Quotulatiousness

February 22, 2014

Venezuela’s crisis

Filed under: Americas, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

With all the attention being on Ukraine’s political upheaval, there’s another political crisis happening in South America:

How is Venezuela doing? Well, tens of thousands of protesters are in the streets, the army’s been sent to crush revolt, an opposition leader has been arrested and supporters of the government just shot dead a former beauty queen. It’s going to hell in a handcart, that’s how it’s doing.

After Hugo Chavez died he was replaced by Nicolas Maduro, a man of considerably less talent who bears a striking resemblance to an obese Burt Reynolds. A Venezuelan friend explains that Chavez’s titanic personality held his revolution together, reconciling its various contradictions with his charismatic nationalism. By contrast, “Maduro has let the worst people take over” — surrendering authority to radical mobs and corrupt officials in a bid to keep them all on side. The result? Bad economic management, inflation at 56 per cent, rising unemployment, food shortages, shocking levels of crime and an increasing reliance on government control of the press.

The Left always insisted under Chavez that some meddling in the media was necessary because it was otherwise controlled by dark, foreign forces (read: people who disagreed with Chavez). But Maduro is now threatening to expel CNN, which is about the fairest and most balanced news source on the planet. CNN’s crime was to report on the recent protests that have engulfed the capital. And good for CNN. Coverage on what’s happening in Venezuela has been eclipsed by events in Ukraine, so for those who don’t know here’s what’s happening on the ground.

  • On February 12, the opposition held a massive rally that resulted in bloodshed. Three people were killed, including two opposition protesters and one pro-government activist. The National Guard was dispatched to prevent further rallies.
  • Violence quickly spread out across the country. Some 3,000 troops were sent to pacify the city of San Cristobal, where the government also cut off transport links and the internet.
  • Opposition leader, Leopoldo Lopez, was forced to hand himself over to the National Guard on charges of inciting violence.
  • The President blamed America for starting the conflict and has expelled US officials.
  • Local TV stations have gone into lockdown and simply aren’t reporting the fighting. Venezuelans are relying on social media, which includes some false reporting. The opposition lack a single national TV outlet to be heard on.

Ukrainian President flees coup

Filed under: Europe, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

The situation in Ukraine just got more fluid, as President Yanukovych is said to have fled from Kiev and the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament announced a vote to remove him from the presidency. James Marson, Alan Cullison and Alexander Kolyandr report for the Wall Street Journal:

Government authority appeared to melt away Saturday, leaving protesters in control of the capital’s center. President Viktor Yanukovych left the capital for a city in the country’s Russian-speaking east and vowed to remain in power.

In a television interview Saturday afternoon in Kharkiv, Mr. Yanukovych denounced the events in Kiev as a “coup d’etat” that he blamed on “bandits.”

“I have no plans to leave the country and I have no plans to resign. I am the legally elected president and all the international intermediaries I’ve talked to (over the last few days) have given me guarantees of security. We’ll see how those are fulfulled,” Mr. Yanukovych told a small TV station in Kharkiv.

Opposition leader Vitali Klitschko earlier had called on parliament to vote to oust Mr. Yanukovych and announce presidential elections in May, as police withdrew from the center of the capital Saturday.

Ukraine opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was expected to be released from prison within hours, according to a spokeswoman for the opposition.

Ukraine is divided politically and linguistically on almost the same line:

Ukraine language map

The BBC reports that new elections have been called for May 25:

Ukrainian MPs have voted to oust President Yanukovych and hold early presidential elections on 25 May.

Mr Yanukovych’s spokeswoman said he did not accept the decision.

Earlier on Saturday, protesters walked unchallenged into the president’s office and residential compounds.

Also on Saturday afternoon, prominent opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko was freed from a hospital in the eastern city of Kharkiv where she was being held under prison guard.

A BBC correspondent saw Tymoshenko driven away in a car after leaving the hospital.

MPs had voted to pave the way for her release on Friday. She was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2011 for abuse of power.

Her supporters have always maintained this was simply Mr Yanukovych taking out his most prominent opponent, and her release has always been a key demand of the protest movement.

Christie watch ongoing

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:47

The greatest crisis facing the American people today is apparently the nefarious doings of New Jersey Governor Chris “Bridgegate” Christie. If you, like all right-thinking Americans want to know where Christie is and what he’s up to at any given moment, there’s a website you need to follow:

Carla is bemused by my obsession with the New Jersey Governor Christie Christie Bridgegate scandal. I can’t really explain it myself, other than to say it is interesting to watch public servants who can’t keep their psychopathy under control and shut down the world’s busiest bridge traffic out of spite. (I’m not saying Christie shut the traffic down, I’m saying the bad apples he surrounded himself did).

Until now, I’ve had to keep myself satisfied with Rachel Maddow’s excellent, unrelenting, obsessive coverage of the scandal on her nightly show, but now I can get mini-fixes throughout the day, thanks to The Christie Tracker, a website created by Matt Katz of WNYC. I’m so excited!

Christie Tracker website

I’m sure there must be dedicated fans of Rob Ford’s antics who are already trying to put together a similar tracking website for Toronto’s newsworthy mayor…

Federal Liberals to switch emphasis to the economy

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

David Akin recounts the last few federal campaigns the Liberal Party ran and the dismal results they achieved:

When the Conservative war room in the 2011 general election first saw video of then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff hoarsely exhorting Canadians to “rise up!”, they could hardly believe their good fortune.

As Maclean’s political editor Paul Wells reports in his latest book, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, Conservative operatives at first thought it was a hoax. But, no, there was Ignatieff running around the country, literally calling for a revolutionary overthrow in the midst of the worst recession since the Depression.

“You’ve got Stephen Harper on the one hand saying times are dangerous and we need a stable government and then you got a guy yelling at people to rise up?” a Conservative told Wells.

Canadians, of course, did not rise to Ignatieff’s call to arms, and instead dumped Liberals in record proportions. New Democrats and Conservatives had stuck doggedly to themes that revolved around pocketbook issues and reaped the electoral rewards.

The Liberals ignored pocketbook issues, too, in 2008 focusing instead on Stephane Dion’s “Green Shift”. Dion’s plan could quite easily have been sold as a job creation plan with a huge tax cut but instead was sold as the solution for a problem — climate change — Canadians were not nearly worried about as much their own household economic security.

And in 2006, Paul Martin had a rock-solid economic record that should have helped him glide right by the sponsorship scandal and back to power. Incredibly, he tried to seal the deal in the last weeks of the campaign with a surprise pledge to eliminate the “notwithstanding clause.” Riiiight! Canadians love to vote for parties promising constitutional amendments!

This time, the party appears to have decided to fight the 2015 election campaign on economic grounds, and Justin Trudeau’s video appearance is intended to be the beginning of that new tack. As Akin points out, the Tories and NDP have been occupying that part of the agenda for the last few years, so the Liberals have to find a way to draw the public attention to them and away from the other parties. That may be a key advantage for them in media terms, as Trudeau is far more mediagenic than Harper or Mulcair, so they have a fighting chance to catch attention but still need to work on what to do when they get it. The next election is starting to look more interesting all the time.

Update: Stephen Gordon is attending the Liberal convention and while he applauds them for allowing non-party members to sit in on their economic discussions, he’s not blown away by the quality of the economic arguments and suggestions:

I don’t want to be overly harsh (really!), because the proposals were the result of a lot of work and thought on the part of the people bringing them forward. Engagement on that level is something we need more of. The problem is that they came from people whose views on economics have been largely conditioned by the dirigiste approach that Liberal governments have adopted in the past. I counted no fewer than nine calls for a ‘National Strategy’, a few ‘National Policies’ and countless other ways of spending enormous amounts of money, often for no better reason than ‘it’d be really neat if we had this.’ For example, the “Building a More Competitive Economy” session was chock-a-block with proposals for infrastructure spending, and bereft of anything that would have actually created more competition in the Canadian economy.

The fault lies within the policy process itself. None of the proposals were accompanied with estimates of their costs, and I’m informed that party members are warned against discussing costs when they put their proposals together. (I can only infer that the party would rather avoid controversial stories on proposals that had not been endorsed by the leadership.) This is unfortunate, because cost-benefit analysis is at the heart of economic policy analysis. Virtually all of the policy initiatives proposed here bring some benefits, but the really hard and interesting question is whether or not these benefits outweigh their costs. The problem is that answering this question is the prerogative of the leadership, and not the delegates.

February 20, 2014

ESR examines the “Dark Enlightenment”

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

Remember that “Dark Enlightenment” we’re all supposed to be terrified about? ESR is looking at the phenomenon (it’s not really a movement, or at least, it isn’t a single movement):

The Dark Enlightenment is, as I have previously noted, a large and messy phenomenon. It appears to me in part to be a granfalloon invented by Nick Land and certain others to make their own piece of it (the neoreactionaries) look larger and more influential than it actually is. The most detailed critiques of the DE so far (notably Scott Alexander’s Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell and Anti-Reactionary FAQ nod in the direction of other cliques on the map I reproduced but focus pretty strongly on the neoreactionaries.

This is the map ESR is referring to:

Scharlach's affinity diagram of the Dark Enlightenment movement, grouped according to their major themes

Scharlach’s affinity diagram of the Dark Enlightenment movement, grouped according to their major themes

Nevertheless, after we peel away clear outliers like the Techno-Commercial Futurists and the Christian Traditionalists, there remains a “core” Dark Enlightenment which shares a discernibly common set of complaints and concerns. In this post I’m going to enumerate these rather than dive deep into any of them. Development of and commentary on individual premises will be deferred to later blog posts.

(I will note the possibility that I may in summarizing the DE premises be inadvertently doing what Scott Alexander marvelously labels “steelmanning” – that is, reverse-strawmanning by representing them as more logical and coherent than they actually are. Readers should be cautious and check primary sources if in doubt.)

Complaint the first: We are all being lied to – massively, constantly, systematically – by an establishment that many DE writers call “the Cathedral”. Its power is maintained by inculcation in the masses of what a Marxist (but nobody in the DE, ever, except ironically) would call “false consciousness”. The Cathedral’s lies go far deeper than what most people think of as normal tactical political falsehoods or even conspiracy theories, down to the level of some of the core premises of post-Enlightenment civilization and widely cherished beliefs about the sustainability of racial equality, sexual equality, and democracy.

[…]

Complaint the second: “All men are created equal” is a pernicious lie. Human beings are created unequal, both as individuals and as breeding populations. Innate individual and group differences matter a lot. Denying this is one of the Cathedral’s largest and most damaging lies. The bad policies that proceed from it are corrosive of civilization and the cause of vast and needless misery.

[…]

Complaint the Third: Democracy is a failure. It has produced a race to the bottom in which politicians grow ever more venal, narrow interest groups ever more grasping, the function of government increasingly degenerates into subsidizing parasites at the expense of producers, and in general politics exhibits all the symptoms of what I have elsewhere called an accelerating Olsonian collapse (after Mancur Olson’s analysis in The Logic Of Collective Action).

Even when he does nothing, Justin still gets great press

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Paul Wells discusses the upcoming Liberal Party convention in Montreal, and the evergreen topic of Justin Trudeau’s ability to get loving press coverage even when he’s not doing or saying anything at all:

… Justin Trudeau, whose party has led the others in national polls for 10 months. Since Trudeau has been the Liberal leader for the same length of time, he has become a figure of some fascination, not least among the members and supporters of other parties. They are convinced the coltish young man, who first set foot in 24 Sussex Drive at the same moment he first set foot anywhere at all, has been given a free ride by the press gallery. Not just a free ride: a leg up. Perhaps even a leg over. In my own case I’ve gone about it in odd fashion, by publishing a 400-page book about Stephen Harper whose thesis is that the Prime Minister is eternal, but you knew I was devious when you walked in.

The Liberals’ opponents have compensated for the gallery’s failure to give Trudeau proper scrutiny by scruting him as hard as they can. The Conservatives have spent millions of dollars on commercial radio ads — in Punjabi, Cantonese, Mandarin and English — warning parents that Trudeau will give their kids marijuana. The Liberals have spent large sums rebutting the Conservative ads with their own. This fight has been going on for four months and may now stand as the most sustained bout of pre-writ campaign advertising in your lifetime. Newspaper reporters, who do not listen to commercial radio and are not sure they believe it exists, have covered almost none of it.

But if the Conservatives attack Trudeau for four months on the radio — and every day in the Commons, and almost as often in email blasts to Conservative donors — and the Liberals still lead, are the Conservative attacks failing? Hard to know. Maybe the Liberals would be less popular if the Conservative back bench and Ezra Levant stopped talking about him. Or maybe they’d be riding even higher, carried aloft on the praise of complacent scribes. Politics rarely lets us test counterfactuals properly.

But if Trudeau’s big mouth reliably gets him into trouble — a proposition routinely argued by his opponents while they are on breaks from trying to get him into trouble — then the Liberals’ Montreal convention is a risky proposition for him. He has two big speeches scheduled there, one on Thursday and a second on Saturday. If his jaw is a shovel custom-built to dig his political grave, he will have two chances to dig deep.

I must commend whoever it was in the Liberal war room that suggested the Tories get “Justin”-themed rolling papers printed up. Even the Conservatives — who have been known for generations for laughably bad political notions — might not have come up with something so dumb without help.

February 19, 2014

Euromaidan versus Berkut – it’s not a game

Filed under: Europe, Government, Liberty, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:34

The situation in Ukraine is not getting the public attention it deserves in the West, and Zenon Evans provides a quick summary of the extent of the protests and government repression:

Violence between Ukraine’s opposition (known as Euromaidan) and the government’s SWAT-style police force (Berkut), has boiled over today. Fires are raging across protesters’ tent-towns and police stations in what is being described as “open warfare.” Estimates indicate that over 20 people are dead and over 1,000 are injured. The BBC reports that officers are using rubber bullets and stun grenades, while The Daily Beast says machine guns are their weapon of choice. Protesters are armed with an array of weapons, from bricks and molotov cocktails to firearms of their own.

Parliamentary member Lesya Orobets writes:

    The war is here. A real fierce war. It is impossible to grasp this emotionally, although the mind is working precisely and quickly quite apart from emotions. We are being exterminated because of our desire to have dignity and decide our lives independently. This simply makes no sense. My fellow Ukrainians are being killed by the creatures that not only resemble us biologically, but also carry Ukrainian passports.

Russian news website Slon.ru explains that mayhem was sparked because police blocked opposition members and their representatives from entering Ukraine’s parliamentary building, where they planned on introducing constitutional reforms to limit the authority of President Yanukovych, who has been consolidating power.

For more background, Joey DeVilla has assembled a primer on Euromaidan at his blog:

Ukraine language map

I continue to be surprised with how many people I keep running into who don’t know what’s going on in Ukraine right now. For those of you who haven’t been following the news or who’d like to know more, this article’s for you!

For the most basic introduction, check out the above video by the Washington Post, Ukraine’s crisis explained in 2 minutes. It starts with a question that you might be asking: What is Ukraine? (If you live in the Bloor West Village area of Toronto, you have no excuse for not knowing about Ukraine.)

Federal Liberals begin to outline their economic agenda

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Stephen Gordon examines what is said (and left unsaid) in Justin Trudeau’s video on the economy.

For example, the video offers a definition for what means to be middle class in all those Liberal talking points:

    the people who live off their incomes, not their assets

This is a bit of a head-scratcher: everyone lives off their incomes. The people who live off their assets have incomes – it’s just that their incomes are generated by their investments and not by working. If Trudeau is referring to people who depend on their earned income, then he’s including most of the one-percenters: the surge in income at the top has been driven by earned income, not their asset holdings. He’s also excluding retirees: their incomes are generated by their asset holdings. (Raising this point gives me an excuse to point people to the CBC Radio series The Invisible Hand, and especially the “Your Grandmother is a Capitalist” episode.) Trudeau probably does not want to include one-percenters in the middle class and almost certainly doesn’t want to ignore retirees, but his definition appears to do just that.

As I said, it’s a head-scratcher.

Later on, Trudeau brings up a compelling point, one that has been raised by many others (including myself):

    I worry that at some point, Canadians will say: “Why should we support a growth agenda if it doesn’t help my family?”

I don’t know how the Liberals intend to answer this challenge, but this is a good and constructive way of framing the problem. It is far more likely to generate a useful answer than putting it in terms of terms of class warfare.

February 18, 2014

The Tea Party’s vulnerabilities on abortion, gay marriage, and immigration

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:21

L. Neil Smith agrees with a lot of Tea Party positions, but correctly points out that their determination to drag (some) religion into politics undermines them in three key areas with non-Tea Party audiences:

As for abortion, gay marriage, and immigration, I was taught in college (and have since confirmed) that the populist Grange Movement of the nineteenth century never quite got off its knees because white farmers didn’t want to share their cause with black farmers. The Tea Parties are demonstrating exactly the same kind of suicidal short-sightedness.

In the eighteenth century, most Americans were either passionately for or against slavery. When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they came to a compromise about the issue: slaves would be counted as three fifths of a person for the purpose of representation. They have been severely castigated about this compromise for a couple of centuries, but without it, there would never have been a United States of America.

I’m saying that similar compromises are possible regarding two of the three issues I’ve mentioned, and I have a question about the third.

Abortion first: I know that one side thinks it’s murder and doesn’t seem aware that half the population — with equal passion and sincerity — considers laws against it to represent expropriation and slavery.

A few years ago, I ran an admittedly unscientific abortion survey on my personal website for three years, asking this question: “Could you be satisfied with a compromise under which abortion would remain legal, but not a single cent of tax money would ever used to pay for it?”

The result was that an overwhelming eighty-five percent responded “Yes”, leaving, I assume, a disgruntled seven and a half percent at either end of the curve, who believe that women — or at least their uteruses — belong to the State, or that abortion ought to be an entitlement. Beyond the palest ghost of a shadow of a doubt, the issue is settled, then. We just need to pound it into our “leaders'” thick skulls.

[…]

The question I have about the third issue is this: by precisely what mechanism is my marriage of thirty-odd years to my lovely and talented wife in any way damaged or diminished by letting my friends George and Fred get married, too? I’m talking about nuts and bolts, here, palpable connections. I don’t want to hear about the Bible or your religion. Under the First Amendment, that’s excluded from the conversation.

Their taxes help pay for the courthouse and the judge’s salary. They are entitled, by virtue of that payment, to exactly the same services that you and I expect. What we’re talking about here is leaving George and Fred alone to live the same dream that Cathy and I have been able to live, I can’t find it in myself to deny them that hope.

February 17, 2014

Ultra-progressive agenda to fix California’s woes

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:06

Let’s be clear: parts of California are doing fantastically well, but other portions of the state are suffering disproportionally. Here are a few suggested legislative fixes to redress the inequalities of life faced by too many disadvantaged people in the state:

2. The Undocumented Immigrant Equity Act

The “I am Juan too Act” would assess all California communities by U.S. Census data to ascertain average per-household income levels as well as diversity percentages. Those counties assessed on average in the top 10% bracket of the state’s per-household income level, and which do not reflect the general ethnic make-up of the state, would be required to provide low-income housing for undocumented immigrants, who by 2020 would by law make up not less than 20% of such targeted communities’ general populations.

There are dozens of empty miles, for example, along the 280 freeway corridor from Palo Alto to Burlingame — an ideal place for high-density, low-income housing, served by high-speed rail. Aim: One, to achieve economic parity for undocumented immigrants by allowing them affordable housing in affluent areas where jobs are plentiful, wages are high, and opportunities exist for mentorships; and, two, to ensure cultural diversity among the non-diverse host community, bringing it into compliance with the state’s ethnic profile.

[…]

4. The Silicon Valley Transparency and Fair Jobs Act

This “Google Good Citizen Act” would set up a regional board to monitor commerce in the San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara tri-county area. The state regulatory commission would monitor offshore investment, outsourcing, and unionization. All commercial entities, with over 100 employees, would be in violation and face state fines if: 1) the number of a firm’s employees overseas accounted for 10% or more of the workforce currently employed within the tri-county Silicon Valley area; 2) more than 1% of the current capitalization of a Silicon Valley company were deposited in banks outside the United States; and 3) more than 50% of a tri-county company’s workforce were non-union. Aim: To ensure progressive Silicon Valley commercial businesses are caring progressive state citizens.

5. The California Firearms Safety Act

The “No Guns for Grandees Act” would forbid private security details to be armed with handguns or semi-automatic long guns. It would allow private security personnel to be armed only with paintball, BB or pellet guns. Aim: To prevent unnecessary armed deterrence by private security units in the hire of the affluent.

6. The Fair Housing Adjustment Act

The “Everywhere an Atherton Act” would tax all private residential square footage in excess of 1800 square feet at four times the current per square foot assessment. Aim: It would ensure state resources are equally distributed and not inordinately siphoned off to a small minority of the state population. Would encourage existing large homes to downsize through reverse remodeling.

There’s a lot of money in US politics

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

Jim Geraghty included this table in a blog post about the biggest contributors to the two major US political parties, and it’s rather shocking. This is the list of top donators from 1989 to 2014:

US political contributions 1989-2014

Clearly, there’s a need to get big corporations out of the political game. Two of them are in the top ten, and three are in the top 15. Oh, and two of them actually gave more money to the Republicans than the Democrats! When will they reform the system to prevent this kind of distortion to the political process?

February 9, 2014

Democracy and the media

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

Nigel Davies looks at the uncritical admiration of the form of democracy (while actively ignoring the actual practice) among Western media people:

It is interesting to look around the world at the moment and identify the failures of democracy, and to be amused by the Western media’s complete incomprehension of what is going on and why.

Time and time again you get headlines about how people should stand back and accept the ‘democratically elected government’, despite the fact that the democratic result was a fairly evil dictator keen on persecution, mass murder, civil war and ethnic cleansing.

This is because most ignorant Western journalists believe as an absolute truth that ‘democracy’ is a good thing, despite all the evidence that democracy is as bad, or even worse, than any other form of government. (Interestingly many non-western journalists treat democracy with considerable scepticism, which baffles Western journalists even more.)

Just to be clear Robespiere, Napoleon III, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were in some form ‘democratically elected’ leaders, and every Communist dictator, ever, has regularly received about 97% of the popular vote in their countries.

[…]

Which brings us to unofficial one party states, like South Africa, where there is a popular vote which means virtually nothing. People get a say, but there is no chance of removing the party which — very largely through its dreadful economic and social policies — has kept the vast majority of the voters ignorant and poor (while flooding them with propaganda suggesting that result is an outside conspiracy, and only the people’s party can save them …) Actually some of you might recognise this more directly as being Mugabe’s very blunt approach, but the principal is the same when adopted by more weasely worded one party statists (for whom too many Western journalists have a romanticised and highly inaccurate perspective).

Most African (and many Asian and Middle Eastern … and Eastern European) ‘nations’ that pretend to democracy, are effectively one party states where the ‘opposition’ is never really going to be allowed to get anywhere.

A current example he points to is Egypt:

I am not just talking about people like Hitler who managed to manipulate 25-30% of the vote to dominate a chaotic parliament long enough to change all the rules and entrench their power. (Though that appears to be the default result for 90-95% of all Republics throughout all history, so perhaps it is worthy of some reflection.) No, I am more interested in places where a genuine majority of the population vote repeatedly for a leader who every educated and thinking (not the same thing unfortunately) person knows will lead them to disaster.

Effectively what we are talking about here is popularistic appeals to the ignorant peasantry who make up the majority of the population.

Egypt recently elected the Muslim Brotherhood. This was done by the majority votes of the ignorant peasants in the rural areas, and against the wishes of practically anyone who could be classed as educated, literate, liberal, or with an understanding of rule of law, or role of commerce and legal rights in a modern society. Ie: the traditional appeal to the ignorant to grab control of the ‘means of production’ and ‘distribute it more fairly’ — which always leads to the same results of poverty and persecution whether you call it a Fascist state (Nazi Germany) Communist state (People’s Republic), Theocratic state (Muslim republic, Hindu republic, North Korea), or just a kleptocracy.

Naturally the Western journalists believe the Muslim Brotherhood should be left to develop its ‘democratic’ course.

The inevitable result of letting the Muslim Brotherhood rewrite the constitution and entrench their powers while introducing a Muslim republic with proper Sharia laws, would be a particularly nasty form of dictatorship. Like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, future votes would have been ‘controlled’ and eventually pointless. So the intervention of the military to throw them out and try and redo the democratic project was necessary, and possibly the only (very slim) hope of making it work. However, like Fiji, it may be only the start of many interventions to stop backsliding, until the military and people give up in disgust and settle down to exactly the sort of dictatorship which, more or less, kept things together and slowly moving forward under their previous dictators.

February 8, 2014

The utopian bubble of elite university students

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Jonah Goldberg on the “ideal” lifestyle of students at elite universities:

There’s a certain kind of elite student who takes himself very, very seriously. Raised on a suite of educational TV shows and books that insist he is the most special person in the world — studies confirm that Generation Y is the most egocentric and self-regarding generation in our history — he is away from home for the first time, enjoying his first experience of freedom from his parents. Those same parents are paying for his education, which he considers his birthright. Shelter is provided for him. Janitors and maids clean up after him. Security guards protect him. Cooks shop for him and prepare his food. The health center provides him medical care and condoms aplenty. Administrators slave away at finding new ways for him to have fun in his free time. He drinks with abandon when he wants to, and the consequences of his bacchanalia are usually somewhere between mild and nonexistent. Sex is as abundant as it is varied. If he does not espouse any noticeably conservative or Christian attitudes, his every utterance in the classroom is celebrated as a “valuable perspective.” All that is demanded of him is that he pursue his interests and, perhaps, “find himself” along the way. His ethical training amounts to a prohibition on bruising the overripe self-esteem of another person, particularly a person in good standing with the Coalition of the Oppressed (blacks, Latinos, Muslims, women, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, et al.). Such offenses are dubbed hate crimes and are punished in a style perfected in Lenin’s utopia: through the politicized psychiatry known as “sensitivity training.”

But even as this sensitivity is being cultivated, the student is stuffed to the gills with cant about the corruption of “the system,” i.e., the real world just outside the gates of his educational Shangri-La. He is taught that it is brave to be “subversive” and cowardly to be “conformist.” Administrators encourage kitschy reenactments of 1960s radicalism by celebrating protest as part of a well-rounded education — so long as the students are protesting approved targets, those being the iniquities of “the system.” There is much Orwellian muchness to it all, since these play-acting protests and purportedly rebellious denunciations of the status quo are in fact the height of conformity.

But it is a comfortable conformity, and this student — who in all likelihood will go into a profession at the pinnacle of the commanding heights of our culture — looks at this Potemkin world and thinks it is the way things are supposed to be. He feels freer than he ever has or ever will again, but that freedom is illusory. He is, in fact, a dependent: All his fundamental needs are met and paid for by others. This is what the political theorists call positive liberty — when someone else gives you a whole pile of stuff so you can be “free” to do whatever you want.

February 4, 2014

SoCons and their ambivalence toward libertarianism

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Jonah Goldberg makes a case (that might not sit well with many SoCons) that social conservatism is actually more fundamentally libertarian than modern liberalism:

I guess where I’d disagree with Siegel’s formulation (and Vin’s) is the idea that liberalism is necessarily “radically civil-libertarian” about much of anything. Of course, individual liberals may be civil-libertarians. I can certainly think of plenty who are. But as an intellectual, cultural and political project, I think liberalism is better understood as a competing value system. Think of it this way. Social conservatism is very libertarian about all sorts of things, and not libertarian about other things. Constitutional considerations aside, where it believes the State shouldn’t interfere it is because non-interference advances a cultural agenda of traditional conservatism.

The same goes for liberalism. It celebrates certain lifestyles or cultural choices because it likes the content or fruits of those choices. It is a mistake, it seems to me, to say liberals are libertarian about much of anything. They are outraged about alleged intrusions into our privacy when it comes to the NSA, but utterly dismissive of potentially far greater intrusions into our private lives via things like Obamacare.

Consider gun rights. Yes, conservatives believe in second amendment rights because they are in the Constitution. But they also value a culture of self-sufficiency, self-defense and a traditional understanding of individual sovereignty. (Relatedly, I think it’s fair to say that hunting culture is inherently conservative and, very broadly speaking, anathema to much of liberal culture). Liberals dislike gun rights, because they detest gun culture (their Constitutional arguments in this regard have always struck me as nearest-weapon-to-hand debating points and rationalizations given their general disdain for Constitutional literalism in nearly every other regard) and see gun violence as a kind of public health issue, which means the State should have an unlimited license to deal with it. The right of armed self-defense also offends the State’s monopoly on violence, and liberalism is a jealous guardian of State power. Liberals talk a great game about being libertarian when it comes to sexual politics, but have no problem politicizing other, equally personal, choices: like what you can eat, or what you can say (I’m thinking of things like campus speech codes). Moreover, the recent push to socialize the provision of birth control (and abortion) is hardly a libertarian enterprise.

[…]

Oh, a quick addendum, lest I be greeted with the usual scoffing at the suggestion that social conservatism is more libertarian than liberalism.

I would argue — and have argued for years — that mainstream conservatism is vastly more libertarian than liberalism for a number of reasons. I’ll list four. Law, Metaphysics, Economics and the Family.

1) Mainstream conservatism actually takes the Constitution seriously, which means that written into conservatism is a very real limit on what the State can do to advance a cultural agenda.

2) Metaphysically, conservatism draws heavily on Judeo-Christian values, and therefore has a constrained vision about the limits of social and individual perfectibility and the power of the State to achieve such things. Liberalism, as Bill Voegeli, Thomas Sowell and others have argued, has no such limiting principles because at its core it is an unconstrained vision.

3) Economically, conservatism and libertarianism while not entirely identical overlap considerably. This means we actually believe that there’s a very limited positive role for the State to second guess the allocation of resources in the market place or to spend money better than the people who earn it.

4) Conservatism, unlike liberalism, considers the family a near-sacrosanct institution that should be an oasis from government meddling (barring instances of abuse and the like). The family, for liberals is the last nut to crack. Which is why people like Melissa Harris Perry can talk about “public ownership” of children or in the words of Hillary Clinton talk about how we need to move away from the idea there is any such thing as somebody else’s child.

I could go on, but I think those four should do for now.

February 3, 2014

QotD: Plight of youth – unpaid internships and helotry

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

It is popular now to talk of race, class, and gender oppression. But left out of this focus on supposed victim groups is the one truly targeted cohort — the young. Despite the Obama-era hype, we are not suffering new outbreaks of racism. Wendy Davis is not the poster girl for a resurgent misogyny. There is no epidemic of homophobia. Instead, if this administration’s policies are any guide, we are witnessing a pandemic of ephebiphobia — an utter disregard for young people.

The war against those under 30 — and the unborn — is multifaceted. No one believes that the present payroll deductions leveled on working youth will result in the same levels of support upon their retirements that is now extended to the retiring baby-boom generation. Instead, the probable solutions of raising the retirement age, cutting back the rate of payouts, hiking taxes on benefits, and raising payroll rates are discussed in an environment of après moi le déluge — to come into effect after the boomers are well pensioned off.

The baby-boomer/me generation demands what its “greatest generation” parents got — or, in fact, far more, given its increased rates of longevity. The solution of more taxes and less benefits will fall on young people and the unborn, apparently on the premise that those under 18 do not vote, and those between 18 and 30 either vote less frequently than their grandparents or less knowledgeably about their own self-interest.

[…]

Symbolic of the many gifts bestowed by the baby boomers to the present generation of youth — aside from Botox and liposuction — was the new idea of the “intern”: an unpaid helot position predicated on the notion that the young and poorer might someday win a wage from the older and richer.

How odd that President Obama, in his soon-to-be-infamous “I have a pen and phone” boast to bypass the Congress, claimed that he would act outside the Constitution to enact his agenda and help the “kids.”

In truth, no administration in recent memory has done more to harm young people. Like some strange exotic species of the animal kingdom, we Americans are now eating our own young.

Victor Davis Hanson, “Eating Our Young”, VDH’s Private Papers, 2014-01-28

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress