Quotulatiousness

November 25, 2024

Andrew Sullivan as an (unconscious?) exemplar of the mentalités school

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

I sent the URL to Andrew Sullivan’s article I linked to yesterday to Severian to see what he’d make of it. He certainly didn’t disappoint me:

Founding Questions coat of arms by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.

Because someone like Andrew Sullivan is the kind of guy he is, we might have a good example to hand of a mentalités approach to History [Wiki]. We can all play along, because the key to a mentalités approach is a version of our favorite game, “For That to Be True”. Let’s see if we can’t ferret out some of Sullivan’s cultural assumptions here, and what that might tell us about our world.

There was something truly surreal about President Biden suddenly changing course and agreeing to give Ukraine advanced long-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory in the last two months of his administration. There was no speech to the nation; no debate in the Senate; just a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power. You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump.

A couple things stand out immediately. The great thing about fags and chicks as pundits is that they’re hyper-emotional, so they always go for the big splashy adjectives. “Surreal”, for instance (and not just surreal, “truly surreal”). Let us instead return to the cool, rational prose of 18th century diplomacy, and term this a volte-face.

They happen all the time, of course. Indeed it’s one of the standard criticisms of representative government — they’re impossible to deal with, long term, because the volte-face is baked into the system. No agreement is so airtight that it’s not at immediate risk of repudiation if one of the other guys wins the next election. This is Diplomacy 101.

So, there’s the first assumption we need to examine: Since this kind of thing does, in fact, happen all the time — as any professional political analyst surely knows — why does this particular volte-face seem so “truly surreal?”

Moreover, it’s not as if the Biden Administration has been the model of consistency up to now. Not only is the diplomatic volte-face pretty common, so is the domestic — again, it’s a standard criticism of parliamentary-style government. And not just during election season. Domestic policy changes with the winds, because that’s kinda what it’s supposed to do. Vox populi, vox dei, at least as far back as the early 18th century, and the populi are notoriously fickle.

So why is this one “truly surreal”? If I were one of those Peter Turchin or Steve Sailer types, I’d plug all the Biden Administration’s policy decisions, foreign and domestic, into an Excel sheet and graph the changes. You know, plotting “variance ratios” against “consistency coefficients” and whatnot. It’d be all over the damn place, for reasons we here in this clubhouse call “The Do Long Bridge” — Brandon is the titular head of government, but there ain’t no fuckin’ CO, and if you look at the spastic incoherence of “Biden’s” policy decisions you’d see it plain as day.

It seems extremely unlikely, to put it no stronger, that a paid political analyst like Andrew Sullivan doesn’t see that. So either he does see it, but is pretending not to, for fun and profit — possible cultural assumption #1 — or he truly doesn’t see it, which would be revealing of cultural assumption #2.

I can’t decide which is which yet, but I can see a common denominator for both. It’s the last sentence I quoted in that paragraph:

    You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump.

There’s a whole world full of embedded assumptions there. Does Trump actually do that — “a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power”? […] To me, it sure looks like Trump was actually remarkably restrained when it came to unilateral demonstrations of presidential fuck-you power, alas, compared to Biden and especially Obama (he of the infamous pen and phone). And the few times he tried, he got Hawaiian Judged to hell and back. But since I don’t have my Steve Sailer graph to hand, I’m not going to assert that (maybe it’s one of my assumptions — I really want to see Trump exercise some fuck-you power).

And the verb is extremely interesting. They’re worried about Trump doing it; they’ve heretofore not been bothered by Biden doing it.

In search of bluer skies

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

In The Critic, Benedict Spence channels his inner David Attenborough to document the majestic migration of American progressives from their habitual grazing lands to friendlier territory:

What will Twitter do without its smuggest inhabitants?

And so we come to it again. It is that time of year when we put on our David Attenborough voices, and talk in low, slightly wistful tones about the great migration that is about to unfold. Everywuh you look, creatures great and small are beginning their treacherous juhneys across a vast and inhospitable wilduhness to happiuh hunting grounds and more pleasant pastures under the clear blue skies. The hullabaloo that accompanies them is impossible to miss — across the plains, the cries go up from elders to alert the rest of the herd of the imminent departure.

Though some may never return from this arduous trek, most will. Disavow yourself of the mental image of elephants and zebras crossing the African savannah — that’s not what we’re here for. This migration is metaversical in nature: it is time, once more, for people to announce they are leaving Twitter.

This year’s exodus came later than usual, prompted by Donald Trump’s bulldozer of a victory over Kamala Harris in the US presidential election, with grown men and women across the country — and its second largest airbase, the UK — deciding that Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and the Orange Man’s endorser-in-chief, was at least partly responsible for this travesty. Not the economy, you understand, oh no. Nor immigration, nor the preoccupation by Democrats with shoulder-chewingly stupid culture war issues the average voter thinks are at best mad and at worst satanic.

No, no, it is all about Musk — who is at once the world’s wealthiest evil genius and also a gibbering moron, according to people who thought Cacklin’ Kamala was a born winner. Musk, we are told, has ushered in a stream of “hate” ever since buying Twitter and rebranding it 10, warping the minds of the impressionable and irreparably damaging the future of the West by facilitating Trump’s return.

This is not Musk’s only crime, though. He has also tweaked other aspects of X’s features, including the block function, making it possible for those on the receiving end of this internal exile to see the posts of their nemeses again without being able to interact with them. This was for a fair few blockees how they were reminded of the existence of their blockers, many of whom they had long since forgotten. Often, in the same instance, it was also how they learned said blocker was off somewhere else.

Musk has also moved to erode the power of institutions and individuals who lived their lives high on the power of credentialism, and the authority this brought them. The changing of blue tick criteria and the emphasis on community notes now means many who were once feted on the site by virtue of who they were must now work harder for their dopamine. But above all else, Musk has refused to silence a swathe of right wing voices who always existed but lived their X lives in the shadows. The platform became more right wing, and for many that was just too much. Having been reliably told throughout the past year that the crude reply guys were just Russian bots and that their gal would ride over them on a wave to victory, they and their allies over here — the infamous adults back in charge of the UK — are doing the grownup thing and going off in a huff to play somewhere else.

Looking toward the first order effects of 47

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Government, Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter is delighted that his pessimistic election forecast turned out to be wrong and considers what the incoming Trump administration will be doing in the short-term:

There are obvious parallels between the 2024 election, the 2016 election, and the Brexit vote, all of which are a bit awkward for elite theory maximalists. Their position, taken to its extreme, seems to be that only the elite can actually do things, that all political phenomena are ultimately a consequence of elite machinations. Which makes elite theory in many ways the highbrow version of conspiracy theory, the main difference being that they talk about the Cathedral’s systems of power instead of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and smoky backrooms. And yet, the elite clearly don’t always get their way. In the case of Brexit, the elite were absolutely unanimous in their support for Remain … and the elite lost. Similarly in the case of the 2016 US election. Elite preferences carry an enormous amount of weight; it’s generally much better for a cause to have elite support than suffer elite opposition. But elites are not actually decisive. They can be beaten.

It’s obviously much too early to judge the 47th US presidency, which hasn’t started yet. Cynics expect a repeat of 2016: just as Trump’s promises to drain the swamp and build the wall came to, if not nothing, then very little, so will his promises to deport them all, replace the income tax with tariffs, reign in the universities by going after their accreditation and endowments, drain the swamp for real this time, and so on prove to be so much hot air. So far all we know are Trump’s cabinet picks and other appointments, which suggest that this cynicism might be premature. […]

The new Trump admin shows every sign of gearing up for a Dark MAGA rampage through the Beltway.

If you’re curious about where Dark MAGA came from, why yes it was memed into reality. Aristophanes
tells the wild saga: from in-joke to shitcoin to the hat on Elon Musk’s head.

They aren’t going to just drain the swamp. They’re going to drain it, dry it, soak it in gasoline, and set it on fire. They are going to purge the US government of the useless, the incompetent, the subversive, and the criminal. At least, that seems to be the intention … and given the way the rats are scrambling to escape the ship before it sinks, the regime’s minions, at least, seem to think that plan has a good chance of succeeding. […]

Of course, a lot could happen between now and January. The Democrats might find some convoluted legal pathway to deprive The Insurrectionist of the Oval Office, as Tree of Woe suggested, which of course would initiate a constitutional crisis and probably a civil war. They could assassinate him, which would also probably start a civil war, and which is probably why Trump has been holed up in Mar-a-Lago since the election. Either of these outcomes would probably place JD Vance in the presidency, which is probably much worse for the regime than Trump: Vance is marine corps combat vet who reads Curtis Yarvin and is fluent enough in meme that he probably has a frog alt on Twitter.

[…]

News that suicides spiked after the election is apparently fake, though crisis call centres catering to the Pronoun Jugend did experience a massive increase, and one guy apparently unalived his entire family. They’re still in a state of shock: shaving their heads, vowing to start a sex strike, fleeing to Canada (I do not recommend).

The left are religious fanatics, and religious fanatics don’t give up just because it looks hopeless. It’s also worth recalling that the last time Trump won, the riots didn’t start until inauguration. There’s plenty of time yet, and there are a lot of very wealthy and very influential people who probably feel they have nothing to lose as their precious oxen are in danger of being lethally gored by Dark MAGA on the Washington Mall as a sacrifice to America’s Founding gods, after which they themselves will be hanged from Wotan’s Tree of Liberty. Note that it doesn’t matter if Trump will really follow through with all of this; what matters is if the other side thinks that he will. Ruling out a dramatic escalation in civil violence in the US is almost certainly hasty.

[…]

Another play the regime could make is to just start World War III before Trump takes office, either in order to justify a military coup d’etat, or just to dump a catastrophe in Trump’s lap so that he’ll be too busy dealing with that to drain the swamp. They definitely seem to be ramping things up in Ukraine, with the new strategy of long-distance missile strikes deep into Russian territory. The idea is probably to provoke the bear so badly that it starts mauling NATO countries directly, rather than just chewing through their exhausted national arsenals in the mud of the Donbass. That might work; then again, Putin knows full well that all he has to do is wait a couple months and he’ll be dealing with Trump directly, and Trump is on record as wanting to wind down hostilities as a top priority as soon as he’s in office. Vlad may be a bad man, but he is a very patient bad man.

Assuming that the regime is unsuccessful in baiting Russia into a direct attack on Europe, Trump’s victory probably has very big, tumultuous, and positive implications for European politics. Positive, at least, for anyone who doesn’t hate Europe … and therefore very bad implications for the people currently running the civilizational centre of the human species into the dirt.

The Germans, at least, seem to think so.

Chancellor Scholz’ unstable “traffic light” coalition disintegrated almost immediately after Trump was elected, sending Germany into its own election … in which the AfD is poised to do very well for itself, much to the consternation of Germany’s political class. eugyppius has been doing invaluable work covering Germany’s politics for the anglosphere audience; he provides an excellent overview of the reasons for the coalition’s collapse in this recent interview on the J Burden show.

November 24, 2024

Trump breaks the electoral pattern that had persisted for decades

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

In Quillette, Jason Garshfield outlines the “traditional” pattern of presidential elections and identifies the relatively few breaks in that pattern and how Donald Trump represents a major disruption compared to what outside observers might have expected to see:

How The New Republic saw Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign.

… Yet the symbolic power of the presidency is paramount. We speak of the 1980s as the Reagan Era and the 1990s as the Clinton Era, not the “Tip O’Neill Era” or the “Newt Gingrich Era”. The presidency represents control over the federal government, and ultimately over the spirit and the direction of the nation. It is the highest political prize, and a party consistently denied the presidency will not remain a satisfied player in the system, even if they achieve political success on other meaningful fronts. This is dangerous in a nation where mutual assent is a prerequisite for the smooth functioning of a free and fair electoral system.

Trump’s 2024 victory does not feel as shocking as his 2016 victory did. After all, we’ve seen this show before. But 2024 is a more remarkable coup than 2016. Back then, Trump’s victory did not buck the prevailing trend. This time, he won against that trend and shattered the pattern.

Some have argued that Trump’s indomitable force of personality, demonstrated in the way in which he has refashioned American politics in his image over the past decade, vindicates the Great Man Theory of History. For instance, Yair Rosenberg, writing for The Atlantic in 2022, commented that Trump’s “personal idiosyncrasies — and, I would argue, malignancies — altered the course of American history in directions it otherwise would not have gone”. To Rosenberg, this represented a turn for the worse, but many of Trump’s supporters would say the same, while casting it in a more positive light. As with Napoleon Bonaparte, one cannot confidently state that if Trump had never been born, someone like him would have done what he did.

Elsewhere in this magazine, I compare Donald Trump to the Mule, a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories who, with his unique superpower of mind control, manages to undo the entire Seldon Plan which had been designed to direct the future of the galaxy. In Asimov’s fictional social science of psychohistory, humans are compared to molecules within a gas: the path of each individual molecule is unpredictable, but the movement of the gas as a whole can be predicted. But the psychohistorians assume that no one molecule can ever have a significant effect on the whole — and they are mistaken.

Trump is a particle that defies measurement. It is as though Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies to him: you can know where he is, or how fast he is going, but never both at the same time. Once you think you have him pinned down to a fixed point in the cosmos, he throws your calculations into chaos. This drives his opponents crazy and imbues his most fervent supporters with a near-messianic belief that he will triumph against any odds.

Social scientists tend to hate the Great Man Theory of History because it renders their work entirely meaningless. No matter how strong certain social forces may be, they can ultimately be dispensed with at any time by unpredictable mighty figures. As a result, the future is frighteningly unknowable. But both Great Man Theory and historical determinism have dire implications. Either individuals are irrelevant, or else we live in an unknowable and irrational universe, which unfolds according to no fixed laws. Neither theory allows rationalism and individualism to coexist.

The durability of the eight-year pattern in American politics seems to provide strong evidence against the Great Man Theory. Many of the leaders and almost-leaders of the United States since 1952 have been outsized personalities, yet the sociological paradigm suggests that their personal charisma had little impact on their success or failure. In this view, neither Barack Obama’s charm nor John McCain and Mitt Romney’s lack of charm radically influenced the outcomes of the 2008 and 2012 elections. It was simply time for a Democrat to win, and McCain and Romney might as well not have run. For that matter, both parties might as well have saved their energy and agreed to simply exchange places every eight years — that is, if we accept historical determinism as the driving factor.

Before Trump, only two other figures in postwar America came close to being Great Men. They were the finalists of the 1980 election: Ronald Reagan, who managed to win against the pattern and usher in twelve straight years of Republican control, and Jimmy Carter, who lost the election he should have won. It is debatable as to whether the 1980 election was more a story of Carter’s weakness or Reagan’s strength, but both undoubtedly played a role. Now Trump has become both Carter and Reagan, the unexpected loser of one election and the unexpected winner of another.

November 23, 2024

They just can’t stop themselves from taking the MAGA bait

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

Kat Rosenfield in UnHerd discusses the inability of American leftists from rising to the (obvious) trolling from pranksters on the right:

Carol Kane and Billy Crystal as Valerie and Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, 1987.

The current state of the American political discourse is best understood through the lens of the 1987 movie The Princess Bride — or more specifically, one scene therein. It’s the part where Miracle Max is decompensating over the insistence of his wife, Valerie, on saying the word, “Humperdinck”, the name of the movie’s evil prince, who is also Max’s most loathed nemesis.

“Why would you say that name!” he screams.

“What? Humperdinck!?” she shrieks back, gleefully.

One gets the sense that these two do this a lot — her Humperdincking, him screaming, which only makes her Humperdinck harder. That this problem has two obvious solutions only illuminates its intractability. Valerie could stop saying the name, but then again, Max could also choose not to react to its every utterance as if he’s been electrocuted. That neither of them are making different choices suggests that something about this dynamic serves them both.

I thought of this scene when the first “Your body, my choice” post from a male Trump voter skittered insect-like across my timeline in the wake of the election — closely followed by a handful of “My body, his choice” remixes by savvy OnlyFans models hoping to cash in on the moment. This crude riff on the feminist war cry that once defined the battle for abortion rights was akin to an inaugural shout of “Humperdinck!”, designed explicitly to trigger a meltdown among liberals. And lo: if you do an internet search for the phrase now, around 5% of the results are of people posting it and 95% are critics freaking out in response. “Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers,” The Guardian announced, while CNN warned: “Attacks on women surge on social media following election”. And The New Yorker, for whom the phrase is a harbinger of a “coming era of gender regression”, described it as “A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right”.

The phrase “irony-poisoned” in that last headline — which graces an essay by Jia Tolentino — struck me as an especially savvy bit of rhetoric. It functions as a preemptive strike against the obvious counterpoint to all this panic. Namely: “your body my choice” is a repulsive thing to say, but also the furthest thing from a legitimate threat.

The men behind these posts are not rapists-in-waiting, announcing their intent to commit sexual violence; they are trolls, gleefully trolling away in the hope of making people Mad Online. But if Tolentino knows this is bait (and she clearly does), she nevertheless cannot help taking it, hook, line, and sinker. The piece is imbued with a near-religious sense of horror at seeing the feminist catechism of “my body my choice” twisted by nonbelievers into something unfathomably malignant. This is beyond distasteful; it is heretical. And unlike the provocations in which the millennial Left once delighted, back in the days when one measly crucifix soaked in urine could trigger a weeks-long meltdown among religious conservatives, this little joke (Tolentino argues) is simply not funny.

Common sense on males in female sports from … checks notes … the United Nations?

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

Ramesh Thakur summarizes some of the findings from a recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls which somehow defies the narrative from most of the legacy media in the Current Year:

Has Hell frozen over? Uncommonly for the UN (think Antonio Guterres with the global warming hyperbole), one of its recent reports is full of common sense. In the last three years, I have been critical of UN performance regarding some high-profile issues, including World Health Organisation failings in responding to the coronavirus pandemic and a power grab for future pandemic management; lawfare against Israel by the world court and International Criminal Court; and UN Women’s betrayal of the raison d’être for its creation and existence with a shamefully delayed acknowledgment of the weaponisation of mass rape, sexual violence, mutilation and public humiliation of Israeli women on October 7th 2023.

Enter Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. It’s a relief and a pleasure to acknowledge her positive report “Violence against women and girls in sport“. Published on August 27th, it was presented to the UN General Assembly last month. She notes that until very recently, the need for a separate category for females “to ensure equal, fair and safe opportunities in sports” was a “universally recognised principle”. Maintaining separate-sex sports is a proportional action that corresponds to legitimate aims within international law. Females also have a right to privacy under international law which is forfeited by compelled mixed-sex spaces in intimate facilities. Alsalem explained to Fox News on October 21st that this is primarily a human rights issue, not a cultural or an individual issue.

Biological advantages for males in competitive sports include strength (162% greater punching power on average!), weight, muscle mass, speed, height, reach and endurance. Separate categories for males and females were created to recognise this biological reality and provide equal, fair and safe opportunities for females to win recognition, prize money, fame and career advancement. Allowing biological males into female sports is unfair and amounts to cheating by males who are simply not competitive in male sports (think swimmer Lia Thomas). It steals women’s dreams, aspirations and rewards. Alsalem’s data show that more than 600 female athletes in over 400 competitions have lost nearly 900 medals across 29 different sports. Other reports document instances of injuries from trans-on-females encounters, including teeth knocked out, concussions resulting in neural impairment, broken legs and skull fractures. Thus safety is yet another another concern.

Despite the unfairness, invasion of privacy, opportunity costs and safety risks, many athletes and coaches who object to trans-inclusion policies are silenced or forced to self-censor at the risk of losing sporting opportunities, scholarships and sponsorships. Many who do speak out despite such formidable hurdles are accused of bigotry, suspended, expelled and subjected to unfair disciplinary proceedings. Many (like Moira Deeming) face hostility if they assemble to discuss how to deal with these issues, violating the fundamental human rights to freedom of belief, opinion and expression. Some have quit sport entirely under the cumulative stress. Because “biological sex is central” to women’s “experiences of discrimination and violence”, countries that permit biological men to compete in women’s sports deny women “their femaleness”. To counteract the “worrisome trend”, she recommends the creation of open categories in sports competition and non-invasive and confidential sex screening procedures to ensure fairness, safety and dignity for female athletes alongside inclusive participation for everyone.

The trans-extremist assault on female spaces in the workplace and sporting arenas has been in the thick of the culture wars. Amidst the wreckage of those wars, the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) industry has morphed into DIE (division, intolerance, exclusion), promoting resentment, language-policing and unjust outcomes instead of real solutions. Trade-offs are central to public policy decision-making. The last major issue on which this was ignored was the panicked response to Covid and we will be paying for the resulting disasters for many years yet. By putting the spotlight back on the importance of balancing competing and clashing rights through policy trade-offs, this report provides a key to navigating our way out of the wreckage. It’s potentially also helpful in Sall Grover’s appeal in the Giggle v. Tickle case, as is the return of Trump to the White House. Alsalem is right to note that these policies originate from and exist almost entirely in Western countries. Their hold on many parts of the UN system is evidence of the hegemony of Western ideas and practices as the global norm. The adoption of trans and multigender language and the inclusion of trans athletes in international sports is confirmation of cultural imperialism at the cost of women-specific human rights.

November 21, 2024

QotD: The 1965 Immigration Act

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

Caldwell’s account is indispensable — especially for liberals — in understanding how those resentments grew until they finally exploded under Barack Obama. The Tea Party was the first real movement of this sort; the collapse of immigration reform proposals under George W. Bush and then under Obama revealed how powerful these feelings were; Trump managed to wrap them all up into a populist fervor that was distributed geographically enough to give him a win in the Electoral College. Liberals, increasingly ensconced in their own economic and social bubble, were shocked.

Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.

But how do we get out of this trap? That’s where the depression sinks in. Neither Caldwell nor Klein see a way back to a common weal and a common good. Ezra offers some technical corrections — ending the Electoral College, the filibuster, and winner-takes-all voting. And they might help, although their potential unintended consequences should be carefully considered. Then he recommends meditation to control our own primal instincts — a role that Christianity traditionally held. (I don’t disagree with Ezra on the benefits of meditation, but it’s hardly a game-changer in America in 2020.) Caldwell proposes something far more drastic: a repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, you read that right. The proposal’s perversity matches its impossibility — and it’s buried in one sentence on the penultimate page of the book.

So much of Caldwell’s polemical history is fresh air; but the bleakness of its reactionary mood reveals how tribal Caldwell has become. He can barely eke out a few sentences reluctantly acknowledging some of the good things that the last 50 years have brought — in the lives of many women, in the prospects for African-Americans, in the dignity of homosexuals. He never acknowledges that Obama actually stood a chance of healing racial divides, if the GOP hadn’t demonized him from the start. And as an old friend of Chris’s, I know him to be a more gracious and humane person than this polemic might, at times, suggest. But that such a good man has gotten caught up in polarization and tribalism and such a brilliant man sees no hope for a peaceful resolution merely reveals how deep our problem is.

I have a smidgen more optimism. I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.

Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?

Andrew Sullivan, “America Needs A Miracle”, New York, 2020-01-31.

November 20, 2024

Trump’s electoral victory may help get rid of “lawfare” as a political tactic

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

Chris Bray thinks that one of the best things to come out of the last US federal election was that it may have totally discredited the notion of using the courts as a weapon to damage a political opponent:

A hundred years from now, Americans will benefit from a lesson learned in this election: When a political party prosecutes the leading figure of the opposing party in an attempt to influence an upcoming election, voters revolt against the politicization of criminal justice. Prosecuting the other side as a political maneuver makes a martyr — who probably wins the next election, the retribution election.

Shorter version: Donald Trump just buried lawfare. Maybe forever, certainly for a long time. And political lawfare, this profoundly authoritarian misuse of police and prosecutorial power, needed to be killed and buried. Conservative-ish media interprets the moment narrowly:

So lawfare against Trump, by Democrats, is over. I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that lawfare is discredited, full stop. Ninety years from now, when the Taylor Swift Party thinks about prosecuting the presumptive presidential nominee of the Drake Party, they’ll be all like, wait, didn’t that like not work and stuff? Donald Trump didn’t kill Democratic lawfare against Donald Trump; Donald Trump killed lawfare. Win elections with political arguments, the end.

Now, NBC News has published a story today that would win all the prizes for tone-deafness and missing the point, if we had journalism awards for that. I’m hinting about a new kind of journalism award, by the way, if anyone wants to design the trophies.

Oh no, Trump might “prosecute adversaries”.

QotD: The Chads, the Staceys, and the Incels

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

I have spent some time in the twilight reaches of the manosphere researching a new book, a world of depressing forums, full of hatred and despair, where young men gather to focus on the absence of sex in their lives. There are two broad categories: The Incels hate women because they won’t sleep with them. The Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW) guys won’t sleep with women because they hate them.

These boys have their own vocabulary and belief systems. Pretty girls (Staceys) all sleep with the same few Alpha men (Chads). The Staceys ride the Cock Carousel, ie, have sex with the same few Chads. All this sluttish behaviour gives the Staceys something called A Thousand Cock Stare.

It is a grim world, in which women are evil and manipulative, and hated both for being sluts and for being virgins. It is a world in which pictures of pretty girls with their pet dogs are unbelievably sinister. These boys choose to live in this bleak world. They are culpable. But, if you tell all young, white boys that they are damned, why should they not behave as if they are damned?

A society which does not allow for people to atone, to be redeemed, and to be judged on their intent and actions is a miserable place. Most people interact with each other without antagonism most of the time. We should start being a bit more forgiving to each other, ditch the Puritanism and learn to cherish the well-meaning stumble towards decency. Even if, sometimes, we fall.

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

November 19, 2024

“Sometimes, a bouncy castle is just a bouncy castle”

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

From Donna Laframboise at Thank You, Truckers!, part of the story of the bouncy castles during the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa in 2022:

A t-shirt shows some of Bianca’s post-Convoy branding.

More than two years after the trucker protest ended, Bianca says the COVID era was clarifying. “It opened my mind to what we need to do — and what we don’t need to do.” In her view, childhoods are precious and fleeting. Society should have gone to greater lengths, she feels, to insulate children from pandemic panic and fear. “The kids don’t need that. They just need to be kids.”

[…]

Other than a brief conversation with TVA — a Quebec French-language television station — Bianca says no one from the media spoke to her.

How do we explain this profound lack of curiosity? A young mother inflated bouncy castles that were wholly impossible to miss. Mere steps from the National Press Building. Two weekends in a row. (Smaller inflatables sometimes put in an appearance mid-week.)

Several journalists commented on the bouncy castles. But no one reported Bianca’s story. No one tried to understand.

[…]

Many people instantly grasped the outsized, symbolic significance of the inflatables. “I will never get tired of seeing videos with the bouncy castles in them,” one person tweeted. “It just crumbles the false narrative …”

But “the mainstream media told us the trucker rally was all hate and violence,” someone else pointed out facetiously, while another chimed in: “Those fringe extremists ruining Canada with their happiness and joy.”

If the flag of Canada is ever changed, still another added, the maple leaf should be replaced with a red bouncy castle.

“I absolutely love the tactic” (italics here and below by me), someone else tweeted. “It’s peaceful, family oriented, and gives the Politicians the finger at the same time. Mayor Watson was near tears on CTV today.”

Many people — both sympathetic and hostile to the protest — talked about the bouncy castles as if they were part of a pre-determined plan, dreamt up by a mastermind. According to one individual, the “bouncy castle is probably one of the greatest strategic moves against any government lusting for violence in the history of war strategies“.

Another described the inflatables as “one of the finest information warfare tactics I’ve seen to date”. In the opinion of someone else, “The bouncy castles are the unsung heroes of the protest. The government doesn’t dare send in the tanks or snipers while children are playing in bouncy castles. The optics would be horrific.”

Thomas Juneau, a University of Ottawa professor who specializes in Middle Eastern politics, confidently told the world: “Just to be clear, the bouncy castle was an info op, and more than a few gullible commentators fell for it”. In the universe inhabited by our pompous professor, no evidence is actually required. According to someone else, the presence of bouncy castles pointed to “a sophistication of terrorists”.

On the Monday following the first bouncy castle weekend, someone said the inflatables had disappeared because the “bouncy castle guy” had to report to work. Ten days later, someone else claimed the bouncy castle (singular) had exited the stage because those responsible “are hoping to get their deposit back on it so they can afford the bus fare back to Alberta”.

But the facts in this matter are straightforward. The Freedom Convoy story is about ordinary people who did extraordinary things. Bianca of the Bouncy Castles was one of those people. A mom who cared about the kids. A resident of Quebec who lived three hours distant. An event planner who knows how to make things happen.

There’s nothing covert or complicated here. Sometimes, a bouncy castle is just a bouncy castle.

November 18, 2024

Changing the way “our leaders” speak to us

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

Ted Gioia says that the old rules of communicating to the public are undergoing a major shift.

Before they executed Socrates in the year 399 BC — on charges of impiety and corrupting youth — the philosopher was given a chance to defend himself before a jury.

Socrates started his defense with an unusual plea.

Socrates defends himself at his trial (painting by Louis Joseph Lebrun, 1867)

He told his listeners that he had no skill at making speeches. He just knew the everyday language of the common people.

Socrates explained that he had never studied rhetoric or oratory. He feared that he would embarrass himself by speaking so plainly in his trial defense.

“I show myself to be not in the least a clever speaker,” Socrates told the jurors, “unless indeed they call him a clever speaker who speaks the truth.”

He knew that others in his situation would give “speeches finely tricked out with words and phrases”. But Socrates only knew how to use “the same words with which I have been accustomed to speak” in the marketplace of Athens.

Socrates wasn’t exaggerating. His entire reputation was built on conversation. He never wrote a book — or anything else, as far as we can tell.

Spontaneous talking was the basis of his famous “Socratic method” — a simple back-and-forth dialogue. You might say it was the podcasting of its day. He aimed to speak plainly — seeking the truth through open and unfiltered conversation.

That might get you elected President in the year 2024. But it didn’t work very well in Athens, circa 400 BC.

Socrates received the death penalty — and was executed by poisoning.

Is that shocking? Not really.

Western culture was built on one-way communication. Leaders and experts speak — and the rest of us listen.

This is how leaders once spoke to the people — but it’s now changing.

Socrates was the last major thinker to rely solely on conversation. After his death, his successors wrote books and gave lectures.

That’s what powerful people do. They make decisions. They give orders. They deliver speeches.

But not anymore.

In the aftermath of the election, the new wisdom is that giving speeches from a teleprompter doesn’t work in today’s culture. Citizens want their leaders to sit down and talk.

And not just in politics. You may have seen the same thing in your workplace — or in classrooms and other group settings. People now resist one-way orders from the top.

The word “scripted” is now an insult. Plainspoken dialogue is considered more trustworthy. This is part of the up-versus-down revolution I’ve written about elsewhere — a conflict that, I believe, may have even more impact on society than Left-versus-Right.

For better or worse, the hierarchies we’ve inherited from the past are toppling. To some extent, they are even reversing.

This is now impacting how leaders are expected to speak. Events of the last few days have raised awareness of this to a new level — but the “experts” should have expected it. That’s especially true because the experts will be those most impacted by this shift.

November 16, 2024

You say you want a referendum …

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

In the above-the-paywall portion of his latest column, Paul Wells discusses the chances that we’re going to go into another maple-flavoured Groundhog Day marathon separation referendum in Quebec:

I’ve been thinking this for a while, but I haven’t written it down. We may be only a couple of years away from a national-unity crisis.

And the dwindling number of people with a working memory of the last crisis have retained instincts that will be useless if there’s another one. Any future Quebec sovereignty referendum campaign would be unrecognizably different from the first two, more chaotic and inherently unpredictable.

I’ve been doing some public speaking in Quebec lately, and it’s pretty clear from the Q&A sessions that even many francophone Quebecers haven’t thought through the ways in which a future sovereignty referendum might play out. So it’s time to start contemplating ghosts of Christmas yet to come.

The Trudeau Liberals aren’t the only political party in Canada that’s fallen and can’t get up. It’s looking grim for Quebec’s governing Coalition Avenir Québec too: Wednesday’s monthly Léger poll was the worst for Quebec’s governing party in eight years. Premier François Legault, who sailed to re-election in 2022 on the general impression that he had a unique sightline into the heart of the average Quebecer, has lumbered from crisis to crisis ever since. It’s rough when a leader whose intuition is his brand loses his touch.

What might make all of this a national story is the identity of the challenger who’s settling into Poilievre-esque polling dominance: Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon, the young leader of the Parti Québécois. Yes, that Parti Québécois.

Plamondon can be a charming and agile political performer. His PQ is at 35% in the latest Léger, up three points from last month. Legault’s CAQ is at 24%, down three points. Liberals and the urban lefty francophone Québec Solidaire are under 20%. Checking the last Qc125 projection, we see these numbers suggest a solid PQ majority for the first time since — wow, since Lucien Bouchard’s only victory as PQ leader in 1998.

A new PQ leader would have the option — would, in fact, be under harsh pressure from his party members — to call a referendum on Quebec’s secession from Canada. Younger readers may be surprised to learn this has happened before, in 1980 and again in 1995. Forests have been felled and ink lakes drained to tell the tale of how those two campaigns went. Short version: Quebec’s still in Canada.

Support for sovereignty is at a relatively low 37% in the Léger poll, and it hasn’t risen in pace with the PQ’s increasing popularity. That makes it possible, perhaps even likely, that Saint-Pierre Plamondon could join a list of PQ leaders who’ve become premier but didn’t hold referendums — a list that includes Pierre Marc Johnson, Bouchard, Bernard Landry and Pauline Marois.

But the instruction manual for politics in the 21st century is a single page, on which is written, DON’T ASSUME THE BEST. On my list of no-referendum PQ premiers above, I note that Johnson, Bouchard and Landry simply inherited power from their predecessors. Marois had only a minority of seats in the National Assembly.

Based on a small sample — René Léveque, elected 1976, referendum 1980; Jacques Parizeau, elected 1994, referendum 1995 — we can propose this hypothesis: when the PQ takes power with a majority government after a long period in opposition, it holds a secession referendum.

Support for sovereignty was around 40% when Parizeau called the 1995 referendum. It climbed to nearly 50%.

So here’s a plausible future. A federal election a year from now produces a majority Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre as prime minister. A Quebec election a year later, in 2026, produces a majority PQ government led by PSPP. He calls a referendum a year later on a relatively clear question.

Let’s consider the challenges for those who’d like Canada to continue with Quebec in it. The first one is obvious. The rest, based on my recent conversations in Quebec, apparently really aren’t.

As has been noted many, many times … if any of the referenda had been extended to the whole country, Quebec would have been an independent nation since 1995, if not 1980. To non-Quebec residents, it sometimes seems as if the federal government is actually an organization devoted to placating Quebec’s loud demands, rather than governing for all Canadians.

November 15, 2024

Lysistrata updated for 2024

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

Tom Knighton recognizes the right of progressive women to take whatever actions they feel are appropriate to show their dissatisfaction with the election of Donald Trump, but suggests that the Lysistrata strategy may not be the answer for them:

From the moment Donald Trump was declared the victor in the 2024 presidential election, some started trying to figure out not how they could convince people to vote differently in the midterms but to try and punish people who disagreed.

There’s a reason people are cutting off family members right before the holidays, among other things.

But one of the more…interesting things is that it seems progressive women are going on a sex strike.

    In response to Donald Trump’s election victory, some women in the US are joining a radical feminist movement that seeks to “decentralize” men in their lives. The movement, called 4B, originated in South Korea about a decade ago in response to broader dissatisfaction with gender discrimination and sexual violence online. Now thousands of Americans are tuning in to the movement on social media as Trump — who appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn national abortion rights, and has been found liable for sexual abuse—prepares to return to office. While the movement has yet to show signs of gaining traction offline, its resurgence reflects a growing sense of frustration among women who fear that Trump’s second term will be characterized by unchecked misogyny and the continued rollback of bodily autonomy in the US.

    …

    Now the 4B movement appears to be booming on social media in the US: at time of writing, there were over a hundred thousand videos about the movement on TikTok; Google registered a massive surge in the search for “4B” starting on Election Day. “I’ve been waiting for everyone to catch up to speed for a while,” Alexa Vargas, a 4B adherent, said in a TikTok video posted last week. In a less restrictive interpretation of the movement’s tenets, Vargas encouraged women not to engage in “hookup culture” and to wait at least three months before considering having sex with new romantic partners. “Decenter men from your life,” she advised. “Get off the dating apps.” Another TikTok user said that she’d been keeping her participation in the movement private but decided to speak about her experiences publicly after the election: “As somebody who’s been 4B for two years now … at thirty-six years old, it is the best thing I’ve ever done for my mental health,” she said. “We are not alone in this.”

    It’s too early to tell whether the movement will have much staying power, but it has already sparked a debate, both online and in more traditional media. Sex strikes are about as old as male-dominated societies: the practice has been an anti-war measure for centuries — it was central to the plot of the Ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, in which women on both sides of the Peloponnesian War denied their husbands sex as a way of forcing peace talks — and more recently has returned to the discourse in the US following the introduction of a strict anti-abortion measure in Georgia and the repeal of Roe v. Wade. (Lysistrata was also adapted, in late 2015, into Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq.) Such movements “rarely result in widespread support,” Helen Morales, a cultural critic and classicist, told The Guardian in 2022, but they can be a powerful tool for building awareness. “Women tend to protest with their bodies when they don’t have a voice,” Morales added.

Of course, women do have a voice. They can speak freely and petition the government for the redress of grievances. They have full access to every mechanism of free speech men have.

A voice, they don’t lack.

But that said, they’re free to go this route if they want. However, when it doesn’t actually do anything, I’m going to laugh.

First, as was noted above, these kinds of things don’t really go anywhere. Why? Women like sex too. Especially since feminists have said for decades that women being able to be sexual beings is an act of empowerment, only now they seem to want women to turn that off in order to drive a political movement that will do … what?

Convince men that everything they believed was wrong because they want to actually have a relationship with a woman?

I hate to break it to you ladies, but most single men on the right are looking at this right now and thinking, “Thank you, God”.

November 14, 2024

Germans are perfectly free to post anything to the internet as long as it doesn’t criticize politicians

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

Once again, eugyppius helpfully illustrates the broad range of freedoms German citizens enjoy in their online activities and the totally reasonable and not-at-all-insane restrictions to those rights:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It’s been a while since I last wrote about the highly advanced democratic freedoms that we enjoy in Germany. Here in the Federal Republic, the police will never fine you or harass you or raid your house for criticising the government – except, of course, when they do all of these things, because you happened not even to tweet, but merely to retweet, the wrong image.

Stefan Niehoff is a 64 year-old retiree who lives in the small town of Burgpreppach in Lower Franconia. He runs an X account with 1,200 followers, where he occasionally expresses his dissatisfaction with the present state of German politics and with the Greens in particular.

In June 2024, he retweeted this image …

… which appropriates the logo of a popular cosmetic brand to suggest that Robert Habeck, our Green Minister of Economic Affairs, might be a “professional moron”.

Habeck and his associates are notorious for pursuing internet users who share highly illegal content of this nature. They brought Niehoff’s retweet to the attention of authorities, and the Bamberg public prosecutor’s office decided that Niehoff was indeed guilty of a criminal speech offence. The Bamberg District Court then issued an order permitting the police to search Niehoff’s residence and confiscate his electronic devices.

In this order, reproduced by NiUS, the judges explained their rationale as follows:

    On the basis of the investigations to date – in particular the screenshots of the posts and the investigations into the user of the X-account “IchbinFeinet” – there exists the following suspicion of a criminal offence:

    The accused is the user of the account “IchbinFeinet” on the internet platform X with approx. 901 followers.

    At a time that cannot now be determined more precisely, in the days or weeks before 20 June 2024, the accused published an image file using his account that showed a portrait of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs with the words “professional moron” … in order to defame Robert Habeck in general and to make his work as a member of the federal government more difficult.

    The public prosecutor’s office affirms the public interest in criminal prosecution.

    This is punishable as defamation directed against persons of political life in accordance with §§ 185, 188 para. 1, 194 StGB. …

    The measures ordered are proportionate to the severity of the offence and the strength of the suspicion and are necessary for the investigation …

Armed with this document, Schweinfurt police showed up at Niehoff’s house at 6:14am yesterday morning and took his tablet. Police later told the press that the raid was one in a series of enforcement actions – part of something called “an action day against cybercrime”. By harassing a lot of cybercriminals all at once, police and prosecutors hope to send a message to the people of Germany that they cannot just retweet anything, and that they may only retweet the right things.

Trump’s position and likely options on Ukraine

Filed under: Europe, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In his weekly commentary, Niccolo Soldo considers what the incoming Trump administration might do about the war in Ukraine:

The situation in Ukraine as of 8 November, 2024.
Map from the UK Ministry of Defence via X.

… Ukraine is losing the war, and is losing it at a faster pace than before. Time is not on Kiev’s side, and there is no magic wand that anyone can wave to turn the tide in its favour. The question is: how much is Kiev willing to give up in order to save as much as it can?

The foreign policy blob is on tenterhooks, waiting to see what Trump will do regarding this conflict:

    Like in Trump’s first term, different factions are set to compete to influence the Republican’s foreign policy. More traditionally minded allies such as Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state now in contention to lead the Pentagon, are likely to push for a settlement that doesn’t appear to give a major win to Moscow. Other advisers, particularly Richard Grenell, a top candidate to lead the State Department or serve as national-security adviser, could give priority to Trump’s desire to end the war as soon as possible, even if it means forcing Kyiv into significant concessions.

Pompeo is out, but that doesn’t mean that those like him are entirely out either, as he has DoD officials sharing his views. No doubt that there are certain elements in the State Department, CIA, and in Congress as well who take the same position.

    The proposals all break from Biden’s approach of letting Kyiv dictate when peace talks should begin. Instead, they uniformly recommend freezing the war in place — cementing Russia’s seizure of roughly 20% of Ukraine — and forcing Ukraine to temporarily suspend its quest to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

    One idea proposed inside Trump’s transition office, detailed by three people close to the president-elect and not previously reported, would involve Kyiv promising not to join NATO for at least 20 years. In exchange, the U.S. would continue to pump Ukraine full of weapons to deter a future Russian attack.

    Under that plan, the front line would essentially lock in place and both sides would agree to an 800-mile demilitarized zone. Who would police that territory remains unclear, but one adviser said the peacekeeping force wouldn’t involve American troops, nor come from a U.S.-funded international body, such as the United Nations.

    “We can do training and other support but the barrel of the gun is going to be European,” a member of Trump’s team said. “We are not sending American men and women to uphold peace in Ukraine. And we are not paying for it. Get the Poles, Germans, British and French to do it.”

“Pumping” Ukraine full of weapons would be attractive to Trump, as it means steady cash flow. He is a businessman after all.

The last bit is the most important, as it conforms to US policy trends in which the dumpster fire that they started is left to the Europeans to extinguish while the Americans go deal with the Chinese.

    That proposal in some respects echoes comments made by Vice President-elect JD Vance during a September interview, when he suggested a final agreement between Ukraine and Russia could involve a demilitarized zone “heavily fortified so the Russians don’t invade again.” Russia, Vance continued, would get to keep the land it has taken and be assured of Ukraine’s neutrality.

    “It doesn’t join NATO, it doesn’t join some of these sort of allied institutions,” he said on “The Shawn Ryan Show,” a podcast.

“No NATO, no stealth NATO”, is music to Moscow’s ears. The problem here is that the Russians do not trust the Americans to keep up their end of any deal. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has famously described the Americans as “agreement non-capable”.

Also, why would the Russians even agree to negotiate at this point?

    For one, Ukraine and Russia still have vastly differing war aims and little desire to alter them. With Russian troops advancing slowly but steadily in Ukraine, the Kremlin has shown little inclination to negotiate, and has shown its willingness to escalate the conflict with hybrid attacks outside its borders, such as sabotage operations in Europe.

    “The objectives of the special military operation remain unchanged and will be achieved,” Dmitry Medvedev, a top Russian official, posted Wednesday to X after learning of Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Zelensky is over a barrel:

    Zelensky, whose country is heavily dependent on the U.S. for military and financial assistance, could — more easily than Putin — be forced by Trump to negotiate, but the Ukrainian leader would have to contend with a public that views ceding territory as capitulation to Moscow.

    Trump has said that Ukraine’s survival is important to the U.S., but has repeatedly criticized Zelensky, calling him the “greatest salesman”, a stance that has worried some officials in Kyiv that a Trump-led U.S. might push for a settlement that favors Russia.

    Zelensky on Wednesday congratulated the president-elect on his victory, appealing to their September meeting in New York and praising his “‘peace through strength’ approach in global affairs”.

Forcing Zelensky to concede land would open up the possibility of a coup d’etat in Kiev, and even civil war. Even if a deal were hammered out, Zelensky would be forced to try to sell it at home. There are may factions in Ukraine that have no desire to budge even one inch, and would happily take his head off of the rest of his body to make sure that no one signs away any Ukrainian land.

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