Quotulatiousness

June 22, 2015

“Because economic growth is a dead end. The greens present the only way out”

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

J.R. Ireland pokes fun at the UK Green Party manifesto for the last general election:

All around the world our cultures might be different, our languages might be different, and we may think differently and act differently, but there is one fact which is true in every country on the face of planet Earth: The local Green Party will always be completely and irredeemably insane. From Australian pundit Tim Blair I’ve been made aware of the manifesto for the United Kingdom Green Party, a ludicrous amalgamation of wishful thinking, happy talk, and a total unwillingness to consider the unintended consequences of their proposed policies. From the absolutely bugfuck bonkers Youth Manifesto:

    Because economic growth is a dead end. The greens present the only way out.

Vote Green because they’re the only party courageous enough to promise voters that they will end economic growth. If there’s one way to win elections, it’s to tell the good people of Britain that you promise them an eternity of poverty and absolutely guarantee they will never get any richer.

Furthermore:

    We would introduce the right to vote at 16 because we believe that young people should have a say, as proven by the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014.

Indeed. Who wouldn’t want to have their country governed by the preferred candidates of middle teenagers? Why, the average 16 year old is so incredibly knowledgeable about the world and completely understands such complex topics as economics, immigration, and that hot chick Kristy’s red panties that he accidentally saw when she was uncrossing her legs in homeroom. With those sorts of brilliant minds choosing the leaders of the future, what could possibly go wrong?

[…]

But the real crazy, the high-end crazy, the crazy with a ribbon on top was saved not for their youth manifesto but for the manifesto allegedly meant for the big boys and girls who have hit puberty biologically, even if they never quite made it intellectually. The Green Party, you see, promises to give you infinite happiness without any negative consequences whatsoever:

    Imagine having a secure, fulfilling and decently paid job, knowing that you are working to live and not living to work. Imagine coming home to an affordable flat or house, and being valued for your contribution and character, not for how much you earn. Imagine knowing that you and your friends are part of an economy that works with the planet rather than against it. Imagine food banks going out of business. Imagine the end of poverty and deprivation. The key to all this is to put the economy at the service of people and planet rather than the other way round. That’s what the Green Party will do.

Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too.

Indeed. Now if only John Lennon lyrics were a governing philosophy, by Jove the Greens might be onto something! Unfortunately for the Green Party, our actions often have consequences we could not have foreseen and, unsurprisingly, if you declare war on business with massive taxes, anti-trade legislation and the nationalization of banks and the housing industry, it’s awfully difficult to ‘end poverty and deprivation’ since you’ve completely eliminated the way by which people have the opportunity to lift themselves up. But don’t worry — the Greens will just sprinkle some fairy dust around and negative consequences will magically be done away with! Supply and demand is simply a filthy conspiracy perpetuated by the bourgeoisie!

June 21, 2015

“… the carbon tax, like Paris, is worth a Mass”

Filed under: Environment, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At National Review the editors’ response to the Pope’s encyclical on climate change is not warm:

There is an undeniable majesty to the papacy, one that is politically useful to the Left from time to time. The same Western liberals who abominate the Catholic Church as an atavistic relic of more superstitious times, who regard its teachings on abortion and contraception as inhumane and its teachings on sexuality as a hate crime today are celebrating Pope Francis’s global-warming encyclical, Laudato Si’, as a moral mandate for their cause. So much for that seamless garment.

It may be that the carbon tax, like Paris, is worth a Mass.

The main argument of the encyclical will be no surprise to those familiar with Pope Francis’s characteristic line of thought, which combines an admirable and proper concern for the condition of the world’s poor with a crude and backward understanding of economics and politics both. Any number of straw men go up in flames in this rhetorical auto-da-fé, as the pope frames his concern in tendentious economic terms: “By itself, the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion.” We are familiar with no free-market thinker, even the most extreme, who believes that “by itself, the market can guarantee integral human development.” There are any number of other players in social life — the family, civil society, the large and durable institution of which the pope is the chief executive — that contribute to human flourishing. The pope is here taking a side in a conflict that, so far as we can tell, does not exist.

“Why libertarianism is closer to Stalinism than you think” … unless you actually know anything about libertarianism, of course

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

Alan Wolfe, I’m reliably informed, is a highly respected sociologist and political scientist at Boston College. If this kind of thing is typical of his output, I’m inclined to doubt my sources:

“Libertarianism has a complicated history, and it is by and large a sordid one,” charges Wolfe. It is “a secular substitute for religion, complete with its own conception of the city of God, a utopia of pure laissez-faire and the city of man, a place where envy and short-sightedness hinder creative geniuses from carrying out their visions.”

I’d call him the Hitler of Hyperbole, but that seems, I don’t know, a tad over the top. Sort of like equating a live-and-let-live philosophy such as libertarianism to Stalinism. Which I confess it totally is. Except for the gulags, the mass murders, the forced relocations, the belief in statism, a demonstrably insane economic policy — I’m probably forgetting one or two other points of similarity.

Predictably, Wolfe disinters the corpse of Ayn Rand and insists not only was the Atlas Shrugged author “an authoritarian at heart” but that she remains the beating heart of an intellectual, philosophical, and cultural movement that includes a fistful of Nobel Prize winners (Friedman, Buchanan, Smith, Hayek, Vargas Llosa, etc.); thinkers such as Robert Nozick and Camille Paglia; businessmen such as Whole Foods’ John Mackey, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Overstock’s Patrick Byrne; and creative types ranging from Rose Wilder Lane to the creators of South Park to Vince Vaughn. Sound the alarum, folks! Team America: World Police and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story are running on Comedy Central again!

June 18, 2015

P.J. O’Rourke – Donald Trump may be the perfectly “representative” candidate

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

If you’re looking for the Tsar of Tacky, the Baron of Bad Taste, the Grand Duke of Garishness, then you really will love Donald Trump for President, because he is America personified:

Has the office of the presidency diminished in stature until it attracts only the midgets of public life?

Or have our politicians shrunk until none of them can pass the carnival test “You Must Be Taller than the Clown to Ride the White House Tilt-A-Whirl”?

During this endless grim, foggy, electoral season with its constant drizzle of wannabes, I intend to make little prose pictures of each candidatural dwarf until we are down to two.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that the two may be “Clinton” and “Bush.” Members of the electorate in their right minds will go into the ballot booth, see the names, think to themselves, “I did this already.” And leave with the ballot unmarked. Voter turn-out will be 6 percent. The shuttle from the local extended care facility will send a few memory-impaired Republicans to the polls. A DNC bus will collect some derelicts from skid row. And we will have the first President of the United States elected by a franchise limited to sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease and drunken bums.

Let us therefore begin at the bottom of the campaign barrel with the lees, the dross, and the dregs, by which I mean Donald Trump.

Or is Trump just using the garbage of his personality to chum for publicity again? If he isn’t really a candidate, I see no reason to take him at his word, any more than I’d take him at his word about anything else.

Besides, I, personally, support his candidacy. “Democracy,” said H. L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The American government is of the people, by the people, for the people. And, these days, America is peopled by 320 million Donald Trumps. Donald Trump is representative of all that we hold dear: money. Or, rather, he is representative of greed for money. We common people may not be able to match Trump’s piggy bank, but we can match his piggishness.

June 17, 2015

When you tax something, you get less of it

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

At International Liberty, Dan Mitchell points out an example of leftists who genuinely want higher taxes on “the rich” even when the higher rate will return less money to the government:

Every so often, I’ll assert that some statists are so consumed by envy and spite that they favor high tax rates on the “rich” even if the net effect (because of diminished economic output) is less revenue for government.

The Laffer Curve

In other words, they deliberately and openly want to be on the right side (which is definitely the wrong side) of the Laffer Curve.

Critics sometimes accuse me of misrepresenting the left’s ideology, to which I respond by pointing to a poll of left-wing voters who strongly favored soak-the-rich tax hikes even if there was no extra tax collected.

But now I have an even better example.

Writing for Vox, Matthew Yglesias openly argues that we should be on the downward-sloping portion of the Laffer Curve. Just in case you think I’m exaggerating, “the case for confiscatory taxation” is part of the title for his article.

Here’s some of what he wrote.

    Maybe at least some taxes should be really high. Maybe even really really high. So high as to useless for revenue-raising purposes — but powerful for achieving other ends. We already accept this principle for tobacco taxes. If all we wanted to do was raise revenue, we might want to slightly cut cigarette taxes. …But we don’t do that because we care about public health. We tax tobacco not to make money but to discourage smoking.

The tobacco tax analogy is very appropriate.

June 15, 2015

“The destruction of the family is the single most destructive force in the past 40 years”

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

Gavin McInnes talks to Dr. Amier Carmel, a New York psychoanalyst, about trauma and “cry-bullies”:

He describes the cry-bullies as people with “an intense need to control” and says that “the resentment associated with this need to correct is often an induced feeling used to fix another problem.” This makes perfect sense. Whenever I argue with liberals and they preach to me about immigration, education, or women’s rights, their lack of knowledge on the subject makes it clear they’ve never looked it up. “It’s never about what it’s about,” as Derb would say. Ask them how many illegals are in the country and they’ll rarely get within 10 million of the number. Ask them how much we spend per student per year and they’ll say, “Not enough.” Ask them how much young women without kids make compared with men and they’ll say, “Women need a choice.” They’re not in it for the truth. They’re in it for the platitudes of the crusade and the power it evokes. We all know that by know. The question is why.

Carmel has a fascinating answer. “The destruction of the family,” he opines, “is the single most destructive force in the past 40 years.” Amier then discusses the back-and-forth kids do, going from mom to dad every time they have a grievance. “This dance,” he says, “is how we attain justice. It’s how the parameters of our sense of internal integrity are defined.” Amier seems particularly concerned with the lack of fathers. “The father sets down the law. When he is not there, a sense of anxiety takes root and that leads to outwardly directed hostility. Soon you are looking to the outside world to show you what the limits are. You’re ‘acting out’ and hoping society will control you. The desire for paternal law becomes pathologized.” Amier calls PC violations “narcissistic injury” and adds that this fear-driven petulance becomes especially dangerous when the ideology becomes someone’s entire identity. “When that happens,” he says, “it’s as though rationality and socialized relationships dissolve. The ideologically identified person can often become wildly reckless because they seek the obscuring of accountability with increased pathos.”

We can see this in the liberal demigod Che Guevera. His insatiable lust for power was cloaked as a need for justice, but it’s arguably just a case of a mentally ill child trying to impose order on a world he felt was spinning out of control. Che grew up in a household where his emotionally absent father would openly flaunt infidelity. Ernesto Guevara Lynch was a loser who blew his wife’s fortune on himself and young girls. I’ve noticed a pattern with liberals and fathers who were negligent and financially irresponsible. So much of their belief system seems to come from revenge. This is why they attack white men for looking at someone funny but turn a blind eye to a child prostitution ring in Rotherham. This is also why feminists won’t shut up about the “white male patriarchy” (“patriarch” meaning “father”) but have nothing to say about the shocking difference between black-on-white rape and white-on-black rape. Che is no different. He took his pain and turned it into a crusade against the world. This is why liberals put him on a T-shirt. They don’t like him because he freed Cuba or forced socialism down its throat. They like him because he personifies the cry-bully.

June 13, 2015

We’re approaching peak offensensitivity

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

The secretive Bilderberg group meets to plan global domination

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

… or, y’know … to get the global movers and shakers together for a quick rubber chicken dinner or six and a few grip’n’grins among the well-connected and the extremely-well-wealthed:

The annual Bilderberg meeting begins today in Telfs-Buchen, Austria. This year the summit’s influential attendees range from David Petraeus to Henry Kissinger, from the CEO of Airbus to the secretary general of NATO. There are some press figures on the guest list too — Bloomberg‘s John Micklethwait, The National Post‘s Andrew Coyne, The Washington Post‘s Anne Applebaum, and a few others. But the journalists won’t be writing about what they see, because the whole thing is off the record.

This combination of power and secrecy inevitably produces conspiracy theories, and the Bilderbergers have been dogged for decades by people convinced they’re the secret parliament of the world. The meeting is more mundane than that, sitting somewhere on the spectrum between a G7 summit and a Davos forum. But if some of the things people claim about Bilderberg are crazy — a couple years ago, Michael Tracy interviewed a protester outside the meeting who was convinced it featured “Devil worship” and “pedophilia” — it’s not at all kooky to recognize that powerful people are gathered there and that the things they’re saying in private may be newsworthy. Bilderberg is not a hidden government, but it’s certainly an elite institution, and it has been since it was founded in 1954.

June 12, 2015

Reason becomes a DOJ target because commenters disrespected a judge

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

Every now and again, it’s easy to believe that we’ve somehow slipped down a hole in time to a less free, more authoritarian time. This is the kind of thing you could easily imagine happening in Fascist Italy or Franco’s Spain rather than in the United States in 2015:

The United States Department of Justice is using federal grand jury subpoenas to identify anonymous commenters engaged in typical internet bluster and hyperbole in connection with the Silk Road prosecution. DOJ is targeting Reason.com, a leading libertarian website whose clever writing is eclipsed only by the blowhard stupidity of its commenting peanut gallery.

Why is the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet?

Because these twerps mouthed off about a judge.

Last week, a source provided me with a federal grand jury subpoena. The subpoena, issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, is directed to Reason.com in Washington, D.C.. The subpoena commands Reason to provide the grand jury “any and all identifying information” Reason has about participants in what the subpoena calls a “chat.”

[…]

Regrettably, The Government Can Probably Abuse the Grand Jury Subpoena Power This Way

The grand jury’s investigative power — exercised nominally on its behalf by the U.S. Attorney’s office — is nearly unchecked. It’s not like a stop-and-frisk or search; the government doesn’t need reasonable suspicion or probable case to use grand jury subpoenas to seek information. In general, one can only challenge grand jury subpoenas when they are irrationally burdensome (like demanding that Apple produce every document about iPhones in its possession) or for an improper purpose (like using the grand jury to improve trial evidence after an indictment has already been returned) or, very rarely, when privacy or constitutional issues are in play.

Reason.com — or the anonymous commenters — could file an action in federal court seeking to quash this subpoena. We know how that would likely come out, because someone recently did it. During the 2012 election cycle a juvenile but prolific Twitter personality named “Mr. X” tweeted “I want to fuck Michelle Bachman in the ass with a Vietnam era machete.” The government subpoenaed Twitter for Mr. X’s identifying information; Mr. X filed a motion to quash the subpoena. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the motion.

The psychic powers of the Python crew…

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

… all those years ago, they still managed to foresee the kind of political arguments we’d be having in the twenty-first century:

H/T to American Digest, among others who pointed out the prophetic powers of the Pythons.

June 10, 2015

QotD: The Rabbits and the Evil League of Evil

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

On the one hand, you have a faction that is broadly left-wing in its politics and believes it has a mission to purge SF of authors who are reactionary, racist, sexist et weary cetera. This faction now includes the editors at every major SF publishing imprint except Baen and all of the magazines except Analog and controls the Science Fiction Writers of America (as demonstrated by their recent political purging of Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day). This group is generally frightened of and hostile to indie publishing. Notable figures include Patrick & Theresa Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi. I’ll call this faction the Rabbits, after Scalzi’s “Gamma Rabbit” T-shirt and Vox Day’s extended metaphor about rabbits and rabbit warrens.

On the other hand, you have a faction that is broadly conservative or libertarian in its politics. Its members deny, mostly truthfully, being the bad things the Rabbits accuse them of. It counteraccuses the Rabbits of being Gramscian-damaged cod-Marxists who are throwing away SF’s future by churning out politically-correct message fiction that, judging by Amazon rankings and other sales measures, fans don’t actually want to read. This group tends to either fort up around Baen Books or be gung-ho for indie- and self-publishing. Notable figures include Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Tom Kratman, John C. Wright, and Vox Day. I’ll call this group the Evil League of Evil, because Correia suggested it and other leading figures have adopted the label with snarky glee.

A few other contrasts between the Rabbits and the Evil League are noticeable. One is that the Evil League’s broadsides are often very funny and it seems almost incapable of taking either itself or the Rabbits’ accusations seriously – I mean, Correia actually tags himself the “International Lord of Hate” in deliberate parody of what the Rabbits say about him. On the other hand, the Rabbits seem almost incapable of not taking themselves far too seriously. There’s a whiny, intense, adolescent, over-fixated quality about their propaganda that almost begs for mockery. Exhibit A is Alex Dally McFarlane’s call for an end to the default of binary gender in SF.

There’s another contrast that gets near what I think is the pre-political cause of this war. The Rabbits have the best stylists, while the Evil League has the best storytellers. Pick up a Rabbit property like Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014 and you’ll read large numbers of exquisitely crafted little numbers about nothing much. The likes of Correia, on the other hand, churn out primitive prose, simplistic plotting, at best serviceable characterization – and vastly more ability to engage the average reader. (I would bet money, based on Amazon rankings, that Correia outsells every author in that collection combined.)

Eric S. Raymond, “SF and the damaging effects of literary status envy”, Armed and Dangerous, 2014-07-30.

June 3, 2015

QotD: The Heinleins, the Goldwater campaign, and racism

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

Over a dirty-tricks television ad of a girl picking daisies over a countdown to an atomic bomb that goes off in the background, Johnson supporters turned Goldwater’s campaign slogan — “In your heart you know he’s right” — against him: “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”

Ginny stepped up her work for the campaign. Heinlein stepped up his work, too, but he was still conflicted — and at another meeting at Bob Laura’s house on August 1, he finally had more than he could take. Laura was temporizing over an offer of help Ginny had taken by telephone from a woman who identified herself as a Negro. He would take the matter up with his State Central Committee contact, Laura said, but his own reaction was: “Oh, they are free to go ahead and form their own committee.” Heinlein lost his temper for the first time in many years. He told Laura,

    They offered to stick their necks out; we should have shown instant gratitude and warmest welcome … I can’t see anything in this behavior but Jim-Crowism … you were suggesting a Jim-Crow section in the Goldwater organization.

    Mr. Goldwater would not like that. His record proves it.

    Negroes are citizens, Bob … It is particularly offensive, this year and this campaign, to suggest that Negro Goldwater supporters form their own committee…

He then ticked down a list of Laura’s administrative foul-ups, concluding:

    — these faults can easily lose the county … [sic] and with it the state […] and, conceivably, if the race is close, the Presidency itself.

    … So I’ll try to refrain hereafter from offering you advice. But I think it’s time for you either to behave like a manager, or resign.

Laura apologized for his part in the altercation.

Ginny went into field work full time, and Heinlein agreed to handle an expansion of the county office now that the nominating convention was over and the campaign was ramping up in earnest. As Laura temporized on the Jim-Crow question, he gave Heinlein a personal criticism, not the first time he had heard it: “I know you don’t believe that anyone could consider you a “yes” man. I wonder, however, if you can conceive of another’s opinion, differing though it may be, possessing any merit.”

On this issue, no: The opinion that a Negro volunteer should be treated differently from a white volunteer possessed no merit whatsoever — and if that was “intolerant” in Bob Laura’s book, so be it. “I’m one of the most intolerant men I’ve ever met,” Heinlein noted to himself. “I had thought that, simply because I had uncustomary responses as to what I liked and what I hated that I was ‘tolerant.’ I’m not. I’m not even mildly tolerant of what I despise.”

There were things more important than party unity in the Republican Party of Colorado.

William H. Patterson Jr., Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better, 2014).

May 31, 2015

Jonah Goldberg – The real Republican primary contest

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

Jonah was taken aback by something Kevin Williamson wrote — not so much at the article itself, but at the casual assertion that his favourite presidential candidate was “the mighty Cthulhu (‘Why Vote for a Lesser Evil?’)”. Jonah explains why:

I found this curious. Kevin’s preferred candidate is Cthulhu? Don’t get me wrong, I get the appeal. Cthulhu gets things done. He doesn’t pander. He certainly seems to believe in a kind of sound-money policy (by the way, I’m using the masculine pronoun for convenience, not descriptive accuracy; Cthulhu is beyond sex and gender). But Cthulhu poses some problems as a presidential candidate. The first that comes to mind is that he is evil.

I should note that the claim that Cthulhu is evil has actually sparked some controversy on Twitter. Some of his devotees tell me that he’s beyond mortal conceptions of evil which, of course, is what evil people always say. Moreover, his campaign slogan is “Why vote for the lesser evil?” Is he lying? Will he be a flip-flopper, refusing to follow through on his platform of full-spectrum evil? The last thing this country needs is an EDINO — Evil Deity In Name Only. No, I take him at his word.

Call me old-fashioned, but even though I take a back seat to no one in appreciating the appeal of a cleansing fire that shall sanitize this corrupt husk of a planet, choosing evil still strikes me as morally problematic.

Jonah’s preferred choice? SMOD:

I suggest that for the principled conservative looking to chuck it all in and give up, there’s only one candidate with the credentials and philosophy the times require. I’m referring, of course, to the Sweet Meteor of Death, Smod to his friends.

Smod describes himself as a “pre-cambrian conservative.” He has no cultists looking to rule in his name. He doesn’t endorse evil, merely the sweet release of planetary destruction. While Cthulhu can be a bit of windbag, Smod makes no speeches, he makes no sounds at all as he glides through the cosmic ether. Calvin Coolidge looks loquacious by comparison. Meanwhile, Cthulhu’s will is unpredictable, he vows chaos and anarchy here on earth. Smod provides what the market demands: certainty, predictability, and simple rules for a complex society. Who knows what Cthulhu will do tomorrow? With Smod there is no tomorrow. He has the single-minded focus only a cold and soulless inanimate object can provide.

Last, Smod is real. We don’t know when he’ll get here, but odds are he eventually will. Sure, “Why Choose the Lesser Evil?” is a great bumper sticker, but aren’t we tired of fakes who fail to deliver? To borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, Smod is real and he’ll be spectacular (for a fraction of a second. And then silence. Sweet, sweet silence).

Kevin responds:

Jonah, I thank you for the kind words. But, hesitant as I am to disagree, I think you might need to think through this a little bit. I am second to none in my admiration for Sweet Meteor O’Death, and I pray devoutly that he arrives in one piece every time I turn on MSNBC, but there is a strong case to be made for Cthulhu in 2016.

Smod is a little bit like Rick Santorum: You may sympathize with what he stands for, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily want him to be president. Imagine the fear, the absolute terror, the despairing wails of the entire human race at the moment of his arrival: You could get all that by nominating Santorum for secretary of education and saving the presidency for surer hands.

Jonah, I think this is another case of the tension between more libertarian-leaning conservatives such as myself and the more traditional Burkeans such as you. I am perfectly comfortable with a reign of eldritch chaos on Earth, while you, in spite of your own warnings against the totalitarian temptation, present us with the ultimate one-size-fits-all solution. Yes, solving all of our problems in a blinding flash of planet-ending mass extinction is, given the current political environment, a genuine feel-good solution — but what are we, hippies?

Sure, Smod is bound to have some clever campaign ads, e.g. a big picture of the Earth over the slogan “I’d Hit That!” (Another possible Smod motto: “The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome.” You’d think he’d have thought of that.) But we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by that kind of shallow demagoguery.

May 29, 2015

QotD: Buying modern indulgences for Silicon Valley billionaires

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

Silicon Valley is an American success story. At a time of supposed American decline, a gifted group of young entrepreneurs invented, merchandized, and institutionalized everything from smartphones and eBay to Google and Facebook. The collective genius within a small corridor from San Francisco to Stanford University somehow put hand-held electronics into over a billion households worldwide — and hundreds of billions of dollars in profits rolled into Northern California, and America at large.

Stranger yet, Silicon Valley excelled at 1950s-style profit-driven capitalism while projecting the image of hip and cool. The result is a bizarre 21st-century 1-percenter culture of $1,000-a-square-foot homes, $100,000 BMWs, and $500 loafers coexisting with left-wing politics and trendy pop culture. Silicon Valley valiantly tries to square the circle of driving a Mercedes or flying in a Gulfstream while lambasting those who produce its fuel.

But the paradox finally has reached its logically absurd end. In medieval times, rich sinners sought to save their souls by buying indulgences to wash away their sins. In the updated version, Silicon Valley crony capitalists and wheeler-dealers buy exemption for their conspicuous consumption with loud manifestations of cool left-wing politics.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Valley of the Shadow: How mansion-dwelling, carbon-spewing cutthroat capitalists can still be politically correct”, National Review, 2014-07-22.

May 27, 2015

Russian deputy prime minister – “Tanks don’t need visas”

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

Your weekly dose of Cold War nostalgia this week comes by way of Dmitry Rogozin, the eminently quotable Russian deputy PM in charge of the Russian defence industry:

“I’ve always joked about it… so what if they won’t give us visas, put us on sanctions list … tanks don’t need visas,” he told an interviewer on Russian state television last Sunday, according to AFP.

Last year, the former ambassador to NATO and notorious Putin loyalist, was put on a sanctions list of both the U.S. Treasury Department and the European Union, which made Rogozin announce that the Russian defense industry has “many other ways of traveling the world besides tourist visas.”

Additionally, after Romania prevented the deputy prime minister’s plane from entering its airspace in 2014, he announced that “next time I will fly in a Tu-160″ — referencing Russia’s newest strategic bomber. That comment made the Romanian Foreign Ministry issue a statement calling Rogozin’s words “a serious threat.”

Back in 2013, after the commissioning of the first Borei-class SSBN (see: “Putin’s Red October: Russia’s Deadliest New Submarine”), the Russian Cabinet member tweeted: “You bourgeoisie tremble! You are screwed!”

The most recent diatribe comes in the wake of two-week long Western military maneuvers in the Arctic, codenamed “Arctic Challenge” and involving 115 fighter aircraft and 3,600 military personnel from nine countries.

[…]

In response to yesterday’s launch of “Arctic Challenge”, the Russian Defense Ministry announced a four-day long military exercise of its own, a “massive surprise inspection” involving 12,000 troops 250 aircraft and 689 units of “various weapons and military equipment” targeting an “imaginary enemy.” The snap maneuvers are taking place in the Ural mountains and Siberia – home to Russia’s central military district.

Dmitry Rogozin’s most recent comment on Russia’s ties with the West was published yesterday on his Twitter account: “It’s not Russia that threatens the West. Its foundations will crash down under the pressure of ISIS and gays.”

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