Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2025

Proposed California legislation to allow “Big Oil” to be sued for “climate change damage … regardless of cause”

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

California is a lovely place. I’ve only ever been there once, back in January 1991 but it was a wonderful (business) trip. California’s political “leaders” on the other hand are clearly in need of immediate re-institutionalization:

First, the madness of the California state legislature is richly displayed in Senator Scott Wiener’s remarkable new bill that would allow people to sue the oil industry because climate change damaged their property, via “natural catastrophe, including a hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, wind-driven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought, or, regardless of cause, a fire, flood, or explosion”.

I hope you caught that “regardless of cause” thing, there at the end. If this bill passes — it won’t, being mostly a theatrical performance, but let’s pretend — Californians will supposedly be able to sue Chevron or ExxonMobil (and so on) because a flood or fire damages their property, which implicates fossil fuel-induced climate change, regardless of the cause of the flood or fire.

  1. I threw matches on your couch
  2. Climate change
  3. Big Oil burned your couch

On the hook: anyone who sold “fossil fuels” in California “since the year 1965”, although a lawsuit has to be brought within three years of the discovery of the damage caused by the fossil fuel’s effect on the climate.

Favorite part, and look at item #2 (click to enlarge):

I’m not a lawyer, but I have doubts about declaring in a law that you can’t question the constitutionality of the law. We had similar legal doctrines on the playground in elementary school, despite which some members of the first-grade community controversially persisted in utilizing the disallowed tag-back.

Wiener’s press release on the bill is … very special. California government knows why the recent fires were so harmful, and none of it involves California government. Sample quote from, please help me, the state senator who represents my district:

    “The Eaton Fire destroyed over 9,000 structures in my District, wiping out almost the entire town of Altadena, leaving thousands of my residents calling for justice and accountability,” said Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena). “Our communities have never seen anything like this in urban Los Angeles. The reality is that climate change is here and will continue impacting communities everywhere. What makes this worse is decades ago, Big Oil knew this would be our future, but prioritized lining their own pockets at the expense of our environment and the health of our communities. The Affordable Insurance and Climate Recovery Act will hold the oil industry responsible for the damage it has inflicted, and provide relief for future communities impacted by climate disasters.”

Decades ago, Big Oil knew Altadena would burn, but they did it anyway. Case closed.

I’m also quite fond of the senator’s use of “my residents”, which sounds like she’s buying up dead souls to expand her vassalage. I pay her in grain, of course.

The MAGA movement as “America’s Thermidorian Reaction”

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

Fortissax lays out the case for Canada remaining separate from the United States, in what he says is the longest single article he’s written. It is indeed a long piece, from which I’ve selected a small portion that helps identify the US MAGA movement as something other than just pro-Trump activism:

“Canada’s national identity is rooted in Order, as expressed in its national motto, Peace, Order, and Good Government, conceived by Sir John A. Macdonald. This stands in contrast to the United States, whose core value is Liberty, reflecting its liberal and individualist foundations in the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The MAGA movement, as explored in my colleague and fellow Canadian Endeavour’s article, can be understood not as a counter-revolutionary or genuinely reactionary force, but as America’s Thermidorian Reaction — a movement within the post-WWII liberal order to purge its own radical excesses. Endeavour draws parallels to the French Revolution, where the Thermidorian Reaction was not a restoration of the monarchy but a moderation of the Reign of Terror’s extremism, and to the Soviet Union’s Destalinization, which sought to distance the regime from Stalin’s radical policies without abandoning communism.

Similarly, MAGA does not aim to dismantle the liberal framework established during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, marked by the Civil Rights Act and Hart-Celler Act, but instead seeks to address the instability caused by the radicalization of this framework during the “Great Awokening” of the 2010s. Its faith in “colourblind meritocracy” is rock solid. Just as the Thermidorians and Khrushchev’s regime sought to preserve their respective systems by eliminating destabilizing elements, MAGA represents an attempt to recalibrate the liberal order by challenging excessive ideological commitments like open borders, identity politics, and globalist policies.

While MAGA appeals to traditionalist sentiments, it ultimately operates within the boundaries of the same liberal system it critiques, lacking the philosophical depth to present a true alternative. Trump’s 2016 campaign was fueled by widespread dissatisfaction with the establishment and a sense of cultural alienation among, working-class European-Americans. As an outsider candidate, Trump faced opposition from both political parties and the media but managed to channel populist anger into an unexpected victory. However, his presidency revealed that he posed less of a threat to the system than many anticipated. Trump’s administration implemented some reforms but fell short of disrupting the liberal order, leading many elites to reframe him as a tolerable alternative to the increasing instability caused by radical left-wing movements. The 2024 campaign differs significantly from Trump’s earlier runs because he has garnered support from influential elite factions. Figures in Big Tech, such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and segments of the Zionist lobby, see Trump as a tool to stabilize the system without fundamentally altering it. While Trump continues to appeal to his populist base, his elite backers are likely to exert more influence over his presidency than grassroots supporters.

The Four Agendas of America’s Elite

Endeavour outlines four major agendas driving the U.S. political landscape, which often overlap but also compete for dominance:

  1. The Anti-White Agenda (Wokeism)

    2. This agenda promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as core principles, advocating for identity politics, demographic transformation, and the demonization of traditional Western cultural norms. Organizations like the NAACP, SPLC, and Open Society Foundations champion this cause.

  2. Managerialism

    3. Focused on centralized control, managerialism, coined by James Burnham, expands bureaucratic oversight in both public and private sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic epitomized managerial overreach, as policies enforced compliance on an unprecedented scale. Key proponents include BlackRock, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

  3. The Zionist Lobby

    4. Primarily concerned with ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel, the Zionist agenda overlaps with wokeism in promoting leftist social causes but diverges when these causes conflict with Israeli interests. Organizations like AIPAC and the ADL straddle this divide.

  4. Big Tech

    5. Initially aligned with wokeism, Big Tech has begun to push back against its most radical elements due to its impact on innovation and competence. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) symbolizes this shift, as does growing discontent with DEI mandates within the tech sector.

While these agendas are not inherently unified, they collectively uphold the liberal framework established in the 1960s, even as they compete for dominance within it. I’ve defined these forces in the past as left-liberalism vs right-liberalism, which I covered here: MAGA & Wokism

Parallels to Historical Thermidorian Reactions

MAGA’s role is likened to historical Thermidorian Reactions, where moderates sought to rein in revolutionary excesses to stabilize their regimes. For example:

  • The Thermidorians ended Robespierre’s radical Reign of Terror, easing persecution and executions while maintaining the republic.
  • Khrushchev’s Destalinization moderated Stalin’s authoritarian rule but preserved the communist system.

Similarly, MAGA seeks to temper the radicalism of woke managerialism without challenging the core tenets of the liberal order. The “Great Awokening,” characterized by intensified DEI policies, identity politics, and cancel culture, parallels the Reign of Terror and Stalinist purges in its ideological zeal. Trump’s 2024 campaign represents an attempt to dial back these excesses and restore a degree of moderation.

Challenges Facing the Thermidorians

Despite its goals, MAGA faces significant hurdles in moderating the system:

  • Demographic Shifts: The growing influence of progressive, non-white voting blocs entrenches leftist policies.
  • Institutional Entrenchment: Managerial bureaucracies are staffed with ideologues deeply committed to woke principles, making reform difficult.
  • Superficial Reforms: Even if MAGA eases censorship and curbs DEI mandates, it is unlikely to reverse structural changes such as demographic transformation or the Civil Rights Act.

Endeavour contends that MAGA’s moderation of woke managerialism may improve short-term conditions but will not address deeper contradictions in the liberal order. For example:

  • The Zionist lobby’s support for both Israeli ethno-nationalism and woke policies in the U.S. creates unsustainable contradictions.
  • Universalist egalitarianism remains fundamentally flawed, and attempts to reform it, like Gorbachev’s Perestroika in the USSR, may inadvertently accelerate systemic collapse.

While MAGA may temporarily stabilize the United States, it will not fundamentally alter the trajectory set in motion during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The deeper issues of demographic change, cultural alienation, and institutional decay remain unresolved. Trump’s vision—and likely that of most within the MAGA movement—is rooted in nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s, a romanticized era cherished by many baby boomers. This idealized vision imagines a time when race was purportedly invisible, the black middle class thrived, and patriotism unified Americans across racial lines. This narrative conveniently ignores the darker realities of that period, including the L.A. race riots and the rise of militant groups like the Black Panther Party. At the same time, this Thermidorian Reaction is being leveraged to solidify control over America’s imperial vassals, with the Anglosphere serving as its primary appendages and European nation-states as key dependencies. Populist movements across Europe echo rhetoric nearly identical to that of MAGA, with many receiving direct or indirect support from individuals and entities affiliated with the movement. Figures like Elon Musk have actively amplified some of these efforts, like promoting the Alternative für Deutschland party and bolstering independent actors aligned with MAGA’s agenda, thereby expanding its influence across the Western world. Not ideal, but a means to an end for sure.

QotD: Michael Moore

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

Bowling for Columbine is the latest documentary from Michael Moore, the leftwing multi-millionaire provocateur in his usual cunning disguise as an all-American lardbutt loser — baseball cap, unkempt hair, untucked shirt. This time, the nominal subject is American violence, but, by now, connoisseurs of Roger and Me and Moore’s TV work know that, whatever the subject, the routine never varies: he turns up at company headquarters unannounced and demands to see the chairman. The receptionist says he’s not available, and Moore merrily films the stand-off before moving on to some other target. If he showed up to see me without making an appointment, I’d tell him to piss off and then fire a warning shot. If I showed up to see him unannounced and accompanied by a camera crew, his people would do the same to me.

But most folks are nicer than that.

And so you can’t help noticing that, for a champion of the little guy, he goes to an awful lot of time and effort to make the little guy look like a chump. Moore has no interest in digging deep into his subjects when all the fun’s to be had on the surface of American life — the squeaky receptionists, the bored security guards, the bland PR women, the squaresville company guy in the suit, the State Police trooper with the infelicitous phrasing, the bozo in the pool hall … His vision of America as a wasteland of gun kooks, conspiracy theorists and perky brain-fried mall clerks will doubtless have them rolling in the aisles in Paris this weekend. In my corner of New Hampshire, there were only four other moviegoers in the theater. But Moore, a great favorite with the BBC, now does his shtick with an eye to the non-American market.

Mark Steyn, “Bowling for Columbine”, Steyn Online, 2002-11-30.

January 29, 2025

Canadians – “polite lunatics”

Filed under: Cancon, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Mitch Heimpel talks about a Canadian culture from a time before a Canadian PM could get away with maligning the country as having “no core identity”:

In recent days, The Line has spoken of the need for Canada to go “full psycho”. To “Make ‘Canada’s back’ a threat”. And, specifically, to recapture a Canadian identity that was, not long ago, widely shared — Canadians as scary and even dangerous. My own mind had been on similar topics of late, and I’d been thinking, specifically, about how those representations used to show up not just in our pop culture, but in American pop culture.

And in at least one place, you can find it still: Shoresy, a hilarious comedy show about Canadian hockey hosers that has found success on both sides of the border.

Shoresy is interesting not because it’s new, but almost because it’s retro. Once upon a time, the kind of Canadian identity shown in Shoresy was just … Canadian identity. Here’s a great example of what I mean that I suspect many readers will have seen: 1968’s The Devil’s Brigade, a film about the First Special Service Force, a joint Canadian-American unit that would become the forerunner to the American Green Berets. The film is a remarkable reflection of the attitudes that the two cultures had about each other. In one particular scene, after the Americans (predominantly tough guy actors Claude Akins and James Coburn) have spent days making sport of the Canadians, a new Canadian sergeant — played by Jeremy Slate — is introduced in a mess hall scene. Mild-mannered, lithe, and even bespectacled, the Sergeant sits down next to Akins and begins to insult him. He starts by literally elbowing the American bully for room at the table in the Mess and proceeds to call him a fat tub of lard.

Sgt. Patrick O’Neill (Jeremy Slate) in the mess hall scene in The Devil’s Brigade (1968).

Once Akins has had enough, he attacks the Canadian sergeant, who reveals himself to be the unit’s new hand-to-hand combat instructor, and proceeds to pummel Akins while barely smudging his glasses. After having bruised the American’s body, as well as his ego, he returns to dinner and punctuates it by asking Akins for the salt. Akins hands it over.

This was not a remarkable representation. The Americans used to view us as polite lunatics. This showed up not just in American media, but also our stories about ourselves. Characters like Slate’s sergeant Patrick O’Neill showed up in the songs of Stompin’ Tom, Ian Tyson, and even Gordon Lightfoot. They’re memorialized in the works of Robert Service and Al Purdy. Purdy, in particular, describes this archetype well, both in At the Quinte Hotel and in The Country North of Belleville:

    backbreaking days
    in the sun and rain
    when realization seeps slow in the mind
    without grandeur or self-deception in
    noble struggle
    of being a fool –

    A country of quiescence and still distance
    a lean land
    not like the fat south.

In those few lines, Purdy captures Canadiana so easily. A people shaped by distance and the harshness of the land. Capable of the toughness needed to endure. With just a little foolishness mixed in for good measure.

Polite lunatics.

The Korean War 032 – Thunderbolt! US Troops Go On the Offensive – January 28, 1951

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 28 Jan 2025

Peng Dehuai’s armies rest and recuperate on the banks of the Han River, nursing their supply issues, and the initiative has firmly swung in favor of the UN side. The North Koreans in the east are fleeing, and Matt Ridgway’s latest offensive in the west gets underway without a hitch. Are we about to see yet another reversal of fortune and pursuit up the Korean Peninsula?

Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:11 Recap
01:33 An Aggressor Nation?
07:38 Chinese Sit-Rep
10:59 Operation Thunderbolt
14:56 Summary
15:14 Conclusion
(more…)

January 28, 2025

“Like Sulla, [Trump]’s been taking names, and he has a list”

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

So-called “Sulla” (probably from the time of Augustus) after a portrait of an important Roman from the 2nd century BC.
From the Glyptothek collection via Wikimedia Commons.

The comparison of Trump to the man who prefigured Julius Caesar in the final years of the Roman Republic is, we should all passionately hope, more rhetorical than realistic. Sulla came to power in Rome after being, in his view, illegally removed from his rightful position, and he came wading through the blood of his enemies. He then created a brand new position for himself, using the old and disused title of “dictator”, but piling on far more power than any earlier dictator had held (the irregular election was held in hearing distance of where Sulla’s army was busy executing many of his captured enemies). He used his power to reconfigure and codify the rules by which the Republic was run, to “restore the Republic” to what he imagined was a purer, better nation. He set a precedent that would be followed a generation later by Julius Caesar and the end of the Republic was clearly in sight.

Trump has come again to power, from which he believes he was illegally removed, although he has not been wading through the blood of his enemies. He has been using the powers of his position very actively, but thus far seems to be staying within the bounds of the Constitution (mostly). On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds says that the second Trump presidency will be much worse for his political opponents than if he’d won his second term in 2020, and I think that’s the right analysis:

Well, if you follow me here, you probably don’t need to be told how fast Trump is moving. But I have a few other thoughts here that didn’t fit the column. The main point is that the Democrats’ over-the-top rule-breaking, norm-busting attacks on Trump have backfired bigly. I like to use the Tolkien quote, “oft evil will shall evil mar”, and that happened here for sure.

A second consecutive Trump term would have been better, from my perspective, than Biden’s sham administration, obviously. But it certainly would have been better for the Democrats than this second non-consecutive term. Trump spent the past four years not only planning his comeback, but planning what he would do after his comeback.

In his first term he was too busy running to plan, and he was naïve about how Washington and the federal government – and the Republican Party – actually work. Not so much anymore. I’ve seen people – to continue the Tolkien reference – compare him to Gandalf the White coming back after battling the Balrog, and that’s not a bad analogy.

Then there’s this one, which pretty much sums up what I’m saying here. Like Sulla, he’s been taking names, and he has a list.

And there’s this:

It really is. Trump could get carried away with this stuff at some point, but at present he seems to be settling all family business in a very measured way. Where the opening months of the first Trump Administration were confused – Omarosa in the White House? – this time around he’s realized that personnel is policy, and he’s clearly done a lot of thinking about who his personnel will be. And it’s no coincidence that he’s put a lot of people who were victims of various government agencies in charge of those same agencies. Not much danger of them going native, I think.

A second consecutive Trump term would have delayed the advance of the left/Democrat agenda, and pushed it back in some minor ways, but would probably have ultimately been no more than a bump in the road for that agenda. This Trump term will likely burn it down.

January 27, 2025

Davos is so over, even the high-priced escort girls are giving it a miss this year

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

Elizabeth Nickson enjoys a nice, rich dish of schadenfreude as the “elite” of the Davos gab-fest dimly begin to realize that their high times are over:

It was a great ride while it lasted, hey, lefties? But it’s over now. You have been left in the screech forward of history. That stink? It’s the burning wreckage of your “ideas”. All you weasely little people like the slender tight-mouthed beta-males at the Biden White House, or the cross-dressing central banker Mark Carney who is laughably trying to be Prime Minister of Canada after bankrupting not one but TWO countries, are history. Like Rory Stewart, the regime apologist in the U.K., who says things like “there’s something really dark and nasty behind the right“. Like Macron, Jacinta Ardern, Trudeau, like the nasty little snake people at Davos right now trying to extract yet more blood and treasure from us. KNEEL and take your SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS OR YOU ARE RACIST.

You sold your birthright for power. You sold us for power. You sold the future for power. When you get to heaven this is what you should say: I failed, I ruined three generations. I need to be broken down into my component parts and remade into a new being, with a new soul. The old one is stained with the killing of innocents. Like the thousands dead from your obsession with psychopathic primitive Muslims, like the child migrants in cartel sex slavery.

All your projects are in ruins. All your toys lie broken. Your failure is one for the Ages. It will be discussed in heaven and hell for millennia. You have bankrupted the world. Even the freaking oligarchs abandoned you. Even the central bankers decided they badly needed growth or they and their heirs will be living underground for the next five hundred years, hunted like the ghastly little demons they worship. Trump means growth. Big big growth.

You probably don’t know who Rory Stewart is, but he is useful as an example. Not for him, the careful measured sentimental meaningless pap that comes out of every leftie politician’s mouth. Nope, he’s a gabber. He loves attention, in fact, he never ever shuts up, so he is their interlocutor, their dark shrunken snobbish soul.

Stewart is a “writer” and a Westminster gadfly, “much loved” in the British way of saying, “he’s so cute”. He advises, he hangs out with Afghan warlords, he speaks at gatherings of the great and the good. He runs for office, he writes editorials. He is a product of the British elite educational system, and the administrative left, which is to say the outfit that until Monday ran the world. And he has an ego the size of his big stretchy mouth.

This is what he had to say about Trump on Monday. Imagine a rich spoiled debutante drawling this and you’ll get his character.

“He’s so lowering.” By which he means he brings down the tone. Like for instance, the interviewer says Trump tweeted at Gavin Newsom they day after the fires, “Congratulations Gavin New Scum.”

Now, of course, that is how I think of Newscum.

[…]

“We need ideas”

“We need a plan for growth”

“We need to explain how we’re going to sort out the economy”

“and society”.

Buddy, your lot has been in power since Thatcher.

Someone said recently that the reason the English do absolutely NOTHING about those raped, sodomized, beaten little girls is that the upper classes view the lower as less than human, so they don’t care. They don’t care about the freezing old ladies in council houses, the fact that women can’t walk down streets safely, or the farmers not being able to feed people.

For these benevolent rulers protected in their rural retreats and policed neighbourhoods, the multicultural ideal is more important than their fellow citizens.

These are the people who have taken the ideas of Marxism, merged them with predatory capitalism, and from their offices and through countless conferences and meetings a year, try to distribute goods “fairly”, as they determine. Which country shall rise, which shall be invaded, whose resources do we want next? What delicious war shall we start?

That’s what they mean when they say “our democracy”. It’s theirs and nobody else’s.

For more than half a century they have focused on impoverishing middle America. Not the upper middle class, no, they’re fine. Like western Europe, they were broken early and are happy servants, mouthing legacy media propaganda like good little serfs with nice houses and a chance for their children to join the betas taking their orders from the grim oligarchs behind the scenes.

January 26, 2025

Andrew Sullivan reluctantly welcomes Trump’s actions to undo Biden’s radical agenda

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

I have to admit that I didn’t expect to see Andrew Sullivan saying nice things about Donald Trump, and I’m sure it caused him much personal distress to have to write this:

A quick image search turns up plenty of examples of Presidents proudly showing off freshly signed documents. Usually these will be laws passed by the legislators but sometimes (especially in January 2025) it’s rule-by-decree on steroids.

To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs.

But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad.

Joe Biden brazenly lied when he promised moderation in 2020. Check out my column on his initial flurry of executive orders four years ago this week:

    [Biden] is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.

All Trump had to do was wait. But Biden’s EOs on “equity” were even more extreme, effectively ending any pretense of color-blindness in American law and society. Biden, I wrote four years ago, was:

    enforcing the Ibram X. Kendi view that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”. And he’s enforcing it across the entire federal government and any institution the federal government funds.

It was a direct and proud embrace of systemic race and sex discrimination by the federal government. It was accompanied by a massive shift in the private sector toward illegal race and sex discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion. This was buttressed by actual mandatory workplace indoctrination in critical race, gender, and queer theory. This was authoritarian brainwashing, accompanied by blatant race discrimination.

Biden also decreed by executive order that the postmodern notion of “gender” would henceforth replace biological sex in determining who is a man or a woman. He mandated that any school or university getting federal funds should remove distinctions between boys and girls — even in sports and intimate spaces. His administration fully backed the medically irreversible transing of children with gender dysphoria, lied about the science, and secretly urged removing all age restrictions on transition — subjecting countless gay and autistic children to the permanent destruction of their future ability to have kids or even an orgasm.

Biden was, in these respects, an unremitting extremist; and almost all Trump is doing this week is unraveling this insanity. The one actually radical act from Trump is rescinding LBJ’s “affirmative action” directive of 1965. Reagan wanted to do this, but he faced bipartisan opposition. One justification of the feds moving from anti-discrimination to being pro-discrimination was because, in LBJ’s words, African-Americans “don’t have their 12 percent” in federal employment, i.e. their proportion in the country at large. Today, African-Americans are almost 19 percent of federal employees — much higher than their population share. The MSM won’t frame it this way. But that’s the truth. And Trump’s EO language suggests he now has a staff shrewd and determined enough to push back. This week was more regime change than shit-show.

It is, however, far too soon to declare the war on left authoritarianism over. It is far from dead; it has replaced Christianity entirely for many, as we saw with Bishop Budde at the National Cathedral this week, or the Oscars giving an unpopular film 13 nominations just so they can give a Best Actress award to a biological man. The Ivy League will do everything it can to keep discriminating against members of “oppressor classes.” The MSM is too far gone to reform itself. If you want proof of that, notice that the NYT has two emphatically “queer” columnists pushing gender woo-woo, and it just fired the only writer in that publication, Pamela Paul, who helped expose the medically baseless transing of children.

Not only will the Trump EOs end the systemic racism in the federal government and its contractors, his people are also aware of attempts to foil color-blindness by their own woke bureaucrats, and will be vigilant. More importantly, the new administration will deploy the DOJ to restore equality of opportunity in the private sector. After so many major corporations have been openly bragging about their race and sex discrimination these past few years, they sure have been asking for it.

QotD: The map is not the territory, state bureaucrat style

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

… most bureaucrats aren’t evil, just ignorant … and as Scott shows, this ignorance isn’t really their fault. They don’t know what they don’t know, because they can’t know. Very few bureaucratic cock-ups are as blatant as Chandigarh, where all anyone has to do is look at pictures for five minutes to conclude “you couldn’t pay me enough to move there”. For instance, here’s the cover of Scott’s book:

That’s part of the state highway system in North Dakota or someplace, and though again my recall is fuzzy, the reason for this is something like: The planners back in Bismarck (or wherever) decreed that the roads should follow county lines … which, on a map, are perfectly flat. In reality, of course, the earth is a globe, which means that in order to comply with the law, the engineers had to put in those huge zigzags every couple of miles.

No evil schemes, just bureaucrats not mentally converting 2D to 3D, and if it happens to cost a shitload more and cause a whole bunch of other inconvenience to the taxpayers, well, these things happen … and besides, by the time the bureaucrat who wrote the regulation finds out about it — which, of course, he never will, but let’s suppose — he has long since moved on to a different part of the bureaucracy. He couldn’t fix it if he wanted to … which he doesn’t, because who wants to admit to that obvious (and costly!) a fuckup?

Add to this the fact that most bureaucrats have been bureaucrats all their lives — indeed, the whole “educational” system we have in place is designed explicitly to produce spreadsheet boys and powerpoint girls, kids who do nothing else, because they know nothing else. Oh, I’m sure the spreadsheet boys and powerpoint girls know, as a factual matter, that the earth is round — we haven’t yet declared it rayciss to know it. But they only “know” it as choice B on the standardized test. It means nothing to them in practical terms, so it would never occur to them that the map they’re looking at is an oversimplification — a necessary one, no doubt, but not real. As the Zen masters used to say, the finger pointing at the moon is not, itself, the moon.

Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.

January 25, 2025

“How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; … be Fascism redux?”

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

As discussed yesterday, one of the many “hitting the ground running” acts of Donald Trump at the beginning of his second term in office has been to issue executive orders to dismantle a lot of progressives’ favourite policies, and many of them are calling it “fascism”:

Trump-the-Presidency 2.0 has already proved to be rather different from the 1.0 version. It is not merely that this time around he won the US popular vote. It is that he has “hit the ground running” with a whole stack of executive orders.

Watching the reaction to this has become — to put it mildly — a somewhat bifurcated experience. Lots of people, who were relieved at his victory, applaud what they see as a return to common sense; a rejection of censorship; a rejection of a politics intrusive into any and all aspects of life.

Conversely, there are also lots of — typically very online — people who see it as Fascism redux, as the equivalent of the end of Weimar Germany being live-streamed. How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; of removing DEI commissars from the US Federal Government; that includes appointment of women and persons of colour to senior positions; be Fascism redux?

The short answer is: it isn’t. The question then becomes, how can it be seen as such? This is where the long-run consequences of anti-discrimination law kicks in.

Anti-discrimination law creates a legal-bureaucratic structure that operates on the basis that the general citizenry is continually hovering on the edge of wrong think (racism) and wrong act (discrimination). The presumption becomes — without all this active effort — racism and discrimination will be unleashed.

This is nonsense. Anglosphere countries have low levels of racism and anti-discrimination norms have become widely accepted. Where there are discrimination issues, they are mostly problems of cultural distance that have a significant element of practicality from differing expectations between groups.

Nevertheless, it is very much in the interests of the legal-bureaucratic structure that anti-discrimination law sets up that propensities to wrong act and wrong think be seen as real, and endemic. Even better, is if the problem is seen as even larger than originally conceived.

So, we get a double expansion. The first expansion is in the range of protected groups. This provides a broadening of the social ambit of the potential wrong thinking (racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia …) and of the potential wrong acting (who might be discriminated against).

As this moral dimension becomes so elevated—not least because there are so much employment involved, but also as considerable social leverage is created by for those who can set what is, or is not, legitimate action and speech—there is expansion of what constitutes wrong think and wrong act. There is large, indeed expanding, ambit for intellectual and other entrepreneurs to identify new sins of discrimination, new sins of unequal consideration, new ways wrong think propagates, and new ways of signalling one’s rejection of such sins.

It is better still if uttering true things becomes a wrong act, expressing wrong think, for people are prone to do that, to notice things. Of course, if you start trying to shun, shame and punish folk for expressing true things, for noticing things, you are likely to generate quite a lot of resentment. This is useful, for such pushback just further “establishes” the propensity to wrong think and wrong act. Hence Transphobia and Islamophobia becoming such markers of wrong think—there are so many true things to not notice.

There is even a term for someone who notices inconvenient patterns — far right. A term that has become the classic thought-terminating cliché in the service of not noticing.

QotD: “Big budget cuts!”

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

So why is there such a big disconnect in the media? Why are there headlines about cutting and slashing when government is growing by every possible measure?

For the simple reason that the budget process in Washington is pervasively dishonest, as I’ve explained in interviews with John Stossel and Judge Napolitano. Here are the three things you need to know.

  1. The politicians created a system that automatically assumes big increases in annual spending, called a baseline.
  2. When there’s a proposal to have spending grow slower than the baseline, the gap between the proposal and the baseline is called a cut.
  3. It’s like being on a diet and claiming progress because you’re gaining two pounds each month rather than five pounds.

Defenders of this system argue that programs should get built-in increases because of things such as inflation, or because of more old people, which leads to more spending for programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

It’s certainly reasonable for them to argue that budgets should increase for these reasons.

But they should be honest. Be forthright and assert that “Spending should climb X percent because …”

Needless to say, that won’t happen. The pro-spending politicians and interest groups like the current approach because it allows them to scare voters by warning about “savage” and “draconian” spending cuts.

Daniel J. Mitchell, “The Media’s Pervasively Dishonest Coverage of Trump’s New Budget”, International Liberty, 2020-02-10.

January 24, 2025

The end of “affirmative action” in US government hiring

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Coleman Hughes outlines how the US federal government got into the formal habit of hiring and promoting staff based on things other than ability and merit during the Nixon administration:

Trump’s Executive Order 14171 is titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. It describes how vast swaths of society, including the “Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)”.

In response, Trump has ordered the executive branch and its agencies “to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements”.

That is a lot of preferences and mandates. Trump’s executive order accurately describes the enormousness of the DEI bureaucracy that has arisen in government and private industry to infuse race in hiring, promotion, and training. Take, for example, the virtue-signaling announcements made by big corporations in recent years — such as CBS’s promise that the writers of its television shows would meet a quota of being 40 percent non-white.

And so, we will now see what federal enforcement of a color-blind society looks like. We’ll certainly see how many federal employees were assigned to monitor and enforce DEI — Trump has just demanded they all be laid off.

The most controversial part of this executive order is that it repeals the storied, 60-year-old Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Johnson’s original order mandated that government contractors take “affirmative action” to ensure that employees are hired “without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin”.

The phrase affirmative action, however, has come to have a profoundly different meaning for us than it did during the 1960s civil rights era. Back then, it simply meant that companies had to make an active effort to stop discriminating against blacks, since antiblack discrimination was, in many places, the norm. Only later did the phrase come to be associated with the requirement to actively discriminate in favor of blacks and other minorities.

One of the great ironies of affirmative action is that it was not a Democrat but a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who did more than anyone to enshrine reverse racism at the federal level by establishing racial quotas. According to the Richard Nixon Foundation, “The Nixon administration ended discrimination in companies and labor unions that received federal contracts, and set guidelines and goals for affirmative action hiring for African Americans”. It was called the “Philadelphia Plan” — the city of its origin.

For the first time in American history, private companies had to meet strict numerical targets in order to do business with the federal government. Philadelphia iron trades had to be at least 22 percent non-white by 1973; plumbing trades had to be at least 20 percent non-white by the same year; electrical trades had to be 19 percent non-white, and so forth.

In the intervening decades, this racial spoils system has not only caused grief for countless members of the unfavored races — it has also created incentives for business owners to commit racial fraud, or else to legally restructure so as to be technically “minority-owned”. As far back as 1992, The New York Times reported that such fraud was “a problem everywhere” — for instance, with companies falsely claiming to be 51 percent minority-owned in order to secure government contracts. In a more recent case, a Seattle man sued both the state and federal government, claiming to run a minority-owned business on account of being 4 percent African.

When the law schools went woke

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

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Ilya Shapiro’s book Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites:

As Donald Trump begins his second term as president with a mandate to undo the damage done to the country by leftist ideology, incompetence, and corruption, one of the many stables that most need cleaning up is academia – which is, of course, the source of virtually all of the most misbegotten ideas that have sent America astray.

To be sure, some parts of academia are more desperately in need of reform than others. As a rule, the elite universities, especially those in the Ivy League, are more poisoned by the new progressivism than most state schools, especially those in the heartland. Humanities and social science departments are worse off than STEM departments. And as Ilya Shapiro points out in his important new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elite, the introduction of woke thinking into law schools is singularly damaging.

Yes, writes Shapiro, it’s unfortunate enough if, say, a sociology faculty is selling ideology rather than fact, for it represents “a loss to the richness of life and the accumulation of human knowledge”. But for a law school to head down the same road is far more perilous. For these schools turn out the lawyers, politicians, and judges who will serve as “the gatekeepers of our institutions and of the rules of the game on which American prosperity, liberty, and equality sit”.

And the sad fact, alas, is that in too many American law schools today, a preponderance of students are the products of classrooms in which, as Shapiro puts it, “the classical pedagogical model of legal education” has been abandoned in favor of “the postmodern activist one” – a process that has been underway for decades but that was greatly accelerated during the Covid pandemic and in the wake of the irrational nationwide hysteria over the killing of George Floyd. Hence those students swallow such dangerous notions as critical race theory and its corollary, critical legal theory, and therefore believe that colorblind justice, due process, and freedom of speech aren’t desiderata but tools of white supremacy.

Lawless has its roots in Shapiro’s own hellish encounter with this ideological leviathan. It happened like this: on January 26, 2022, the day that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, Shapiro tweeted that the “best pick” for a replacement was Sri Srinivasan, who, if appointed by President Biden, would be the “first Asian (Indian) American” on the Court. Yet because Biden had promised to name a black woman, lamented Shapiro, “we’ll get [a] lesser black woman”. After sending off the tweet, Shapiro went to bed – and awoke in the morning to discover that his comment had caused pandemonium in the legal community, where he was being viciously attacked as a racist and a sexist. Shapiro immediately deleted the tweet and issued an apology for expressing his opinion in such an “inartful” manner.

But that wasn’t the end of it. As it happened, Shapiro, who had just left the Cato Institute, was scheduled to take up a new position at Georgetown University’s school of law in five days. And unluckily for him, the dean of the law school, William M. Treanor, was a wimp of the first order, the kind of craven academic administrator who’s quick to cave to the noisiest and most radical elements. On January 27, Treanor issued a statement in which he represented Shapiro as believing that “the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman”.

This was the height of disingenuity: it was clear that Shapiro simply meant that Biden shouldn’t limit the pool of possible nominees on the basis of sex or race – a view shared by three-quarters of the American public. But as Shapiro would soon discover, under the current dispensation at woke law schools “what matters is not the objective meaning of a given statement or even its intent but its effect – not the facts but the feelings”.

So it was that Treanor ordered an elaborate and expensive “investigation” by a top-dollar law firm into Shapiro’s tweet – yes, an investigation into a tweet. Ludicrously, it took more than four months – during which Shapiro’s new job was put on hold. In the end, the “investigators” concluded that Shapiro had indeed expressed an offensive opinion but permitted him to start work at Georgetown. Wisely, Shapiro decided that, given everything that had happened, Georgetown would not be a comfortable fit for him – at least not with Treanor at the helm – and chose instead to accept a job offer from the Manhattan Institute, where he works today.

Was WW1 Pointless? – War Goals Of Every Major Nation

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, Russia, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published 13 Sept 2024

The First World War is often seen as futile and pointless. Millions of men fought and died for years, but no one was satisfied with the outcome, which did not bring a lasting peace. But that is not how governments and many people saw the war as it was being fought. So what did the countries fighting actually want to achieve? In other words, what was the purpose of the First World War?
(more…)

January 23, 2025

Do you want an imperial presidency, because this is how you get an imperial presidency

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

On paper, prime ministers in Westminster parliamentary systems have more power, but the US president has more immediate, practical power to direct government activity using totally non-democratic executive orders. Democrats didn’t mind that when it was Obama wielding the pen, but they’re incandescent now that it’s the Bad Orange Man inking rules into existence. MAGA Republicans hated when Joe Biden’s ventriloquist was writing the orders, but suddenly it’s fine because it’s their president doing it. In neither case is democracy safe:

A quick image search turns up plenty of examples of Presidents proudly showing off freshly signed documents. Usually these will be laws passed by the legislators but sometimes (especially in January 2025) it’s rule-by-decree on steroids.

Well before President Donald Trump returned to office, his supporters boasted that he would start the second term with a flurry of executive actions. The new president exceeded expectations with an avalanche of pardons, orders, and edicts on matters great and small. Some should be welcomed by anybody hoping for more respect for liberty by government employees. Others extend state power in ways that are worrisome or even illegitimate. All continue the troubling trend over the course of decades and administrations from both parties for the president to assume the role of an elected monarch.

From an Interoffice Memo to “Shock and Awe”

“When President Trump takes office next Monday, there is going to be shock and awe with executive orders,” Sen. John Barrasso (R–Wyo.) predicted last week.

The president signed some of those orders as he bantered in the Oval Office with members of the press, engaging in more interaction than we saw from his predecessor over months. Wide-ranging in their scope, Trump’s orders “encompassed sweeping moves to reimagine the country’s relationship with immigration, its economy, global health, the environment and even gender roles,” noted USA Today.

Executive orders, which made up the bulk of Trump’s actions (he also pardoned and commuted the sentences of participants in the January 6 Capitol riot), are basically interoffice memos from the boss to executive branch agencies. “The President of the United States manages the operations of the Executive branch of Government through Executive orders,” according to the Office of the Federal Register of the National Archives and Records Administration.

That doesn’t sound like much — and at first, it wasn’t. Executive orders as we know them evolved into their modern form from notes and directives sent by the president to members of the cabinet and other executive branch officials. Nobody tried to catalog them until 1907.

But because executive branch officials interpret and enforce thickets of laws and administrative rules under which we try to live, guidance from the boss is powerful. Interpreted one way, a rule regulating unfinished gun parts leaves people free to pursue their hobbies; interpreted another, and those owning the parts are suddenly felons. The president can push interpretations either way.

They Can Be Used Correctly, or Abusively

So, some of Trump’s executive orders are very welcome, indeed, for those of us horrified by federal agencies pushing the boundaries of their power.

“The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end,” Trump said in his inaugural address regarding an order intended to punish politically motivated use of government power. “I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” he added of another.

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