Isn’t it interesting that no matter what the current global crisis is, according to leftists, the solution is always the same: a benevolent world dictatorship of the enlightened elite, and mass transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations.
That’s what they want to do about global warming. It’s what they wanted to do about overpopulation. It’s what they wanted to do about endangered species.
Steven den Beste, commenting on “Population Bomb Epic Fail” by Steven Hayward, 2011-10-29.
August 19, 2018
QotD: A unified theory of left-wing causes
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August 17, 2018
“…when he asked her about [Jagmeet] Singh’s CBC appearance, ‘Notley laughed out loud'”
Colby Cosh is apparently fascinated by the internecine fight shaping up between the NDP Premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, and the federal NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh:
Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.
If I am being honest, the thing about the Singh-Notley quarrel that interests me most is not the range of possible political consequences. Nor is it the brute economics of Canadian oil. No, I am most interested in the rhetorical style of it. Last week, on CBC’s Power and Politics, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was discussing Saudi Arabia’s strange diplomatic meltdown and started speculating about Canada’s need to look for imported oil from other countries. Western viewers — no doubt the CBC technically has some — were well aware that Singh had opposed the controversial Energy East pipeline.
[…]
With Saudi Arabia acting like the cranky, unstable extended family it is, Energy East is looking a bit like a missed opportunity — not only for landlocked Alberta, which has a permanent stake in the multiplication of oil export options, but for the entire country. So it did not take long for people to start laughing at Singh’s musings about where, oh where on this great planet Earth, Canada might obtain some oil.
I am using the word “laughing” literally. On Friday, the Edmonton Journal’s politics columnist, Graham Thomson, had a sitdown with Alberta NDP Premier Notley, and when he asked her about Singh’s CBC appearance, “Notley laughed out loud … ‘It struck me that that was a thing that maybe he should have thought through before he said it.’ ”
The premier went on to add “What happened with Jagmeet is that he’s learning that things are not as simple as they sometimes seem” and insisted that “to throw (workers) under the bus as collateral damage in pursuit of some other high-level policy objective is a recipe for failure, and it’s also very elitist.” The e-word! For New Democrats, that’s rough talk.
[…]
Her rough treatment of Singh is unlikely to hurt his by-electoral cause in Burnaby, so the Notley-Singh fight can still be dismissed as mutually beneficial political theatre. Still, Singh tried to defend himself, sort of, in a Monday interview with our Maura Forrest. “I know that Premier Notley’s in a tough political fight,” he said, “but I’ve always felt, and I believe, that personal attacks are beneath her. That’s not my way and I think she’s better than that.”
I will never stop being confused and amused by the way politicians speak in these situations. Read for pure ostensive meaning, Singh is not accusing Notley of making a personal attack on him: in fact, he’s specifically saying that she is incapable of such a thing. But then why should she need the excuse of a tough political fight? Of course, we all know that saying someone is “better than that” is another way of calling them a jerk — perhaps the cruellest.
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QotD: TINA
I believe, and I have alluded to this several times, that we must anchor all our policies in North America. We are, I have said, again more than once, bound by what some wag called TINA²: we are Trapped In North America and There Is No Alternative. (TINA X TINA = TINA²) That’s the crux of it … no matter what some romantics might wish we are and must remain for generations anchored in North America. We are not big enough and rich enough to be powerful enough to face the world on our own, treating the USA as just another great power ~ as, arguably, Australia does. Geography, economics, personal issues ~ we are kith and kin ~ and the power imbalance make us dependent upon America to a degree that some, including me, find unhealthy.
But, until we can grow our population to 100 million, until we can grow up and appreciate that we need substantial hard (military) power in order to promote and protect our vital interests around the globe, until we can become a global free trader, and until America’s decline is more marked then There Is No Alternative … we are Trapped In North America ~ trapped in Donald Trump’s America, for now, anyway.
Ted Campbell, “Anchor, cornerstone or stumbling block?”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2018-07-17.
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August 16, 2018
August 15, 2018
Robert Heinlein – Highs and Lows – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 14 Aug 2018Heinlein’s novels made science fiction mainstream and even contributed to modern libertarianism. His novels vary widely in the philosophies they explore, but ultimately they all reflect how Heinlein saw himself: as the self-reliant “competent man” protagonist of his stories, despite glaring inconsistencies.
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Maxime Bernier on sensible limits to “unlimited” diversity
Maxime Bernier responds to Prime Minister Trudeau’s apparently unlimited desire for more and more diversity in Canada:
1/ Trudeau keeps pushing his “diversity is our strength” slogan. Yes, Canada is a huge and diverse country. This diversity is part of us and should be celebrated. But where do we draw the line?
Diversity is what makes Canada strong: Trudeau https://t.co/dZmCffRBFY
— Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) August 13, 2018
The following tweets as a screencap, to avoid slowing down the whole page loading (as often happens with multiple tweet embeds):
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August 12, 2018
Misunderstanding what the trade deficit represents
In a post from last week, Tim Worstall explains why Donald Trump is wrong about the economic impact of a trade deficit:
I should note here that I didn’t, because as a foreigner I can’t, support The Donald at the last election. But I didn’t support Hillary even more. So this is more about really, actually, insisting that Trump is wrong on trade issues rather than just the more general he’s wrong about everything common in the US press.
[…]
What Trump, DiMicco and Navarro are getting wrong is this, the GDP equation.
Y = C+I+G+(X-M)GDP is consumption plus investment plus government spending plus the trade balance – and minus it if there’s a trade deficit. So people look at this and think yep, if there’s a trade deficit than that makes Y, GDP, smaller!
But this is a mistake, an error. For, as the textbook immediately goes on to explain, what is it that we do with imports? Well, we either consume them, use them in investments or government buys them. So all imports are already in C and I and G. Meaning that if we don’t deduct them we’ll be double counting them. So, to avoid double counting we subtract them.
Trump and his advisers are simply wrong on this. The trade deficit doesn’t reduce the size of the economy. They’re getting it wrong simply because they’re not reading the second page of the explanation of the GDP equation.
Public statuary … can we just get rid of the politicians?
In the wake of Victoria’s city council deciding to remove a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Colby Cosh suggests that we apply a broader brush to what is acceptable for public display and get rid of the rest of the politicians, too:
The mayor of Victoria, Lisa Helps, emphasized that the removal of the statue is “temporary,” promising to “find a way to recontextualize Macdonald in an appropriate way.” This suggests that the statue will find a home somewhere, perhaps even in its accustomed place, but will have to be accompanied by a sanitizing “This was a bad, racist guy despite having led the creation of our federation” text inscribed nearby.
All of this gives me a chance to rehearse my inconveniently unclassifiable views on the subject of revisionist iconoclasm in public settings. Part of me is sympathetic to the anti-revisionist case. Even if Victoria took a year with this decision, a year is not a long time to reconsider an act of commemoration that was intended to be permanent in the first place. Any one generation, let alone a small group within it, ought to be hesitant in removing public statuary — doubly so, perhaps, if you are doing it “temporarily” but without a deadline for its return. Putting objects of built heritage in storage is the easiest way for a government to demolish them, through neglect, on the sly.
With that said, I could be convinced to pick up a hammer if there is to be a general smashing of statues of politicians. No city or country really has a shortage of people to honour whose contribution to humanity is unambiguously and uncontentiously positive. Those who exercise political power, even in a democracy, rarely fall into this category. If we were building a country from scratch, I would suggest we start building statues to those who excel in the realm of pure thought — physics, math, music, scholarship — and work “down” through artisans, philanthropists, innovators and entrepreneurs.
Once we’re past the tradesmen who did good work and mentored the young, and we have made modest busts or reliefs of everyone who just worked to make a neighbourhood nicer or cleaner or safer, and we have put a few people on postage stamps just for contributing their own earnings or effort to any of the Corporal Works of Mercy, we can start with politicians of an especially noble and humane character who executed great necessary enterprises by means of law.
Politicians get big-ass statues because it is politicians who build statues: that’s all. The problem is that this encourages the dangerous habit of reverence for politicians, who, despite endless complaining about the thanklessness of their vocation, hardly go without social privileges or deference or celebration within their own lifetimes. In the case of statues or images of Sir John A. Macdonald, the veneration is all but explicit. The Old Chieftain represents the juvenile desire to have a George Washington-like national paterfamilias, to have a single founder to serve as the incarnation of our glorious state.
I am not a politician and I endorse this message. I’d be even more on board if we also chiselled off the names of politicians from schools, community centres, streets, and any other edifice built with taxpayer money.
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August 11, 2018
QotD: Reductio ad Hitlerum
The poverty of peoples’ collective memory and imagination is such that the first minute any politician strays from the path of universalism, commentators reach for the most shocking (and only) historical comparison they can think of.
Ed West, “It’s absurd to compare Amber Rudd’s immigration speech to Mein Kampf”, The Spectator, 2016-11-07.
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August 9, 2018
Scottish schools’ proposed gender initiative will encourage gender uncertainty in 5-year-olds
Joanna Williams explains why authority figures actively undermining one of the few certainties in a young child’s world is bound to cause much more harm to many children:
Education Scotland, regional NHS boards and the Scottish government jointly came up with this new gender initiative’s daft – sorry, draft – guidelines, which are set to come into effect from 2019. The plan is to tell children: ‘Your sex is what you are told by a doctor when you are born. Most people are told they are a male child (a boy) or a female child (a girl).’ But this ridiculous statement contradicts everything children will later learn in biology lessons. Babies are not ‘told’ they are a particular sex in some odd conversation between parents and midwives on the labour ward. The overwhelming majority of babies actually are male or female, boys or girls. Sex is not a lottery. It doesn’t depend on how the doctor happens to be feeling at a certain point in time. It is there in the child’s genitals and in their chromosomes. Telling children that sex is simply something that is arbitrarily announced by a doctor is a lie.
But propagating this lie and encouraging children to believe that sex is a random declaration allows teachers to go on to tell children: ‘Your gender is what you decide.’ In other words, children will be told to ignore the evidence they see before them every time they go to the toilet or get undressed. Ignore what the nasty doctor said. And ignore what family members have wickedly led them to believe. Not only does this undermine parents, it also heaps a lot of pressure on to the shoulders of five-year-olds. Most find it difficult enough to decide what to have for breakfast. Their brains are full of Minecraft, superheroes or Friendship Fairies. They worry about dinosaurs coming back to life and unicorns not being real. It is hard to see how telling children this age that one of the few things they know for certain isn’t certain after all can do anything other than cause distress.
But the problematising continues. ‘People might think they know your gender because of the clothes you wear or the things you like to do’, children will be told. But, of course, these people are wrong: ‘You are a unique person, you know who you are.’ This confuses two separate issues – gender stereotypes and actually being a boy or a girl. It also seriously underestimates children. The youngest children distinguish between boy stuff and girl stuff; they know whether they are a boy or a girl and which clothes and toys they are supposed to like. But while some children might police gender stereotypes with enthusiasm, others do not. They know, better than the Scottish government it seems, that you can play football and still be a girl or dress up as a princess and still be a boy. Even those keen to enforce gender conformity at age five may well rebel by the time they are 15. And so what if they don’t? If a boy enjoys being a boy and wants to grow up into a man, is that really so bad?
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August 7, 2018
“[Trudeau’s] ideology is jeopardizing 20% of the Canadian economy”
Brandon Kirby on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s failing efforts to negotiate with the United States on trade:
Trade with Canada constitutes 2% of America’s GDP and trade with America constitutes a whopping 20% of Canada’s GDP. My home province of New Brunswick finds 50% of its private sector exporting to the U.S. – NAFTA is of vital importance to our economy.
The dwindling efforts of Trudeau’s cabinet to negotiate a deal with the Americans could become his government’s greatest failure. With tariffs already being imposed on steel and aluminum, NAFTA is potentially unraveling before our eyes and along with it, the Canadian economy.
Trudeau’s American counterpart isn’t known for his vocal support of trade and yet he handed Canada everything on a silver platter at the recent G7 summit. He offered to remove all tariffs and subsidies on imports and exports, provided Canada did the same. This is about as fair an offer as one could expect. Trudeau retaliated by insisting Canada had been insulted.
The trouble with Trudeau is precisely that. He was given a talking point. He developed rhetoric rather than substance. Akin to Marco Rubio’s disaster of a debate performance, who refused to go off script even when he was being called out for scripted answers, Trudeau had a talking point. It was a good one, Canadians and Americans died together in the mountains of Afghanistan to bring justice for Americans who died on September 11th. Trump alluded to our tariffs on their dairy farmers as a national security threat. But when Trump acquiesced, Trudeau kept to his talking points and refused to go off script, even when his talking points no longer made sense.
The initial renegotiation began with Trudeau’s government attempting to include a chapter on gender. The Americans weren’t enthusiastic about devoting a significant portion of their time at the negotiations to discussing an unenforceable chapter of the deal, but Trudeau pressed on.
The liberal rationale in the briefing notes was leaked, “Think back 20 years and remember the early discussions of labour and environment in the context of trade agreements.”
Environmental and labour standards were included in the negotiations of decades past because a country that has humane labour standards is at a trade disadvantage to countries that neglect their workers and their environment. Gender doesn’t have any bearing on trade. His ideology is jeopardizing 20% of the Canadian economy.
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August 6, 2018
QotD: Voting
Most people vote in elections for the candidate they dislike the least, and perhaps this is as it should be: positive enthusiasm for candidates and politicians in general is likely to give them an inflated idea of their own importance and thereby promote the politicization of life.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Self-Anointed v. Resentful: A view from across the Atlantic”, City Journal, 2016-11-08.
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August 4, 2018
Violence against women
Joanna Williams on the problem that well-established, well-paid, financially secure women — at least the professional feminists fitting those criteria — are having to work very hard to maintain their air of victimhood:
Being a feminist must be hard work. Perhaps you’ve got a newspaper column to fill with your hot take on the latest sexist outrage. Or perhaps you have a university sexual-harassment policy to write. Or a government minister to consult about a proposed new law. Or a hefty budget to administer. You’ve got the salary, a platform for your views, and the capacity to influence what happens in almost every institution in the country. And yet the entire basis for you being in this fortunate position, for walking the corridors of power, is your powerlessness. The bind for today’s professional feminist is the more power and influence she gains, the harder she needs to work to show that women are still oppressed.
[…]
As feminists increasingly take positions of power, tackling violence against women drives their agenda. The World Health Organisation tells us that violence against women ‘is a major public-health problem’. The United Nations tells us it is ‘a grave violation of human rights’. The British government describes violence ‘against women and girls’ as a serious crime that has ‘a huge impact on our economy, health services, and the criminal-justice system’.
Of course, violence against women and girls deserves to be taken seriously and perpetrators should be severely punished. But the lives of women in poverty-stricken and wartorn countries are very different to those of women in England. Likewise, adult women have far more agency and control over their lives than girls. Conflating the experiences of women all around the world, and of adult women with children, allows professional feminists to claim suffering by proxy.
At the same time, the definition of violence seems to broaden by the day. The internationally agreed definition of violence against women and girls is: ‘Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women [or girls], including threats of such acts.’ In the UK and the US, violence encompasses sexual harassment – which includes winking, whistling and looking at someone for too long. Amnesty International describes women’s experiences of ‘violence and abuse on Twitter’. In 2017, the organisers of a women’s strike against President Trump described ‘the violence of the market, of debt, of capitalist property relations, and of the state; the violence of discriminatory policies against lesbian, trans and queer women’.
This is not violence as a physical act, but violence as metaphor. No wonder it is experienced everywhere. The World Health Organisation describes violence against women as an ‘epidemic’. We are told that over a third of girls have been sexually harassed at school and that more than a third of women have experienced sexual harassment at work. But then we also learn that two women are killed each week by a current or former partner. And here, immediately, is the problem with violence as metaphor. Real violence becomes relativised. When winking and nasty tweets are described as acts of violence, the word is no longer enough to describe acts of physical brutality and murder. Violence has become nothing more than a badge permitting membership of an inclusive feminist club, and this does little to support women who really are in need of help.
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August 2, 2018
The role of the gatekeepers for Trans youth
This is a debate that has been bullrushed by the sudden political success of Trans activists, but there are genuine medical and ethical issues that need to be taken into account:
I’m a transsexual woman in my thirties who transitioned in my early twenties, and I wish I could have done so earlier. Even so, I am wary of today’s Brave New World of transgender activism in which important safeguards of transition are under attack and any counter opinion, even if made by a trans woman such as myself, are labelled as an attack on trans rights. At first it was easier for me to not ruffle the trans activists’ feathers, but my conscience got the better of me, and now I am continuing to speak up in order to help those who deserve better in their own journey of transition.
Through talking to other trans people in my life, it has become apparent to me that transition surgeries are an answer but not the answer to the long-term health and well-being of gender dysphoria patients. Unfortunately, many trans people get so fixated on surgery for so long, that they may forget that there is more to life and transitioning than just surgery and other medical intervention. The fixation is often driven by the fantasy that surgery, and transition in general, will transform them into a new person, and that all the problems in life will go away.
I haven’t known a lot of trans people over the years, but of the few that I know, there did seem to be a powerful belief that if they could fix just this one thing — their gender — then their lives would be perfect forever. In at least two cases, having transitioned, they then discovered that they were just as miserable as they had been before despite having changed to their preferred gender. All the surgery in the world won’t fix mental problems, and the disappointment and anger seemed to be that much greater when the situation finally came home. I’m not claiming this is in any way universal, but of the small number of trans people I’ve known, it was true for half of them.
During my gender transition, I didn’t fixate on surgery even though I was highly dysphoric back then. I’ve had my ups and downs, but I’ve always done okay. To be honest, thinking about sex and gender a lot is unhealthy, particularly during high-conflict public debates on what it means to be transgender and what rights we have to get the help we need. As the debate grows more divisive, the media valorization and glamorization of trans people, especially trans children, is not helping but rather, it is pulling us away from the honest conversations we need to have.
Forty-one percent of transgender people [PDF] have experienced suicidal ideation or self-harm, though this statistic does not indicate to what extent the attempts were before or after transition, or at what stage of transition. Nevertheless, studies have shown high rates of suicide among (alleged) trans people post-medical transition. Why is this the case and can the quality of transition be a factor?
As I understand it, the overall success rate of transgender surgery is higher the earlier it is conducted … within reason. This is where the ethical issues are the most pressing:
The move away from the medical gatekeeping model for treating gender dysphoria is not only unfortunate, it is irresponsible. Over the past few decades, the strictness of the standards of healthcare used to determine suitability for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and related surgeries have been relaxed significantly. In 2008, the Endocrine Society endorsed puberty blockers as a treatment for trans teenagers. Then in 2011, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) issued new Standards of Care internationally for treating such patients via puberty suppression, while formalizing the ‘informed consent’ model. But it didn’t end there.
Last month here in Australia, new guidelines published in the Medical Journal of Australia gave the green light for potentially more trans children to go on HRT as young as 13, defying international guidelines. Specifically, “decisions about affirming a young person’s gender identity should be driven primarily by the child or adolescent, in conjunction with their family and health care providers.” While this experiment was hailed as world-leading, the minimum legal age for smoking, drinking and voting in Australia remains at 18, and it’s still 16 for consensual sex. So in Australia, a 15-year-old teen cannot consent to sexual activity but they can consent to life-altering medical treatments that they almost certainly cannot fully grasp at that age.
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August 1, 2018
British Labour Party continues to sideline pro-Brexit MPs
Fraser Myers on the most recent pro-Brexit Labour MP deselected by local party activists:
Labour Party activists have passed votes of no confidence in two of Labour’s Brexit-backing MPs, and called for their deselection. Frank Field and Kate Hoey were censured by their local parties for voting with the government against an amendment that would have kept the UK in a customs union with the EU after Brexit. If passed, it would have killed off any prospect of Britain having an independent trade policy after Brexit, and would have kept us under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Recognising this as a betrayal of the Leave vote, Labour Brexiteers had no other choice but to vote with the government to defeat the amendment. Now, for defending the democratic choice of 17.4million voters, Field and Hoey stand accused of ‘betraying’ the Labour movement and ‘siding with the reactionary Tory establishment’.
This sends a disastrous message to voters and pits Labour against the Leave vote, the largest democratic mandate in British history. Labour’s better-than-expected result at the 2017 General Election depended on retaining Brexit-voting seats. Two thirds of Labour MPs represent Leave-backing constituencies, with some of the largest Leave votes in Labour-held seats. Labour needs to win 64 seats at the next election to form a majority government, 42 of which are dotted around blue-collar, Leave-voting England. To attack the few Labour MPs who are on the side of the Leave majority is an astonishing act of self-harm for a party that claims to represent ordinary people.
While some Blairite MPs have long feared the prospect of deselection campaigns launched by the Corbyn-backing Momentum, the no-confidence motion against Kate Hoey was initiated by members of the Blairite pressure group, Progress. And rather than stand up for Hoey, a defender of Corbyn’s leadership, Momentum sided with its erstwhile rivals against the Brexiteer MP. As Owen Jones revealingly writes in the Guardian: ‘Self-professed Blairites, soft lefties and Corbynites were united in this vote.’ While the Blairite and Corbynite wings of the party claim to agree on very little, they appear to be united in their contempt for the electorate and for democracy.
These activists seem to forget that Labour has a long history of Euroscepticism. Labour’s much-celebrated postwar prime minister, Clement Attlee, and the architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan, were against Britain joining the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community (EEC). When the left-winger Michael Foot led Labour into the 1983 General Election, the party’s manifesto pledged to withdraw Britain from the EEC. Tony Benn – Corbyn’s hero – opposed the anti-democratic tendencies of the EU all his life. Would Benn, Foot and Bevan face a similar fate to Hoey and Field in Labour today?
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