Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2022

City governments that can’t even set a budget want to spend, spend, spend to fix global problems

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

It’s one of my standard quips that the more government tries to do, the less well it does everything, but Chris Bray‘s city government shows that I’m being far too Pollyanna-ish:

We’ve built political systems that are astoundingly disconnected; they go where they go, and you can’t turn them, or even try to communicate with them. I just spent weeks trying to get basic information about the operation of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live — a problem I started writing about here. Just as I was getting really frustrated that I couldn’t get anyone in county government to tell me anything about anything, I saw an interview with Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who says that he’s never met our district attorney, and has only managed to speak to him on the phone once. Then a staff member in the office of our county supervisor finally responded to my repeated questions about local criminal justice statistics with a quick message letting me know that, as Supervisor Barger’s criminal justice staff assistant, she doesn’t have local criminal justice statistics. So, no, you’re probably not going to communicate with your government; it doesn’t even communicate with itself. The sheriff has never met the DA. That’s the world we’re living in.

I live in a tiny suburban city, a little over three square miles. As I’ve written before, the city is a relentless shambles, constantly fumbling its simplest tasks while holding city council meetings to offer bold pronouncements on the city’s direct role in managing the climate of the planet. We went the better part of the last fiscal year without a budget, because the fifth finance director in two years screwed up the budget proposal so badly that the council couldn’t vote on the worthless thing.

Cities are supposed to regularly adopt an updated general plan that makes educated guesses about business and residential growth, so they can prepare for change around questions like do we have enough fire stations for the population we expect to have in five years? Our current general plan was adopted in 1998; the city is now in its sixth year of a fumbling effort to write a new plan, with no sign that it’s moving toward success. Meanwhile, our small-town city council is focused on getting electric patrol cars for the police department — to control the climate of the planet — and banning the sale of tobacco products, to take the fight to Big Tobacco. (Three square miles.)

I can’t get my city government to fix a bunch of basic and obvious problems, in a city where I pass members of my city council in the supermarket. I send out email messages to them, but nothing comes back from them in response. They go where they feel like going, endlessly pursuing lawn sign politics in a city government that struggles to complete budgets and basic planning documents; currently they’re signaling that their next interest is in developing a local mandate for residential greywater systems, and they won’t be talked out of it in favor of completing their endlessly incomplete basic tasks.

Now: Put your hands on the levers to stop the madness of the United States of America sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. Right?

April 30, 2022

God Help These British Agents – WW2 – Spies & Ties 16

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 28 Apr 2022

We’ve seen it time and time again in this war. Supposed Allies arguing with each other instead of fighting the enemy. But when SOE and MI6 begin vying for leadership of Britain’s secret war, it’s more than cross words. Now there are lives at stake.
(more…)

April 27, 2022

“We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.”

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray has a bit of fun at David French’s expense:

In the 1830s, British merchants with trade routes from India had forced open an enormous market for opium in China, and were pouring the product into the country, producing a lucrative addiction crisis. (Queen Victoria, the first Sackler.) But the Qing Dynasty had run China with a firm hand since the first half of the 17th century, and the emperors of the dynasty had long regarded themselves as, to use an academic term from the field of political science, The Shit. In 1839, Commissioner Lin Zexu sent a huffy letter to the British monarch, warning her that her tedious little pissant country over there in Nowhereville was trifling with a vast and dangerous power:

    Our celestial empire rules over ten thousand kingdoms! Most surely do we possess a measure of godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom! Still we cannot bear to slay or exterminate without previous warning …

The British responded with naval artillery, and the limits of the Qing Dynasty’s power were revealed with the greatest possible clarity. Commissioner Lin had an image of himself, an understanding of his place in the world and the meaning of his nation’s power, that couldn’t survive an encounter with reality.

So: David French. In his own version of Commissioner Lin’s letter, French warns this week that American institutions most surely do possess a measure of godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom, yet ye weak and depraved subjects of these potent institutions offer not thine gratitude. It’s insane. He doesn’t see the world he’s describing, so his description doesn’t have anything to do with the people he’s talking to, and he has no idea.

Before I say anything else, though, I have to point out that I recently described the American crisis like this: “We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.” French does the opposite, describing institutions that are undermined by the dreadful human material beneath them: “Our government is imperfect, but if this republic fractures, its people will be to blame.” Wreckers and saboteurs have undermined the otherwise successful five year plan, you see. The problem is bottom-up.

This is exactly the same beat patrolled by “real conservatives” like Max Boot and Tom Nichols, who endlessly warn that the fat dumb peasants lack the sense to lick the hands of their capable superiors. These are very strange men.

Here, watch French do his thing:

    The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived. They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.

    It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.

Tell me the comparison to Commissioner Lin isn’t perfect. Does not our wealth and power astonish you!?!?

As French writes about the privileged creatures who live “under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet,” the Taliban rules Afghanistan. A reminder: The Taliban controlled about half of that country in September of 2001; then the most powerful military in the history of the planet invaded, and fought the Taliban for two full decades, at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, the result of which is that the Taliban now controls … all of the country. The implosion of the American effort in Afghanistan happened last fucking year, and we’ve somehow already taken care to forget the details of that goat rodeo. What was the plan?

March 29, 2022

A leading source of incompetence

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

My contacts on social media have probably gotten tired of me pointing out that any big organization will perform less well than a smaller one in the same activity, and governments across the western world have been growing bigger and less competent every year. Sarah Hoyt recalls the time she saw an almost Soviet display of big government incompetence on a visit to her native Portugal:

The last time I was in Portugal I got to witness (actually the time before last, while running through the Lisbon airport) something I’d only previously read about as being normal in the Soviet Union: structures that were being built and decaying, simultaneously, which seems impossible, but I assure you it’s not.

[…]

The question is: competence has existed, and had high marks. We know it existed at various times, because their works survive: the landscape of Europe is still littered with Roman bridges and aqueducts, not to mention Roman roads. Cathedrals and monuments abound. Our own country has marvels of engineering and construction still standing and you don’t have to fix daily.

So, where did that competence go? And why does no one seem to know how to do anything. (Here as an aside, almost everything I learned to do competently had to be learned on my own, and often against massive resistance.)

Well, for about a hundred years now, we’ve been under the ideological ascent of socialism. And socialism — international socialism, to be precise — is only good for creating picturesque ruins. (The romantics would have loved them.)

Note that I’m not defending national socialism. As I’ve pointed out before, when the government takes over the economic life of a country, and directs what the companies can or cannot do, the tendency is to quash innovation, and as a rule everyone becomes very poor.

It’s just that it depends. Like empires (which to an extent they are) national socialist regimes can do okay under an extraordinary ruler. I had a mini-dispute with Herb in the comments on whether Franco was or was not Fascist. He absolutely was, both in the economic, and in the repressive, take over every minutia of life aspect. He was also better than the average bear at directing the economic life of the country which is why before his death we used to go shop in Spain, where more and better goods were available than in Portugal.

Relatively speaking, Salazar was a softer leader. Or at least, he stomped less on the opposition (while making more noises about stomping. It’s the Portuguese way.) But as an economic leader (director of the economic life. Führer if you will. Or where did you think that came from?) he sucked. He sucked upside down and sideways and with his head in a sack. And that’s because he was raised by Jesuits, and got his economic theories from them. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. So over his rule, everyone became increasingly poorer. But weirdly not incompetent. (In fact, as a person who — there and here — likes to follow craftsmen around watching how they do things, the average craftsman who learned his trade under national socialism, was probably way better than anyone else.)

Which brings us to: how does international socialism/communism not only destroy competency but introduce incompetency and corruption to the degree it is enforced/implemented.

March 15, 2022

For military procurement blunders, “no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada”

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

Germany has announced that they will be purchasing US F-35 stealth fighters as part of their re-armament program. My favourite headline on this was over at Blazing Cat Fur: “Germany To Buy 35 Lockheed F-35 Fighter Jets From U.S. Amid Ukraine Crisis … Canada Will Buy Cool ‘Fighter Jet Stickers’ With Eco-Friendly Adhesive”

On a more serious tone — but with sadly the same basic message — Mitch Heimpel looks at the multi-generational rolling catastrophe that is Canadian military procurement since the unification of the forces in 1968:

Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army since WW2. When I was in the reserves, we were told this was due for replacement in a few years. I was in the reserves from 1976-1980. It still hasn’t been replaced.

To say we have a checkered history with military procurement, fails to capture exactly how bad it is. Our political leadership has failed us continually over the course of half a century. No party has done it well. Some have done it better than others. But no one can claim any kind of bragging rights.

Fighter jet procurement in this country is so fraught it once caused the birth of a new political party. Trying to buy helicopters helped bring down a government. We only successfully bought those helicopters after they [the old helicopters] became a greater danger to the personnel manning them than they were to any potential adversary. We have been running a procurement for the next generation of fighter jets for an entire generation. Even Yes, Minister writers would have given up on something that absurd.

Our submarine fleet seems to be almost permanently in dry dock. Our most recent ship procurement resulted in the absolutely monstrous prosecution of one of the country’s most accomplished military leaders.

And we just issued a revised bid to finally replace our Second World War-era pistols … last week.

Just cataloguing that level of incompetence is exhausting. No leader or party looks good. The civil service, as the one constant through all these cartoonish blunders, surely has to wear some of this, too. The fact that we seem to repeat the same mistakes can, at least in part, be attributed to a significant institutional memory failure on the part of the people trusted with having the institutional memory.

Now, it is worth noting in fairness that no nation has an easy time with large scale military procurement. Ask the Americans about the development of the V-22 sometime. But, still, no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada.

I’m not a hardware expert. I can’t tell you which pistol we should buy. There’s also genuine policy questions here that need to be settled — I don’t know whether we should focus on the navy because we’re an Arctic nation, or the air force because it allows us to participate more readily in allied force projection exercises — like, say, no-fly zones? The necessary mix for Canada is no doubt some of both, and it’s fine to have disagreements between parties on what the right mix is.

But setting that aside, I want to talk about what it would take politically, to get us to start taking procurement seriously — just a few basic rules that any government would need to follow to procure anything that they chose was important for Canada to have.

February 7, 2022

QotD: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

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

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their own capabilities.

The term lends a scientific name and explanation to a problem that many people immediately recognize — that fools are blind to their own foolishness. As Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

An Overview of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
This phenomenon is something you have likely experienced in real life, perhaps around the dinner table at a holiday family gathering. Throughout the course of the meal, a member of your extended family begins spouting off on a topic at length, boldly proclaiming that he is correct and that everyone else’s opinion is stupid, uninformed, and just plain wrong. It may be plainly evident to everyone in the room that this person has no idea what he is talking about, yet he prattles on, blithely oblivious to his own ignorance.

The effect is named after researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the two social psychologists who first described it. In their original study on this psychological phenomenon, they performed a series of four investigations and found that people who scored in the lowest percentiles on tests of grammar, humor, and logic also tended to dramatically overestimate how well they had performed. Their actual test scores placed them in the 12th percentile, yet they estimated that their performance placed them in the 62nd percentile.

Kendra Cherry, “What Is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?”, verywellmind, 2018-04-09.

October 6, 2021

QotD: British military incompetence

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of country life, due to the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the more spirited workers off the land. It explains the immobility of the public schools, which have barely altered since the ‘eighties of the last century. It explains the military incompetence which has again and again startled the world. Since the ‘fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for opening tins. It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the Air Force, have always been more efficient than the regular army. But the navy is only partially, and the Air Force hardly at all, within the ruling-class orbit.

It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and looking at them merely from a liberal, negative standpoint, the British ruling class had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists. But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from the outside.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

September 26, 2021

“… is there a single area of public policy where Canada has its shit together?”

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

In The Line‘s weekly round-up, they point out a little-noticed Globe and Mail article that illustrates something that should really concern Canadians:

Sometimes the big lessons are in the small things. While everyone was busy jawboning about the federal election returns earlier this week, we were also struck by a barely noticed story in the Globe and Mail reporting that the federal government had awarded a contract to begin replacing the disastrous Phoenix payroll system. Phoenix, you’ll recall, was an IT project designed to harmonize the payroll for the entire federal public service. The 2016 rollout was a disaster, resulting in thousands of employees being paid too much, too little, or not at all. Fixing it has cost billions and has not entirely succeeded, and now it is being replaced entirely.

We were still pondering this news when Alex Usher idly wondered: “Genuine question: is there a single area of public policy where Canada has its shit together?”

Alex isn’t some rando Twitter troll. By day he runs Canada’s premier higher education consultancy. But he’s also one of the country’s most perceptive policy analysts, writes a daily blog about just about anything policy related, and is probably one of the three or four smartest Canadians still on Twitter.

Which is why his question was met with more thoughtful responses than the usual schoolyard heckling that is typical of the platform. Fiscal policy between 1993 and 2015, offered Ken Boessenkool. Andrew Coyne half-heartedly suggested monetary policy. Rachel Curran proposed immigration, prisons, and the coast guard, but was quickly set right by people who knew what they were talking about.

So when Usher followed his question with a long Twitter thread showing just how broken Canada is, with a sophisticated and nuanced take on why that’s the case, there really wasn’t anyone left making a serious argument against him. Everyone knows it is true.

Everyone, that is, except two of the most politically polarized groups in the country, who disagree about everything except the capacities of the government.

On the one hand there are the Build Back Better people, mostly housed in the increasingly unpopular Liberal Party of Canada. These people persist in believing that the federal government is poised to make big decisions, to take big actions, on big issues such as climate change, pandemic preparedness, and dealing with the rise of China. They are prepared to talk big talk, and spend big money, in pursuit of their policy objectives.

On the other, there are the paranoid conspiracists who believe that the government is using the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic to implement all manner of social controls. These include suspicions that the government would use a contact tracing app to engage in mass surveillance, that they are putting a 5G payload into the vaccines, or that this is all part of a big Liberal internationalist plan to set up a world government.

While these seem to be diametrically opposed worldviews, what they share is the deep conviction that the government can actually do something. Indeed, what is charming about the conspiratorial worldview is how much faith it actually has in the authorities.

Confront China? Please. We can’t buy ships, planes or even handguns for our military. Pandemic preparedness? You’re kidding, right? We can’t even hire enough nurses for the health-care system. Set up a world government? Lol who would we hire to work for this government? We can’t even figure out how to pay the public servants we already have on staff.

As usual, the correct counter to conspiracy-minded thinking is not to have faith in government, it’s to be realistic about it. Similarly, the correct response to the build back better crew is not enthusiasm, but realism. And ultimately, the right approach to everything the government proposes is deep, deep, deep cynicism.

One of the major reasons I’ve long favoured smaller government — the smaller the better — is that the bigger any organization gets and the more things it tries to do, the less effective it is at all of them. Governments in the western world generally have gotten so big that they’re incapable of doing almost anything in an effective, competent, and repeatable manner. A hypothetical world government would be even worse (just look at the existing United Nations to see how billions of dollars not only get nothing useful done, but often exacerbate existing problems).

May 1, 2021

The more we ask governments to do, the less well they do … everything

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

Matt Gurney’s latest Code 47 post reflects on the good and bad of Canadian governance right now (and yes, I agree with his basic take that despite buffoonery and incompetence at all levels of government, Canadians still generally have it good):

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

In some ways, absolutely. Canada’s relative awesomeness is not an accident. We rest on the accomplishments of prior generations and some of what we do today contributes directly to the common prosperity. A ton of stuff happens behind the scenes, every day, that contribute enormously to our way of life — really, make it possible. But in other ways, the pandemic has revealed just how incompetent and inept our governments have become meeting new challenges. It’s like every last bit of bandwidth our governments have is used up just keeping the status quo running along, and if we ask it to do anything new, it’s like hitting a computer with one process too many for its CPU. It just locks up.

Real-life example: I was watching today as the Ontario and federal governments continued bickering about the proper border controls we should have during what will probably be the last phase of this crisis. And what struck me was the sheer insanity of not having settled this a long time ago. I’m not even saying what I think the answer should have been. There’s a lot of genuinely competing interests there. I have my opinion, you can have yours. But can we at least agree that what to do about the goddamn borders ought not to still be under active decision 14 frickin’ months after this all began?

The federal government, in particular, seems to have fallen into a trap of its own making in that it corporately seems to believe that saying they’ll do something is exactly the same as actually doing something. Often enough, I’m pleased and relieved to find that Trudeau Jr.’s latest brain fart never got further than the press release and obligatory photo op, but it has become a constant in federal affairs. Optics matter far more than achievements, as long as the tame Canadian media play along — and they always played along with their boyfriend PM even before he bought them off with real money — nothing really changes. And everyone seems generally okay with this … except that real problems are not being addressed (ask any First Nations representative about how well the feds are helping with long-standing, known issues, for instance).

Certain provinces have done better than others. It’s tempting to point at them and go, ah ha, there’s what we should have done. And I think this is in large part fair and true. But it’s hard to make direct comparisons. Nova Scotia is not Ontario, and what worked in Nova Scotia wouldn’t necessarily have worked here. Believe me, if I could have swapped in their leaders for ours, I would have. It would have been an upgrade for sure. But the right solution, and personalities, for one crisis, in one time and place, aren’t necessarily the right solution for even that same crisis, at the same time, in a different place. I suspect we’ll spend a long time arguing about this once it’s all over, but I think that’s more or less where I’ve landed. Most of us would have been better off trying to be more like the Atlantic, but that doesn’t mean it would have recreated Atlantic-like successes everywhere.

But all that being said, there have been enormous basic failures, both in leadership and execution. You’ve all heard the joke about how someone new to government is shocked and dispirited to finally seize the levers of power, only to discover they’re not connected to anything. You can push and pull the levers all day long. But they don’t do anything. In Canada, both federally and in some of the provinces, we’ve been shockingly slow, again and again, to pull those levers. And sometimes, even after they’re pulled, nothing happens.

I don’t know if I have this thought through yet in a meaningful, useful way. This is a big, big idea that I’m starting at from different angles, trying to even conceive of its dimensions and scope. But if there is one problem we have — we have more, but if there is a meta-problem — I think it is that Canadian governments have lost the ability to execute new policy agendas. What we already have will generally work, more or less. But new things, or updates to old things? We routinely accept that failure is an option, or that even our successes will be late and overbudget — beyond acceptable real-world margins. (Life is always more complicated than theory.) There are things in my life that I just take for granted will work. If I get into my car and it doesn’t start, that surprises me, even though I am intellectually aware that that’s a possibility every time I try. But too often, with government, there is an entirely justified skepticism that it’ll succeed at all, let alone as intended, and yet, we shrug, because, hey. It’s Canada. Things are still good. How upset can I get about another program failure when I can just go fire up the barbecue and watch some hockey or something.

Governments are generally not very good at solving problems, especially novel problems that don’t already have a template to follow for success in similar circumstances. Set up a bureaucracy, establish processes and procedures, and set it in motion and it’ll carry on until the final Trump, but don’t ask it to cope with a crisis or even just an unexpected event or six. That’s not what they’re good at and they generally lack the organizational flexibility to adapt on the fly. Or at all.

August 1, 2020

Why incompetent people think they’re amazing – David Dunning

Filed under: Business, Education, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TED-Ed
Published 9 Nov 2017

Check out our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/teded

View full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-incomp…

How good are you with money? What about reading people’s emotions? How healthy are you, compared to other people you know? Knowing how our skills stack up against others is useful in many ways. But psychological research suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. In fact, we frequently overestimate our own abilities. David Dunning describes the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Lesson by David Dunning, directed by Wednesday Studio, music and sound by Tom Drew.

Thank you so much to our patrons for your support! Without you this video would not be possible!
Juan, Jordan Tang, Kent Logan, Alexandra Panzer, Jen, Ellen Spertus, Ryan Mehendale, Mary Sawyer, Scott Gass, Ruth Fang, Mayank Kaul, Hazel Lam, Tan YH, Be Owusu, Samuel Doerle, David Rosario, Katie Winchester, Michel Reyes, Dominik Kugelmann, Siamak H, Stephen A. Wilson, Manav Parmar, Jhiya Brooks, David Lucsanyi, Querida Owens.

April 5, 2019

The Brexit trainwreck is “revealing to the British public the extent of its political class’s incompetence”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal on the scale of political tomfoolery going on in the Brexit clusterfutz:

The imbroglio over Brexit has at least had the merit of revealing to the British public the extent of its political class’s incompetence. If it is accepted that people get the leadership that they deserve, however, thoughts unflattering to self-esteem ought to occur to the British population.

Theresa May did not emerge from a social vacuum. She is typical of the class that has gradually attained power in Britain, from the lowest levels of the administration to the highest: unoriginal, vacillating, humorless, prey to the latest bad ideas, intellectually mediocre, believing in nothing very much, mistaking obstinacy for strength, timid but nevertheless avid for power. Thousands of minor Mays populate our institutions, as thousands of minor Blairs did before them.

Avidity for power is not the same as leadership, and Brexit required leadership. There was none to be had, however, from the political class. From the very first, it overwhelmingly opposed Brexit — for some, the eventual prospect of a tax-free, expense-jewelled job in Brussels was deeply alluring — but found itself in a dilemma, since it could not openly deny the majority’s expressed wish. Many Members of Parliament sat for constituencies in which a solid majority had voted for Brexit. They feared that they would not win their next election.

The opposition Labour Party was as divided as the Conservatives. Irrespective of what its MPs actually believed about Brexit—its leader was, until recently, ardent for leaving the European Union, which he believed to be a capitalists’ club, changing his mind for reasons that he has so far not condescended to disclose — its main concern was to force an election that it believed it could win, a victory that would soon make Brexit seem like a minor episode on the road to ruin. The majority of the Labour MPs wanted first to bring about the downfall of a Conservative government and second to prevent Britain leaving the European Union without an agreement — what might be called the leaving-the-Union-without-leaving option. But they wanted the first more than they wanted the second, so under no circumstances could they accede to anything that Prime Minister May negotiated. Because of her tiny majority in Parliament, the hard-line Brexit members on her own side who want Britain to leave without a deal, and the refusal of her coalition partner, the Democratic Unionist Party, to back her, May needs the support of a considerable proportion of Labour MPs — which, so far, she has not received.

But the House of Commons as a whole, including the Conservatives, deprived May of leverage with which to renegotiate, because it voted that it would not accept leaving the Union without a deal. This deprived the European Union of any reason to renegotiate anything: it was a preemptive surrender to the demands of the E.U. that makes Neville Chamberlain look like a hard-bitten poker champion.

March 3, 2018

QotD: Elite incompetence

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Most people, most of the time, are perfectly happy to let elites run the country. After all, it seems to make the elites happy to run run things, and as long as they’re reasonably competent at it, and do it reasonably unobtrusively, no one much seems to care. But when elite competence is compromised by faulty ideology and cronyism, people become unhappy. And when the elite response to complaints is dismissal or insult, political problems begin to bloom. People begin to think about politics. They begin to do things. It is no coincidence, as our Soviet friends used to say, that the last decade has seen the rise of the TEA Party, the Occupy Movement, and the Trump phenomenon. People of all political stripes are becoming unhappy.

I think we’re about to watch the elites start paying a price for their incompetence, inattention and contempt. Euroskepticism is on the rise elsewhere in Europe. If EU membership were put to a popular vote in the Netherlands, Spain, or Sweden, there is a good chance that Leave would win there, too. Indeed, it’s possible that a vote to leave the EU might even win in France, the nation for whom creating and strengthening the EU has been the primary policy goal for 60 years.

Perhaps the “Vote Remain, you virulent racist!” PR campaign for staying in the EU needs a bit more thought.

Dale Franks, “Vote Properly, You Virulent Racist!”, Questions and Observations, 2016-06-28.

November 22, 2017

Why incompetent people think they’re amazing – David Dunning

Filed under: Health, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

TED-Ed
Published on 9 Nov 2017

View full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-incompetent-people-think-they-re-amazing-david-dunning

How good are you with money? What about reading people’s emotions? How healthy are you, compared to other people you know? Knowing how our skills stack up against others is useful in many ways. But psychological research suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. In fact, we frequently overestimate our own abilities. David Dunning describes the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Lesson by David Dunning, directed by Wednesday Studio, music and sound by Tom Drew.

Thank you so much to our patrons for your support! Without you this video would not be possible!
Juan, Jordan Tang, Kent Logan, Alexandra Panzer, Jen, Ellen Spertus, Ryan Mehendale, Mary Sawyer, Scott Gass, Ruth Fang, Mayank Kaul, Hazel Lam, Tan YH, Be Owusu, Samuel Doerle, David Rosario, Katie Winchester, Michel Reyes, Dominik Kugelmann, Siamak H, Stephen A. Wilson, Manav Parmar, Jhiya Brooks, David Lucsanyi, Querida Owens.

The first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club is that you don’t know you’re in Dunning-Kruger Club…

August 14, 2017

When did you first suspect that the world was being run by incompetent idiots?

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

Ace discusses the moment he realized there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the otherwise incomprehensible way our government and mainstream media operate:

Here’s a question I’d like to ask. I’ll try to figure out my own answer in the comments. But this is what I’m interested in:

When did you begin to suspect that the people in charge of the government and the media were dumb, ignorant, and sometimes actually deranged, and what confirmed it for you? What were your feelings about this? That is, was it like taking the Red Pill? Was it scary?

I’m trying to remember when this happened to me. Oh, the media I knew was biased; but I didn’t realize until the last decade that it was pig-ignorant and incompetent and filled with people who are mentally unwell.

The government — well, I blithely assumed that people who ran the government (or other major institutions) were generally at least low-level qualified.

At some point I realized we are being led — or rather controlled, as we do not follow willingly, but through coercion — by misfits, morons, and maniacs.

It was both scarifying and liberating, in a dark way.

But I think these realizations came kind of slowly and I’m trying to think of major things that crystallized them.

It also changed my opinion of many of my fellow citizens and onetime allies: I now view them as fools and maniacs (or worse) themselves for apparently seeming to continue to believe that Everything’s Okay and we’re still being led (controlled) by, if not the best and brightest, certainly the somewhat good and reasonably intelligent.

March 18, 2016

QotD: The war on competence

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

There is a war on. People who can do things, even just the things our parents could do, or less, are losing.

[…]

But there is worse. Lately I’ve been running into a new category “people who can’t do their jobs.” And these aren’t just our manual labor imports, I mean, people who supposedly are trained and certified and either can’t or won’t do their jobs.

I know everyone was very impatient with me last year when I was fixing the house for sale, but honestly, there is a reason I do all the manual labor I can. The reason is the tile wall I paid someone 1500 to fix (it had fallen. Long story) and which fell in the night, the day after he put it up. He’d mixed the adhesive wrong. So he came back and fixed it. It fell again. The third time I got a book (this was before Youtube) figured how to do it and did it. This wasn’t an isolated incident. It just keeps happening when someone comes over to fix something. So if I can, I do it.

But there’s more serious cases, like the guy who replaced our brakes but didn’t replace the brake cables. Leading to us losing brake power 15 minutes later. (Thank G-d someone was looking out for us. We lost it a) when Dan was driving. I’d have panicked. Well, he did too, but… he works even panicked. b) we were JUST outside a garage c) we’d been going very slowly.) Or the doctor who convinced himself my 13 year old had an STD and wouldn’t listen to the kid when he insisted he was a virgin. If I hadn’t gone over his head to a urologist, and told the boy to stop taking the antibiotic that was making him ill, my son would probably have died within months. (Of the problem, which was rare, but not unheard of particularly in early teens. As in the urologist identified it on symptoms alone.)

I’ve been given completely wrong instructions by someone selling me a machine or a product. I’ve had ghastly things done to garments or objects taken in for repair because the person who was supposedly an expert on this just couldn’t do it.

[…]

Publishing… well, there’s a reason the houses are floundering. And it’s not just the innovation, the end of push marketing, or the fact they can’t wrap heads around Amazon. That’s all I’ll say. Every time someone tells me they can’t go indie because how do they know the book is good if no professional has read it, I remember when I was sitting in a panel with the editor of my friend’s book, (professional, one of the big five) and it became clear not only hadn’t she read the book, but she had only skimmed the proposal. I later watched for the tells and (other than Baen) most of my books were published without anyone but the copyeditor even looking at them. And the copyeditor often sounded like she (it was always a she) had a high school education, even the ones editing history books.

Movie making. Director’s cuts are illuminating. “I filmed that scene, then it didn’t work. I don’t know why” — usually the reason is a gross error in basic storytelling. One anyone who had read a couples of plotting books could fix. But billionaires in Hollywood have no clue. They were never trained.

Sarah Hoyt, “The War On Competence”, According to Hoyt, 2016-03-04.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress