Quotulatiousness

October 31, 2024

The US federal election goes into garbage time

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

Lauren Smith on the latest attempt by Joe Biden to suck the oxygen out of the room (Kamala Harris was also speaking while Biden’s “gaffe” grabbed the media’s full attention):

US president Joe Biden has re-emerged from wherever he was being hidden to hand Donald Trump an incredible, accidental boost. In a rare public appearance, he branded Trump’s supporters “garbage“.

For some reason, the president decided to wade into the row over a joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend. Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”, sparking some confected outrage among those pretending not to know he was joking. In response, while speaking to Hispanic advocacy group Voto Latino, Biden said: “The only garbage I see floating out here is [Trump’s] supporters”.

The Republicans have understandably seized on the remark. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, slammed it as “disgusting”. Florida senator Marco Rubio repeated the smear to Trump supporters at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania last night, to furious boos from the crowd.

The White House then rushed to try to retract the comments. Today, in a statement on X, Biden claimed that he was actually talking about the “hateful rhetoric” being “spewed” at the rally, not about Trump’s supporters themselves. That, he says, is “all I meant to say”.

But that is plainly not what he said. And everyone can guess it’s probably not what he meant, either. As Trump pointed out at the Allentown rally yesterday, Biden’s “garbage” gaffe is highly reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “deplorables” outburst. During her 2016 presidential campaign, she described “half” of Trump’s supporters as “racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic”, saying they all belonged in a “basket of deplorables”. It was a blunder that many, including Clinton herself, believe cost her the election.

Jim Treacher investigates what he calls “the Case of the Planted Apostrophe” as the bulk of the legacy media rallied to try to cover up, mitigate, or explain away Biden’s “garbage” comment:

I think I heard something about MSNBC intercutting footage from the ’39 rally with the Trump rally? I haven’t watched that network since they fired Olbermann, but it sounds like something they’d do.

Little did they all know what a gift they were about to be handed. One of the speakers at the rally was comedian and Kill Tony podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe, and everybody lost their minds about this joke:

Perfect. The headline wrote itself: TRUMP RALLY BASHES PUERTO RICANS!!!

If Trump wanted to convince everyone he’s not a bigot, Hinchcliffe certainly didn’t do him any favors. Even though, as a few lonesome bloggers shouted into the wilderness, it was a joke.1

The entire journalism industry then spent 48 solid hours pouncing and seizing on Hinchcliffe’s unfortunate wisecrack. “See? Do you see how racist they are? They’re just so … so … racist!!”

Oh, they were so happy.

But they forgot one thing: Grandpa Joe is still around.

And he wants to help.

Emphasis mine:

    The Puerto Rican that I know, or Puerto Rico where I’m, in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable.

Oops.

Yes, Joe Biden just called Trump supporters “garbage”. It’s the only clear sentence in that whole paragraph of gibberish.

There are maybe six million Puerto Ricans in America. In 2020, there were something like 75 million Trump voters. I’m no mathematician, but that’s a lot more. If alienating the first group is bad, then alienating the second group is much, much worse.

No matter how much Joe Scarborough hates them.

If a dumb joke by a podcast host matters, then so does the sitting president of the United States telling tens of millions of voters that they’re “garbage”.

    1. The journos are now digging into Hinchcliffe’s voting history. They’re investigating a comedian for telling a joke. And they wonder why we hate them.

October 30, 2024

Less than a week of increasingly desperate measures left to go …

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

I’m referring to the antics of the major US political parties as the formal date of the US election heaves into sight. On the one hand, Theophilus Chilton characterizes the Democrats as “cornered animals”:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

With just about a week left before Election Day, things have definitely been heating up. At this point, it’s pretty apparent that all of the indicators are in Trump’s favour — and this is driving the Democrats absolutely nuts (even more than they usually are). A month ago, one could have definitely made the case that Kamala Harris had a good chance of winning. Now, that seems pretty far-fetched outside of the Democrats figuring out a way to fraud the vote so hard that they can overcome their ever-worsening situation in basically every swing state. As we enter this final week, Trump definitely has the momentum and is conducting an upbeat, optimistic campaign. Meanwhile, Kamala and her surrogates seem palpably despondent, screaming at their microphones and rolling out one ill-conceived “October surprise” after another at an increasingly frenetic pace.

That this is the case seems to find a lot of varying data points to support it. Public-facing polling is always subject to a healthy dose of skepticism (“… gonna need to see some internals there, bub”), but even that seems to have moved in the direction of a possible outright Trumpian popular vote victory. It’s obvious where both campaigns’ internal polling is trending, as Trump heads to states like New Mexico and Virginia to expand the slate of contested states while Kamala does damage control in bright Blue urban centres where her party’s early voting numbers have collapsed. Republicans have been overperforming bigly in every swing state’s early voting. Newspapers like the Washington Post and techbros like Jeff Bezos (with access to tons of relevant Big Data) are starting to make nice with Trump because their information is pointing them in that direction. At a demotic level, Trump supporters appear loud and energised in all sorts of places where Trump support has not been traditionally robust, while Kamala’s supporters seem dejected and subdued — when they’re not angrily screaming at small children. On and on, the “non-traditional” indicators keep pointing in the same direction.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious that there is a preference cascade that is moving in Trump’s direction.

Now, if we were dealing with normal people, getting the kind of feedback that an electoral loss like this represents would cause the Left to step back and reassess what they’re doing. They’d take a moment to “look in the mirror”, so to speak. But understand that we are not dealing with normal people. Losing elections (or at least losing the actual voting, the “election” is a different matter altogether) does not send them the same message it sends to everyone else. Instead of introspection, it merely generates anger. It tells them that they need to screech harder, steal harder, and smash harder. After all, these people are on the Right Side of History and anyone who opposes them is a “fascist” and a Nazi (their actual closing argument this week, by the way). And as we all know, heroes like Indiana Jones punch Nazis. If the election is lost, it’s not because the Democrats ran an absolutely clueless, tone-deaf campaign that basically only appealed to wine aunts, gay men, and twenty-something sluts. It’s because Trump is a Russian asset and his supporters accessed a secret reservoir of racism, sexism, and transphobia like it was some kind of evil superpower that allowed them to scurrilously subvert the Good People in America. In other words, the Left will only double down on their own intrinsic madness.

I mean, this isn’t just a theory — we’re already starting to see this pattern of behaviour take place even though Harris hasn’t even lost yet. Celebrities are already starting up with their bidecadal threats to leave the country if their candidate loses. Keith Olbermann wants Elon Musk to be arrested and lose all of his government contracts for the crime of not suppressing oppositional speech on X like it used to be censored back in the old days. The ever-amusing Will Stancil is gloompilling and appears to be on the verge of either suicide or a murder spree. These people are not well. Not at all.

On the other hand, Trump is not only Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin re-incarnated with his red-hatted brownshirts terrorizing the land … he’s literally the Devil:

My current prediction — based on the average of the Trump v Harris opinion polls at Real Clear Politics — is that President Trump will win both the popular vote and the Electoral College in the 2024 election. This prediction is not only based on President Trump now effectively tying with Vice-President Harris in the average of polls, but even more on that VP Harris has never polled as well as Secretary Clinton did at the relevant points in the 2016 campaign.

What reading this Substack Note brought out very clearly was how very different this US Presidential election seems to folk on the two sides of a deeply politically polarised polity.

On the VP Harris side, the salient view is some version of “how can you even consider voting for That Man!?” This is usually attached to a whole list of sins and other claims, of varying accuracy. This is the Trump-The-Devil view. The election is all about Trump and how appalling he is, both as a person and as a political figure. Sure there are other issues (e.g. climate change, abortion) but the lead and focus is how awful Trump is.

To deal with the reality that President Trump has already been President, there is regularly extra focus on his personal Devilness plus various claims about how a second Trump Presidency would be so much worse, for whatever reasons.

Back in the 2016 campaign, it was noted that Trump’s supporters treated what he said seriously but not literally, while his opponents treated his words literally but not seriously. That is, his opponents focused on Trump’s erratic connection to accuracy in his statements but did not take the political pressure points he mobilised anywhere near as seriously. Those were simply ignored and/or dropped into “the bigotry, so ignore” box. Conversely, his supporters were being mobilised by precisely those political pressure points.

The focus on President Trump’s willingness to say things for their rhetorical effect rather than their accuracy loses some of its moral high ground, given how willing President Trump’s opponents have been willing to make statements about him for rhetorical effect, rather than accuracy.

October 28, 2024

QotD: Democracy as theatre

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

The world does not have much experience with democracy. What we know of it comes from the century or so the West been tinkering with it and, of course, what can be learned from the ancient Greek experiment with it. Unlike monarchy or various forms of despotism, democracy has had a relatively short run. We have more real world experience with various types of totalitarianism than we do democracy, so it stands to reason that we are just coming to understand its benefits and liabilities.

One thing we are learning about modern democracy is that it is a myth. The people are not in charge. They get to vote on things and select representatives, but those representative don’t actually represent the interests of the people, who voted them into their positions. The office holders in a modern democracy represent the interests of the money-men who sponsored them. Politicians in a democracy are like prize fighters, in that they are controlled by a management team.

Like a prize fighter, one of the demands placed upon a modern politician is that he must at all times seek the attention of the public. Much of what we see in our modern democracies is false drama, designed to gain attention. This is why women have proven to be so successful as politicians. Women are naturally gifted with the ability to get attention, especially through false drama. It turns out that democracy is a form of governance modelled on the beauty pageant.

This is the point of the impeachment fiasco. The Democrats are the party of girls and gay men, so they naturally seek drama. Trump’s great sin is that he is a great showman, so he gets all the attention. Impeachment allows the vagina party to one-up him and force him to pay attention to them. If you look at the people celebrating in the streets, it’s lesbians and middle-aged woman. They are not celebrating because they hate Trump. They are happy someone is noticing them.

The Z Man, “Impeaching Democracy”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-19.

October 27, 2024

Whittier College as a small-scale model of the decline of higher education

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

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter returns to the state of higher education in the west, this time looking at the plight of Whittier College which appears to be well along in a death spiral:

Whittier College’s most famous graduate, Richard M. Nixon, 1 June 1972.
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

While I like to jump around subject matter here, in order to keep myself – and you – from getting bored, one topic that I return to regularly (as a dog returns to his vomit, as a sow returns to her mire) is the ongoing polycrisis in higher ed. You may have noticed, as I just wrote about this a week ago. Academia Is Women’s Work created a bit of a buzz. It seems to have struck a nerve with a lot of people, both with those who have observed the same things that I’ve noticed, and who had the same “ah-hah!” moment that I did once the phenomenon of male flight was connected to the myriad symptoms of academic decay that we all know so well; and with those (mainly women, naturally) who reacted with sputtering outrage – misogynist! incel! – when my Xitter thread on the subject went viral and broke containment in the basedosphere. Despite quite a few hostile eyeballs on the thread, the only thing they could find to correct was a grammatical typo (*its!) in the opening tweet.

When writing about the DIEvory Tower I usually keep it very general, as the problems are systemic, affecting the entire sector, and the view from orbit avoids giving the impression that the issues are specific to any one institution. But a couple of stories recently came to my attention which are simply too perfect not to share with you. Each of them provides a sort of holographic totality of the academic polycrisis, illustrating all of the afflictions in specific, personalized detail.

[…]

The title of this article really says it all: “Plunging enrollment, financial woes, trustee exodus. Whittier College confronts crisis“. It’s a bit out of date now – it was published about a year and a half ago – but the subject matter remains timeless. It has everything: infrastructural decay, forced diversity, incompetent and corrupt administration, a terrified faculty, accusations of racism, collapsing enrolment, angry alumni, reduced donations, budgetary problems. It’s all there.

Whittier College is a small liberal arts school in California, founded in the 19th century by abolitionist Quakers, and known mainly for being President Richard Nixon’s alma mater. It has seen better days:

    [T]he once-bustling quad is often all but empty these days, students say, and inside the Wanberg Hall dormitory, carpets smell musty, the Wi-Fi is spotty, and 25 students share two restrooms with toilets that frequently break down and take ages to fix. The eerie quiet outside and fetid bathrooms inside are signs of the turmoil roiling one of California’s oldest liberal arts colleges.

Imagine spending $49,000 a year to use fetid bathrooms.

Enrolment and revenue have both collapsed over a very short timespan:

    Since 2018, enrollment has plummeted by about 35%, from 1,853 students to about 1,200, according to college figures. Annual revenue has plunged by 29% over roughly the same period, audited financial statements show. … This term, faculty report the number of undergraduates is just 1,027.

The athletics programs are being sacrificed:

    Partly to save money, Whittier cut football and three other sports programs last year.

One of the other teams that got shut down was lacrosse, which is a very white sport. Sheer coincidence, probably. “Partly to save money,” though, huh.

The president of Whittier College is one Linda Oubré. Oubré has an MBA from Harvard Business School, previously served as a dean at College of Business at San Francisco State University, has worked as a consultant, was president of a teeth-whitening spa, and is also – and this surely the most important line item on her curriculum vitae – professionally qualified as a black woman. Given these impeccable credentials, it will be no surprise to learn that Whittier’s problems commenced immediately upon Oubré taking the helm.

[…]

Oubré is very concerned about people doing racisms:

    For a decade, more than half of Whittier’s undergraduates have been people of color. But in an hour-long talk at a South by Southwest education conference earlier this month, Oubré told attendees she encountered attitudes at Whittier such as, “‘We can’t have too many Hispanics,’ whatever, fill in the blank, ‘because the white kids won’t be comfortable’.”

It seems very unlikely that any of the faculty at a contemporary liberal arts college would have dared to suggest that the potential discomfort of white students was something to be avoided – yes, I’m saying that I think Oubré just made that up – but it’s revealing that she thinks that saying that people saying that the white kids might be uncomfortable with too much diversity is an own. The white kids are supposed to be uncomfortable! Also: a greater-than-fifty-percent non-white student body, in a country that is (for now) majority white, is apparently an insufficient level of diversity. Sufficient diversity is zero white people. But we already knew that.

October 26, 2024

Thank goodness somebody finally had the courage to say that Trump is a fascist

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

I mean it’s been obvious since his supporters have been goose-stepping around the Reichstag the White House in their brown shirts, red armbands, and constant chanting of the “Horst Wessel Lied“. How have the mainstream media managed to avoid seeing the clear inspiration of Trump’s Kampf and reporting it to credulous flyover state cretins Americans?

This week Kamala Harris described Donald Trump as a “fascist” who seeks “unchecked power”. Conservative commentators have expressed outrage at this absurd strategy, one which will doubtless backfire. And yet they appear to have forgotten that Trump has repeatedly referred to Harris as a “fascist” and, one on occasion, called her a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist”.

We have grown accustomed to the tactics of social media, the online crèche where those who bawl the loudest are rewarded with treats. What has become known as “Godwin’s Law” states that the longer an online discussion continues, the higher the probability that a comparison with the Nazis or Hitler will take place. Even Godwin has succumb to Godwin’s Law, penning an article for the Washington Post last December with the headline: “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.”

If this election is going to be reduced to each candidate shouting “fascist” at the other, we may as well give up hope. I have never been more convinced of the growing infantilism of political discourse than in the last few weeks, or that the US is now divided – perhaps irreparably – between two groups who see the world in entirely incommensurable ways. With sensible discussion now seemingly impossible, the election has descended into a battle of memes.

Harris’s campaign team, for instance, gleefully embraced the “Brat” identity bestowed upon their candidate by Charli XCX. I must confess that I have no idea who Charli XCX might be. Her surname in Roman numerals means 100 – 10 + 10, so I can only assume she’s a classical scholar making a sardonic point about the philosophical principle of eternal recurrence.

Likewise, Trump’s now infamous reference to the eating of cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, has been remixed multiple times and shared more widely than any campaign statement. All of which is very funny, but one might be forgiven for yearning that the election of the leader of the free world should be a generally humourless affair. International conflicts are not best resolved through a series of “yo momma” jokes.

This week I wrote a piece for the Washington Post about George Orwell’s essays, and the lessons that might still be gleaned from them. Specifically, I pointed out that Orwell continually cautioned against tribal thinking, and is still despised today in certain left-wing circles for reminding his readers that authoritarianism can occur on both sides of the political aisle. I quoted Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism” (1945), in which he identified “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” I also quoted his dismay that the word “fascist” is so commonly misused. The piece can be read here.

I don’t often read the comments under my articles (except for here on Substack, of course), but I was interested to see how the overwhelmingly Democrat-supporting readership of the Washington Post might react. The comments are extremely revealing, given that most of those wading in seem determined to prove my point. I have rarely seen such unthinking and flagrant tribalism on display. Apparently, Trump is a literal “fascist”, and Orwell would have been the first to identify him as such. Orwell, of course, took up arms against actual fascists in Spain and was shot in the throat for his troubles. Would these commentators argue that if Orwell were alive today he would have packed up his gun and headed for the US in the run-up to this election? If not, why not?

Our solar energy future – “In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro”

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Checking in with what’s been happening in Germany, eugyppius explains why solar power is far from the cost-free energy source that politicians and scam artists try to claim:

Photovoltaic panels on a roof, 28 April, 2015.
Photo by Antonio Chaves, via Wikimedia Commons.

Climatism in Germany is attended by all manner of naive ideas and bright pink fairytale slogans. Among the latter is a dubious proverb proclaiming that “The sun doesn’t send any bills” (in German: “Die Sonne schickt keine Rechnung“). Such proverbs always seem initially plausible (is there anything freer and more democratic than sunshine?) while proving to be basically the opposite of the truth. In fact, the energy transition has landed German taxpayers in the position of paying billions of Euros for the sun to shine. It is becoming an unmitigated disaster, and what is worse, the more we expand solar capacity, the more we will have to pay. For something that does not send any bills, sunshine has sure become very expensive here in the Federal Republic.

Welt calls it “the solar trap,” and it works like this: Our Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) pledges to pay renewables producers fixed tariffs for every kilowatt hour of electricity their installations feed into the grid. Whether you are an ordinary climate-conscious person with solar panels on your house or you run massive solar farms, the EEG entitles you to receive these fixed “feed-in tariffs” for a period of twenty years. The EEG also requires grid operators to accept your electricity regardless of demand and to sell it on the electricity exchange.

Now the sun, although it may not charge for its services, turns out to have this naughty habit of shining in many places all at once. When this happens, electricity supply often exceeds electricity demand and exchange prices fall. They can fall all the way to zero, or in extreme situations of excessive sunshine they can even go negative. Negative prices mean that you have to actually pay “buyers” to take the excess power off your hands. Whether the prices are merely very low, or zero, or negative, the German taxpayer has obligated himself, via the EEG, to pay these producers of unwanted if extremely green and climate-friendly electricity their fixed feed-in tariffs anyway. That is, we are on the hook for the difference between the actual exchange value of excess electricity and the feed-in tariffs promised to producers. In this way we have ended up literally paying for the sun to shine.

In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro. Our sunny autumn is destroying our already-fragile government budget. Federal number-crunchers had originally allocated 10.6 billion Euros for feed-in tariffs in 2024, but already the government owes 15 billion and the year is not yet over. Scholz’s cabinet are thus trying to allocate an additional 8.8 billion Euro for the rest of the year. The parliament have yet to approve the additional funds, though, and also the damned sun will just not stop fucking shining, and so probably even this supplementary allocation won’t be enough. We’re bleeding money, all for a sun that doesn’t send any bills.

This problem will get worse before it gets better. The more solar panels we install, the greater oversupply we’ll face when the sun shines, and the larger the spread between the fixed feed-in tariffs and the actual market value of this green electricity. In 2024, as I said, the government projected that feed-in tariffs would cost 10.6 billion Euros, but they’ll probably end up costing 20 billion at least. Next year, the costs are projected to be even higher, and the year after that, they will be higher still. As Welt report, the German government plans to triple our solar capacity to 215 gigawatts over the next six years – “the equivalent of 215 nuclear power plants” every time the sun emerges from behind a blessed cloud.

The energy transitioners know they messed up. The new plan is to change the rules for solar subsidies. When prices go negative, larger producers won’t receive their fixed tariffs, and they’ll also have to sell their electricity themselves. In this way, they will become newly sensitive to market demand and stop overproducing electricity when nobody wants it. It is almost like creating a blind system totally oblivious to market incentives was a bad idea. Unfortunately, the new rules will apply only to new solar installations. The German government will still have to honour its insane agreement to pay the operators of older solar plants for years to come. We will light billions on fire for nothing.

The coming Hundred Days (?)

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

In spite of everything, I still lean toward optimism, so I can’t say that I agree with Kulak’s take here:

January 6th, 2021 — A protest that got out of hand or the worst act of insurrection since 1861, depending on your political preference.

    There are decades when weeks happens, and weeks in which decades happen
    – Variously attributed to Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Robespierre, Napoleon, and Steve Bannon

As of writing it is 18 days to the election on Nov 5th, and 94 days to Inauguration Day on Jan 20th.

Maybe the most knowledgeable meta-historian/Commentator alive today, whatifalthist, has predicted a civil conflict in which over 1000 Americans die will begin in this period …

And I’d put the odds of “A Conflict” in which over 1 million die involving the US overlapping with this period at something like 70-80%. If it doesn’t happen then Biden will have somehow played the perfect drunken master and embodied the Trifecta of God favouring “fools, drunkards, and the United States of America”.

That is a major American conflict: beginning, continuing, or dramatically ending within this period.

Civil War or “Troubles” is still slightly below a 50% likelihood … But that’s because I think The Ukraine or Israel wars going nuclear, a hot war with Iran, A Chinese move towards Taiwan, or what’s increasingly looking like a possible foreign backed Cartel-War on US soil (see Aurora) … might suck the oxygen out of a final domestic reckoning between America’s two political factions (Trump and Swamp) … at least until 2028 or 2032.

However America’s domestic instability is what’s driving the risk of escalation, miscalculation and uncertainty everywhere else and that will be the focus of this piece …

I am unprepared for what I think is coming … I’ve maybe thought about such an outcome for a decade now, I lived through 2020 and the Canadian Lockdowns with outrage and totalitarian anxiety (remember Canada was the testing ground for what they wanted to everywhere else, we got what Alex Jones only prophesied), and I’ve been a amateur and semi-professional war and preparedness commentator for 2 and a half years now … and it’s hit me how unprepared I am.

I’m more prepared than most, but, setting aside the political implications, I would trade A LOT for another 4 year election cycle of 2023 conditions to make money, network, buy kit, develop skills, read books, write articles, prepare, plot …

I’m doubtful I’ll get it.

I’m also painfully aware that a very large percentage of people and institutions would not financially or morally survive a long Biden “normalcy” … and that that desperation is driving a lot of the instability.

But ya, I’m already starting to intuitively anticipate/feel that hard times — things moving too fast — reactive loss of initiative feeling that I’ve only really felt when a relationship was imploding, during that one very rough exam season in Uni, at the height of the 2020 election-2021 Canadian Lockdowns, or those months when the doctors discussed amputation as an possibility …

And depending on who you are and your personal situation, you’re either keenly feeling that as well or blissfully unaware.

October 25, 2024

The “party of youth” is led by decrepit, doddering wrecks and time-serving political hacks

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

You can tell a lot about a political party by looking not at its current leadership but at its “bench” … the next couple of generations of potential leaders. In the United States, the Republicans actually don’t look too bad for future leaders, but the Democrats are facing a bench of already-too-old and never-will-be-ready-for-primetime hacks, as the “groovy fossils” have been clinging on to power right to the bitter end and drive away competent potential successors:

Thirty years ago, Democratic politicians were people you disagreed with, but they were from and of the body of the people. They were us, our brothers and sisters who saw things differently. I lived in California when Jerry Brown was the governor, twice, and I liked him. He was a brilliant crank, colorful and interesting. Whatever else he was, he was never dumb. If you remember the 1992 Democratic primaries — yes, this is a deep reach — the campaign season was full of distinctly likeable people, with the exception of the one who prevailed. Paul Tsongas used to say, often, that he was socially liberal but absolutely certain that federal transfer payments were on an unsustainable trajectory. His best line in the primaries was, “I’m not Santa Claus.” He was an unorthodox Democrat, when it was still possible to be one of those.

The current cultural model of the Democratic Party has produced a generation of politicians who are nakedly stupid and empty.

I’ve compared the Biden years to the Brezhnev years, with the army of handlers covering up the decline of the old party hack who’s been elevated beyond his ability. What we’re seeing now is the generation of dismal, time-serving party hacks that comes after the old decaying party hack. Democrats have credentialed their leaders on their ability to fit themselves tightly to the ritual grooves carved into the discourse. When asked about transgender issues, they say, “Trans women are women”. They have the whole list of correct slogans available for the moments when the machine is expected to push those slogans through the slot. Hate has no home here! (applause) They above all do not say things that are not the slogans. It’s time for the billionaires to pay their fair share!

And so we get Kamala Harris, and holy cow please help me. This may be the first person in the history of the world who has never answered a question. She seems programmed in her core functions to turn away from the actual substance of anything that anyone might ever ask, like she was brainwashed after that one combat patrol that ended vaguely.

[…]

This isn’t an accident. A generation of Democratic politicians have been culturally trained into a deflective and hollow discourse. It’s fascinating to watch them sort JD Vance, who talks like a person, into the category of “weird”.

Diversity at all costs

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

In the National Post, Harry Rakowski explains why Toronto Generic University — sorry, I mean “Toronto Metropolitan University” — is reserving 75% of available enrolment in their new medical school for more diverse candidates, even if they wouldn’t normally qualify by their grades:

We have a critical shortage of doctors and nurses in Canada. Almost a quarter of our population can’t find a family doctor. Wait times for seeing a specialist, getting medical imaging and surgical dates continue to climb, with only Band-Aid solutions being proposed by the federal and provincial governments. We desperately need to expand medical schools and the licensing of highly qualified foreign medical graduates.

So it was welcome news to hear that 94 undergraduate medical students and 105 postgraduate students (residents) will be entering the newly established Toronto Metropolitan University School of Medicine when it opens in September 2025. The city of Brampton, Ont. donated a former civic centre along with $20 million in funding for renovations in order to make the school happen.

However, it was highly disturbing to learn that admissions to the new facility will be driven by a culture-war philosophy that will dilute the quality of medical practice.

There’s no doubt that diversity in medicine helps to optimize care and provide better outcomes for the differing needs of Canada’s highly diverse population, which includes many individuals disadvantaged by their geography as well as racial and economic inequality. But TMU is going about it the wrong way. Its admissions policy will focus on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) rather than quality.

TMU’s plan is to reserve 75 per cent of its enrolment slots for “equity-deserving” students — Black and Indigenous applicants and others who meet “equity-deserving” criteria including students who identify as members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, those who are “racialized” and individuals “with lived experiences of poverty or low socio-economic status.” It will accept a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 3.3 (B+) — or even less for select Black and Indigenous applicants — and then use GPA only as an application criterion, not as a selection criterion. By comparison, the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine requires a minimum GPA average of 3.6 for undergraduate applicants (although average acceptance is now 3.95).

October 24, 2024

It’s called “piercing the corporate veil” and it’s a terrible idea

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall explains why the EU’s latest brain fart is not just a bad idea in its own right, but a truly horrific precedent for the future:

Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.

… But now, this, now this is even more important than that. We can deal with free speech by the judicious use of lampposts. This is worse:

    The European Union has warned X that it may calculate fines against the social-media platform by including revenue from Elon Musk’s other businesses, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Neuralink Corp., an approach that would significantly increase the potential penalties for violating content moderation rules.

    Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules.

In English law that’s known as “piercing the corporate veil”. It’s also something we don’t do. Because that corporate veil is the very thing, the only thing, that makes large scale economic activity possible.

It has actually been said — and not just by me — that the invention of the limited company is the third grand invention of all time. Agriculture, the scientific method, the limited company.

Before the limited co everything was done through partnerships. Every individual involved in the ownership of something was liable for all of the debts of that thing. Which, when you’ve got 5 or 10 blokes trading isn’t that bad an incentive upon them to be honest.

Now think of large scale activity. We want a blast furnace — plenty of folk say Britain should have one after all. £3 to £5 billion these days. OK. No one’s got that much. So, we need to mobilise the savings of many thousands of people to go build it. But without limited liability that means all of those thousands are liable for all the debts — off into the future — of that blast furnace.

“Invest £500 in the new, new British Steel. And if we fuck up then in 10 years’ time they’ll come and take your house.”

Err, yes.

Large scale economic activity depends upon being able to separate the debts of one specific activity from the general economic life of all its backers. If this is not true then no one will invest in large scale economic activity. Therefore we won’t have large scale economic activity. Which would, you know, be bad.

The colonization of academia

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

Lorenzo Warby decries what he calls “the systematic attack on sense-making”, especially the galloping credentialization of everything in sight partly through the long-running takeover of the universities:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

The disastrous dysfunction of our universities is nowhere more obvious than in the Education Faculties and Departments, which have been invaded by systems of toxic nonsense that not only have no pedagogical value, they are actively pedagogically destructive. Ideas that manifest in pedagogical “theories” and “techniques” that not only lack evidence, but actively go against the evidence, yet allow adherents to flatter themselves as noble Social Justice activists.

In 2004, psychologist Richard E. Mayer published in American Psychologist the paper “Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?: The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction”. In it, he decried the way Education academics kept re-packaging ideas that have been shown, again and again, not to work.

Fast forward to 2023 and the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results show that about a third of Australian school children have inadequate literacy. The Australian Education Minister announces a A$12bn package to, among other things, essentially bribe the public school systems to bring in explicit instruction — an effective approach to pedagogy in line with what psychologists have shown across decades to work. This would replace the — yet again repackaged — notions pushed by Education academics that do not work and which appear to be on their fourth or fifth iteration. So, no, three strikes were not enough.1

Sympathetic reviews of Isaac Gottesman’s The Critical Turn in Education applaud the sets of ideas he discusses as flowing through Education academe. Yet they are all sets of ideas not only without pedagogical value, but that are actively pedagogically toxic.

All of this colonising of Education Faculties — and then of school systems — of pedagogically disastrous ideas has been done on the basis of massive bad faith. This process of colonisation pushed ideas that did not remotely reflect the view of the citizens that were paying for all this and who entrusted their children to ideologically-colonised school systems.

Ideas that have no evidentiary basis worth mentioning to support them: indeed, went systematically against the available evidence. Ideas, moreover, that actively seek to increase social dysfunction so that the oppressive “dross” of contemporary societies can be burnt away and the transformational future can emerge like gold from the ashes: i.e., social alchemy theory.

Hence the systematic attack on the mechanisms for adjudicating facts, and on mechanisms of accountability.

Much of the anti “disinformation” push — also coming out of the universities — is about protecting preferred ways of looking at the world from inconvenient criticism and inconvenient concerns. Fake news, even on a broad definition, is a tiny proportion (0.15 per cent) of US daily media consumption, and is dwarfed by consumption of mainstream news. It is a prop of convenience.

The convenient-moral-panic campaigns to block “disinformation” also go against both historical and scholarly evidence that censorship tends to promote conspiracism and entrench views among the censored. The hate speech laws of Weimar Germany enabled prosecuted Nazis to play the martyr game.

Cargo cult grant structures

There is a lot one could say about the institutional problems that gave rise to all this academic dysfunction. For instance, the innovation cargo cult that has led to spurious academic “innovation” funded by grants. Grant structures that have had many invidious effects — including, via daft citation metrics2 and straightforward financial interest, the replication crisis — and massive waste of public funds on toxic nonsense.

Universities and mainstream media want to maintain their authority, while evading responsibility for what they have done to destroy that authority.

    1. Australia has had public schools since the 1850s. Apparently, they still have not yet learnt to reliably teach students adequate literacy. Let that sink in. (In reality, it is worse than that, their performance has regressed.)

    2. Citation metrics that replace what is useful — good teaching — with what is public while also enabling idea laundering.

October 23, 2024

More on “Millennial Snot” from Freddie deBoer

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

The conversational tone of the perpetually online cohort — called “Millennial Snot” by Dudley Newright in a guest post at The Upheaval — has Freddie deBoer nodding in agreement:

This piece at The Upheaval is useful. Though I think the turn towards explicit partisan politics at the end goes badly wrong, it’s very perceptive and correct when it comes to its object of interest, “Millennial snot”, an important concept and appropriate term. Though there are many examples offered in the piece, you already know what Millennial snot is. It’s some overeducated shithead with an email job saying “Uh, I’ve unpacked the privilege knapsack in intersectional space, OK sweetie? Get on my level.” “Whoa, did you just say ‘handicapped’? That’s a big yikes, chief.” It’s a form of engagement, quintessentially Millennial, that’s defined by a combination of self-righteous liberal politics, out-of-date internet lingo, terms from university humanities departments that have become mimetic in the past decade, and a performative, shit-eating quality of being perpetually amused with oneself. Anyone who was on Twitter between 2012 and 2022 or so knows Millennial snot. It’s fake courage as meme, a rehearsed facsimile of self-confidence deployed by people who’ll never know the real thing.

Writer Dudley Newright invokes Tom Scocca’s famous “On Smarm” essay, which is a useful reference. Scocca is far too sharp and well-spoken to engage in Millennial snot, but his essay helped contribute to a permission structure for congenitally not-witty people to engage in what they thought was wit. Scocca’s essay counterposed smarm against snark, presumably because Gawker was constantly accused of popularizing the latter; he defended the value of blank meanness and universal sarcasm as the antidote to false, sunny positivity that exists to foreclose on criticism. Scocca’s piece was a sensation among his Twitterati peers, which is unsurprising given that it was ultimately an essay in defense of being deliberately unhappy and they were all unhappy people. The whole debate looks rather funny to me, in hindsight, a battle royale between a couple of meaningless abstractions that provoked a lot of trivial people to man the imaginary battlements. The week that Gawker published Scocca’s essay, they had been running post after post about “Batkid“, a charming little fellow with cancer who was given a Make a Wish-style experience that Nick Denton’s crew lustily wrung some clicks out of — that is, textbook smarm. Commerce!

Anyway, part of the basic confusion of that little cultural moment was to suppose that snark (reflexive, dismissive negativity) and smarm (treacly positivity in which power might hide) were antonyms. But Millennial snot demonstrates that they were always kissing cousins, easily integrated, two complementary spices begging to be added to the same chowder. Millennial snot is smarmy in that it depends on the speaker’s certainty that they are the good, righteous being in every exchange, and it is snarky in that it operates under a logic of being limitlessly disaffected, an asserted perpetual superiority that’s always believed to be apparent to everyone. It’s a simulation of being witty and cutting the way people are in movies, impressed with the self and literally nothing else, like asking ChatGPT to make you into the cool kid at the back of the class that you’ve always longed to be. Millennial snot so easily integrates two supposedly opposed approaches to communicative integrity because it’s the vocabulary of people who have no particular interest in integrity. They simply want to feel powerful, if however briefly, if only in insincere and meaningless online exchanges.

    “Imagine not knowing that I’m a tenure-track professor in Problematic Studies. Not a good look. Read some bell hooks and get on my level.”

The purveyors of Millennial snot attempt to fool themselves and the world about their level of self-belief with two primary tools: one, through embracing the preening sanctimony of contemporary left politics, acting as though they simply are the campaigns against racism or injustice or need, themselves, expressed of course in an obfuscatory academic vocabulary; two, through the language of droll disdain that has become the default idiom of the 21st century as insecurity has become the universal marinade of American elite life. It’s the fusion of modern progressivism’s self-celebratory nature, the discourse norms of our most overeducated age cohort, and the reflexive retreat into triviality as a self-defense strategy. It’s an inescapable style of online engagement even though the heyday of this way of talking is now firmly in the past, just like the heyday of the Millennials who popularized it. It’s the idiom of a failed generation, the unconvincing puffery of millions of unhappy front-of-class kids who have spent their adulthoods expecting the pure beauty of their creative souls to someday be rewarded with fame and riches, somehow, just like Orson Welles giving Kermit and the rest of the Muppets the standard rich and famous contract. It floats the ineradicable belief that success is just around the corner, exactly the way it seemed to be when they wore jumpsuits to warehouse parties in 2005.

I’m not a fan.

Canadian history through the propagandist lens

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

Fortissax casually tosses a few bricks into the glass house of Canadian history as it has been taught to schoolchildren over the last 30-40 years:

During our annual Not One Body Found season, I thought I’d discuss the truth about the brutal violence and savagery of North America’s most early, prominent and influential indigenous tribes, and popular narratives surrounding them.

If you’re an ethnic Canadian, born in the 1990s, you’re no doubt familiar with the education system’s attempts to subject you to a program of Maoist-style struggle sessions over the alleged genocide of the indigenous peoples in Canada. These struggle sessions in classrooms and collective humiliation rituals serve multiple purposes. One is to de-legitimize the history of, and perpetuate the ongoing deconstruction of Canada. The other is to de-legitimize the existence of the Canadian people as a nation (defined as a group sharing ethnic, cultural, and historical ties), in preparation for demographic replacement via mass migration.

The average Canadian’s school experience is filled with a turbo-charged version of liberal Noble Savage mythology, which is still propagated by leftists and indigenous activists. This has given the impression to many of the indigenous tribes as a singular race, continent-wide, uniformly peace-loving, non-binary, nature-appreciating matriarchal egalitarians until the evil, white, patriarchal Christian man arrived.

This resembles equally revisionist history about the Indo-European invasions into Europe around 4000 B.C. against the Pre-Indo-Europeans. You know that story: patriarchal brutes from the Eurasian steppes, with their advanced bronze weaponry and horse-powered chariots, wiped out the longhouse-dwelling, peace-loving, egalitarian agricultural Early European Farmers, who were feminist. This theory, conceived by Maria Gimbutas, a feminist intellectual, was debunked and discarded years ago. In reality, the Early-European-Farmers were extraordinarily warlike, violent, engaged in child murder or sacrifice and were apparently innovative as they built monuments like Stonehenge. This is much the same for indigenous in North America. All of this is framed in a Marxist oppressor-oppressed paradigm.

Tales of cruel treatment, deliberate biological warfare via smallpox blankets (of which there is only one known reference, with attempts to implement unknown), or extermination by colonial death squads haunts the minds of Canadians, planting the seeds of self-doubt and masochism. If you listen carefully to the rhetoric of leftists and indigenous activists, you’d be led to believe there was an industrial mass-slaughter of tribes, with conveyor belts funneling indigenous people into machines that spit out moccasins and dream catchers. The depopulation of indigenous tribes was not the result of deliberate action but rather Europeans being far more numerous and carrying diseases to which they had no immunity. The second cause was perpetual, brutal warfare by the survivors against each other. The mass depopulation from epidemic disease in North America occurred in the mid-1600s, after epidemic breakouts in the filthy, cramped conditions of Europe. Not almost a hundred years later in 1763, where smallpox blankets are merely discussed by General Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet.

Indigenous activists believe they were subject to a holocaust-style genocide. It is not a coincidence that the amplifying of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation occurs at the same time as the Managerial Regime in Canada has declared itself a “post-national state” (which the indigenous also live in and suffer consequences from). They believe Canada is a country without a people. Ironically this lines up with activists’ own definition of “cultural genocide”, because in 1867 during Confederation Year, according to census data, Canada was 92% Anglo-French, 7% miscellaneous Europeans, and the remaining 1% indigenous. Canada is unquestionably, unmistakably, a European construct of Anglo-French extraction.

In 2021, seemingly out of nowhere, the public was subjected to the establishment of this astroturfed federal holiday, which was made statutory—still only for employees of the federal government (what a coincidence!)—as of March 2023. Participation in this public humiliation ritual involves the coerced wearing of orange, and sometimes red, shirts. Canadians across the political spectrum knowingly or unknowingly participate in this ritual, with many rough, cowboy-hat-wearing, lifted-big-black-truck-driving conservatives, as well as tattooed, soy-eating, vegan ketamine enthusiast quartz-worshiping leftists also enthusiastically partaking.

It’s called being a decent human being, Chud! Schools, the monopolized legacy media, corporations, and brands all recognize and partake in the humiliation ritual, directed exclusively at ethnic Canadians. Football games have their players sing the national anthem, and every clinically obese, corn-syrup-slurping sportsball fan claps as the announcer humiliates and shames him or her with a land acknowledgement to prove to the crowd and community that they “don’t see race”. Medical professionals and university faculty across the country also include land acknowledgements in professional email signatures. Even law enforcement gleefully participate in the the ritual, dancing like circus monkeys to the tune of people who despise them.

October 22, 2024

The “Man Enough” ad for the Harris campaign

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

Janice Fiamengo on the amazing political artifact that was the “Man Enough” ad by Kamala Harris supporters trying to persuade men to vote for her:

I wasn’t going to write anything about the “Man Enough” political ad that came out last week, an awkward attempt to woo male voters by a group calling itself Creatives for Harris (a “grassroots collective of ad execs, TV writers, and comedians“). The ad acknowledges a growing gender divide in the U.S. presidential election, especially among younger voters, as feminist belief or lack thereof has become a significant indicator of party affiliation.

By the time I had heard of the ad, there were already dozens of reactions to its bizarre masculine stereotypes and ponderous feminist messaging. It has been called “the Mount Everest of Unintentional Comedy“, “The Most Self-Sabotaging Political Ad Ever” and “an attempt to gain votes by insulting the people it’s courting“. (It also received plaudits from many voters who support Harris.)

Cramming into 90 seconds every feminist cliché of the past two decades about regressive and progressive masculinities, the ad was so cartoonishly overdone as to leave some viewers unsure whether it was a parody or not. How could anyone have thought that undecided male voters would respond positively to an obese chicken farmer boasting about his ability to rebuild carburetors, or a muscular black man telling us that dead-lifting weights doesn’t prevent him from “braiding the sh*t out of my daughter’s hair”.

All of the men in the ad, after first touting their hyper-macho proclivities (for weight-lifting, steak, Bourbon, motorcycles, trucks, hay bales), then assure us that as manly men (“I’m a man, man,” says one), they are more than willing to emote, cry, and — above all — give support to “women who take charge”. I’m surprised we weren’t also told how happy they are to vacuum, and to take submissive postures during sex.

Being pro-woman, according to the ad, means supporting every choice a woman could make, including killing her unborn baby. The ad even comes with an accusatory warning near the end: real men like these are “sick of so-called men domineering, belittling, and controlling women just so they can feel more powerful”.

Statements from the ad’s main creator, Jacob Reed, a comic who has worked for Jimmy Kimmel Live and other productions, proclaimed the ad a genuine attempt to appeal to men, a humorous yet sincere invitation for them to embrace pro-feminist masculinity. Reed mentioned in interview that earlier versions of the ad, which had actually been even more preachy and censorious, with lines like “I’m not afraid of a woman having rights because what kind of creep would I be then?” had been toned down out of respect for male viewers.

“Reed realized the last thing he wanted to do was condescend to his potential audience,” wrote Fast Company author Joe Berkowitz approvingly. “Ultimately, he decided viewers would be savvy enough to intuit the negative implications of the opposing viewpoint without having it spelled out.” How broad-minded of Reed not to spell out the loathsomeness of non-feminist men!

Far from offering a parody of feminist dogma, then, the ad was a straight-up celebration of it.

QotD: Antisemitism

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

The right and the left take turns deciding who’s going to be anti-semitic this century. For some time now the hard left in the West has led the charge against the Jews — or, as the sleight-of-hand term has it, the Zionists. The adolescent spirits of the left love nothing more than a revolution, a story of a scrappy underdog rising up against a colonizing power, and the Palestinians, with their romantically-masked fighters and thrilling weapon-brandishing, fit the bill. Plus, there’s something so deliciously naughty and transgressive about calling Jews the new Nazis — if it feels that good, it must be right.

Doesn’t matter that one side is a liberal democracy that grants rights to women and non-Jews, and the other side has thugs and assassins for rulers and sends its kids to summer camps where they learn the joys of good ol’ fashioned Jew-killin’; doesn’t matter at all. According to the script of the hard left, Israel was created when some Europeans (hisssss) invaded the sovereign nation of Palestine, even though we all know the Jewish homeland is somewhere outside of Passaic. Then for no reason Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza — which for some reason had not been set up as New Palestine by the Egyptians and the Jordanians, but never mind — and made everyone stand in line and get frisked. Those who joined the line in ’67 are just getting through now. Evil Zionists.

James Lileks, “The most important story in the world last Sunday”, Screedblog, 2005-08-11.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress