Quotulatiousness

May 18, 2018

Deploy scare quotes as required when considering the “cultural” “impact” of the suburbs

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

Rick McGinnis has a thoughtful piece on the creation and evolution of the modern western suburb, in the context of the ongoing Ontario election:

Maybe it’s some remnant of our tribal past, but it’s hard for us to leave behind some impulse to fear and vilify whoever lives one village over, beyond the river or in the next valley. We might think we’re sophisticated, cosmopolitan people, but this nascent tribalism is never far from the surface, and I saw it re-emerge with a roar during recent municipal elections here in Toronto.

Back when the late Rob Ford won his surprise mayoral victory in 2010 – certainly a surprise for his opponents, who couldn’t imagine how decisively he’d win – the electoral post-mortems painted his triumph as the revenge of the suburbs that once comprised a group of independent townships over the downtown, Toronto’s older urban core.

It was a battle between the suburbs and the city, won this time by the suburbs, who rallied behind various standards – summed up in the media as a love of cars, ethnic and cultural homogeneity and lower property taxes. As with any history written by the losers – the media, for the most part, who identified as urbanite, not suburbanite – it relied on conveniently ignoring facts that didn’t fit, and the deployment of sweeping generalizations, many of them out of date – if they were ever true at all – by decades.

[…]

Up here in Ontario, the imminent provincial election means that the suburbs versus city scenario will be revived, to either apportion blame should Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford become premier, or get unpacked if he loses and the boogeyman of a monolithic voting bloc needs to be triumphantly debunked.

There remains the small matter that Ford Nation events – held inevitably in the suburbs since the heyday of Doug’s brother Rob – are visibly far more diverse than, say, the average Liberal fundraiser, and Ford opponents have been chewing on that tough gristle for nearly a decade.

Obviously, the suburbs can’t be both a politically, economically and culturally monolithic place, and a diverse, complex collection of communities mysteriously moved to unite during election cycles to oppose the prerogatives of certain political parties and the urbanites who love them. There’s a very complex story about the suburbs dying to be told, but we’re still invested in stereotypes that are decades out-of-date for the purposes of situational political utility. It’s an object lesson that politics, more than anything else, is the enemy of truth.

Diversity has joined “marriage,” “rights,” “privilege” and “family” on that list of words that we’ve come to use without sharing a common meaning, especially when we talk about places like the suburbs, what have come to mean something very different in our imaginations than they exist in reality. For the people living there – whose lived experience has nothing to do with convenient fictions – the suburbs are really just a place where a mortgage might be affordable, where you can have a front and a back yard, and where you don’t share walls with your neighbours.

QotD: The purpose of propaganda

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

No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.

Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1960.

May 17, 2018

QotD: Emotion beats the facts (to post on social media)

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

Suppose a black guy is shot by a cop. I have absolutely no information about it. I don’t know if the black guy was shot, for example, accidentally or in a conflict. I don’t know if he was armed or not. I don’t know if the cop shooting is black or white.

I know nothing about it.

Now — should I have an opinion on this matter?

The obvious answer is “No, I should not,” but that’s not the real answer.

In this #HotTake non-culture culture, I should definitely have an opinion.

Based on what, if i have no information?

Based upon my tribal sympathies and chauvinisms, is the answer.

See, anyone can condemn a cop shooting once they know the actual facts and the facts turn out to show that the victim was innocent and the cop was blameworthy, fast on the trigger or negligent or what have you.

But if I wait to know the facts, what does that say about me as a person? It says nothing about me — again, anyone can see the facts of a bad shooting and then say “That was a bad shooting.”

No — to establish yourself as on a higher moral plane than other people, You have to offer a strident, emotionally-hot opinion without knowing anything.

Because only if you don’t have the proper facts upon which to make that determination can you successfully advertise the fact that you are knee-jerkedly siding with BlackLivesMatter.

(Or, for that matter, with cops, if that’s your preference.)

Again, this is not a game of showing that you’ve come to a reasoned judgment after the evidence has emerged and you have apprised yourself of it.

Bad people can use the power of reason too, after all. Racists can see a shooting was bad, if the evidence proves the shooting was bad.

The game is not to make a reasoned, fact-based judgment — because that says nothing about your default sympathies, tribal allegiances, and ideological priors.

The game is to make an unreasoned, non-fact-based judgment, a judgment based only on emotion and allegiance and chauvinism — because that, unlike a fact-based judgment, shows where your heart is.

That’s why people in the #HotTake culture pressure others to take positions before any facts are actually known — facts are for the emotionally cold.

Ace, “Our #HotTake Culture and Why It Exists, and Open Thread”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2016-08-26.

May 15, 2018

QotD: The making of Gandhi

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

As it happens, the government of India openly admits to having provided one-third of the financing of Gandhi out of state funds, straight out of the national treasury — and after close study of the finished product I would not be a bit surprised to hear that it was 100 percent. If Pandit Nehru is portrayed flatteringly in the film, one must remember that Nehru himself took part in the initial story conferences (he originally wanted Gandhi to be played by Alec Guinness) and that his daughter Indira Gandhi is, after all, Prime Minister of India (though no relation to Mohandas Gandhi). The screenplay was checked and rechecked by Indian officials at every stage, often by the Prime Minister herself, with close consultations on plot and even casting. If the movie contains a particularly poisonous portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Indian reply, I suppose, would be that if the Pakistanis want an attractive portrayal of Jinnah let them pay for their own movie. A friend of mine, highly sophisticated in political matters but innocent about film-making, declared that Gandhi should be preceded by the legend: The following film is a paid political advertisement by the government of India.

Gandhi, then, is a large, pious, historical morality tale centered on a saintly, sanitized Mahatma Gandhi cleansed of anything too embarrassingly Hindu (the word “caste” is not mentioned from one end of the film to the other) and, indeed, of most of the rest of Gandhi’s life, much of which would drastically diminish his saintliness in Western eyes. There is little to indicate that the India of today has followed Gandhi’s precepts in almost nothing. There is little, in fact, to indicate that India is even India. The spectator realizes the scene is the Indian subcontinent because there are thousands of extras dressed in dhotis and saris. The characters go about talking in these quaint Peter Sellers accents. We have occasional shots of India’s holy poverty, holy hovels, some landscapes, many of them photographed quite beautifully, for those who like travelogues. We have a character called Lord Mountbatten (India’s last Viceroy); a composite American journalist (assembled from Vincent Sheehan, William L. Shirer, Louis Fischer, and straight fiction); a character called simply “Viceroy” (presumably another composite); an assemblage of Gandhi’s Indian followers under the name of one of them (Patel); and of course Nehru.

I sorely missed the fabulous Annie Besant, that English clergyman’s wife, turned atheist, turned Theo-sophist, turned Indian nationalist, who actually became president of the Indian National Congress and had a terrific falling out with Gandhi, becoming his fierce opponent. And if the producers felt they had to work in a cameo role for an American star to add to the film’s appeal in the United States, it is positively embarrassing that they should have brought in the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, a person of no importance whatever in Gandhi’s life and a role Candice Bergen plays with a repellant unctuousness. If the film-makers had been interested in drama and not hagiography, it is hard to see how they could have resisted the awesome confrontation between Gandhi and, yes, Margaret Sanger. For the two did meet. Now there was a meeting of East and West, and may the better person win! (She did. Margaret Sanger argued her views on birth control with such vigor that Gandhi had a nervous breakdown.)

I cannot honestly say I had any reasonable expectation that the film would show scenes of Gandhi’s pretty teenage girl followers fighting “hysterically” (the word was used) for the honor of sleeping naked with the Mahatma and cuddling the nude septuagenarian in their arms. (Gandhi was “testing” his vow of chastity in order to gain moral strength for his mighty struggle with Jinnah.) When told there was a man named Freud who said that, despite his declared intention, Gandhi might actually be enjoying the caresses of the naked girls, Gandhi continued, unperturbed. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see Gandhi giving daily enemas to all the young girls in his ashrams (his daily greeting was, “Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?”), nor see the girls giving him his daily enema. Although Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule for India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine cleaning (“The bathroom is a temple. It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there”), I confess such scenes might pose problems for a Western director.

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.

May 11, 2018

Imagine Ontario’s election

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

Andrew Coyne on the fantasy campaign that is just kicking off in Ontario:

The first NDP ad of the 2018 Ontario election campaign invites viewers to “imagine a place” where hydro is cheap, drugs are free, and dental care is on the house — all at no cost to anyone except the “very rich” who will be “asked” to “pay a little more,” which I gather is NDPese for “taxed within an inch of their lives.”

That word — “imagine” — might be the theme of the coming election. The three major parties appear to be living in a world of the imagination, with platforms full of imaginary promises paid for with imaginary dollars. The province is sinking ever deeper in debt, notwithstanding the Liberal government’s desperate efforts to conceal it, its debt-to-GDP ratio headed for 45 per cent even after a decade or more of uninterrupted economic growth. A recession of any length or severity would blow that number skyward.

Beyond that the picture only grows darker, with the first of the baby boomers just into their 70s and the costs of health care projected to rise, relentlessly, as they grow into their dotage. And yet all three parties are merrily racking up new spending promises — daycare, pharmacare, dentacare, the works — with money they wouldn’t have even if the official budget numbers were genuine, and not, as the province’s auditor general has lately warned, a swindle and a fraud (I paraphrase). It’s an election in la-la land.

Oddly, this does not seem to be the conventional view. The advance word on the election, rather, is that Ontario is facing a choice of unprecedented starkness, a polarizing election with no one seeming to occupy the middle ground.

“It’s hard to remember a provincial campaign that’s featured two leaders so diametrically opposed to each other,” broadcaster Steve Paikin wrote recently, of the Liberals’ Kathleen Wynne and the Conservatives’ Doug Ford. “The political centre,” agrees the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee, “has vanished like a puddle in the sun.”

It’s true that the Liberals and the NDP are in something of a bidding war for the left-of-centre vote. If the March budget signalled a retreat from the Liberals’ not-overly-stringent devotion to fiscal restraint, the NDP platform goes further in every direction: about $4 billion a year further, in fact.

May 9, 2018

QotD: The “you can’t get good help” period after WW1

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Politics, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Look, I, like you, heard about how terrible the aftermath of WWI was, and how broke people were right after, and how they were moving to cities and living in tenements. It wasn’t until I was reading a book about the between the war period in England that I realized they were telling me TWO stories which couldn’t both have happened. In the part about the common folk, they were telling me how much poorer they were than before the war. In the part about the great families, they were telling me how the huge rise of the middle class and the building of suburbs had hurt them, and how the newly rich common folk no longer wanted to be servants.

That was one of those “wait a minute.” Sure I was taught both things in school, but you know you write down the bullet point for the test, and that’s it. Now I was going “Who the heck wrote these narratives and why doesn’t anyone question them?”

The truth, btw, from going to primary sources is closer to the second. And the people who wrote the narrative were the unseated noblemen, who did not like all these nouveau riche but who wanted to justify their disgust by showing how it hurt the poor. (It did increase the underclass somewhat, not because of economic conditions, but because a lot of men don’t integrate well after war, and well, WWI was something special by way of trauma.)

There are tons of these when you start poking. For instance the idea that the industrial revolution was unremittingly bad for the poor/people. Looking at China and India and such places right now, all I can do is roll my eyes.

Yeah, sure, the conditions of the early industrial revolution were appalling. And yet people crowded to the cities to take these jobs. What the historians never ask themselves is “How much worse was what they were escaping from?” We know that in India and China and other recently industrialized countries.

Sure the countryside has relatively clean air and more open space, but there are still real famines, and the work was unremitting and brutal and yes, little children worked too (says the daughter of middle class in a rural community whose first “job” was weeding the onion patch at five. And I was a pampered moppet. Kids my age from farming families had what we’d call full time jobs. Factory jobs at least had a stopping time.)

The idea that the industrial revolution was awful comes from upper class historians who could see the little kids twisted by working in the mills but who never consorted closely enough with the rural poor to see the misery behind raising baah lambs and the pretty pretty flowers.

Yeah. So the past isn’t written in stone. And it’s not a conspiracy. Not precisely a conspiracy. Yeah, sure, the Marxists influenced a lot of modern history with their ideas, but that is not necessarily conspiring. They view the world a certain way and it influences how they view the past too.

Sarah Hoyt, “How Do You Know?”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-24.

May 7, 2018

“Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll”

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

In the June issue of Reason, Matt Welch looks at the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and notes that he’s not “the second coming”:

“If you think tough men are dangerous,” University of Toronto psychologist and overnight YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson writes in his new book, “wait until you see what weak men are capable of.” It’s a warning shot for would-be social engineers trying to defang maleness and for Peterson’s startlingly large audience of young dudes teetering on the edge of nihilism. Perhaps it is also a subconscious caution to the author himself.

January 2018 was the month Jordan Peterson went from unknown to inescapable. The two reasons for that were a Channel 4 News (U.K.) exchange that went viral after an increasingly hostile and flustered female interviewer failed to hang an unflappable Peterson as a misogynist, and then the appearance one week later of his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House Canada), which immediately shot up bestseller lists throughout the English-speaking world. “He has skyrocketed from relative obscurity to international celebrity in a couple of weeks,” Psychology Today noted with wonder.

As befits a lecturer fixated on the “tightrope” between chaos and order, good and evil, yin and yang, “the Jordan Peterson moment” (so christened by New York Times columnist David Brooks) has produced an almost perfectly polarized response. Celeb psychologist Jonathan Haidt called Peterson “one of the few fearless professors”; Houman Barekat in the L.A. Review of Books deemed him a peddler of “toxic masculinity” and “reactionary chauvinism.” He is “the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan” (Camille Paglia), or an “an intellectual fraud who uses a lot of words to say almost nothing” (Nathan J. Robinson).

What is indisputable — and what makes the Peterson pop phenomenon more interesting than the quality of his work — is the way it has galvanized a generation of wayward young men, including many who have clustered around the “alt-right.” The numbers are staggering, and vaulting upward by the minute: As of early April, there were 49 million views of his YouTube videos, 1,008,000 subscribers to his channel (plus 584,000 Twitter and 256,000 Facebook followers), and, most impressively, an estimated $90,000 a month donated to his account on the crowdfunding site Patreon. By Peterson’s own reckoning, the solid majority of his sold-out audiences on the lecture circuit are males between the ages of 20 and 35; their gratitude for his “grow the hell up” message has moved the man to tears on several public occasions.

Peterson self-identifies as a classical liberal, frequently retweets content from the Cato Institute, and forthrightly criticizes the alt-right for playing the “collectivist game” of identity politics. Yet he’s a lightning rod among libertarians too. I first became aware of the psychologist last fall when his name came up serially at a private gathering of libertarian activists anxious about the real and perceived overlap between their world and the reactionary right. One participant counseled keeping Peterson at arm’s length, lest “we end up with another cult-leader libertarian.” Taking the opposite view at the website Being Libertarian was Adam Barsouk, who argued that “Peterson is able to do something no libertarian commentator before him could: he can argue that a freer, less coddled way of life is not just ethical, but also adaptive, better for humanity as a whole.”

Peterson’s popularity has demonstrated the happy fact that you can reach illiberal ears with a message that contains some classical liberal content. But he has gotten there not via persuasive argument about intellectual ideas but through the top-down, teacher-student, authoritarian exhortations of self-help. Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll.

QotD: Running for the presidency

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

One of the most difficult problems for a journalist covering a presidential campaign is getting to know the candidates well enough to make confident judgments about them, because it is just about impossible for a journalist to establish a personal relationship with any candidate who has already made the big leap from “long shot” to “serious contender.” The problem becomes more and more serious as the stakes get higher, and by the time a candidate has survived enough primaries to convince himself and his staff that they will all be eating their lunches in the White House Mess for the next four years, he is long past the point of having either the time or the inclination to treat any journalist who doesn’t already know him personally as anything but just another face in the campaign “press corps.”

There are many complex theories about the progressive stages of a presidential campaign, but for the moment let’s say there are three: Stage One is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire primary when the field is still crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get – especially media exposure, so they can get their names in the Gallup Poll; Stage Two is the “winnowing out,” the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three survivors of the early primaries begin looking like long-distance runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and Stage Three begins whenever the national media, the public opinion polls and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that a candidate has picked up enough irreversible momentum to begin looking like at least a probable nominee, and a possible next president.

This three-stage breakdown is not rooted in any special wisdom or scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic campaigns well enough to make the point that any journalist who doesn’t get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he’s still in Stage One might just as well go with his or her instincts all the way to Election Day in November, because once a candidate gets to Stage Two his whole lifestyle changes drastically.

At that point he becomes a public figure, a serious contender, and the demands on his time and energy begin escalating to the level of madness. He wakes up every morning to face a split-second, 18-hour-a-day schedule of meetings, airports, speeches, press conferences, motorcades and handshaking. Instead of rambling, off-the-cuff talks over a drink or two with reporters from small-town newspapers, he is suddenly flying all over the country in his own chartered jet full of syndicated columnists and network TV stars……. Cameras and microphones follow him everywhere he goes, and instead of pleading long and earnestly for the support of 15 amateur political activists gathered in some English professor’s living room in Keene, New Hampshire, he is reading the same cliché-riddled speech – often three or four times in a single day – to vast auditoriums full of people who either laugh or applaud at all the wrong times and who may or may not be supporters……. And all the fat cats, labor leaders and big-time pols who couldn’t find the time to return his phone calls when he was desperately looking for help a few months ago are now ringing his phone off the hook within minutes after his arrival in whatever Boston, Miami or Milwaukee hotel his managers have booked him into that night. But they are not calling to offer their help and support, they just want to make sure he understands that they don’t plan to help or support anybody else, until they get to know him a little better.

It is a very mean game that these high-rolling, coldhearted hustlers play. The president of the United States may no longer be “the most powerful man in the world,” but he is still close enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to cross him by accident. And anybody who starts looking like he might get his hands on that kind of power had better get comfortable, right from the start, with the certain knowledge that he is going to have to lean on some very mean and merciless people just to get himself elected.

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 6, 2018

Peace and Revolution I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1919 Part 3 of 4

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 5 May 2018

The Paris Peace Conference gets underway while the world continues to go up in flames. In 1919 it seems like every corner of the world is plagued by revolutions, strikes, protests, oppression, ethnic violence, massacres, or war.

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

Justin Trudeau may (or may not) delay the legalization date for marijuana

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

It’s just another day in Liberal Ottawa, as the Prime Minister briefly appears to wobble on the one election promise he’s close to fulfilling before the next election cycle begins. Colby Cosh manfully avoids a few drug-related jokes while recounting the latest “goffe” (as Gary Johnson actually said):

The legislative scenes preceding the three-quarters-legalization of marijuana in Canada continue to have an unreal, hallucinatory quality for which I am determined not to use the obvious metaphor. On Tuesday the Senate Aboriginal Peoples Committee presented the government with a demand that its vague summer legalization deadline be delayed by “up to one year” because Indigenous groups were not consulted closely enough on the effects of making it lawful to have a plant.

The prime minister, after some hemming and hawing, reiterated that legalization will happen on time, whatever the particular date happens to end up being. This will certainly come as a relief to the people who have poured zillions of dollars into a new horticultural and retail industry on the premise that it would, y’know, exist. Seeing how many of them are former Conservative politicians, perhaps they can be persuaded to buy a novena or two for a Liberal government that has — despite the unique moral pressure that Indigenous Canadians are capable of exercising, and in arguable defiance of its own history — decided to stick to an electoral promise.

Even as it is, the promise is taking most of the life of a Parliament to fulfill. Perhaps the conscience of Justin Trudeau, the little cartoon angel that perches on his shoulder and whispers progressive maxims in his ear, would have preferred to relent and toe the legalization deadline forward a year. Unfortunately, on the list of Trudeau’s political problems, “not being able to get stuff done in Canada” ranks alarmingly high at the moment.

In an ideal world, going along with the Senate committee and inflicting a wrestler’s piledriver on the economy for the sake of a principle might have been tempting. May 2018 is, alas, not really the time to be asking for that. It is precisely because so many interest groups and subnational governments have had to be negotiated with and appeased that pot legalization has taken so long — long enough that another election is in sight, with other elements of the Liberal program already in smithereens by the wayside.

Now I understand why Google calls it a “campus”

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

I’ve worked in high tech for my entire career, and I’ve never worked at a company that had anything like this kind of non-work-related activity … it sounds much more like a university than a workplace (and I don’t mean that in a positive way):

A recent report in The Wall Street Journal chronicles the drama of a thoroughly politicized and tribal workplace at Google, where activist employee groups stage competing talks on their pet issues, and a growing number of former employees are suing the company for discrimination and bias.

The article opens with an incident that took place in January, when Ingrid Newkirk, the co-founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was slated to give a presentation at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters as part of the “Talks at Google” series.

The subject of her talk, which was organized by the “Googlers for Animals” employee group, was how animals can be subject to discrimination and bias just like people are. But another employee group, the “Black Googler Network,” understandably found the premise of the talk offensive and protested it. The talk was canceled at the last minute, as Newkirk was waiting in a parking lot outside Google.

“Such is the climate inside the tech giant, where fractious groups of employees have turned the workplace into a virtual war zone of debate over all manner of social and political beliefs,” wrote the Journal. “Google has long promoted a work culture that is more like a college campus—where loud debates and doctrinaire stances are commonplace—and today its parent, Alphabet Inc., is increasingly struggling to keep things under control.”

Welcome to Google, microcosm of America in 2018. Like nearly every facet of American life these days, Google’s workplace has become politicized, which means the company must now constantly adjudicate every offense that arises from an ever-growing roll call of the aggrieved.

Google reportedly has employee groups for every conceivable cause: “Activists at Google,” which is anti-Trump; “Militia at Google,” which is pushing for the ability to carry guns in the office; “Conservatives at Google,” which claims the company discriminates against right-leaning job candidates; and “Sex Positive at Google,” which doesn’t want explicit content removed from Google Drive file-sharing software. Like other tech companies, Google has cultivated a college atmosphere in the workplace. It seems the company has succeeded, but only in the sense that its workplace has fractured into competing identity groups.

How would anyone get any actual work done with all those competing circus acts clamouring for attention throughout the “work”day?

May 3, 2018

“[T]hose who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ are merely whingers with too much time on their hands”

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

Naomi Firsht rightly calls cultural appropriation “the ultimate first world problem”:

If ever there was an entirely invented problem, it is ‘cultural appropriation’. No one had even heard of it five years ago. Now it pops up in news stories on an almost weekly basis.

Mansfield College at Oxford University cancelled a cannabis-themed party a few weeks ago because some students feared it could lead to cultural appropriation. It seems some were concerned that the team organising the event drew on the music and culture of the Caribbean in its invitation.

That anyone could care so much as to complain about an event that encouraged students to ‘Get creative with puns’ for fancy-dress ideas – ‘Ganjalf’, ‘The Grim Reefer’ and ‘Ganja Claus’ were among the suggestions – is just sad.

The people most likely to denounce others for their “cultural appropriation” are also the ones most likely to suffer at the sight (or thought) of anyone having fun. They’re modern-day Puritans with tattoos, piercings, and multi-coloured hair.

Let’s be honest, those who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ are merely whingers with too much time on their hands. Not only is this a non-problem, it is also an inherently First World, middle-class problem. Just take a look at Teen Vogue’s article on this year’s Coachella – the annual music and arts festival held in California.

Writer Dillon Johnson complains about ‘appropriative fashion’ at the festival, including bindis, box braids and warbonnets. ‘It’s never okay to wear someone’s culture as a costume, especially not for the sake of getting double taps’, writes Johnson, before generously offering to ‘inform and educate those that are willing to learn’.

Considering a ticket to this year’s Coachella cost a minimum of $429 (and that’s before you’ve paid for accommodation, travel and food), it’s unlikey the festival-goers’ fashion choices will be of much importance to most people.

One of the greatest things about culture is its unifying power. One group borrowing cultural aspects of another is a sign of a diverse society that is proud and admiring of its many influences. As an Ashkenazi (of Eastern Europe descent) Jew, I take immense pleasure in hearing Yiddish words (the language of my grandparents and great-grandparents) being used so liberally in the US. You’d be hard pressed to find a New Yorker who doesn’t know words like schmuck, bubbe and chutzpah. And the liberal littering of Yiddish phrases in Hollywood films always makes me smile. It breathes new life into an old language.

The rage against cultural appropriation sucks the fun out of culture, and, even worse, encourages a new kind of segregation. We should encourage cultural sharing – it enriches our society. Only a schmuck would think otherwise.

I’m sure just calling him “Ontario’s Trump” will be a fantastic winning strategy in June…

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

Chris Selley on Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford’s on-again, off-again plans for the Greenbelt:

Thus far, for want of many specific Progressive Conservative policy proposals, the Liberal line on Doug Ford has essentially been to brace for catastrophe: trust that no matter what he says, he will fire everyone and cut everything and destroy all that you hold dear, because he’s Doug Ford and that’s what Doug Ford does. Oh also he’s Donald Trump. The Liberals know no other way of campaigning. They were comparing Patrick Brown to Trump way back in October.

On Monday, though, Ford unveiled a specific, bold, novel and controversial policy approach on the major issue of affordable housing in the Greater Toronto Area — something wonks and pundits and opposition politicians could really sink their teeth into. Sadly it was a tremendously dumb policy: to develop “a big chunk” of the Greenbelt, while somehow tacking other compensatory bits of land onto it to ensure it didn’t shrink in overall size.

It was the worst of all things Ford: uninformed (there is no need for this); confusing (where exactly are they going to find all this replacement land?); a bit sketchy (the Liberals released a video of Ford saying the idea came from big developers); and ultimately not worth the napkin it was drawn on the back of. On Tuesday afternoon, citing public feedback, Ford abandoned the plan and promised to be the greenbelt’s fiercest protector.

“I govern through the people, not through government,” he explained in a statement. (He is running to lead Canada’s second-largest government.) Campaign spokesperson Melissa Lantsman was reduced to characterizing it as a great leadership moment.

May 1, 2018

Sikh separatists (and even terrorists) are being protected by the federal government

Filed under: Cancon, Government, India, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There’s no reason that Canadian Sikhs can’t agitate for their fellow Sikhs in India to create a separate country in the Punjab, but that freedom must not include active support for terrorists. The Canadian government is looking particularly bad on this front, and it isn’t just because of Justin Trudeau’s farcical adventures on his recent trip to India. None of the major federal parties want to appear to be anti-Sikh, as Sikh voters cluster in several key swing ridings around the country, and any criticism of the terrorists is spun as an attack on all Sikhs. At Quillette Terry Milewski details the government’s unwillingness to deal with the problem:

The Sikh faith, created in what is now northern India by the 15th-century Guru Nanak, remains obscure to many in the West. Turbaned Sikh men are sometimes confused with Muslims, and some have been assaulted by confused thugs following Islamist terrorist attacks. Like the United States, Britain and other Western countries, Canada has been home to emigrant Sikhs for generations—the vast majority of them living peaceably in their adopted homeland.

In the 1980s, however, a powerful spasm of separatist militancy shook India and spread to the Sikh diaspora. In June, 1984, two months before the Madison Square Garden convention, Prime Minister Gandhi and her government set out to end a killing spree by Sikh militants who had turned the Sikhs’ holiest site — the Golden Temple at Amritsar — into an armed camp. The Indian army wrecked the temple complex and took many lives. Revenge came on October 31, 1984, when Gandhi was gunned down in her garden by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Hindu mobs immediately took revenge for the revenge, slaughtering thousands of Sikhs in hellish reprisals that were aggravated by official complicity. The police looked the other way. The horrors of 1984 won’t be forgotten by either side.

Soon, Canada and its Sikh community were dragged into the thick of the struggle. In June of 1985, Parmar’s Babbar Khalsa placed suitcase bombs on two planes leaving Vancouver. One brought down Flight 182, a massacre that remained, until 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of aviation. The second bomb, intended to destroy another Air India plane simultaneously, exploded on the ground at Narita Airport in Japan, killing two baggage handlers. The reverberations from the attack were so profound in Canada that even today, 33 years later, a striking emblem of the Khalistani dream survives: a large “martyr” poster honouring Talwinder Parmar, sword in hand, permanently fixed to the exterior of an important Sikh gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. Tens of thousands gather beneath it each spring for an annual Sikh parade. In American terms, the poster is equivalent to a public veneration of Osama Bin Laden.

[…]

Today, the parents who lost their children [on Air India Flight 182] are old, the orphaned children have their own children and the Sikh struggle for independence is moribund in India. Last year, in fact, Sikh voters overwhelmingly supported a united India and were key to the election of the Congress Party — the party of Indira Gandhi — to govern the Sikh homeland of Punjab. Support for Congress was especially strong in majority-Sikh districts. And Punjab’s Chief Minister is a strongly pro-unity Sikh, Amarinder Singh, who has alleged separatist influence in the Canadian government.

Harjit Sajjan, a Sikh who is Canada’s Minister of National Defence, firmly denied the claim. And on Justin Trudeau’s visit to India this year, Singh agreed to a photo-op including Sajjan. But the Chief Minister let it be known that he’d handed over a list of Canadians he suspects of fundraising for Punjab’s few remaining separatist Sikh militants.

The listed suspects amount to a tiny subculture among Canada’s 450,000 Sikhs, the vast bulk of whom seek no return to the bloody 1980s and 1990s, when the battle for Khalistan took some 20,000 lives in India, most of them Sikh. But the hardliners are a well-organized political force, still raising the cry of “Khalistan Zindabad!” — long live Khalistan — in some Canadian gurdwaras where “martyred” Sikh assassins are memorialized as models for the young. These include the two bodyguards who machine-gunned Indira Gandhi. Khalistani fervour is alive on social media and a 2018 tweet from “George” (@PCPO_Brampton) declared: “Indira’s assassins are HEROES. Sikhs should glorify them.”

The endurance of such attitudes in Canada reflects the weak record of its justice system in deterring violence. For years, it seemed, Canadian courts were where terrorism cases went to die.

April 26, 2018

Britain drops down a league table that really matters, for a change

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

Mick Hume on the parlous state of press freedoms in Britain:

Britain prides itself on being an historic home of freedom and the free press. So how come we are languishing in 40th place in the international press-freedom table?

Imagine the crowds singing an updated version of Rule Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms, about how Britain ‘shall flourish great and free / The dread and envy of them all / Except for the 39 freer nations, obvs’.

According to the 2018 World Press Freedom Index, published on Wednesday by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the UK is now ‘one of the worst-ranked countries in Western Europe in terms of respect for press freedom’.

Its 40th place puts the UK one ahead of Burkina Faso and two clear of Taiwan, and suggests that journalists working in Britain have less freedom to hold the powerful to account than those in such liberal states as South Africa, Chile or Lithuania.

British observers are far more likely to bemoan how far we have fallen down the world rankings in football, another field we claim to have invented. Unlike the glorious irrelevance of football, however, freedom of the press really is a matter of life and death for a democratic society.

The UK’s 40th place is unchanged from 2017. But that is 18 lower than its ranking in the first Index, published in 2002 – and 12 places down on six years ago, before the publication of the Leveson report.

That should give a clue as to the new threats press freedom faces in the UK. Unlike in some other illiberal parts of the world, we are not confronted by old-fashioned government repression and state control of the press. Instead, and especially since the Leveson Inquiry, press freedom in the UK has been threatened by a more underhand assault from allegedly liberal political and cultural elites – backed, to their shame, by the Labour Party leadership and the Corbynite left.

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