Quotulatiousness

September 5, 2024

CASA doloroso, or Jagmeet finally locates a pair

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

Ding, dong! The long-running deal between the New Democrats and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals has finally been terminated. It was Jagmeet Singh’s support that kept Trudeau in power and had been intended to run until next summer, but Singh announced he was no longer going to provide confidence and supply votes in Parliament. The editors at The Line warn us that this doesn’t automatically mean we can start heating up the tar and ripping open the feather pillows quite yet:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh in happier days at a 2017 Pride parade.
Photo via Wikimedia.

On Wednesday, Jagmeet Singh finally took longstanding criticism to heart, and announced he would be tearing up the Confidence and Supply Agreement, the deal that allows the Liberals to hold the confidence of the house.

That said, don’t expect an election just yet.

CASA has been an unmitigated disaster for the little sister of the non-alliance alliance between the two parties. As we’ve previously noted here at The Line, Singh proved to be a weak negotiator, agreeing to support Justin Trudeau with nary a cabinet seat nor a concrete spending promise. To date, the only real concessions the NDP have landed amount to, essentially, half-baked Pharmacare and dental programs that are little more than targeted subsidies to the poor. The merits of these programs in and of themselves is a debate for another day; however, what benefits they do bring have not benefited the NDP one whit.

That’s because the Liberals will — and have — taken full credit for these programs, while Singh has been left in the unenviable position of having to criticize a sitting government that he continues to buttress through the CASA. In other words, for virtually no spending concessions, the NDP has fatally undermined its position as a credible critic of the government.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party — still strong in the polls — can lean on the NDP’s hypocrisy in order to gather up traditional blue collar and even union workers into the bosom of its culturally cozy embrace.

Obviously, this position is untenable. However, we at The Line admit to being surprised that Singh is actually ripping it up ahead of the deal’s natural expiry in June of 2025. Rather, we expected the Liberals to rag the puck on this government for as long as constitutionally possible — and, to be honest, we thought the NDP would stay in step because the party is, at its heart, weak.

Lo! We were surprised.

By ending CASA, the party has time to restore some of its spent credibility, bashing Trudeau hard to drum up fundraising ahead of the next election. Without the NDP’s support, the Liberals can carry on only until they are required to pass a confidence motion — likely the Spring budget. This gives the NDP a few months to generate support. Of course Singh won’t win that election, but he can now leave his party in a stronger position to live to fight another day.

That is … unless Trudeau decides to respond to the collapse of CASA by simply dropping the writ now, catching his opponents on the left off guard and unprepared to run a full election campaign.

Is the DEI tide finally receding from corporate boardrooms?

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

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Jon Miltimore explains why many major US corporations are reconsidering their earlier “all in” approach to lecturing their customers about progressive causes:

Bud Light’s brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney, whose antics triggered a consumer boycott that cost the company over a billion in lost revenue.

DEI is just one form of corporate social activism, which comes in various forms and includes its cousin Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). Both ideas fall under, to some degree, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the idea that corporations have a duty to take social and environmental actions into consideration in their business models.

If you’re wondering why Burger King has commercials on climate change and cow farts, and why Bud Light’s commercials went from featuring Rodney Dangerfield and Bob Uecker to trans activist Dylan Mulvaney, it’s because of CSR.

The idea that corporations should fight for social causes has skyrocketed in recent years to such an extent that activism is inhibiting companies in their primary mission: generating profits by serving customers.

“Firms leveraging situations and social issues is not new, but showcasing their moral authority despite a disinterested consumer base is,” Kimberlee Josephson, an Associate Professor of Business at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania, has observed.

Bud Light’s decision to feature Mulvaney cost them an estimated $1.4 billion in sales, and it revealed the danger of corporations leaning into social activism, particularly campaigns and policies that alienate their own consumer bases.

Not very long ago, companies like Chick-fil-A faced backlash from progressive activists for supporting traditional marriage. Culture war advocates on the right have responded in similar fashion.

Conservative influencers have made a point of raising awareness around “woke” corporate initiatives — white privilege campaigns, climate change goals, LGBTQ events, etc. The most successful ones, such as Robby Starbuck who pioneered the campaign against Tractor Supply and John Deere, made a point of targeting corporations with conservative consumer bases.

“If I started a boycott against Starbucks right now, I know that it wouldn’t get anywhere near the same result,” Starbuck recently told the Wall Street Journal.

One can support Robby Starbuck’s tactics or oppose them. What’s clear is that corporations increasingly face risks for participating in social activism campaigns, and the threats now come from both sides of the political aisle.

Respectful neutrality on cultural issues used to be the default way for companies to avoid insulting the general public and potentially alienating customers. Under the influence of DEI/ESG/CSR advocates, corporations were persuaded that they could offend half of the population without suffering any meaningful financial losses. That turned out to be untrue.

September 4, 2024

There’s always been “BC weird”, but today’s BC politics is weirder than ever

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

Although I can technically say I’ve been to British Columbia, a couple of hours driving around just west of the BC/Alberta border in 1988 doesn’t give me any real understanding of Lotusland’s, uh, unique political landscape. Fortunately, here’s Rob Shaw in The Line to give a somewhat better-informed view of BC politics today:

British Columbia politics has always been weird.

This is a province in which an obese Taiwanese billionaire once bought a premier’s personal amusement park using envelopes stuffed with cash in his underwear; where the clerk of the legislature was convicted of fraud; where the Speaker claimed the legislature’s ceremonial mace was bugged by spies; and an MLA stole from a children’s charity for the disabled.

In short, the province has a bit of a reputation. So it might be tempting to view the most recent headlines about the implosion of the former dominant B.C. Liberal party — and the meteoric rise of the B.C. Conservatives — as keeping with British Columbia’s unique brand of zaniness.

Except, it isn’t.

B.C.’s political realignment mirrors one that’s already occurred in several other provinces and is playing out federally, as well, as a tired, middle-road centrist party is squeezed out by a harder-right, hungrier, more-energetic conservative movement.

At the leading edge of it all is an unlikely figure — a 61-year-old former Liberal cabinet minister with a low profile, who was booted from the B.C. Liberal caucus in 2022 by leader Kevin Falcon for sharing a social media post questioning the role of CO2 in climate change. Rather than retire quietly, John Rustad took the ejection, pivoted and joined the moribund B.C. Conservative party, which had clocked only 1.9 per cent of the popular vote in 2020. He gave the party a seat in the legislature, and a profile to grow. Since then, it has skyrocketed.

“Of course nobody thought you could do this in a year, take a political party from two to three per cent to challenge to form government,” Rustad told me. “Lots of people ask me about it and I put it down simply to people are really desperate and looking for change.” Last week — two years and 10 days after he was fired — Rustad stood in a Vancouver hotel ballroom to accept Falcon’s political surrender. The leader of the B.C. Liberal dynasty, a party that ruled the province from 2001 to 2017 under premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, announced that he was disbanding B.C. United ahead of the next election. Supporters were encouraged to flock to the Conservatives.

“This is the right thing to do for the province,” Falcon said at the Aug. 28 press conference. “I said to John: I may only agree with about 75 per cent of what you might believe in, but I do know this, that on his very worst day John Rustad would be a far better premier than (B.C. NDP premier) David Eby on his very best day. And I’ve never lost sight of that bigger picture.” The Conservatives have been within striking distance of the governing NDP for months, according to polling done by almost every firm in the country.

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy indulges himself with a Trudeau-esque bit of geopolitical posturing

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Military, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill outlines the British government’s odd choice of timing to announce suspension of (some) arms shipments to Israel:

Bereft of vision, the modern politician is obsessed with “optics”. Which makes foreign secretary David Lammy’s announcement this week that the UK will be suspending some arms exports to Israel all the more surreal. The optics of withholding weapons from the Jewish State the day after we discovered that its enemy is so ruthless it will happily murder young Jews in cold blood are atrocious. Did not one functionary in the Foreign Office think to raise his or her hand and say: “Sir, should we at least wait until the bodies of those six Israeli hostages are cold before we shame and punish the nation they came from?”

This goes way beyond optics, of course. It is more than a failure of spin. It is a failure – a colossal, unforgivable one – of morality. As the bodies of the six slain Jews found in one of Hamas’s hellish lairs in Rafah were being transported back to a grief-stricken Israel, our government took action not against the Islamist extremists who carried out this unutterable atrocity, but against the nation that suffered it. Mere hours after the discovery of an act of fascistic savagery, our government handed a propaganda victory to the fascists by dragging Israel’s name through the mud. What were they thinking? Shameful doesn’t cover it.

Mr Lammy has said around 10 per cent of arms sales to Israel will be suspended. Thirty out of 350 arms-exports licences will be cancelled, primarily affecting parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones. The reason for this smug, haughty smackdown of the Jewish State? Because there’s a “clear risk”, said Lammy, that such equipment will be used to “commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”. Big talk from a politician who noisily supported the West’s imperial bombardment of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the widescale torture and rape of prisoners.

Many are damning Lammy’s partial embargo as gesture politics. “What is the point?”, headlines wonder. Denying Israel a few parts for planes won’t make much difference, some moan. For the frothing Israelophobes of the iffy left, nothing less than a complete arms embargo will do. They want not one gun to go to crazy Israel. If only there was a word to describe people who agitate morning, noon and night for the disarming of a Jewish nation that recently suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust.

The obsession with the partial nature of Lammy’s reprimanding of Israel misses the point. What the Foreign Office has just done is huge – and profoundly troubling. Sure, it won’t make much of a dent in Israel’s ability to fight Hamas, but it will cast aspersions on Israel’s fight against Hamas. It won’t militarily weaken Israel’s war on the pogromists that slaughtered more than a thousand of its people on 7 October, but it might morally weaken that war with its sly implication that there’s a criminal element to this crusade against Hamas’s army of anti-Semites. The partial arms embargo is indicative of something far more unsettling: a solidarity embargo as Britain slowly but surely turns its back on the Jewish nation.

QotD: The modern tribal divide – the “Somewheres” versus the “Anywheres”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In his book The Road to Somewhere, my colleague David Goodhart identified two broad political tribes – those who see the world from Anywhere and those who see the world from Somewhere.

Boris Johnson’s election victory has once again brought this divide to the surface.

Anywheres tend to be younger and place more value on career and education – that is, they see themselves in terms of what they have achieved. They are also more comfortable with ethnic diversity and mass immigration, precisely because their identities are less rooted to place and group.

Somewheres, by contrast, are older and place greater value on the communities in which they live. This is not to say that Anywheres do not care about their community. Rather, Anywheres can see themselves prospering in any community.

Goodhart estimates that around 50 per cent of the population are Somewheres, 25 per cent are Anywheres, and the remainder occupy the grey area between the two camps. Both worldviews are perfectly legitimate, but the problem is that they can conflict.

From sitting in seminar after seminar, packed with policymakers, politicians, journalists and academics, Goodhart became painfully aware of how much the Anywhere view dominates public discussion, despite being a minority view.

Richard Norrie, “The revenge of the Somewheres”, Spiked, 2020-01-13.

September 3, 2024

QotD: The Libertarian Party clown car

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

Why are libertarians like this? I see no reason why people who value liberty in the social and economic sphere must also be weirdos who probably eat the silica packet in a beef jerky pouch because it says “DO NOT EAT” and they don’t like being bossed around. I have some sympathy for libertarian positions: I’m socially more liberal than basically every Republican, and I like markets more than most Democrats. But I also know a fully stuffed clown car when I see one, and the Libertarian Party is very much that. And lest you think that this week’s convention was a rare foray into Crazytown, here are some events that establish the Libertarian Party as a tenth-generation Crazytown family whose antecedents are featured on the city crest.

Jeff Maurer, “Why Can’t the Libertarian Party Be Normal?”, I Might Be Wrong, 2024-05-28.

September 2, 2024

“Queering Nuclear Weapons” … no, don’t laugh because it isn’t funny

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

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter looks into what at first seemed like a less-than-brilliant headline from The Babylon Bee, but is actually a much more serious concern:

Nuclear security is, I’m sure you do not need to be convinced, a deeply serious matter. Ever since we cracked the atom over Hiroshima our civilization has been walking a tightrope over an abyss. A single misstep could mean annihilation – hundreds of millions dead within minutes, billions within days. Doubtless there would be some survivors, but it’s doubtful that industrial civilization would survive. We’ve come within a hair’s breadth of this a few times, not only in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but on other occasions, when radar mulfunctions or computer glitches left launch officers in the USA and the former USSR unsure whether or not to press the big red buttons they were entrusted with. Fortunately for everyone, they didn’t. If they had, none of us would be here.

Nuclear power plants can be almost equally dangerous. We saw the consequences of mismanagement in the 80s, with Chernobyl. Political officers who had no idea what they were doing covered up one screw-up after another. The results horrified a continent and poisoned the good name of the nuclear energy to this day.

Nuclear security, of civilian infrastructure and especially of the strategic weapons reserve, is the kind of thing that you want deeply serious men in charge of. The kinds of guys who wear impeccable grey suits, didn’t laugh because they don’t think your joke is funny, and have multiple degrees in military history and nuclear physics.

[…]

And now, here we are again. The Department of Energy’s new Special Assistant for National Nuclear Security Administration, one Sneha Nair, is also the author of an article titled Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament.

The National Nuclear Security Administration is a semi-autonomous alphabet agency responsible, as its name implies, for maintaining the security and efficacy of the USA’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Its remit also includes preventing the proliferation of WMDs, overseeing the provision of nuclear propulsion for the US Navy, and responding to radiological emergencies.

These are not small things to be responsible for, and one of their newly appointed senior administrators is apparently obsessed with painting rainbows on the warheads.

Let’s have a look at her.

Unlike Brinton, Nair doesn’t obviously look like a spiteful mutant. No aposematic hair colouring, no facial piercings, no obvious tattoos, nor any other obvious signs of mental illness. Her Xitter account doesn’t even proclaim her pronouns.

So unlike Brinton, there’s no obvious evidence that she’s a sexual deviant. By all appearances, she’s merely another overly earnest head girl, looking to burnish her virtue via demonstrative allyship.

Most of the media coverage was just lol’ing at the woke absurdity of the title of Nair’s article – what could adult diapers, dildos, bugchasing, and Monkeypox possibly have to do with preventing the fiery nuclear annihilation of the human species? Aside, that is, from keeping the observably mentally ill as far from the big red button as possible? What fresh madness is this? But we’re all inured to the regime’s infinite absurdity, these days, so after having a sensibly cynical chuckle we all moved on. I shrugged and moved on myself, until a few days ago when Stelios Panagiotou of Podcast of the Lotus Eaters took the time to actually read Nair’s work. What he found wasn’t lolcow fodder. It was deeply sinister.

There’s no limit to how progressive politicians want to control your life

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

In the National Post a couple of days ago, Carson Jerema provided many examples of how the Canadian federal government — despite failing and fumbling so many of its existing responsibilities — still wants to increase control over the daily lives of Canadians:

After a decade or so, progressives are on the defensive in Canada and elsewhere because regular people, as in those who are not activist weirdos, are tired of the agenda to control every aspect of our lives. Point this out to a progressive, and they will deny that anyone’s life is being interfered with and claim only some far-right monster would think otherwise. They can’t believe there are people out there who share a different view. They don’t understand how this could be.

But progressive governments are trying to control our lives in ways big and small, and in ways that range from subtle to a punch in the face.

In Canada, the federal government’s environmental policies are the most obvious example of this interference. The Liberals have banned plastic straws and plastic bags; even compostable bags are banned in grocery stores because they resemble plastic. Such bans are pointless irritants that make shopping more expensive, and life slightly less enjoyable as paper straws dissolve in one’s drink. People might dismiss these concerns as simply minor inconveniences, but this is how most people experience government policy, by being forced to replace their bag of plastic bags that they were already reusing, with more expensive, less useful options.

Next up, the Liberals are exploring options to bring in environmental regulations for clothing. The cost of clothes has actually gone down in recent years, so leave it to Ottawa to look for ways to bring the cost back up and to limit options.

There is also the plan to essentially force Canadians to purchase electric vehicles, that nobody would otherwise want, through government mandates to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars and trucks.

On a larger scale, the government is attempting to restrict the kind of work people do, specifically work in the oil and gas industry, through steep emissions targets, which will close off lucrative job opportunities in western oilfields. It will also limit the kinds of fuels people will be able to use to heat their homes.

There are also policies that the Canadian government hasn’t implemented, but which green activists have endorsed, such as the banning of gas stoves and the ludicrous suggestion from some academics that “climate lockdowns” be implemented to help cut emissions.

It is possible to be supportive of all these policies, despite their paternalistic and job-killing nature, but pretending that no one is trying to, or that no one wants to, interfere with our liberty is not a credible position to take.

QotD: Yes, yes, but does it work in theory?

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

For Smart people, it’s all about the process. As we’ve discussed before, there’s some mysterious Hegelian alchemy happening in the minds of the Left, whereby process somehow becomes achievement. I’ll give you an example from academia, because that puts us firmly in the realm of “stuff that can’t possibly matter”. Stick with me:

I told y’all a while back about a friend of mine in grad school, who did his dissertation on an aspect of the Vietnam War. I’m making some of this up, of course, to protect various anonymities, but it’s at least as “fake but accurate” as the Rather Memo. Anyway, he had a long section on how Colonel So-and-So’s actions while attached to MACV-SOG only made sense in the light of his belief that his ARVN counterpart, Maj. Long Duc Dong, was a Communist infiltrator.

To my buddy, this appeared to be a completely unproblematic assertion. After all, he had reams of paperwork from Col. So-and-So, asserting his categorical belief that Long Duc Dong was a communist. Please note that it was absolutely irrelevant, for dissertation purposes, if Long Duc Dong actually was a Communist. It only matters that Col. So-and-So thought he was, and acted accordingly — which was a 100% true fact, about as “proven” as anything gets in the Liberal Arts. It’s actually extremely rare in the History Biz to find someone saying something like “I, Colonel So-and-So, believe X, with all my heart and soul, and I’m staking my entire professional reputation, not to mention the very lives of my soldiers, on this belief,” but that’s what my buddy had.

One particular prof on my buddy’s defense committee had a problem with this section. Oh, the evidence was fine, and the conclusions reasonable, and well written, and all that jazz. It was just that my buddy didn’t have enough Theory. That’s how it came back through the mark-up process: “Needs more Theory”.

This is where you need to understand academia’s weird argot, as it’s a window into the Smart People’s world. Normal folks would be scratching their heads at this point. Didn’t my buddy already have a theory, a really robust one? “Col. So-and-So only did thus-and-such because he thought Long Duc Dong was a Communist.” My buddy unearthed literal reams of evidence pointing to exactly that. QED, time to move on dot org …

… but that’s not how “Theory” works in academia. I’ve been very careful to capitalize it, because to them, it’s nothing so grubby as “a hypothesis which can be verified or rejected on the basis of evidence”. No, “Theory” is that highfalutin’ Frog shit. What my buddy really needed was an analysis of Long Duc Dong’s subalternity (or “subalterity”, despite years in grad school I’m still not sure which one is “correct”) vis a vis Col. So-and-So, an examination of the colonial and postcolonial discourses of power between the two of them, a long explication of the Colonel’s hegemony and Dong’s resistance. In other words, a shitload of buzzwords, simply for the sake of having buzzwords.1

That‘s how Smart People operate. The real world of actions and consequences, real people doing real things, is completely irrelevant. If you can’t fit it into Gayatri Spivak’s work on “strategic essentialism”, it doesn’t matter.

That’s why Smart People’s decisions seem so randomly stupid, yet planned, simultaneously. They’re not interested in examining actual facts in the real world. Most of the time, they’re not dealing with what we’d recognize to be “facts” at all. Regarding Long Duc Dong’s “subalternity”, or “subalterity”, or whatever, normal people’s normal response is: Who gives a shit? He himself surely didn’t, not having his PhD in Grievance Studies, and neither did Col. So-and-So. Those dumbasses, being so very very NOT-Smart, were only concerned with irrelevancies like “staying alive” and “winning the war”.

But to the Smart, Long Duc Dong’s subalternity (or whatever) isn’t just a real thing, it’s the only thing. When they’re forced to confront actual facts in the real world, they will put all their mental energy into shoehorning those facts into their paradigm, their “Theory”. Hence, Afghanistan. Did the Totally Legit Joe administration really believe that handing a list of our people to the Taliban was a good idea? Did they really think the Taliban would help them get to the airport, rather than marking them down on their rapidly-growing kill list?

You’re damn right they did. Despite all evidence, despite all reason, because the Afghans are “the subaltern” in the Smart People’s Theory — they have to act in thus-and-such way, because Postcolonial Theory insists they can do no other.

Really. I know it’s mind-boggling, but it’s nonetheless true.

Severian, “Mail”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-27.

    1. After talking my buddy down from the ledge — he had, after all, spent years on this, including several trips to frickin’ Hanoi — we got blind drunk together and had great fun writing the “Theory” section of that chapter. My friends, you’ve never seen such incomprehensible polysyllabic buffoonery. The Postmodern Essay Generator itself couldn’t have done better. To this day I have no idea what any of that shit meant — not one word — but it sailed through committee, and my buddy now has tenure at Big State. When he went to publish his diss as his first book, even the editors — no mean SJWs themselves — confessed to being baffled by it, and suggested taking it out.

September 1, 2024

The supermarket master plan to defeat the “far right” in Germany

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

There are elections ongoing in the German states of Thüringen and Saxony, and the polls show that the “far right” Alternative für Deutschland is potentially going to get 30% of the votes, which would give them more representation in those states than any of the other parties. Panic and hysteria have set in not only among the politicos and the mainstream media, but even among some businesses:

In Germany, all political parties have a colour. The Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union are black, the Social Democratic Party is red, the liberal Free Democratic Party are yellow and the evil fascist Alternative für Deutschland are blue. This coming Sunday, Thüringen and Saxony will hold state elections, and the blue AfD are leading the polls in both states with about 30% support. This has a lot of people very, very upset. Most of them are merely upset with the AfD, but some psychologically unstable people have allowed their anger to embrace the colour blue more generally, because there can be no limits when it comes to resisting the evil antidemocratic forces of fascism.

Among the new sworn enemies of the blue band of the visible electromagnetic spectrum are the marketing team at Germany’s largest supermarket corporation, the Edeka Group. A few days ago, this supermarket chain, whose own logo strangely enough is primarily blue …

… ran an ad in Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung explaining “WHY BLUE IS NOT ON OFFER AT EDEKA”.

That wall of text in the middle reads as follows:

    Yellow bananas, red tomatoes, green lettuce, purple grapes, orange carrots, pink dragon fruit … EDEKA’s fruit and vegetable department is full of colourful diversity. Or is it?

    If you look closely, there’s one colour you won’t see: blue. And that’s no coincidence. Because blue food is nature’s way of warning us: ‘Watch out! I could be harmful!”

    Evolution has taught us that blue is not a good choice.

    And speaking of choices: Blue is not only the natural enemy of a healthy diversity of fruit and vegetables. In Germany, “the blues” are also the biggest threat to our diverse society.

    So let’s read the warning signs correctly ahead of the state elections in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg in September – and ensure that we can live together in harmony. Because we love diversity.

For those wondering whether Edeka have decided to cease selling fascist blue fruits like blueberries, there is a helpful note down in the corner:

There we learn that, while “‘Blueberries’ or ‘Blue cabbage'” may have “‘blue’ in their names”, their “colour pigments” are not blue. This is “at least what Science tells us – and as we know you should always listen to Science more”. Nothing about this is remotely obnoxious; indeed, if current-year Germany needs anything, it is more blind platitudinous calls to Follow the Science – particularly when it comes to exonerating innocent fruits and vegetables from suspicion of blue fascism.

August 31, 2024

Kamala deigns to speak to the loyal, pantingly eager sycophantic press … briefly

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

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill seems somehow underwhelmed by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz descending from Olympus to grace poor mortals as they appeared on CNN on Thursday night for their first big media appearance:

Yesterday, finally, the kween deigned to engage with her subjects. Yes, Kamala Harris did her first sit-down media interview since replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket nearly 40 days ago. For more than a month she’d maintained a monarchical distance from the grubby presses, flat-out refusing a one-to-one with any of its probing hacks. Now she’s relented and had an exclusive chat with CNN’s Dana Bash. The end result? Only one word will do, and it’s a word normally aimed at the other side: weird.

Seriously, can we talk about this shitshow? It is hands down the oddest “first big interview” I’ve seen with a candidate for high office. It took place at Kim’s Cafe in Savannah, Georgia and none of it made sense. Even the lighting was off – it’s the first time I’ve seen Kamala look bad. The angles were all wrong, meaning Harris, the supposed colossus of joy who will transform America, looked scrunched and tiny between Tim Walz and Ms Bash. And what was VP pick Walz even doing there? Chaperoning? “Strong, Capable Woman Asks Man To Come With Her To Job Interview In Case They Ask Any Hard Questions”, quipped the Babylon Bee.

They had no worries on that front. There were no hard questions. The ass-kissage was off the scale. Bash didn’t only give Harris easy questions – she gave her the answers, too. The most extraordinary moment was when she gently prodded Harris on her flip-flopping over policy. Finally, I thought, a tricky query. But then she told Harris what to say. “Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information?”, she wondered. The way Harris’s face lit up when she was handed this oven-ready excuse for her chameleon-like politics – even in the bad lighting you could see her glee at CNN’s servility to the Kamala cause.

A more objective broadcaster – hell, a kid with a camera fresh out of journalism school – would have dragged Harris for her vagueness. She issued flat platitudes. She engaged in Orwellian gobbledygook about how her policies might have changed but her “values” haven’t – eh? She spoke in tongues about climate change – it’s “an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time”, she said, like a schoolkid padding out an essay with superfluous adjectives. And Bash just sat there, smiling. Maybe everyone in DC speaks like this?

Some of Harris’s volte-facing really is extraordinary. She once said she would ban fracking, now she says she won’t. And how on Earth did she go from comparing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the KKK and saying “an undocumented migrant is not a criminal” to now saying we must sternly enforce our nation’s borders? “I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed”, she said. There’s that padding again. Sixteen words in that sentence are unnecessary. And the remaining five – “My values have not changed” – are not true.

QotD: Celebrity activism

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

It was never a practical project to silence the acting profession. These people are famous. Having acquired their fame, they then want to use their fame to do good, and in the process to become even more famous. This is only natural, especially when you consider that doing good and being heroic is what, according to the entertainments these people spend their lives making and acting in, life is all about. Trying to stop famous actors from expressing what they consider to be virtuous and heroic opinions in public is like trying to stop the wind from blowing or the sea from being wet.

Brian Micklethwait, “Minnie Driver and the changing meaning of goodness”, Samizdata, 2005-08-01.

August 30, 2024

Experts are concerned that criticism of experts will weaken their role in our political system

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

In the National Post, Geoff Russ dares to imply that the experts are not the divinely inspired superior beings with unfailing wisdom about any and all issues:

So-called “experts” have weakened Canada’s political discourse far more than Pierre Poilievre ever has. Journalist and author Stephen Maher recently penned a column in the Globe & Mail titled, “By slamming experts, Pierre Poilievre and his staff are degrading political debate”.

Maher is an even-handed journalist, and his column should not be written off as the scribblings of a Liberal partisan. What his column misses is how the term “expert” has been abused, and the degree to which “experts” have thoroughly discredited themselves in recent years.

Poilievre’s criticisms of the “experts” would not resonate if they lived up to the title bestowed upon them.

For example, the Doug Ford government’s decision to close 10 safe injection sites after implementing a ban on such facilities located near schools and child-care centres. The closures were lamented by “experts” trotted out by the CBC as putting peoples’ lives at risk.

The safe injection sites slated to be shut down are near schools and daycares, and there is demonstrable proof that crime rises near these sites wherever they are located.

Derek Finkle recently wrote that the critiques of the closures levelled by selected “experts” failed to note how community members had been threatened with rape, arson, and murder since the injection site in his Toronto neighbourhood had been opened.

These are reasonable grounds for a government to reconsider whether they should allow drug-use, supervised or not, to proliferate in neighbourhoods where families reside.

For all their alleged expertise, many “experts” seem unwilling to actually investigate what is happening on the ground, and often give plainly bad advice altogether, and this goes back decades.

The “experts” failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis, they said the risk to Canadians from the coronavirus was low in early 2020, and they failed to prevent runaway inflation after the worst of it had subsided.

Was it not the “experts” who asserted that arming and funding of Ukraine prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion in 2022 was a bad idea? After the invasion began, was it not the “experts” who confidently predicted Putin’s army would conquer the whole of Ukraine in a matter of days, and not be bogged down in a years-long conflict that would reshape global trade?

The truth is that we live in a worse-off world because of the advice and predictions of “experts”.

Two-Tier Keir’s “mask off” moment(s)

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Millennial Woes presents a disturbingly long summary of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s responses to popular non-violent protests:

The situation in Britain now is so perverse that, if you could convey it to people from a century ago, I think they, after getting over the disbelief and astonishment and accepting that this really was true, would assume it could not possibly have come about by chance. Whatever their complaints about the Britain of 1900, they wouldn’t have believed it capable — on its own — of the degeneration we have seen. They would insist that it must have been wickedly subverted, every failsafe removed, and entire systems of governance, culture and morality repurposed, made to achieve the opposite of their purported function.

I hardly need list the symptoms of this, but for the sake of posterity …

  • The control nexus (of which the government is merely one node) ships massive numbers of unassimilable foreigners into the country against the repeatedly expressed wishes of the natives, and in clear violation of their best interests.
  • Natives who complain about this are hounded, doxed, demonised, made unemployable, and often imprisoned.
  • Their children are systematically indoctrinated by fiction media to accept their dispossession. They are encouraged to despise the “bigoted” attitudes of their parents and grandparents, and to loathe their nation’s history. The boys are encouraged to idolise non-native men. The girls are encouraged to race-mix with them.
  • Teachers deliver the same indoctrination in the classroom — in every classroom. You won’t be allowed to become a teacher unless you voice enthusiasm for such things. Alternative views have been eradicated from the classroom and the lecture hall.
  • Natives are systematically disadvantaged in numerous sectors of education and employment.
  • Natives are demonised in fiction and news media while non-natives are made to look wonderful.
  • The mass sexual abuse of native children by non-natives is systematically down-played by news media, who shift discussion to false “equivalents”.
  • Natives’ history is systematically distorted in education and fiction media.
  • The very existence of the natives, as a group, and their ownership of their homeland, are systematically denied by education, fiction media, news media, and phoney “science”.
  • The police do whatever they are told to do, kneeling for the participants in one riot, hunting down the participants in a different riot.
  • Judges pass obviously outrageous prison sentences upon certain people, for blatantly political reasons. These people are denied bail and pressured to plead guilty for fear of sentences even more outrageous. All of this is to send a message to other people: “don’t dare complain or the same will happen to you”.
  • The media rushes to concoct fake narratives about events, to keep the public misinformed.
  • A so-called “charity”, which is heavily linked to the government and the civil service, seeks to indoctrinate the young and ruin the lives of “troublemakers”, and actively aids the government in concocting fake narratives in order to control public thought and direct events.
  • Fake news from such Establishment agents is forgiven, fake news from the Establishment’s enemies is answered with threats of prosecution.
  • The media “memory hole” stories of appalling violence by non-natives, explain away such incidents with talk of mental illness, tell natives “don’t look back in anger”, and at all costs defend the suicidal ideologies that make such incidents possible.
  • The prisons are emptied of rapists, child molesters and murderers so that troublesome natives can be assigned their cells. They are placed alongside non-natives who might well be violent to them, and journalists gloat about it.
  • The slaughtering of three little girls by a non-native is dismissed by the Prime Minister, who says “it doesn’t matter” that the rioting was a response to this outrageous crime, which was enabled by the outrageous government policies that the natives have been complaining about for decades. Their shock, their trauma, their resentment, their dignity, their pain… “doesn’t matter”. This is in stark contrast with how he reacted to Black people rioting several years before.
  • The natives’ freedom of speech is continually undermined, one government after another actively seeking to erode it further.
  • Not one single organisation is fighting for the wellbeing, rights or interests of the natives.
  • Any political party that would do anything about any of this is refused the right to stand in elections, debanked, demonised and, in most cases, destroyed.

Any one of these examples would, in itself, be cause for great alarm. The whole lot together indicate a society that is not just largely, not just fundamentally, but wholly opposed to the continued existence of its native population. To underline: British society is actively perpetrating the destruction of the native British people.

It has been said that the ruthless authoritarian response of the fledgling Starmer government to this summer’s (White) riots is a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party. Others have called it a “mask off” moment for the British Establishment, which transcends the particular party in office. Indeed, things that didn’t happen under the Conservatives have suddenly happened under Labour; things that one would more neatly associate with the former have instead happened under the latter. That can only mean either that the Labour Party has utterly lost its sense of itself, or that the particular party in office simply doesn’t matter, because the Establishment abides.

I think, in fact, all of these statements are true. It has been a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party, and for Keir Starmer himself, and for the Establishment which enables and directs them. The Labour Party has lost its sense of itself — or, to put it less romantically, has been completely repurposed. And the Establishment does abide; no matter which party is in office, things only ever evolve in one direction. And after all, while Starmer’s behaviour casts a bad light on him, he is only Prime Minister in the first place because the Establishment wanted him, not someone who might have reacted to these riots in a different manner. (Boris Johnson is good at stoking war abroad, but not so willing to stoke it at home.)

But in the end it doesn’t really matter. We don’t need to pin the blame on Starmer, Labour, the British Establishment or Davos; they are all one and the same miasma. Yes, the Conservative Party might have reacted differently to the riots, so to some extent we can blame Labour’s ideology or Starmer’s personality, but the pendulum is kept swinging for a reason. One empty suit is shifted out, another is shifted in. Each one might be enthusiastically on-board with the agenda or compelled to go along with it, this being the only variance. And thus the Establishment abides, always getting what it wants against the wishes of the natives, and always degrading and dispossessing them.

August 29, 2024

How activists used lawfare to force the Boy Scouts to go woke (and then go broke)

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

A guest post from Cole Noble at Postcards From Barsoom discusses how progressive organizations and political activists have managed an immense take-over of the great outdoors, not least of which were the legal and political efforts to force the Boy Scouts of America to accept gay scouts and scout masters:

[…] This entertainment ecosystem, increasingly infested with culture warriors, also started chipping away at the longstanding prestige of organizations like the BSA [Boy Scouts of America]. Depicting someone as a scout became a kind of character development shorthand, signalling them as uncool.

The targeting wasn’t incidental; the existence of the pre-centennial BSA was a serious problem for the ruling class. Their organization’s commitment to values-based conservation served as living proof that going along with society’s adoption of critical theory was completely optional. If the BSA was free to refuse the push, others might start getting ideas.

Lawfare was inevitable.

In 2000, the United States Supreme Court heard Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. In one corner you had James Dale, an avowed gay rights activist, co-president of the Rutgers University Lesbian/Gay Alliance, and outspoken advocate for gay teens having gay role models. In the other, you had the BSA, who didn’t want someone like Dale around its young, impressionable members.

The BSA won, but there was blood in the water. Culture warriors circled back around, this time employing social pressure. They tried to make their demand sound as reasonable as possible: drop the policy against openly gay members. Just one teeny tiny rule. What’s the point anyway? It’s outdated. No real sense keeping it, right?

Smart members of the program clocked this Trojan Horse from miles away. Alas, the organization’s leadership did not. Possessing both the physique and fortitude of rice pudding, they caved, capitulated, and acquiesced some more — agreeing to an ever-escalating series of demands that hollowed out the once-proud group into an empty vessel for The Current Thing(TM).

The Boy Scouts of America is now all-inclusive! Not just to gay scouts and leaders, but girls too. In a show of solidarity with Black Lives Matter after the riots of 2020, a mandatory DEI merit badge has replaced camping as a requirement to attain the once coveted rank of Eagle Scout.

Let’s not forget the Scout Masters now left to deal with teens using the program’s overnight trips as cover for hookups.

Oh, and they went bankrupt.

The organization agreed to a 2.5 billion dollar settlement over tens of thousands of sex abuse cases perpetuated by adult men, against underage boys.

(data compiled from the BSA’s publicly available annual reports)

Rather than bolster ranks, adopting DEI cost the organization more than 1 million members.

The BSA – sorry, Scouting America1 – didn’t publish annual membership reports from 2020 to 2022, I imagine out of embarrassment. During this time, the Mormons, who used Scouting as a youth program for its boys, took their 400,000 members, and their money, and left.

[…]

Scouting was one of, if not the last bastion of quasi-unstructured outdoor activities. While the death of free-range childhood seems to be commonly understood, there is some debate about the precise cause.

Whatever your opinion on the matter, regime journalists shoulder enormous responsibility for eroding societal trust and inspiring mass paranoia through sensational reporting. Former latchkey kids became hysterical helicopter parents, petrified of letting their children out of sight.

Playing outside became a heavily supervised affair, usually relegated to fenced-in backyards with locking gates.

Kids have been robbed of the experiences that could lead them to develop an organic appreciation for outdoor recreation, and groomed into a hypersexualized version of early adulthood. All the while, the institutions which once taught conservation and virtue now serve as apparatuses of critical theory.

    1. They changed their name in May of 2024, after 114 of being the Boy Scouts. Since they’re no long the Boy Scouts, this is at least honest.

Cole’s own Substack is Quandary Magazine, which you should check out if you’re generally interested in the great outdoors.

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