Quotulatiousness

February 25, 2025

Likely trajectories of the victims of DOGE

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

Bruce Ivar Godmundsson identifies the most probably career dislocations of civil servants winkled out of their expected life sinecures by the minions of Elon:

To put things another way, the status deprivation experienced by erstwhile feeders at the Federal trough will eventually lead to a great deal of radicalization. After all, if history is any guide, it is not the victims of sustained oppression who raise the banner of revolt, but those who lost advantages that they had earlier expected to enjoy for the rest of their days. (It was not, after all, agricultural laborers, let alone vagabonds, who enlisted in the machine-smashing armies of General Ludd, but practitioners of “decent trades” who had previously occupied lucrative bottlenecks in supply chains.)

As they LARP as extras in the street fighting scene of Les Misérables, the outcasts will find, standing beside them on the barricades, youngsters who, as recently as the autumn of 2024, had expected to parley their ability to paraphrase (or, at the very least, parrot) the Party Line into an internship with an agency, a poorly paid (but prestigious) place in an NGO, or, for those especially adept at symbolic manipulation, a job with a name-brand consulting firm.

Leaving aside the cinematic metaphors, some of the dispossessed will, no doubt, resort to rioting. More will ride the protest circuit, which will do for them what comic-book conventions do for fancy-dressed fans of manga and anime. Most, however, will do little more than haunt the margins of the middle class, muttering about their masters degrees in public policy as they wait for the next command to appear on the screens above their grills.

Repeated encounters with the fallen may drive the final nail into the coffin of the assumption, once central to the world view of so many Americans, that possession of a sheepskin entitled its holder to a desk job. No longer will parents dining at McDonalds whisper to their children “if you don’t go to college, you’ll end up like that”. Rather, they will point to the technician repairing a self-service kiosk and say “that’s the sort of thing that you want to do”.

German election results

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

Germany voted on Sunday (on paper, and the votes all got counted in less than 24 hours) and the most likely result will be a coalition between the centre-right CDU and the social democratic SPD, excluding the second-largest party, the extremely extreme extreme right-wing AfD:

The federal elections in Germany are over, and the preliminary count is in. The CDU/CSU have narrowly avoided the Kenyapocalypse, as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht failed to meet the 5% hurdle for representation in the Bundestag by a mere 13,435 votes. In consequence, the Social Democrats and the Union parties together will command a thin but workable parliamentary majority of 328 seats. In all likelihood, we will have a black-red government under CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz – a not-so-grand coalition of the kind we grew used to under Angela Merkel.

Here is a district-by-district map of the election results, with each district coloured according to the winning party. Black is CDU/CSU, blue is AfD, red is SPD and green is Green:

My district is the one all the way due south of Munich on the Austrian border. The CSU got 41.9% of the party vote here – one of their best showings in all of Bavaria.

The Losers

The preliminary results of each party compared to the last elections in 2021 reveal last night’s losers clearly enough:

This vote was as poignant a rejection of Olaf Scholz’s parodically bad traffic light coalition as anyone could imagine. Everybody has improved at the expense of red-green-yellow, but it is interesting to observe who has done the worst.

The Greens dominated the traffic light, and voters have dealt them the lightest punishment of all. Imagine how crazy you have to be ever to enter a government with this toxic party: They get their way on all major political issues and you get punished for it. Even so, the Greens did much worse than I thought they would. Almost everybody beyond their hardcore devotees has abandoned them, and Green Chancellor Candidate Robert Habeck (who also lost his direct mandate in Flensburg-Schleswig) has announced he will never again seek a leading role in the party. We have finally rid ourselves of his Majesty the Sun Chancellor, the champion of speech crime charges, and that alone is worth a stiff celebratory scotch.

The FDP lost far harder than the Greens. Last night was their worst showing of all time – worse even than the last time they were chased out of the Bundestag in 2013. Party chief Christian Lindner will resign and withdraw from politics, and he should. The FDP stood idly by and waved through ruinous Green policies like the building heating ordinances, all the time pleading that things would be even worse if the FDP weren’t in government. After the constitutional court in Karlsruhe killed the budgetary schemes of the traffic light, the FDP could have left the coalition, but they subjected all of us to another year of Scholzian incompetence and insanity. If there is any justice in the world the FDP will become a minor West German party that nobody thinks about anymore.

The next biggest loser of the night was the Social Democrats, who likewise booked their worst electoral result in history, and also achieved the worst-ever electoral collapse of a chancellor party in the 80-year history of the Federal Republic. Olaf Scholz has said he will not participate in any future government or coalition negotiations, and party co-chair Lars Klingbeil spoke last night of a “caesura” in the history of the SPD, promising substantial changes in party leadership. The first such change happened almost immediately, with the resignation of SPD faction leader Rolf Mützenich. Klingbeil will replace him. Many expect that Klingbeil’s co-chair, Saskia Esken, will also be forced out before long, although she is clinging to her job for the moment.

Looking from the US, CDR Salamander notes the very high turnout for a federal election with approval:

Sunday, Germany held national elections for the parliament, the Bundestag. Congrats to the German people and their ~83% turnout, the greatest I believe, since unification.

The previous government led by SPD and hobbled the the Greens was unstable at best, and was not doing great things for the German people. That would be why the SPD’s results were the worst since 1887.

    Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has clear words for the performance of his SPD. “This is a devastating, catastrophic result,” he said. “There is no way to sugarcoat it.” He congratulated the Union on its election victory. “I hope that — especially in view of Friedrich Merz’s speech in Munich yesterday — they will now strike the right tone and understand that it is about keeping the democrats together and not playing them off against each other.” An AfD at 20 percent cannot leave the Social Democrats in particular at rest.

Nuff said.

The above numbers were from Sunday night and are not final, but we can safely assume that they are roughly where the final count will be.

You need 316 seats to control, and you need 5% to enter government. That last bit puts FDP and BSW out of the picture. I’ll chat a bit about that at the bottom of the post, but let’s focus on the big boys.

First things first, Germany voted for right-wing governance. CDU/CSU (Union), and AfD got 49.2% of the vote. However, no one will form a government with them, so the Germans will not be getting what they voted for.

[…]

AfD broke into the former West Germany. Both Kaiserslautern and Gelsenkirchen voted for AfD. I also find it interesting that in addition to the West Germany/East Germany divide, the East Berlin/West Berlin divide is still there.

History is sticky.

I lived with Germans for four years, yet I don’t fully grasp German politics. Still, some political constants hold true everywhere.

Again, the Germans voted for a right-wing government. With Union having to partner with SPD, that will pull the center of the government to the left, further away of the center of the electorate … again.

Were I a German, I would want a few things, in this order:

  1. Cheaper energy — lower monthly bills and prices across the board. It will also make German manufacturing more competitive. Yes, the only way to do that is to restart the nuclear power plants. With the Greens gone, no reason not to.
  2. Stop migration. Expel illegal migrants. If someone has vacationed in the nation they claimed to seek asylum from, deport them. Etc.
  3. Be a player in ending the war in Ukraine, if it can be ended. If Russia refuses to be reasonable at the table, then fully back the Ukrainian fight. As this is aligned with the general direction of the USA and other allies, it makes sense.
  4. Redouble spending on national defense. 2% will not do. 2.5% is the floor, and must be reached faster.

All the four above will be more difficult with SPD in government. Remember my long-held position that applies everywhere, not just in Germany:

    When the center-right and center-left refuse to address the legitimate concerns of the people, especially in issues of migration and culture, then the people will look elsewhere for their concerns to be met.

If AfD were brought into government, they would be forced to moderate and to be held accountable for the action of government. With AfD in opposition — with a bone in their teeth — they will most likely, if they do not implode due to their well-known “personnel challenges”, they will increase their popularity with voters.

QotD: Identity politics as a secular religion

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

Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, The making of the Western Mind, identifies the “trace elements” of Christianity in the woke world. The example he used was the intersectional feminists in the #MeToo movement offering white feminists the chance to “acknowledge their own entitlement, to confess their sins and to be granted absolution”.

But the problem with identity politics as a secular religion is precisely its failure to allow for absolution. The faith that Saad espouses is utterly bleak, even cloaked as it is in words of love. It utterly fails to allow for redemption, and its most direct religious antecedent is found in Calvinist predestination.

Under this doctrine, God has predetermined whether you are damned or elect. From the second that the right sperm hit it lucky with the most fecund egg, your place in the woke hierarchy was decided. In the modern progressive world, informed by intersectional feminists, it does not matter what you say or do, the only defining factor in your state of grace is your skin, gender and sexuality.

This is a profoundly depressing outlook for three main reasons. The first is the essential nihilism in the creed. Your intent? Irrelevant. Your deeds? Likewise. The sum of your experience, desires, longings, beliefs? Your humanity itself? Nah, not relevant.

The second dispiriting message is that the problems its aims to address are insoluble. White people are racist by their nature, and inherently incapable of seeing their own racism or addressing it. Men are misogynists, by default, witting or unwitting bulwarks of the patriarchy. If they don’t believe they are individually at fault they are in denial. And if they try to say, actually, I’m not sure the patriarchy exists, they are mansplaining misogynist bastards. This is the politics of perpetual antagonism, of a kind of bleak acceptance that all relationships between different categories of human are necessarily fractious.

[…]

The third problem with Puritan wokeness is that it [has] sinister echoes in the history of predestination. When the creed reached its zenith in the seventeenth century, the logical hole at its centre became insanely obvious. If it does not matter to God how you behave, because your salvation was pre-determined at birth, why not behave however the hell you want to?

Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.

February 24, 2025

Rule by bureaucrat, believe it or not, was once considered a better form of government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the 19th century, the Americans switched from a system where one of the major outcomes of a presidential election was the wholesale replacement of government employees to one where the civil service was “professionalized” to the point that only the very top levels were subject to presidential replacement (Trump 2.0 may mark a significant change in this). Fans of the professional bureaucracy would sometimes gesture toward the venerable Chinese model, which had been run in this way for a very long time until the 20th century. Lorenzo Warby considers the actual performance of these kinds of systems:

Excerpt from the handscroll Viewing the Pass List. Imperial examination candidates gather around the wall where results had been posted. Traditionally attributed to Qiu Ying, but now suspected to be the work of a late-Ming painter with Qiu Ling’s name added.
National Palace Museum via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the course of the C19th, Western states adopted the Chinese notion of appointment by examination for their government bureaucracies. Such appointment-by-merit did have the effect — for about a century and a half — of creating effective and responsive bureaucracies. So much so, that Western democracies gave more and more tasks to such bureaucracies.

This replicates the early stage of the Chinese dynastic cycle — the actual one (see below), rather than the traditional version — where, early in a Dynasty, rule through the bureaucracy is quite effective, even efficient. In modern Western democracies, the legitimacy of democratic action — the demon-in-democracy problem, where the all-trumping legitimacy of the democratic principle tends to overwhelm other ways of doing things — aided the massive expansion in government action, and so in the ambit of government bureaucracy.

The trouble with adopting the Chinese model of appointment-by-merit bureaucracy — including selection-by-examinations — is that folk failed to take a good hard look at the patterns of Chinese government. This despite the fact that the keju, the imperial examination, was introduced under Emperor Wen of Sui (r.581-604) and was not abolished until 1905, so there was quite a lot of history to consider.

The patterns of Chinese government are much less encouraging, because the quite effective, quite efficient, stage of bureaucratic administration does not last. The problem with appointment-by-merit is that it selects for capacity, but not character. Confucianism tries to encourage good character, but it repeatedly turned out to be a weak reed compared to incentive structures. (Almost everything is a weak reed, compared to incentive structures.)

The actual dynastic cycle was:

  1. Population expands due to peace and prosperity in a unified China. This pushes against resources — mainly arable land — creating mass immiseration, an expanding underclass with no marriage prospects, peasant revolts and falling state revenues.
  2. The number of elite aspirants expand — a process aggravated by elite polygyny — but elite positions do not, leading to disgruntled would-be elites who provide organising capacity for peasant revolts (including through sects and cults).1
  3. Bureaucratic pathologies multiply, leading to a more corrupt, less responsive, less functional state apparatus, eroding state capacity and increasing pathocracy (rule by the morally disordered). Late-dynasty imperial bureaucracies could be astonishingly corrupt and dysfunctional.

In contemporary Western societies, mass migration interacting with restrictive land use, and other regulation (e.g. “net zero”), so that:

  1. housing supply is blocked from fully responding to demand for housing—thereby driving up rents and house prices; while also
  2. inhibiting infrastructure supply from responding to demand—increasing congestion and other (notably energy) costs

is creating immiseration pressures. Figures about the “macro” health of the US economy, for instance, are misleading as much of the growth is either not reaching people further down the income scale or is failing to compensate for rising rents.

Western commercial societies are sufficiently dynamic that elite over-supply is much less of a problem than in pre-industrial societies. There is, however, very much a problem of toxic parasitism — the entire (Diversity Equity Inclusion) DEI/EDI apparatus to start with. What we might call malign elite employment or bureaucratic parasitism.

    1. NR: I’ve read that the Taiping Rebellion in China was led by a man who’d failed the Imperial Examination and raised the banner against the entire system as a form of revenge. By the time the rebellion was quashed, somewhere up to 30 million people were killed in the fighting or as an indirect result of the conflict. (Traditional note of caution about any statistics from pre-20th century China … well, any Chinese statistics at all, really.)

Update: Fixed broken link.

The Third Triumvirate?

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

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, John Carter posted an amusing thread (unrolled here courtesy of the @threadreaderapp):

JD Vance as Julius Caesar
AI image by Grok

Trump, Musk, Vance: the new triumvirate, bringing a window of stability to the troubled Republic.

Trump: the old warhorse, beloved of the people, a part of the establishment but with an uneasy relationship to it. Trump is Pompey.

Musk: the richest man in the world. Musk is Crassus.

Vance: the charismatic young upstart. Vance is Caesar.

So how does this play out?

Musk’s ambition is to go to Mars, just as Crassus wanted to conquer Parthia. Musk harnesses his wealth, launches the expedition to great fanfare. Things go horribly wrong after their arrival. Contact with the colony is lost. Musk’s grave is never found.

At the head of a private military corporation equipped with letters of marque, Vance is sent into the badlands of South America to crush the cartels and secure the Panama Canal. The war takes longer than expected. By the end of it, Vance hasn’t merely crushed the cartels – he’s conquered the entirety of Central America.

At home, Vance is beset by his enemies in the Senate, who mistrust his ambitions and intentions. It is whispered that he wishes to make himself king.

Vance’s enemies whisper in Trump’s ears. Were you not the one who built the wall? If Vance brings the Central American republics into the Union, what then of immigration? Of your life’s work? Vance will destroy it all.

And do the people, after all, not love you first and most? Are you not their hero? Why then should you fear this upstart?

With Trump’s blessing, Vance is recalled by the Senate, to face charges of corruption.

But throughout this time Vance has been building auctoritas with the people, going directly to them with his poasts, showing them his victories and their fruits. The people have come to love him more than they love Trump — for he has sent great wealth back to them, and crushed their enemies abroad.

And so the fateful day comes in which Vance returns, as summoned … but he does not demobilize his mercenary army when it crosses the Rio Grande. His forces — which now include former cartel soldiers, some of whom he has won to his side — drive straight to Washington in a blitzkrieg attack.

Washington empties out in panic.

Trump and the Senate flee to New York City, where they rally their forces. There are still many who are loyal to Trump, particularly within the military … but it turns out that Trump’s base is much older than Vance’s … and there are many, more than expected, who declare for Vance.

And so the Union cracks apart into the Civil War that was deferred when the triumvirate first seized power, so many years ago.

But this is not first and foremost a war of ideology, as it would have been — a showdown between right and left.

It is a war of personalities and personal loyalty, a war to determine a single question: who is to be king?

Obviously none of this is going to happen. History never repeats itself so precisely.

But it’s fun to think about Vance rampaging around Central America at the head of a PMC.

February 22, 2025

Trump’s movement is not the same old GOP

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

Lots of comments by and for Canadians in the last few weeks have been of the “running around with hair on fire” school of journalism. Donald Trump has transmogrified from the butt of jokes to the embodiment of everything technocratic Canadian “elites” fear:

Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons

The re-election of Donald Trump has masked a growing and profound shift in American politics, and ushered in a new era of Republicanism in the United States. Trump’s return is seen by many to be an isolated incident, an aberration from previous conventional norms and one that will resolve once the man himself is gone from power or from this earth.

For these people, the issue is Trump and Trump alone.

I believe that this is a profound misunderstanding of what is happening in America today, and what the future holds.

The old Republican party is gone. In its place is a movement that is built on the foundations of 19th century expansionism; strength and self-interest. It is motivated to settle grievances against the post-war consensus conservatism that it blames — more than it even blames the left — for the decline of the once-mighty American empire. For the New Republican, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were as much responsible as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in ushering in America’s decline.

Donald Trump is the transitionary vessel to carry that movement forward. He is the tip of the spear whose job is to crack open the institutions that the New Republican believes poisoned America for decades. Overton’s Window is wide open for the New Republican now.

It is useful to start with describing the New Republican movement. It is not the previous Republican movement of lower taxes, less state intervention or smaller government. These things may also be part of Trump’s movement, or at least a slice of it, but those are the beliefs of yesterday’s Republicans. Today’s ideology happens to dovetail well into the libertarian beliefs of the tech bros led by Elon Musk. Trump and Musk’s bromance is premised on some shared affection for each other as strong businessmen and leaders. But the alliance is shaky. Libertarian Republicans are only being tolerated by the larger movement because it’s useful in tearing down the structures the New Republican wishes to rebuild.

[…]

The New Republican is a value proposition. He rejects the very notion of normative values, that some countries may have values that are different, and which are to be tolerated even though they may be counter to American interests. There is no space for these values for the New Republican. The New Republican believes American values are superior and should be exported to the world. These values include family, fortitude, hard work, God, self-interest, the proper roles of the (two) sexes and especially, strength. That these values are the “right” values is self-evident to the New Republican, who believes that they should also be for everyone else.

Who are the New Republicans? One should look to Trump’s choices for cabinet — J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Howard Lutnick are good places to start. They all figure to be around — and in control of the party apparatus — once Trump is gone.

Elon Musk is not one of these people. Like Trump, he is the pointy end of a spear, and when the falling out between him and the New Republicans happens, it will not be pretty.

Finally, the New Republican is a lot of Americans. More than many would like to believe.

“German politics have become a sad farce”

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

German elections will be held very soon, and the all-party-but-one alliance to keep the extremely extreme extreme right wing out is sagging badly but the technocrats and the media are doing everything they can to hold the line:

“We are the cordon sanitaire – no cooperation with the AfD”: the banner leading the Berlin protest against AfD and CDU on 2 February, which was financed in part by the German taxpayer and arranged by semi-affiliated apron organisations of the governing Green and Social Democrat parties of Germany.

Behind all of the disingenuous fact-checking and the performative outrage, one detects in German mainstream commentary the deeper recognition that J.D. Vance was very far from wrong about a great many things in his landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday. Only the truth can provoke the kind of panicked and intemperate reactions that followed Vance’s remarks. German politics have become a sad farce – a ridiculous performance that every day I find a little more embarrassing. The primary reason for this farce, as Vance said, is the fear our political class harbour towards their own people, and their complete inability to reverse course on any of the catastrophic policies they have put their names to, from the energy transition to mass migration to the war in Ukraine.

The firewall will keep German politics frozen in amber for some time still. It will keep everything as it was ten years ago under Angela Merkel, until this inflexible, sclerotic system suddenly breaks and unleashes all of the potential energy it has accumulated in one great chaotic crisis. And make no mistake about it, that crisis coming, precisely because the controlled demolition that would be in the best interests of our rulers is also utterly beyond their imaginations and their talents. This might read at first like a pessimistic post, but I promise it’s not. I’m developing a cautious optimism almost despite myself as I try to ponder what will happen in the coming months.

In two days and thirteen hours, German voters will elect a new Bundestag. The polls could not be worse for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and their smaller Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. The latest INSA survey presents a nightmare scenario for both parties. It has CDU/CSU at 30%, Alternative für Deutschland at 21%, the Social Democrats (SPD) at 15%, the Greens at 13%, Die Linke (the Left Party) at 7% and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) at 5%.

On the left are the INSA poll results, and on the right is the “theoretical seat distribution” that these numbers, if they were election results, would yield.

Readers often ask me whether the polls are understating AfD support. That is possible, but I’d argue the question is not important, because whether AfD come in at 20% or 23% won’t make much difference. Everything actually depends on the small socialist parties that few are talking about right now. Die Linke – successor to the DDR-era Socialist Unity Party – seems all but certain to make it back into the Bundestag, following a social media blitz that has won them wild popularity with young voters. The BSW, meanwhile, probably have even odds of clearing the 5% hurdle for representation.

If both Linke and BSW make it in, CDU and CSU are absolutely screwed, and this by their own cowardly insistence on the firewall. Refusing AfD votes means they will have to cave to the SPD and the Greens on everything to form a coalition with them. Otherwise, the left-wing parties will band together, hijack Bundestag procedure and form their own minority government right under their noses.

That’s right: The firewall means we stand a real chance of getting basically the same deeply unpopular SPD-Green government we have now, additionally radicalised by the hardline socialists of Die Linke. This is precisely the thing nobody wants and precisely the thing our political elites are prepared to deliver, all to keep the Evil Fascist Nazi Party away from power. If this happens, we’ll get a paralysed leftoid Chancellor who is incapable of so much as passing a budget. The AfD will climb in the polls and the CDU will bleed voters until the pressure grows so great, or the political crisis so intense, that they decide to break the firewall after all and chase the leftists out of power.

QotD: Modern journalism

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

We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant to boot.

They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.

It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces. Here’s the typical resume of one of these hacks:

  • Went to high school, and never went to parties
  • Went to college, majored in journalism, and never went to parties
  • Went to journalism grad school, and never went to parties
  • Works in the media, and goes to Manhattan/Georgetown cocktail parties

This apparently qualifies them to explain to people like us who have actually done something in our lives how stuff is supposed to work.

Kurt Schlicter, “Our Super Smart Elite Shines During This Pandemic!”, TownHall.com, 2020-04-02.

February 21, 2025

“… a sea change in American foreign policy priorities”

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

Theophilus Chilton on how the markedly changed US foreign policies under Donald Trump are roiling the old certainties of so many western “transnational” elites:

Last Friday, an event occurred which represents a sea change in American foreign policy priorities, but the importance of which may have been missed by many. Vice-President Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference. In this speech, he basically pulled no punches, calling out the various Western European governments for their support for mass immigration, their opposition to free speech, and the erosion of democratic functions within their governments. The speech itself presented a stark contrast between the new American administration and the “leadership” that currently exists in most European countries. It represents a decisive rupture between an American executive which is in the process of refuting the influence of a globalist transnational “elite” over its country and European governments which are still firmly ensconced in that elite’s thrall.

The thing is, Vance was pretty much right about everything he said. Mass immigration, especially that part of it coming from Africa and the Muslim world, is absolutely destroying the social fabric of every European nation as well as dragging down their standards of living toward third world levels. Euro governments, in fact, do absolutely hate freedom of speech and apply strictures that medieval monarchies would never have dreamed of instituting. For all their talk about the importance of democracy and the “threat” to it represented by Trump and his administration, Euro countries make an absolute mockery out of the entire concept. Those European slaves of the globalists can grumble and sit there aghast at Vance’s words, but the simple fact of the matter is that he was right in every way in the criticisms he leveled against them.

After all, these are the people who overturn Romanian elections because actual Romanians voted for the wrong person — all to “defend democracy”. These are the people who ban political parties to “defend democracy”. These are the people who let “migrants” stab little girls to death to “defend democracy”. These are the people who arrest Christians for singing hymns on a public street to “defend democracy”. These are the people who do armed midnight raids and throw people into prison for sharing memes on social media to “defend democracy”. You get the picture. Populism and popular sovereignty are such a threat to these regimes because their democracy is a sham, a foil used to give a pretended legitimacy to globalist policies which are destroying the actual people of these various countries.

For all the breathless hyperventilating about Russia “invading Europe” (which it is in no position to do, LOL), the fact is that there is nothing that the Russians could do to the people of Europe that would be worse than what their own governments already subject them to.

What makes this all the more amusing is the excited “nationalism” we’ve been seeing from the lefties and globalists in several of the countries that have been in the Trump/Vance crosshairs over the past month. A good example would be in Canada, in response to the tariff threats that Trump made to try to push the Canadian government into being a little more proactive about securing their side of the border from the fentanyl and illegal aliens that enter the USA. Watching the Canadian government fall all over itself trying to fake an exuberant pride in their Canadian-ness, even as they continue to turn their country into an Indian colony and treat their own White Canadian population like a bunch of expendable paypigs has been enlightening, to say the least. Obviously, what’s driving the reaction is not a genuine love of country or people, but loyalty to the transnational elite that is piqued at recently being disempowered in the USA.

In all of this, it’s important to remember that the enemies here, the people who deserve our ire and derision, are not the peoples of Canada, the UK, the European countries. It is the transnational clique and their progressive Left hangers-on, the same people who were until very recently doing the exact same things to the American people, too. We need to be very clear that regular, everyday Americans and regular, everyday Frenchmen, Germans, Canadians, Italians, and all the rest are on the same side here. We have the same enemy. The European and other peoples are victims of their own governments, first and foremost. I mean, their own governments are now formally making them eat the bugs as part of their anti-human green agenda, just to give one example.

February 19, 2025

Europe’s moral leaders stand strong against grotesque American fascism

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

You have to hand it to the great and the good of Europe … they sure can find every. last. rake. to step on as they hysterically react to the slightest hint of disagreement or contradiction:

Germany is right. Opposition parties must be forbidden or firewalled. Political criticism must be criminalized. The public sphere must be firmly controlled by government, with guardrails against disagreement and heterodoxy. If we don’t do these things, we might descend into authoritarianism.

Margaret Brennan’s bizarre response to JD Vance’s speech in Munich — free speech? but that’s the weapon the Nazis used to commit the Holocaust! — wasn’t mere ignorance or accident. It’s a maneuver. You’re going to see more of it, in an urgent wave of moral inversion. Case in point, from the New Republic today:

Remember that Vance said things like this:

    The good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.

    And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organisers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them …

    I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.

So governments should live in dialogue with the populations they govern; citizens should speak freely; banning or limiting political parties makes society less free and less open. From start to finish, Vance spoke for liberty and openness, for free expression and societies organized through unfettered debate.

The calculated response — the calculated response, a deliberate deflection — is: Oh no, he’s saying we should turn into Nazis! Look at the subhed to the thing in the New Republic: arguing for freedom is aligning ourselves with international fascism.

Openness is genocide. Freedom is fascism. Speech is violence. Free societies arrest people for saying the wrong thing. Free speech — you mean like ADOLF HITLER!?!?

Read the piece in the New Republic, and look closely at Michael Tomasky’s language, which is full of Stasi-adjacent framing: “The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a ‘suspected extremist’ organization by the German domestic intelligence agency.”

A brief nod to the shade of Missouri Representative James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark

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

I was aware that the greatest Liberal Prime Minister in Canadian history, Sir Wilfred Laurier, had lost an election on the basis of a negotiated free trade deal with the United States, but I was not aware of exactly how that happened. Colby Cosh provides the gory details that got Laurier out of office for good:

Funny thing I noticed: Friday marked the anniversary of the 20th century’s most remarkable explosion in Canadian-American relations, which took place on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1911. On that day, Feb. 14, Missouri Democratic congressman James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark gave a short speech in defence of a free-trade agreement that had been hammered out between the (Republican) Taft administration and Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government.

Clark, a progressive and witty westerner who had already been chosen to become Speaker of the House in April, was widely expected to be the Democratic nominee for president in 1912. He was, in other words, a man who counted. And on the floor of the House, he advocated passage of the free-trade deal on grounds that eventually doomed it: namely, that it was a conscious step toward total American absorption of the Dominion of Canada.

When Clark’s remarks hit the newspapers up north — and no news story hit harder between 1900 and the dawn of the Great War — there was a spasm of anti-American and pro-Empire feeling throughout the country. As any schoolbook will tell you, this helped lead to the defeat of Laurier and the ruin of the trade deal in September 1911’s general election. This gaffe is indeed now what Clark is best remembered for, along with his eventual fumbling away of the 1912 presidential nomination to an unassuming professor named Woodrow Wilson.

When I was an undergraduate, we all had to have it explicitly explained to us that back in Edwardian days, the Liberals were the party of free trade, and the Conservatives the great defenders of tariff protection (although Sir John A. had sometimes sought without success to kick-stark “reciprocity” negotiations with the U.S.). Perhaps the most confusing feature of the 1911 controversy to students of today will be Champ Clark’s idea that the U.S. government would want to lower trade barriers to facilitate eventual annexation of Canada, rather than raising them to mutually punitive levels as a matter of crude antagonism.

Between Confederation and Champ’s time, Americans often just assumed as a matter of course that Canada would fall into their laps without any need for aggression or invasion. We northerners would eventually see that the benefits of American citizenship were more valuable than our romantic imperial attachments, and we would come beat down the door. This was certainly Clark’s own idea, and it created no controversy among Americans themselves when he expressed it.

Of course, in Laurier’s day “liberal” meant something closer to the modern sense of “libertarian” than it does to the current incarnation (or shambling corpse) of that party.

February 18, 2025

Canadian academic life now entails mandatory indoctrination about “settler colonialism”

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

In Quillette, Jon Kay talks about the pervasive indoctrination of Canadian university students in that invasive intellectual weed from Australia, “settler colonialism”:

Last month, I received a tip from a nursing student at University of Alberta who’d been required to take a course called Indigenous Health in Canada. It’s a “worthwhile subject”, my correspondent (correctly) noted, “but it won’t surprise you to learn [that the course consists of] four months of self-flagellation led by a white woman. One of our assignments, worth 30%, is a land acknowledgement, and instructions include to ‘commit to concrete actions to disrupt settler colonialism’ … This feels like a religious ritual to me.”

Canadian universities are now full of courses like this — which are supposed to teach students about Indigenous issues, but instead consist of little more than ideologically programmed call-and-response sessions. As I wrote on social media, this University of Alberta course offers a particularly appalling specimen of the genre, especially in regard to the instructor’s use of repetitive academic jargon, and the explicit blurring of boundaries between legitimate academic instruction and cultish struggle session.

Students are instructed, for instance, to “commit to concrete actions that disrupt the perpetuation of settler colonialism and articulate pathways that embrace decolonial futures”, and are asked to probe their consciences for actions that “perpetuate settler colonial futurity”. In the land-acknowledgement exercise, students pledge to engage in the act of “reclaiming history” through “nurturing … relationships within the living realities of Indigenous sovereignties”.

My source had no idea what any of this nonsense meant. It seems unlikely the professor knew either. And University of Alberta is not an outlier: For years now, whole legions of Canadian university students across the country have been required to robotically mumble similarly fatuous platitudes as a condition of graduation. It’s effectively become Canada’s national liturgy.

After my tweet went viral, I was contacted by a US-based publication called The College Fix, which covers post-secondary education from a (typically) conservative perspective. Like many observers from outside Canada, reporter Samantha Swenson couldn’t understand why Canadian students were being subjected to this kind of indoctrination session. “I hope you can answer,” she wrote: “Why do schools make mandatory classes like these?”

I sent Swenson a long 13-paragraph answer — which, at the time, felt like a waste of my time: I assumed the reporter would pluck a sentence or two from my lengthy ramble, and the rest of my words would fall down a memory hole.

So when her article did come out — under the title, Mandatory ‘Indigenous Health’ class for U. Alberta nursing students teaches ‘systemic racism’ — I was pleased to see that I’d been quoted at length. I especially appreciated the fact that Swenson had kept in my point that educating Canadians (especially students in the medical field) about Indigenous issues is important work; and that courses such as Indigenous Health in Canada would provide value if they actually served up useful facts and information, instead of self-parodic faculty-lounge gibberish about “decolonized futurities”.

Trump is a lot of things, but he’s no Neville Chamberlain

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

Tom at The Last Ditch reacts to his European friends’ facile association of Trump’s overtures to Putin with Chamberlain’s ill-fated attempts to appease Hitler:

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Heston Aerodrome, waving a copy of the Anglo-German Declaration he had negotiated with Adolf Hitler, 30 September, 1938.
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s interesting to watch my Continental friends react on their socials to President Trump’s overtures to that monster Putin — the greatest modern example of a real life Bond villain. Their sympathies, like mine, are with plucky Ukraine. Its soldiers, outgunned and outmanned, have fought like lions and their place in history is assured. Toasts will be drunk and songs will be sung, for sure. But they’re losing and not one European power is ready to send in troops. Under Biden the policy of the West was to fight to the last Ukrainian. Trump sees it in more practical terms.

[…]

Trump’s drama, trolling and exaggeration is in the same category. Most people just don’t get it and react to his bluster like that naive articled clerk I once was. Everything he says and does is calculated to find a path to the best achievable outcome. There’s not a virtue-signalling molecule in his body and yet there’s more actual virtue than in his hypocritical critics.

My European friends are comparing Trump to Chamberlain and Putin to Hitler. Europe seems unable to move on from World War II. Every issue is analysed through the historical lens of how they mishandled the rise of the Nazis. As someone once said, all we really learn from history is that we never learn from history.

The hypocrisy here is breathtaking. If his critics were any more ready than him to send in their troops, they’d have the moral high ground over him. They aren’t and (Poland perhaps excepted) they never will be. So whether it’s just or not, Ukraine can’t win. The only people the Germans and French are ready to see die in this war are Ukrainians, Americans and their loyal English-speaking sidekicks — as usual. So they have no moral basis for their maiden auntery

The post-war settlement has expired. Continental Europeans have to meet their long-neglected NATO obligations and stop expecting Uncle Sam (already carrying more debt than the world has assets) to pay for everything.

Putin is evil, yes, but Ukraine is every bit as corrupt as Russia and would add nothing to NATO’s strength. It’s in the right here as a matter of international law and (for what it’s worth in war) morality. But international law is a myth unless the rich nations enforce it by (plausible threat of) military action. Europe is just standing by signalling virtue while breaching sanctions and sending half the military matériels it promises. Meanwhile Ukraine loses men and wealth with no hope of victory. When the last Ukrainian soldier has died or surrendered, what do Europeans think the outcome will be? Ukrainian flags on your socials won’t win it mes amis.

My advice to my Continental chums? They should let the President try to make peace and hold their comments until they see the result. Based on all my years working in Continental Europe, I expect them all to decry the result and pretend their leaders (prepared to sacrifice nothing) would have done better. It’s bullshit. War is hell and has to end eventually. This is not a Hollywood movie. There are no guarantees that the (relatively) good guys will win. If you won’t end it with arms, then jaw jaw is all you have. This man is much better at jaw jaw than you are so shut up and stop assisting the enemy by showing him how divided the West is.

QotD: The soft sexism of low expectations

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

If a woman has spent her life marinating in the left-wing feminist subculture, a few things are highly likely to be true:

  • She’s been told she’s great — fabulous! — just the way she is.
  • She’s been taught to dismiss all push-back as misogynistic.
  • She’s been assured that she’s entitled to success — and that any failures to achieve said success are the fault of men.
  • She’s been trained to demand that these dastardly men — who are totes holding her back — kindly step aside and let her take the trophy — whether she’s actually earned it or not.

You might think I’m being unfair here, but frankly? I don’t agree. Given all the stuff I’ve read in the news for the past decade plus, I believe I’m right on the money.

Everywhere I look, I see illustrations of all four of the above bullet points. I hate to keep harping on the fat acceptance movement, but really: isn’t that a textbook example of point number one? Go ahead, ladies: eff those unrealistic beauty standards and rock on with your 300 pound selves. Yas, queen, slay! (And don’t worry that you can’t make it up a single flight of stairs without getting winded. The negative impacts of extreme obesity are way over-stated, amirite?)

Then there are all the times leftists of the distaff persuasion have thrown down the poor-me-I’m-being-harassed-by-meanie-sexist-men card each time they start losing an online argument. To be sure, in the absolute dumpster fire that is internet discourse, such women probably do get burned with the occasional “die, bitch!” PM or email. But as I noted on my fan blog, men get that crap too — and oddly, I don’t see them whining about it nearly as often. (Probably because crying doesn’t work for men. Only women get picked up by the waaaaaambulance.)

And just to hit on bullets three and four: everywhere I look, I see leftists justifying moves to ease standards to give vag a hand up. Just last month, for example, it was reported that Oxford is considering removing Homer and Virgil from a foundational classics course due to “attainment gaps between male and female candidates”. Don’t buckle down and study your Latin and Greek, dears. We’ll remove that pesky obstacle for you. And oh my great and fluffy Lord, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard feminists complain about the academic weeding that goes on in engineering or computer science — because apparently, advanced math is oppressive and patriarchal. As a woman who numbers pretty good — indeed, I even teach that stuff for a living! — I headdesk so hard whenever I hear this BS that I’m surprised my skull is still intact.

Where does all this anal-smoke-blowing lead? When you’re told constantly that you should get prizes simply for being a good little girl — as leftist women are — the result is predictable: you stop developing. If you’re already Ms. Polly Perfect, well — that obviates the need for critical self-examination and the consequent moves towards self-improvement. If your naysayers are all dismissible as “women-hating men bitter over the loss of their privilege” (or as women suffering from “internalized misogyny”), then your arguments are almost certainly untested and malformed. And if people have always been clearing the road for you and shielding you from any real challenges, you’re no doubt much stupider than your competition — and much weaker.

Stephanie S., “Prizes for Good Little Girls Syndrome”, Conservative Thoughts, 2020-03-07.

February 17, 2025

A maple-flavoured DOGE? Maxime Bernier proposed this in 2020

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

It’s both amusing and alarming seeing the kind of things the US government has been pouring money into, as the young auditors of Elon Musk’s DOGE dig into the accounts. Some folks on social media have been asking for a Canadian version of DOGE, but they’re nearly five years behind PPC leader Maxime Bernier:

Did you know that the Canadian government is spending $143,000 to help the African country of Senegal implement a “sectorial gender strategy” in its armed forces?

Or $46,793 to improve healthcare for intersex people in the Chinese province of Shandong?

What about $4.6 million to develop programs promoting a “positive masculinity” in Cuba?

There are hundreds of such crazy programs costing Canadian taxpayers billions of dollars every year to fund the Liberals’ woke ideology in other countries.

Many people on social media just found out that these programs exist last week, after they started looking for them on the website of the Government of Canada.

They were inspired by similar crazy programs that Elon Musk has unearthed with his DOGE team in Washington.

The DOGE – or Department of Government Efficiency – was created by President Trump and has already cut tens of billions of dollars in frivolous spending after only a few weeks.

I’m being asked if I support having the equivalent of a DOGE in Canada.

Not only do I support it, but I didn’t wait for Trump and Musk to do it to propose one. I did years ago!

In 2020, I stated that a PPC government would have a Minister of Government Downsizing to examine every federal program and cut or abolish everything that is inefficient, wasteful or not essential.

And speaking of DOGE, Coyote Blog shares some thoughts about some of the reasons Democrats are critical of the organization’s efforts:

… having thought about this longer, I think this is about more than just money. It is also about class. Just listen to how the cool kids in the media talk about Musk’s group of young weirdly-nicknamed geeks. This is fairly typical:

    He was speaking specifically about a Trump executive order that decrees that the Department for Government Efficiency can force federal agencies into firing four people for every new hire. “Who the hell voted for Mr. Musk?” Begala raged. “Who the hell voted for — excuse the phrase — a guy who calls himself Big Balls? A 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists. It’s, it’s appalling.”

This is moderately hilarious from a) a party who still has not told us which unelected people really were making decisions behind the curtain for a senile Joe Biden; and b) an individual (Begala) who wielded immense power and influence across all departments of the Clinton Administration. The department staffs in DC are 99.99% people who are both unelected and unconfirmed by Congress. The issue is not that they are unelected, the issue is that they are “the wrong sort”. I am reminded of the British aristocracy in the 19th century that would tolerate almost any sort of governmental incompetence or malfeasance as long as the people were “the right sort” — meaning of their class.

The mention of Victorian England reminds me of another way that class is likely involved here. In the English aristocracy the oldest son inherited the title and often all the land and income (which was entailed to the title). This left little for any additional sons, so an income had to be found somewhere for them in a profession that did not require them to sully themselves with “trade” (daughters were handled a different way, through the marriage market). Reading for the law was an acceptable profession for a son with brains, and the army or navy were outlets for many. But most families needed a way for their sons without too much brains or ability and not militarily inclined to make a living. A position in the Church was often the solution.

Modern American blue-blood parents are no different — they need a way to secure a living for their kids who won’t or can’t land a job in the modern elite career choices (law, consulting, investment banking, or a sexy startup). Unlike in Victorian times, the military or the Church are no longer preferred elite options. So what to do with your 22-year-old gender studies major? The parents need her to get an income and they need her to do it in a context that they can proudly report to their friends — Paul Begala does not want to tell his friends that his son’s job is maintaining distributor pricing lists (anyone who does not believe the latter criteria should have been at my Princeton or Harvard Business School 25th reunions).

The solution? Get them a job at a non-profit, the modern American version of going to the Church. As Arnold Kling noted once, non-profits tend to have much higher status than do for-profits. And without competition they don’t have to carry the same performance standards as for-profits. And they are incredibly susceptible to trading a position for your kid in exchange for a nice donation.

The employment rosters of non-profits and NGO’s are stuffed with the children of privilege. So much so that there are many non-profits that seem to do nothing EXCEPT employ and pay the travel expenses of 20-something kids from rich and/or influential families. I have been writing about the non-profit scam for years. As I wrote then:

    From my direct experience, I would go further. There is a tranche (I don’t know how large) of non-profits that are close to outright scams, providing most of their benefits to their managers and employees rather to anyone outside the organization. These benefits include 1) a salary with few performance expectations; 2) expense-paid parties and travel; 3) myriad virtue-signalling opportunities; 4) opportunities to build personal networks. This isn’t just criticizing theoretical institutions — people I know are in such jobs in these organizations.

The spending that DOGE is going after at USAID and other departments likely threatens the income of a number of under-qualified elite kids. So I will update my meme:

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress