Quotulatiousness

February 18, 2018

“The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Matt Ridley on the rising tide of neo-Victorian prudery in western society:

Is it so different here or are we slipping down the same slope? Pre-Raphaelite paintings that show the top halves of female nudes are temporarily removed from an art gallery’s walls; young girls are forced to wear headscarves in school; darts players and racing drivers may not be accompanied by women in short skirts; women are treated differently from men at universities, as if they were the weaker sex, and saved from seeing upsetting paragraphs in novels; sex is negotiated in advance with the help of chaperones. We have been here before.

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1928, she portrayed the transition from the 18th century to the Victorian period thus: “Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides.”

How we laughed at such absurdity in my youth. But even for making the point that some of the new feminism seems “retrograde” in promoting the view that women are fragile, the American academic Katie Roiphe suffered a vicious campaign to have her article in Harper’s magazine banned before publication. “I find the Stalinist tenor of this conversation shocking,” she told The Sunday Times. “The basic assumption of freedom of speech is imperilled in our culture right now.”

The sin of blasphemy is back. There are things you simply cannot say about Islam and increasingly about Christianity, about climate change, about gender, to mention a few from a very long and growing list, without being accused of, and possibly prosecuted for, “hate speech”. Is it hate speech to say that Muhammad “delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse”? That was Voltaire, one of my heroes. You may disagree with him but you should, in accordance with his principle, defend his right to say it. In demanding tolerance of minorities, many younger people seem to be remarkably intolerant.

There is an odd contradiction between the declared wish to live and let live — “diversity!”, “don’t judge!” — and the actual behaviour, which is ruthlessly and priggishly judgmental. They never stop drafting acts of uniformity, always in the name of the collective against the individual. The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all.

February 17, 2018

Only 3.8% of American adults identify themselves as LGBT

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

Most people guess a much higher percentage, and if the poll was restricted to the under-30s, the number would likely be at least twice as high. The poll is a few years old now, but it points out that most Americans over-estimate the number of gays and lesbians in the population:

The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans’ 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.

The stability of these estimates over time contrasts with the major shifts in Americans’ attitudes about the morality and legality of gay and lesbian relations in the past two decades. Whereas 38% of Americans said gay and lesbian relations were morally acceptable in 2002, that number has risen to 63% today. And while 35% of Americans favored legalized same-sex marriage in 1999, 60% favor it today.

The U.S. Census Bureau documents the number of individuals living in same-sex households but has not historically identified individuals as gay or lesbian per se. Several other surveys, governmental and non-governmental, have over the years measured sexual orientation, but the largest such study by far has been the Gallup Daily tracking measure instituted in June 2012. In this ongoing study, respondents are asked “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender?” with 3.8% being the most recent result, obtained from more than 58,000 interviews conducted in the first four months of this year.

H/T to Gari Garion for the link.

February 16, 2018

Trump’s Fake News: Deep Breaths and Fact-Checking Might Just Save America

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 15 Feb 2018

President Trump labels whatever he dislikes as “fake news,” and makes up his own, but the media is part of the problem. In the latest “Mostly Weekly,” Andrew Heaton provides a solution.

—————-

Donald Trump tends to call whatever he dislikes “fake news,” from inconvenient facts to unfavorable reporting. Even though the President himself is less a font of truth and more a spigot of self-serving exaggeration and insults.

But Trump isn’t all wrong when he labels reporting against him as fictitious or slanted. Reporters have become so enraged with the President that in their hurry to lambast him, they sometimes forget about fact checking and standard quality controls.

The result is that actual “fake news” is slipping into major news outlets. When hit pieces turn out to be false, they bolster Trump’s claims about the media and discredit journalists in the eyes of his supporters.

In the latest “Mostly Weekly” Andrew Heaton explains the relationship between “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” fake news, and a solution for the media.

Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton, with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind.

Script by Sarah Rose Siskind with writing assistance from Andrew Heaton and Brian Sack.

Special guest appearance by Brian Sack as “TV doctor”

Edited by Austin Bragg and Siskind.

Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.

February 11, 2018

QotD: British Socialism in the 1930s

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

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.

February 10, 2018

Protecting (some) women from their own decisions

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

Kirio Birks on the Formula One “grid girls”:

Objectification, we are told, is degrading. Why? Because any job that requires employees to be sexually attractive and gazed upon for that reason necessarily dehumanises them. It encourages others to treat them as pretty ‘things’ rather than as autonomous people with their own lives, passions, thoughts, and desires. Or so the thinking goes. ‘Grid Girls’ – models employed by Formula One for promotional purposes – have just discovered that their role is to be discontinued. As Formula One’s managing director of commercial operations explained: “While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula 1 Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”

But in their hurry to spare Grid Girls the indignity of the male gaze, nobody making this argument seems to have stopped to wonder whether Grid Girls might have an interest in defending what they do. Instead, a collective of ostensibly progressive voices leapt to their defence without bothering to ask the girls themselves if they needed defending at all. In response, Formula One abandoned its Grid Girls so that it can be seen to be moving with the times and hip to contemporary mores. In doing so, Formula One’s executives have implicitly conceded that they have spent too long objectifying women instead of empowering them. They would like it to known that they’d rather see women driving the cars, or as members of the engineering teams, or just about anywhere other than track-side holding a driver’s name-board and looking beautiful.

What baffles me is that a move supposed to empower women came at the expense of other women, and only because a minority of outsiders found Grid Girls inappropriate, problematic, and otherwise an offence against good taste. But even if Grid Girls are being objectified, then – contra the explanation offered above – it’s not at all clear that objectification is wrong in and of itself. It is acceptable to use people as a means to an end – that’s called employment. Grid Girls obviously know that they will be objectified and they make an autonomous, informed decision to take the job anyway. They are not harmed, they are paid for their time and their work, and many of them have come forward to say, with understandable indignation, that they enjoy what they do. Needless to say, this has not impressed those feminists who applauded their redundancies. But surely a woman has a right to be the object of somebody else’s desire if she wants and surely it doesn’t matter if she is being paid for it?

Opponents may suggest that Grid Girls have internalised their own oppression in a society shaped by patriarchal values, but not without making two claims: (1) that Grid Girls are unable to adequately think for themselves because of the society they live in and (2) that thinking for yourself is only evidenced by acknowledging the existence of a patriarchal status quo and resisting it.

QotD: “The masses”

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

I don’t believe that the ordinary people in fact resemble the normal description of the masses, low and trivial in taste and habit. I put it another way: that there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, 1989.

February 9, 2018

Defining bias

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

In Quillette, Bo Winegard explains how to define bias:

Bias is an important concept both inside and outside of academia. Despite this, it is remarkably difficult to define or to measure. And many, perhaps all, studies of it are susceptible to reasonable objections from some framework of normative reasoning or another. Nevertheless, in common discourse the term is easy enough to understand. Bias is a preference or commitment that impels a person away from impartiality. If Sally is a fervid fan of the New York Knicks and uses different criteria for assessing fouls against them than against their opponents, then we would say that she is biased.

There are many kinds of biases, and bias can penetrate the cognitive process from start to finish and anywhere between. It can lead to selective exposure, whereby people preferentially seek material that favors their preferred position, and avoid material that contradicts it; it can lead to motivated skepticism, whereby people are more critical of material that opposes their preferred position than of material that supports it; and it can lead to motivated credulity, whereby people assimilate information that supports their preferred position more easily and rapidly than information that contradicts it. Often, these biases all work together.

So, imagine Sally the average ardent progressive. She probably exposes herself chiefly to progressive magazines, news outlets, and friends; and, quite possibly, she inhabits a workplace surrounded by other progressives (selective exposure). Furthermore, when she is exposed to conservative arguments or articles, she is probably extremely critical of them. That National Review article she read this morning about abortion, for example, was insultingly obtuse and only confirmed her opinion that conservatives are cognitively challenged (motivated skepticism). Compounding this, she is equally ready to praise and absorb arguments and articles in progressive magazines (motivated credulity). Just this afternoon, for example, she read a compelling takedown of the Republican tax cuts in Mother Jones which strengthened her intuition that conservatism is an intellectual and moral dead end. (This example would work equally well with an average ardent conservative). The result is an inevitably blinkered world view.

The strength of one’s bias is influenced by many factors, but, for simplicity, we can break these factors into three broad categories: clarity, accuracy concerns, and extraneous concerns. Clarity refers to how ambiguous a topic is. The more ambiguous, the lower the clarity and the higher the bias. So, the score of a basketball game has very high clarity, whereas an individual foul call may have very low clarity. Accuracy concerns refer to how desirous an individual is to know the truth. The higher the concern, on average, the lower the bias. If a fervid New York Knicks fan were also a referee in training who really wanted to get foul calls right, then she would probably have lower bias than the average impassioned fan. Last, extraneous concerns refer to any concerns (save accuracy concerns) that motivate a person toward a certain answer. Probably the most powerful of these are group affiliation and status, but there are many others (self-esteem et cetera).

At risk of simplification, we might say that bias can be represented by an equation such that extraneous concerns (E) minus (accuracy concerns (A) plus clarity (C)) equals bias: (E – (A + C) = B).

February 8, 2018

Dilbert’s Scott Adams Explains How He Knew Trump Would ‘Win Bigly’

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 7 Feb 2018

The cartoonist-turned-political-prognisticator talks about Trump, “master persuaders,” and winning arguments in a “world where facts don’t matter.”

—————-

In 2015, Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the massively popular comic strip Dilbert, boldly predicted that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election.

“The reason I can see it coming is because I have studied this field of persuasion,” says Adams. “I saw this Trump character and he had the full tool set.” The 60-year-old Bay Area resident doesn’t agree with Trump on many political issues, but his prediction was enough for his to receive death threats from embittered Hillary Clinton supporters.

Adam’s new book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, is both a detailed analysis of how Trump reframed political rhetoric during the 2016 campaign and a guide to how all of us can communicate more effectively and persuasively.

Adams sat down with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie in front of a live audience in San Francisco to talk about his book, his “extreme liberal” views, the popularity of his live broadcasts with followers via Twitter, and why Trump is a “master persuader.”

Cameras by Zach Weismueller, Paul Detrick, and Justin Monticello. Edited by Ian Keyser.

The revenge of the return of the bride of rent control

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

Megan McArdle on the unexpected return of one of the very worst economic policies known to mankind, or as our beloved Prime Minister would insist “peoplekind”:

According to the Wall Street Journal, rent control seems to be making a retro comeback. Most forms of intelligent life could be forgiven for asking why.

Serial experimentation with this policy has repeatedly shown the same result. Initially, tenants rejoice, and rent control looks like a victory for the poor over the landlord class. But the stifling of price signals leads to problems. Rent control starts by producing some sort of redistribution, because the people with low rents at the time that controls are imposed tend to be relatively low-income.

But then incomes rise, and rents don’t. People with higher incomes have more resources to pursue access to artificially cheap real estate: friends who work for management companies, “key fees” or simply incomes that promise landlords they won’t have to worry about collecting the rent. (One of my favorite New York City stories involves an acquaintance who made $175,000 a year, and applied for a rent-controlled apartment. He asked the women taking the application if his income was going to be a problem; she looked at the application and said, “No, I think that ought to be high enough.”)

So the promise of economic justice erodes over time, as lucky insiders come to dominate rent-controlled apartments, especially because having gotten their hands on an absurdly cheap apartment, said elites are loathe to move and free up space for others.

The longer the rent-control policies remain, the more these imbalances grow. The gap between the rent that is charged, and the rent that could be charged in a competitive market, widens. Deprived of the ability to make a profit, landlords skimp on maintenance and refuse to build new housing. If you loosen the law to incentivize renovation, or new building, this only creates new forms of dysfunction: discrimination against tenants who might stay longer than a few years (limiting the ability to raise rents); a decontrolled market that has to absorb all of the excess demand created by locking up so much of the housing market in rent-controlled leases that rarely turn over; even landlords who renovate too often, the better to raise the rent. This arrangement is very good for the people who happen to have gotten their hands on a rent-controlled apartment, and very bad for everyone else, especially newcomers to the city.

February 6, 2018

Katie Roiphe on the new whisper network

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

She’s already taken a lot of heat from other women over this essay:

For years, women confined their complaints about sexual harassment to whisper networks for fear of reprisal from men. This is an ugly truth about our recent past that we are just now beginning to grapple with. But amid this welcome reckoning, it seems that many women still fear varieties of retribution (Twitter rage, damage to their reputations, professional repercussions, and vitriol from friends) for speaking out — this time, from other women. They are, in other words, inadvertently creating a new whisper network. Can this possibly be a good thing?

Most of the new whisperers feel as I do, exhilarated by the moment, by the long-overdue possibility of holding corrupt and bullying men such as Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, and Matt Lauer to account for their actions. They strongly share some of its broader goals: making it possible for women to work unbothered and unharassed even outside the bubble of Hollywood and the media, breaking down the structures that have historically protected powerful men. Yet they are also slightly uneasy at the weird energy behind this movement, a weird energy it is sometimes hard to pin down.

Here are some things these professional women said to me on the condition that their names be withheld:

    I think “believe all women” is silly. Women are unreliable narrators also. I understand how hard it is to come forward, but I just don’t buy it. It’s a sentimental view of women … I think there is more regretted consent than anyone is willing to say out loud.

    If someone had sent me the Media Men list ten years ago, when I was twenty-five, I would have called a harmlessly enamored guy a stalker and a sloppy drunken encounter sexual assault. I’d hate myself now for wrecking two lives.

    One thing people don’t say is that power is an aphrodisiac … To pretend otherwise is dishonest.

    What seems truly dangerous to me is the complete disregard the movement shows for a sacred principle of the American criminal justice system: the presumption of innocence. I come from Mexico, whose judicial system relied, until 2016, on the presumption of guilt, which translated into people spending decades, sometimes lifetimes, in jail before even seeing a judge.

    I have never felt sexually harassed. I said this to someone the other day, and she said, “I am sure you are wrong.”

    Al Franken asked for an investigation and he should have been allowed to have it; the facts are still ambiguous, the sources were sketchy.

    Why didn’t I get hit on? What’s wrong with me? #WhyNotMeToo

    I think #MeToo is a potentially valuable tool that is degraded when women appropriate it to encompass things like “creepy DMs” or “weird lunch ‘dates.’” And I do not think touching a woman’s back justifies a front page in the New York Times and the total annihilation of someone’s career.

I have a long history with this feeling of not being able to speak. In the early Nineties, death threats were phoned into Shakespeare and Company, an Upper West Side bookstore where I was scheduled to give a reading from my book The Morning After. That night, in front of a jittery crowd and a sprinkling of police, I read a passage comparing the language in the date-rape pamphlets given out on college campuses to Victorian guides to conduct for young ladies. When I read at universities, students who considered themselves feminists shouted me down. It was an early lesson in the chilling effect of feminist orthodoxy.

But social media has enabled a more elaborate intolerance of feminist dissenters, as I just personally experienced. Twitter, especially, has energized the angry extremes of feminism in the same way it has energized Trump and his supporters: the loudest, angriest, most simplifying voices are elevated and rendered normal or mainstream.

The “Socialist Caucus” of the US “Libertarian” Party

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

L. Neil Smith is unhappy with the US Libertarian Party, but this is nothing new — he’s been against the party’s long drift away from philosophical libertarian principles and policies for decades. However, after hearing that the party had turned down Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano as speakers at the next national convention at the urging of a pack of drooling morons calling themselves the “Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party”:

The first article I read (in a movement publication) about the current situation wanted to claim that Ron started the libertarian movement, or at least the party, and maybe set the Moon and stars in the sky, but that’s not true, and I don’t believe that kindly Dr. Paul would ever make a claim like that for himself. It overlooks the lives and lifelong labor, decades earlier, of freedom-fighters like Leonard Reed, Ayn Rand, John Hospers, and Roger Lea MacBride (look them up) not to overlook Dave Nolan. Nevertheless, Ron has been an integral member of the tribe that calls itself “libertarian” for more than forty years, and was such a consistently libertarian member of Congress that his less-principled colleagues (when they weren’t asking him how to vote) called him “Dr. No”.

Thus, to proclaim with grand stupidity, as LP Convention Coordinator Daniel Hayes does (whoever he is), that the former Congressman has no idea what the Party stands for, speaks of abysmal ignorance and profound disrespect. The fact that this ass-clown is also an At Large member of the Libertarian Party National Committee, shows what massive trouble the Party is in. Trouble that it is very likely not to survive.

And now I’ll confess to some ignorance of my own. When I started this article, I thought I knew who Judge Andrew Napolitano is. I have always enjoyed seeing him on FOX, visiting with the ladies. However I followed my own advice and looked him up, in Wikipedia, because that’s easiest. This guy is an unapologetic, uncompromising libertarian on steroids. I urge you to look him up, yourself, you will be amazed.

Dr. Paul, it appears, is in trouble because he criticized the LP’s laughable 2016 campaign, an effort that only needed another 23 clowns and a tiny car to make the picture complete. Apparently, the Party is now run to cozy up to a vile creature named Mike Shipley, founder of an obscene excrescence called the Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party. If I weren’t already out of the Party, that, alone, would cause me to quit. Don’t the teachings of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises mean anything anymore? Socialism is the “philosophy” that murdered two hundred million people in the 20th century and there is no difference in principle between it and the blackest, most evil communism that ever existed. Besides a profound and willful historical blindness, what mental illness afflicts low, crawling organisms like this Shipley? Or those who tolerate him and welcome him into the ideological home that others (and betters) built?

This is what comes of claiming in the lilting rich and fruity falsetto voice of Political Correctness, that there are “right” libertarians and “left” libertarians, What bloody nonsense. There are, in fact, only libertarians, those governed by the Principle of Non-Aggression (which the LP has tried to toss overboard every minute of the past twenty years), and those non-libertarians who are not. There is also, apparently, a creature called Nicholas Sarwark, the National Chairman who, according to the article I read, thinks Bernie Sanders is a libertarian. I looked him up, too; he’s a typical product of the confused Arizona politics that gave us John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Jan Brewer. He is on record having called the Ludwig von Mises Institute a Nazi organization and wouldn’t know a real libertarian if it walked up to him and pissed in his ear. The fact that he’s been “embedded” in the LP for so long (look him up, too) is a further symptom of its dire distress.

Years ago, when the LP nominated a candidate of dubious integrity who handed out over a million dollars in campaign contributions to his cronies and family as “consultant fees”, I ran against him in one state (Arizona, again) to deprive the LP of 50-state ballot status, something they seemed to think was important. It wasn’t much, and many people still hate me for it, but a statement had to be made against corruption. I made it and I will never regret it.

This current disaster is the direct result of tolerating Political Correctness even a little bit. It is no different, in principle, from inviting Anti-Fa into your living room. The LP needs a purge, and then the system of internal education I proposed almost 40 years ago. Until then, Hayes, Shipley. Sarwark, and others of your collectivist ilk, watch your ballots for something called “The Real Libertarian Party” — and see the LP vote split right down the middle.

February 4, 2018

BC versus Alberta – the existential threat of “dilbit”

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

Colby Cosh on the warlike preparations taking place in Alberta in advance of the interprovincial war over “dilbit”:

The special concern with dilbit [diluted bitumen — the form in which hydrocarbons from the Alberta oilsands are shipped to refineries as a liquid] is a pseudoscientific contrivance designed to allow Horgan to meet, or at least take a step toward, his loud campaign promises to thwart Trans Mountain. Now, even if you don’t believe that, you can understand that Horgan is threatening to conjure an all-new improvised layer of environmental regulation here. Even if you are convinced that it was spilled dilbit that killed Tasha Yar in “Skin of Evil,” you can see the unfairness of Horgan imagineering an infinite regress of scientific panels — each one surely more scientific than the last! — to injure a neighbour’s economy for his own electoral welfare.

The truth, however, is that B.C.’s New Democratic premier knows the hand-wringing about dilbit is B.S. And so does Alberta’s New Democratic premier. And so does just about everybody in Alberta. Yes, we Albertans have been busy this week preparing for border war: there is so much to do, what with the need to make propaganda posters, train commandos for mountain-pass warfare, dig victory gardens, and re-label all the Nanaimo bars “Liberty squares.”

Sadly, it probably won’t come down to a shooting war, but will remain in the crystal blue elysium of political manoeuvring. If it did come to a fight, Alberta would have a pretty big fifth column operating on its behalf across the legal border. I have a running joke with friends that I have occasionally referred to in print: it’s the idea that there exists a “Greater Alberta” that includes sizable parts of Saskatchewan and, in particular, B.C.

The so-called Peace River block that spans the border is one economic unit, and people at its western end, jealous of having ended up on the wrong side of a discontinuity in taxation, have actually agitated in the past for secession from British Columbia. And, as many have pointed out in the feverish climate of interprovincial hostility, the jagged southeast corner of B.C. has significant transmontane cultural and economic ties, too. It looks, on a flat map, like it ought to “belong” to Alberta. (In real-world topography, on the other hand, the Continental Divide is definitely a thing that it is hard not to notice.)

In short, almost everybody is now making my “Greater Alberta” semi-sorta-kinda-joke. But this is not really a Greater Alberta thing. At almost every point of the compass, that B.C. map is full of resource employees who are watching with distaste as their NDP government acts like an NDP government. This is surely a real moral advantage for Alberta in the grand struggle — but, remember, there are genuine practical gains for Horgan from his theatrical eco-rectitude: right now the motivating passion of his life, from dawn to dusk, is to persuade Green voters to turn orange.

QotD: Modern feminism

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

Feminism now regularly calls for women to be treated as eggshells instead of equals. And through this, it does something pernicious to the women it claims to advocate for: Feminism has become a movement for female disempowerment, or what I call “encouraged helplessness” (from psychologist Martin Seligman’s “learned helplessness”—the feeling that there’s nothing you can do to escape your fate).

In fact, feminism, bizarrely, has morphed into paternalism — instructing women that they are fragile, passive, powerless victims who need authority figures to advocate for them.

That’s a movement I want no part of. Or, as I like to put it — because I’m neither a feminist nor much of a lady: Count me the fuck out.

If you’re a woman, I encourage you to join me — count yourself the fuck out of what feminism has become.

This doesn’t require you to be fearless. You just need to shove your fears aside and do what needs to be done — say, getting up on your hind legs and telling some co-worker, “Stop saying that thing to me” or “…treating me this way.”

Now, if they persist after you’ve told them to stop a few times, that’s harassment and you can seek support to get them to stop. But consider that it’s less likely to get to that point if you simply act like men’s equal—act as if you’re powerful — instead of acting like you’re a feminist.

Amy Alkon, “Are Women Really Victims? Four Women Weigh In”, Quillette, 2017-11-22.

February 2, 2018

“Europeans like the U.S. to be a great St. Bernard dog that takes the risks and does the work, while they hold the leash and give the orders”

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

Conrad Black on how the European press in general — and the British press in particular — view the United States:

A week in England has enabled me to see more clearly the absurdity of the depths and length that the political scandal-mongering in the United States has achieved. Most of the British media are anti-American anyway, and, like most of America’s so-called allies, Britain likes weak American presidents who are fluent and courteous, other than when they are themselves in mortal peril, at which point strong American presidents suddenly are appreciated. Generally, the Western European attitude toward the U.S. evolved from fervent and almost worshipful hope for rescue by Roosevelt, to appreciative, even grateful recognition for Truman and Marshall’s military and economic support of non-Communist Europe, while fretting whether America would “stay the course” (Mr. Churchill’s concern), to complacent patronization in the post-Suez Eisenhower-Dulles era. Europe, like most of the world, swooned over John F. Kennedy and genuinely mourned his tragic death, but it has been slim pickings since. Johnson was regarded as a boor and an amateur, and, on the left, a war criminal. Richard Nixon was regarded with suspicion and then the customary orchestrated opprobrium, though with grudging respect for his strategic talents. Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush were regarded as dolts, though Reagan, whose anti-missile defense plan was regarded with shrieks of derision and fear, was seen, long after he left office, as possibly useful. Clinton was likeable but déclassé, and Obama was greatly welcomed but ultimately a disappointment. The Europeans like the U.S. to be a great St. Bernard dog that takes the risks and does the work, while they hold the leash and give the orders.

With Donald Trump, the British and most Western Europeans have the coruscation of their dreams that the United States is a vulgar, completely materialistic, cultureless Darwinian contest of the most tasteless and unsavory elements, elevating people in their public life who excel at the country’s least attractive national characteristics. In the British national media there is almost never a remotely insightful or fair commentary on anything to do with President Trump. At one point last week, Ambassador John Bolton had what amounted to a debate with some academic British supporter of the Paris climate accord, and of feeble responses to all international crises, from Ukraine to Syria to North Korea. Both participants were speaking from remote locations and were on large screens, and the moderator’s questions were posed in such a provoking and tendentious manner to John Bolton that he began his last several responses with the stated assumption that the management of Britain’s national television network presumably approved of framing questions on such serious subjects in a deliberately dishonest way, and then answered effectively. The BBC correspondent in Washington uniformly referred to “Donald Trump” or just “Trump” and never to “President Trump” or to “the president,” as normal professional usage requires. The Economist, a distinguished magazine for many decades, follows the same route, referring to Mr. Trump as a “bad” or “poor” president, as if this were an indisputable and universally agreed fact.

The British, and to a large degree the major continental powers, slavishly repeat the Trumpophobic feed from the American national media and justify “Trump’s” view that most of the media propagate lies as a matter of policy, and that America’s allies are largely freeloaders — passengers of the Pentagon with no loyalty to the country that liberated them from Nazism and protected them from Soviet Communism. Senator McCain’s editorial criticism of the president in the New York Times two weeks ago, that his attacks on the press weakened democracy by demeaning a free press, is bunk. The president was closer, though, as is his wont, was slightly carried away, when he called the primal-scream newscasters and writers “enemies of the people.” They are even worse abroad.

February 1, 2018

The Government is Going to Shut Down Again (And That’s Bad)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 31 Jan 2018

System failures are a false path to limited government.

——–

Libertarians want to shrink the government, but a shutdown is little cause for celebration. Hitting a giant “pause” button on federal agencies won’t end the drug war or reform entitlements. A government shutdown doesn’t even save money. Back pay to furloughed federal employees ensures that taxpayers pay just as much as they would have if the government had proceeded as normal. But during a shutdown taxpayers don’t receive the government services they’re paying for, and the economy takes a hit from the disruption.

In the latest “Mostly Weekly,” Andrew Heaton explains why libertarians should be against the next government shutdown.

Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind. Special appearance by Brian Sack.

Script by Andrew Heaton with writing assistance from Sarah Rose Siskind and Brian Sack
Edited by Austin Bragg and Sarah Rose Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: “Frozen” by Surfer Blood.

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