 2019

QotD: The roots of Italian Fascism

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Politics, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Colourized portrait of Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in 1940.
Colourization by Roger Viollet via Wikimedia Commons.

Italian Fascism … originated as a kind of live-action role-playing game for disgruntled Italian WWI vets led by a charismatic war hero, aviator, and poet named Gabriele D’Annunzio. Compared to what it evolved into, early Italian fascism had a rather charming opera-bouffe quality about it – theoretical ideas that were incoherent to the point of surrealism, lots of prancing around in invented uniforms, and dosing of opponents with castor oil. The history of D’Annunzio’s Fascist microstate of Fiume makes amusing reading.

Then came Benito Mussolini, a man looking for a vehicle.

Mussolini was a revolutionary Socialist organizer influenced by the theories of Georges Sorel, who was responding to one of the early failures of Marxism. In Marxian “scientific socialism”, universal revolution was a process that would follow mechanically from the capitalist immiseration of the proletariat. But by the second decade of the new century it was becoming clear that most national proletariats were unwilling to play their appointed role in the theory and indeed tended to be among the most patriotic and nationalist elements of their societies. Class warfare as the engine of international socialism had failed, creating a doctrinal crisis in communist/socialist circles.

Sorel responded by writing a new theory of political motivation he called “irrationalism” which proposed that instead of fighting popular sentiments like patriotism and nationalist mythology, socialists and communists should embrace them as tools to build and perfect socialism. Mussolini was persuaded, broke with the Socialist Party, and went looking for a vehicle for a Sorelian revolution. He found it in D’Annunzio’s Fascists and, swiftly shunting D’Annunzio aside, became their leader.

I’ve covered this history in detail because it explodes one of the prevailing myths about Fascism – that it arose out of some fundamental opposition to Communism. In fact this was never true; Fascism was a Marxist heresy from the day Mussolini seized it, differing from Marxism not mainly in its aims but in the means by which they were to be achieved.

The defining doctrine of Fascism once D’Annunzio was out of the way was this quote by Mussolini: “Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” (There are a few variant translations from the original Italian.) Building directly on Leninist political economics, Benito Mussolini wrote a theoretical justification of the totalitarian state which paralleled Joseph Stalin’s less theorized but brutally-executed totalitarianization of the Soviet Union at around the same time.

The Fascist theory was of a unitary, totalizing state ruled by a leader acting as the embodiment of the will of the nation. No power centers in opposition to the embodied will can be tolerated; church, family, education, and civic institutions must all become organs of that will.

Eric S. Raymond, “Spotting the wild Fascist”, Armed and Dangerous, 2019-04-30.

June 1, 2019

2020 Presidential Candidate Blowout!

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

ReasonTV
Published on 31 May 2019

Election season is heating up, which means Republicans and Democrats are ready to sell you the candidate of your dreams. Whether it’s government intrusion into your private life or government intrusion into your economic life, they’ve got you covered.

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Experimental social media link thumbnail thingy:

May 31, 2019

Basil Fawlty’s “John Cleese” moment

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

Renowned English comedian Basil Fawlty had a thinko the other day when he (accidentally?) tweeted in the character of noted racist, sexist, white supremacist, homophobe, transphobe, neo-Nazi, etc., etc., “John Cleese”:

Arthur Chrenkoff somehow mistakes the actor for his character (because no real life person like “John Cleese” could possibly exist in post-Cool Brittania, could they?).

As you can imagine, this sentiment didn’t go down very well. The mayor of London, Saddiq Khan, tweeted back “These comments make John Cleese sound like he’s in character as Basil Fawlty. Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub.” Don’t mention the culture war, I guess. Needless to say, various other worthies have joined in to chide Cleese, including questioning what is Englishness anyway?

That’s a good question. Cleese no doubt had in mind the ethnic English, or people who come from the Anglo-Saxon or at least the Anglo-Celtic stock and heritage, who for the great majority of the past millennium and more have constituted the great, if not the overwhelming, majority of the inhabitants of England, and who, again over the course of centuries, have created what we know and understand as the English culture, tradition and institutions. Yes, there have always been migrants arriving and contributing to the mix – Normans, French Huguenots, Jews – but they have been relatively small in number and by and large ethnically and culturally similar. But Cleese’s definition is increasingly at odds with the post-nation state view of belonging. As TV presenter Anila Chowdhry replied to the Monty Python alumnus, “John Cleese, your comment is not only ironic as you live in the Caribbean, but it fails to recognise the benefits of multiculturalism AND that people of different colour in London may actually be English too! I was born & bred in England. I’m brown, English & proud. #ThisIsMyHome”, which of course can be true too, if anything as a legal and cultural matter. This is also coincidentally while it is easier to “become” an American or an Australian or another -an of one of the historically migrant countries where the “-anness” is built on shared civic ideas rather than ethnicity.

(For the record, over 40 per cent of London residents have been born overseas, which is one of the highest proportions in the world, and if you consider major cities, over one million in population, only Toronto, Sydney and Melbourne have more first-generation migrants. Whatever you think, and whatever you think of it, the London of today is certainly not the London of Cleese’s childhood or even his middle age.)

May 30, 2019

Moving the Overton window, illustrated

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

The Wikipedia entry for Overton window reads:

The Overton window is a term for the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse, also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians’ individual preferences. According to Overton, the window contains the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office in the current climate of public opinion.

Overton described a spectrum from “more free” to “less free” with regard to government intervention, oriented vertically on an axis, to avoid comparison with the left-right political spectrum. As the spectrum moves or expands, an idea at a given location may become more or less politically acceptable. Political commentator Joshua Treviño postulated that the degrees of acceptance of public ideas are roughly:

  • Unthinkable
  • Radical
  • Acceptable
  • Sensible
  • Popular
  • Policy

The Overton window is an approach to identifying which ideas define the domain of acceptability within a democracy’s possible governmental policies. Proponents of policies outside the window seek to convince or persuade the public in order to move and/or expand the window. Proponents of current policies, or similar ones, within the window seek to convince people that policies outside it should be deemed unacceptable.

There’s also a helpful illustration of the concept:

Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons

To move the Overton window is to shift how the public considers certain ideas, making once unthinkable things merely radical, then acceptable, and so on. Shifting the window is usually something that takes time and media preparation, as a series of tweets from Zach Goldberg handily illustrates:




The full thread can be viewed at this Thread Reader link.

May 29, 2019

The EU election was “the Tories’ worst result since 1678”

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

Mark Steyn on the results of last week’s EU parliamentary elections:

In any normal UK election, it would be inconceivable for either of the two main parties – Conservative and Labour – to attract just 23 per cent of the vote. The fact that that is all they could muster between them is hilarious, and greatly to be enjoyed. As I put it on the radio last week, the departing Theresa May has led the Tories to their worst result in two hundred years. But, really, that’s praising with faint damns. I saw Daniel Hannan on the telly extending Mrs May’s impressive feat back through the pre-Reform Act era and accounting it the Tories’ worst result since 1678. Which is kind of hard to spin. Her forced resignation last Friday morning (by which point her party had made it clear they wouldn’t stick with her past lunch) ensures that she and that election result will be yoked together for all time. And jolly well deserved it is.

When the party of government falls from favor, the beneficiary is usually the principal opposition. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party saw its vote fall almost as precipitously as the Tories’. Against the Conservatives’ single-digit nine per cent, Labour could muster only fourteen per cent, its own worst result in a century – in fact, since 1910. Which would also be hard to spin, had Theresa May not done Corbyn the favor of pulling off an unbeatable record.

[…]

Instead, Mrs May in particular but also Parliament in general chose to double-down on the estrangement from the masses revealed by the referendum, and spent the next three years demonstrating that, whatever the Prime Minister had in mind when she first declared “Brexit means Brexit”, it obviously doesn’t mean leaving the European Union. Either through malice or stupidity or condescension, the political class opted to widen its breach with the people – and Nigel Farage, who is a very canny fellow, decided six weeks ago to create a party to fill the gap in a European election the UK shouldn’t have had to participate in.

Listening and/or watching to the BBC on Sunday for as long as I could stomach it, I detected a strange urge to suggest that the Brexit Party had somehow under-performed, as though it’s normal for a six-week-old party to win twenty-nine out of seventy-three seats, while the century-old Labour Party wins only ten, and the Tories four and the nearest Nigel gets to a run for his money is the second-placed Liberal Democrats with sixteen seats. Farage and the other officially pro-Brexit parties (Labour, Tory, Democratic Unionist) won 44 seats. The Lib Dems and the other officially Remainer parties (Green, Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin, Alliance Party) got 29. Adding in the unelected UKIP and Ulster Unionists, the Leave share of the vote was 58 per cent.

Yes, yes, I know, that’s a bit of a simplification, in that the Tories are supposedly pro-Brexit but totally bollocksed it, and Labour is only pretending to be pro-Brexit as part of a difficult straddle between its Old Labour working-class base and the New Labour preening metropolitan Euro-luvvies. Many of the latter – including such hitherto loyal champagne socialists as actors Simon Callow and Michael Cashman and even Blair’s old Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell. – flew Corbyn’s coop and voted for the Lib Dems. Even so, for those demanding a second referendum (or, as they cynically call it, a “people’s vote”), there’s not much evidence for a second-time-around sadder-but-wiser Remain majority. Among riven Tory families, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sister stood for the new Brexit Party while Boris Johnson’s sister stood for the equally new “Change UK”, a militantly anti-Brexit party formed by a coterie of disaffected Remainer media self-promoters of the soft left and soft right. Annuziata Rees-Mogg was duly elected in the Farage surge, while Rachel Johnson flopped out because “Change UK” had barely any statistical support outside the more desperate bookers of telly current affairs shows.

Trudeau’s Liberals consider running on “more taxes” platform for fall election

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

Are you ready for more taxes? Justin Trudeau seems to think you are, and internal Liberal Party documents indicate that several “revenue enhancement” tools are among the ideas being considered for inclusion in the party’s election campaign:

Are you ready for a tax on pop?

That is what some Liberals want to run on in October’s election.

Well, that and a carbon tax, a plastic tax, a tax on selling your home and more.

When it comes to taxes, Liberal like them all.

Lest you think I’m picking on Liberals, this actually comes from an internal party document that was first reported by the Liberal-friendly CBC.

“Ontario Liberal MPs want to pitch voters on a “sugar sweetened beverages levy — more commonly known as a soda tax — in the coming federal election campaign,” reported CBC over the weekend.

The information came from a series of policy proposals put forward by Ontario Liberal MPs that were to be considered for both the budget earlier this year and as potential policies for the upcoming election.

“We have a problem with sugar sweetened beverages being too readily available at too low a price and it is massively contributing to the obesity epidemic,” Liberal MP Mark Holland wrote in support of the proposal.

The Liberals want a tax of 20% on any sugar sweetened beverage believing it could bring in an estimated $1.2 billion a year or $29.6 billion over 25 years and health-care savings of $7.3 billion over 25 years.

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