Quotulatiousness

January 10, 2025

Javier Milei’s “devastation” and “social chaos” report card

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

In the Washington Examiner, David Harsanyi checks the current state of Argentina against the doom-and-gloom predictions from the start of Javier Milei’s term:

In the days leading up to the August 2023 presidential election in Argentina, a hundred “leading” economists from around the world, including progressive favorite Thomas Piketty, published an open letter warning that “radical right-wing economist” Javier Milei would inflict “devastation” and social chaos on his country.

However, they said it like it was a bad thing.

By the time Milei unexpectedly won the presidency, Argentina, once one of the wealthiest nations in the world, had a poverty rate of over 40% and the third-highest inflation rate in the world. After decades of Peronism, a toxic melding of fascism, socialism, and unionism, the nation bankrupted its central bank, and the peso was depreciating at warp speed. Do you think your mortgage rate is bad? Interest rates hit 118% in Argentina weeks before the election. The country was on its way to becoming another Venezuela. Milei wanted to blow it up.

After Milei’s unlikely victory, political scientist Ian Bremmer warned, “Economic collapse is coming imminently”. Felix Salmon, the chief financial correspondent at Axios, argued that Milei’s policies would plunge Argentina into “a deep recession”.

Seven months later, Argentina was out of a recession that had set in before Milei’s victory. The chainsaw-wielding economist, “el Loco” to friends, followed through on his promise of “shock therapy”, prioritizing taming inflation by cutting spending and deregulating the economy.

Almost all problems in modern Keynesian fixes are prominent features of governance in the modern West. Governments are always bragging about spending their way out of economic tribulations (tribulations they usually instigate). If a person suggests that free-market economic policy would have been more beneficial in the long term, they are forced to rely on a counterhistory. This is one reason why lots of elites are rooting against Milei, who argues that most of the West’s economic ills lie in Keynesian economics. They want him to fail.

As we all know, most panic-inducing cases of “austerity” are just minuscule reductions in the trajectory of spending growth. Not Milei’s plan, which entailed shutting down 13 government agencies and firing over 30,000 public workers — around 10% of the federal workforce. That is an unrivaled political revolution. Argentina’s federal budget was reduced by 30%. Even if the Department of Government Efficiency accomplished everything Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are talking about doing, they wouldn’t come close to 3%, much less 30%, in spending cuts. There has likely been no comparable austerity program in any Western economy.

By May 2024, Argentina recorded its first quarterly budget surplus since 2008. Inflation, still high, dropped from a debilitating 25% at the end of 2023 to 2.4% by the end of 2024. Per capita salary, having plunged, is now also recovering.

Dan Mitchell agrees that it’s easy to mock economists for their hair-on-fire reaction to Milei’s election:

Consider the supposedly prestigious left-leaning academics who asserted in 2021 that Biden’s agenda was not inflationary. At the risk of understatement, they wound up with egg on their faces.1

Today, we’re going to look at another example of leftist economists making fools of themselves.

It involves Argentina, where President Javier Milei’s libertarian agenda has yielded amazingly positive results in just one year.

Some of us knew that good policy would lead to good results.

Others, like the editors at Bloomberg, perhaps did not expect such a quick turnaround. But, to their credit, they just acknowledged the amazing progress in an editorial.

The U.K.-based Telegraph leans to the right, so this headline can probably be interpreted as a victory dance.

Rome – Part 6, The Second Punic War, 218-201 BC

Filed under: Africa, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 22 Aug 2024

This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.

Lecture 6: The Second Punic War (218-201 BC)

• Carthaginian Expansion into Spain
• Hannibal Takes Over in Spain – War Declared
• Hannibal and the Invasion of Italy
• The Three Shattering Defeats
• Roman Strategy for Victory
• Compete and Overwhelming Roman Victory
• Rome Emerges as the Mediterranean Superpower
(more…)

QotD: The “bottle service” model as a “douchebag Potlatch”

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

Gabriel: So far we’ve been discussing bottle service from the consumer’s point of view as a potlatch, but the core of the book is that it requires an enormous amount of extremely convoluted work to mobilize models as a sort of rent-an-entourage to be guests at the potlatch. Veblen observed that one of the functions of dependents, and indeed the primary function of dependents with little or no functional purpose, is to consume beyond what a rich man could consume himself and thereby demonstrate the rich man’s wealth and power. A Wall Street bro can probably consume a lot more alcohol than a woman with a body mass index of 18, but several underweight women at the bro’s table can considerably expand the amount of alcohol that the table can collectively consume. The distinctive feature of bottle service is that rather than the guests being either the host’s long-standing dependents or the host’s frenemy and the frenemy’s long-standing dependents as in a classic potlatch, the models are strangers to the host and their presence is arranged by the club, which subcontracts this to party promoters. I suppose this isn’t totally unprecedented since the synoptic gospels’ parable of the feast (Matthew 22 and Luke 14) also involves mobilizing a bunch of randos to benefit from the host’s largesse; but (a) the host in the parable relied on randos as a substitute when his regular dependents blew off his invitation, and (b) the parables aren’t intended to be realistic stories so aren’t good evidence than an actual 1st century AD host would behave this way.

As to whether I’ve gotten a grant to pay for bottle service, mercifully no. I have had dinner with a (former) model, but it was Ashley herself at the kind of restaurant that occasionally has a hedge fund Powerpoint deck critiquing its management go viral. It was a decent hour, both of us were completely sober, there was no party promoter arranging the meeting, and there was no EDM played at OSHA-violation decibel levels. My idea of a good time is a lucid conversation with a smart friend, such as both that occasion and this email exchange, whereas I’d pay a good amount of money to avoid getting extremely drunk and staying out until dawn in an environment too loud for conversation.1 However I salute Ashley for doing so and thereby providing us with this book. The most I’ve had to suffer for my scholarship is writing response memos to annoying reviewer questions, or struggling with merge errors whilst munging data files.

And yet, contrary to my own taste, the people at the night clubs are paying a lot of money and/or waiting in line to get in, so obviously they seem to think it is appealing. I don’t think we can call this false consciousness either. Ashley is very clear that part of the reasons the models go to the clubs is as a favor to the promoters (much more on that later), but part of it is that a lot of models think going to a famous night club is really glamorous and cool. I’m tempted to say this is just de gustibus non disputandum, but just shrugging at taste is kind of a cop out for a sociologist since one of our mandates is to explain socially patterned taste.

I think a key explanation for what’s going on is Girard’s mimetic desire. The club is glamorous because there’s a long line of people outside waiting to get past the velvet rope. The women are beautiful because everyone agrees that tall skinny women are beautiful, even though in other contexts a lot of men (including the promoters) are more attracted to the kind of shorter curvier women who are barred entry to the club as “midgets”. Everyone and everything in the world of models and bottles that is desirable is desirable primarily because they or it are desired by others.

John: I’ve never read a fashion magazine or watched a runway show, so I just naively assumed that models were stunningly attractive and feminine. But as Mears points out, the models are not actually to most men’s tastes. They tend to have boyish figures and to be unusually tall.2 Is this because the fashion industry is dominated by gay men, who gravitate towards women who look like teen boys? Whatever the origins of it, there is a model “look”, and the industry has slowly optimized for a more and more extreme version of it, like a runaway neural network, or like those tribes with the rings that stretch their necks or the boards that flatten their skulls. There’s actually a somewhat uncanny or even posthuman look to many of the models. The club promoters denigrate women who lack the model look as “civilians”, but freely admit that they’d rather sleep with a “good civilian” than with a model. The model’s function, as you say, is as a locus of mimetic desire. They’re wanted because they’re wanted, in a perfectly tautological self-bootstrapping cycle; and because, in the words of one promoter: “They really pop in da club because they seven feet tall”.

The men don’t want to sleep with the models, and by and large they don’t. This leads directly to one of the most jaw-dropping insights in the entire book: the models are a potlatch of sorts too. The men are buying thousand dollar bottles of champagne and dumping them out on the floor, destroying economic value just to show that they can. And likewise, they’re surrounding themselves with dozens of beautiful women and then not sleeping with them. A potlatch of female beauty, sexuality, and reproductive potential — flaunting their wealth by hoarding women and conspicuously declining to enjoy their company, but at the same time denying them to every other man. An anti-harem.

Actually, you know what else the models remind me of? Medieval jesters. There was a point in the 15th century when every ruler in Europe had to have a dwarf in his entourage — not because there was anything intrinsic or valuable about very short men, but just because it was rare. The first guy did it to show that he was a big enough deal to have something expensive and hard to find, and then everybody else started doing it because it was the thing to do. (When dwarfs became too commonplace, the status symbols got weirder.) I think model phenotype is a little bit like that — desirable because it is rare, and because gathering and showcasing all these rare objects is a way to demonstrate your wealth and power.

John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.

    1. Another interesting work of scholarship on partying is Minjae Kim’s work on Korean work team binge drinking. Minjae shows that people go binge drinking because most of them hate it and thus it serves as a costly signal of loyalty.

    2. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.

January 9, 2025

“Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance”

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

The extent of active disinterest to ongoing criminal activity in British towns and cities over a period of several years passes belief. The fear of being accused of racism metastasized to the extent that the authorities may even have colluded with criminals to hide the crimes to preserve politicians’ and senior bureaucrats’ careers. It’s now broken through the conspiracy of silence to being actively discussed in British media and even on the floor of the House of Commons. Even the Prime Minister may have to answer for past actions (or inactions):

It’s very easy to judge the past, particularly when you’re on the “right side of history”. What supreme confidence it must take to assume that all previous generations had got it so wrong, and that humanity was simply waiting for you to turn up and set them straight.

And yet isn’t it curious that so many who like to judge the values and behaviour of people in the past are also rarely willing to turn that critical eye on other cultures that exist today? According to the principle of cultural relativism, all societies and ways of life are equal. So we must not assert that we are morally better to a culture that permits the genital mutilation of children or that denies women an education, but we may assume that we are highly superior to the Ancient Greeks.

This debate has become particularly relevant with the recent explosion of interest in the rape gangs scandal. A report by Professor Alexis Jay in 2022 determined that more than 1,400 young girls were raped and abused in the period between 1997 and 2013 by what became known as the “grooming gangs”, so called because of the manipulative tactics that were employed to gain the victims’ trust. These groups comprised mostly of men of Pakistani heritage, which led many authorities to overlook the severity of the crimes.

Consider this example from a speech delivered by Andrew Norfolk, reporter for the Times. When police discovered a 13-year-old girl, drunk and mostly naked in the company of seven Pakistani men, they arrested her and failed to question any of the adults.

Police have admitted that such failures to investigate were largely down to a desire to avoid allegations of racism. The Jay report noted that several members of local council staff “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”. Politicians and media commentators were more concerned with maintaining the fantasy that multiculturalism has been a success, rather than taking seriously their obligation to safeguard children. When Julie Bindel — the first journalist to investigate the grooming gangs — tried to publish her findings, she faced resistance ‘because some editors feared an accusation of racism’.

The Labour government has shown itself incapable of making amends. Jess Phillips has rejected a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham. And Keir Starmer has stated that anyone interested in a full-scale inquiry into these failings is jumping “on a bandwagon of the far right”.

This acute form of tone-deafness would, in any sound political climate, be cause for immediate resignation. While it is true that racists will be quick to weaponise the criminal behaviour of a minority, there is nothing remotely “far right” in taking an interest in the wellbeing of children and wishing to see those who abuse them held to account. But Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance.

Something may change with the release this week of crime league tables according to nationality. Up until now, there has been tremendous political resistance to releasing such statistics, with police in many European countries not recording such details at all in order to preserve the daydream of multiculturalism. And yet those that do keep such records have revealed a clear trend. Data from the Danish government, for instance, has shown that although non-Western immigrants constitute only 9% of the population, they account for 25% of convictions for violent crime. According to the Telegraph, in Sweden immigrants are “three times more likely to be registered as a suspect for assault than the native population – which grows to four times for robbery, and five times for rape”.

By happenstance, I posted this to social media the other day, which seems apposite:

Hollywood’s favourite creation … the “hero forgives” scene

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

I’ve never been much of a moviegoer or TV-watcher, so I hadn’t consciously noticed what kulak is discussing here:

“El Cid” (Charlton Heston) releases enemy raiders who’ve just burnt down a village … for no reason.

“All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
-Edmund Burke

The reason the boomers are the way they are, and the reason no one in the west fights back against their dispossession and replacement is an 80 year long program to indoctrinate an Ideology I call “Hollywood Anti-justice”.

In almost every piece of media to do with violence, crime, justice, and individual heroism of the past 80 years there is a scene: The “Hero Forgives” scene.

Upon violently defeating, disarming, and capturing the villain, the hero, in spite of his every instinct, in spite of friends screaming at him and reasoning with him with arguments he can’t counter, in spite of the villains mocking unrepentance, dead to rights evidence, gleeful confessions, and even vows to reoffend.

Even if the villain is guilty of hundreds of murders, rapes, and treason, even if the hero himself has killed hundreds of henchmen to capture the villain …

The hero will refuse to kill or punish him.

Sometimes the hero will insist that he must go through the courts … Sometimes the villain will openly mock him that the courts are corrupt and will never convict him, and the hero still will refuse to take matters into his own hands …

Sometimes the hero himself IS the lawful authority. Sometimes the hero is a Military officer, post apocalyptic militia captain, Medieval Knight, Greek Hero, Roman Centurion … etc. And in fact his private judgement IS the official lawful means of passing judgement and executing obviously guilty villains … And he STILL refuses to punish or kill them.

I recently saw El Cid, where the hero, a Knight, refused to hang brigands who had pillaged, raped, burnt a town, confessed and were themselves quite resigned to dying, and even as his fellow knights berated him that the law itself demands he hang them, that it is his sacred duty to hang them, and that it would be treason for him not to…

And the Hero simply cuts their bindings and lets them go … Choosing to be forsworn as a traitor rather than hang the confessed and red-handed guilty. Now this may be a historical, but as far as I’ve been able to find such an event never occurred, it’s been made up for the film, doubly egregious because the historical El Cid almost certainly executed many criminals and brigands, committing and ordering justice … Which is NOT depicted in the film.

Even if the hero has been in this exact position before and spared the villain only for more to die, sometimes even his own family and friends, demonstrating the failure of this unspoken philosophy, the hero will STILL let them go … AGAIN.

Ussually there is some Deus Ex Machina that makes this all workout some ironic or divine punishment will find the Villain through their own folly … but not always. Indeed entire franchises have been perpetuated on THE SAME serial killer villain being forgiven, released, allowed to escape, etc. over and over again.

And audiences consistently hate this, this is always the most cliched, poorly written, out of character, film breaking scene in the entire work … Supposedly great kings, ruthless bounty-hunters, outlaws, veteran knights, military officers, grey and black market criminal anti-heroes, smugglers … All of them transformed into the most inconsistent pacifists for exactly this scene. I’ve seen audiences groan and scream at the TV “Just kill him” and yet the hero, often entirely contrary to their character, will not.

This is not an old literary trope, this is a Hollywood trope.

You can read the original Greek legends, the tales of King Arthur and his Knights, early modern nationalist heroes’ stories, the adventure stories of the Napoleonic officer, the Boys’ Own adventures of empire, and well into contemporary fiction westerns, crime stories, military science fiction, historical fiction, etc.

And in all of them you will see heroes kill their enemies in cold blood, order executions of the guilty, demand deserters, spies, and traitors be shot, seek revenge, order mass hangings … Etc.

Nor is this some uniquely American madness … As late as the 1950s the vigilantes/terrorists of the original reconstruction era (1864-1877) Ku Klux Klan were treated as folk heroes… Birth of a Nation was played at the White House when it was released. The idea of vengeance, wild justice, and vigilante killings being some unconscionable moral horror was simply not the case in the first half of the 20th century … It was celebrated, much as it had been for the previous 3000 years of the west.

In 1915 the legitimacy of Vigilantism, Vengeance, and Private Justice was so accepted that even arch-progressive, Princeton University Professor, and US President Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilante-terror campaign, at the White House.

Why did Hollywood invent this trope?

Where Hollywood producers just so attached to an idea of Christian forgiveness and pacifism that they just HAD to include it over the groans and often shouting of their audiences?

Were any of these writers, directors and producers even Christian to begin with!?

Why would the communists, atheists, Jews, and pedophiles that comprise the core of Hollywood writing include such an unusual Christian theme so insistently and often story breakingly?

Well. why do they insist on bullshit girl-bossery, race mixing, and woke theming today over the protests and disinterest of their audience?

Because it benefits them to brainwash the masses that way.

The Hollywood writers never identified with the hero refusing to kill an enemy … they identified with the villain and quite liked for him to get away (indeed many Hollywood writers will openly say as much, that they identify with the villains and much prefer writing them).

Trump plays fast and loose with numbers over US/Canadian trade

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

On her Substack, Tasha Kheiriddin refutes some of the big numbers US President-elect Donald Trump has been using in his “make Canada the 51st state” campaign:

US President-elect Donald Trump successfully trolled Justin Trudeau about Canada becoming the 51st state of the union.

“We don’t need their cars. … We don’t need their lumber”, Trump said. “We have massive fields of lumber … We don’t need their dairy products. We have more than they have.”

This is, of course, a giant lie. Canada has plenty of things America needs, including raw materials like oil and food that it refines and transforms. That transformation generates millions of well-paying US industrial and manufacturing jobs. The US also imports nearly $5 billion in fertilizer to boost agricultural production.

And if we don’t have anything America needs, why would Trump want to annex us? Because, he claims, the US trade deficit with Canada is a “subsidy.” Trump asks, “Why are we losing $200 billion dollars a year and more to protect Canada?”

This is a second lie. First of all, trade deficits are not subsidies. A trade deficit represents the difference in the value of imports and exports. Second, the US trade deficit with Canada isn’t $200 billion, or even the $100 billion figure Trump has previously used. In 2023, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, it was $USD 41 billion. And if you remove energy exports, the US actually runs a surplus with us, not a deficit. Energy exports accounted for over $177 billion of Canada’s exports south of the border. Twenty-eight per cent of what we export is energy, namely, over four million barrels per day of oil, the largest amount from any country in the world.

Trump is correct that Canada has benefitted from the American military’s umbrella. We benefit by proximity, because we happen to be next to the US – just like Americans benefit from buying our discounted crude oil, because they happen to be next to us. The US would maintain their military whether we were neighbours or not. They wouldn’t have a smaller military if they annexed Canada; if anything, they’d spend more, because they would be actively engaged across our entire landmass, directly defending our borders. We have also been a steadfast ally in times of war, a fact Trump handily omits.

So Trump’s argument is a lie, but a clever lie. It’s something that will resonate with his voters, with the average American struggling to pay their bills. It’s purportedly about fairness, doing what’s right. Not taking over a sovereign nation, but returning to Americans what’s rightfully theirs.

It’s like Putin saying that the Donbas is full of Russians, so it really should be part of Russia. Or Xi Jinping saying that Taiwan is really part of China, so the two countries should be “reunified”.

It’s also cover for the real reason Trump would like to take over Canada: because we do have a lot of what the US needs, namely oil, water, and critical minerals. He would love to take control of the Arctic, ostensibly for security reasons, but really for the resources that lie beneath. Drill, baby, drill. But Trump can’t say that part out loud, because then he sounds like a communist dictator, not the leader of the free world.

Trump wants to use tariffs to break Canada. Our GDP could drop by two to four per cent and put us in an official recession. Two and half million jobs would be at risk. People would get poorer at a time when two million of us are already using food banks. Throw in a simultaneous diet of pro-annexation propaganda pumped out by Trump’s friends on social media, and the blathering of front groups funded by vested interests, and the 13% of Canadians who favour joining the US could swell to the point where they put political pressure on Ottawa to cave to Trump’s demands.

And then, all bets are off. Trump figures Canadians will beg to join the US, and he may not be wrong. Manifest destiny, achieved — and a YUGE legacy for him.

In the National Post, Carson Jerema wishes the Canadian media would calm the hell down and recognize that Trump is still trolling the heck out of them:

So it turns out Donald Trump doesn’t really want to annex Canada. Seriously. Anyone who watched his news conference Tuesday, and not just the short clip shared on social media, should come away assured, as much as one can be with Trump anyway, that his comments about this country becoming the 51st state really are little more than trolling. Certainly, the U.S. president-elect repeatedly musing about absorbing Canada has never been funny, and the words themselves undermine Canadian sovereignty, but nothing Trump said Tuesday was much different than what he’s been saying for weeks.

Yes, I’m aware that we are supposed to be in crisis mode at Trump’s latest musings, which the Toronto Star called “explosive”, and the Globe and Mail referred to as an “escalation”. Even the National Post’s Wednesday front page played up the president-elect’s comments. A similar response came from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who posted on social media that “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell” that Canada would merge with the U.S., and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who posted that “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period”.

As is so often the case, what Trump actually said is less exciting than the reaction it generated.

When asked by a reporter if he was “considering military force to annex and acquire Canada?” Trump responded, “No. Economic force because Canada and the United States, that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line and you take a look at what that looks like and it would also be much better for national security.”

That response is the sum total of the so-called “escalation”.

It is, at a brief glance, easy to see why so many felt compelled to react the way they did to the president-elect’s comments, but it was the reporter, not Trump, who used the word “force” first, and getting “rid” of the border could mean any number of arrangements, short of a merger. Beyond that, however, there isn’t much in the way of a new development in the supposed annexation crisis of 2025.

Forgotten Armies of the Vietnam War: Australia, Korea, China, USSR

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

NR: Sorry about this … RTH must have taken this video down at some point between me scheduling it to appear and today.

Real Time History
Published 16 Aug 2024

The Vietnam War is mainly remembered as a conflict between the Vietnamese and the United States. But both sides received direct and indirect support from other countries.
(more…)

QotD: Teenagers

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At some point I stopped wanting to go to the farm on Sundays; I was suffering from Sudden Onset Self-Addled Sullen Disengagement Syndrome, which strikes when you blow out 14 candles.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-08-10.

January 8, 2025

The Korean War 029 – The Third Battle of Seoul – January 7, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 7 Jan 2025

The Chinese People’s Volunteer Army crosses the Imjin River in force and attacks the South Korean capital. The best units available to Eighth Army commander Matt Ridgway defend it, but with more Chinese armies and reformed North Korean units pushing in the east, is there any hope of holding onto it?

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:09 Seoul Good
03:13 Seoul Gone
07:39 To Line D
10:20 The Ceasefire Committee
14:02 Summary
14:20 Conclusion
(more…)

Canada – “Absurd people facing an absurd political crisis”

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

At Reason, Liz Wolfe shows her worldly sophistication and disdain for her inferiors as she takes on the emotional labour of thinking about Canada for a brief moment:

US President-elect Donald Trump successfully trolled Justin Trudeau about Canada becoming the 51st state of the union.

I cannot believe I am being forced to care about Canada right now. They call their cops Mounties you know. Absurd people facing an absurd political crisis. Let’s dig in.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, over his nine-year reign, become terribly unpopular. He resigned yesterday. This was semiexpected because all relevant opposition parties had vowed to mount challenges to his leadership come late January/early February, and because Trudeau’s finance minister quit last month after the two clashed.

Canadians are pissed off, like so many others around the world, with the high cost of living, which they attribute to Trudeau. Earlier in his term, he prioritized climate change–related initiatives (like a costly carbon tax) and catering to Indigenous groups. He’s prioritized letting in lots of immigrants, which many Canadians have soured on. When the pandemic hit, provincial governments imposed economically ruinous lockdowns, and Trudeau himself imposed a vaccine mandate for all those entering the country, as well as the entire federal work force. The vaccine mandate for all border-crossers, which was in place from October 2021 to October 2022, spurred the Canadian trucker convoy, an occupation of Ottawa that attempted to protest the government to change this freedom-trampling policy. Trudeau’s response was to freeze the bank accounts of people involved, in an attempt to suppress the peaceful dissent.

When he first came to power in 2015, the nepo baby (son of another former prime minister) was widely admired due to his purported good looks and charm. When Donald Trump took office in the U.S. in January 2017, Trudeau quickly positioned himself as a foil to Trump, earning adoration from America’s #Resistance left. Now, those people’s opinions don’t really matter (if they ever did at all), and normal Canadians have seen first-hand the impacts of Trudeau’s policies. He sees the writing on the wall and is attempting to minimize the damage to his party.

“This country deserves a real choice in the next election and it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election,” he said in a press conference yesterday. In order to do that, he’s prorogued Parliament — suspending it without dissolving it.

“To allow his party’s thousands of members to choose his successor, a lengthy process that will involve campaigning, Mr. Trudeau suspended Parliament until March 24. A general election is expected to follow,” reports The New York Times. “Holding a party leadership election before a general one is par for the course in countries with parliamentary systems like Canada’s. Suspending Parliament to hold such an election is far less common. By doing so, Mr. Trudeau wards off the likely collapse of his minority government and gives the Liberals time to choose a leader unburdened by his dismal poll numbers.” In other words: Suspending Parliament is a political ploy to stop the bleeding and help his allies stay in power.

This final act seems par for the course for a man who prefers playing politics to crafting sound policy. It’s possible someone more freedom-appreciating will replace him (though I’m pretty sure 90 percent of the population qualifies as more freedom-appreciating than Trudeau). But this comes at a difficult time for Canada, as Trump mulls slapping 25 percent tariffs on all Canadian goods, partially blaming our northern neighbors for an influx of migrants and fentanyl. It remains to be seen whether Trudeau will be replaced with someone better and whether Canadians can dig themselves out of this terrible economic hole that’s been wrought by seemingly endless government spending.

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, John Carter links to a thread by Julius Ruechel on the Canadian system of governance:

What Julius Ruechel said:

Nothing about [Canada’s] dysfunctional parliamentary system makes a shred of sense (a thread🧵):

1/ Trudeau “resigned” today. And shut down parliament.

So, now we effectively have a kind of custodial govt for the next few months. Run by Trudeau.

2/ Only now, with parliament shut down, Trudeau and his cabinet continues to run the govt, issue govt contracts, control the treasury, and negotiate on the world stage on Canada’s behalf … but without any parliamentary oversight.

How do you hold a govt to account without a parliament? The police won’t do it — they’ve more than proven that over 9 years of rampant govt corruption and abuse.

3/ The Governor General (who is supposed to ensure that Canada has a functioning government) gave Trudeau the green light to shut down (prorogue) parliament without triggering an election. Even as the country continues to unravel and as Canada’s finances continue to spiral towards an inflationary debt and currency crisis … “go ahead, get your party in order, Canada can wait (paraphrasing)”

4/ What a lovely gift from the Governor General … all so that the same party that could have ousted Trudeau for 9 disastrous years, but didn’t, has time to pick a new leader to continue to govern us.

Remember, Trudeau’s resignation does not automatically trigger an election, only a leadership race within the Liberal Party (lasting a minimum of 3 months during which Trudeau still remains as Prime Minister). The winner of that race emerges to govern the country without having to face a general election open to all Canadians.

Throughout all of this fiasco, there has not been a non-confidence vote to trigger the fall of the govt. The Liberal Party retains its mandate to govern Canada (despite their leadership race) because the other left-wing parties (NDP, Greens, and Bloc Quebecois) continue to prop up Trudeau’s Liberal govt.

And now, with parliament prorogued, the other parties couldn’t trigger a non-confidence vote even if they wanted to. Parliament would need to sit again before that can happen.

5/ In other words, the Governor General (the only one who currently has the power to trigger an election) is keeping Canada in crisis in order to accomodate a political party that has lost all its legitimacy to govern.

But guess who appointed the Governor General … yup, Trudeau.

It gets worse …

6/ Voting in the Liberal leadership race is open to children as young as 14. And to foreign nationals living in Canada that don’t even have citizenship or residency. How is that even legal? What could possibly go wrong?

7/ By shutting down parliament, Trudeau has also effectively shut down the ongoing parliamentary investigation into foreign interference. Based on a govt report, there are at least 11 MPs (plus multiple support staff) who have been compromised yet continue to work in our govt. But, the Liberals have refused to release their names. Or to fire them.

And now, thanks to Trudeau’s prorogation stunt, we won’t know their names ahead of the next election.

8/ The Conservative party is likely to challenge the proroguation of parliament to try to trigger an immediate election. But 7 of Canada’s 9 Supreme Court judges were appointed by … you guessed it again … Trudeau.

9/ And if the Conservatives come to power under Pierre Poilievre when we finally do get another election, the legislation they want to pass requires the Senate to sign off on it.

But 90 of Canada’s 105 senators are appointed by Trudeau, with another 8 open seats that will likely also be filled by Trudeau during this “transition” period. Yes, he still has the power to do that … without parliamentary oversight.

10/ At the 1:15:50 mark of his January 2nd YouTube interview with Jordan Peterson, Pierre Poilievre even openly admitted that (because of the Liberal bias in the Senate) the Conservatives need Canadians to help him pass legislation by becoming much more politically active — specifically he needs them to put pressure on their senators to “motivate” them to support his economic reforms.

That might work in the US where senators are elected. But how do Canadians “put pressure on senators” when Canadian senators are appointed by the Prime Minister and serve for life (until age 75)?

11/ Nonetheless, at the 24:35 mark of the same interview with Jordan Peterson (https://youtu.be/Dck8eZCpglc?si=y268pZaYSBG0gPKR&t=1475), the leader of Canada’s official opposition party, Pierre Poilievre, proudly proclaimed that :

“we have … the best system of govt in the history of the world — the parliamentary system. Not the best govt, but the best system of govt.”

How reassuring … 🤦‍♂️

In the National Post, Carson Jerema argues for the abolition of the Liberal Party of Canada, the self-imagined “National Governing Party”:

The corrupting influence of the Liberal party has become all encompassing. When this or that cabinet minister gets uppity about being responsible with public money (Bill Morneau), or about interfering in criminal prosecutions (Jody Wilson-Raybould), they are simply replaced with someone more pliant, until that replacement is no longer useful, and is then kicked to the curb (David lametti, Chrystia Freeland). Ministers who had distinguished, or at least not humiliating, careers before politics, say a Bill Blair or a Marc Garneau, have been reduced to the role of yelping sycophant.

The illness radiates outward turning anything even remotely connected to government into a client or an arm of the Liberal party.

The explosion in the size of the federal bureaucracy, the vast expansion of corporate welfare into preferred Liberal businesses (read, green), Ottawa’s aggressive invasion into what’s left of provincial jurisdiction (dental care, pharmacare, energy and natural resources), has all been conducted for the benefit of the party.

Nothing happens in this country unless it benefits the Liberals. No one is hired, no cavity is filled, no money is invested and no child is educated, without partisan approval. And, it is only approved, if there is some electoral gain, however narrow. The rapid increase in immigration over the past decade could, as it has in the past, create a longterm base of Liberal voters. It is hard to believe the Liberals being as enthusiastic about immigration, if it didn’t have this prospect.

As government grows and grows and grows, it isn’t meeting any sort of public service need, or any ideological end, it is simply patronage on a grand scale. The entire state, and everyone in it has been turned into a beneficiary of the Liberals, all of us, part of the machine. Even Sir John A. Macdonald, fresh off the Pacific Scandal, would be embarrassed by this state of affairs.

All governments advance policies for electoral advantage, but there is something otherworldly about what the Liberals have done. Moreover, when what they do is plainly indefensible, such as dismissing Chinese election interference, or subordinating foreign policy to the preferences of Jew hating-pro-Hamas protesters, they can’t understand why anyone would ever question them. Large segments of the news media are always happy to comply and help the government gaslight the electorate.

How To Make 17th Century Clotted Cream – A History

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 27 Aug 2024

Clotted cream served with scones and jam

City/Region: England | Scotland
Time Period: 1670 | 1755

Clotted cream is one of the most delicious and simple foods I’ve ever had. It’s made with only one ingredient, but has a richness and nuttiness that is divine. It’s one of those foods that is difficult to track down the origins of, but one story includes the ancient Phoenicians, and another a fairy princess and prince. Both are equally likely to be true.

For best results, look for cream that isn’t ultra-pasteurized. Labels will say “pasteurized” or “low temp pasteurized”. This recipe doesn’t have a lot of active time, but the cream does need to cook for 12 hours, so I recommend starting first thing in the morning. It’s worth it.

    To make clouted Cream
    Take Milk that was milked in the morning, and scald it at noon; it must have a reasonable fire under it, but not too rash, and when it is scalding hot, that you see little Pimples begin to rise, take away the greatest part of the Fire, then let it stand and harden a little while, then take it off, and let it stand until the next day, covered, then take it off with a Skimmer.
    — The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet by Hannah Wolley, 1670

    Clouted Cream
    … If you please beat Part of it with a little Rose-water, and a Lair of unbeaten Clouts, with Sugar between …
    — A New and Easy Method of Cookery by Elizabeth Cleland, 1755

(more…)

QotD: “Striver” lifestyles for each generation

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

Our forefathers, the Boomers, competed for social status the old fashioned way — bigger houses, fancier cars, trendier job titles, younger / hotter / tighter trophy wives, that kind of thing. When Gen X entered the workforce, we couldn’t compete with that, and not (just) because of Boomer narcissism; there were just too few of us. So we invented the “lifestyle striver” method of social competition. We made fun of the corporate ladder-climbers (anyone else remember “die yuppie scum” from the late 80s?) and embraced “authentic” experience.

That’s why everything was suddenly so Xxxtreeeeem!!! in the early 90s through the Naughts. We can’t afford to fly to Gstaad for a ski weekend, but we can buy a snowboard. Dad might be on Wife 3.0 at that point, and she’s younger than us, but our girlfriends — marriage is for squares — are so much more environmentally friendly. We can’t compete with their high-end clothes, so we’ll push for “business casual” in the office, homeless-casual in our personal lives (everyone can afford thrift store flannel). And so on.

The Millennials and Gen Z, lacking the wherewithal to do even that (what with the six figure college debt and all), invented the “persona striver” as their means of intra-group social competition. For the low low price of a smartphone and a data plan, you too can pretend to be The Most Interesting Persyn in the World online. I’m told there are entire subcultures online, “cottagecore” and the like, revolving around aping the style and mannerisms of prior eras. “Anonymous” seems to think that these kids are actually, physically doing this stuff — that the “cottagecore” lesbians really are moving into little houses on the prairie to bake bread by hand — but it’s obvious that’s not necessary, as this is an entirely online thing and Photoshop exists.

Either way, it’s sufficient for our purposes to note that the cost of entry keeps dropping, while the “totalization” (for lack of a better word) of the lifestyle keeps growing. An old-fashioned, conspicuous-consumption style striver was free to be an individual. Yeah, sure, they were all “yuppies”, but there were Protestant yuppies and Catholic yuppies (and atheist yuppies and everything in between). There were Liberal yuppies and Conservative yuppies (and Libertarian yuppies and everything in between). You might find the same few standard books on all their shelves — management meatball crap; the novels of Danielle Steele and Sydney Sheldon — the same way you’d find the same basic kinds of clothes in their closets, but there was still a lot of individual variety within those broad constraints. You could predict a few broad, superficial things about a yuppie from his business card, but there were no safe bets on anything else.

The lifestyle and persona strivers, on the other hand, are much more narrow. While the yuppie might go to Molokai this summer on vacation, next summer to Italy, because why not?, the lifestyle striver was pretty much trapped in his niche — it’s trail hiking or bust. And the persona striver can’t afford to go anywhere, so xzhey have to make up elaborate justifications for it (“by staying home and baking these muffins from an original 18th century recipe, I’m being completely carbon neutral”). It’s no accident, in the Marxist sense, that marathons and Crossfit and all that shit really took off after the turn of the century, as well as the whole “animal rescue” deal — it’s both a lifestyle and a persona, and it costs next to nothing, and you can, indeed must, do it all day every day.

Severian, “Striving for Revolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-11.

January 7, 2025

Justin Trudeau announces his resignation … and a nation rejoices!

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

Rather than letting Canadians have an election, Justin Trudeau announced that he is resigning as Liberal party leader but that Parliament will be prorogued for long enough for the Liberals to run a full leadership campaign. This means that Trudeau’s replacement will likely be prime minister for roughly as long as it takes for Parliament to come to order after prorogation and not a minute longer. Nice work, Justin!

Full credit to the Babylon Bee for their coverage:

It’s impossible not to feel that Trudeau’s ego has been the biggest player in our national psychodrama over the last few months (years, actually), as it seems inevitable that Trudeau’s hapless successor is going to be the Liberal Party’s version of former PM Kim Campbell, although probably not being reduced to a caucus of two seats in a landslide, as Campbell endured.

The Line‘s immediate response quite properly describes Trudeau as “an absolute Muppet”, and I think that’s pretty unkind … to Muppets:

There was only one major thought that crossed your Line editors’ minds when watching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation speech on the porch of Rideau Cottage on Monday morning: “Jesus Christ, the absolute self regard of this fucking Muppet.”

Yes, that’s harsh. We’re even almost sorry about it. And we’ll touch on the humanity of it all in a moment. But for now, like, gosh. This isn’t good.

We are well aware that much of the media will be replete with mopey paeans to the decade-long service of this prime minister, even as he announces his entirely hypocritical plan to prorogue Parliament until March 24 in order to enable his party to assemble a chaotic and hasty leadership race. You’ll get none of that from us here at The Line. Trudeau deserves no such consideration — at least not at the top. From where we sit today, the sheer arrogance of this man, and the party that has enabled him, has just locked the nation into months of parliamentary paralysis in the midst of what is likely to shortly become an economic trade war and a broader international geopolitical realignment.

While we fully expect news of Trudeau’s resignation to lead many of our readers to sound the bells, we share none of their relief. The decision he announced on Monday demonstrates a total lack of respect for voters, an utter disregard for the good of the nation, and a profound obliviousness to the realities of the international environment we are about to find ourselves in.

And while we’d like to give Trudeau some credit for demonstrating an ounce of genuine humility in his resignation speech, too much of it was crammed with statements of breathtaking, overweening egotism; he pegged his decision to leave squarely on internal divisions — a fantastic parting “fuck you” to his caucus that abrogates any attempt at accountability for his own policy or leadership failures.

Trudeau repeatedly justified his decision to ask for the house to be prorogued by noting that Parliament had become dysfunctional, the opposition parties had stalled business of the house on process questions, and the government was in need of a “reset”.

This blithely ignores a few points, including the fact that part of the reason Parliament has been stuck in a procedural quagmire is because Trudeau’s own government has refused to hand over a potentially incriminating dossier that may demonstrate thwacks of taxpayer cash being siphoned off to well-connected businesses and insiders via what the opposition has deemed a “green slush fund”.

This is a matter upon which the Commons’ Liberal speaker ruled against his own party. The Liberals could have stopped the pseudo-filibuster by turning over to Parliament the documents that they are required to turn over. They didn’t.

The very foundations of the Westminster parliamentary system are rooted in the concept of confidence: if you can’t maintain the confidence of the house, you cannot rule Parliament. Prorogation is a procedural tool intended to govern ordinary logistics. It should never be used to circumvent a matter of confidence — and while it was delicious to watch Trudeau squirm on this point during his resignation speech, defending Stephen Harper’s 2008 use of it in order to justify his own, the fact remains that both leaders have now set and affirmed a dangerous norm that undermines one of the foundational democratic concepts of our democracy and how it functions.

When a government finds itself this battered and unpopular, and when a long-serving leader has announced that he’ll step down, while prorogation may be legal, there’s only one politically and even morally right thing to do. There is only one way to “reset” parliament. Only one.

Call an election.

Paul Wells says “The Liberals give themselves three months to save the furniture”:

He was late as usual. He sounded sad. The wind blew his script away. He said more or less what you expected. When his time in office ends at the end of March, he’ll have been prime minister for a few months less than Stephen Harper was. His party has very little chance of recovering, but more than it had yesterday. It would have been so easy to pick his own time, maybe at the end of 2022, but apparently these decisions are hard to make.

Things happen fast. It’s been six weeks, Monday to Monday, since Donald Trump threatened 25-per-cent tariffs on everything Canadian. Three weeks since Chrystia Freeland resigned from cabinet. In two weeks Donald Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States. Justin Trudeau’s resignation is a pure product of this crisis.

I see a straight line from Trump’s Truth Social outburst of Nov. 25 to this week’s events. Trudeau’s circle once thought a second Trump victory would help them make the case against Pierre Poilievre. It’s fair to say the results are not up to their hopes. With Elon Musk continuing his hobby kibbitzing in the politics of countries around the world, Canada will now stand as a warning to governments elsewhere: Trump and his crew can take you down.

Having stalled until he ran out of options, Trudeau will now become incidental to events. There’s a lot going on. Wistful tribute speeches in the House of Commons will have to wait. The Trudeau succession will play out quickly, in four arenas at once: Parliament; the Liberal Party; the electorate; and Canada’s national security. Events in each venue will influence the others.

Some people accuse Trudeau of doubling the national debt during his time in office — from C$612B in 2015 to C$1.2 trillion currently — but as mathematically inclined commentators have noted, Trudeau also successfully engineered the decline of the value of the Canadian dollar so that the actual increase in national debt is less than 55%! Success!

At Spiked, Tom Slater bids farewell to “Canada’s first black prime minister”:

Yes, Justin Trudeau – the man who proved that in these topsy-turvy political times you can be a liberal and an authoritarian, and painfully woke while also having spent much of your youth in black face – has finally resigned.

The writing’s been on the wall for some time now. After historically low poll ratings, came the resignation before Christmas of his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, who clashed with Trudeau about how to tackle president-elect Donald Trump’s imperious threats of a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods. In the end, Justin jumped before he was pushed.

After almost a decade in power, he will step down as prime minister and Liberal leader as soon as a successor can be found. Polls suggest that, such is the hole he has left his party in, whoever replaces him will likely face a shellacking in the upcoming election.

Where did it all go wrong? When Trudeau took the reins of his nation back in 2015 – following in the footsteps of his father, Fide … sorry, Pierre – he rode on a wave of popular support and corporate-media swooning.

With the election of another pampered rich kid south of the border a year later, Trudeau was praised in the international media as the anti-Trump – progressive, pro-migration and drop-dead gorgeous, to boot!

Indeed, the next time an establishment scribe slurs Trump supporters as doe-eyed dolts dazzled by celebrity, point them in the direction of the gushing coverage of “hunky” Trudeau, who seemed to govern as if he was in a budget version of The West Wing.

Soon enough, he began carrying on like an unsubtle caricature of a cringe, establishment liberal, chiding women for saying “mankind”, instead of “peoplekind”, and declaring that he was insisting on a 50:50 male-to-female cabinet “because it’s 2015“.

Trudeau is the apotheosis of a hectoring style of politics that assumes voters are terrible bigots in need of lecturing, and women and minorities are perennial victims in need of his paternalistic assistance.

I’m frankly amazed it took the good people of Canada almost 10 years to wipe that smug look off his face.

Caesar’s dictatorship and the Ides of March – The Conquered And The Proud 11

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 31 Jul 2024

Continuing “The conquered and the proud”, this time we look at Julius Caesar as dictator in Rome, about his activities and reforms and his murder on the 15th March — The Ides of March — in 44 BC. We talk about Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators and what motivated them.

QotD: Most people hate their jobs

Filed under: Business, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A Gallup poll found that 85 percent of people hate their jobs. Business schools would say that this is due to poor strategy, poor leadership, or poor innovation. Nothing that cannot be fixed with an MBA degree. The real explanation is much simpler, however: 85 percent of people hate their jobs because, given the choice, they would never do them in the first place. Twenty years ago, I applied to a business school. A good one. Actually, one of the best. When the acceptance letter arrived, I was convinced that I’d been admitted under some female quota, as my abilities are perfectly average. Then I started the course and realised that so were everyone else’s. No one in my class was especially bright. Or if they were, it was of the topical, tactical sort of intelligence — one that allows a person to see the different angles but somehow totally miss the point. The course itself was akin to vocational training: two months of accounting, two months of strategy, two months of marketing, and then off you go, ripe and ready for the office. Sorry, for leadership — which is telling other people in the office what to do.

We do, of course, have a choice. If you don’t like office work, you can become a PE teacher. If you are bad with authority, start your own business. The corporate sector is too greedy for you? Join an NGO. How glorious our life would be if things were so simple. Regrettably, they are not. Nicolai Berdyaev, a Russian religious philosopher during the first half of the twentieth century, argued — quite convincingly — that this choice to which we habitually refer is not really a choice at all. There is no freedom in it. It is a decision to adjust, adapt, and fit in. It is not a choice to create. At best, it is the choice of an animal looking for food and shelter, not of a human agent created in God’s image. He was right. As we leave childhood and the need to earn a living becomes increasingly urgent, our dreams start getting trimmed and trampled and squashed, until there comes a day when we no longer remember them. We begin by seeking the sublime. We end up resigned to the ordinary.

Elena Shalneva, “Work — the Tragedy of Our Age”, Quillette, 2020-01-29.

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