The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.
I read about the PWR BTTM accusations. They’re disturbing. I take them seriously. But these guys have had their careers erased overnight, and the idea that we have any responsibility to give them the chance to defend themselves is treated like you took part in their alleged crimes. You simply cannot say, in polite society, “basic fairness requires us to avoid a rush to judgment and to give people the right to respond to accusations”. To do so gets you lumped in with the criminals. Like a friend of mine said, “the only acceptable reaction to an accusation is enthusiastic and unqualified acceptance”. I don’t know how people can simultaneously talk about prison abolition and restoring the idea of forgiveness to literal criminal justice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kangaroo court system. Like I wrote once, we can’t simultaneously be a movement based on rehabilitation and restorative justice AND a viciously judgmental moral aristocracy. You know who thinks everybody’s guilty until proven innocent? Cops. You know who thinks people don’t deserve the right to defend themselves? Cops. You know who says those who defend basic fairness and due process are as bad as criminals themselves? Cops.
Freddie deBoer, “Planet of Cops”, reposted by Jesse Singal, originally published 2017-05-17.
August 18, 2023
August 17, 2023
Lawfare as politics by other means
Chris Bray explains why getting rid of the Donald Trump candidacy wouldn’t even begin to solve the real problems in US politics today:
Donald Trump has been charged with crimes, so the Republican Party should drop him as a candidate and move on to someone else who hasn’t been indicted. That’ll solve the problem!
It won’t. The problem is lawfare. The Republican governor of Wisconsin defeated a recall effort, so Democratic district attorneys launched a long series of predawn raids on his supporters — until the courts made them stop. The Republican governor of Texas won four terms, but then was indicted by the office of a Democratic district attorney — for a budget veto, an action within his constitutional authority. Again, the courts intervened, and the legally absurd charges were dismissed.
Today, scumbag California Assemblyman Evan Low, a uniquely craven publicity chaser even by the local standards, proudly announces that he’s just introduced a legislative resolution calling for the federal government to open a criminal investigation into Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
So. Get rid of Trump and nominate DeSan— oh, wait. Okay, name someone, anyone: Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, a utility nominee to be named later in exchange for three rookie infielders. Oh no, it turns out that the new nominee is under criminal investigation for [TBD]! As of, uh, tomorrow.
I have mixed feelings about Donald Trump, who supported pandemic lockdowns and school closures and the rushed development of mRNA injections with limited testing. Dumping him as a candidate because he’s been indicted misses the point. No Republican candidate will run for the presidency without being indicted, unless he’s a court-eunuch Mitt Romney figure, too safe to bother attacking.
August 15, 2023
History must be forced to fit the narrative
Chris Bray revisits an older article from the Obama years:
President Barack Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi in 2014.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
There is no question that authoritarianism is descending on the United States of America, quickly. There is also no question where it’s coming from, as you quickly learn from the current social media musings of the most wonderfully progressive people. Trump must be silenced NOW! Why is the authoritarian being ALLOWED TO SPEAK? Ruth Ben-Ghiat, please call your office.
How have we gotten here?
I’ve mentioned before a looooong essay I wrote, more than ten years ago, about the cottage industry in Barack Obama hagiographies. Obama’s fellatiographers noted, for example, that Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, had been ordered back to Indonesia in 1966, and that photos of him from that time show him in the uniform of the Indonesian army. They also mention, with remarkably disingenuous vagueness, that there was maybe some political trouble going on in Indonesia while Obama was there as a child and his stepdad was a soldier.
But what was happening in the mid-1960s in Indonesia is that the Indonesian Communist Party tried to restructure Sukarno’s careful balancing of competing forces in the new country with the kidnapping and killing of a group of right-wing flag officers by leftist soldiers, beheading conservative military power — after which the military responded with the wholesale killing of hundreds of thousands of communists, often with machetes and with a serious commitment to doing the job as grimly as possible: bodies in rivers, heads on pikes, slow killing in front of mass graves. Here’s my last paragraph from that section on the Obama biographies:
And the lesson? Indonesia was where “Ann was Barry’s teacher in high-minded matters—liberal, humanist values”, Remnick concludes. It’s where she taught him the values of “honesty, hard work, and fulfilling one’s duty to others”, where she lectured him about “a sense of obligation to give something back”, Scott adds. It’s where she “worked to instill ideas about public service in her son”. Because Indonesia in the late sixties was the perfect place and time to learn about liberal humanist values and public service.
Barack Obama was a Democrat who attained the presidency, which means that journalists knew he had to be a sainted figure, and he was the first black president, which means that journalists knew he had to be brilliant and extraordinary. So they assembled the threads of his story — Barack Obama went to Indonesia in 1966 with his stepfather, a soldier, during a long period of extraordinarily brutal political retribution by the Indonesian army — and then, pro forma, wove those threads into the foundation of “liberal, humanistic values”.
If Barack Obama had spent his childhood torturing kittens to death and eating their eyeballs in front of a sobbing crowd of kitten-loving toddlers, the Obama biographies would have said that Barack Obama spent his childhood torturing kittens to death and eating their eyeballs in front of a sobbing crowd of kitten-loving toddlers, a heartwarming experience that taught him the value of democratic pluralism and fundamental human decency. The story was written before anyone began working on it: Barack Obama [experience TBD] and [experience TBD], the formative experiences that made him the kind and wonderful genius he is today.
See also this recent discussion with David Garrow, a historian who
has written a new(corrected: published a post-Obama-presidency) biography — and who found, as he researched his subject, that he was often looking at evidence no one had ever pursued before. The hagiographers of the Obama presidency-era weren’t looking for evidence; they already knew the story they meant to write. They came up with some evidence-simulating objects for form’s sake, to assemble their liturgy in the apparent form of biography. Their “Barack Obama” was never Barack Obama.Their “Donald Trump” is not, now, Donald Trump. There’s a formula; they apply it. There’s a narrative to be written. Donald Trump said he would repeal two federal regulations for every new regulation he implemented — textbook authoritarianism! Donald Trump said that America has fought a bunch of “dumb wars”, and should be much more careful about foreign military involvement — JUST LIKE ADOLF HITLER!!!!!!
It’s beside the point to note that the conclusions never matched the evidence. They were never meant to.
This is crazymaking behavior. Constantly spinning narratives that have nothing to do with anything in the actual, physical world is a recipe for a psychotic break. And we have multiple layers of institutional actors who cosplay “elite” — in media, in academia, in government, and in corporations — who’ve been playing with their shadow puppets for so long that they’ve forgotten they’re shadow puppets. They believe themselves.
That’s how you get to we need a single-party ballot to prevent authoritarianism and we have to arrest the opposition leader to prevent authoritarianism. It’s socially distributed insanity, a real descent into the world of false symbols. And it’s becoming incredibly dangerous.
August 14, 2023
“Behold rationalism’s turncoats”
Brendan O’Neill calls out the New Atheist community for their wide adoption of the trans ideology-cum-faith:
Fractal Pride flags
We are living through a great showdown between hysteria and reason. On one side stand the adherents to the cult of transgenderism, hawking their hocus pocus about gendered souls and self-authentication through castration. On the other side stand those of us who know that biology is real, and that every cell in the human body is sexed, and that a man is as likely to become a woman as that chalice of wine is to become the blood of Christ during Mass (apologies, Catholics).
You’ll never guess which side some New Atheists are taking in this clash between delusion and truth. The crazy side. The side that says a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be a lesbian. Which is infinitely more cranky than the idea that a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be the Son of God. How did rationalist bros, those secularists on steroids, those Dawkins acolytes whose hobby for years was to make fun of the faithful, become devotees of such a strange, post-truth sect?
One by one, atheists are falling at the altar of trans. This week a Twitterfeed called The New Atheists slammed Richard Dawkins for becoming a TERF. Dawkins is a rarity in the new rationalist ranks: he thinks people with penises are men, not women, just as bread is bread, not the body of Christ. He is “utterly confused”, decreed his angry apostates. Biology “isn’t black and white, it’s a full spectrum of colour just like a rainbow”, they said. This hippyish belief that humans can pick their sex from a multicoloured smorgasbord is entirely an article of faith, of course, not science. Behold rationalism’s turncoats.
We’ve witnessed Neil deGrasse Tyson, America’s best-known scientist, bow to the creed of gender-as-feeling. In a TikTok video he said “XX/XY chromosomes are insufficient” when it comes to reading someone’s sex, because what people feel matters along with their biology. So someone might feel mostly female one day but “80 per cent male” the next, which means they’ll “remove the make-up” and “wear a muscle shirt”. Sir, that’s cross-dressing; it does nothing to refute the truth of chromosomes, which absolutely do tell us what sex a person is. As destransitioner Chloe Cole said to Tyson, you’re “confusing basic human biology with cosmetics”.
We’ve seen Matt Dillahunty, a leading American atheist, promote the mystic cry that there’s a difference between “what your chromosomes are” and your “gender identity”. “Transwomen are women”, he piously declares, perhaps keen to prove that while he might be fond of bashing the old religions, he has not one cross or blasphemous word to say about the new religion. Well, no one wants to be excommunicated from polite society.
Stephen Fry is another godless lover of science who appears to have converted to the trans belief. Phillip Pullman, Stewart Lee and others who were once noisy cheerleaders for rationalism are likewise strikingly reserved on this new ideology, this devotional movement which, among other things, invites young women to submit themselves to bodily mortification in order that they might transubstantiate into “men”. Seems like something a rationalist should question.
August 13, 2023
Don’t worry about losing all your news links, citizen! The Liberal government’s Ministry of Propaganda will tell you everything you need to know!
The federal government still seems shocked and a little bit hurt that the “tech giants” are carefully obeying the letter of their new Online News Act instead of pumping millions of dollars into government-favoured media outlets. How dare Alphabet and Meta obey the law we wrote? We wanted to soak them for bribes subsidies to give to legacy corporations who can be depended upon to cheerlead our agenda!
Blocking of news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada has becomes increasingly widespread in recent days, leading to a growing number of public comments from media outlets and reporters expressing surprise or shock about the scope of the link blocking. Indeed, outlets with blocked links include university student newspapers, radio stations, and foreign news outlets. While there may have been some errors (Facebook has a page to seek review of any blocked link decision), the inclusion of a very wide range of Canadian and foreign news outlets is no accident. Rather, it reflects the government’s Bill C-18 approach, which effectively covers all news outlets worldwide whose links are accessed in Canada. The Canadian government could have adopted a more targeted approach – for example, limiting the scope to news links from those news outlets eligible to negotiate agreements with Internet platforms under the law – but it instead went for the broadest possible approach that includes foreign news outlets with little or no connection to Canada.
Understanding why Bill C-18 covers news links from outlets who are not “eligible news businesses” under the law requires unpacking several provisions. First, start with the definition of a “digital news intermediary”, which states:
digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada. It does not include an online communications platform that is a messaging service the primary purpose of which is to allow persons to communicate with each other privately.
This definition is critical since the only companies that are subject to Bill C-18’s requirement to negotiate agreements with news outlets are (1) those that qualify as DNIs under this definition and (2) meet the requirements found in Section 6 on a significant bargaining power imbalance. The absence of significant bargaining power imbalance is why companies such as Twitter, Microsoft or Apple are not subject to the law. That leaves Google and Meta, provided that they qualify as DNIs. The key phrase in the qualification requirement is that the companies “make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada”. If the companies do not make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada they are not DNIs and are not subject to the law.
[…]
… the government’s choice was to try to bring Meta and Google into the scope of the law by virtue of any news links to any news outlet anywhere in the world, even if those outlets have nothing to do with Canada or with the Bill C-18 system. Given Meta’s stated goal of complying with Bill C-18 by removing links to news content that would render it a DNI, the government’s legislative choice of covering all news links from all news outlets therefore effectively requires it to block all of those news links.
It takes a lot to make Google, of all companies, a sympathetic victim … yet Canada’s awesomely awful Liberal government aced it. Bananada strikes again!
August 11, 2023
Queer Eye for the Tudor ?guy?
At First Things, Carl R. Trueman looks into a recent post from the Mary Rose Museum (where the remains of King Henry VIII’s favourite warship now resides), considering Tudor artifacts recovered from the wreck from a Queer perspective:
“Mary Rose Museum & HMS Victory” by Silly Little Man is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
.
The anti-Western left has been exposed for its sexual imperialism over the last few months. Evidence is all around. American Muslims have led protests against the imposition of LGBTQ policies and curricula in schools, leaving American progressives uncomfortably caught between two pillars of their favored rhetoric of political thought-crime: transphobia and Islamophobia. The Washington Post opined that anti-LGBTQ moves in the Middle East were “echoing” those of the American culture wars—as if Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan had been listed by the Human Rights Campaign as favored vacation destinations until their ruling elites started reading the website of Moms for Liberty.
It is, of course, the nature of imperialism that everything, everywhere, is always to be measured by the imperialists’ standards. And that is also what makes them so impervious to spotting their own imperialism. “Queering the Mary Rose‘s Collection”, an article on the website of the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England, is a recent example of this. The Mary Rose was a Tudor warship that sank in 1545 and was raised from the seabed in 1982 in a groundbreaking act of marine archaeology. The museum is dedicated to displaying artifacts retrieved from the wreck, some of which are now been analyzed “through a Queer lens”.
The specific examples are an octagonal mirror, nit combs, a gold ring, and Paternosters. Apparently, looking into a mirror can stir strong emotions for both straight and queer people, and for the latter it can generate, for example, feelings of gender dysphoria or euphoria, depending on whether the reflection matches their gender identity. Combs would have been used by the sailors to remove the eggs of hair lice. Today they are reminders of how hairstyles can be the result of imposed gender stereotypes, but also make possible the subverting of these through hairdos that break with social expectations. Rings are a reminder of marriage and, of course, that the Church of England founded by Henry VIII, king during the Mary Rose‘s working life, still does not allow gay marriage. Finally, the Paternosters remind us that the crew were “practicing” Christians and that, once again, Henry VIII, via his initiation of the English Reformation, facilitated the civil criminalization of homosexual acts.
Two things are striking about the article, in addition to its lack of any intellectual merit. First, the absence of any historical awareness is striking. For example, the category of “practicing Christian” is essentially meaningless when applied to the early sixteenth century. Everybody, bar a few underground Jews, Anabaptists, and radicals, was part of the Catholic Church by baptism. The question of how the crew might have understood themselves, whether in terms of mirrors, rings, combs, or Paternosters, is never asked. To be fair, a short blog post cannot ask all the relevant questions, but this does not even nod in the direction of suggesting that the differences between yesterday and today might be remotely interesting or instructive.
David Thompson also has some thoughts on the Mary Rose artifact interpretations:
It’s quality stuff. Just like being there, in the mists of history. And not at all inept, or jarring, or comically incongruous.
As we have seen, many objects can be viewed through a Queer lens and can indirectly tell LGBTQ+ stories.
And thanks to peering through this “Queer lens”, readers will doubtless find that their understanding of Tudor history has been enriched no end.
We’re told – indeed, assured – by Hannah McCann, of the museum’s collections and curatorial staff,
From the Tate Britain and the Wellcome Collection, to the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, museums are reinterpreting and Queering their objects.
A comfort, I know.
Exactly why such “queering” is underway – what its relevance might be – is not, however, made clear. An explanation for this bolting-on of irrelevant, flimsy tat – in the name of “queer theory” – was not, it seems, deemed necessary. Nor is it entirely obvious how such “queering” of museum contents benefits those who wish to know more about Henry VIII’s favourite warship.
August 10, 2023
“Forget global boiling … It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about”
Remember when [your local TV station/newspaper] was blaring the alarming news that your [city/town/state/province] was warming at twice the rate of everything else? All the legacy media NPCs got the same patch at the same time — and it was blatant enough that most people realized it was utter bullshit. As Brendan O’Neill explains, they’re not normally quite so clumsy in their constant attempts to gaslight us all about the climate, but they’re definitely still doing it:
Picture the scene. You’re in London, the sky is menacingly grey, it’s drizzling. You zip your jacket against the elements, annoyed that Britain has just had one of its wettest Julys since records began. Then you reach for your copy of the Evening Standard as you head home from work, only to see splashed across the front page a Photoshopped image of the Earth on fire. “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”, the hysterical headline asks. The drizzle turns to rain and you fold your Standard in two to use as an impromptu umbrella, turning a mad piece of global-boiling propaganda into flimsy protection from this strange, wet summer.
This was London yesterday. It really happened. It was yet another overcast day, in keeping with the record-breaking precipitation of the past month. The UK had an average of 140.1mm of rain in July, the sixth-highest level of July rainfall since records were first kept in 1836. And yet here was the freebie London paper warning us that flames will shortly engulf our celestial home. That heat death is coming. That an inferno of our own dumb making is licking at our feet. I know we live in mad times but even I never expected to see damp commuters brushing raindrops off their shoulders while surrounded by discarded papers telling us it’s so hellishly hot we might all soon die. Rarely has the gap between MSM BS and real life felt so cavernously vast.
They’re lying to us. Forget global boiling, the crazy term invented by UN chief António Guterres a couple of weeks ago. Forget global warming, even. It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about. If gaslighting, in the words of the Oxford dictionary, is “the process of making somebody believe untrue things in order to control them”, then that lunatic Standard cover was classic gaslighting. The planet is not on fire. Earth is not burning. These are untruths. This is delirium, not journalism; fearmongering, not fact-gathering. And the aim, it seems to me, is to try to control us; to frighten us with pseudo-Biblical prophesies of hellfire and doom until we obediently bow down to the eco-ideology.
Adding insult to injury, the Standard frontpage had pics of Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Rishi Sunak next to its crackpot query, “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”. Let’s leave to one side that President Biden doesn’t seem to know what planet he’s on half the time, never mind being able to save one; and that Rishi can’t even control Britain’s borders, far less the climate of our entire mortal coil; and that Xi and Modi are surely more concerned with their pursuit of economic development than with indulging the End Times hysteria of the Notting Hill set that writes and publishes the Standard. The more pressing point is this: no one needs to stop Earth from burning because Earth isn’t burning. You can’t put out a fire that doesn’t exist. As Bjorn Lomborg said last week, the idea that the “world is ablaze” is pure bunkum.
“Ultra-Processed Food” is so bad that we need extra scare-quotes!!
Christopher Snowden seems, for some inexplicable reason, to be skeptical about the hysterical warnings of people like Chris van Tulleken in his recent book Ultra-Processed People: Who Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?
If Jamie Oliver is the fun police, Chris van Tulleken is the Taliban. The selling point of books like Ultra-Processed People is the idea that everything you know is wrong. Van Tulleken, an infectious diseases doctor and television presenter, takes this to extremes. In this book, almost everybody is wrong, many of them are corrupt and almost no one is to be trusted. Only Dr. van Tulleken, a handful of researchers and anyone who pays £25 to read this book knows the real truth. The problem is not sugar. The problem is not carbs. Artificial sweeteners don’t work. Exercise doesn’t work. Willpower doesn’t work. Every scientist who has published research contradicting his theory is in the pay of the food industry or — how’s this for an ad hominem argument? — has cited studies by people who are. The British Nutrition Foundation, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the British Dietetic Association, the Centre for Social Justice, the Institute of Economic Affairs, Tortoise Media, Diabetes UK, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation are all tainted by food industry funding. Even Jamie Oliver – Saint Jamie, the Sage of Essex — is guilty by his association with Tesco and Deliveroo, and because he makes ultra-processed food (“albeit fairly marginal items”).
It is this ultra-processed food (UPF), argues van Tulleken, that is the real cause of obesity and diet-related diseases in the world today. Food is classified as UPF if it is wrapped in plastic and contains an ingredient you don’t have in your kitchen. This includes everything from mustard to Magnums but, counter-intuitively, doesn’t include sugar, salt or fat. Van Tulleken doesn’t quite put it like this but, in effect, anything you make at home is healthy while nearly anything you buy in a supermarket, aside from raw ingredients, is bad for you.
The evidence for this striking proposition can be briefly outlined, and van Tulleken deals with it swiftly in a single chapter. Firstly, there are a number of studies using observational epidemiology which find a correlation between diets which are high in UPF and various ailments, including not only obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes, but also dementia, depression, cancer and more. Secondly, there is a randomised controlled trial which gave a small group of volunteers a two-week diet of either ultra-processed food or minimally processed food. The nutritional profile of each diet was similar (the same levels of salt, sugar, etc.) and the volunteers were offered twice as much as they needed to maintain a healthy weight. The people on the ultra-processed diet ended up eating 500 calories more than the people on the minimally processed diet and put on nearly a kilogram of weight.
The randomised controlled trial was published in 2019 and already has over 1,200 academic citations. Van Tulleken considers it to be extraordinarily robust, but it only really stands out because the general standard of dietary research is so poor. The volunteers were not given ultra-processed versions of the same meals. They were given totally different meals, plus very different snacks, and they could eat as much as they wanted for free. What does it actually demonstrate? Arguably, all it shows is that if you give people unlimited quantities of tasty food, they will eat more of it than if you give them blander food. Van Tulleken assures us that “the two diets were equally delicious”, but this would seem to contradict his claims elsewhere that UPF is “hyper-palatable”, delicious and irresistible.
As for the epidemiological correlations, what is it that actually correlates? UPF is an incredibly broad category encompassing most foods that are known as HFSS (high in fat, sugar or salt) and many more besides. People who eat a lot of UPF tend to have lower incomes, which correlates with all sorts of health conditions. In the study van Tulleken cites to demonstrate that UPF causes cancer, the people who ate the most UPF had the highest smoking rate and were least likely to be physically active. Epidemiologists attempt to control for such factors, but with so much going on in the data, it is an heroic assumption to think that the effect of food processing can be teased out from the effects of fat, sugar, salt, obesity, smoking, stress, exercise and numerous socio-economic influences.
August 9, 2023
“Soon, they say, white America will be over”
At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage considers the prominent media narrative about the inevitability of a “majority-minority” America within the next twenty years:
According to both the Daily Stormer and the Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin, white people will be a minority sometime in the 2040s.
In 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau projected that “non-Hispanic” white Americans would fall to 49 percent by the year 2042.
Since then, breathless media-politicos have taken the coming “majority-minority” as gospel. Some on the left celebrate the forthcoming date as the first day of their permanent dominance. Some on the right employ the doomsday date to encourage lunatics to rub out innocent people in a synagogue.
The 2020 census continued the theme. Breathless, lazy journalists took the clickbait. Ominously, they said the white population was “shrinking”. According to the Census Bureau, the white population shrunk to just 57.8 percent. Michael Moore did a little dance.
On white nationalist forums, users with names like WhiteGenocide88 were traumatised, and tooling up for war. No doubt, there are a few Robert Bowers with monstrous campaigns lurking around their skulls.
The problem with this theory, or so my Jewish puppet masters instruct me to say, is that it’s nonsense.
Firstly, the white population didn’t “shrink”. Not unless one believes the Jim Crow “one-drop” rule meaning one non-white ancestor renders one non-white. Secondly, the census ignores millions of white Americans who check the “Hispanic” box. These Americans more than cover any white decline.
According to the census, only those of one hundred percent white European ancestry are white. The Ku Klux Klan tends to agree.
For the first time on the census form, white people could include their varied multi-racial ancestry. Over 31 million whites did so. When we count these white people as white, the white population climbs to 71 percent. So, rather than “shrinking”, the white population has since 2010 increased by four million.
With a sensible definition of white, even by 2060, America remains around 70 percent white.
Professor Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York, says that definition means America remains a majority-white nation indefinitely — no doomsday clock, no murderous rampages, no primitive bloodsport over a faulty horoscope.
I’m no demographer but counting all white people as white people means there are more white people. I’m no sociologist either but revealing the increase in white people means fewer Robert Bowers keen to pump shotgun rounds into human flesh.
At Not the Bee, Joel Abbott is concerned about the obvious glee displayed by legacy media folks when they push the “replacement” story line:
You can practically feel the excitement here from the quivering fingers of the journalist that wrote this.
Ah.
Hmm.
Well, this is awkward.
See, I’m told this isn’t happening. White people aren’t being “replaced,” they’re just simply being phased out with a percentage that isn’t white at the same time all our institutions, companies, and leaders are pushing to eradicate things like “whiteness” and “white rage” in the name of equity.
For the record, I really couldn’t care less about the skin color of who lives in America. I care an infinite amount more about the spiritual worldview and values of my neighbor than whether their physical DNA gave them dark skin, blue eyes, or a big nose.
This is why I find it weird that the media keeps reporting, with abject glee, that people who look like me will be in the minority soon.
August 7, 2023
Legacy media puzzled at falling levels of public trust in the scientific community
Given the way “the science” has been politicized over recent years and especially through the pandemic, it’s almost a surprise that there’s any residual public trust left for the scientific community:
Sagan’s warning was eerily prophetic. For the last three-plus years, we’ve witnessed a troubling rise of authoritarianism masquerading as science, which has resulted in a collapse in trust of public health.
This collapse has been part of a broader and more partisan shift in Americans who say they have “a high degree of confidence in the scientific community”. Democrats, who had long had less confidence in the scientific community, are now far less skeptical. Republicans, who historically had much higher levels of trust in the scientific community, have experienced a collapse in trust in the scientific community.
John Burn-Murdoch, a data reporter at The Financial Times who shared the data in question on Twitter, said Republicans are now “essentially the anti-science party”.
First, this is a sloppy inference from a journalist. Burn-Murdoch’s poll isn’t asking respondents if they trust science. It’s asking if they trust the scientific community. There’s an enormous difference between the two, and the fact that a journalist doesn’t understand the difference between “confidence in science” and “confidence in the scientific community” is a little frightening.
Second, as Dr. Vinay Prasad pointed out, no party has a monopoly on science; but it’s clear that many of the policies the “pro science” party were advocating the last three years were not rooted in science.
“The ‘pro science’ party was pro school closure, masking a 26 month old child with a cloth mask, and mandating an mrna booster in a healthy college man who had COVID already,” tweeted Prasad, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco.
Today we can admit such policies were flawed, non-sensical or both, as were so many of the mitigations that were taken and mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But many forget that during the pandemic it was verboten to even question such policies.
People were banned, suspended, and censored by social media platforms at the behest of federal agencies. “The Science” had become a set of dogmas that could not be questioned. No less an authority than Dr. Fauci said that criticizing his policies was akin to “criticizing science, because I represent science”.
This could not be more wrong. Science can help us understand the natural world, but there are no “oughts” in science, the economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, echoing the argument of philosopher David Hume.
“Science is competent to establish what is,” Mises wrote. “[Science] can never dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at.”
August 6, 2023
QotD: Pierre Trudeau’s legacy
There is a lot of documentation about Pierre Trudeau and his views and attitudes, much of it laudatory, some of it critical. I make no secret of the fact that I assert that one Canadian prime minister (perhaps, in my opinion, Canada best-ever leader) the great Liberal Louis St. Laurent, gave Canada a coherent, principled, liberal, values-based grand strategy in the late 1940s and then, just 20 years later another Liberal, Pierre Trudeau, tore it all down, threw it all aside and imposed new, very illiberal, values on Canada ~ all because, I guess, he could not reconcile the facts that stared him in the face in the late 1940s with his own personal choice to have stood, firmly, on the wrong side of history in 1944 when he elected to continue to study (this time at Harvard) rather than to join in the fight to crush Hitler.
M. St. Laurent and M. Trudeau could not have been more different. Louis St. Laurent was an internationally respected lawyer, he was “a man of the world”, neither an anglophile, like Sir Wildred Laurier, nor an anglophobe like Trudeau, he was secure in being a Canadian. He came to politics reluctantly, as a duty, but he quickly became known to, respected by, and, indeed, often friends with Harry Truman, George Marshal, Dwight Eisenhower and Dean Acheson, with Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin, Clement Atlee, Sir Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, and with Tage Erlander of Sweden, Jawaharlal Nehru and V.K. Krishna Menon in India, Sir Robert Menzies of Australia, Tunku Abdul Rahman in Malaysia and leaders, from the West, the East and the non-aligned states. Pierre Trudeau, on the other hand, was a small, very parochial man who did not, really, understand Canada, beyond French-speaking Québec. He became “famous” for opposing Maurice Duplessis ~ something, I have suggested, that would not be much beyond the intellectual capabilities of a somnolent house cat. He travelled the world but never seemed, to me, to have acquired the respect that was accorded to Louis St. Laurent or Mike Pearson … except, perhaps from Fidel Castro.
Ted Campbell, “Pierre Trudeau’s legacy”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2019-08-02.
August 5, 2023
In the “New World Order”, China was expected to become more democratic. Instead, the west is rapidly becoming more like China
N.S. Lyons discusses the unhappy convergence of Communist China with the post-democratic western world, led by the United States:
Differences and tensions between the United States and China have never been greater. The whole world is dividing itself between the blocs of these two opposing superpowers. A new Cold War is dawning, complete with a global ideological “battle between democracy and autocracy“. Freedom is on the line. The future of global governance will be determined by the winner of this extended competition between two fundamentally opposed political and economic systems – unless a hot war settles the question early with a cataclysmic fight to the death, much as liberal democracy once fought off fascism.
This is the simple and easy narrative of our present moment. In some ways it is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading: when it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but converging to become more alike.
In fact, I can already predict and describe the winner set to prevail in this epochal competition between these two fiercely opposed national systems. In this soon-to-be triumphant system …
Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy”, the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.
This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management”, or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard. Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.
All of this is justified by a utopian ideological dialectic of historical progress and inevitability. Those more in tune with the tide of history (i.e. elite interests) are held to be morally and intellectually superior, as a class, to backwards reactionary elements. Only certain views are stamped “scientific” and “correct,” although these may change on a political whim. An economism that values only the easily quantifiable reigns as the only moral lodestar, and frictionless efficiency is held up as highest common good; the individual is encouraged to fulfill his assigned role as a docile consumer and cog in the regime’s machine, not that of a self-governing citizen. The state regularly acts to stimulate and manage consumer demand, and to strategically regulate and guide industrial production, and the corporate sector has largely fused itself with the state. Cronyism is rampant.
The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed. Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled, and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain. Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the state as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie. Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher…
Which country does this describe? If you can’t quite tell, well, that’s the point. For many citizens of the West, the systems of governance under which we live increasingly feel uncomfortably similar to what appears offer in the People’s Republic of China.
August 4, 2023
Vivek Ramaswamy as “Trump 2.0”
Bari Weiss considers Vivek Ramaswamy as an improved version of Donald Trump, appealing to a similar audience but with less obvious baggage. Here are some excerpts from her recent interview with Ramaswamy:
Vivek Ramaswamy and his family.
Detail of a photo from his campaign website, https://www.vivekramaswamy.com/
BW: Politics is all about storytelling, and the winning candidate — or the candidate that catches fire — is almost always the one with the best story. What is your story, and why is it the story that Americans are craving right now?
VR: Whether Americans are craving it or not, that’ll be for them to decide. But I’ll tell you what my story is. I’m the embodiment of the American dream. My parents came to this country over 40 years ago with almost no money. I’ve gone on to found multibillion-dollar companies that created value by doing valuable things for other people, developing five medicines that are FDA approved today. One of them is a life-saving therapy for kids, another one for prostate cancer. I did it while getting married, while bringing two sons into this world, while following my faith in God, while growing up with the ultimate privilege in this country. And I think the thing that’s extraordinary about that story is that it isn’t extraordinary. It is the story of this country. And I don’t think we’re in decline. I think we are still a nation in our ascent, in the early stages of our ascent actually, a nation whose best days are still ahead. I think it takes someone in my shoes to see our nation that way, too. That’s truly what pulled me into the race.
BW: There’s a lot of people running on a reformist platform. You’re running on a radical or a revolutionary one. You say America needs a second revolution. Many people hear revolution, and they think bloodshed and violence. What do you mean by that, and what does that revolution look like?
VR: To me, it does not mean bloodshed and violence, but it means a revival of the ideals that set this nation into motion in 1776. I do think we live in a 1776 moment. I think that the American bargain was built on the idea that we, the people, determine how we settle our political differences through free speech and open debate in the public square where every person’s voice and vote counts equally. That is self-governance. And I think that there is the Old World vision now rearing its head in multiple forms that says, no, we the people cannot be trusted. The citizens of a nation cannot be trusted to determine what’s actually good for them — so we, the intelligentsia, must make that determination centrally at large. I stand on the side of the American Revolution, the ideals that birthed this nation. I think we live in a moment where we have to confront those radical ideals. I think that the American ideals are very fundamentally radical ideals: self-governance, free speech, like absolute free speech, the idea that you get ahead through unbridled meritocracy, the unbridled pursuit of excellence, the steadfast commitment to the rule of law rather than the whims of men. These are radical ideals, because for most of human history, it was done the other way. I think it is the radicalism of the American Revolution and those ideals that are our last best chance for national unity, because that is what actually binds us together across our diverse attributes. And without embracing that radicalism, I think we’re nothing.
BW: You’re incredibly entertaining. You have a view on everything. You’re a phenomenal talker, which will take you far. And remarkably, as of the latest polls, you’re third behind Trump and DeSantis. But many commentators say that ultimately, you have no shot at the nomination. Why is that conventional wisdom wrong about you?
VR: Everyone seems to be shocked where I am right now. I’m not surprised. This is exactly where we expected to be. The reality is, I think people are hungry for the unfiltered truth. I would rather speak the truth about my own beliefs at every step and lose the election than to play some political Snakes and Ladders. And I believe that our voters across this country have a good sixth sense for being able to tell the difference for somebody who’s actually sharing their true beliefs versus somebody who’s giving them carefully constructed, poll-tested slogans. And that is the competitive advantage. My gut instinct is we’re going to win this election. We’re going to win it in a landslide of a margin similar to what Reagan delivered in 1980.
BW: So you’re going to be the Obama of this race, not the Andrew Yang?
VR: I’m going to be the Vivek Ramaswamy of this race, and that’s what I’m committed to being.
At 7% in the polls at the moment, Ramaswamy is a long-shot to win the Republican nomination, but you’ll know if his chances are improving when the media slow-walks the Bad Orange Man stories and starts criticizing Ramaswamy (or “Bad Curry Man” as some online wits have dubbed him).
August 2, 2023
You say you want a revolution …
The latest book review from the Psmiths is Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche, by John Psmith:
This is a book by Bernard Yack. Who is Bernard Yack? Yack is fun, because for a mild-mannered liberal Canadian political theorist he’s dropped some dank truth-bombs over the years. For example, check out his short and punchy 2001 journal article “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism” if you need a passive-aggressive gift for the democratic peace theorist in your life.1 The subject of that essay is unrelated to the subject of the book I’m reviewing, but the approach, the method, and the vibe are similar. The general Yack formula is to take some big trendy topic (like “nationalism”) and examine its deep philosophical and intellectual substructure while totally refusing to consider material conditions. He’s kind of like the anti-Marx — in Yack’s world not only do ideas have consequences, they’re about the only things that do. Even when this is unconvincing, it’s usually very interesting.
The topic of this book is radicalism in the ur-sense of “a desire to get to the root”. What Yack finds interesting about radicalism is that it’s so new. It’s a surprising fact that the entire idea of having a revolution, of burning down society and starting again with radically different institutions, was seemingly unthinkable until a certain point in history. It’s like nobody on planet Earth had the idea, and then suddenly sometime in the 17th or 18th century a switch flips and it’s all anybody is talking about. We’re used to that sort of pattern for scientific discoveries, or for very original ways of thinking about the universe, but “let’s destroy all of this and try again” isn’t an incredibly complex or sophisticated thought, so why did it take so many millennia for somebody to have it?
Well, first of all, is this claim even true? One thing you do see a lot of in premodern history is peasant rebellions, but dig a little deeper into any of them and the first thing you notice is that (sorry vulgar Marxists)2 there’s nothing especially “revolutionary” in any of these conflagrations. The most common cause of rebellion is some particular outrage, and the goal of the rebellion is generally the amelioration of that outrage, not the wholesale reordering of society as such. The next most common cause of rebellions is a bandit leader who is some variety of total psycho and gets really out of control. But again, prior to the dawn of the modern era, these psychos led movements that were remarkably undertheorized. The goal was sometimes for the psycho to become the new king, sometimes the extinguishment of all life on earth, but you hardly ever saw a manifesto demanding the end of kings as such. Again, this is weird, right? Is it really such a difficult conceptual leap to make?
Peasant rebellions are demotic movements, but modern revolutions are usually led by frustrated intellectuals and other surplus elites. When elites did get involved in pre-modern rebellions, their goals were still fairly narrow, like those of the peasants — sometimes they wanted to slightly weaken the power of the king, other times they wanted to replace the king with his cousin. But again this is just totally different in kind from the 18th century onwards, when intellectuals and nobles are spending practically all of their time sitting around in salons and cafés, debating whose plan for the total overhaul of society, morality, and economic relations is best.
The closest you get to this sort of thing is the tradition of Utopian literature, from Plato’s Republic to Thomas More, but what’s striking about this stuff is how much ironic distance it carried — nobody ever plotted terrorism to put Plato’s or More’s theories into practice. Nobody ever got really angry or excited about it. But skip forward to the radical theorizing of a Rousseau or a Marx or a Bakunin, and suddenly people are making plans to bomb schools because it might bring the Revolution five minutes closer. So what changed?
Well this is a Bernard Yack book, so the answer definitely isn’t the printing press. It also isn’t secularization, the Black Death, urbanization, the Reformation, the rise of industrial capitalism, the demographic transition, or any of the dozens of other massive material changes that various people have conjectured as the cause of radical political ferment. Instead Yack points to two abstract philosophical premises: the first is a belief in the possibility of “dehumanization”, the idea that one can be a human being and yet be living a less than human life. The second is “historicism” in the sense of a belief that different historical eras have fundamentally different modes of social interaction.
Both views had some historical precedent (for instance historicism is clearly evident in the writings of Machiavelli and Montesquieu), but it’s their combination that’s particularly explosive, and Rousseau is the first person to place the two elements together and thereby assemble a bomb. Because for Rousseau, unlike for any of the ancient or medieval philosophers, merely to be a member of the human species does not automatically mean you’re living a fully-human life. But if humanity is something you can grow into, then it’s also something that you can be prevented from growing into. Thus: “that I am not a better person becomes for Rousseau a grievance against the political order. Modern institutions have deformed me. They have made me the weak and miserable creature that I am.”
But what if the qualities of social interaction which have this dehumanizing effect are inextricably bound up with the dominant spirit of the age? In that case, it might be impossible to really live, impossible to produce happy and well-adjusted human beings, without a total overhaul of society and all of its institutions. This also clarifies how the longing for total revolution is distinct from utopianism — utopian literature is motivated by a vision of a better or more just order. Revolutionary longing springs from a hatred of existing institutions and what they’ve done to us. This is an important difference, because hate is a much more powerful motivator than hope. In fact Yack goes so far as to say (in a wonderfully dark passage) that the key action of philosophers and intellectuals upon history is the invention of new things to hate. Can you believe this guy is Canadian?
1. Of course, if my reading of MITI and the Japanese Miracle is correct, popular sovereignty may not be around for that much longer.
2. I say “vulgar” Marxists, because for the sophisticated Marxists (including Marx himself) it’s already pretty much dogma that premodern rebellions by immiserated peasants aren’t “revolutionary” in the way they care about.
August 1, 2023
“Tonight in the news: the moon is made of green chees- wait, patch downloading … not made of green cheese, and anyone who says it is is a MAGA conspiracist h8er.”
Sarah Hoyt on the amazing co-ordination of messaging from so many legacy media and their social media collaborators:
Many of us are amused with how fast the left acquires a sudden mission to propagate the one holy acceptable opinion. How it changes overnight, and how it comes from all of them at once, in almost the same words. And how it gets repeated ad-nauseam, in defiance of all sense, until the message changes.
This has led the least kind among us (eh. Myself, sometimes) to refer to our leftist brethren as “NPC”s who do whatever the programmers put in their heads.The sad truth, though, is they’re not NPCs. They’re humans, like the rest of us, just — a lot of them — through cowardice or a more conformist temperament, humans who want to be “right” with the “majority” as they perceive it. They, like most primitives the world over, have no moral center, and want to back the winner and the strong horse.
Add in a dose of truly bad education, and their self-conceit as smart, and what you have is someone who reads all the accepted publications, catches on to what they’re saying, and runs to get ahead of what they think will be (and to be fair is, of their kind only) a parade.
The sequence goes something like this: Leftists, for nefarious, stupid, or money reasons (and often all three) declare that they want something utterly, inconceivably stupid to happen: ban something, force some tech, whatever.
Immediately, on command, some “scientist” (usually of the softer side) who smells grant money does studies showing this idea is brilliant and will bring about utopia. The stupid is flawed and irreproducible, but the journalists are all leftists who want to “support the current thing” and jump on it. Suddenly every possible and some imaginary publications tell us how the Current Thing is the most important thing ever, and it must be done nowwwww.
Take Joe Biden’s idea of cooling the Earth by covering the sunlight. — Okay, not his idea. Or maybe it is. Who knows how much meth they’re putting in his ice-cream? — But the idea of the group of people who form “Joe Biden.” Or the idea of those jokers at the WEF that the planet is BOILING and the only solution if for us peasants to surrender to their wisdom and eat the bugs, and give up private transportation.
