Quotulatiousness

September 26, 2013

Roll back Obamacare? Not with these tactics

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Coyote Blog calls the current approach by the GOP “Republican Fail” and explains why:

Yes, I understand why things are happening as they are. From a re-election strategy, their approach makes total sense. A lot of these House guys come from majority Republic districts where their biggest re-election fear comes from a primary challenge to the right of them. I live in one of these districts, so I see what perhaps coastal media does not. In everyday conversation Republicans are always criticizing their Congressmen for not rolling back Obamacare. Republicans need to be able to say in a primary, “I voted to defund Obamacare”. Otherwise I guarantee every one of them will be facing a primary opponent who will hammer them every day.

But from the perspective of someone who just wants the worst aspects of this thing to go away, this was a terrible approach. Defunding Obamacare entirely was never, ever, ever going to succeed. Obama and Democrats would be happy to have a shutdown last months before they would roll back his one and only signature piece of legislation. They may have caved in the past on other issues but he is not going to cave on this one (and needs to be seen not caving given his recent foreign policy mis-steps that has him perceived as weak even in his own party). And, because all the focus is on Obamacare, we are going to end up with a budget deal that makes no further progress on containing other spending.

September 25, 2013

QotD: “Liberaltarianism”

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

Oh, so anyway, another peeve of mine is the way liberals — and many libertarians — act as if there’s a lot of common cause between liberals and libertarians. The thinking seems to be that since both liberals and libertarians are for drug legalization, gay marriage, etc., that liberals can be seduced to the libertarian cause or that libertarians and liberals should forge a new “liberaltarian” political alliance to replace the old right-leaning fusionism. This was my friend Brink Lindsey’s big cause for a while, and I never bought it. It’s also something you hear from a lot of liberal college kids who want a wee bit more plausibility when they pose as rebellious.

But the truth is that what we call liberals today — a.k.a. progressives — simply aren’t libertarian even on most of their “libertarian” issues. As I’ve written before, being a “social liberal” isn’t the same thing as being a libertarian:

Your typical liberal Democrat says she’s liberal on social issues but that doesn’t make her in any meaningful way a libertarian. For instance, the vast majority of the libertarians I know hate things like speech codes, smoking bans, racial quotas, and the vast swaths of political indoctrination that pass for “education” today. They tend to oppose gun control, think fondly of homeschooling (if not always homeschoolers) and are generally split on the question of abortion. They do not, however, think that the government should be steamrolling religious institutions with Obamacare or subsidizing birth control. Liberals tend to loathe federalism or states’ rights (though there’s been some movement there), libertarians usually love the idea. The liberals who don’t like it fear that states or local communities might use their autonomy to live in ways liberals don’t approve of. Libertarians couldn’t care less.

Sure, there’s overlap between liberalism and libertarianism on things like gay marriage. But the philosophical route libertarians and liberals take to get to that support is usually very different. Libertarians are disciples of thinkers like Hayek and von Mises. Liberals descend from thinkers like John Dewey. The former believed in negative liberty, the latter positive liberty. And therein lies all of the difference. As a gross generalization, libertarianism advocates freedom to do whatever you like (short of harming others). Liberalism supports freedom to do whatever liberals like; everything else is suspect.

[…]

That’s because libertarianism is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Jonah Goldberg, The Goldberg File, 2013-08-23

September 24, 2013

Reason.com banned from Reddit‘s /r/Politics subgroup

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:35

Nick Gillespie is puzzled that Reddit users are no longer allowed to submit links to Reason:

So I’m left wondering exactly what we did to incur the wrath of TheRedditPope. Reddit penalizes sites and users that scrape articles from original sources, try to game the system by submitting only material in which they have an publishing interest, and don’t add much information or analysis. As several of the commenters in the thread note, Reason.com is the biggest libertarian news site on the web and whether folks agree or not with our take on a given topic, they can’t seriously accuse us of ripping off other sites or not shooting our mouths off with our own particular POVs on any given topics.

Consider the attempted post that brought the ban to our attention. The user who contacted us had apparently tried to submit this story: “Do-Nothing Congress? Americans Think Congress Passes Too Many Laws, Wrong Kinds of Legislation.” Click on the link and you’ll be taken to an extended analysis of information drawn from the latest Reason-Rupe Poll, an original quarterly survey of American voters that has garnered praise from all over the political spectrum and has been cited in all sorts of mainstream and alternative outlets. If the Reason poll — which is designed by Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this site, and is executed in the field by the same group that conducts Pew Research — and that post in particular don’t meet the threshold of original content that is news-rich and original, then nothing does.

I am a huge admirer of Reddit, even in the wake of recent revelations about the /r/Politics ban. As I wrote last year in a Reddit thread,

    Reddit is one of those rare sites that actually delivers on the potential of the Internet and Web to create a new way of creating community and distributing news, information, and culture that simply couldn’t exist in the past. Like wildly different sites ranging from slashdot to Arts & Letters Daily to Talking Points Memo to the late, lamented Suck, Reddit is precisely one of the reasons why cyberspace (or whatever you call it) continues to excite us and make plain old meatspace a little more tolerable.

September 23, 2013

Merkel’s victory

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:06

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives won re-election yesterday, but their Free Democrat coalition partners did not earn enough votes to retain their seats in the Bundestag, so a new coalition will may have to be formed. The Economist has more:

Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany for eight years, seems likely to stay in office for a few more. She has won for her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a sparkling election result, with about 42% of the vote when including its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, according to exit polls and estimates. Depending on how the smaller parties fare, that may even suffice for an absolute majority of seats in parliament, allowing Mrs Merkel to govern without a coalition partner as only Konrad Adenauer, also of the CDU, did in the 1950s.

But as of the evening of this election day, September 22nd, other outcomes were still possible. For one, voters delivered a stinging rebuke to Mrs Merkel’s current coalition partner, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP). Having been thrown out of the Bavarian state parliament a week ago, and the state parliament of Hesse today, the FDP seemed likely to be ejected from the federal parliament as well. Its leadership will have to go, its message will have to be renewed, if it is to have any future in German politics.

The greatest unknown on this Sunday evening is the fate of the newest party in German politics, the euro-sceptic (as in: sceptic about the euro, not necessarily the European Union) Alternative for Germany. At 4.9% in the exit polls, it teeters on the edge of the 5% threshold necessary to get into parliament.

Earlier this year, I linked to a Zero Hedge piece which predicted if not the end of the world, the end of stability in Europe following this particular electoral outcome:

There will be nothing but lying until September 22, 2013 which is the date of the German elections. This is the drop dead date that I have been asked about for so long. Then, as soon as the celebration is over that Ms. Merkel is to remain in power, the world will turn on its axis. The status quo will disappear and there will be a “shock and horror” campaign as the Southern nations of Europe demand more help and Germany squirms and then refuses to provide it because it does not have the assets to do so.

Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, and even Italy are all going to line up at the trough only to discover that the promise of water was just that, a promise, and does not exist. A Biblical drought will be upon the Continent and from the political battles will emerge new alliances and new screams calling the traitors by name. The twin towers upon which the markets rest, money from nothing and fairy tale financials, will decompose in the light of this new sun and our old friend, Fear, will return to haunt us.

Let us cast our eyes toward Berlin and see whether this is prophecy or mere doom-mongering.

September 22, 2013

Statistical fail for political axe-grinding

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:29

Coyote Blog views with alarm a recent article in Rolling Stone which abuses statistics to make a point that apparently isn’t true:

What I want to delve into is the claim by the author that wildfires are increasing due to global warming, and only evil Republicans (who suck) could possibly deny this obvious trend […]

These are the 8 statements I can find to support an upward trend in fires. And you will note, I hope, that none of them include the most obvious data — what has the actual trend been in number of US wildfires and acres burned. Each of these is either a statement of opinion or a data point related to fire severity in a particular year, but none actually address the point at hand: are we getting more and larger fires?

Maybe the data does not exist. But in fact it does, and I will say there is absolutely no way, no way, the author has not seen the data. The reason it is not in this article is because it does not fit the “reporters” point of view so it is left out. Here is where the US government tracks fires by year, at the National Interagency Fire Center. To save you clicking through, here is the data as of this moment:

Wildfire averages 2004-2013

Well what do you know? The number of fires and the acres burned in 2013 are not some sort of record high — in fact they actually are the, respectively, lowest and second lowest numbers of the last 10 years. In fact, both the number of fires and the total acres burned are running a third below average.

The one thing this does not address is the size of fires. The author implies that there are more fires burning more acres, which we see is clearly wrong, but perhaps the fires are getting larger? Well, 2012 was indeed an outlier year in that fires were larger than average, but 2013 has returned to the trend which has actually been flat to down, again exactly opposite of the author’s contention (data below is just math from chart above)

Wildfires average acres per fire 2004-2013

In the rest of the post, I will briefly walk through his 8 statements highlighted above and show why they exhibit many of the classic fallacies in trying to assert a trend where none exists. In the postscript, I will address one other inconsistency from the article as to the cause of these fires which is a pretty hilarious of how to turn any data to supporting your hypothesis, even if it is unrelated.

The lasting influence of the Frankfurt School

Filed under: Germany, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Lee Stranahan talks about the Frankfurt School’s continuing importance in modern liberal thought:

For a decade, the Southern Poverty Law Center and others on the left have been trying to hide and distract from one of the main origins of both radical academia and media hostility towards capitalism: the ideology of cultural Marxism and Critical Theory that arose from the Frankfurt School.

The SPLC and others dismiss the facts about the German think-tank and its subsequent influence in America as a conspiracy theory. Understanding these attacks is an object lesson in how the left creates self-sustaining mythology by demonizing the people who dare expose their ideology while misdirecting their own followers as to the real story behind liberal ideas.

Organizations on the institutional left such as the Southern Poverty Law Center didn’t just appear out of nowhere or in an ideological vacuum. The SPLC in particular has a specific role of designating organizations as ‘hate groups’, often smearing mainstream conservatism by falsely tying it to tiny, violent and racist organizations.

The SLPC’s designation of what does and doesn’t constitute a hate group has clear foundations in the world of academic political correctness and censoring of speech it considers ‘racist, sexist and homophobic’; all terms that it defines in leftist terms and very selectively. For example, in the wake of last year’s shooting at the headquarters of the Family Research Council, the SLPC went out of their way to double down on it’s claim that the FRC is a ‘hate group.’

Even political correctness, however, didn’t just suddenly pop up out of thin air; it has its basis in a group of academic Marxist philosophers that came together in Germany between World War I and World War II called the Frankfurt School. Their cultural Marxist approach would go on to have a profound influence in the United States after many in the Frankfurt school fled Germany and came to America in the 1930s.

September 21, 2013

Michael Ignatieff on the aftermath of electoral defeat

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

The Toronto Star has an excerpt from Michael Ignatieff’s new book, Fire and Ashes:Success and Failure in Politics:

Zsuzsanna and I returned to Stornoway and disconsolately packed up our things. I remembered a photograph I’d seen of men in overalls carting belongings into a moving van at the back of 10 Downing Street after Margaret Thatcher defeated James Callaghan in 1979.

The arrival of the moving van is as momentous a symbol of the sovereignty of the people as the moment when a leader takes the oath of office. Now the moving vans were at our back door. The people had told us to pack our bags.

In an emptying house that had once felt like home, I pulled my books off the library shelves as the portrait of Laurier, our greatest prime minister, seemed to follow me with its eyes. Every leader of the party but two had become prime minister. Now I had become the third leader to fail.

The day before I’d had an airplane, a security detail, a staff of 100, a car and driver, a chef and housekeeper to welcome us home, and, most valuable of all, a political future. The day after, that future had vanished. I was unemployed and five and half months short of eligibility for the pension that usually goes with six years of service as an MP.

I was filling boxes while making phone calls to find myself a job. Rob Prichard, a friend of 30 years, came to the rescue, and after he’d made a few calls to John Fraser, master of Massey College, David Naylor, the president of the University of Toronto, and Janice Gross Stein, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, I was back in my old life, teaching human rights and politics once again. Finding a new start was much harder for many of my defeated colleagues.

‘Defeated, disconsolate, forlorn’

I hadn’t driven for five years, and so I went to renew my licence the day after the defeat. The photograph they took that day shows a person I now barely recognize: defeated, disconsolate and forlorn. The eyes — my eyes — don’t focus.

September 14, 2013

Vlad the (journalistic) Impaler

Filed under: Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:06

Mark Steyn on the sudden re-emergence of Russia on the international stage:

For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.

It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.

All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” In the biographical tag at the end, the Times editors informed us: “Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.” But by this stage, one would not have been surprised to see: “Vladimir V. Putin is the author of the new memoir The Audacity of Vlad, which he will be launching at a campaign breakfast in Ames, Iowa, this weekend.”

As Iowahawk ingeniously summed it up, Putin is “now just basically doing donuts in Obama’s front yard.” It’s not just that he can stitch him up at the G-8, G-20, Gee-don’t-tell-me-you’re-coming-back-for-more, and turn the leader of the free world into the planet’s designated decline-and-fall-guy, but he can slough off crappy third-rate telepromptered mush better than you community-organizer schmucks, too. Let’s take it as read that Putin didn’t write this himself any more than Obama wrote that bilge he was drowning in on Tuesday night, when he took to the airwaves to argue in favor of the fierce urgency of doing something about gassed Syrian moppets but not just yet. Both guys are using writers, but Putin’s are way better than Obama’s — and English isn’t even their first language. With this op-ed Tsar Vlad is telling Obama: The world knows you haven’t a clue how to play the Great Game or even what it is, but the only parochial solipsistic dweeby game you do know how to play I can kick your butt all over town on, too.

Reason.tv: George Will’s Libertarian Evolution

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

“I’ve lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that’s a lot of folly to witness up close,” says Washington Post columnist George Will. “Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.”

“In part, I owe my current happiness to Barack Obama,” continues the 72-year-old Will, who “so thoroughly concentrates all of the American progressive tradition and the academic culture that goes with it, that he’s really put the spring in my step.”

Branded “perhaps the most powerful journalist in America” by the Wall Street Journal, Will received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977 and is the author of numerous books, including Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, and One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of our Singular Nation. A regular panelist on ABC’s This Week, Will has the distinction of having been attacked in the pages of Doonesbury and praised in an episode of Seinfeld (for his “clean, scrubbed look”).

More recently Will has become a champion of libertarianism, both in print and on the air. “America is moving in the libertarians’ direction,” Will wrote in a 2011 review of The Declaration of Independents, “not because they have won an argument but because government and the sectors it dominates have made themselves ludicrous.”

Will sat down with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch to discuss his libertarian evolution (2:16), how Sen. John McCain spurred his political transformation (4:07), Ronald Reagan (4:29), the tax code (8:45), why the Republicans are becoming more interesting (19:30), what the government should be spending money on (23:14), war hawks and foreign policy (25:19), the benefits of judicial activism (34:49), gay marriage (37:55), marijuana legalization (39:04), the importance of Barry Goldwater (40:28), Mitt Romney (45:45), the 2016 election (46:37), Medicare (48:52), how Everett Dirksen’s untimely death changed his life (50:42), why President Obama makes him happy (52:06), affirmative action (53:07), and his optimism in America’s future (57:31).

September 12, 2013

American voters suddenly decide to take a serious look at foreign policy

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:58

A guest post at Zero Hedge by Robery W. Merry suggests that somnolent American interest in foreign policy may be waking up:

Political analysts over the next year or so, and historians well into the future, are likely to point to the fall of 2013 as a fundamental inflection point in American politics. That period, they will say, is when the American people forced a major new direction in American foreign policy. Before the events of this fall, the country’s electorate largely delegated foreign policy to its political elite — and largely supported that elite as it projected American military power with more abandon than the country had ever before seen. Even as the government steadfastly expanded the range of international problems that it said required U.S. military action, the electorate accepted that expanded international role and that increasingly promiscuous use of force.

Those days are gone now. The American people conveyed emphatically, in public opinion surveys and in communications to their representatives in Washington, that they did not want their country to launch air strikes against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Not even if Assad used chemical weapons against his people, as they generally believe he did. Not even if the strikes are limited in magnitude and duration, as Obama promises they will be. Not even if the president of the United States says the strikes are in the country’s national interest. They don’t buy it, and they don’t want it.

Poll numbers in recent days have demonstrated this turnaround in stark fashion. In addition, congressional reluctance to support the president’s authorization request was growing inexorably. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the president was “losing ground in both parties in recent days,” while the Wall Street Journal said support for Mr. Obama’s position on Syria “was slipping in Congress.” If Russia’s Vladimir Putin hadn’t interrupted the U.S. political process with his call for a negotiated end to Assad’s possession of chemical weapons, it seems inevitable that the president would have suffered a devastating political defeat in Congress. That’s still the likely outcome if it ever comes to a vote.

[…]

In a survey reported in Tuesday’s New York Times, the paper asked broader questions about American foreign policy, and the results were revealing. Fully 62 percent of respondents said the United States shouldn’t take a leading role in trying to solve foreign conflicts, while only 34 percent said it should. On a question whether the United States should intervene to turn dictatorships into democracies, 72 percent said no. Only 15 percent said yes. The Times said that represents the highest level of opposition recorded by the paper in various polls over the past decade.

To understand the significance of these numbers, along with the political pressures building on lawmakers on the issue, it’s important to note that American political sentiment doesn’t change willy-nilly, for no reason. What we’re seeing is the emergence within the American political consciousness of a sense that the country’s national leaders have led it astray on foreign policy. And, given the country’s foreign-policy history of the past two decades, it isn’t surprising that the people would begin to nudge their leaders with a certain amount of agitation.

Stirring up opposition to the Charter of Quebec Values

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells gives a bit of sovereigntist history and brings us up to date on the proposed Charter of Quebec Values:

When Bernard Drainville, another minister in today’s post-cosmopolitain PQ government, released the text of his proposed Charter of Values — complete with handy wall charts showing the articles of clothing (Veil! Kippah!) that will heretofore be banished from public servants’ bodies while at work — he had the handy effect of smoking out two federal party leaders who have been equivocal until now. The Liberal, Justin Trudeau, has opposed the charter since the PQ started putting up trial balloons nearly a month ago. The New Democrat, Thomas Mulcair, has most of his seats in Quebec, and had resisted comment until now. So, mostly, had the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, although he did tip his hand when asked about the PQ plan in Toronto: “Our job is making all groups who come to this country, whatever their background, whatever their race, whatever their ethnicity, whatever their religion, feel home in this country and be Canadians. That’s our job.”

On Tuesday the trial balloons became official government policy. The NDP and Conservatives came out unequivocally against the PQ. Speaking for the government, Jason Kenney suggested a possible federal court challenge.

This, too, happens to be one of the tactical tricks Jean-François Lisée cooked up during the long years before he entered electoral politics. In his 2000 book Sorti de secours, Lisée suggested the PQ cook up some scheme that would be rejected by the rest of the country, so Quebecers would feel insulted and want to secede.

Such a plan would depend for its success on a clear distinction between Quebec public opinion and the actions of national parties. So far it’s not going well for the PQ. Mulcair and Trudeau are Quebecers whose parties hold 66 of the province’s 75 seats. The Bloc Québécois did not hurry to embrace Marois’s scheme. Every Montreal mayoral candidate opposes it, as does the Quebec Federation of Women.

The inspiration for the PQ’s decision to retrench is purely electoralist. It is a reaction to 30 years of failed efforts to make the sovereignty movement every Quebecer’s fight. Forced generosity having failed the PQ, the party is falling back on cynicism and pettiness. It’s make-or-break for the entire sovereignty movement, and I’m pretty sure Marois, Lisée and Drainville just broke it.

September 9, 2013

Kafkatrapping

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

Christopher Taylor on the way to shut down an opponent’s argument by accusing them of a thoughtcrime:

Another nifty trick is to accuse someone of something because you don’t care for what they think or say, then if they deny it, call that proof of their evil. It’s called Kafkatrapping, and it works like this: “if you start anything with the words ‘I’m not racist’ well that’s proof you are.” Don’t like someone’s position but cannot factually or rationally refute it? Just Kafkatrap them.

The term Kafkatrapping comes from the book The Trial by Kafka in which the victim is accused of undefined crimes against humanity and destroyed by his denying them. It works like this:

    Person A: Its sad that men are raped so much more than women in America.

    Person B: You’re a sick sexist for even suggesting that.

    Person A: but its true, see this report from the Obama administration? I’m not sexist, I’m just telling you the facts.

    Person B: Your refusal to admit your sexist nature is proof of it.

Just denying your guilt is called proof of it and all rational discussion breaks down because it has become pointless. The argument is not based on facts, truth, reason, or intellectual inquiry, it is a schoolyard argument from the 5th grade which has nothing to do with truth. Its about destroying your opponent, keeping your position intact, and making the other person look bad.

And its inevitable that when people reject reason and objective truth, they’re reduced to childish arguments from emotion and strength. Its all you have left, and all you can use. The more this becomes predominant in a society, the more effective it becomes because people are less and less equipped to even begin to debate rationally.

New South Wales “accidentally elects” libertarian senator

Filed under: Australia, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Australia makes it a legal requirement to vote in elections, which pretty much guarantees that a fairly high proportion of voters know little or nothing about the people they cast their mandatory votes for. Add in the fact that (at least in some jurisdictions) the order on the ballot isn’t in either alphabetical or party affiliation order. In New South Wales, this meant a Liberal Democratic candidate got votes that may have been intended to go to the Liberal party’s candidate:

The man elected to take one of six Senate seats in New South Wales says allowing the general public to carry weapons is one way of curbing gun crime in western Sydney.

Voters in New South Wales have chosen Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm for the Senate after the party appeared in the top left hand corner of ballot papers.

The seldom-mentioned party gained 8.89 per cent of the initial vote allocation, ahead of the Greens’ 7.77 per cent.

The party, which believes in social libertarianism, a free market economy and small government now joins a key group of minor party and independent senators set to hold the balance of power after July next year.

[…]

Mr Leyonhjelm accepts his party probably gained votes in error, with voters thinking they were choosing the Liberals.

The name has been raised as an issue before — in 2007 the Liberal Party objected and they ran as the Liberty and Democracy Party.

Mr Leyonhjelm admits the massively-long NSW Senate ballot paper may also have pushed votes to the Liberal Democrats.

“Oh yeah, we think there are three reasons why our vote was as high as it was,” he said.

“There are some people who voted for us because of our policies and they like what we stand for and we would like to think that that was all of them, but I don’t think that is the case.

“There would be some people who voted for us because we were first on the ballot paper — there is always a sizeable number of people who don’t care and vote for the first one on the paper, and with such a big ballot paper that was probably a factor.

“Then there are some people who mistook us for the Liberals, probably the Liberals, but they could also have mistaken us for the Christian Democrats or even the ordinary Democrats.”

In the 1980’s, we nearly had this happen in an Ontario election: the official Liberal Party candidate was disqualified after the deadline for submitting candidate names to get on the ballot, so the Libertarian candidate got a lot of votes that clearly were from people who thought they were voting Liberal … but not enough to win that riding.

When politicians meddle in defence matters

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

An interesting report in Herald Scotland by Kate Devlin illustrates some of the problems created when politicians make decisions without adequately consulting with the civil service:

The man in charge of equipment at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has warned officials offer “opinion” not fact on defence programmes, including the aircraft carriers being built on the Clyde, because of pressure from ministers.

In recent years the department has become notorious for overspends and procurement problems. But Bernard Gray said that civil servants in his department had “their arms put up behind their backs” to produce hasty costings for projects.

Earlier this week Mr Gray revealed that in 2010, when Tory MP Liam Fox was Defence Secretary, officials were given just hours to estimate the cost of changing the planes to fly from the carriers.

Mistakes in that process led to a humiliating U-turn by Mr Fox’s replacement Philip Hammond last year and have cost the taxpayer at least £74million.

Appearing before a separate committee of MPs, Mr Gray said officials should have been given six months, not a day, to complete the work. He said what was eventually provided was “opinion”.

“People (within the MoD) come under pressure, with people saying, ‘Everybody wants to know, we have to have an answer today,'” he said.

September 8, 2013

QotD: What is Fascism?

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

Learned controversies, reverberating for years on end in American magazines, have not even been able to determine whether or not Fascism is a form of capitalism. But still, when we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini’s Italy, we know broadly what we mean. It is in internal politics that this word has lost the last vestige of meaning. For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term ‘Fascist’. I am speaking of what I have seen in print. I have seen the words ‘Fascist in sympathy’, or ‘of Fascist tendency’, or just plain ‘Fascist’, applied in all seriousness to the following bodies of people:

Conservatives: All Conservatives, appeasers or anti-appeasers, are held to be subjectively pro-Fascist. British rule in India and the Colonies is held to be indistinguishable from Nazism. Organizations of what one might call a patriotic and traditional type are labelled crypto-Fascist or ‘Fascist-minded’. Examples are the Boy Scouts, the Metropolitan Police, M.I.5, the British Legion. Key phrase: ‘The public schools are breeding-grounds of Fascism’.

Socialists: Defenders of old-style capitalism (example, Sir Ernest Benn) maintain that Socialism and Fascism are the same thing. Some Catholic journalists maintain that Socialists have been the principal collaborators in the Nazi-occupied countries. The same accusation is made from a different angle by the Communist party during its ultra-Left phases. In the period 1930-35 the Daily Worker habitually referred to the Labour Party as the Labour Fascists. This is echoed by other Left extremists such as Anarchists. Some Indian Nationalists consider the British trade unions to be Fascist organizations.

Communists: A considerable school of thought (examples, Rauschning, Peter Drucker, James Burnham, F. A. Voigt) refuses to recognize a difference between the Nazi and Soviet régimes, and holds that all Fascists and Communists are aiming at approximately the same thing and are even to some extent the same people. Leaders in The Times (pre-war) have referred to the U.S.S.R. as a ‘Fascist country’. Again from a different angle this is echoed by Anarchists and Trotskyists.

Trotskyists: Communists charge the Trotskyists proper, i.e. Trotsky’s own organization, with being a crypto-Fascist organization in Nazi pay. This was widely believed on the Left during the Popular Front period. In their ultra-Right phases the Communists tend to apply the same accusation to all factions to the Left of themselves, e.g. Common Wealth or the I.L.P.

Catholics: Outside its own ranks, the Catholic Church is almost universally regarded as pro-Fascist, both objectively and subjectively;

War resisters: Pacifists and others who are anti-war are frequently accused not only of making things easier for the Axis, but of becoming tinged with pro-Fascist feeling.

Supporters of the war: War resisters usually base their case on the claim that British imperialism is worse than Nazism, and tend to apply the term ‘Fascist’ to anyone who wishes for a military victory. The supporters of the People’s Convention came near to claiming that willingness to resist a Nazi invasion was a sign of Fascist sympathies. The Home Guard was denounced as a Fascist organization as soon as it appeared. In addition, the whole of the Left tends to equate militarism with Fascism. Politically conscious private soldiers nearly always refer to their officers as ‘Fascist-minded’ or ‘natural Fascists’. Battle-schools, spit and polish, saluting of officers are all considered conducive to Fascism. Before the war, joining the Territorials was regarded as a sign of Fascist tendencies. Conscription and a professional army are both denounced as Fascist phenomena.

Nationalists: Nationalism is universally regarded as inherently Fascist, but this is held only to apply to such national movements as the speaker happens to disapprove of. Arab nationalism, Polish nationalism, Finnish nationalism, the Indian Congress Party, the Muslim League, Zionism, and the I.R.A. are all described as Fascist but not by the same people.

George Orwell, “What is Fascism?”, Tribune, 1944

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