Quotulatiousness

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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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.
—————-

Written by Austin Bragg. Starring Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg. Video produced by Bragg.

Happy Happy Game Show Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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Photo credit: Richard B. Levine/Newscom

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.

May 28, 2019

Brexit Party wins big in European elections

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

Nigel Farage and his brand-new Brexit Party took 31.6% of the popular vote in England, Scotland, and Wales in the European elections (the Northern Irish results are delayed):

The distribution of the seats:

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says that despite the Brexit Party’s stunning results, the establishment is still determined to prevent Brexit and deny the democratically expressed wishes of British voters:

And still the establishment is in denial. Even following the stellar performance of a brand new party in the Euro elections, still the political establishment and its cheerleaders on social media are in a state of blinkered, fingers-in-ears denial about political feeling in the UK. How bad is their denial? Get this: the Brexit Party, barely six weeks old, soared to victory in the EU elections, decimated the Tories, conquered historic Labour-held territories like Bolsover and Hartlepool, and became the largest party in the entire European Parliament, and yet the No1 political trend on Twitter is… #RemainSurge.

Yes, these people, these inhabitants of the Brexitphobic echo chamber, have convinced themselves that this electoral revolt in which the Brexit Party steamrollered all the other parties is actually a victory for them. This takes self-delusion to giddy new heights.

“This is a really strong night for Remain”, said Caroline Lucas, like a real-life version of that meme showing a dog saying “This is fine” as his house burns down. “Tonight the Brexit Party wasn’t supported by around two-thirds of voters”, said Hilary Benn, perversely ignoring the millions of people who did vote for the Brexit Party, who vastly outnumber those who voted for his Labour Party. Alastair Campbell interpreted the election results as a mandate for a second referendum, which is almost as mad as saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within 45 minutes.

In the face of this colossal culture of denial among the political and media elites, let’s reiterate some basic facts. The Brexit Party battered Labour and the Tories. It won more than five million votes. It won 31.6 per cent of the vote, which is 8.4 per cent more than the Tories and Labour combined: the Tories got 9.1 per cent (fifth place) and Labour got 14.1 per cent (third place). The Brexit Party got 28 seats, making it the largest party in the European Parliament. It won in every single region in England apart from London, speaking profoundly to the massive political and moral divide separating the capital – the heart of the political establishment – from the rest of England. It also did spectacularly well in Wales, topping the poll and winning in 19 out of 22 council areas.

And yet myths are already taking hold, being feverishly promoted by pro-EU figures. The first is that the Brexit Party is “just” – why just? – picking up the old UKIP vote and therefore its victory isn’t all that significant. Actually, the Brexit Party has got almost 32 per cent of the vote share, which is five percentage points higher than UKIP got at its high point in the Euro elections of 2014. The other myths – that the Brexit Party is only successful because it is a shadily funded, demagogic outfit, whose new MEPs probably have Russian roubles stuffed in their pockets – is the usual conspiratorial and anti-democratic rubbish we’ve come to expect from the rattled defenders of the status quo.

As for the “Remain surge” idea. Get real. The two parties that are most explicitly anti-Brexit and have expressed their searingly anti-democratic intention to overthrow the mass vote of 2016 – the Lib Dems and the Greens – won a combined vote of 29.7 per cent. That’s two per cent less than the Brexit Party got. The most poisonously elitist anti-Brexit Party – Change UK – disappeared without a trace, winning 2.8 per cent of the vote. Remember how much Change UK was talked up by the liberal media? At one point the chattering classes really did see this party as the saviour of Britain from the horrors of Brexit and yet it won a pathetic, paltry level of electoral support – 600,000 votes to the Brexit Party’s five million.

Rumours of a pending gun ban fuel panic buying at Canadian gun stores

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

During the Obama years in the US, fears of new government restrictions on firearms helped create a booming market for firearms and the same thing is happening here in Canada as the Trudeau government is said to be contemplating some draconian revisions to existing gun laws, especially for handguns and AR-15 style semi-automatic weapons:

Colt Canada’s model SA20, a commercial version of the Canadian C7A2 rifle.
Image from the Colt Canada website.

Federally licensed sport shooters are snapping up $3,000 guns on concern Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will ban new sales to win votes in the October election.

The website of Firearms Outlet Canada showed all AR-15s “Out of Stock” today at 3 p.m. in Toronto. At Al Flaherty’s Outdoor Store, all but 2 of the 17 versions offered online were “Sold Out.” The website of Wolverine Supplies said most are “Out of Stock.”

The Ontario and Manitoba companies are among the biggest independent gun shops in Canada.

“We are completely sold out of AR-15s, AGAIN…except for what’s on consignment,” Select Shooting Supplies in Cambridge, Ontario, said today on Twitter.

[…]

All guns are banned already for everyone who doesn’t have a firearm licence authorized by the federal police.

Anyone who buys, sells, owns or travels with a firearm in Canada is severely restricted by law. They must pass courses, tests, background checks, reference checks and obtain spousal approval to get police permission for a licence. They must disclose breakups and job losses.

More Controls

People who own AR-15s and handguns endure even more controls.

They need special police permission to buy each gun or to take one to another province. They can go to prison for having a standard-capacity AR-15 ammunition magazine, for shooting anywhere besides one of the 1,400 government-approved target ranges, or for taking a detour on the way to the range.

As we all know, crime involving weapons — especially firearms — is widely reported in the media, and many Canadians seem to have the belief that the majority of these criminals are somehow going to be deterred from using firearms if we just pass one more law. Urban Canadians generally have little or no contact with legal gun owners, and tend to assume that gun crime is directly linked to legal guns (often through the totally nonsensical “gun show loophole” that doesn’t exist in Canada).

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

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