Quotulatiousness

July 7, 2018

The Incel Rebellion will (almost certainly) be streamed

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

Fraser Myers looks at the incel ?movement? (not quite sure if that’s the right word to encapsulate that group of people, honestly) and explains some of the more commonly used terms by and about incels:

Incels are ‘involuntary celibates’ – men frustrated with their inability to find a sexual partner. Estimates on the size of the incel community vary from thousands to hundreds of thousands. The forum ‘r/incels’ on Reddit had 41,000 members when it was banned in November 2017 for violating the site’s rules on violent content.

Incel forums, like the website incel.me and the message board /r9k/ on 4chan, are awash with anonymous declarations of self-pity, self-loathing and, at times, a violent misogyny directed at the women deemed responsible for their loneliness. Behind a great deal of mindless chatter and ‘shitposting’ is a shared understanding of how they came to be despised by the opposite sex, alongside a bewildering array of slang terms to describe and explain the various states of ‘inceldom’.

According to the incels, there is a ruthless sexual hierarchy, and as ‘beta males’, they find themselves at the bottom. The foil to the incel is a ‘Chad’ – a confident, attractive man with multiple sexual partners, comprising usually attractive but supposedly shallow women, known as ‘Stacys’. Chads are envied and despised in equal measure. Then there are the ‘normies’ (normal people), hated for their herd-like mentality and mocked for their ignorance of incel culture. ‘Blackpilling’ refers to the acceptance that the traits you are born with mean you are destined to be romantically unsuccessful. The term is a play on the moral dilemma presented by the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which Neo is offered a blue pill to remain in a world of illusion and a red pill to see the world as it truly is – ‘redpilling’ is a central trope in online men’s rights’ activism, while blackpilling is the incel equivalent. Physical traits such as height, facial features or penis size (sometimes posted with accompanying pictures), are said to play a big role in the incels’ low status, while a large number of them also blame self-diagnosed mental-health problems, particularly autism-spectrum disorders.

But while many incels are open about their flaws, ultimately the blame is laid on the women who overlook them. Women are seen as effectively slaves to their biology, guided by so-called ‘hypergamy’: an attraction to higher-status men linked to evolutionary psychology. Some parts of the so-called manosphere – a loose constellation of male-dominated online subcultures, including men’s rights activists and pick-up artists – believe that evolutionary psychology can be used to a man’s advantage, that certain techniques can be deployed to overcome a lack of attractiveness and confidence to manipulate women into bed or into a relationship. Incels reject even this bleak view and insist that beta males accept their place in the social-pecking order.

This belief in a rigid social hierarchy inevitably produces problems when it comes to race. ‘Ricecels’ (incels of Chinese and South East Asian origin) and ‘currycels’ (of South Asian descent) are often found posting photos of ‘proof’ of a theory called ‘JBW’, that in order for them to be successful with women they should ‘just be white’. Some white incels look upon black men with envy for their perceived sexual success, while a minority rail against any kind of ‘race mixing’ – even as a form of escape from inceldom.

In addition, incels speak of an ‘80:20 rule’ when it comes to sexual competition: the most attractive 20 per cent of men are said to be sought after by the most attractive 80 per cent of women, with the least attractive 80 per cent of men left to compete for the remaining 20 per cent of women. In previous eras, this situation would have supposedly been prevented by institutionalised monogamy. Some incels call explicitly for a return to a patriarchal society. Today’s world of relative sexual freedom, contraception, no-fault divorce and dating apps, on the other hand, is blamed for offering an abundance of opportunities for Chads and women, at the expense of incels.

July 5, 2018

The soon-to-be-announced target of the two-minute unceasing hate

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

At Reason, Jacob Sullum says Trump did well with his first Supreme Court pick, and the unwillingness of Trump’s opponents to acknowledge that shows how much blind partisanship has gripped the left:

Anthony M. Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, swears in Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C. Also shown, Gorsuch’s wife Louise stands on stage holding a family Bible. Justice Gorsuch is the Supreme Court’s 113th justice.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

“We have to STOP the next Trump nominee!” says a pop-up solicitation on People for the American Way’s website. Before you rush to “donate now,” you might want to consider the organization’s assessment of Trump’s last Supreme Court nominee.

“Far from being a fair-minded constitutionalist,” PFAW says, Neil Gorsuch “has proven to be a narrow-minded elitist who consistently votes in favor of corporations and the powerful.” The gap between that description and Gorsuch’s actual performance on the Court speaks volumes about the blind partisanship of Trump critics who care more about scoring political points than defending civil liberties.

PFAW is echoing the criticism of Democratic senators who worried, before Gorsuch was confirmed in April 2017, that he was not inclined to stand up for “the little guy.” Gorsuch’s record during a decade on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit belied that claim, and his 15 months on the Supreme Court provide further evidence that he is not shy about defending the principles that protect politically disfavored individuals from the whims of the powerful.

In sharp contrast with the man who nominated him, Gorsuch worries about abuses of the government’s power to take people’s property “for public use.” In June 2017, when the Court declined to hear a case that raised the question of whether a state can impose limits on the “just compensation” it owes for takings under the Fifth Amendment, Gorsuch, joined by Clarence Thomas, urged his colleagues to address that issue at the “next opportunity.”

That pairing was notable because Gorsuch is on record as admiring Thomas’s passionate dissent from the widely condemned 2005 decision in which the Court approved the use of eminent domain to transfer property from one private owner to another in the name of economic development. Big businesses routinely use such arrangements to override the wishes of little people who get in the way of their plans.

Barbara Kay on revising Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum

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

Her latest column in the National Post has some advice for Premier Doug Ford and his merry band of (dare I say) reformers:

Doug Ford at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Ontario.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Doug Ford’s victory was in some measure due to his promise — I believe a heartfelt one — to repeal the sex ed curriculum in Ontario schools. I assume there’s a replacement program in the works. A sex-ed vacuum is not politically tenable, or even what most conservative parents want.

What principles will undergird a Doug Ford inspired curriculum? I’d suggest four guidelines for his consideration.

First, take sex ed out of the hands of ideologues and activists. Constitute a task force made up of a variety of stakeholders, involving both liberal and conservative parents (including parents of LGBT students), disinterested scientific authorities and, yes, religious representatives, to hammer out recommendations for a sex ed paradigm, in which science is separated from theory, and in which proponents of morality and modesty-based sex ed have a voice and a vote.

Second, revisit the underlying premise in sex ed today that all children must learn everything under the sun that touches on sexuality from the state.

[…]

Third, there is the question of readiness. Children can be taught the facts of biology quite early, but there is no need to engage young children in detailed discussion of sexual preferences before they fully understand the nature of sexual desire. It is obviously appropriate to warn against internet porn and social media perils at a fairly early age, and the reality of same-sex couples (including parents of students) openly acknowledged, but full engagement in the nature of sexual desire in all its diversity and detail is best left for adolescence.

Finally, nowhere is the need for distinction between science and theory more urgently required than in the area of transgenderism.

Much of what children are learning about transgenderism today, at a very tender age, is not science-based, but activist-dictated theory that can result in psychological harm.

July 4, 2018

It’s never a good idea to expand the power of the state

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

Francis Porretto on the problem of giving the state yet another tool for its already overflowing toolbox:

    The party in power is smug and arrogant. The party out of power is insane.” – Megan McArdle, a.k.a. “Jane Galt”

Among the older maxims of politics is to beware handing the State a new power without first reflecting on how your opponents could use it against you. For as sure as the Sun rises in the East, your opponents will return to dominance someday, and whatever powers you awarded the State will be in their hands.

Just now, the focus is on President Trump’s choice of a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. The Democrats are tearing their collective hair out over this, as now that the filibuster is a dead letter for judicial appointees, their minority status in the Senate leaves them no way to block his selection. Yet it was Senate Democrats during the Obama Administration who first attacked the filibuster – when they were in the majority and sought to confirm Obama appointees. Coulda told ‘em then, but they weren’t in a mood to listen.

Today’s critical battles are over freedom of expression and “deplatforming.”

Some folks of sound mind and generally good will are exercised about how Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter regulate their immensely popular social-media platforms to disfavor conservatives. The complaints have been many, and a great many of them are both accurate (i.e., the things complained about really happened) and valid (i.e., only persons of conservative or libertarian bent were silenced). However, they come up against a barrier that’s proved impassable to date: the right of private property.

So a lot of those folks have embraced the notion that those platforms could be regulated by the federal government as public accommodations. That’s the conception under which the Civil Rights Acts were deemed to hold legitimate authority over restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and other nominally private properties. If you present your facility as “open to the public,” the logic runs, then you can be forbidden to discriminate – i.e., to provide your services to some members of the “public” but not others.

(For those who remember the “nationwide Bell System,” the phrase common carrier might rise to mind. The concept is essentially the same, as was the federal government’s assertion of authority over it. However, in that particular case, the rationale was that the Bell System was a monopoly, protected by that same federal government. Telecom deregulation and the breakup of the Bell System put paid to that scheme, thank God.)

Those in the Right who favor this notion are asking for trouble. Someday the balance of power will shift leftward once again. What would the Democrats – an increasingly totalitarian bunch who’ve never seen a law, a regulation, or a tax it didn’t love – do with the precedent that an Internet platform can be regulated as a public accommodation, despite being private property?

H/T to Bill St. Clair for the link.

July 3, 2018

Andrés Manuel López Obrador wins Mexican presidential election

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

Tom Phillips and David Agren report from Mexico City for the Guardian:

A baseball-loving leftwing nationalist who has vowed to crack down on corruption, rein in Mexico’s war on drugs and rule for the poor has been elected president of Latin America’s second-largest economy.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President-Elect of Mexico, who will assume office on 1 December, 2018
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a silver-haired 64-year-old who is best known as Amlo and counts Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn among his friends, was elected with at least 53% of the vote, according to a quick count by Mexico’s electoral commission.

López Obrador’s closest rival, Ricardo Anaya from the National Action party (PAN), received around 22% while José Antonio Meade, a career civil servant running for the Institutional Revolutionary party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for most of last century, came in third with around 16%.

Addressing the media after those results were announced, López Obrador vowed to repay the trust put in him by millions of Mexicans. “I will govern with rectitude and justice. I will not fail you. I will not disappoint you. I won’t betray the people,” he said.

Mexico’s president-elect vowed to rule for people of all social classes, all sexual orientations and all points of view. “We will listen to everyone. We will care for everyone. We will respect everyone,” he said. “But we will give priority to the most humble and to the forgotten.”

[…]

Analysts also expect him to pursue a less aggressive and less militarised approach to Mexico’s 11-old ‘war on drugs’ which has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives and is widely viewed as a calamity. During the campaign, Amlo has argued “you cannot fight violence with more violence, you cannot fight fire with fire” and proposed an amnesty designed to help low-level outlaws turn away from a life of crime.

Eric Olson, a Mexico and Latin America specialist from Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Centre, said he saw Mexico stepping back from regional affairs under its new leader. “Amlo is not an internationalist … we can expect him to play less of an active role in the region on Venezuela, on Nicaragua and other trouble spots.”

Olson also expected tense moments with US president Donald Trump whose family separation policy Amlo recently denounced as arrogant, racist and inhuman. “But it’s impossible for the US to walk away from Mexico or for Mexico to walk away from the US. They are joined at the hip and need to work together even if their presidents don’t like each other and don’t get along.”

Carlos Bravo, a politics expert from Mexico City’s Centre for Economic Research and Teaching, predicted President Amlo would make fighting poverty a flagship policy, just as former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did after his historic 2002 election with projects such as Bolsa Família and Zero Hunger. Under Amlo he foresaw “massive investment in social policy” which Mexico’s new president could use to show he was attacking not just poverty and inequality but also the social roots of crime and violence.

However, Bravo said the “motley coalition” behind Amlo’s election triumph was so diverse – featuring former communists, ultra-conservatives and everything in-between – that trying to guess how he might rule was a fool’s errand. “Quite frankly, right now there is a lot of uncertainty regarding what the López Obrador government will do.”

July 2, 2018

The holy book of Marx and the religion of progress

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt discusses the religious nature of progressive thought in the western world:

While the left not only filled every nook and cranny of twentieth century “narrative industries” to the point the only way a conservative could work in one of those was under deep, deep cover, the engineers made the internet.

The left didn’t even know it really had any serious opposition left. You can’t blame them too much. Even those of us who were very opposed and very disgusted kept it polite in public and treated them as retarded children who couldn’t take opposition.

Would it have made any difference if we’d talked back, say 30 years ago?

I doubt it.

You see, leftism is as much as anything else a religion. The crazy Marx with his vision of the future created an entire narrative from paradise (pre-capitalism, i.e. it never existed, guys, not even as apes. Apes, as we now know, trade) through fall into capitalism to eventual paradise again, where the New Man (what used to be called the Soviet Man) will be so altruistic and communally oriented that a government isn’t needed. (Like the peace of Islam, there’s only one way to obtain that, and no. Just no. Worldwide species extinction is as fantastical as the idea of that primordial paradise. Humans are humans, and someone will survive. I’m just not interested in letting them send us back ten thousand years.)

You hear it in the talk of the left — particularly the rather intellectually inbred fourth generation, who ate the pap the older people fed them and never had an original thought in their lives — stuff like calling us “reactionaries” (when they’re the ones in power, and have been for a long time, and the ones knee-jerk reacting) and talking about “the future” as belonging utterly to them, and the arrow of history, as though history were the chart in their book, with an arrow beneath.

Their faith doesn’t align particularly well with reality. For instance there’s the whole thing of them talking about us — always — as though we were the ones in power, when they have all the gatekeeping positions and all the contacts.

This dissonance has required them to make up invisible monsters that give us all the power: Patriarchy (a laughable idiocy in America and weak everywhere in the west. While they refuse to see it in the Middle East and Latin America where it actually exists in spades.) Micro aggressions. White privilege (which is so strong that it gives an edge to concentration camp survivors.)

All the while they refuse to admit the real privilege: Leftist privilege. The fastest way to rise in the narrative fields is to be lefter-than-thou. Because they’re in charge and that’s how the system is setup, so they can stay in charge.

Unfortunately this has created their isolation. You see, every song, every movie, ever history book, every fictional book, assures them they’ll win. They know that “the people united shall never be defeated.” They also know that though held back by patriarchy, racism, sexism and all the micro aggressions, the people really are with them. HAVE TO BE, because they’re ideology of the future, and history’s arrow points to their paradise. Every book, movie, etc. says so either subtly or openly. So they KNOW. Everybody knows.

QotD: Perverse incentives, death penalty edition

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

People cheered when, in the 1990s, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich advocated mandatory executions for drug dealers. But economists wondered why Gingrich wanted to decrease the penalty for murder. How does the death penalty for drug dealers decrease the penalty for murder? Think about it this way: Suppose that Gingrich’s bill becomes law and the police bust into an apartment where three drug dealers have hidden their stash. What happens? The drug dealers know that if they give up, they will be put to death. So why not try to kill the police? If the dealers are lucky, they get away. If the dealers are unlucky, they are no worse off than if they didn’t fight because when drug dealing is a capital offense, drug dealers face no additional penalty for murder.

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles: Microeconomics (3rd Edition), 2015.

June 30, 2018

Wealthy virtue-signalling hurts the poor

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

At Catellaxy Files, Rafe Champion discusses some of the points raised by Matt Ridley in his recent book:

Essentially, the poor pay for the virtue-signalling of the rich. Dr Matt Ridley opens chapter 14 of Climate Science: The Facts with some blunt claims.

    Here is a simple fact about the world today. Climate change is doing more good than harm. Here is another fact. Climate change policy is doing more harm than good.

On top of that he points out that the poor are carrying the cost of today’s climate policy. That is something for the ALP [Australian Labour Party] and the social justice warriors to think about.

This should remind people of another great postwar example of destructive virtue-signalling – massive foreign aid to the developing nations aka the Third World. That did more harm than good for the people of the Third World, apart from the crony criminals in power. The great Lord Peter Bauer was onto that very smartly, starting in the 1940s and his findings have been consolidated lately, notably by William Easterly [in] The White Man’s Burden: Why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. There are exceptions to the rule such as hands-on medical care and private education.

Ridley mentions in passing some of the cases where apparently smart people have made very bad calls, starting with a prominent and wealthy leftwinger who he debated on TV. Faced with the charge that climate policy was hurting the poor he replied “But what about my grandchildren?”. As though the future wellbeing of the presumably affluent and privileged grandchildren of the talking head might be threatened by policies that help the poor who are with us at present. Ridley also cited a son of Charles Darwin who thought that eugenic breeding programs were essential to save civilization and Paul Ehrlich who in 1972 predicted that millions would die due to over-population (prompting the one-child policy in China).

June 29, 2018

Justin Trudeau’s emotional thinking style resonates with female voters

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

Brandon Kirby on, among other things, why Justin Trudeau polls consistently higher with women than with men:

Justin Trudeau and family during India visit
Image via NDTV, originally tweeted by @vijayrupanibjp

Justin Trudeau gave one of his worst interviews during the campaign with a Maritime reporter, Steve Murphy.

Murphy continually asked him for the numbers on his spending promises, to which Trudeau had none to give. Eventually he went on the offensive against Murphy and suggested that Murphy approached politics with a calculator while Trudeau can speak to Canadians. People who think in terms of STEM find this remarkably absurd.

It’s problematic that if the numbers don’t add up in Trudeau’s budgets, he won’t be helping Canadians at all. Wages will remain stagnant while power bills go up, grocery bills go up, and our tax bills will go up.

Trudeau is on the record claiming that he will grow the economy from the heart outward, but as the calculator dictates, his plans have serious economic consequences and the rhetoric that appears caring is actually destructive.

Rational thinkers find the empty rhetoric of growing the economy from the heart outward, while simultaneously making life harder on the poor and middle class, highly offensive.

Feminists have supplied us with the premise that on average, women don’t think in terms of STEM. Economics as a science requires an appraisal that is thoroughly calloused at times, which people who don’t appreciate STEM will find highly offensive.

The end result is that if women don’t think in terms of calloused rationalism, they won’t find libertarianism at all appealing.

If it were the case that only Canadian women were permitted to vote, Trudeau would win a majority government easily. If only Canadian men were to vote, Trudeau would be swiftly defeated.

George W. Bush was the most unpopular president in the U.S. during my lifetime, and yet his approval ratings are polled higher for Americans than Trudeau’s are among Canadian men.

There’s a discrepancy between men and women but that doesn’t imply individualism is wrong.

[…]

We do need to encourage women to adopt the calloused STEM approach. $99 per case of water isn’t how most women think, but unlike the opposing view it has the virtue of actually being getting water to people; going beyond stage-one-thinking – it’s actually compassionate.

June 28, 2018

US Supreme Court rules on the Janus case

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

Eric Boehm reported soon after the decision was announced on Wednesday morning:

More than four decades after the Supreme Court ruled that public sector workers could be required to pay dues to unions even if they do not join one, a 5–4 majority on the high court overturned that precedent in a closely watched case that could have major ramifications for the future of public sector unions.

“Under Illinois law, public employees are forced to subsi­dize a union, even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bar­gaining and related activities,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmem­bers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”

In the short-term, the ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees means that plaintiff Mark Janus was successful in his decade-long fight to prevent the union from taking $50 out of his paycheck every two weeks. Over the years, Janus estimates, he’s contributed more than $6,000 to the union.

More broadly, Wednesday’s ruling could end the automatic deduction of union dues from millions of public employees’ paychecks, forcing unions like AFSCME to convince workers to voluntarily contribute dues — something workers would do, presumably, only if they have a reason to do so.

“So many of us have been forced to pay for political speech and policy positions with which we disagree, just so we can keep our jobs. This is a victory for all of us,” said Janus in a statement. “The right to say ‘no’ to a union is just as important as the right to say ‘yes.’ Finally our rights have been restored.”

The ruling is “a landmark victory for rights of public-sector employees,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which supported Janus’ lawsuit.

While today’s ruling certainly shifts the balance towards worker freedom, groups like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represented Janus, say they are already prepared for additional rounds of litigation. In states that previously have embraced right-to-work policies, unions have often tried to make it as difficult as possible for workers to renounce their membership.

At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw highlights a few of the key points:

Justice Alito wrote the decision and it followed along with the expectations of those who watched the case play out before the court. Also as expected, this was a 5-4 decision, split along partisan lines. At the heart of Janus was the question of whether or not unions can forcibly extract dues from workers’ paychecks without the worker proactively volunteering to contribute. In parallel to that, the court had to determine whether or not those extracted fees, being put toward lobbying efforts, constituted involuntary political speech on the part of the worker. The ruling answers both questions definitively.

You can read the full decision here [PDF] but I’ve extracted a couple of the key points from the syllabus. First is the issue of whether the previous ruling in Abood (which went in the unions’ favor) erred in allowing the forcible extraction of dues. Alito leaves no room for doubt.

    The State’s extraction of agency fees from nonconsenting public sector employees violates the First Amendment. Abood erred in concluding otherwise, and stare decisis cannot support it. Abood is therefore overruled.

The second question was the one about subsidizing the speech of others when it runs contrary to your personal beliefs. Again, Alito is definitive.

    Forcing free and independent individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable raises serious First Amendment concerns. E.g., West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 633. That includes compelling a person to subsidize the speech of other private speakers.

A union official, Paul Shearon, the IFPTE Secretary-Treasurer, put out an immediate statement saying that this was based on, “a bogus free speech argument.” He went on to say that the justices voting in the majority “are little better than political hacks.” That was followed up by a threat to take it to the streets.

    In the short run, the Janus decision may hurt some unions financially, but in the long run it will serve to make unions and their members more militant and force a stronger culture of internal organizing. The recent statewide teacher strikes demonstrate that when public sector workers face limitations on their bargaining rights they take their case to the streets.

This is going to send shockwaves through not just the unions, but the Democratic Party at large. The amount of money that the unions flush into Democratic coffers every year is likely more than most of you imagine.

Steven Malanga in City Journal provides some rough figures on how much money was at stake for the unions and their political activities:

With the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch, unions feared the outcome of the Janus case. After all, many union members have stated that they would give up their memberships if the court ruled that compulsory fees were illegal. An officer of the Communications Workers of America, which represents government employees in New Jersey, told an AFL-CIO convention last fall that only 54 percent of its 60,000 members said that they would remain in the union if they could opt out of paying fees. The California Teachers Association, meanwhile, crafted a 2019 budget that anticipated that as many as 23,000 members would leave if the court overturned the Illinois law. The union will also suffer from the loss of revenues from 28,000 nonmembers who’ve been paying agency fees, and will presumably stop doing so now that they’re no longer compelled. The union, according to a published report, estimated it could suffer a loss of some $20 million annually as a result.

Even before the ruling, government unions were reeling. Their membership has declined from a peak of 7.9 million in 2009 to 7.2 million today — a drop of nearly 9 percent. The portion of government workers in unions, which peaked in the mid-1990s at 38.7 percent, is now down to 34.4 percent, according to unionstats.com. Some of the decline is due to a significant reduction in the number of government workers after the 2008 financial crisis; even today, nine years into a recovery, the total number of government workers remains 10 percent lower than before the recession — a loss of 233,000 positions. But unions have suffered an even bigger falloff, because when government employment began trending back upward in 2014, union membership stayed flat. Many of the gains in government jobs since then have been in nonunion positions.

Unions have suffered big losses in Wisconsin, which banned compulsory unionization in the public sector in 2011. Some 140,000 union positions have dried up as workers chose not to retain their memberships. But other states that continued to compel workers to join a union or pay agency fees have also seen major losses, including New York, where union membership has fallen by 150,000, Illinois (down 88,000), Pennsylvania (down 54,000), and New Jersey (down 50,000). Those declines are reflected in union numbers, too. The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union, has lost nearly 250,000 members, or about 8 percent of its membership, since 2009. AFSCME’s national membership has shrunk by 200,000, or 13 percent.

Shifting attitudes toward mass immigration in Europe

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Gates of Vienna, Baron Bodissey maps the way public sympathies are changing in the wake of the immigration/refugee waves of the last few years:

From Szczecin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, a Razor-Wire Curtain Has Descended…

Immigration-related events are moving rapidly this in Europe summer. The situation is in such flux that now would be a good time to step back and try to get an overview of the process.

Three years ago the dead baby hysteria, followed by Chancellor Merkel’s invitation to the world (“Y’all come in and set a spell, bitte!“), launched the Great European Migration Crisis. Since then I’ve read hundreds of news articles and analyses about the flow of “refugees” and the reactions to their violent and fragrant arrival in Western Europe.

After digesting all that information I created the following map, which presents my subjective evaluation of the different approaches to migration by various European countries. I’ve rated the policies of 28 different countries (the EU 27 minus Croatia, plus Switzerland) on a scale from 0 to 100, from zero (red) for the open-borders attitude of the “Welcoming Culture” to 100 (blue) for the absolute refusal of mass migration by the Visegrád Four (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic). Data from the last six months weighs more heavily in the score assigned to each country — for example, Spain and Italy recently changed governments, which has strongly affected each country’s migration policy.

[Click to see full-sized image]

The grouping of countries based on their stance on migration bears a striking resemblance to the division of Europe into East and West by the Iron Curtain. This is especially true if we roll the clock back three months — back then Italy and Bavaria would have been quite red. And the analogy becomes even more apt if we remember that Austria was occupied by Soviet troops until 1955, which gives it one foot in the Eastern camp.

The biggest change in the past three months has been the formation of a new anti-immigration government in Italy. The “xenophobia” of the East Bloc has now broken through the razor-wire curtain and gained a foothold in Western Europe. No wonder EU politics is in such turmoil! After failing to contain the “anti-European” attitudes of Poland and Hungary, Brussels now has to contend with Matteo Salvini. Italy is one of the “big four” pillars of the European Union, so its defection to the anti-migration side carries enormous significance for continental politics.

The situation is metamorphosing rapidly, but before we analyze the process of change — the “delta”, as they say in the military-industrial complex — let’s go over the snapshot of current European migration policies.

June 27, 2018

Canada’s euphemistically named “High Risk Returnees”

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

Judith Bergman on the Canadian government’s kid-gloves approach to dealing with Canadian citizens who return to Canada after volunteering to serve with terrorist organizations:

Canadians who go abroad to commit terrorism – predominantly jihadists, in other words – have a “right to return” according to government documents obtained by Global News. They not only have a right of return, but “… even if a Canadian engaged in terrorist activity abroad, the government must facilitate their return to Canada,” as one document says.

According to the government, there are still around 190 Canadian citizens volunteering as terrorists abroad. The majority are in Syria and Iraq, and 60 have returned. Police are reportedly expecting a new influx of returnees over the next couple of months.

The Canadian government is willing to go to great (and presumably costly) lengths to “facilitate” the return of Canadian jihadists, unlike the UK, for example, which has revoked the citizenship of ISIS fighters so they cannot return. The Canadian government has established a taskforce, the High Risk Returnee Interdepartmental Taskforce, that, according to government documents:

    “… allows us to collectively identify what measures can mitigate the threat these individuals may pose during their return to Canada. This could include sending officers overseas to collect evidence before they depart, or their detention by police upon arrival in Canada.”

Undercover officers may also be used “to engage with the HRT [High Risk Traveler] to collect evidence, or monitor them during their flight home.”

In the sanitizing Orwellian newspeak employed by the Canadian government, the terrorists are not jihadis who left Canada to commit the most heinous crimes, such as torture, rape and murder, while fighting for ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but “High Risk Travelers” and “High Risk Returnees”.

The government is fully aware of the security risk to which it is subjecting Canadians: According to the documents, “HRRs [High Risk Returnees] can pose a significant threat to the national security of Canada”. This fact raises the question of why the government of Canada is keen to facilitate these people’s “right of return” — when presumably the primary obligation of the government is to safeguard the security of law-abiding Canadian citizens.

June 24, 2018

Europe and the refugees

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Government, Italy, Law, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the various European governments’ attitudes and actions on the refugee problem:

Europe, despite its Union, is as divided as ever. Recently, when Italy’s new right-wing government — anxious to prove its credentials — refused to allow a boat carrying 629 African migrants to dock in Italy, Spain’s new left-wing government — equally anxious to do the same — accepted the boat. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, criticized the Italians for their decision, the Italian government accused the French of hypocrisy, inasmuch as they had refused to take more than 9,000 migrants from Italy that they had previously agreed to accept.

This story is revealing in several aspects. The first is that, whatever attitude governments take to the migrants, no one truly believes that they are more of an asset than a liability. Madrid’s action, for example, was taken on “humanitarian” grounds, rather than because it believed that Spain would benefit from the migrants’ presence. When European leaders discuss the migrant question, it is always in terms of sharing the burden, not the assets, equitably. No one speaks of foreign investment in this way, which suggests that European politicians believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the free movement of people and capital are different in an important way.

The leaders speak of sharing the burden, then, and are incensed when countries such as Hungary and Poland refuse point-blank to take any migrants from Africa or the Middle East. But I have never seen mentioned in this context the question of where the migrants themselves want to go. They might as well be inanimate toxic waste as far as the discussion is concerned, rather than human beings with wishes, desires, ambitions, and so forth. They are but pawns in a political game. Hungary, for example, is deemed duty-bound to take x number of migrants: no one asks whether x number of migrants can be found who want to go to Hungary. Nor is the question ever discussed in public whether Hungary, having open borders, would be held responsible for making the migrants stay there once they had arrived. Short of penning them in, how exactly would you keep them in Hungary, or in Poland?

June 23, 2018

“An extraordinary thing happened in internet culture this week: Godwin repealed Godwin’s Law”

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

Mike Godwin obliterates his own legacy:

An extraordinary thing happened in internet culture this week: Godwin repealed Godwin’s Law. Godwin’s Law is the idea that the longer an internet discussion thread drags on, the more likely it is that one of the discussants will mention Hitler. Rashly and inappropriately. They’ll compare their opponent to Der Fuhrer or say, ‘This is how Nazism started!!!!’. Reductio ad Hitlerum, as some call it. The law was invented by Professor Mike Godwin, an American attorney. And this week he scrapped it. To the delight of virtual leftists and Trump-bashers who are chomping at the bit to say ‘TRUMP IS LITERALLY A NAZI’, Godwin tweeted in relation to the Trump administration and its child-migrant policy: ‘By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.’

The response was one of glee. ‘Godwin has officially suspended Godwin’s Law’, tweeters crowed. The ‘actual, literal creator of Godwin’s Law’ has okayed Hitler comparisons, they whooped. They could now crack on with their hysterical likening of Trump to Hitler, and everything he does to what happened in 1930s Europe, without having to worry about someone shouting, ‘Godwin’s Law!’ at them. It so perfectly sums up the arrogance of the Twitterati and opinion-forming set: for years they mocked the Hitler-obsessed ‘below the line’ (BTL) commenters on their Tumblr blogs or Guardian columns, and even instituted an internet law to paint them as vulgar idiots, and now they themselves embrace mad Hitler blather and have scrapped the law that said such online talk was wrong. One online law for thee, another for me.

They can dress up their adoption of the Reductio ad Hitlerum worldview as a legitimate political position as much as they like. They can carry on saying, ‘Ah, but Trump’s policies really are like Hitler’s, which means my Nazi comparisons carry more weight than those of the non-Oxford-educated blowhard I had to block on Twitter because he kept saying “Hillary is Hitler”’. But they’re not fooling anyone. Except themselves. The rest of us know they are now just like the BTL people they once slagged off: confused, angry, rash and willing to exploit the greatest crime in history if it helps them to register and advertise their emotional fury with political developments. They are BTL people now, though they’re above the line, still all over the media, busily making it acceptable to talk shit about the Holocaust in public.

This week, with the controversy over Trump’s separation of families arriving illegally from Mexico, has represented a turning point in their popularisation of the Hitler comparisons they once chided. They refer to the places in which the children of illegal migrants are being housed as ‘concentration camps’. The former director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, tweeted a photo of Auschwitz with the words, ‘Other governments have separated mothers and children’. Pre-empting the suspension of Godwin’s Law, a writer for the New Statesman said: ‘Stop talking about Godwin’s Law – real Nazis are back.’ Twitter buzzes with Trump-as-Hitler talk. ‘This is how the Holocaust started’, they all say.

I’m not a Trump fan … for the first few months of his administration (and during the election campaign), I labelled him as Il Donalduce, but I mostly meant that as a visual reference: watch any of Mussolini’s speeches and you’ll see some resonances with how Donald Trump speaks. The Hitler equivalence is wish-fulfilment by those who oppose him … it’s not an accurate or useful way to portray him, unless your goal is to make Adolf Hitler seem less demonic. I literally do not understand why anyone in pursuit of a modern political goal would try to make Hitler’s crimes seem more acceptable in an attempt to blacken the reputation of a living politician, unless you are clinically insane.

As a libertarian, Trump is far, far from my ideal of the “leader of the free world” (as the western media tends to portray the US president), but he’s not even close to the evil genius that created the “Thousand-year Reich“, and any attempt to portray him that way is historically illiterate and politically tone-deaf.

June 22, 2018

What the well-dressed politician shouldn’t be wearing

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

Ann Althouse reacts to a New York Times article on what clothes “say” about the wearer:

I clicked on that title because I thought it was going to say that it’s a mistake for female candidates to wear pants (in any form) rather than a skirt/dress (of some kind). But the article lumped skirted suits and pantsuits together.

To my eye, women in pants look less dressed up than a man in a standard business suit, and I don’t think women should put themselves at that disadvantage, especially since pantsuits look sloppier on a woman’s body than a business suit on a man’s body.

I don’t mean to insult women by saying that, but women’s bodies are (generally) shaped differently than men’s and women’s pants are (generally) fitted differently from men’s suit pants. Men’s suit pants do not hug the legs or crotch, so they completely deflect attention away from the lower body. Men’s suits bring us right up to the shoulders — the idealized shoulders — and and then, via shirt and tie, aim us straight at the face.

Women’s pantsuits are more fitted in the leg and use color in a way that draws the eye downward, and they often do things with the jacket — such as making it very long — to cover up what’s happening down there in the legs. But then the jacket is distracting.

In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s jackets were flat-out weird, with perplexing patch pockets. In fact, I don’t like Vanessa Friedman’s reference to the “Elizabeth Warren/Hillary Clinton/Kirsten Gillibrand mold,” because Warren and Gillibrand wear very low-key things and Hillary Clinton launched into clothes that we struggled to understand, that got compared to loungewear or sci-fi costumery.

I don’t really know what the best answer is. It depends on the individual. But you’re asking to be trusted with responsibility, not to be enjoyed as a pop star or fashion maven. You don’t want to look as though you’re seeking power for purpose of expressing your individuality.

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