Quotulatiousness

July 15, 2023

Environmental fanatics want to impose “austerity on steroids”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill points out the hypocrisy of the progressives who protest against anything smacking of government austerity — often merely a slowing down in the rate of increase of funding that they condemn as “cuts” — yet fervently desire to impose a form of austerity that would literally lead to hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths:

There are countless contradictions on what passes for the left these days. We’re against sexism, they cry, and then they’ll while away entire days hounding every uppity broad who dares to question the trans ideology. We’re anti-racist, they say, even as they yell “Uncle Tom” at any person of colour who deviates from their white liberal orthodoxies. Be kind, they tweet, in between their venomous crusades against TERFs, gammon, boomers, deplorables, “semi-fascists”, you name it.

We’re against austerity, they insist, and yet then they agitate for an austerity of apocalyptic proportions. This, surely, is the most stark incongruity of the modern left. They rail against every library closure or reform of welfare payments as an intolerable assault on people’s living standards, and then they take to the streets in their thousands in support of a degrowth agenda that would plunge vast swathes of humankind into penury. They’re far meaner than any right-wing penny-pincher they claim to oppose.

[…]

Environmentalism is austerity on steroids. Consider one of JSO’s key demands: “No new oil or gas”. This would be – there’s no other word for it – psychotic. Not only would such a crazed policy instantly throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, by decommissioning the rigs and mines where they make their living – it would also make it all but impossible to keep society going. The infantile moralism of modern greens would have us believe that vile oil and gas are only used to propel 4x4s and airplanes packed with the rich and other “bad things”. In truth, every facet of our lives requires energy from oil and gas. The delivery of foodstuffs, house-building, schools, hospitals, life-support machines, heaters to protect the elderly from death in winter – all need energy derived from fossil fuels. Or consider libraries. The left wept when Osborne’s cuts led to library closures, but you try running a library in your post-fossil-fuel dystopia. Without oil, gas, electricity and trees torn down to make books, libraries would cease to exist.

As Alex Epstein argues, to “rapidly eliminate fossil-fuel use” would make the world “an impoverished, dangerous and miserable place for most people”. Fossil fuels provide 80 per cent of the world’s energy. Just three per cent comes from solar and wind power, so beloved of green anti-modernists. And even that measly slice of global energy production is, in Epstein’s words, “totally dependent on fossil fuels, especially natural gas, for 24/7 back-up”. That is, if the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, we have to crank up the fossil fuels. Ours is a world in which three billion people still use less electricity than your average American fridge. Agitating for less energy production in such a time is callous beyond belief. It would issue a death sentence on the world’s poor. George Osborne is Father Christmas in comparison with these crusaders against the gains and wonders of modernity.

One heartbeat away

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

Joe Biden is old and his age is clearly a factor in his declining ability to carry out his duties as President. If he dies or is forced to leave office before his term is up, Kamala Harris would succeed him. If that isn’t a scary thought, you haven’t been paying attention:

When it comes to preferences based on identity of one kind or another, it is difficult to know where to start with this insufferable and corrupt woman who may be the next President of the United States of America. First, she is a woman, or at least identifies as one. Second, she is a woman of colour. Third, she is black. Fourth, she is an Indian American woman. And last, but definitely not least, she is a woman of Afro-Caribbean heritage. In other words, she is highly qualified to achieve success in Biden’s America.

The daughter of two college professors, Kamala Harris is poised to become the first female president of the United States for one reason alone: her demographics. She is a very visible poster child for all that is wrong with the system of preferences and favoritism based on identity and immutable characteristics which has replaced the ideals of meritocracy and colour blindness.

Sadly, Vice President Harris is not alone. Those willing to trade their identity for professional advantage are growing in number by the day. Indeed, such individuals are being encouraged and are found aplenty throughout state and federal government, public schools and academia, corporations, and increasingly in law enforcement and the military.
Recently, Harris attended the Essence Festival of Culture, organised by Essence, a magazine aimed at black women. Asked to explain the role of culture in enhancing and securing the achievements of African-Americans, she treated her audience to one of her delectable word salads that have become the hallmark of her vice presidency.

“Culture is …” she informs us after a slight pause, “it is a reflection of our moment and our time. Right?” she asks, seeking reassurance from her interlocutors. “And present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment. That is a reflection of joy. Because,” she adds, in an inexplicable allusion to Psalm 30, “[joy] comes in the morning,” before bursting into that cackling laughter which can engender suicidal thoughts in vulnerable people, including the current author.

She goes on: “We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life. And I think about it in that way too.”

My goodness! Are those the words of a woman who could have access to the nuclear codes in just under two years? I am afraid they are. They are the words of someone whose rise to legislative and executive power has been determined entirely by the immutable characteristics of sex and race and the calculus of political advantage.

Only a nation which has abandoned the meritocratic values that made it great could produce such a paragon of ineffable mediocrity as Kamala Harris. Only a nation which has lost its aspirations to greatness will continue to elevate men and women to positions of high rank on the basis not of talent, ingenuity, and character, but demographic attributes that check the right boxes and ignore merit, privileging cosmetics over competence. If this madness continues (and it will take a lot more than the recent SCOTUS ruling to make it go away) such a policy will eventually spell doom for America, maybe sooner than you think.

July 14, 2023

QotD: Resolving “disagreements” on Wikipedia

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

I keep telling anybody who’ll listen, anytime the subject comes up: Always go to the Wikipedia talk page when you do your “researching” on Wikipedia! Take what you read in the main article with a huge grain of salt if you find a big back-and-forth melee going on in the talk page, for you can take it to the bank that if there’s a disagreement going on between conservative and liberal editors, it will be “resolved” by way of the liberal editors locking the article down after they’ve made sure to get the last word in. Which means what you’ve just read is mostly nothing but pure bovine product. If you’re gleaning this information for any kind of actual purpose, it goes without saying that this is something you should know. Information is meaningless without the “meta data”; without context.

And if there isn’t anything going on back there at all, you should probably still take the main article with a grain of salt because you might be reading a bunch of “everybody knows” gibberish without too much thought behind it.

M.K. Freeberg, “Latest Wikipedia Talk Page Mess: Socialism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2012-12-01.

July 12, 2023

“[E]lite colleges are machines for laundering privilege”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scott Alexander ponders the reasons our elite universities operate as they do:

Harvard University Memorial Church.
Photo by Crimson400 via Wikimedia Commons.

We could think of “the best college” as a self-fulfilling prophecy; for whatever reason, one college has gotten a reputation as the one whose signal is most valuable. Everyone naturally tries to get in there; if they fail, they go to the college with the next-best reputation, and so on. The system is stable; the “best” college will keep its reputation (since it gets the best students) and the best students will always want to go to the best college. If, as Matt’s son suggests, all the Ivies started accepting the worst students instead, an Ivy degree would soon become a signal that you’re bad, and employers would stop respecting it.

I heard a fascinating variation of this hypothesis from Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House: elite colleges are machines for laundering privilege.

That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!

The most blatant form of this obfuscation: suppose you own a very successful family business. You can leave your son your fortune, you can leave him the business, you can leave him your mansion, but you can’t (directly) leave him an aura of having deserved all these things. What you can do is make a $10 million donation to Harvard in exchange for them accepting your son. Your son gets a Harvard degree, a universally-recognized sign of being a highly meritorious person. Then when you leave him the business, everyone will agree he deserves it. Who said anything about nepotism? Leaving a Harvard graduate in control of your business is an excellent decision!

This happens a little, but I think it mostly isn’t this obvious. More often the transactions are for abstract goods: prestige, associations, favors. The Maharaja of Whereverstan sends his daughter to Harvard so that she appears meritorious. In exchange, Harvard gets the credibility boost of being the place the Maharaja of Whereverstan sent his daughter. And Harvard’s other students get the advantage of networking with the Princess Of Whereverstan. Twenty years later, when one of them is an oil executive and Whereverstan is handing out oil contracts, she puts in a word with her old college buddy the Princess and gets the deal. It’s obvious what the oil executive has gotten out of this, but what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.

People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.

Is this good or bad? It’s good insofar as it provides a justification for making some elite positions dependent on merit and accessible to anyone, but bad insofar as it helps defend and obfuscate the ones that aren’t. It’s good if you think it’s good for all the elites (meritocratic and otherwise) to know each other and be on the same page; it’s bad if you don’t want them to be (maybe because it helps them oppress people more efficiently).

I expect that without such a system the elites would do their own thing without any concession to merit whatsoever – so maybe it beats the alternative.

“Folksy” Joe Biden has always been a nasty piece of work

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

One of the most puzzling things about how Joe Biden has been represented in the legacy media is that — despite mountains of evidence that he’s a hot-tempered bully who has always been eager to belittle and demean other people — he still gets fawning coverage of his supposed kindly personality:

Joe Biden likes to present himself as a folksy type, the kind you’d think of as a kindly old uncle or something. He tells stories about Corn Pop and virtually anything else and the press eats it up.

But it’s a veneer, a mask Biden wears so the public will like him.

We’ve seen it slip a time or two, but Axios has a story that hints that what we’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg.

    In public, President Biden likes to whisper to make a point. In private, he’s prone to yelling.

    Behind closed doors, Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast.

    The president’s admonitions include: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!” and “Get the f**k out of here!” — according to current and former Biden aides who have witnessed and been on the receiving end of such outbursts.

    …

    “There’s no question that the Biden temper is for real. It may not be as volcanic as Bill Clinton’s, but it’s definitely there,” said Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.

    Whipple’s book quotes former White House press secretary Jen Psaki as saying: “I said to [Biden] multiple times, ‘I’ll know we have a really good, trusting relationship when you yell at me the first time.'”

    Whipple notes: “Psaki wouldn’t have to wait long.”

    Zoom out: Biden’s temper comes in the form of angry interrogations rather than erratic tantrums.

    He’ll grill aides on topics until it’s clear they don’t know the answer to a question — a routine that some see as meticulous and others call “stump the chump” or “stump the dummy”.

    Being yelled at by the president has become an internal initiation ceremony in this White House, aides say — if Biden doesn’t yell at you, it could be a sign he doesn’t respect you.

Go and read the whole thing, because this is troubling, and not just because I dislike Biden.

While Axios goes out of its way to paint this as just an impassioned politician who demands much of his staff, that’s not what I’m seeing here.

Instead, I’m seeing an abusive man who is taking advantage of his powerful position to bully his subordinates.

I won’t pretend I’ve never lost my temper before. Doing so would be a lie. However, my yelling at someone has never been a sign of respect. It’s been a sign that I lost control.

And if Biden is doing it this often, there’s not much chance the man has any control over much of anything.

Of course, this is a report from Axios. Maybe it’s not really a thing. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it because I can’t stand Biden.

July 11, 2023

Western legacy media is suffering from an overdose of Professionally Correct speech

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

David Friedman can’t help but notice this phenomenon:

When the question of alcohol and health came up on “Doctor Radio”, a satellite radio program, all of the participants agreed that evidence showed that consuming a moderate level of alcohol, something like one beer a day for a woman, one or two for a man, or the equivalent in other drinks, was good for you, better than no alcohol at all. All of them also agreed that they would not advise their patients to do so.

Why? They mentioned that there were problems with prescribing something that depended on the exact dosage and that a higher level of consumption was likely to lead to auto accidents, but distinguishing one beer a day from three is not a difficult problem even for those who are not doctors. My conjecture was that the real explanation was the reluctance of doctors to appear to be on the wrong side. Everyone knew that alcohol was a bad thing, a source of auto accidents and various medical (and other) problems. By giving a truthful account of the medical evidence the doctors on the program might appear to be pro-alcohol; all good people are anti. Hence they had to qualify their conclusion as a purely theoretical matter, not something that would affect what they told their patients. Think of it as a different version of PC — Professionally Correct speech.

A similar pattern exists for ice cream. Multiple independent studies have found evidence that consuming ice cream reduces the chance of getting diabetes — and found ways of explaining the evidence away. In several cases they have gone so far, in public statements, as to report that yogurt is protective against diabetes, other dairy products are not, when ice cream in their study showed as strong, in some studies a stronger, effect than yogurt.

Yogurt, as everyone knows, is a healthy food. Ice cream, as everyone knows, is bad for you.

From time to time I see a news story on some piece of scientific research that somewhat weakens the case for taking strong action against global warming. I believe that every time I have seen such a report it was accompanied by a quote from the researchers to the effect that global warming was a serious problem and their work should not be taken as a reason to be less worried about it. They almost certainly believed the first half of that, but their work was a reason to be less worried even if not to stop worrying.

Good people are on the side that believes that warming is happening, is anthropogenic, is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with immediately. Bad people deny one or more of those claims. If that is what all the people who matter to you, such as the fellow members of your profession, believe, and you are so unfortunate as to produce results that strengthen the bad people’s case, it is prudent to make it clear that you are still on the side of the angels. Just as, if you are so unfortunate as to be an honest doctor aware of the evidence in favor of alcohol, it is prudent to make it clear that you have not transferred your allegiance to demon rum.

July 10, 2023

“De-banking” is the financial world’s version of cancelling someone

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At the Free Life blog, Alan Bickley considers the recently reported rash of prominent (and not-so-prominent) critics of the British government being refused service by their banks and further refused permission to open new accounts with any other chartered bank. Being “cancelled” by social media companies is bad, but being “de-banked” in a modern economy is worse than being declared a “non-person” by a totalitarian regime:

In the past month, we have heard that various rich and well-connected people have had their bank accounts closed, seemingly because of their dissident political opinions. The same has happened to other people who are much poorer and without connections. Twenty years ago, the same happened to the British National Party. There is a simple libertarian response to this.

No one has the right to coerced association with anyone else. If someone comes to me and asks me to provide him with services, I have an absolute right to say yes or no. If I am uncharitable enough to dislike the colour of his face or what he does in bed, so much the worse. I may lose valuable business. But it is my time, and it is my choice. If anyone starts a whine about the horrors of discrimination, he should be ignored. We have an absolute right to discriminate against others for any reason whatever.

This being said, the position becomes less clear when state power of some kind is involved. Banks in this country require a licence from the State to operate. This protects them from open competition. It also gives them access to services and information from the State that are not given to other persons or businesses. If a bank finds itself in serious financial difficulties, it has at least a greater chance than other large businesses of being saved by the State – by a coordination of support by others or by direct financial help. The State has also made it illegal for many transactions to be made in cash. If I try to buy a car with £20,000 in cash, the car dealership is obliged to refuse my business, or to make so many enquiries that accepting my business is too much trouble. In effect, anyone who wants to spend more than a few thousand pounds in cash is obliged by various actual and shadow laws to use a bank account.

So we have privileged corporations and an effective legal obligation for people to do business with them. This entirely changes the libertarian indifference to commercial discrimination. The banks are a privileged oligopoly. The banks compete for custom among a public that is free to choose one bank rather than another, but that is compelled to choose some bank. For this reason, since the relevant laws will not be repealed, it is legitimate to demand another law to offset some of the effects of the others. Banks should be legally obliged to accept the business of any person or group of persons without question. Limitations on what services are provided must be justified on the grounds of previous financial misconduct as reasonably defined. For example, it should be permitted for a bank to refuse an overdraft to someone who is or has recently been bankrupt, or whose spending habits are obviously reckless. Perhaps it should be permitted for a bank to refuse to lend money for purposes it regards as scandalous as well as commercially unviable. Therefore, a representative of the White Persons’ Supremacy Foundation, or the Vladimir Putin Appreciation Society, should be able to walk into any bank and open an account – with no questions asked. If an account is refused, there should be a legal obligation on the bank to provide a full explanation of the refusal. If the refusal is not made on valid commercial grounds, there should be a right of appeal before a tribunal which does not award costs, and this tribunal should have the power to grant punitive damages against any bank found to be discriminating on any grounds but the validly commercial.

The refusal of banking services is only the beginning of a new and sophisticated totalitarianism. What the banks can do can also be done by supermarkets, by Internet service providers, by hotel chains, by airlines and railway companies, and by utility providers. There is indeed a good case for insisting on a law forbidding any organisation that has the privilege of limited liability from any but obviously commercial discrimination.

“… the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society”

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

The Armchair General would almost certainly agree with my frequent lament that the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything:

There is a famous quote by American journalist and satirist H.L. Menken, which has been deployed by many political writers over the years:

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

It is an enduring quote because it has the ring of truth1, and it certainly fits with the Machiavellian aspect of politics. This attitude was, without doubt, deployed by governments across the world during Covid (and, to some extent, still is).

Your jaundiced2 General would like to propose a related, alternative and rather more plausible soundbite that, I believe, more adequately describes the Western world in the twenty-first century:

    The whole consequence of practical politics is the keep the ignorant populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be kept in comfort) by an endless series of colossal fuck-ups, labelled as crises, caused entirely by the government.3

Every time that you see the media whipping up a frenzy about a “crisis“, you can be 99% sure that the issue in question has been caused by the state — and that the real solution is to remove the government intervention. And that is never, ever the action actually proposed.

Crises of Government Origin
Your jaundiced General refers to these phenomena as “Crises of Government Origin” (COGO), and will form the back-bone of a series of posts titled with that acronym. Many of the issues are interlinked, and most are absolutely critical if we are ever to confront the economic and social issues facing us today.

These include (but are not limited to):

  • the energy crisis;
  • the Climate Warming / Change / Heating crisis;
  • the housing crisis;
  • the NHS staffing crisis;
  • the police shortage crisis;
  • the obesity crisis;
  • the education crisis;
  • the pandemic crisis;
  • the productivity crisis;
  • the activist “charity” crisis;
  • the drugs crisis (Scottish edition);
  • the rape gang crisis;
  • the intersectional and gender crisis;
  • just about any other “crisis” you can think of.

To be sure, the UK government is not the worst in some of these areas — but, since it is in UK that my comfy leather armchair is situated, it is the rampant stupidity of our own governments that I shall concentrate on. And no, not all of these posts will include reminding people that Grant Schapps is a prick.

I can promise that every one of them will include illustrations demonstrating the mind-gargling incompetence of our governments (of all persuasions) and “Rolls Royce” civil service4.

The law is a blunt instrument, and the government is really inefficient at doing anything at all.

Fundamentally, the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society. And the UK is in the vanguard of this malaise as Sharon White, at the time Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (and currently fucking things up in typically Rolls Royce civil servant fashion at John Lewis), said (in a rare example of her being right) in 2015 at the Institute for Government:

    The UK is “almost the most centralised developed country in the world”.

Indeed it has been observed that, by some measures, the UK is more centralised than Soviet Russia. This is why we are failing.

The Crises Of Government Origin (COGO) series aims to examine some of these failures — large and small. For starters, let’s have a look at Hate Speech laws and why they are so dangerous.

    1. The same applies to Menken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.

    2. Caused less by poor mood than incipient liver failure. Now pass the port, would you, old chap. No, to the left, you fool!

    3. Yes, yes — I realise that it needs honing, but it will do for now. Feel free to submit more elegant versions in the comments.

    4. Snork.

Barbara Kay – “[M]any Canadians [suffer] from highly contagious, patriotism-suppressive Post National Syndrome”

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

Canadians are deluged with messages that imply — or explicitly demand — that they should be ashamed of Canada and of being Canadians. That there is nothing to celebrate in our history or cultural achievements and instead we should humbly beseech forgiveness for our many, many, many sins. Barbara Kay disagrees:

On Canada Day, near St. Sauveur, Quebec, we were treated to torrential rain, hail, nearby tornado warnings, and continually flickering power. Not a day for fireworks. Just as well, since fireworks are the last thing one craves when one suffers, as many Canadians do, from highly contagious, patriotism-suppressive Post Nationalism Syndrome.

This scourge cannot yet be cured, since it was intentionally cultivated and released into the environment by the current government. Only herd immunity can end it. However, the symptoms of Post Nationalism Syndrome can be alleviated by certain traditional antivirals, like National Postism. Last Saturday’s NP featured several commentaries that buoyed my spirits, in particular Michael Higgins’s misery-loves-company column, “Stop shaming and start celebrating Canada”.

Higgins enumerates recent examples from a tiresome litany of complaints by our elites that “want to turn us into a nation of self-flagellating penitents”. The National Gallery of Canada insinuates that Canada’s iconic artists, the Group of Seven, are linked to white supremacy; a parliamentary motion endorses the residential school system as “genocide”; the attorney general actively considers legal sanctions against “denialism” — dissent from genocide as a proper descriptor (including me); and the erasure of Sir John A. Macdonald’s name from the eponymous Parkway.

In a nearby feature, the false claim that Macdonald was a guilty party in the alleged schools genocide was handily demolished by lawyer Greg Piasetzki, titled, “John A. Macdonald saved more indigenous lives than any other prime minister”. This evidence-based rejoinder to sticky defamatory myths about Macdonald is an excerpt from a new book of essays by 20 writers, The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished — Not Cancelled, published by the Aristotle Foundation, and edited by its founder and president, Mark Milke. 

Piasetzki’s essay mirrors the 19 others in its forthright challenge of our culture’s reigning anti-western dogmas, which brand Canada as a failed nation. Every author encourages the pride in being Canadian that has not dared to speak its name since Justin Trudeau came to power. I highly recommend it. If enough Canadians read it, we might arrive at herd immunity to Post Nationalism Syndrome.

QotD: Liberal and conservative views on innovation

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

Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote for different parties — they are different kinds of people. They differ psychologically in ways that are consistent across geography and culture. For example, liberals measure higher on traits like “openness to new experience” and seek out novelty. Conservatives prefer order and predictability. Their attachment to the status quo is an impediment to the re-ordering of society around new technology. Meanwhile, the technologists of Silicon Valley, while suspicious of government regulation, are still some of the most liberal people in the country. Not all liberals are techno-optimists, but virtually all techno-optimists are liberals.

A debate on the merits of change between these two psychological profiles helps guarantee that change benefits society instead of ruining it. Conservatives act as gatekeepers enforcing quality control on the ideas of progressives, ultimately letting in the good ones (like democracy) and keeping out the bad ones (like Marxism). Conservatives have often been wrong in their opposition to good ideas, but the need to win over a critical mass of them ensures that only the best-supported changes are implemented. Curiously, when the change in question is technological rather than social, this debate process is neutered. Instead, we get “inevitablism” — the insistence that opposition to technological change is illegitimate because it will happen regardless of what we want, as if we were captives of history instead of its shapers.

This attitude is all the more bizarre because it hasn’t always been true. When nuclear technology threatened Armageddon, we did what was necessary to limit it to the best of our ability. It may be that AI or automation causes social Armageddon. No one really knows — but if the pessimists are right, will we still have it in us to respond accordingly? It seems like the command of the optimists to lay back and “trust our history” has the upper hand.

Conservative critics of change have often been comically wrong — just like optimists. That’s ultimately not so interesting, because humans can’t predict the future. More interesting have been the times when the predictions of the critics actually came true. The Luddites were skilled artisans who feared that industrial technology would destroy their way of life and replace their high-status craft with factory drudgery. They were right. Twentieth century moralists feared that the automobile would facilitate dating and casual sex. They were right. They erred not in their predictions, but in their belief that the predicted effects were incompatible with a good society. That requires us to have a debate on the merits — about the meaning of the good life.

Nicholas Phillips, “The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism”, Quillette, 2019-06-06.

July 9, 2023

“… corporations sit in the late adopter phase of the marketing curve”

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

Elizabeth Nickson reminds us that the mass media corporate messaging is trailing edge, not leading edge:

Now everything is filtered through a warped looking glass, a Mad Hatter tea party of nonsense, run by the grimmest socialist operatives who ever lived, backed by buckets and wheelbarrows of stupid corporatist/fascist money. They are running a demoralization program on us.

It’s not working.

Never forget that corporations sit in the late adopter phase of the marketing curve, which is to say the lifeless part, the raking-in-the-money-from-stupid-women part. Women too, as a class, are part of the late adopter curve, because as Jordan Peterson once pointed out, women instinctively see humans as helpless babies needing protection and SAFETY FIRST. We are easily manipulated by our compassion, as is clear from the fact that only women and those who want to be, support the left now. The left traffics faux compassion and it is a killer drug. Included of course are beta males, hornswoggled by mommy, the wet diaper babies of Antifa and BLM. And of course, the paid operatives of the stinking cabal, the truly horrid public sector unions, the vicious thugs at AFL-CIO and the humanity-hating environmental movement.

The people the left cultivated so carefully over several generations have all fled to populism and eventually their vicious operatives won’t even be able to steal the votes they need. How big is it? Imagine 2000 Trump rallies. And then ten times that. And then quadruple it. Double and double and double again. And they are having the best time, more fun than you can imagine, working away in obscurity, asserting their human right to determine their own future.

[…]

Normals have turned, all of them. They are not available to the Trudeaus, Macrons and Rishi Sunaks of the world. They are wised up. Some of them know more than me about the filth at the heart of “environmentalism” and I know a lot. They are not Russian serfs or Chinese peasants. There is no way they are going to be corralled in 15 minute cities. They are going to bring the house down.

They/we are the people that Richard Haas, when resigning from the Council of Foreign Relations, a nest of nasty neo-liberal, neo-con oppressors if there ever was one, warned against when he said the greatest threat facing the world is American populists. Sure, buddy.

One of the those dreadful people (as they call us) is Kevin Fernandes82 on Instagram. Probably not his real name, but he is not aiming for public recognition. What he does, methodically, every day many times, is chronicle the slow crumbling of the old regime. I am using a lot of his reporting and as he shows, we are beating the pants off them every single day.

Their jobs are untenable. People are resigning from every safe berth in the world or being fired from plush jobs because the world the neo-liberal hegemon has created is counter-rational, so chaotic, it is unstable. It is unstable because we know it is stupid. We are opposed. And our opposition is slowly slowly bringing it down.

This is long. You don’t have to read it all to get the point, but give it to the despairing, keep it for when you despair. All these wins happened in the last two weeks. People, judges and administrators and politicians within the system, are starting to dance to the populist tune. Many of the worst are running as fast as they can.

We are the future.

Time to start thinking about what we want the new world to look like.

Herewith:

The Sound of Freedom has outsold the new Indiana Jones film, on 2,000 fewer screens and with no PR, against the full force of the Hollywood machine.

The Dutch government has reportedly fallen over asylum policy. Farms confiscation is wildly unpopular. Mark Rutte, architect of the prosecution of farmers has resigned.

The decoupling of the BRICS from the dollar means the death of the neo-liberal hegemon. Mark Wauk and Tom Luongo do a neat job of wrapping up this particular mess. As they say: there are no neo-liberals in a multi-polar, decoupled world.

The BRICS are set to introduce a new currency backed by gold, against the US backed dollar which depreciates in value every day because of inflation caused by choking energy supply and crazed overspending by governments.

EU laws that let banks shut accounts over political views to be scrapped.

Federal judge in Louisiana prohibits DHS, FBI and DOJ from working with Big Tech to censor posts.

The list goes on for quite a lot longer…

July 8, 2023

Iowa votes to re-impose child labour in ways that violate federal labour laws

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray covers the breathless excitement of national media covering recent changes to Iowa labour laws:

Suddenly, though, this message is all over social media:

These messages are not exactly false, and not entirely true. They take note of a real development, but strip away all the limits and caveats to fake up the creation of a 21st-century Upton Sinclair novel. But the effects of this successful legislation — this is where it gets complicated.

Start here (or here) with Iowa Senate File 542: signed into law in May, took effect on July 1. A bunch of the first-glance shocking details are more complicated than the outrage-farming Twitter takes suggest: 16 year-olds can serve alcohol in restaurants, with at least two adults to supervise, but not in bars; 15 year-olds can work on assembly lines in school-based work training programs, with parental permission; teenagers can work until 11 p.m. in the summer, but not during the school year. Allowing a 16 year-old coffee shop waitress to bring you a beer strikes me as … not the end of the world?

But all of those details aside, the new Iowa law expands child labor (while ending some earlier measures allowing even younger workers to do a few jobs like migrant farm labor), and will, in fact, put 14 year-olds to work in what will look a great deal like adult settings. So red state legislatures are expanding child labor at the moment they’re banning gender mutila— uh, gender-affirming medical care for teenagers, and making that latter choice on the highly defensible grounds that teenagers lack the maturity to make decisions like that. So a 15 year-old working in a factory lacks the maturity to make adult decisions, is where we end up when we put all of this together.

July 7, 2023

Justin Trudeau says that Canada is merely defending itself from the “attack” by Facebook

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has never faced a situation he couldn’t get histrionic about:

The government escalated the battle over Bill C-18 yesterday, announcing that it was suspending advertising on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms due the company’s decision to comply with the bill by blocking news sharing and its reluctance to engage in further negotiations on the issue. While the ad ban applies to federal government advertising, Liberal party officials confirmed they plan to continue political advertising on the social networks, suggesting that principled opposition ends when there might be a political cost involved. At issue is roughly $11 million in annual advertising by the federal government, a sum that pales in comparison to the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s estimate of at least $100 million in payments in Canada for news links from Meta alone.

In addition to raising the economic cost to Meta for stopping news sharing, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau increased the rhetoric, describing Canada as having been “attacked” by Meta and likening the government’s fight over the bill to defending democracy in Ukraine or during the Second World War [at 13:30]:

    Facebook decided that Canada was a small country, small enough that they could reject our asks. They made the wrong choice by deciding to attack Canada. We want to defend democracy. This is what we’re doing across the world, such as supporting Ukraine. This is what we did during the Second World War. This is what we’re doing every single day in the United Nations.

There are strongly held views on both sides of the Bill C-18 debate, but the suggestion that stopping sharing news links on a social network is in any way comparable to World War 2 is embarrassingly hyperbolic and gives the sense of a government that has lost perspective on the issue. Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has repeatedly described the manner of compliance with Bill C-18 as a business choice for the Internet companies, yet the Prime Minister now calls that choice an attack on the country.

If it were truly comparable to a world war, then surely the Liberal Party (joined by the NDP) would not continue to advertise on the platform. Yet since the 2021 election call, the party alone has run approximately 11,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram. That is separate from individual MPs, who have also run hundreds of ads. The Meta Ad Library provides ample evidence of how reliant the party has been on social media. For example, since the start of the year, Anna Gainey ran over 500 ads as part of her by-election campaign in Quebec. David Hilderley, who was a candidate in the Oxford by-election, ran approximately 180 ads on Facebook during the same timeframe.

July 5, 2023

Intersectionality showdown

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

Chris Bray on the major break in progressive solidarity caused by non-white American Muslims’, Ethiopian Christians’, and Peruvian Catholics’ unexpected reaction to woke teachers wanting to sexually indoctrinate their children:

We’re wading through this culture war sewage because we have a political class that’s deliberately pumping it into the culture to keep us from noticing that, how can I put this in a sophisticated way, they suck.

But this really tedious maneuver is increasingly leading to moments like this — and Twitter still won’t let Substack writers embed tweets, so click to watch video, but here’s the substance of the thing:

The fake conflict is increasingly likely to be a dozen sanpaku-eyed AWFL’s against a thousand genuinely multicultural parents, battling over insane questions like the “book bans” that remove highly explicit sexual content from elementary school libraries. In 2023, the culture war is rapidly cooking down to STOP PREVENTING US FROM TALKING TO YOUR EIGHT YEAR-OLDS ABOUT SUCKING DICK, YOU NAZIS.

If you’ve never read what I wrote about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, please take a moment to go read this. About 900 people died at Jonestown in 1978, but Jones started in Indianapolis in the 1950s. He moved his church to a rural property in California, and then to Guyana, by constantly telling his parishioners that they were threatened by hostile forces outside the church that were maneuvering to destroy them. The frequent recourse to invented threats is a sign of a sick movement, not a sign of something the grows and flourishes.

That’s where we are. We’re watching a sick thing die. The question, now, is how long it takes to die, and how much damage it does in its death throes. But the increasingly hysterical tone, against an increasingly matter-of-fact response — a thousand parents saying calmly that no, we won’t let you inflict this curriculum on our children — suggests that the inflection point is getting closer.

July 4, 2023

QotD: The (arguments over the) founding of America

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

You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different than saying that the ideals themselves were false. (They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition. But that would be conventional wisdom — or simply the central theme of President Barack Obama’s vision of the arc of justice in the unfolding of the United States.

No, in its ambitious and often excellent 1619 Project, the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go — and tells us this before anything else. Even though those ideals eventually led to the emancipation of slaves and the slow, uneven and incomplete attempt to realize racial equality over the succeeding centuries, they were still “false when they were written”. America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy, which was masked by highfalutin’ rhetoric about universal freedom. That’s the subtext of the entire project, and often, also, the actual text.

Hence the replacing of 1776 (or even 1620 when the pilgrims first showed up) with 1619 as the “true” founding. “True” is a strong word. 1776, the authors imply, is a smoke-screen to distract you from the overwhelming reality of white supremacy as America’s “true” identity. “We may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy,” Hannah-Jones writes. That’s a nice little displacement there: “some might argue”. In fact, Nikole Hannah-Jones is arguing it, almost every essay in the project assumes it — and the New York Times is emphatically and institutionally endorsing it.

Hence the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines! Am I exaggerating? The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed … it is finally time to tell our story truthfully”. Finally! All previous accounts of American history have essentially been white lies, the NYT tells us, literally and figuratively. All that rhetoric about liberty, progress, prosperity, toleration was a distraction in order to perpetrate those lies, and make white people feel better about themselves.

Andrew Sullivan, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism”, New York, 2019-09-13.

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