Quotulatiousness

July 20, 2024

When diversity and competence requirements conflict

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

Janice Fiamengo compares the iconic Trumpian reaction after being wounded by a sniper with the cries for diversity at all costs from others:

Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024.

Many observers have had harsh words for the female Secret Service agents who performed poorly in response to the attempt on Trump’s life last Saturday (see this Wired article for a catalogue of the charges, in which the author cannot muster a single rebuttal). Some noted that Trump’s security detail for the Republican National Convention is now, it appears, exclusively male. And rightly so. There is no equality when bullets start to fly, and it is lethal to pretend there is.

When the first shot rang out, 50-year-old Pennsylvanian firefighter Corey Comperatore is reported to have done what men typically do in such situations: he shielded his wife and daughters, taking a bullet to the head. Women far more rarely perform such acts of self-sacrifice.

Comperatore lost his life because of a multitude of errors on the part of the Secret Service, including a long hesitation by snipers tasked with neutralizing threats. Video shows that at least one of these snipers, seemingly with the gunman in his sites, failed to take action until seconds after the gunman began firing. The agent seemed befuddled, scrambling back when the first shot came. Was he new on the job, inadequately trained, or sub-par in his skills? Or directed not to fire?

I am not equipped to answer these or the many other, darker, questions about the bungled security operation. What can be said for certain is that if some element of the Secret Service was not treasonously complicit in the attempt on Trump’s life, it was certainly massively inadequate to its task of protecting him and others at the rally. The gunman was allowed to gain access to his rooftop shooting position, and Trump was not extracted the moment the shooter’s presence became known.

Director Kimberly A. Cheatle, who expressed to CBS News in interview her concern with “developing and giving opportunities to everyone in our work force, and particularly women“, has a lot to answer for.

Perhaps the women we saw in Trump’s security detail were new recruits helping Cheatle reach her target of 30% women by 2030. They looked amateur, panicked, and unpracticed. One of the women attempting to remove Trump from the stage was simply too small, and hesitant, for the task; she looked at one point as if she were engaged in a group hug at a United Church reconciliation ceremony. (As many have noted, her small stature enabled Trump’s fist-raised gesture of masculine defiance and his exhilarating “Fight! Fight! Fight!”). As Trump was being taken into the security vehicle, the four women surrounding the car looked jumpy and confused, scared and awkward. One woman was visibly unable to holster her gun.

I’ve never seen so many women guarding a former president, and I’ve never seen so many women obviously incapable.

We know that men and women have different strengths and aptitudes. Nearly a decade ago, the United States Marine Corps demonstrated through a year-long study of hundreds of Marines that even women who could pass the physical exam simply could not carry out standard military tasks as efficiently as men. The study found, unsurprisingly, that “The males were more accurate hitting targets, faster at climbing over obstacles, better at avoiding injuries.” The women struggled to carry weapons and ammunition, and even to use the weaponry properly. Women’s higher injury rate was marked: “The well documented comparative disadvantage in upper and lower-body strength resulted in higher fatigue levels of most women, which contributed to greater incidents of overuse injuries such as stress fractures.”

June 29, 2024

“No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years”

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

Joe Biden’s performance in the first Presidential debate on Thursday night was so bad that even his strongest supporters in the media have turned on a dime and are now contemplating his replacement:

This is not a hard column to write. In fact, I wrote it twice already! But last night’s debate performance by Joe Biden is the end of his campaign. It’s over. Done. No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years. No sane person can vote for him.

And watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife.

The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?

And if they have not told him the truth on this, what else are they afraid to tell him?

The mainstream media also bears responsibility for once again being an arm of the DNC establishment, running countless stories about Biden’s acuity and sharpness from inside sources, while attacking the few journalists who actually dared write the most obvious truth about this election: Biden has deteriorated rapidly in the last four years, he is unrecognizable from the man who ran in 2020, and we’ll be lucky if he is able to function as president for the next six months, let alone four years.

I watched MSNBC after the debate. It was like watching State TV in Russia. It took them an hour to acknowledge what the world had just seen, as they danced pathetically around what was staring them in the face. They are literally administration spokespeople — Jen Psaki has the exact same job she always had — waiting for instructions on what to say out loud. And they have all lied through their teeth for months about Biden’s fitness, only to refuse any accountability. Joe Scarborough recently declared on his show:

    Start the tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth: and F— you if you cannot handle the truth. This version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever.

To which the only response is: No, F— you, Mr Scarborough. And fuck all the lies you have told.

But there is a huge, gleaming, hopeful silver lining, as I’ve noted many times before. For the first time this year, we have a chance of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office with a new nominee from a younger generation. No, I don’t know who — except it obviously cannot be Kamala Harris, who would lose by an even bigger margin than the ambling cadaver. But that is what politics is for! There is time for a campaign before a convention that could now be must-see television. A future campaign already has a simple message that vibes with the moment and instantly puts Trump on defense: it’s time for the next generation to lead. We are choosing between the past (Trump) and the future, between the old and the young, between the insane versus the coherent.

All it takes is a credible Democrat of stature to say they are running against Biden. Then all the bets are off. He or she need not criticize Biden, and, in fact, should lionize his service. But they can say they’re running because beating Trump is the first and most important objective, and, at this point, it is obvious that Biden simply cannot beat Trump.

Does anyone have that courage? The person who shows it will instantly become the front-runner. Go for it.

In The Free Press, Bari Weiss points the finger at all of the American media and the apparatchiks of the Biden administration who have been loudly and consistently proclaiming that Biden was in great mental shape, running rings around his advisors, and fit, rested and ready to debate Trump:

Rarely are so many lies dispelled in a single moment. Rarely are so many people exposed as liars and sycophants. Last night’s debate was a watershed on both counts.

The debate was not just a catastrophe for President Biden. And boy—oy—was it ever.

But it was more than that. It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.

Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “fake news”, and, most recently, “cheapfakes”.

Cast your mind back to February, when Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice to look into Biden’s handling of classified documents, came out with his report that included details about Biden’s health, which explained why he would not prosecute the president.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Can anyone doubt that characterization after watching Biden’s debate performance?

Yet Eric Holder told us that Hur’s remarks were “gratuitous”. The former attorney general tweeted: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised”. Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser, said Hur’s report was a “partisan hit job”. Vice President Kamala Harris argued: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous”. The report does not “live in reality”, said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, stressing that the president was “sharp” and “on top of things”.

May 31, 2024

“You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Helen Dale considers the painful notion that political ideas that work for the “elite” (defined in various ways) may not work at all for people unlike members of any given “elite”:

When I reviewed Rob Henderson’s Troubled for Law & Liberty at Liberty Fund, I made this observation:

    The reality that classical liberalism — the closest to my own political views, I admit — has at least a whiff of the luxury belief around it stings. It’s discomforting to acknowledge that what goes by the name of paternalism has its own intellectual pedigree, while liberalism can be a system developed by the clever, for the clever. “Highly educated and affluent people are more economically conservative and socially liberal,” Henderson says. “This doesn’t make sense. The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”

[…]

Joseph Heath […] uses the phrase “self-control aristocracy” to describe those who really do benefit from maximal freedom. These are people who can make better choices for themselves than any authority could make on their behalf. When the state or large corporates boss them (us) around, they (we) get really bloody annoyed. They (we) know better!

Heath’s phrase is simply a layman’s term for the personality trait various formal tests measure, and which overlaps with executive function to a considerable but as yet unknown degree.

    Because I am self-conscious about my membership in the self-control aristocracy, I am acutely aware of the fact that, when I think about questions of “individual liberty” in society, I come to it with a particular set of class interests. That is because I stand to benefit much more from an expansion of the space of individual liberty than the average person does – because I have greater self-control. So I recognize that, while a 24-hour beer store would be great for me, it would be a mixed blessing for others […]

    What does this have to do with libertarianism? It is important because every academic proponent of libertarianism – understood loosely, as any doctrine that assigns individual liberty priority over other political values – is a member of the self-control aristocracy. As a result, they are advancing a political ideal that benefits themselves to a much greater extent than it benefits other people. In most cases, however, they do so naively, because they do not recognize themselves as members of an elite, socially-dominant group, that stands to benefit disproportionately. They think of liberty as something that creates an equal benefit for all.

My response to reading Professor Heath’s piece was simplicity itself: I feel seen. I’ve even done the night school thing while working full-time. I’ve written books and chosen to play sports that require a long time and lots of skill to master. I retired at 45.

Politically, I’m not a libertarian. Libertarianism is a distinctive and largely American ideology (as the recent and bonkers fracas at its US Convention indicates) with philosophically unusual deontological roots. I am, however, within the British and French tradition of classical liberalism (which does assign individual liberty priority over other political values). And like many classical liberals I’ve been blind to problems of laws and governance for people unlike me.

I disclose this because I’ve worked in policy development in both devolved and national parliaments. I’ve probably given politicians and civil servants alike dud advice. There is almost certainly a shit policy out there (in either Scotland or Australia) with my name on it. However, this mind-blindness doesn’t only apply to people who advocate libertarian politics. I think it applies to a significant number of political ideologies just as strongly as it does to libertarianism.

That is, the ideology serves the inherited personality traits of those who promote it. “You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so” always struck me as a genuinely mean criticism of people who were involved in politics and policy (I may have been one of those people, natch). The problem — as I’ve been forced to accept — is that it’s true.

May 29, 2024

A visit to failure pier

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CDR Salamander has some advice for any US congresscritter with a spine (unfortunately, that probably means none of them):

This old operational planner has one bit of advice to Congress in their role of having oversight of the Executive Branch; subpoena the Decision Brief for the Gaza pier operation.

This was on the lowest of low scale of military operations, Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Response. There is little to nothing classified about any of this rump of a capability. Call in member of the Joint Staff who were involved in this planning — and I would prefer if you could find a few terminal O5/6 to testify as well. You might actually enjoy some candor.

The Commander’s Intent, the Higher Direction and Guidance, the Planning Assumptions, the Constraints and Restraints, the Critical Vulnerability analysis, etc. It is all there. If not, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense should tell the American people to their face.

This is a larger issue than anything happening in that impossible corner of the globe. Over the weekend, we saw yet more indications of an empire in decline deteriorating from bad to pathetic.

From the time the first load came off the pier, the aid barely made it past 300 meters until it disappeared into Hamasistan.

I’ll go ahead and tap the sign;

[…]

Generally this latest act in this other-end-of-the-Med-from-the-Greeks tragedy that has unfolded in front of everyone. As we saw at the top at Ashkelon Beach, first some ancillary bits floated over to Israel as the Eastern Mediterranean reminded everyone it is at the eastern end of a big sea with weather and waves and stuff.

We then found out that three soldiers were injured in a forklift accident. Just to add insult to injury, as the locals laughed, it appears more of the business end decided to try to make it to Haifa on its own.

[…]

I’m not sure how you scatter Army property all over the Eastern Med without a boot getting dry, but maybe I’m wrong. Gaza is lava, and all.

Empires don’t often die in a blaze of glory, no. More often than not they end in simpering apologies and excuses from poor leaders putting the wrong people in positions they have no place being, and when they fail — there is no accountability.

May 8, 2024

ESR on the shambolic response of the “elite” universities to the protests

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

ESR finds a silver lining to the storm clouds of all the ongoing pro-terrorist campus protests we’re seeing these days:

What I’m thinking as I watch the shitshow elite universities are making of their response to violent pro-Hamas demonstrations and the systematic terrorization of Jewish students:

All my life I’ve been watching Marxist infiltrators capture more and more of our institutions, and been terrified of the moment when they achieved primacy, because our f*cking useless conservatives ran away from that fight after the Army-McCarthy hearings, a few years before I was born.

The moment of victory for the Long March is here, or as close to it as makes no difference, but I’m feeling curiously relieved. Because it turns out that what they discarded in order to sock-puppet every institution in sight was *competence* (which is white supremacy, doncha know, they keep telling us that themselves), and then public trust in those institutions.

Their triumph is collapsing around them because they are literally too dysfunctional and insane to run what they have captured. I was expecting competent totalitarianism, not this. I like this better.

Of course there is the problem that the wider civilization might not survive the collapse of everything they’ve corrupted. But as long as we can avoid that, I actually feel more hopeful about the future than I did 20 years ago.

And the thing elite academia has become is certainly something we can watch collapse into rubble without worrying that it’s going to take civilization down with it.

April 4, 2024

Boeing and the ongoing competency crisis

Filed under: Business, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo on the pitiful state of Boeing within the larger social issues of collapsing social trust and blatantly declining competence in almost everything:

By now, most of you have heard of the increasingly popular concept known as “the competency crisis”. For those of you who haven’t, the competency crisis argues that the USA is headed towards a crisis in which critical infrastructure and important manufacturing will suffer a catastrophic decline in competency due to the fact that the people (almost all males) who know how to build/run these things are retiring, and there is no one available to fill these roles once they’re gone. The competency crisis is one of the major points brought up by people when they point out that America is in a state of decline.

As all of you are already aware, there is also a general collapse in trust in governing institutions in the USA (and all across the West). Cynicism is the order of the day, with people naturally assuming that they are being lied to constantly by the ruling elites, whether in media, government, the corporate world, and so on. A competency crisis paired with a collapse in trust in key institutions is a vicious one-two punch for any country to absorb. Nowhere is this one-two combo more evident than in one of America’s crown jewels: Boeing.

I’m certain that all of you are familiar with the “suicide” of John Barnett that happened almost a month ago. John Barnett was a Quality Control Manager working for Boeing in the Charleston, South Carolina operation. He was a “lifer”, in that he spent his entire career at Boeing. He was also a whistleblower. His “suicide” via a gunshot wound to the right temple happened on what was scheduled to be the third and last day of his deposition in his case against his former employer.

In more innocent and less cynical times, the suggestion that he was murdered would have had currency only in conspiratorial circles, serving as fodder for programs like the Art Bell Show. But we are in a different world now, and to suggest that Barnett might have been killed for turning whistleblower earns one replies like “could be”, “I’m pretty sure that’s the case”, and the most common one of all: “I wouldn’t doubt it”. No one believes that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Many people believe the same about John Barnett. The collapse in trust in ruling institutions has resulted in an environment where conspiratorial thinking naturally flourishes. Maureen Tkacik reports on Boeing’s downward turn, using Barnett’s case as a centre piece:

    “John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

Please keep in mind that this report offers up only one side of the story.

A decaying institution:

    But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

    “Prince Jim” — as some long-timers used to call him — repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes”, and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

There is a new trend that blames many fumbles on DEI. Boeing is not one of those. Instead, the short-term profit maximization mindset that drives stock prices upward is the main reason for the decline in this corporate behemoth.

March 11, 2024

Google’s “wild success and monopolistic position has made it grow fat, lazy, and worst of all, stupid”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Google has long been the 500lb gorilla in the room as far as search engine dominance is concerned, despite a significant and steady drop in the quality of the search results it returns. Niccolo Soldo suggests that Google has gotten fat and lazy in the interval since the release of its last huge success — Gmail — and the utter catastrophe of Gemini:

It’s become passé to complain about Google’s search engine these days, because it’s been horrible for years. We all recall its early era when its minimalist presentation effectively destroyed its competition overnight. Only us olds remember AltaVista‘s search engine, for example. So ubiquitous is its core function that the word “google” entered our lexicon.

Roughly 85-90% of the readers who have subscribed to this Substack have used a gmail address to do so. It’s a great product, although it could be better. Like many of you, I have several gmail addresses, and use email services from other providers like Protonmail. Gmail is incredibly easy to use, and works very well on all the devices that we operate on a daily basis.

Google is a tech behemoth, and is in a monopolistic position when it comes to both of these services. It has used this position to hoover up an insane amount of cash, taking a battering ram to many other businesses in the process, especially news media outlets that rely on advertising revenue. Yet it has not scored any big victories since its rollout of gmail all those years ago. Pirate Wires says that it hasn’t had to for some time … until now. The explosion of AI tech means that its core business is now at threat of extinction unless it can win the AI arms race. Its first foray into this war via its rollout of Gemini has been an absolute disaster. Mike Solana chalks it up to many factors, primarily the “culture of fear” that seems to permeate the tech giant.

The summary:

    Last week, following Google’s Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google’s life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken’s market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

The product rollout was so incredibly botched that mainstream media outlets friendly to Google (and its cash) are doing damage control on its behalf.

Gemini’s ultra-woke responses to requests quickly became a staple of social media postings.

Multiple issues:

    This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator’s Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody’s in charge.

It’s human nature to want to boil issues down to one single cause of factor, when it’s usually several all at once. We humans also have a strong tendency to zoom in on one factor when presented with many, mainly because the one that we focus on is something that we know and/or are passionate about.

Of course, Google’s engineers didn’t do this accidentally. They’ve been very intently observed by the most woke of all, the HR department:

As we all know, HR Departments are the Political Commissars of the Corporate West.

Stupid stuff:

    Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I’ve obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir”, “ey/em”, “xe/xem”, and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There’s no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products.

January 12, 2024

“… normal people no longer trust experts to any great degree”

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

Theophilus Chilton explains why the imprimatur of “the experts” is a rapidly diminishing value:

One explanation for the rise of midwittery and academic mediocrity in America directly connects to the “everybody should go to college” mantra that has become a common platitude. During the period of America’s rise to world superpower, going to college was reserved for a small minority of higher IQ Americans who attended under a relatively meritocratic regime. The quality of these graduates, however, was quite high and these were the “White men with slide rules” who built Hoover Dam, put a man on the moon, and could keep Boeing passenger jets from losing their doors halfway through a flight. As the bar has been lowered and the ranks of Gender and Queer Studies programs have been filled, the quality of college students has declined precipitously. One recent study shows that the average IQ of college students has dropped to the point where it is basically on par with the average for the general population as a whole.

Another area where this comes into play is with the replication crisis in science. For those who haven’t heard, the results from an increasingly large number of scientific studies, including many that have been used to have a direct impact on our lives, cannot be reproduced by other workers in the relevant fields. Obviously, this is a problem because being able to replicate other scientists’ results is sort of central to that whole scientific method thing. If you can’t do this, then your results really aren’t any more “scientific” than your Aunt Gertie’s internet searches.

As with other areas of increasing sociotechnical incompetency, some of this is diversity-driven. But not wholly so, by any means. Indeed, I’d say that most of it is due to the simple fact that bad science will always be unable to be consistently replicated. Much of this is because of bad experimental design and other technical matters like that. The rest is due to bad experimental design, etc., caused by overarching ideological drivers that operate on flawed assumptions that create bad experimentation and which lead to things like cherry-picking data to give results that the scientists (or, more often, those funding them) want to publish. After all, “science” carries a lot of moral and intellectual authority in the modern world, and that authority is what is really being purchased.

It’s no secret that Big Science is agenda-driven and definitely reflects Regime priorities. So whenever you see “New study shows the genetic origins of homosexuality” or “Latest data indicates trooning your kid improves their health by 768%,” that’s what is going on. REAL science is not on display. And don’t even get started on global warming, with its preselected, computer-generated “data” sets that have little reflection on actual, observable natural phenomena.

“Butbutbutbut this is all peer-reviewed!! 97% of scientists agree!!” The latter assertion is usually dubious, at best. The former, on the other hand, is irrelevant. Peer-reviewing has stopped being a useful measure for weeding out spurious theories and results and is now merely a way to put a Regime stamp of approval on desired result. But that’s okay because the “we love science” crowd flat out ignores data that contradict their presuppositions anywise, meaning they go from doing science to doing ideology (e.g. rejecting human biodiversity, etc.). This sort of thing was what drove the idiotic responses to COVID-19 a few years ago, and is what is still inducing midwits to gum up the works with outdated “science” that they’re not smart enough to move past.

If you want a succinct definition of “scientism,” it might be this – A belief system in which science is accorded intellectual abilities far beyond what the scientific method is capable of by people whose intellectual abilities are far below being able to understand what the scientific method even is.

July 31, 2023

2023 compared with the world of C.M. Kornbluth’s “Marching Morons”

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

John C. Wright on what he calls our “incompetocracy”:

The conceit of the C.M. Kornbluth story “The Marching Morons” (Galaxy, April 1951) is that low-IQ people, having less practical ability to plan for the future, will reproduce more recklessly hence in greater numbers than high-IQ people, leading to a catastrophic general decline in intelligence over the generations.

A small group of elite thinkers tries, by any means necessary, to maintain a crumbling world civilization being overrun by an ever increasing underclass of morons.

In this morbid and unhappy little short story, the solution to overpopulation was the Final Solution, that is, mass murder of undesirables followed by the murder of the architect of the solution.

The eugenic genocide is played for laughs, as the morons are herded aboard death-ships, told they are going on vacation to Venus. The government forges postcards to their widows and orphans to maintain the fraud, which the morons are too stupid to penetrate.

You may recognize a similar conceit from the film Idiocracy (2006), written and directed by Mike Judge. Unlike the short story, no solution is proposed for the overpopulation of undesirables.

No one seems to note the absurd self-flattery involved in entertaining Malthusian eugenicist fears: no one regards himself as a moron unworthy of reproduction. Margaret Sanger did not volunteer to sterilize herself on the grounds that she was a moral cripple suffering from Progressive mental illness, hence unfit.

It is only the working man, the factory hand, the field hand, who is unfit, and usually he is an immigrant from some Catholic hence illiterate nation, with a fertile wife and a happy home.

The happy Catholic with his ten children will not die alone, empty and unloved, in some sterile euthanasia center in Canada, like the Progressive will, and so the Progressive hates the happy father like Gollum hates the sun.

The self-flattery is absurd because, first, IQ is not genetic — if it were, average IQ scores for a given bloodline would not change over two generations. Darwinism allows for genetic changes only over geologic eras.

Second, education in the modern day is inversely proportional to intelligence. No intelligent man would or does subject himself to the insolent falsehoods of college indoctrination: we are too independent in thought to be allowed to pass.

Third, a truly intelligent man, if he thought his bloodline was in danger of being outnumbered and swamped, rather than trying to inflict infertility on the competition, would seek the only intelligent solution compatible with honesty and decency: lifelong monogamy in a culture that forbids contraception and encourages maternity. He would, indeed, become Catholic, and attempt to evangelize his neighbors likewise.

A truly intelligent man would accept rather than reject the divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply. The idea of overpopulation is and always was a Progressive scare tactic, meant to undermine and control the underclass. It is the tactic of making the poor feel poorly for trying to use resources and grow rich. It is the politics of enforced poverty.

Why else would billionaires on private jets fly to Davos to eat steak dinners over wine, in order to pressure peons to ride bikes and eat bugs?

Our salvation is that they cannot even do that right. These James Bond style villains who are committing slow genocides with experimental injections, with wars against farming, against guns, against police, against oil drilling, against nuclear energy, and against family life, have not sacrificed the billions their dark and ancient gods crave dead, but this is due only to their lack of skill and organization.

July 27, 2023

Instead of a malignant conspiracy, consider the possibility it’s really a society-wide dearth of competence

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

Sarah Hoyt on a topic I’ve been pushing for years in casual conversation:

Recently, in a conversation between friends, the hypothesis was floated: what if all the burning farms, derailed trains, crop failures, etc. etc. etc. etc. ad scary nauseam aren’t really enemy action, but more a competency crisis.

As in these things happen not because big-bad is plotting against us, but because no one knows how to do the things they purportedly do anymore. Some kind of know, but they are hampered, slow, and sometimes hemmed in by counterproductive regulation or the result of previous “strokes of genius” decisions that broke the system.

I’m not going to bore anyone with what I know to be a massive crisis of competency plus inherited factors breaking ability to function in the field. I already did that at Mad Genius Club this morning, and am not unpacking the whole thing again.

But here’s the thing: All of us can live without a functioning fiction writing/selling market. Maybe not as pleasantly/happily, at least for those of us addicted to reading, but we can survive. We have old books to re-read, and if we get really desperate we can write our own fanfic.

It’s another thing when you talk of transportation or medicine, or farming, or – Well, everything else.

I have friends and fans in a lot of places. And almost everyone’s story is of being caught in the middle of a system where nobody knows or can do much of anything. It’s all the way the cogs and bureaucracy move. And the way they move is completely divorced from what needs done, or what anyone knows how to do.

To give an example: Suppose you were hired to haul buckets from a well. But when you actually get the job, you find out, no. Because of inherited systems, and what your superiors expect, you’re supposed to climb down the wall, hand over hand, and bring up water by the cupfull. And there are regulations in the works to make that by the spoonfull. However, you’ll be fully held to account if you can’t provide the amount of water the company is contracted for. You. Personally.

So, you do what you can. You fudge the books. On paper, you’re getting all this water up. Where the water goes no one knows, every one down stream (pardon the pun) from you does the same.

If this sounds like the soviet system? It is. It’s just that the directives don’t come directly and traceably from the government. (Though under the infestation of Bidentia they increasingly do.) Instead, they come from “experts” “scientists” “Studies” “marketing gurus.” And sometimes they are curtailed or made worse by agencies and regulations.

Yes, the managerial or worse “expert” class is the same that furnishes government. These are not your friends, are not meant to be your friends, and are convinced they know much more than you do.

What they know in fact is “how to manage.” But it’s not how to manage anything. They know theory of management (or whatever) derived from no reality (mostly from the writings of Marx, if you dig a little) and pushed ALL THE WAY DOWN.

It’s like — exactly like — being run by “experts” who memorized the Little Red Book. It might please those in power, but it has nothing to do with accomplishing the actual job in front of you.

Part of this has to do with colleges. Remember all those student demonstrations of the 60s? If you’re like me, and didn’t hit college till the eighties or younger, you might think these are, as the movies show, all anti-war and for civil rights, and all that jazz.

Unspoken to any of us is the fact that half of these demonstrations were to DUMB DOWN THE CURRICULUM. To demand easier grading. And social factors taken into account. And to “update” to “relevant things.”

The idea being that we were in a sort of an year zero and anything else, in the long storied glories of Western civ no longer counted, except for us to declare ourselves superior to it.

July 10, 2023

“… the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society”

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

The Armchair General would almost certainly agree with my frequent lament that the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything:

There is a famous quote by American journalist and satirist H.L. Menken, which has been deployed by many political writers over the years:

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

It is an enduring quote because it has the ring of truth1, and it certainly fits with the Machiavellian aspect of politics. This attitude was, without doubt, deployed by governments across the world during Covid (and, to some extent, still is).

Your jaundiced2 General would like to propose a related, alternative and rather more plausible soundbite that, I believe, more adequately describes the Western world in the twenty-first century:

    The whole consequence of practical politics is the keep the ignorant populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be kept in comfort) by an endless series of colossal fuck-ups, labelled as crises, caused entirely by the government.3

Every time that you see the media whipping up a frenzy about a “crisis“, you can be 99% sure that the issue in question has been caused by the state — and that the real solution is to remove the government intervention. And that is never, ever the action actually proposed.

Crises of Government Origin
Your jaundiced General refers to these phenomena as “Crises of Government Origin” (COGO), and will form the back-bone of a series of posts titled with that acronym. Many of the issues are interlinked, and most are absolutely critical if we are ever to confront the economic and social issues facing us today.

These include (but are not limited to):

  • the energy crisis;
  • the Climate Warming / Change / Heating crisis;
  • the housing crisis;
  • the NHS staffing crisis;
  • the police shortage crisis;
  • the obesity crisis;
  • the education crisis;
  • the pandemic crisis;
  • the productivity crisis;
  • the activist “charity” crisis;
  • the drugs crisis (Scottish edition);
  • the rape gang crisis;
  • the intersectional and gender crisis;
  • just about any other “crisis” you can think of.

To be sure, the UK government is not the worst in some of these areas — but, since it is in UK that my comfy leather armchair is situated, it is the rampant stupidity of our own governments that I shall concentrate on. And no, not all of these posts will include reminding people that Grant Schapps is a prick.

I can promise that every one of them will include illustrations demonstrating the mind-gargling incompetence of our governments (of all persuasions) and “Rolls Royce” civil service4.

The law is a blunt instrument, and the government is really inefficient at doing anything at all.

Fundamentally, the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society. And the UK is in the vanguard of this malaise as Sharon White, at the time Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (and currently fucking things up in typically Rolls Royce civil servant fashion at John Lewis), said (in a rare example of her being right) in 2015 at the Institute for Government:

    The UK is “almost the most centralised developed country in the world”.

Indeed it has been observed that, by some measures, the UK is more centralised than Soviet Russia. This is why we are failing.

The Crises Of Government Origin (COGO) series aims to examine some of these failures — large and small. For starters, let’s have a look at Hate Speech laws and why they are so dangerous.

    1. The same applies to Menken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.

    2. Caused less by poor mood than incipient liver failure. Now pass the port, would you, old chap. No, to the left, you fool!

    3. Yes, yes — I realise that it needs honing, but it will do for now. Feel free to submit more elegant versions in the comments.

    4. Snork.

July 6, 2023

Ursula von der Leyen touted as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s successor

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Fraser Myers is amazed at Ursula von der Leyen’s ability to rise above her own failures time after time:

Ursula von der Leyen with German soldiers during a visit to the Field Marshal Rommel Barracks, Augustdorf, 17 July 2014.
Photo by Dirk Vorderstraße via Wikimedia Commons.

The political career of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has been defined by bungling and incompetence. She is deeply unpopular with voters, distrusted by colleagues and has regularly been mired in scandals. And yet, somehow, she manages to keep rising up the ranks of international politics.

Now von der Leyen has been tipped for another plum job on the global stage. According to reports in the Telegraph this week, US president Joe Biden is pushing for her to be named as secretary-general of NATO. He thinks she is best placed to replace Jens Stoltenberg when he steps down in 2024.

This ought to set off alarm bells. Whatever one thinks of NATO, there could hardly be a worse candidate to lead it than von der Leyen – especially right now, while war wages in Ukraine and NATO faces one of its most serious challenges in its 73-year existence.

Just look at her time leading the EU. She was parachuted into the role in 2019, unelected, over the heads of European citizens. She was a singularly unimpressive candidate. In fact, some argue that this was why she was selected. “When EU leaders picked von der Leyen … they deliberately eschewed candidates with greater experience, charisma or cunning”, according to a Bloomberg report. The European Council apparently wanted a Commission leader that it could easily push around. In the end, despite being the only candidate, she managed to persuade just nine MEPs to back her in the job.

MEPs were right to be sceptical. Her incompetence became all too clear when she faced her first major challenge as president – the Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021. While von der Leyen boasted of taking “personal charge” of the EU’s vaccination programme, the rollout was infamously slow, lagging behind the rest of the world. At the time, fellow commissioners, civil servants and other officials were openly venting their distress with her leadership.

June 25, 2023

QotD: We won’t be seeing any rebooted TV shows from the 1990s

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

… most 1990s entertainment would be impossible to “reboot” now, simply because so much of it presumes a baseline level of social and especially governmental competence. Take The X-Files, for instance. The “hot take” on the show back then was that it reflected our widespread social unease with an all-powerful government. The truth is out there!

Thirty years on, we can only dream of a government competent enough to cover up contact with extraterrestrials. As someone remarked at Z Man’s the other day, our government is now so retarded, Eric Swalwell — a high-ranking member of the House intelligence committee and putative presidential candidate — couldn’t successfully bone a hooker. Sorry, gang, the aliens won’t be stopping by; they only want to make contact with intelligent life.

Severian, “Random Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-17.

June 20, 2023

“Mendicino is a dead minister walking, and we suspect he knows it”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Belated (from me, not from them) section from this weekend’s update from the editors at The Line:

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka

Though you may find this hard to believe, based on what’s above, we were paying attention to some other things this week. The Ottawa vortex of ridiculousness continued at its usual clip. The government continues to try and find a defensible position on Paul Bernardo’s prison transfer to a medium-security prison. Alas for Mr. Trudeau, he’s been hit by a double-whammy of bad luck. Bernardo is an emotional trigger point with probably no rival across Canada. And the PM’s point man on this file is the hapless (!) Marco Mendicino, minister of Public Safety.

Let’s be clear: your Line editors are far too Vulcan-like to possess strong feelings about the transfer of Bernardo. We are of the right age to have grown up during the era of the Bernardo rapes, murders and eventual trial. He was the boogeyman of our youth. That being said, the important thing is that he dies miserable and alone behind bars. We aren’t particularly invested in which particular prison this happens. If there was a sensible reason for him to be moved to the Quebec facility, hey, whatever. He can rot in any suitable prison as far as we’re concerned.

The issue here, and it’s ridiculous that we have to spell this out, isn’t the transfer itself. Nor are we calling upon Trudeau or the federal government to become intimately involved in decision-making for prisoners, even high-profile ones. The only thing that turned this into a huge story was the latest peek it gave us into the Trudeau government. We have been confronted with — surprise! — more incompetence and dysfunction.

Mendicino’s staff had been repeatedly told about the pending transfer; no one told the boss. The PMO had been told, too. No one told that boss, either. Why tell the boss? So that they don’t get caught flatfooted by a scandal. This is basic issues management and internal communications, and we’re being shown, yet again, that the government is terrible at this. And, absurdly, Mendicino apparently has some of the best and brightest providing the adult supervision he so clearly needs: veteran political staffers were sent to his office after he beclowned himself during the gun-control fiasco a few months ago.

And this is the problem. We don’t care which cell holds Bernardo as he slides closer to hell. We do care about yet another data point in a pattern that has emerged with this government: they aren’t on top of their files, their offices aren’t well run, ministers aren’t properly briefed, and there seems to be zero accountability anywhere in this process. It was left to the Ottawa Parliamentary Press Gallery to hunt down Mendicino like ravenous cheetahs on a wayward gazelle after Mendicino had promised to brief them, and then no-showed. He also promised to brief them again later on Thursday, and failed to show up that time, too.

We know, we know. It’s hard to believe he’d lie. Marco Mendicino? An incompetent bullshitter? Say it ain’t so.

Mendicino is a dead minister walking, and we suspect he knows it. The government is obviously hell bent on getting to the summer break without sacking the minister, because to sack him, despite his manifest and repeated failings, would be to admit said failings, and this government will never do that. If they can get to the break, they can shuffle him off to the sweet oblivion of an obscure ministry, or even the back benches later on this summer. This is just the latest example of what Line editor Gerson has observed about these guys: tactically smart, but strategically dumb.

And, ahem, call us hopelessly naïve, but maybe the politics isn’t the point here? Canadians ought to have someone in the job of Public Safety minister — kind of an important role, you’ll agree — who is competent and well-supported by excellent staff. Instead we get this shitshow and frantic politicking to avoid handing the opposition a one-day media-cycle victory. It’s a bad look on the government. But it’s nothing we didn’t already know, we guess. They aren’t here to serve Canadians. They’re here to save themselves.

June 19, 2023

Patterns of incompetence

Filed under: Government, Law, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Palladium, Harold Robertson says that complex systems that we all depend on will not have the resilience to survive our society-wide failure of competence:

Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws — most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

H/T to Theophilus Chilton for the link.

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