Quotulatiousness

February 13, 2019

California mercifully kills the High Speed Train project

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

In Reason, Scott Shackford reports on the sudden acceptance that California’s high speed train dream is dead:

Construction of the Fresno River Viaduct in January 2016. The bridge was the first permanent structure constructed as part of California High-Speed Rail. The BNSF Railway bridge is visible in the background.
Photo by the California High-Speed Rail Authority via Wikimedia Commons.

California’s wasteful, expensive, and likely doomed-to-fail statewide bullet train project is getting killed. Today, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said he’s abandoning the plan as “too costly.”

Newsom made the announcement in his State of the State address this morning. As the Associated Press reports:

    Newsom said Tuesday in his State of the State address it “would cost too much and take too long” to build the line long championed by his predecessor, Jerry Brown. Latest estimates pin the cost at $77 billion and completion in 2033.

    Newsom says he wants to continue construction of the high-speed link from Merced to Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley. He says building the line could bring economic transformation to the agricultural region.

    And he says abandoning that portion of the project would require the state to return $3.5 billion in federal dollars.

    Newsom also is replacing Brown’s head of the board that oversee the project and is pledging to hold the project’s contractors more accountable for cost overruns.

Newsom actually turned against the bullet train project years ago but then went quiet about it when he began his plans to run for governor. He declined to discuss what he saw as the train’s future on the campaign trail, but after he was elected he suggested some sort of cutback was coming, possibly eliminating the bottom half of the project, making it a train from San Francisco to the Central Valley of California.

Now it looks like he’s scaling even that back. Californians are just going to be left with a train in the middle of some of the more rural parts of the state because the Newsom administration doesn’t want to have to repay the federal funding.

Whatever may come next, this is happy news for most California citizens. Voters approved a ballot initiative in 2008 that set aside a $10 billion bond to begin the project of building a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco with the promise that more funding would come through from the feds or from private sources, that the train would not require subsidies to operate, and that it would help fight climate change.

February 9, 2019

The price tag for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s renewable energy dream

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

At Reason, Ronald Bailey looks at how much it would cost to implement Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s post-fossil-fuel plans:

There’s a lot to consider in this resolution, but let’s for the time being focus on the goal of “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” by 2030. The resolution is light on fiscal details, so let’s consider the question of how achieving this goal would cost.

As it happens, a team of Stanford engineers led by Mark Jacobson outlined just such a plan back in 2015. Jacobson’s repowering plan would involve installing 335,000 onshore wind turbines; 154,000 offshore wind turbines; 75 million residential photovoltaic systems; 2.75 million commercial photovoltaic systems; 46,000 utility-scale photovoltaic facilities; 3,600 concentrated solar power facilities with onsite heat storage; and an extensive array of underground thermal storage facilities.

Assuming steep declines in the costs of each form of renewable electric power generation, just running the electrical grid using only renewable power would still cost roughly $7 trillion by 2030. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation calculated that the total cost of an earlier version of Jacobson’s scheme would amount to $13 trillion. And based on how fast it has taken to install energy generation infrastructure in the past, Jacobson’s repowering plan would require a sustained installation rate that is more than 14 times the U.S. average over the last 55 years and more than six times the peak rate.

The cost — $7 trillion — would be spent to save … how much?

    ..global warming at or above 2 degrees Celsius beyond preindustrialized levels will cause— (A) mass migration from the regions most affected by climate change; (B) more than $500,000,000,000 in lost annual economic output in the United States by the year 2100;

$500 billion a year isn’t a lot in the context of the US economy. It’s currently around $20 trillion in size, so we’re talking about 2.5% of the economy being lost. But of course we’re also predicting that the economy will grow between now and then. Actually, we think the US economy will be about $100 trillion a year by 2100. So we’re talking about 0.5% of that economy. Or about the change in size of the US economy between September and December last year. Think how much richer we did feel over those few months. And how much poorer we’d be if it hadn’t happened, that growth.

Oh, and to avoid that loss AOC is suggesting that we spend $7 trillion now? That just doesn’t pass the cost benefit test. It doesn’t even pass at the Stern Review’s special discount rate.

Which is, of course, what all the economists have been trying to tell us all about dealing with climate change. Don’t do it by central planning, do it by using market incentives. Have a carbon tax. Don’t try and do it too quickly – William Nordhaus gained his Nobel in part for saying this – but do it more gradually over time. Don’t junk what we’ve got that already works, instead when the normal time comes to replace it then make sure it’s non-carbon emitting. Finally, don’t do it the expensive way, do it the cheap way. For the cheaper we make it to solve it then the more of the problem we’ll solve. You know, humans usually doing less of the expensive things and more of the cheap?

February 6, 2019

The “Green New Deal” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won’t work

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

Tim Worstall predicts — well in advance of hearing any details of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal — that it won’t work:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking at the Reardon Convention Center in Kansas City, on 20 July 2018.
Photo by Mark Dillman via Wikimedia Commons.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is to reveal the details of her Green New Deal in the next few days – the one thing we absolutely know about this being that it won’t work. This isn’t a commentary upon climate change nor the desirability of doing something about it. This is just a simple statement of fact about the universe we inhabit. As with the climate the economy is a complex, even chaotic, thing. Plans to substantially reform it therefore don’t work, no matter how egghead the planners nor pure in motive the instigators.

All of this being why the very reports which tell us we should do something about climate change – say, the Stern Review – tell us that we shouldn’t try to have those detailed plans for what we’ll do and how we’ll do it. Instead we’ve got to use the only management technique we’ve got for something this complex, markets and prices. Which is why near every economist who has even thought about the problem advocates either cap and trade or a carbon tax.

This is, of course, just a rerun of Friedrich Hayek’s point in his Nobel Lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge”. That universe out there is a complicated place. There’s just no manner that the planner can gain enough information about it, in anything like real time, to be able to plan it. We’ve thus got to use other methods to bend that reality to our will. We can jam a crowbar into prices with a carbon tax for example, but we can’t start planning who should be taking how many car journeys in what sort of vehicles powered in what manner.

So, the Green New Deal from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, it fails at this first and basic hurdle. She’s using the wrong method to try to solve the agreed upon problem. Central planning just doesn’t work.

[…]

The reason we want cheap solutions to climate change is that this justifies producing more of a solution. Again, the justification of doing something about climate change is that it will be expensive. So, we should spend up to the amount of the damage to prevent it. Say it will cost $100, then we’re willing to spend up to $99.99 to stop it. This makes us one cent better off. We’re not willing to spend $200 to stop those $100 damages, that would make us poorer.

And more – we should spend that $99.99 as efficiently as we can because that means we’ll stop more climate change for our dollars. That also makes us richer.

Don’t forget, we’ve all already agreed that we’re going to have some climate change. Our arguments are over how much and how much are we willing to do to stop how much of it?

February 5, 2019

The looming threat of agents plotting to influence the next federal election

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

Andrew Coyne has the details:

I have an urgent warning for the people of Canada. Even now, certain agents are plotting to influence the result of the next election campaign by means of stealth and deception.

Posing as ordinary Canadians, they plan to use social media to spread falsehoods designed to inflame public opinion, using the latest micro-targeting technologies to tailor their messages to the reader’s particular fears and prejudices.

These agents are better known as the political parties.

One of the problems with the Liberal government’s recently announced plan to “defend Canadian democracy” from foreign interference, notably in the form of “fake news,” is the basic premise: that the principal threat to the integrity of the Canadian electoral process is posed by outsiders, third parties and foreign agents, rather than the participants.

If there is something ominous about the government involving itself, however indirectly, in deciding what is and is not fake news, there is something quite ludicrous about a political party raising the alarm over the spreading of falsehoods during an election campaign. Indeed, a good short definition of an election campaign would be “a sustained, intense, all-party burst of falsehood, slander and misrepresentation.”

There isn’t a lot else. A modern campaign consists mostly in what is gently termed “defining” opposing party leaders, in a way calculated to make them unrecognizable to their own mothers. The rest is devoted to deliberately misrepresenting the other parties’ positions, while making false or exaggerated claims about their own.

There remains a gentlemanly expectation that these falsehoods should not be obviously detectable as such — that is, that the lie should itself be artfully concealed, disguised as an elision, half-truth or what a Liberal MP recently called “rhetorical advantage,” rather than rubbed in the public’s faces in the manner pioneered by Donald Trump.

Macron’s desperate efforts to keep the “European Project” on life-support

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

Justin Raimondo on the plight French President Emmanuel Macron is facing:

The EU was a joint project of Euro-intellectuals who wanted a super-socialist State and were afraid Europeans might turn away from “Europe.” They sought to create an ersatz Euro-nationalism that has still only caught on among deracinated yuppies and oligarchs, if anyone at all. What they wanted and still want is what every true state has – an army. Which Macron has been agitating about for some time now. He doesn’t want to persuade Italy and Poland and Hungary to take more refugees – he wants to force them. Even more, he wants a reliable force to crush domestic protests, one that is unlikely to sympathize with the protesters.

Protests are everywhere: the media loves to cover them provided it’s the right cause – and one of the qualifying requirements of coverage should be drama. One would think therefore that the most recent and most violent would attract the media. Not so! We hear nothing about the twelve-week riots that have shaken the Macronist regime to its foundations.

But as the so-called Yellow Vests run roughshod in France – and all over the self-proclaimed “anti-nationalist” Macron – their origins, their ideology, their story remains untold.

French President Macron, a fanatic environmentalist, decided to revise the fuel tax code so that the small urban cars beloved by his circle had their tax reduced, while fuel for trucks and more industrial uses went up as much as 30%. It was a deliberate insult to the rural working poor who must drive long distances.

Macron went out of his way to convey his contempt for the rural voters who did not vote for him. The original reduction was actually intended for long-distance fuel, but Macron changed it around at the last minute to punish this use.

The French “Deplorables” reacted swiftly and not with the usual threat to strike: they simply started an insurrection. No preliminaries. They call themselves Yellow Vests referencing the safety vests required by French law of all motorists to signal emergency: yes, they declare: there IS an emergency going on!

February 4, 2019

A thumbnail sketch of Mad Max and the PPC

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

Anthony Daoud, in an article examining the political loyalty implications of party defections, floor crossings, and resignations, provides a quick outline of Maxime Bernier and his new-but-growing party:

Does Bernier even need an introduction? It seems like everybody in Canada knows about him, and his popularity will undoubtedly grow after appearing on the Rubin Report, a libertarian Youtube show.

He left the Conservative Party and created the People’s Party of Canada, which advocates for smaller government, lower levels of immigration, and more free-markets (including abolishing supply management) according to the party’s website.

In a email to supporters, the PPC proudly proclaimed that it reached its first million dollars in total donations since the party’s founding in September.

Whether Bernier’s party will win any electoral district other than Beauce (his own) is incredibly unlikely, but he can definitely do some damage to the Conservatives’ prospect of victory, since he is already polling at nearly 3%.

What may be the most intense conflict in politics right now is not even taking place in parliament but between the CBC’s Wendy Mesley and the PPC leader. In an interview, she miserably failed at her attempt to link Bernier to a Koch brothers’ conspiracy.

Even more recently, the Quebec politician took the “beef” up a notch when he called for Mesley to be fired after she said Christians in Canada are attempting to sway political landscape, as if they were some sort of foreign interference in our democracy.

Truthfully, the PPC may never come establish themselves as a long-standing party, but more than anything, it could mean that politicians will begin to feel like they can simply leave the party they were elected to represent and literally “do their own thing” once in parliament.

February 3, 2019

QotD: The core of the social justice warrior spirit

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

There is a difference between the spirit and the intellectual content, of course, but the two are intimately connected. A core belief is that ideas and words define the cultural narrative and so create the society itself. This is meant in the most literal sense possible; they do not influence society, they *create* the society in which everyone lives.

Thus ideas and words cease to be individual expressions of people who may differ in beliefs and then peacefully go their own ways. The personal becomes political. Because ideas and words create society they must be controlled in order to establish a proper ones. Ideas that go in the opposite direction become acts of oppression in and of themselves because they are responsible for injustice which SJWs see everywhere. “Incorrect” ideas and words must be eliminated, sometimes with intimidation and open censorship, at other time with the encouragement of “correct” views such as the massive funding of PC within academia.

This explains why SJWs consider dissenting words, ideas and consciences to be not only their business but also violence. To censor and control the minds and mouths of others becomes an act of self-defense and defense of the marginalized. Their absolute commitment to a hyper-narrow vision of justice makes them fanatical about controlling heretics, down to the use of words such as “he” or “she.” SJWs become willing to commit brutal cruelty and (sometimes) even violence against the heretic who is hated. After all, his disagreement with the “true God” is an act of violence against them.

Wendy McElroy, interviewed by Joseph Ford Cotto, “Wendy McElroy explains why ‘SJWs become willing to commit brutal cruelty’ toward ‘the heretic who is hated'”, San Francisco Review of Books, 2017-02-15.

February 2, 2019

Remy: Better Now?

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

ReasonTV
Published on 1 Feb 2019

Promised an improved way of life, Remy does everything he can to believe in a new ideology – except the math.

Written and performed by Remy. Video produced 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
Listened to those leaders so intently
Those Che Guevara shirts all seemed so trendy
Thought that things would be so good and friendly
So why’m I eating my neighbor’s dog Benji?

Twenty million killed, sure, that’s stuff I don’t like
But I could stay on Momma’s plan for the rest of my life
A guaranteed job digging ditches? Well what’s not to like?
It’s failed miserably each time so trying again seemed wise

Now I’m looting, looting, looting, looting
Grabbing wieners like I’m Kevin Spacey
Told a crowd “we need free markets instead”
Now my neck is no longer attached to my head

They promised things would all be better now, better now
If pure equality was finally found, finally found
Now we’re all grocery shopping at the pound, at the pound
Said that we’d have everything
Now we don’t have anything
Whoa…

How much plasma are they gonna take?
Before I finally have enough to trade?
For toilet paper or a rodent steak?
I keep on looking back on better days

They promised things would all be better now, better now
If free expression it was not allowed, not allowed
But I just caught my Roomba texting Mao
Said that we’d have everything
Now we don’t have anything

They promised things would all be better now, better now
If men with guns took farmers’ land and plow, land and plow
Now it’s another night of Rat Kung Pao, Rat Kung Pao
Said that we’d have everything
Now we don’t have anything

They promised things would all be better now, better now
If we just nationalized oil in the ground, in the ground
Now somehow gasoline can not be found, not be found
Said that we’d have everything
Now we don’t have anything

February 1, 2019

QotD: Fanatics and monomaniacs

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

Imagine being willing to take a stranger into your home only on the condition that he did not vote for the man who won the 2016 presidential election. One of those Trump-excluding roommates mentioned in the Times insisted that this discrimination was in the interest of the Trump voters, too, who would be unhappy in a household full of “raging liberals.”

Meditate, for a moment, upon the word “raging.”

The people who believe that there can be no art, literature, culture, or life apart from politics are people who do not understand art, literature, culture, or politics, and whose lives are sad and sadly deficient.

A Buddhist writer once described two kinds of material unhappiness: the absence of what one desires and the presence of what one despises. But the Buddha was known to associate with worldly men and their unclean enthusiasms in much the same way that Jesus slummed around with prostitutes and tax collectors, instructing us by example to seek after lives that are as large as our love and not as small as our hatred. The people who close their doors against those who simply see the world in a different way, who scream profanities at Betsy DeVos or chant “You should die!” at Jewish musicians, are people who cannot rise far enough above their own pettiness to understand that the thing they fear is the thing they are.

Kevin D. Williamson, “No Republicans Need Apply”, National Review, 2017-02-12.

January 30, 2019

The high cost Canadians pay to support our oligopolies

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

In the National Post, Andrew Coyne compares the Liberal and Conservative parties’ respective claims to lower the cost of living for Canadians, and points out some examples that neither party is willing to address:

For example, there is the notorious system of agricultural quotas known as supply management — a price-fixing ring the government not only approves but organizes and enforces, whose effect is to double or even triple the prices of such basic food items as milk, cheese, eggs and chicken. For all their pretended concern for affordability, all parties and every MP, with the sole exception of Maxime Bernier, are publicly, nay fervently in favour of it.

But while the farm cartel gets a lot of ink, there are plenty of other examples. Canadians pay among the highest wireless telephone fees in the world, for starters — maybe even the highest — as study after study has found. The latest report from Tefficient, a European consultancy, found Canada’s carriers take in more revenue per gigabyte of data than their counterparts anywhere else in the world — 23 times more than in Finland.

Similarly, Canadians pay among the highest air fares in the world. The travel website Kiwi. com recently found flights from Canada on a full-service airline cost roughly five times as much per 100 kilometres as flights from the United States. The situation was a little better for domestic flights, where costs were only twice as high as in the U.S. The makers of Hopper, the travel app, note it is typically cheaper to fly from Vancouver to Hawaii than from Vancouver to Regina, though Regina is 3,000 km closer.

Finally, there are Canadian bank fees, also — you guessed it — among the highest in the world, particularly for mutual funds. What is the common thread among these three industries? All are highly concentrated oligopolies: three big wireless carriers, two big airlines and five big banks dominate their respective markets.

Rather than compete as vigorously as they might for Canadian consumers, these quasi-cartels are permitted, in effect, to harvest them. They do so, again, not only with the tolerance but the active participation of the government. Foreigners are effectively precluded from competing in any of them, whether by foreign-ownership restrictions or outright prohibitions on competition — foreign airlines may not fly from one Canadian city to another, for example.

None of the parties currently boasting of their desire to make life more affordable for Canadians proposes to change a line of this, either. Whatever else may be in (artificially) scarce supply, in Canadian politics there’s never any shortage of rank hypocrisy.

QotD: Political memoirs

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

We’re told not to judge books by their covers, but faced with these two it’s hard not to. Harman’s is one of those thick, expensive tomes which, understandably, politicians write when they’ve had enough earache and, unbelievably, publishers keep buying for vast sums, despite the fact that a fortnight after publication you can pick them up cheaper than an adult colouring book in a remainder bin. The old saw that ‘all political careers end in failure’ might now better be: ‘All political careers end with a book on Amazon going for less than the price of the postage.’

Julie Burchill, “Harriet Harman and Jess Phillips: poles apart in the sisterhood”, The Spectator, 2017-02-25.

January 28, 2019

A Most Inauthentic Portrayal of Musketry

Filed under: History, Politics, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Brandon F.
Published on 6 Jan 2018

NOTE: At one point in this video I mention lever-action rifles, but I show a Martini-Henry image. The Martini-Henry is not actually a lever-action, but a falling-block rifle. I had incorrectly assumed that the requirements for a rifle to be a ‘lever action’ were more literal- as in, that it used a lever! This is not the case, as lever action rifles are generally repeating, whereas falling block rifles see individual rounds chambered.

This is a video that I’ve wanted to make for some time, but unfortunately, I had to wait until the highly political topic which the source material discusses was less ‘relevant,’ lest my pedantic corrections be considered grossly inappropriate or offensive. That said, this commercial by the organization “States United to End Gun Violence,” features a musket being used in a criminal nature to provide a social commentary on American legislation. However, the manner in which the musket is portrayed and used in this commercial has a few problems, which I thought it would be fun to discuss here.

This is not a political video, and at no point do I express my own views on this highly contentious issue. Please treat it as what it is- historical nitpicking.

The original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LORVf…

For those who are so inclined, we have a Discord chat for the channel! Do stop by!
https://discord.gg/bJzUWxa

If you would like to support the Channel on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/BrandonF

From the comments:

I was originally planning to upload a ‘me standing in front of the camera,’ lecture style video today, but I’m afraid that I had to alter my schedule rather last minute, so I had to resort to a quicker voiceover video. The next one will (most likely) be in the traditional style!

Also, as you can all see, on advice from some friends I’m trying out a new approach to video thumbnails. This one was actually made by someone else for me, but if we all think it’s a good idea I’ll be trying to edit my thumbnails to include text like this more often in the future.

Also from the comments, and this was almost literally the first thing I thought of when watching the commercial:

lalucre1803
11 months ago
Mistake no. 1 – not fixing bayonet before hand. Could’ve easily finished the job.

January 27, 2019

Modern advertising – “wokeness … for millennials, is basically Corinthian leather for the soul”

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

I’m still not caught up on all my RSS feeds, so this Jonathan Kay piece at Quillette is more than a week old, which is why we’re selling it at half-price:

… Coca-Cola doesn’t make you smile. The “Rich Corinthian Leather” that Chrysler used to upholster car seats wasn’t actually from Corinth. And smoking Virginia Slims doesn’t actually mean “You’ve come a long way, baby.” It probably just means you’re going to die of lung cancer.

But misleading as that Personna ad may have been, it had more substance than most modern commercials. At the very least, it purported to extol the actual physical quality of the product being advertised — even if the evidence presented in support of that claim was thin. Coke, Chrysler and Virginia Slims (a 1960s-era spinoff of Benson & Hedges), on the other hand, were selling fairy tales based on happiness, wealth and liberation, respectively.

A close Mad Men-era analogue to Gillette’s new ad would be this Virginia Slims ad from 1967. It starts with a woman in 19th-century clothing, staring mournfully at her feet while a sad tune plays. “It used to be, baby, you had no rights,” intones a male voice saucily. “No right to vote. No right to property. No right to the wage you earned. That was back when you were laced in, hemmed in, and left with not a whole lot to do. That was back when you had to sneak up to the attic if you wanted a cigarette. Smoke in front of a man? Heaven forbid!”

[…]

In some respects, the act of watching that ad is a voyage to a distant land: It’s not just that cigarette ads have been illegal in western countries for decades (the woman actually takes a puff — right there on TV). But the very idea that “women” smoke with a small “feminine hand” also would constitute its own sort of transphobic thoughtcrime. Nevertheless, the basic Madison Avenue impulse behind the ad is recognizable to modern eyes: There’s this cool social trend out there. Let’s present our product as part of that cool trend. In the 1960s, the cool trend was empowering women. A half century later, it’s hectoring men. In the 1960s, being progressive meant expanding the range of permissible behaviour. A half century later, it’s about imposing constraints. In the 1960’s, the puritans were the bad guys. Today, they’re the ones setting the moral agenda.

As a bonus, he also walks you through a Marketing 101 course (at least, the few things you’d remember after taking a Marketing 101 course) in his local store:

At my local Toronto pharmacy, a pack of eight Gillette “Fusion5™ ProShield™” razors goes for $42.14 (all figures in U.S. dollars) — a staggering $5.27 per razor. These are displayed, of course, at eye level, since they provide the highest profit margin. Stoop down to waist level, and you will find a package of three quad-bladed cartridges—in generic packaging, though they provide more or less the same quality shave as the Fusion5 — for just $2.26 per razor. And if you’re willing to go down to ankle level, you can get a 10-pack of “Life” brand twin blades for just 60 cents each. (They’re marked “disposable,” but I often will use the same one for several weeks.) Do the math here, and you’ll see that we are talking about an almost 10-fold difference in price for products that — notwithstanding the many protestations I’m set to receive from hipsters who shave with hand-forged titanium blades stored in sealed alabaster canisters full of ionized gas — do the same basic thing.

This is true for a lot of product categories where there are no real differences between competing products except what the geniuses in the respective corporate marketing departments can conjure up out of their collective vivid imaginations.

QotD: Political tribalism

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

This is one of my emerging rules of politics: if one political group holds a position that does not seem consistent or logical in the context of their other positions, assume they are holding this position because their rival political group has already staked out the opposite side.

Warren Meyer, “Tribalism”, Coyote Blog, 2017-02-17.

January 26, 2019

QotD: Racism, paranoia, and Presidential Derangement Syndrome

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

Political prejudice is not the moral equivalent of racial prejudice, but they operate in very similar ways, as anybody who ever has spent much time around a genuine racist or anti-Semite knows. Taxes too high? Blame the blacks. Not making enough money? Blame the Mexicans. Foreign policy seem overwhelmingly complex? Blame the Jews. Whataburger gave you a full-on corn-syrup Coke instead of a Diet Coke? Blame the blacks, Mexicans, Jews, subcontinental immigrants … somebody. Racism and anti-Semitism are metaphysical creeds, and those who adhere to these creeds see the work of the agents of evil everywhere. For them, there is no world outside race and racism.

In this, they are very similar to the Hillary Clinton–voting Manhattan balletomanes who seethe that they must endure being seated in the David Koch theater. David Koch’s brand of libertarianism is mild and constructive, and it has about as much to do with ballet as Keith Olbermann has to do with astrophysics. But for the fanatic, even to hear the name spoken is unbearable.

The people who believe that there can be no art, literature, culture, or life apart from politics are people who do not understand art, literature, culture, or politics.

Imagine being so mentally poisoned and so spiritually sick that you feel the need to organize a protest at New York–Presbyterian Hospital because the institution accepted $100 million — the largest gift in its history, being put to purely philanthropic health-care purposes — from someone whose political views are at odds with your own. Imagine what it must be like to feel that doing that is a moral imperative. Imagine sitting down to listen to a Beethoven string quartet and being filled with paralyzing anxiety that the cellist might not share your views on the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Kevin D. Williamson, “No Republicans Need Apply”, National Review, 2017-02-12.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress