Quotulatiousness

September 2, 2020

Cold War 2.0 — you’re soaking in it

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell responds to a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Nadia Schadlow:

Dr Schadlow posits that “A new set of assumptions should underpin U.S. foreign policy … [and, concomitantly, the foreign polices of the US led West, including Canada’s, because] … Contrary to the optimistic predictions made in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, widespread political liberalization and the growth of transnational organizations have not tempered rivalries among countries. Likewise, globalization and economic interdependence have not been unalloyed goods; often, they have generated unanticipated inequalities and vulnerabilities [and] although the proliferation of digital technologies has increased productivity and brought other benefits, it has also eroded the U.S. military’s advantages and posed challenges to democratic societies.”

After outlining the rosy assumption made by leaders and policy makers from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton to Barack Obama ~ assumption which I shared, Nadia Schadlow says that “China had no intention of converging with the West [because] The Chinese Communist Party never intended to play by the West’s rules; it was determined to control markets rather than open them, and it did so by keeping its exchange rate artificially low, providing unfair advantages to state-owned enterprises, and erecting regulatory barriers against non-Chinese companies. Officials in both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations worried about China’s intentions. But fundamentally, they remained convinced that the United States needed to engage with China to strengthen the rules-based international system and that China’s economic liberalization would ultimately lead to political liberalization. Instead, China has continued to take advantage of economic interdependence to grow its economy and enhance its military, thereby ensuring the long-term strength of the CCP.” Of course, from a Chinese perspective it might, very reasonably, appear that the liberal, US made (in the late 1940s) “rules based international system” was, in fact, designed to strengthen the US economy and enhance its military and ensure America’s long term strength … and that is not, many would say, a totally unreasonable view.

[…]

America’s allies, including Canada, need to step up and help the USA (and India) with the containment of both China and Russia in several regions: in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, too. Canada is a G-7 nation. It needs to start acting like one.

Australians, Brits, Canadians and Danes need not share Dr Schadlow’s Trumpian view of the world and of Cold War 2.0 to understand that:

  1. It is here. We are in it, like it or not; and
  2. Like its predecessor, it can turn hot if we do not manage it with care.

Now, at this time, the conventional wisdom is that foreign and defence policy must take a back seat to beating COVID-19 and restarting the economy. But, the Chinese and the Russians are not putting their plans on hold while they deal with the pandemic. (Maybe that’s why Justin Trudeau admires China’s “basic dictatorship” so much.) They will both be moving ahead with plans that aim to put the US-led West, including Canada, at a disadvantage. Additionally, now is a good time to announce plans to build more new warships ~ two or three large helicopter carriers, another supply ship (for a total of four) 16 major surface combatants (the new Type 26 ships) and a dozen smaller corvettes … can be and politicians should say will be built here in Canada, by Canadian workers. Defence related projects, when well conceived and directed, can be great long-term job creators. Canada can do both: speed up our recovery from the pandemic and strengthen our global position by making defence procurement a priority for the recovery.

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

QotD: Prohibition

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

Prohibition only makes things worse, like when alcohol Prohibition turned us from a peaceful nation of wine and beer drinkers into a crazed culture going blind on bathtub gin while the distributors shot each other down with Tommy-guns in the streets.

Vin Suprynowicz, “On Reporters Who Ask No (Unapproved) Questions”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-06-03.

September 1, 2020

King Philip’s War: The Most Important American War You’ve Never Heard Of

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

[Update, 29 Dec 2022 – Andy has uploaded a new video to correct some of the errors he made in this presentation.]

Atun-Shei Films
Published 9 Jan 2019

A generation after the first Thanksgiving, the sachem of the Wampanoag led a coalition of Native American tribes to battle against the ever-encroaching European colonists of New England.
(more…)

August 31, 2020

Michelle Remembers, the seminal Satanic Panic book

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

Jen Gerson discusses the first modern Satanic Panic and the book about the “recovered” childhood memories of a British Columbia woman in the 1970s:

QAnon may sound like something that could only have birthed in the darker corners of the internet. But QAnon predates president Donald Trump and even the internet itself; It’s just the latest iteration of a moral panic that swept the highest levels of Western society only a generation ago. One of the most polarizing and divisive social movements in modern history; it destroyed families, turned communities against one another, and sent numerous innocent men and women to prison.

And it all started in Victoria, BC.

It was known as the Satanic Panic; a conspiracy theory that convinced millions of well meaning and rational people that a secret cabal of Satanists had infiltrated the highest echelons of society in order to sexually molest children. The Satanists were accused of sacrificing animals and using women as “breeders” to create an endless supply of dead babies for use in their gory, bloody-fuelled rituals and orgies.

It destroyed lives and ripped apart families. Reports of ritualistic child abuse were reported across the English speaking-world. Almost all of them were eventually found to have been partially, or wholly fabricated, but not before dozens of innocent people were falsely accused, and sentenced to years and even decades in prison.

Born of a genuine historical injustice — society’s neglect of childhood sexual abuse — this was a panic that saw some of the world’s smartest minds taken in by accusations, that, at their root, were as preposterous as any raised during medieval European witch hunts. It was legitimized by a professional class, captivated law enforcement and proved itself a lucrative grift for fraudsters and attention seekers. Worse, as the conspiracy grew under its own weight and influence, the hysteria inspired real and horrific crimes — usually by disturbed teenagers who claimed they were sacrificing humans to Satan.

This is a case study of how badly off the rails we can go when we allow our best intentions and passions to overwhelm us.

The story begins in 1980, with the publication of a book called Michelle Remembers. It detailed the fantastic claims of Michelle Proby, who recounted several months of gory and sadistic ritualistic abuse at the hands of a cabal of Satanists when she was a child in 1950s Victoria. The memories, she alleged, were repressed for decades, until she sought help from psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. Under a state of hypnosis, Proby began to uncover a horrifying tale of murder, torture, abduction, and molestation. She claimed to have been taken from her willing family and groomed to take part in a ritual to call the devil — one in which she witnessed the murder of children, was forced to eat human remains, covered in dead baby parts, and locked in a cage with snakes.

An explosive bestseller. Michelle Remembers would become the folkloric template for countless other claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse ostensibly uncovered during therapy during the 80s and 90s.

August 30, 2020

“When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot. That’s the thing I’m defending.”

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

An NPR interview with author Vicky Osterweil about her new book In Defense of Looting, published last week:

During the uprisings of this past summer, rioting and looting have often gone hand in hand. Can you talk about the distinction you see between the two?

“Rioting” generally refers to any moment of mass unrest or upheaval. Riots are a space in which a mass of people has produced a situation in which the general laws that govern society no longer function, and people can act in different ways in the street and in public. I’d say that rioting is a broader category, in which looting appears as a tactic.

Often, looting is more common among movements that are coming from below. It tends to be an attack on a business, a commercial space, maybe a government building — taking those things that would otherwise be commodified and controlled and sharing them for free.

Can you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?

It does a number of important things. It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage — which, during COVID times, is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities is often not available, or it comes at great risk. That’s looting’s most basic tactical power as a political mode of action.

It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.

Importantly, I think especially when it’s in the context of a Black uprising like the one we’re living through now, it also attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy. The very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country. Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.

[…]

What would you say to people who are concerned about essential places like grocery stores or pharmacies being attacked in those communities?

When it comes to small business, family owned business or locally owned business, they are no more likely to provide worker protections. They are no more likely to have to provide good stuff for the community than big businesses. It’s actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community. But that’s actually a right-wing myth.

A business being attacked in the community is ultimately about attacking like modes of oppression that exist in the community. It is true and possible that there are instances historically when businesses have refused to reopen or to come back. But that is a part of the inequity of the society, that people live in places where there is only one place where they can get access to something [like food or medicine]. That question assumes well, what if you’re in a food desert? But the food desert is already an incredibly unjust situation. There’s this real tendency to try and blame people for fighting back, for revealing the inequity of the injustice that’s already been formed by the time that they’re fighting.

H/T to Amy Alkon for the link.

Update: Ann Althouse also commented on the NPR interview:

I don’t know if other people in “the movement” are happy to see that idea spoken aloud [that looters and rioters have “always been a part of our movement”]. I’ve been hearing that there are 2 groups of people — the peaceful protesters and these mysterious other people, who, I’ve noted, the journalists don’t seem to care to identify and investigate. Osterweil is saying these are not 2 different groups. It’s one movement, and it’s been going on for a long time.

[…]

That seems to present looting as street theater with a message. It makes an argument. A terrible argument. We’ve heard that argument in words many times over the years, and most Americans reject it. We want to work and build wealth and enjoy our lives and we want the great mutual benefits of hard work and wealth. Osterweil’s looting is a switch from making the argument against property in words and to speak with actions — the destruction of property. But that doesn’t make the argument more convincing! It’s a nasty tantrum thrown because you can’t convince people with your ideas. Ironically, fortunately, it makes the argument for the other side.

Andrew Sullivan – “… let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed.”

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

In the latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan finds himself in agreement with Marcus Aurelius: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

I don’t think I’m the only one, as even the Democrats seem now to realize. And this massive blindspot is not hard to understand. When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about “whiteness”, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk. One of the most devastating lines in president Trump’s convention speech last night was this: “Tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” A cheap shot, yes. But in the current context, a political bullseye.

The key theme of the RNC was reminding people of the American narrative that once was. Yes, it was unbelievably vulgar. Yes, it looked like a cross between a sophisticated CGI video-game and a crude car dealer ad with a dollop of Leni Riefenstahl. But it was extremely effective. To see that, you have to remove your frontal cortex and put it in a jar, accept that it’s all going to be a series of lies so massive they stupefy us into stutters, and then cop the feels. Pence gave us a vision of America that was a souped up Disney special from the early 1960s — from Fort McHenry no less. And look at the icons Trump invoked: Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill. You can mock. But in the midst of a culture being redescribed by the left as a form of foul and relentless “white supremacy”, and in a moment of arson and rioting, it felt like a kind of balm.

All this reassurance played out against a backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, and Minneapolis, where a suicide led to a bout of opportunistic looting, and Washington DC, where mobs of wokesters went through the city chanting obscenities, invading others’ spaces, demanding bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines — guillotines! — in the streets as emblems of their agenda. They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks.

[…]

And let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed. Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.

The pattern is textbook, if you learn anything from history: an economic crisis resulting in mass unemployment; the pent-up psychological disorders a long period of lockdown can and will unleash; a failure of nerve on the part of liberals to defend the values and institutions of liberal democracy, and of conservatives to keep their own ranks free of raw demagogues and bigots. But critically: a growing sense of disorder and violence and rioting as simply the background noise; and a sense that authorities do not have the strength or the stomach to restore order. What most people want in that kind of nerve-wracking instability is a figure who will come in and stamp it out. In Trump, we have someone who would happily trample any liberal democratic norm to do it. And the left seems to be all but begging him to do it — if only to prove them right.

A long time ago, I was mocked for saying that I believed that the election of Donald Trump was an extinction-level event for liberal democracy. But this is where we are. There is no place for liberal debate or dissent, just competing mobs deploying propaganda, intimidation and mutual racial hatred. Norms are trashed, from the shameful cooptation of national monuments for partisan purposes, to violating the privacy and peace of ordinary citizens because they are not in the ranks of agitators. Liberals are now illiberal; conservatives are revolutionaries. The Republican convention we are witnessing makes no pretense of even publishing a platform — all to demonstrate total and unfailing fealty to the leader whose own family is now assumed to succeed him. What about this pattern of events do we not already understand?

Why Gods and Generals is Neo-Confederate Propaganda (and Objectively Sucks)

Filed under: History, Humour, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 12 Aug 2019

Like if Ken Burns and Mr. Plinkett had a baby.

Gods and Generals (2003) is a four and a half hour long epic from the director of Gettysburg (1993), chronicling the first two years of the American Civil War in the Eastern Theater from the point of view of General Stonewall Jackson. In this video essay / review, I examine how the film is an insidious piece of pro-Confederate propaganda, echoing the inaccuracies and misconceptions of the notorious Lost Cause myth.

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August 29, 2020

Durs Egg Ferguson – The Rifle That Didn’t Shoot George Washington

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Oct 2018

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

Captain Patrick Ferguson was a British officer who designed and patented a breechloading rifle in 1776, which would actually see service in the American Revolution at the Battle of Brandywine. Ferguson presented two rifles to the British military for consideration, one of them being this specific gun. In a shooting demonstration on a windy, rainy day he convinced the Board of Ordnance of the viability of his rifle, and a field trials was set in motion. One hundred Ferguson rifles were made for the Crown, and Ferguson was detached from his regiment to be given command of a company of specially trained elite riflemen. His men were drilled in accurate shooting as well as use of the bayonet, they were organized in small groups to make use of cover and concealment, and they were fitted with green uniforms to blend into the terrain. This unit deployed to the American colonies in 1777, and saw action in the Battle of Brandywine.

Unfortunately for Ferguson and his ideas, the unit didn’t make any particularly notable impact on the battle, although not by any fault of their own. Worse, Ferguson was wounded, and because the unit was so heavily dependent on him it was disbanded while he recuperated. He did see service again at the Battle of King’s Mountain, where he was killed in action. This particular Ferguson rifle was made by the noted London gunsmith Durs Egg, and is one of the two guns presented to the Board of Ordnance that began the whole series of events.

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

August 27, 2020

Israel Faces U.S. Sanctions – The Second Arab-Israeli War Begins | The Suez Crisis | Part 1

Filed under: Africa, Britain, France, History, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 26 Aug 2020

Israel launches its invasion of Egypt, much to the surprise of America who reacts furiously to the act of aggression. It quickly becomes apparent to America that Israel is not acting alone when Britain and France deliver an ultimatum to Egypt. However, could Anglo-French war plans hit the buffers if the expected American backing does not materialize?

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel and Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel and Joram Appel
Image Research: Shaun Harrison & Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Maps: Ryan Weatherby

Colorizations:
– Mikolaj Uchman
– Daniel Weiss
– Carlos Ortega Pereira (BlauColorizations) – https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:
National Archives NARA
Library of Congress Geography and Maps Department
Photo From the IAF website, https://www.iaf.org.il

From the Noun Project:
– telegraph – Luke Anthony Firth, GB
– soldier – Wonmo Kang

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Devil’s Disgrace” – Deskant
– “Searching Through Sand” – Deskant
– “As the Rivers Collapse” – Deskant
– “Crying Winds” – Deskant
– “Where Kings Walk” – Jon Sumner
– “Dreamless Nights” – The New Fools
– “Call of Muezzin” – Sight of Wonders
– “Dunes of Despair” – Deskant

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago
Some of the military history buffs out there no doubt know about B.H. Liddell Hart and his contribution to interwar strategic theory. Well, he reportedly referred to the Israeli invasion here, code-named Operation Kadesh, as one of the finest applications of the strategy of the indirect approach he developed. This is reason enough to watch this episode, but the opening of hostilities in Sinai is interesting for reasons beyond purely theoretical concerns.

From the get-go, military plans are inherently tied to political maneuvering. From the secrecy and deception of the IDF’s movements to the delaying of the Anglo-French bombing campaign; politics determine the course of this war. However, it’s easy in limited conflicts like this that are almost academic in their application, to forget that it’s destroying the lives of ordinary people. Not only the soldiers fighting, but also the civilians whose homes and lives are under threat.

Average Egyptian and Palestinians suffered disproportionately in this short campaign. You’ll learn in a later episode about at least one massacre in a Palestinian town, and there was a blatant disregard for civilian life on all sides. You probably all have different opinions on which side deserves to win here and who is at fault. But let’s not forget the real people who suffered as a result of international politics.

QotD: Racism and the minimum wage

Filed under: Australia, Business, Cancon, Economics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Minimum-wage laws can even affect the level of racial discrimination. In an earlier era, when racial discrimination was both legally and socially accepted, minimum-wage laws were often used openly to price minorities out of the job market.

In 1925, a minimum-wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.

A Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia’s minimum wage law as a means to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese” who were willing to work for less.

In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum-wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.

Some supporters of the first federal minimum-wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and underbid construction companies using unionized white labor.

These supporters of minimum-wage laws understood long ago something that today’s supporters of such laws seem not to have bothered to think through. People whose wages are raised by law do not necessarily benefit, because they are often less likely to be hired at the imposed minimum-wage rate.

Thomas Sowell, “Why racists love the minimum wage laws”, New York Post, 2013-09-17.

August 26, 2020

QotD: The U.S. Supreme Court

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

During almost every Supreme Court nomination battle, I try to make the same point: These fights wouldn’t be nearly so ugly if we didn’t invest so much power in the Supreme Court it shouldn’t have in the first place.

Until the Robert Bork nomination in 1987, Supreme Court fights were remarkably staid affairs. But by the late ’80s, the court had become a bulwark for all sorts of policies and laws that should rightly be in the portfolio of the legislative or executive branch, or, better, left to the various states. As a result, on any number of issues — most conspicuously abortion policy — the court became more important than the presidency or Congress. No wonder fights over Supreme Court appointments started to look more and more like political campaigns than debates over the finer points of judicial philosophy.

Jonah Goldberg, “Concentrated Power Inevitably Leads to Political Backlash”, Townhall.com, 2018-05-11.

August 24, 2020

Theodore Dalrymple reviews White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

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

The two books share many characteristics, says the good doctor (in his “Anthony Daniels” guise), and the most noteworthy is a shared hectoring tone:

DiAngelo’s book displays a curious admixture of influences: the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Jimmy Swaggart, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Uriah Heep, the four of them being present in approximately equal proportion.

DiAngelo has apparently made a career of anti-racist struggle sessions in which ordinary employees of various organizations must confess publicly to their racism however hidden it might be, as university professors, primary school teachers, doctors working in slums, etc., had once in China to confess to bourgeois propensities and counter-revolutionary ideas. They may never have uttered a racist sentiment, they may never have been rude to a person of another race, let alone violent towards one, they may have friends of other races or even be married to a person of another race, but they carry racism deep within them like Original Sin, with this difference: there can be no redemption from it even after having read DiAngelo’s book and attended her struggle sessions. Personally, I should not be at all surprised if the end result of all her efforts, at least among the men she has “trained” (which is to say tried to indoctrinate), was to have acted as a recruitment officer for the Ku Klux Klan.

After thirty years of constant work of supposedly anti-racist training, she confesses — like the tearful Jimmy Swaggart — to being still guilty of racism herself, promising to reform, although reform is ex hypothesi impossible because racism is in her society’s DNA, as it were. One is reminded of the type of psychoanalysis which after thirty years of hourly sessions four times a week fails to get to the root of the analysand’s problem, let alone solve it, because it doesn’t even know what the problem is. But failure is also an opportunity, because, like psychoanalysis, the more anti-racist training fails, the more it is needed. DiAngelo, all credit to her, has found an economic niche for herself for the rest of her life. One has a sneaking admiration for such entrepreneurs. They are the asset-strippers of the soul.

As for Uriah Heep, DiAngelo has obviously heard, read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested (as my teachers used to demand of me) David Copperfield. Her oleaginous approach to all “people of color,” as she coyly calls them, makes Uriah Heep seem positively blunt and straight-talking. DiAngelo regards all nonwhite people, ex officio, as being incapable of exaggeration or unjustified self-pity, let alone of lying. As well as being sycophantic, this is, to coin a word, racist, for one of the most important manifestations of free will, and therefore of humanity itself, is the capacity to lie. In effect, then, she regards “people of color” as infra-human truth-uttering mechanisms: they speak, therefore what they say is true. No critical faculties need be applied to what they say.

[…]

DiAngelo is a tremendous moral narcissist. This is shown by her use of the term “people of color.” Until page 31, I thought that it meant black, but on that page I learned that it meant non-white. She shows no interest in the question of whether the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Burmese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Austronesians, Amerindians, and Africans, et al., would all be delighted to be put in the same category, let alone interest in their many cultures. On page 33, we read:

    White supremacy is more than the idea that whites are superior to people of color; it is the deeper premise that supports the idea — the definition of whites as the norm or standard of human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm.

Lumping non-white people together as “people of color” is precisely an instance of what she criticizes: this is what happens when moral rhetoric far outruns intelligence.

How to rectify a serious error the Founding Fathers made in the US Constitution

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that despite his respect for the founding fathers, they made a couple of serious mistakes in drafting the Constitution and it needs fixing quickly:

Founders’ Mistake Number Two: lies in the enumeration of the powers of Congress, to wit:

    “They [congress] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

With those fifty-four words, the Founding Fathers gave birth to a permanent criminal class, as surely as the city councils of Seattle, Minneapolis. Philadelphia, New York, and Portland. Even “treason, felony, and breach of the peace” are for all practical purposes excepted, now, or three quarters of these miscreants would be languishing in prison. That heinous, stupid clause must be repealed or rewritten at once.

For many years, I have advocated reopening Alcatraz strictly for government criminals, although lately it occurs to me that Antarctica might be even better. Cash-poor Russia and the other two-for-a-nickel satrapies that lay claim to slivers of that frozen continent would give them up for thirty-seven cents and a good bus token. And I kind of like the ring of “McMurdo Sound Federal Penitentiary”.

But, as usual, I have, once again, digressed.

Another cure — with similar delightfully frostbitten consequences — might be to incorporate United States Code, Sections 241 and 242 directly into the Bill of Rights, probably as Amendment Zero. They establish the crimes of depriving folks of their rights “under color of law”, conspiring to deprive them of their rights under color of law, and prescribe extremely specific penalties.

To my knowledge, those laws are never properly applied, and that is a travesty and a tragedy. Make them an Amendment, and they might prove more effective. I would consider every American deprived of his or her rights to represent a separate punishable offense. How about three billion years in the freeze-dried slammer, Nancy, for your decades of malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, upfeasance, and downfeasance as a member in evil standing of the Viet Congress?

QotD: Progressive malevolent narcissism

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

This is what happens when malevolent narcissists don’t get slapped and thrown to the ground. The kind of psychology we’re seeing, over and over again, overwhelmingly from the left, is an exercise in bad faith, a fundamental dishonesty. It therefore isn’t amenable to correction with facts or debate, or appeals to reciprocity or some higher purpose. Tolerating such behaviour — and worse, deferring to it — will only encourage an escalation of vanity, malice and sociopathy. It may, however, be discouraged with reminders of physical consequences. Ideally, physical humiliation. A reminder that nasty little egos can be publicly broken.

These are people who will lie as readily as breathing in order to excuse their antisocial urges. They aren’t being obnoxious reluctantly, in desperation, or under duress. They harass, provoke and delight in domination because it gives them pleasure. It makes them feel important and powerful. Power being conceived solely as power over others. It’s a focus for their spite. Anything else is a fig leaf, a pretext. Among Portland’s identikit radicals, the ones exulting in the alarm and misery of others, there is no good faith. And so, you can’t engage with such creatures on their own ostensible terms.

David Thompson, “Shamelessly, He Quotes Himself”, David Thompson, 2020-08-22.

August 23, 2020

The right of asylum

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall is writing here about the situation in the United Kingdom, with would-be asylum claimants risking their lives to cross the English Channel so they can legally claim asylum in Britain, but exactly the same situation should apply with claimants entering Canada from the United States:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

Everyone at even risk – let alone reality – of substantial discrimination in their home country has the right, the right, to asylum. This is one of those international things that we should indeed agree with too. Few of us have anything but contempt for those who wouldn’t let Holocaust fleeing Jews (and or gypsies, gays, whatever, it’s just that we have substantial documented evidence about Jews who were turned away) tarnish their national doormats. Few of us think those who abused such limitations are anything but heroes. I even know of one monk who married Jewesses multiple times to bring them out by train. Umm, married multiple people, not one many times. People working within the too restrictive rules even gave us one of the finest moments of TV ever.

So, asylum, good thing.

And here’s the next thing. That right is restricted. To claiming it in the first safe place you get to. This has some oddities, if you leave Sudan by plane and step off at Heathrow then the UK is where you can – righteously – claim asylum. If you come by land then you have passed through many safe places before reaching the UK. You don’t have the right to asylum in the UK and, to be strict about it, don’t even have the right to apply.

So, people drowning in the Channel because they have to make their asylum application once in the UK? This could be true of those who are being oppressed in France. It’s not true of anyone not being oppressed in France. So there is not that need to take the open boat the 26 miles.

Sure, there’s the desire, we all understand that. But that’s a desire, not a right to asylum.

Here in Canada, we had this arrangement with the American government under the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement, which our Federal Court struck down last month — incorrectly, in my opinion — as being in violation of section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court allowed six months for the federal government to act, but as we all know, the federal government is unlikely to do anything as politically radioactive as passing legislation that could — and would — be seen as anti-refugee.

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