Quotulatiousness

June 7, 2018

Faith Moore explains how to avoid sexually objectifying women

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

It’s apparently very simple and straightforward, once you double-check the feminist cheat sheet:

Apparently feminism has become so confusing that even feminists don’t know what’s feminist anymore. But Everyday feminists apparently do — and they’ve provided us with a handy cheat sheet so we don’t accidentally objectify someone who was trying to be empowered, or empower someone who was trying to be objectified.

The way to tell the difference, according to Everyday Feminism, is to figure out who has the power. “If the person being ‘looked at,’ or sexualized, has the power in the situation, then they are sexually empowered.” Here’s an example: “if someone puts on ‘sexy’ clothing and goes out in public or takes a selfie and shares it, they have the power because they chose themselves to put on those clothes.”

Oh, okay, I get it. So, if a woman chooses to put on “sexy” clothes and go out in public then all the catcalls and inappropriate comments and unwanted marriage proposals are empowering because she chose to put on those clothes. Oh, and also if she takes a “sexy” selfie and posts it on Instagram, all the comments about how she’s a “slut” and a “whore” and should “put her clothes on” are also empowering because she chose to share that photo. (I’m learning so much!)

But wait! Apparently beauty standards “compel” some people to wear sexy clothing “because they believe that they won’t be beautiful” otherwise. And there are even some people who feel they must not wear sexy clothing “because they are shamed if they do.”

So even if you think you put on those clothes of your own free will, it’s possible that society was actually hiding in your closet handing you things to put on (which is creepy) and that’s why you dressed all sexy (or not sexy). Which means that even though you thought you were empowered, it turns out you’re actually being objectified. And if you choose not to dress in the way you wanted to dress because society tells you that society was telling you it was wrong, then you’re empowered because you’re doing what someone else told you not to do about what someone else told you to do. (This makes total sense. I’m such a good feminist!)

But what about people who don’t dress “sexy”? Don’t worry, they can be objectified too. “Even a person who is ‘modestly’ dressed can objectified if the ‘looking’ person makes a non-sexual situation sexual without the ‘looked at’ person’s consent.” Oh good, for a minute there I thought “modestly dressed” people were being excluded from objectification and was worried because I know exclusion is wrong and we shouldn’t do it. Phew! Glad that even people who don’t want to be objectified still can be.

June 6, 2018

How to become Prime Minister of Spain without the pesky need for voter approval

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

Tim Black explains how the new Spanish leader got there without ever winning an election:

There is a big, fat, blindingly obvious problem with Spain’s new prime minister, Pedro Sánchez: no one voted for him, or indeed the Socialist Party (PSOE) of which he is leader.

In fact, 46-year-old Sánchez has never been overly familiar with the electorate. He entered congress in 2009 as an internal Socialist Party replacement because a lawmaker was leaving his seat early. He then promptly lost this seat in the 2011 General Election. Fortunately, in 2013, another Socialist congressional deputy left her seat early, meaning that Sánchez could once more return to the political fray, bypassing the electorate en route. Improbably, he was successfully nominated, thanks to the backing of PSOE grandees, as the Socialists’ general secretary in 2014, leading them to their worst-ever result in the 2015 General Elections. A few months later, the PSOE got rid of him as leader, and Sánchez, in turn, rid himself of congressional responsibilities by quitting his seat. His reason, it seems, was to have time to concentrate on becoming the PSOE leader again. Which is what happened.

His triumph this past week, therefore, was not built on anything resembling popular support. Rather, it was a feat of constitutional chutzpah. It began last week, when the corruption scandal that has long dogged Mariano Rajoy, then prime minister, and leader of the governing Popular Party, came to a momentary head (the so-called ‘Gurtel’ case is ongoing), with the jailing of one of the PP’s former treasurers for 33 years for fraud and money-laundering. The PP was itself also fined for benefitting from the kickbacks for public contracts. Sánchez saw his chance, and proposed a motion of no confidence in Rajoy, a move that under Spanish constitutional law results, if successful, in the replacement of the subject of the motion by the proposer. Congress duly passed the motion and that was that – for the first time in Spanish political history, a sitting prime minister was deposed through a vote of no confidence. Sánchez, with the Socialists in tow, had ascended to power.

But that big, fat fly in the ointment of Sánchez and the Socialists’ success won’t go away. For a start, you can see the absence of any public mandate writ large in the congressional maths. As it stands (following the 2015 General Election), Rajoy’s PP remains the largest single party, with 134 members of the 350-strong Congress of Deputies, while Sánchez and the now ruling socialists have only 84. To be able to govern without going to the electorate, Sánchez will have to strike deals with the seven other parties and regional representatives, including, of course, Catalonia’s independence-demanding cohort. Which means concessions, deals, compromises, all rich in cynicicsm and opportunism.

June 5, 2018

Down with the experts!

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

In Quillette, Alex Smith explores the limits of expertise and why so many people today would eagerly agree with the sentiments in my headline:

“People are sick of experts.” These infamous and much-derided words uttered by UK Conservative parliamentarian Michael Gove express a sentiment with which we are now probably all familiar. It has come to represent a sign of the times — either an indictment or a celebration (depending on one’s political point of view) of our current age.

Certainly, the disdain for expertise and its promised consequences have been highly alarming for many people. They are woven through various controversial and destabilising phenomena from Trump, to Brexit, to fake news, to the generally ‘anti-elitist’ tone that characterises populist politics and much contemporary discourse. And this attitude stands in stark contrast to the unspoken but assumed Obama-era doctrine of “let the experts figure it out”; an idea that had a palpable End of History feeling about it, and that makes this abrupt reversion to ignorance all the more startling.

The majority of educated people are fairly unequivocal in their belief that this rebound is a bad thing, and as such many influential voices — Quillette‘s included — have been doing their best to restore the value of expertise to our society. The nobility of this ambition is quite obvious. Why on earth would we not want to take decisions informed by the most qualified opinions? However, it is within this obviousness that the danger lies.

I want to propose that high expertise, whilst generally beneficial, also has the capacity in certain circumstances to be pathological as well — and that if we don’t recognise this and correct for it, then we will continue down our current path of drowning its benefits with its problems. In short, if you want to profit from expertise, you must tame it first.

[…]

However, it is worth drawing a distinction between these two types of expertise — the kind people question, and the kind people don’t. In short, people value expertise in closed systems, but are distrustful of expertise in open systems. A typical example of a closed system would be a car engine or a knee joint. These are semi-complex systems with ‘walls’ — that is to say, they are self-contained and are relatively incubated from the chaos of the outside world. As such, human beings are generally capable of wrapping their heads around the possible variables within them, and can therefore control them to a largely predictable degree. Engineers, surgeons, pilots, all these kinds of ‘trusted’ experts operate in closed systems.

Open systems, on the other hand, are those that are ‘exposed to the elements,’ so to speak. They have no walls and are therefore essentially chaotic, with far more variables than any person could ever hope to grasp. The economy is an open system. So is climate. So are politics. No matter how much you know about these things, there is not only always more to know, but there is also an utterly unpredictable slide towards chaos as these things interact.

The erosion of trust in expertise has arisen exclusively from experts in open systems mistakenly believing that they know enough to either predict those systems or — worse — control them. This is an almost perfect definition of hubris, an idea as old as consciousness itself. Man cannot control nature, and open systems are by definition natural systems. No master of open systems has ever succeeded — they have only failed less catastrophically than their counterparts.

June 4, 2018

The economic damage of tariffs

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

Tim Worstall fisks a recent Pat Buchanan brain fart article on the glories of erecting tariff walls against foreign trade:

Pat Buchanan has been going on for decades about how wondrous tariffs are and if only they were brought back then things would be just peachy. Sadly, this all seems to be based on his not understanding trade, tariffs, nor apparently even history. That’s not a good set of recommendations for a policy about trade and tariffs, one that has been tried many a time in history.

Now, it is entirely true that if we returned to a more Hamiltonian policy era then we’d all be richer. But that wouldn’t be because we had tariffs which paid for government rather than an income or corporate tax. It’s because government would be confiscating a very much smaller portion of what we all produce to pay for itself. If the Feds took 3% of everything we do instead of the current 18% or so then sure, we’d all be richer. But that’s true however that tax is raised.

[…]

His argument is that, protected from foreign competition, American business was able to develop and grow into being world beaters. No, I don’t think this is true – I insist that behind tariff barriers companies stagnate. Indeed it’s standard economics that the medium to long term effects of trade are that the competition from foreigners is what makes the domestic companies stronger and more productive. But put that argument to one side. Assume that Buchanan is correct.

For his conclusion to be correct then it must have been true that the total costs of trade were rising in that time period. Total costs being tariffs plus transport. Only if the total costs were rising was protection rising. The tariffs are only part of the story. And as it happens total protection was falling over this time period. The falls in the costs of transport – for the US externally primarily the steam ship – were greater than the rises in the tariffs. Thus the US was becoming more open to trade at this time when industry was booming and growing to world class levels.

That’s not an argument in favour of trade protection now, is it?

    The U.S. relied on tariffs to convert from an agricultural economy in 1800 to the mightiest manufacturing power on earth by 1900.

Well, it’s also true that what the US was inside those tariff barriers was the largest free trade area in the world. I’m the guy insisting that free trade makes places grow, Pat the opposite. And the place with more free trade among more people than anywhere else grows fastest? That’s a point in my favour, no, not Pat’s? Remember, the US Constitution expressly forbids the individual states from having tariffs between them…..that regulation is left to the Feds who have never imposed them.

    How have EU nations run up endless trade surpluses with America? By imposing a value-added tax, or VAT, on imports from the U.S., while rebating the VAT on exports to the USA. Works just like a tariff.

No, a VAT does not work like a tariff. In no manner at all does it do so in fact. As every economist keeps trying to point out. Within the EU all goods and services, no matter where they’re made, pay the exact same rate of VAT. Well, OK, ladies unmentionables pay a lower rate than motor cars, that’s true, but all unmentionables pay the same rate, all cars. There is no difference made between domestic and foreign production. It’s entirely unlike a tariff therefore, the crucial component of which is that distinction made between home and foreign production.

Stuff made in the EU and sold in the US pays no VAT. Stuff made in the US and sold in the US pays no VAT. Again, we’ve no distinction by source or origin, this is entirely and completely unlike a tariff.

QotD: Pushing the Confederacy down the memory hole

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

Lately, I have been mightily irritated by the politically-correct campaign to permanently banish the old Confederate flag, and all music associated with the Southern cause, or any symbol that it once existed, before it was comprehensively defeated a century-and-a-half ago. Memorials of Robert E. Lee are being treated as memorials of Adolf Q. Hitler.

It strikes me that even under the old lamentable cotton-plantation slave system of the South, people mixed and got to smell one another — rich and poor, black and white, genteel and grotesque. That, the most forgotten slogan of the Dixie Land was her war cry: “Down with the Eagle, and up with the Cross!” That, it is the Cross of Saint Andrew astride the old Confederate flag that is most galling to the hyper-secular, liberal mind. That, the greatest triumph of the Union propaganda was to tar all those flag-bearers in the way our contemporary media demean all dissenters from the current party line as “racists,” “sexists,” “phobes,” and nothing more. That, the principal crime of the South was to stand by the wording of the U.S. Constitution, and from the beginning, to get in the way of a grand national scheme for social engineering, which triumphed with Lincoln (though hardly a liberal by the standards of today). That, in the Southern view, the eagle swooped down on them, with claws.

Something similar is now happening in the division of “Red States” and “Blue”: in an America from which the Christian conception of the “common man” is being systematically expunged. All who resist the categories to which they have been assigned are instinctively rebelling; “victim” and “oppressor” alike. This is what “common men” will do, when tarred and pressed, often without fully understanding why they rebel. They remember, however obliquely, whose sons and daughters they are. That, no matter how low in social station, they are Christ’s, and not the segregated chattels of some malicious and incompetent — and intentionally divisive — Washington Nanny.

The recovery of USA, and more largely, the recovery of Christendom, turns on the recovery of this conception of the “common man” — as Man, not as member of a client group. This has nought to do with “equality,” for it is none of a government’s business to help one group get even with another. Rather it is to serve man as man. This is a matter that goes deeper even than slavery, as Saint Paul explained. It is an unarguable, even mystical point. Where that conception survives, of the common in man, Christendom persists, and can potentially flourish.

David Warren, “The common man”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-08-29.

June 1, 2018

QotD: Travelling with a political campaign

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

One of the constant nightmares of traveling with politicians is the need to keep them in sight at all times. Every presidential campaign has its own fearful litany of horror stories about reporters – and, occasionally, even a key staff member – who thought they had plenty of time to “run across the street for a quick beer” instead of hanging around in the rear of some grim auditorium half-listening to the drone of a long-familiar speech, only to come back in 20 minutes to find the auditorium empty and no sign of the press bus, the candidate or anybody who can tell him where they went. These stories are invariably set in places like Butte, Buffalo or Icepick, Minnesota, on a night in the middle of March. The temperature is always below zero, there is usually a raging blizzard to keep cabs off the street, and just as the victim remembers that he has left his wallet in his overcoat on the press bus, his stomach erupts with a sudden attack of ptomaine poisoning. And then, while crawling around on his knees in some ice-covered alley and racked with fits of projectile vomiting, he is grabbed by vicious cops and whipped on the shins with a night stick, then locked in the drunk tank of the local jail and buggered all night by winos.

These stories abound, and there is just enough truth in them to make most campaign journalists so fearful of a sudden change in the schedule that they will not even go looking for a bathroom until the pain becomes unendurable and at least three reliable people have promised to fetch them back to the fold at the first sign of any movement that could signal an early departure. The closest I ever came to getting left behind was during the California primary in 1972, when I emerged from a bathroom in the Salinas railroad depot and realized that the caboose car of McGovern’s “victory train” was about 100 yards further down the tracks than it had been only three minutes earlier. George was still standing outside on the platform, waving to the crowd, but the train was moving – and as I started my sprint through the crowd, running over women, children, cripples and anything else that couldn’t get out of my way, I thought I saw a big grin on McGovern’s face as the train began picking up speed….… I am still amazed that I caught up with the goddamn thing without blowing every valve in my heart, or even missing the iron ladder when I made my last-second leap and being swept under the train and chopped in half by the wheels.

Ever since then I have not been inclined to take many risks while traveling in strange territory with politicians. Even the very few who might feel a bit guilty about leaving me behind would have to do it anyway, because they are all enslaved by their schedules, and when it comes to a choice between getting to the airport on time or waiting for a journalist who has wandered off to seek booze, they will shrug and race off to the airport.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.

May 31, 2018

Megan McArdle’s tweetstorm explaining the Reagan coalition to under-35s

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

I’d embed all of these, except it would take a week for the page to render, so here’s the start of the thread, and the rest will just be copy-pasta’d text:

Fear not, my little chickadees, there will be no spoilers. Except that, as Woddy Allen once remarked of “War and Peace”, “It involves Russia.”

Oh, heck, obviously this tweetstorm is going to be typo-tastic. I think we’re just gonna have to roll with it, folks.

Actually, most of this Tweetstorm is going to be about one small point that I raised in the column, but didn’t have space to explore.

Which is the extent to which those on the left who are under 45, and particularly those who are under 35, fundamentally misunderstand the Reagan coalition, because they don’t remember communism.

There’s a phenomenon in cognitive science called “hindsight bias”. People wildly overestimate their ability to predict events when they know what the outcome was.

Indeed, if you ask them to predict an event, then tell them the outcome, and then ask them what they predicted, some of them will misremember having correctly predicted the outcome.

They will also think they could have predicted an outcome that was designed to be random. Don’t think that you are not one of these people. All of us are, at least to some extent, plagued by hindsight bias. It takes conscious effort to overcome, and you never will, fully.

So once you know that Soviet Communism was doomed to the ash heap of history, because it is an infinitely inferior way of satisfying your society’s basic material needs, you become nearly incapable of imagining what it was like to live in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.

Unless you actually did.

Nonetheless, let me try to explain what it was like to our younger viewers. When I grew up, the Soviet Bloc was just one massive red blob on the map. One that the Soviets had repeatedly demonstrated an interest in expanding.

Whatever you think of American foreign policy post-1945, Soviet foreign policy was like that too, except with nastier. Our client regimes were terrible. Their client regimes were terrible. But we didn’t shoot people to keep them from leaving, or run a totalitarian police state.

It obviously, in hindsight, was not plausible to think that they were going to take over the whole world. They didn’t have the resources. But alas, we did not get the benefit of hindsight when it was happening. Almost until the Wall came down, people were predicting convergence.

There was a large, expansionist power. They were basically singlehandedly keeping Cuba afloat, subsidizing actual, honest-to-God communist groups that wanted to bring the rugged splendors of life without consumer goods to America, and oh, had a history of invading their neighbors

And then there were the nukes. So true, funny story–they were phasing out nuclear drills when I was in grammar school, because someone in the NYC Department of Ed had realized there’s not much point in drilling to become radioactive vapor. Pretty much just happens naturally.

But I had an older teacher who insisted on telling us to get under our desks if the Bomb hit. Also, inexplicably, to tuck our pants into our socks to protect us from fallout.

“I’m afraid your daughter is dead, Mrs. McArdle. But just look at those pristine ankles!”

Were Red Dawn and Top Gun over the top and a little silly? Yes. But folks in the 1980s (at least those of the appropriate age for viewing such things) didn’t watch them *ironically*. They believed the Soviets wanted to bury us. Because they had said stuff like “We will bury you”

We grew up actually afraid that the Soviet Union was going to turn our country into a sheet of radioactive glass. In hindsight, seems obviously overblown, but again: *we didn’t have hindsight*.

Also, even in the 1980s, there was a delusional portion of the left that actually thought life was better for ordinary people in the Soviet Union. That portion had, thankfully, gotten smaller after Hungary. But there was a larger portion that thought maybe it wasn’t really worse.

To be clear, I’m not talking about “Democrats”. I’m talking about hard leftists who I grew up with on the Upper West Side. They existed, and were kind of noisy.

And then there was a larger still part of the left that wasn’t Marxist, but thought that the things they were concerned about, like gender inequality and racism, didn’t exist under communism, or were better.

(NARRATOR: they existed. They weren’t better)

They thought these things because it’s hard to get good information about a police state. People saw America’s oppressions being reported on the front pages of American newspapers, and concluded that they must be worse than places we had no information on.

The existence of various sorts of at least vaguely communist-sympathetic folks inside the country, and an eerie background expectation that at any moment, a large, Imperialist communist power outside our borders might vaporize you, made this a very, very politically salient issue

If you are trying to interpret the Reagan Right without understanding the large emotional impact that this had on voters, you are getting it badly wrong.

As an aside, as I also mentioned in this column, this is *ALSO* true of people who aren’t old enough to remember urban crime in the 1980s.

I was mugged for the first time at the age of 8. In the girl’s bathroom of my grammar school. Which was supposedly the safest on the UWS.

A kid in my high school class was hospitalized after a gang of boys his own age beat and mugged him. At 10 in the morning. Off of Park Avenue.

It’s easy to have a complex, nuanced, high-level response to crime when you’re reading about crime statistics. When you are actually personally, viscerally afraid of being hurt or killed every time you walk out of your front door, your reaction tends not to be so measured.

Was there a racialized aspect to politicians talking about crime? Absolutely. That was not, however, the only thing driving it. When politicians ranted about crime, what they were often really actually talking about was … crime. Which was genuinely scary for everyone.

Which is why, as the excellent “Locking Up Our Own” documents, so many “tough on crime” laws that did huge and disproportionate damage to young black men were originated or supported by the black community. They were most at risk from law enforcement, but also from crime.

We can argue over how important “the Southern Strategy” was to the GOP’s rise. But you can’t argue that race was the whole story. Or even the overwhelming majority of the story. There was a lot going on.

But some of those problems faded, largely of their own accord. And the generation that doesn’t remember them first-hand tends to discount those problems that faded, leaving only the problem which is still with us, to which they overattribute Reagan’s success.

The left frequently suggests that conservatives are insufficiently imaginative when discussing the problems of the poor, leaving out huge areas of complexity and nuance. They’re right. I see young lefties making the same error about the problems of their parents & grandparents.

It’s one part hindsight bias (“*I’d* have known this wasn’t that big a threat”) and one part the simple difficulty of imagining how something feels if you haven’t lived it.

May 30, 2018

Eurocrats send Italy back to the polls, to get it right this time

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

What were the Italians thinking? Didn’t they realize that the election of Euroskeptics would just result in the powers-that-be sending them back to vote (and possibly to vote again) until they get the right answer? Brendan O’Neill calls it a putsch:

There has been a putsch in Italy. A bloodless putsch, with no guns or jackboots, but a putsch nonetheless. The president’s vetoing of the finance minister put forward by the populist parties that won a huge number of votes in the General Election in March represents a grave assault on the democratic will. It is a technocratic coup, an EU-influenced, big-business-pleasing attempt to isolate and weaken the popular anti-Brussels sentiment that has swept Italy. Indeed, it has brought about the collapse of the talks to form a new populist government and made it necessary to hold fresh elections. Let’s be honest about what has happened here: March’s democratic election has essentially been voided by technocrats who care more about Euro financiers than they do about the ordinary people of Italy.

Italy has been plunged into political crisis by establishment figures who are repulsed by the Euroscepticism spreading through the nation. In the election in March, the mainstream parties – the Democratic Party and Forza Italia – were decimated by voters. They suffered an historic blow at the ballot box, the Democratic Party getting 18.7 per cent of the vote, and Forza Italia an even sadder 14 per cent. Meanwhile, populist parties, in particular the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League (formerly the Northern League), soared to the forefront of political life. M5S won 32.7 per cent of the vote, and the League won 17.4 per cent – a huge rise on the four per cent it got in the election in 2013.

[…]

The usurping of the popular will is best summed up in who has been promoted by Mattarella to replace Conte as the interim prime minister: Carlo Cottarelli, a former senior official in the International Monetary Fund who is referred to as ‘Mr Scissors’ for his insistence on cuts to public spending. So even though millions of Italians voted for populist parties that said they would reverse spending cuts and challenge Eurozone stability rules, now they find themselves ruled, for the time being, by a technocrat who takes an entirely different view. They have ended up with the opposite to what they voted for. This is the putsch; this is the technocratic coup; this is the thwarting of the democratic outlook by an establishment that thinks it knows better than ordinary people how their lives should be run.

This is how life in the Eurozone, and in the EU more broadly, works now. The people and the parties they vote for are written off by the expert class and technocrats and the forces of big business as irrational or prejudiced or dangerous, and the popular will is overriden in the name of maintaining the status quo. We saw this in the EU fury that greeted the French, Dutch and Irish revolts against the EU Constitution a decade ago; in the enforcement of spending cuts in Greece and Ireland that the people in those countries did not want; and we see it in the ongoing efforts by Brussels and its useful idiots in Britain to weaken or even kill off our mass vote for Brexit. Remainers, behold the truth of the institution you are fighting to defend: not the happy-clappy union of European peoples of your deluded dreams, but rather a vast oligarchical machine that laughs in the face of national sovereignty, views the democratic will as a pesky fly to be swatted away, and looks upon ordinary people as too pig-ignorant to make big political decisions. We need more rebellions against this elitist Euro-hatred for the views of ordinary people, and an all-out defence of the hard-won European principle of democracy.

May 27, 2018

Woke-ism, the new religion of progressives

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

John McWhorter notes the strong parallels between Christianity and woke-ness:

Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.

This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.

I have seen whites owning up to their white privilege using the hand-in-the-air-palm-out gesture typically associated with testifying in church. After the event I have been describing, all concerned deemed it “wonderful” even though nothing new had been learned. The purpose of the event was to remind the parishioners of the prevalence of the racist sin and its reflection in themselves, and to offer a kind of forgiveness, this latter being essentially the function of the black people on the panel and in the audience. Amen.

[…]

The self-affirming part is the rub. This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?” That isn’t what the Civil Rights revolution was about; it is the product of decades of mission creep aided by the emergence of social media.

What gets lost is that all of this awareness was supposed to be about helping black people, especially poor ones. We are too often distracted from this by a race awareness that has come to be largely about white people seeking grace. For example, one reads often of studies showing that black boys are punished and suspended in school more often than other kids. But then one reads equally often that poverty makes boys, in particular, more likely to be aggressive and have a harder time concentrating. We are taught to assume that the punishments and suspensions are due to racism, and to somehow ignore the data showing that the conditions too many black boys grow up in unfortunately makes them indeed more likely to act up in school. Might the poverty be the key problem to address? But, try this purely logical reasoning in polite company only at the risk of being treated as a moral reprobate. Our conversation is to be solely about racism, not solutions — other than looking to a vaguely defined future time when racism somehow disappears, America having “come to terms” with it: i.e. Judgment Day. As to what exactly this coming to terms would consist of, I suppose only our Pastor of White Privilege knows.

May 24, 2018

QotD: Hunter S. Thompson on the importance of breakfast

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

It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco who have been waiting all day in a condition of extreme fear and anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of “The Meaning of Jimmy Carter” to come roaring out of my faithful mojo wire and across 2,000 miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast……. But like almost everything else worth understanding, the explanation for this is deceptively quick and basic.

After more than ten years of trying to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have finally come to the harsh understanding that there is no way at all – not even for a doctor of chemotherapy with total access to the whole spectrum of legal and illegal drugs, the physical constitution of a mule shark and a brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond – to function as a political journalist without abandoning the whole concept of a decent breakfast. I have worked like 12 bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in The Road of Life that cannot be avoided: like a Jesuit priest who is also a practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the First, if we want to use the language of the church)….… Or a vegetarian pacifist with a .44 magnum fetish who wants to run for president without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or his New York City pistol permit that allows him to wear twin six-guns on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all of his press conferences.

There are some combinations that nobody can handle: shooting bats on the wing with a double-barreled .410 and a head full of jimson weed is one of them, and another is the idea that it is possible for a freelance writer with at least four close friends named Jones to cover a hopelessly scrambled presidential campaign better than any six-man team of career political journalists on the New York Times or the Washington Post and still eat a three-hour breakfast in the sun every morning.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.

May 23, 2018

“Red Ken” leaves the Labour Party

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

The former Lord Mayor of London resigned from the British Labour Party earlier this week:

Ken Livingstone resigned from the Labour Party yesterday. Allegations of anti-Semitism, following his comments about Hitler supporting Zionism, had, he said, become a distraction. Indeed, his ongoing membership of the party had become a particular problem for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, his friend and ally, whose leadership has been dogged by the suggestion that he is soft on left anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Livingstone’s resignation is a cruel end to a career that saw him twice govern London as mayor, earn a reputation for radicalism, and play a decisive part in the development of the policy of ‘equal opportunities’ at work.

He was elected to represent Norwood on the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1973. He became head of the GLC in 1981, until it was abolished by the Conservative government in 1986. In 2000, when the Labour government created the Greater London Authority, and a new elected mayoral position, Livingstone was blocked by the party hierarchy from standing. Instead he ran as an independent and won. Later he was re-elected as a Labour candidate and held the position until he was defeated by Boris Johnson in 2008.

In the 1980s, Livingstone was one of the left-wingers who took control of London boroughs after Labour lost control of central government. Seeing that the old alliance of trade unions and Labour was no longer successful in rallying voters, Livingstone set about mobilising other constituencies. As had been trialled in Lambeth council by Ted Knight and Herman Ouseley, Livingstone set up a race-relations unit at the GLC, with a special remit to address discrimination in the recruitment of its workforce.

With similar policies extended to women’s employment, and later to the employment of lesbian and gay employees and those with disabilities, the GLC policy formed the archetype for the equal-opportunities policies that are today ubiquitous.

[…]

Livingstone has certainly given his opponents a lot of ammunition. He defends a view of Zionism as a collaboration with Nazism that loses sight of the difference between the two. He could claim that it is not his historical thesis, but one supported by such writers as Lenni Brenner. Still, more than a few people have noticed that Livingstone seems a bit stuck on this claim, in a way that suggests he might relish provoking Jewish activists and journalists.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of bitter resentment held by more moderate Labour supporters about the way that the left of the party has berated them over questions of racial justice over the years. And so the issue of anti-Semitism has become a means for some of them to get some payback by denouncing Livingstone’s supposed anti-Semitism.

Many of those denouncing Livingstone today are seeking to paint him – and, by connection, Corbyn’s team – as hopelessly anti-Semitic. In doing so they appear indifferent to the debt they owe to Livingstone for the development of equal-opportunities policies, whose very logic they are using to denounce an enemy for his improper expressions.

QotD: The threaten, bribe, bamboozle hypothesis

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

Ruling elites have three basic ways to keep the subject population under their thumb: threaten, bribe, and bamboozle. Everything they do is a variant of one of these basic actions. So, if the lush, misleading overgrowth were cut away, all government activities could be undertaken by only three departments: the Department of Cops and Soldiers; the Department of Santa Claus; and the Department of Delusion. However, if such a drastic, visible simplification were undertaken, the efficacy of the bamboozlement would be greatly diminished. It would be a public disservice to load more truth on the public than it can stand.

Much of what the government does ostensibly to carry out some valuable purpose (e.g., assisting the deserving poor, the sick, the struggling millionaire farmers, the domestic sellers facing allegedly unfair import competition, the sober college students, the elderly, people suffering ethnic or racial discrimination; protecting the nation against menacing foreigners and aliens from outer space; containing disastrous global warming; promoting a cleaner, healthier environment; undertaking or subsidizing scientific and technological research) amounts to specific forms of bribery, to buying people’s loyalties by giving them a portion of the loot the government acquires by means of its threats of enforcement and its bamboozlement in regard to the subjects’ “civic duty” to cough up taxes as the government stipulates. The state’s organizational complexity and its associated pragmatic and ideological veils prevent the general public from seeing what is really going on and then, perhaps, opposing it or becoming more recalcitrant in complying with government edicts and demands for tribute, thereby throwing sand in the state’s machinery of oppression and plunder.

As an exercise, you might test the TBB (threaten, bribe, bamboozle) hypothesis. See if you can find any significant government activity that does not fit under one or more of these three rubrics.

Robert Higgs, “The Three Basic Means by Which Ruling Elites Maintain Their Control”, The Beacon, 2016-09-07.

May 21, 2018

The five tribes of the Scottish Nationalist Party

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

Stephen Daisley explains the five main groupings within the overall SNP and why they aren’t getting along:

Fractiousness is nothing new in Scottish Nationalism. For most of its history, the only thing SNP members could agree on was the merit of a good rammy. Gradualists declared sovereignty would come in increments; while fundamentalists insisted independence yesterday would still be independence too late. Conference was an annual pitched battle where each faction schemed, cajoled and manoeuvred against the other. The gradualists came to dominate the leadership and party machine, but the fundies consoled themselves that the members were really with them.

After 11 years in government, a lost independence referendum and an explosion in membership, the battle lines in Scottish nationalism have been redrawn into five main camps. These are the Deciders, the New Establishment, the Separatist Spoilers, the Social Media Chauvinists and the Reluctant Reformers.

At the top sit the Deciders – First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, husband Peter Murrell and select advisers. This is the most exclusive club and it runs the party (and the country) almost singlehandedly. Consultation outwith the clique is rare and once a course of action has been decided, the chances of an outsider successfully challenging it are next to none. The Deciders decide; everyone else exists to nod along and applaud as instructed.

The New Establishment is the nomenklatura of SNP Scotland; dutiful courtiers, stenographers and political enforcers for the Nationalist elite. Among them are financially canny third sector executives, on-message opinion formers and the professional class who were conscientious Labour until the polls told their conscience to back the other horse.

The New Establishment rates itself highly and bristles when shown insufficient deference – a daily hazard when the rest of the movement sees them as useful idiots.

One such impatient class is the Separatist Spoilers. Many have arrived at the doors of the SNP megachurch after September 2014, emptying their pockets into the collection box and singing the hymns one syllable behind everyone else.

Others will be regular attendees and even elders, who are heartened by the new congregants and their fervour, even if they are a little brash, a bit Central Belt, a touch too socially and culturally Labour.

What unites the Separatist Spoilers is unwavering devotion to the catechism of independence. Separation is their chiefest joy. Nothing – no biased BBC reporting, no Unionist-infiltrated GERS office, no ‘facts’ from the London-based IFS – will dissuade them from the path of righteousness.

They are spoilers insofar as the ruination of Scotland’s schools, hospitals, and economy are deemed a price worth paying for her freedom.

Beyond these lie the Social Media Chauvinists, who combine belligerent nationalism with online invective and intimidation. The category is not limited to obscure keyboard warriors; it includes elected Nationalists for whom abusing the enemy – they do not see mere opponents – is intrinsic to their politics.

Social Media Chauvinists whip up cybernat pile-ons, keep the worst of the grassroots ginned up and target journalists and critics sceptical of the regime. They have constructed their own reality from an echo chamber of antagonistic bloggers and unhinged conspiracy theorists. Their indoor voice is a howl and paranoia their idea of equanimity; they are often to be found in a tizz over British-branded foodstuffs and unpatriotic weather maps.

[…]

Most pitiful of all are the Reluctant Reformers. They are no less committed to independence but accept the constraints of economics and public opinion. They are willing to make a go of devolution but alarmed by how quickly colleagues tire of discussing the attainment gap and NHS performance. Opponents are to be engaged with and compromise found in the common interest. Reluctant Reformers are in tune with SNP voters but treacherously off-key to the rest of the movement.

Separatist Spoilers hate the New Establishment; Reluctant Reformers hate the Social Media Chauvinists; everybody hates the Deciders.

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

May 20, 2018

QotD: Robert Conquest’s Laws of Politics

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

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

May 19, 2018

QotD: Operation “keeping up appearances”

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

It’s hard to blame the Army, and even if it wasn’t not all of even most of the blame can be laid at the Army’s doorstep.

Government, both Conservative and Liberal kept repeating Pierre Trudeau’s lie that “we’re here and we’re doing our full, fair and agreed upon share.” Kudos to Prime Minister Mulroney who, when faced with irrefutable and embarrassingly public evidence that we simply could not deploy and sustain two small brigades in war, cancelled the North Norway brigade commitment and pulled the Germany-based brigade back to Canada.

canadian-defence-spending-ted-campbell

This graph, which is only rough, being drawn from three different sources and “rounded” for ease of plotting, shows, essentially, what happened between 1964 (Prime Minister Pearson) and 2014 Prime Minister Harper). As you can see defence spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product ~ a fair measure of our national, political commitment to our defence of Canada and of our allies and neighbours, has declined steadily even though, generally, with one “blip” in the Chrétien era, when he was trying to wrestle with the deficit, the actual dollars spent on defence have grown in number. What it really shows is that our GDP grew a lot in the past 50 years ~ it’s now almost $2.5 Trillion (that’s $2,500,000,000,000.00) ~ but our political willingness (or appreciation of the necessity) to spend 2% of GDP, as we did in about 1970s and as we have, sort of, agreed (in NATO) do aspire to do again, has not kept pace with our increasing prosperity. In fact, while the dollars spend on defence have doubled, in 50 years, the % of GDP spent of defence has fallen to ⅓ of its 1964 level. But ministers’ desires to “talk good fight” remain at historically high levels and even as resources shrink admirals and generals are told to “keep up appearances”. That, keeping up appearances, was what the admirals and generals wanted to do … no one really wanted to go into various international military fora and say “as our resources decline we’re going to have to do less,” instead they went out and said “we’re learning new ways to do more with less,” which is, of course, utter nonsense. Meanwhile more and more quite senior officers came back from tours of duty in the USA and brought with them some very American ideas about organization and management. Now American organizational models might work very well for armies with 1,000,000+ soldiers, or even for those with 495,000, like South Korea’s perhaps, even for those with 100,000+ like the French army, but they are not always or even often suitable for an army with 20,000± regulars and 25,000± reservists. The new organizations might make us look bigger, on paper, but they hide the fact the army has been hollowed out since 1970.

The Army of 1964, the one that consumed its fair share of the 3% of GDP that Canada spent on defence had four brigades, the largest had about 6,500 soldiers in it, the smaller ones had about 5,000 each. That was more men and women in combat units than we have in the entire, top heavy, Canadian Army today in total. But we still have three of the four brigades, we have nine instead of 13 battalions of infantry and three instead of four regiments of artillery … but how? Simple: it’s the Potemkin village, again, battalions that should have 950 soldiers have 500 … if their lucky. In fact there are no combat ready infantry battalions. Any battalion being readied for operations must be reinforced from other infantry battalions … we have nine battalion commanders and nine regimental sergeants major and so on but we only have enough soldiers in rifle platoons to staff five battalions … maybe only four if the battalions are properly equipped with mortars and heavy assault weapons. Why? Because no one, not ministers, not senior civil servants and not the generals want to “cut his coat according to his cloth.”

Ted Campbell, “A Canadian Potemkin Village”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2016-09-15.

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