Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2018

“Libertarian brutalists” … yet another name for the alt-right

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

At Catallaxy Files, Jeffrey Tucker identifies two very different kinds of libertarian:

Why should we favor human liberty over a social order ruled by power? In providing the answer, I would suggest that libertarians can generally be divided into two camps: humanitarians and brutalists.

The humanitarians are drawn to reasons such as the following. Liberty allows peaceful human cooperation. It inspires the creative service of others. It keeps violence at bay. It allows for capital formation and prosperity. It protects human rights of all against invasion. It allows human associations of all sorts to flourish on their own terms. It socializes people with rewards toward getting along rather than tearing each other apart, and leads to a world in which people are valued as ends in themselves rather than fodder in the central plan.

We know all of this from history and experience. These are all great reasons to love liberty.

But they are not the only reasons that people support liberty. There is a segment of the population of self-described libertarians — described here as brutalists — who find all the above rather boring, broad, and excessively humanitarian. To them, what’s impressive about liberty is that it allows people to assert their individual preferences, to form homogeneous tribes, to work out their biases in action, to ostracize people based on “politically incorrect” standards, to hate to their heart’s content so long as no violence is used as a means, to shout down people based on their demographics or political opinions, to be openly racist and sexist, to exclude and isolate and be generally malcontented with modernity, and to reject civil standards of values and etiquette in favor of antisocial norms.

These two impulses are radically different. The first values the social peace that emerges from freedom, while the second values the freedom to reject cooperation in favor of gut-level prejudice. The first wants to reduce the role of power and privilege in the world, while the second wants the freedom to assert power and privilege within the strict confines of private property rights and the freedom to disassociate.

To be sure, liberty does allow both the humanitarian and the brutalist perspective, as implausible as that might seem. Liberty is large and expansive and asserts no particular social end as the one and only way. Within the framework of liberty, there is the freedom to love and to hate. At the same time, they constitute very different ways of looking at the world — one liberal in the classical sense and one illiberal in every sense — and it is good to consider that before you, as a libertarian, find yourself allied with people who are missing the main point of the liberal idea.

In my experience, most of the people who espouse these “brutalist” notions are not people who have ever identified as libertarians.

October 25, 2017

Climb aboard the invective treadmill!

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

Megan McArdle tries to point out the urge to call everyone you don’t like a “racist” or “white supremacist” runs you the same trust risk that the boy who cried wolf did:

It’s the inverse of what Steven Pinker has dubbed “the euphemism treadmill,” where we try to find nicer words for something we don’t think is very nice, and find that the new words quickly take on all the old connotations. So “toilet,” turns into “bathroom,” then migrates onward to “rest room.” Only we still know there’s a toilet behind that door, and whatever words we use about it, our feelings don’t change.

This is why attempting to change how Americans feel about illegal migrants by changing the terms we use to describe them is a project doomed to failure; whether they are “illegal aliens” or “undocumented immigrants,” the political realities remain the same. People who feel negatively toward “illegals” feel just as negatively toward “undocumented immigrants.”

The invective treadmill works in a similar fashion, only in reverse.

[…]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, I found myself confronted by a curious problem: Many of my readers simply didn’t take it seriously when I pointed out that Donald Trump was, if not an outright racist himself, at least happily pandering to people who were.

“The media calls every Republican racist,” my conservative readers replied. “They said it about Mitt Romney, they said it about George Bush, so what’s different about Trump?”

They were right. Other columnists had accused Romney and Bush of being racist and pandering to racists. I pointed out that Trump’s racist appeals were different, and much worse, than anything that earlier Republican presidential candidates had been accused of. But it didn’t do any good. The media had cried wolf to condemn garden-variety Republicans; labels like “racist” had been rendered useless when a true threat emerged. We shouted to no avail as Trump coyly flirted with hardcore white supremacists, something no mainstream party had done for decades.

Indeed, it seems to me that critical race theorists have gone to “white supremacy” precisely because the increasingly broad uses of the word “racism” have made it less effective than it used to be at rallying moral outrage. The term still packs some wallop, but less than it once did, because it is now defined so broadly that a Broadway musical could sing “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” White supremacy, on the other hand, is still clearly understood as beyond the pale.

But if we indiscriminately apply the term to everything from the alt-right white nationalist Richard Spencer, to anyone who thinks that football players should stand for the national anthem … for how long will white supremacy still be considered beyond the pale? What happens if people accused of racism start shrugging off the epithet — or worse, embracing it? And when another Richard Spencer comes along, how will we convey how dangerous he is?

August 19, 2017

How to Safely Watch The Eclipse or CNN

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Published on 18 Aug 2017

Remy has a few helpful tips for safely watching large orange balls of gas.

Written by Remy. Produced by Austin Bragg

August 18, 2017

“Rebel Commander Ezra Levant” calls retreat

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

In the National Post, Chris Selley recounts the sudden changes in staffing and editorial policy at Ezra Levant’s mini media empire:

If Rebel Media’s uppance was coming, if some event was finally going to wipe the smirk off its face, it could hardly have been more hideously appropriate than what happened over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va.

Live on the internet, Rebel personality Faith Goldy was blathering on about how intolerant the left is, and about left-right double standards in the media and in policing, and about all the other things that gladden the hearts of the Rebel’s grievance-based nihilist-conservative fans.

And then, right there in the frame, someone rammed his car into the crowd of counter-protesters she was mocking, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring many others. That guy, allegedly, was 20-year-old James Alex Fields, whose high school teachers said he was obsessed with Adolf Hitler in all the wrong ways.

Fun time was over. This was, apparently, a real live neo-Nazi committing, certainly, real live murder.

At this point, Rebel Commander Ezra Levant could have steered his vessel in one of several directions. “Nothing to do with us,” he could have said, plausibly enough.

[…]

Levant could have gone there; instead, he blinked.

“When I first heard of the alt-right a year ago, I thought it simply meant the insurgent right, the politically incorrect right … the right that backed Trump and his ‘Make America Great Again’ style over Jeb Bush and the swamp,” he wrote in a purported “staff memo.”

“But the alt-right has changed into something new, especially since Trump’s election,” Levant lamented. “Now the leading figure … is Richard Spencer, and other white nationalists.” There were actual Nazi flags in Charlottesville, Levant noted, waxing appalled (while allowing they might have been carried by “agents provocateurs”). That’s “racist,” he averred, rather than “conservative,” and he would have none of it.

It is, in a word, pathetic. Spencer coined the term “alt-right,” for heaven’s sake. He has never, ever been shy about his white nationalist views. A manifesto he released before the march in Charlottesville talks of “a shared civilization” that “sprang” from the “Aryan” race, and dismisses the idea of “Judeo-Christian values” as “a distortion of the historical and metaphysical reality of both Jews and Europeans.”

I haven’t closely followed the adventures of Ezra and his Rebel Media organization, so the sudden rash of departures (Brian Lilley and Barbara Kay, in particular) caught me somewhat by surprise. I don’t use Rebel Media as a source, but I have linked to non-Rebel Media articles by Lilley and Kay, and probably other contributors outside that affiliation. I had noted the organization’s dedication to “afflicting the comfortable” — almost always those on the political left — without much corresponding “comforting the afflicted” to balance it out. Explicitly abandoning the Richard Spencer wing of the alt-right is probably a good move, but it may have come too late to prevent the alt-right taint from permanently damaging their brand.

August 15, 2017

Brendan O’Neill on the similarities of the Alt-Right and the Ctrl-Left

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

Posting to Facebook on Monday, he wrote:

It’s becoming so clear now why the war of words between SJWs and the new white nationalists is so intense. It isn’t because they have huge ideological differences — it’s because they have so much in common. Both are obsessed with race, SJWs demanding white shame, the alt-right responding with white pride. Both view everyday life and culture through a highly racialised filter. SJWs can’t even watch a movie without counting how many lines the black actor has in comparison with the white actor so that they can rush home and tumblr about the injustice of it all. Both have a seemingly boundless capacity for self-pity. Both are convinced they’re under siege, whether by patriarchy, transphobia and the Daily Mail (SJWs) or by pinkos and blacks (white nationalists). Both have a deep censorious strain. And both crave recognition of their victimhood and flattery of their feelings. This is really what they’re fighting over — not principles or visions but who should get the coveted title of the most hard-done-by identity. They’re auditioning for social pity. “My life matters! My pain matters! I matter!” The increasing bitterness and even violence of their feud is not evidence of its substance, but the opposite: it’s the narcissism of small differences.

July 15, 2017

The Canadian Red Ensign

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

Elizabeth mentioned to me the other day that some idiots in the Canadian alt-right movement are attempting to hijack the Canadian Red Ensign as their version of the Confederate battle flag. Given how historically illiterate reporters tend to be, it’s not surprising that they appear to be buying this line in their coverage of protest groups like the “Proud Boys”. In the Edmonton Journal, Paula Simons tries to put in a good word for the flag Canada used up until 1965:

Canadian Red Ensign 1921-1957 (this is the version I’ve been flying outside my house for over a decade)

First they came for Pepe the Frog. And I said nothing because, to be honest, I didn’t much care that alt-right trolls and white supremacists had co-opted an innocent cartoon frog meme for their own foul purposes.

But now they’ve come for the Red Ensign.

On Canada Day, a small group of alt-right agitators who called themselves the Proud Boys disrupted a First Nations ceremonial event in Halifax. They arrived carrying a Red Ensign flag.

While the Red Ensign was never Canada’s official flag, different variations of it served as Canada’s de facto symbol from 1868 until 1965, when we adopted the red-and-white Maple Leaf flag.

The Proud Boys aren’t alone.

All kinds of conservative fringe groups have adopted the Red Ensign as their standard in recent years. They range from the pseudo-intellectual Northern Dawn movement to the more overtly neo-Nazi Aryan Guard. The idea is to somehow turn the Red Ensign into the Canadian version of the Confederate flag, a symbol of white supremacy. The flag, they believe, hearkens back to some mythical era of when Canada was “pure” and “white.”

This ahistorical appropriation of the Red Ensign isn’t new. It goes back to the early 2000s. But the Proud Boys, the anti-feminist, pro-white group started by journalist turned shock comic turned activist Gavin McInnes, have been getting much more attention. That’s because McInnes is such a canny public provocateur and a master media manipulator.

His racism, sexism and anti-Semitism are supposedly ironic and performative — he’s made hate-mongering into a kind of performance art.

[…]

The Red Ensign has been part of Canadian history since 1682 when the Hudson’s Bay Company flew a variation of the pennant over its forts and on its canoes. It followed Canadians into battle at Vimy Ridge and at Dieppe and Hong Kong and Normandy and Ortona. That’s the flag Canadians flew when they liberated Holland from the Nazis. It’s the flag Canadians flew when they defended South Korea at the Battle of Kapyong, the flag they flew when they went to keep peace in Cyprus.

April 3, 2017

Decoding TLAs among the PUAs

Filed under: Humour, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kim du Toit on a specific example of the use of jargon heavily sprinkled with three-letter acronyms (TLAs) and extended three-letter acronyms (ETLAs, or four-letter acronyms) to create or enhance the impression of their specialized insider knowledge, in this case among the pick-up artists (PUAs):

In every cult, there are people who try to set their group aside from the rest of the population with language — in other words, creating a shorthand that only the initiates or insiders know, which (I guess) makes them feel superior to outsiders. Many times, this language is made up of abbreviations or (my particular bête noir) acronyms that create a level of inscrutability to the casual reader or onlooker and render the simplest of statements completely opaque to the uninitiated. (I’ll talk another time about academic language, which shuns abbreviation and acronym in favor of dense, elliptical words and phrases used as a shorthand among fellow academics and gives the users a veneer of erudition, usually false.)

[…]

All this pales into insignificance by comparison to people who toss off expressions like “This beta orbiter tried to neg the AMOG in front of the SHB to increase his SMV.” Allow me to translate: “This weakling who hangs around pretty women trying to curry favor with them tried to cut down a charismatic man in front of a beautiful woman, in order to make himself more attractive to her.” (AMOG = Alpha Male Of [the] Group or Alpha Male Other Guy, SHB = Smokin’ Hot Babe [sometimes V(very)H(ot)B(abe), and SMV = Sexual Market Value.)

I speak here, of course, of the PUA (pick-up artist) community, in which the High Priests have created this entire glossary of acronyms to show that, yes, they are the gate-keepers of knowledge which, if you buy their training manuals or pay to attend their seminars, you too, Mr. Sad Beta Male, can unlock the secrets of access to SHB pudenda (Latin alert) and become a “notch collector” similar to these skilled exponents of the art.

It’s bad enough when used in a sentence, but when used graphically or in a chart to illustrate a concept or theory, it becomes completely opaque. Here’s a beauty which attempts to show the correlation between a woman’s looks and the likelihood of her being bitchy:

VHB10 -> BQ 0
HB9 -> BQ 0-1
HB8 -> BQ 1-2
PJ7 -> BQ 3-4
PJ6 -> BQ 5-7
PJ5 -> BQ 6-10
PJ4 -> BQ 4-10
UG3 -> BQ 1-8
UG2 -> BQ 1-4
UG1 -> BQ 0-3
VUG0 -> BQ 0-1

VHB = Very Hot Babe, HB = Hot Babe, PJ = Plain Jane, UG = Ugly Girl, VUG = Very Ugly Girl, and the numeric qualifiers 1-10 are the common delimiters on the Female Hotness Scale (FHS). BQ, by the way, is Bitchiness Quotient, and the numeric qualifiers there are the levels thereof.

Note that this is presented as a scientific analysis or model, when in fact it’s no such thing: it’s a creation solely of the writer’s observation or theory and not by actual, you know, data — but creating acronyms gives it quasi-scientific gravitas — damn it, another Latin word, but you know what I mean, right? It’s kind of a pity, because the author at Chateau Artiste has an excellent way with the English language, when he’s not talking utter bullshit like the above. (Credit where it’s due, though: he also called Trump for the overwhelming electoral victory long before anyone else did, so he’s a more-insightful observer of trends than most mainstream media pundits.)

March 20, 2017

Towards a taxonomy of the tribes of the Alt-Right

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

A guest post at Catallaxy Files tries to identify the various sub-groups of the larger Alt-Right movement:

The Alt-Right may be described as the group of people who have been cast out of polite, progressive society. It is not a particularly intellectual movement, but this is a characteristic of the mechanism of its formation: Intellectuals as a group largely have the capacity and inclination to avoid being kicked out of polite society. This is not to suggest that the typical member of the Alt-Right is brutish; far from it. One of the characteristics of the progressive movement is its tendency to attack the people for their privilege: the people who choose to become Alt-Right are both able and independently minded. These are people who get things done.

[…]

Who are they and what do they believe? Again, there isn’t exactly a formal list. Moreover, many loudly deny being part of the Alt-Right, while quietly indicating that they are somewhat aligned. There are some identifiable groupings. Among them there are degrees of acceptance of the truths that are colloquially called ‘red pills’ (as per the Matrix). To this end, Vox Day, one of the more intellectually capable individuals who is openly part of the Alt-Right, set out 16 points on which there is general agreement. A new person in the movement – either intellectually curious or recently cast out – may only agree with 3 or 4 of these points. These people are considered ‘Alt-Lite’. Anyone who agrees with the vast bulk of these points is ‘Alt-Right’. Those on the spectrum from White Nationalism to White Supremacy are a subgroup referred to as the ‘Alt-White’; those with a broader view that has scope for all nationalities and peoples as the ‘Alt-West’. Finally, there are a group of generally aligned intellectual strands which are referred to collectively as the Dark Enlightenment.

The Alt-White holds an interesting position within the Alt-Right. From one perspective, they have been cast out the longest, and were also the originators of the term ‘Alt-Right’, which lends them a touch of primacy. At the same time, they are inclined to a degree of overextension and the their intellectual output is targeted at a broader but less educated base than some other groups. There is a degree of tension, especially where white nationalism gives way to white supremacy. […]

The Alt-West seems to be where a lot of those who were cast out from a more liberal or libertarian position seem to end up. These people may have come to the Alt-Right out of Gamergate, out of the computing/technology industry, out of science fiction community, or a number of other incidents. […] Gamergate is a story in itself, starting with a personal feud on a gaming site and morphing into an acrimonious ideological confrontation between an “alt-right” group and the feral left.

The Alt-Lite is really about getting your toes wet. Its transitional. As such it described people in process more than a set community. That said, places like this expose people to a metered dose of this red-pill.

There is another faction that is roughly ‘men’s groups’, men trying to navigate a world that is hostile to them and to family formation. There is some deep stuff in there if you are looking into social interaction, but it’s largely not suitable for ‘polite company’. A number of the men who started that grouping have broadened out from that starting base. See this site or this one for something less given in to the hedonism and base tendencies of the age.

March 8, 2017

QotD: Canadian attitudes to America

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

Canadians’ views on American politics are generally fairly predictable. Being Canadian means a degree of smugness blended with a drop or two of envy and a fairly constant need to assert moral superiority. In a very polite, but persistent way.

The candidacy, nomination and election of Donald Trump gave the better class of Canadian plenty of opportunity to show each other just how intelligent and enlighted they were. The Coynes and Kinsellas competed with each other in the political snobbery sweepstakes. Trump was Hitler, the Republicans the Nazi Party, Steve Bannon was a badly dressed Göring or, more likely, Satan himself. Breitbart News was Der Stürmer, the alt-right was universally the SS, the Trump regime overnight transformed America – save for the brave “Resistance” – into an anti-semitic, racist, fascist, misogynistic state in which freedom of the press and human rights in general were crushed under the jackbooted heels of Trump’s evil to a man (and pretend woman) Cabinet.

It has been tons of fun to watch ostensibly rational, intelligent, people reach immediately for the white supremacist smear tool kit in the face of the unthinkable occurring in our neighbour to the South. The fact that, one month into the Trump Presidency, the worst he seems to have done is be rude to CNN and the New York Times doesn’t deter our good and decent Canadians one bit. They just know that Trump is an evilton and, at any moment, will open the concentration camps and start rounding up Mexicans, Jews, Blacks, Muslims, Women, Queers, NYT reporters and anyone else the human Cheeto and his henchmen find objectionable.

And, to make the entire thing even more ominous, there seems to be a belief that Trump was put into position by none other than Prince of Darkness, Vladimir Putin and that Trump is simply following orders. Or something.

Jay Currie, “Trump and the Canadians”, Jay Currie, 2017-02-25.

January 30, 2017

An interesting reading on the significance of #GamerGate

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

At Samizdata, Perry de Havilland considers the historical footnote that was #GamerGate:

Looking back, it’s hard to overstate the cultural significance of GamerGate: it marked when the Left suddenly and unexpectedly lost control of social media, right at the point where the influence of social media actually started to matter. In a sense, it was the second wave of discontent that started with the arrival of anti-MSM blogs in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but within a very different internet environment compared to ‘The Golden Age of Blogging’ 2001-2010. As has often been the case in military campaigns, when one side becomes greatly overextended, they only realise they have lost the initiative when they seek to advance and experience a completely unexpected reversal: a result that may seem obvious and perhaps even inevitable to a historian looking back, but which was far from obvious to the people on the ground at the time.

So certain was the Left that they had won the culture war, so confident with the established media under their effective control that ‘truth’ was theirs to declare, that they gave up on any pretence of objectivity. After all, their enemies had been swept from both airwaves and print (I sometimes cannot tell the difference between the Times and the Guardian and the Economist). And so they began to manoeuvre with the assurance and arrogance of an army under an umbrella of complete air(wave) supremacy, a supremacy that suddenly proved to be illusory because opinions had moved on-line.

December 10, 2016

ESR spelunks the alt-right

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ESR has been busy with absorbing technical projects, so he’s not blogging as frequently as he used to. Here’s his take on the alt-right phenomenon:

First, while I’m not entirely sure of everything the alt-right is (it’s a rather amorphous phenomenon) it is not the KKK and neo-Nazis. The most that can truthfully be said is that ‘alt-right’ serves as a recent flag of convenience to which some old-fashioned white supremacists are busily trying to attach themselves.

Also, the alt-right is not Donald Trump and his Trumpkins, either. He’s an equally old-fashioned populist continuous with William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long. If you tossed a bunch of alt-right memes at him, I doubt he’d even understand them, let alone agree.

The defining characteristic of the alt-right is, really, corrosive snarkiness. To the extent an origin can be identified, it was as as a series of message-board pranks on 4chan. There’s no actual ideological core to it – it’s a kind of oppositional attitude-copping without a program, mordantly nasty but unserious.

There’s also some weird occultism attached – the half-serious cult of KEK, aka Pepe, who may or may not be an ancient Egyptian frog-god who speaks to his followers via numerological coincidences. (Donald Trump really wouldn’t get that part.)

Some elements of the alt-right are in fact racist (and misogynist, and homophobic, and other bad words) a la KKK/Nazi, but that’s not a defining characteristic and it’s anyway difficult to tell the genuine haters from those for whom posing as haters is a form of what 4chan types call “griefing”. That’s social disruption for the hell of it.

It is worth noting that another part of what is going on here is a visceral rejection of politically-correct leftism, one which deliberately inverts its premises. The griefers pose as racists and misogynists because they think it’s the most oppositional stance they can take to bullies and rage-mobbers who position themselves as anti-racists and feminists.

My sense is that the true haters are a tiny minority compared to the griefers and anti-PC rejectionists, but the griefers are entertained by others’ confusion on this score and don’t intend to clear it up.

As has been pointed out many times, the habit of all too many on the left to describe anyone to the the right of them politically as being racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc., has reduced the effectiveness and even encouraged otherwise sensible people to start describing themselves in those terms. In the same way that the epithet “fascist” no longer has any meaning beyond “something or someone I don’t like”, these other terms have also lost much of their power through massive over-use.

December 9, 2016

Global anti-libertarianism

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

Tom G. Palmer on the rising tide of anti-libertarian parties, organizations, and groups around the world:

A spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of radical anti-libertarian movements, each grappling with the others like scorpions in a bottle and all competing to see which can dismantle the institutions of liberty the fastest. Some are ensconced in the universities and other elite centers, and some draw their strength from populist anger. The leftist and the rightist versions of the common anti-libertarian cause are, moreover, interconnected, with each fueling the other. All explicitly reject individual liberty, the rule of law, limited government, and freedom of exchange, and they promote instead radical, albeit aggressively opposed, forms of identity politics and authoritarianism. They are dangerous and should not be underestimated.

In various guises, such movements are challenging libertarian values and principles across the globe, especially in Europe, in America, and in parts of Asia, but their influence is felt everywhere. They share a radical rejection of the ideas of reason, liberty, and the rule of law that animated the American Founding and are, indeed, the foundations of modernity. Those who prefer constitutionalism to dictatorship, free markets to cronyist or socialist statism, free trade to autarchy, toleration to oppression, and social harmony to irreconcilable antagonism need to wake up, because our cause and the prosperity and peace it engenders are in grave danger.

THREE THREATS

At least three symbiotic threats to liberty can be seen on the horizon: a) identity politics and the zero-sum political economy of conflict and aggression they engender; b) populism and the yearning for strongman rule that invariably accompanies it; and c) radical political Islamism. They share certain common intellectual fountainheads and form an interlocking network, energizing each other at the expense of the classical liberal consensus.

Although all those movements are shot through with fallacies, especially economic fallacies, they are not driven merely by lack of understanding of economic principles, as so many statist interventions are. While most support for the minimum wage, trade restrictions, or prohibition of narcotics rests on factual misapprehensions of their consequences, the intellectual leaders of these illiberal movements are generally not thoughtless people. They often understand libertarian ideas fairly well, and they reject them root and branch. They believe that the ideas of equality before the law, of rule-based legal and political systems, of toleration and freedom of thought and speech, of voluntary trade — especially among strangers — for mutual benefit, and of imprescriptible and equal individual rights are phony, self-interested camouflage for exploitation promoted by evil elites, and that those who uphold them are either evil themselves or hopelessly naïve.

H/T to Johnathan Pearce for the link.

November 30, 2016

Swept along in the wake of Trump’s election victory

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

Kathy Shaidle didn’t make any friends among the alt-Right with her most recent column:

Weeks later, Trump’s triumph still seems slightly unreal; I permitted myself to purchase Time magazine’s special commemorative issue — can you imagine how much it pained them to put that out? — to serve as cerebral smelling salts and snap me out of those sporadic “Holy shit, he’s the president!” flashes.

But that lapse aside, I put not my trust in princes.

Of course, not everyone shares my horror of personality cults, or the man never would have won. Twitter’s upstart counterpart Gab, for example, is overrun by Trump cheerleaders, for whom fun memes like that “Deplorables” Photoshop or “Donald Crossing the Delaware” aren’t just a split second’s amusement, but the bunting of a burgeoning civic religion.

[…]

Whatever the benefits of a Republican presidency, one of the unavoidable side effects is an emboldening of our side’s flakier elements, who weave two most unsavory obsessions — the occult and “pedophile rings” — into singularly elaborate and ultimately groundless conspiracy theories.

Sure enough, right on cue: Type “Pizzagate” into YouTube’s search engine and soak in the overblown paranoid hysteria.

These kooks and simpletons were harmlessly wrong about Harry Potter turning your kids into witches, and tragically mistaken about the “Satanic panic.” At the very least, they’re a colossal embarrassment, but they also undermine serious business undertaken by serious people.

A big difference this time around is that the president himself won’t be immune to the lure of such twisted, empty-calorie distractions. Trump used to be Birther-in-Chief, remember? And he’s on Twitter.

November 10, 2016

Tracking the rise of Il Donalduce

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

I was curious enough to go back to when I created a “DonaldTrump” tag for posts here on the blog and see how much has changed since he entered the race:

  • The tag was created on June 18 of last year when I posted a link to P.J. O’Rourke’s notion that Trump was the perfectly “representative” candidate.
  • In August (two months with no Trump sightings? Those were the days…), I linked to Walter Russell Mead taking a swing at defining what it is that Trump offered to the disaffected plurality (majority?) of would-be Republican voters. A few days later, Megan McArdle found herself coming back to the phrase “bag o’ crazy” when she tried to make sense of Donald Trump’s immigration proposals.
  • In September, I linked to Grant McCracken’s explanation for why revelations of faults and gaffes didn’t cost Trump much of his support, while Ace speculated that the Trump kryptonite might be “middle class respectability”.
  • In December, Megan McArdle wrote a piece that an unkind soul might call to her attention now, including the immortal line “I rank the odds of a Trump presidency somewhere below the odds of my winning the lottery”. We also looked at the impact of “The Donald” on “The Overton Window”, and Megan McArdle got uncharacteristically conspiracy theoristic.
  • In January, Scott Adams began earning more attention (and much more vilification) for his “master persuader” posts on the Trump insurgency, and Tucker Carlson explained why the conservative establishment so badly misjudged the folks who vociferously supported The Donald. Colby Cosh also gave props to Adams and discussed the odd state of the state of Iowa in US presidential elections.
  • In March, economist Don Boudreaux speculated on the possible good outcome of a Trump electoral victory, and Colby Cosh wrote “Dear America: We need to talk about Donald“. Scott Adams speculated about Trump’s possible rhetorical tactics against Hillary Clinton in the general election. I also finally settled on the appropriate nickname to use for Il Donalduce, having briefly tried “Mussotrumpi” and “The Donald”.
  • In April, Scott Adams wrote on some of Il Donalduce’s recent political mistakes.
  • In May, Adams discussed Clinton’s use of the literal “Woman Card”, and Megan McArdle bewailed the pointlessness of trying to analyze any given Trump policy. Warren Meyer pointed out that Clinton and Trump are equally bad in terms of crony capitalism. Jim Geraghty imagined that Trump was probably thinking “how hard can it be?” to run a government. Tim Worstall pointed out that, despite incoherency on other policies, Trump was correct on solving California’s water crisis.
  • In June, Megan McArdle refuted the “Trump is a scary autocrat” scenario, Camille Paglia compared and contrasted the Clinton and Trump campaigns, and Scott Adams decides to endorse Clinton for his personal safety. Simon Penner explains why President Trump could not do all the things his hysterical opponents claim he would.
  • In July, Shikha Dalmia criticized the “return to mercantilism” aspects of Trump’s trade policies and Scott Adams considered the possibility of Obama declaring martial law to prevent President-elect Trump from taking office. Jonathan Freedland looked at the alienated GOP establishment and the #NeverTrump-ers.
  • At what appeared to be a low point in Trump’s fortunes in August, David Zincavage wondered what Trump would be doing differently if he was actually aiming to lose. After what many pundits considered a potentially geopolitical destabilizing statement on NATO, Tom Kratman concludes that Trump wouldn’t actually abandon the alliance. Regardless of the election’s outcome, Scott Adams thought he’d identified a silver lining to the 2016 presidential race.
  • In September, Jay Currie suggested a three-part plan to bring about a Trump victory, and Tamara Keel outlined the impossible choice facing American voters in November.
  • October saw Megan McArdle addressing the social media outrage at revelations from Il Donalduce‘s partial tax returns leaked to the media. Also in October, an unusually fair article appeared in the Guardian on who Trump’s supporters really were, and Jay Currie looked at the state of US election polling (which we now know from the differences between predictions and actual results is dire).
  • In early November, Ken Stern peered into the murky depths of the right-wing media bubble (and the matching one on the left), then the totally unexpected landslide occurred, and I blamed it on the media (usually a safe accusation to make).

October 16, 2016

Trump supporters aren’t who you think they are

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

An interesting article in, of all places, the Guardian discusses where Trump support comes from and why the media has difficulty identifying or covering them in a realistic fashion:

Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 – higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education, gender, age or race –predicted Trump support.

These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

The faces journalists do train the cameras on – hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags – must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well. That the media industry ignored my home for so long left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.

H/T to John Donovan who comments “I’m pretty sure I don’t share this Kansan’s policy preferences, but I find her view here refreshing.”

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