Quotulatiousness

July 16, 2023

Tricksy Tucker Carlson “tricked conservatives into accidentally thinking that they don’t like the former vice-president”

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

Chris Bray helps dispel the hypnotic trance so many American conservatives have been suffering under:

Tucker Carlson busy hypnotizing innocent conservatives to think they hate poor Mike Pence.

A stupid trend is emerging in the coverage of campaign discourse.

By now you’ve probably seen footage of Tucker Carlson interviewing Mike Pence in Iowa, a discussion that produced a memorable exchange regarding Ukraine. Politico would like you to know that it was a kind of hypnosis routine, a mental hijacking in which Carlson tricked conservatives into accidentally thinking that they don’t like the former vice-president.

The former Fox News host, reports the all-seeing Sally Goldenberg, “primarily used his perch to press candidates on issues of importance to him: namely, the United States’ role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.” As the United States sends cluster munitions to Ukraine and calls up thousands of reservists for “combat-ready” service in Eastern Europe, a journalist is asking political leaders about Ukraine only because it’s a quirky itch his ego needs to scratch — a selfish personal cause, pursued for whatever odd reason. Here’s Goldenberg’s eighth paragraph, and compare it to what you saw with your own eyes:

    Carlson — a fierce Trump defender who later soured on the ex-president — challenged, interrupted and contradicted the soft-spoken Pence at nearly every turn. As a result, the devout Christian candidate faced hostility and jeers at a summit that would have once provided him with a friendly audience.

The hostility and jeers were inorganic and manufactured; they didn’t happen because the audience didn’t like Pence or his answers, but as a result of the performative maneuvering of an interviewer who challenged and contradicted him. It’s simply not possible that the audience actually didn’t like Pence or his answer; rather, journalism’s David Blaine pulled a “hey, do you wanna see some magic?” on them, whisking them away into a world of illusion. Tucker Carlson entered a thousand helpless brains and drove a Pence-loving audience away like a bus. The story goes on the say that “establishment Republicans expressed dismay,” accusing Carlson of “pro-Kremlin misinfo.” They don’t have to write these stories any more — they can just cut and paste from all the previous versions.

This is a template for all future campaign coverage: Voters were accidentally hypnotized today into wrongfully [fill in blank] after [select: Tucker Carlson / Donald Trump] challenged and contradicted more responsible leaders.

July 14, 2023

QotD: Resolving “disagreements” on Wikipedia

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

I keep telling anybody who’ll listen, anytime the subject comes up: Always go to the Wikipedia talk page when you do your “researching” on Wikipedia! Take what you read in the main article with a huge grain of salt if you find a big back-and-forth melee going on in the talk page, for you can take it to the bank that if there’s a disagreement going on between conservative and liberal editors, it will be “resolved” by way of the liberal editors locking the article down after they’ve made sure to get the last word in. Which means what you’ve just read is mostly nothing but pure bovine product. If you’re gleaning this information for any kind of actual purpose, it goes without saying that this is something you should know. Information is meaningless without the “meta data”; without context.

And if there isn’t anything going on back there at all, you should probably still take the main article with a grain of salt because you might be reading a bunch of “everybody knows” gibberish without too much thought behind it.

M.K. Freeberg, “Latest Wikipedia Talk Page Mess: Socialism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2012-12-01.

July 10, 2023

QotD: Liberal and conservative views on innovation

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote for different parties — they are different kinds of people. They differ psychologically in ways that are consistent across geography and culture. For example, liberals measure higher on traits like “openness to new experience” and seek out novelty. Conservatives prefer order and predictability. Their attachment to the status quo is an impediment to the re-ordering of society around new technology. Meanwhile, the technologists of Silicon Valley, while suspicious of government regulation, are still some of the most liberal people in the country. Not all liberals are techno-optimists, but virtually all techno-optimists are liberals.

A debate on the merits of change between these two psychological profiles helps guarantee that change benefits society instead of ruining it. Conservatives act as gatekeepers enforcing quality control on the ideas of progressives, ultimately letting in the good ones (like democracy) and keeping out the bad ones (like Marxism). Conservatives have often been wrong in their opposition to good ideas, but the need to win over a critical mass of them ensures that only the best-supported changes are implemented. Curiously, when the change in question is technological rather than social, this debate process is neutered. Instead, we get “inevitablism” — the insistence that opposition to technological change is illegitimate because it will happen regardless of what we want, as if we were captives of history instead of its shapers.

This attitude is all the more bizarre because it hasn’t always been true. When nuclear technology threatened Armageddon, we did what was necessary to limit it to the best of our ability. It may be that AI or automation causes social Armageddon. No one really knows — but if the pessimists are right, will we still have it in us to respond accordingly? It seems like the command of the optimists to lay back and “trust our history” has the upper hand.

Conservative critics of change have often been comically wrong — just like optimists. That’s ultimately not so interesting, because humans can’t predict the future. More interesting have been the times when the predictions of the critics actually came true. The Luddites were skilled artisans who feared that industrial technology would destroy their way of life and replace their high-status craft with factory drudgery. They were right. Twentieth century moralists feared that the automobile would facilitate dating and casual sex. They were right. They erred not in their predictions, but in their belief that the predicted effects were incompatible with a good society. That requires us to have a debate on the merits — about the meaning of the good life.

Nicholas Phillips, “The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism”, Quillette, 2019-06-06.

May 15, 2023

Would Canadian voters welcome a new “actually centrist” political party?

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

Tasha Kheiriddin on the possibility of yet another political party contesting that mythical centrist voting bloc in Canadian elections:

By now, you have probably heard of Centre Ice Canadians. The group was co-founded a year ago by former two-time Conservative leadership candidate Rick Peterson. It made its debut as Centre Ice Conservatives, during the Conservative leadership process, holding a policy conference in Edmonton, followed by similar events in Halifax and Toronto. It published numerous op-eds and got the Canada Pension Plan to disinvest from funds profiting from slave labour in China. It positioned itself as a home for the politically homeless, chiefly Red Tories and Blue Liberals, who felt that neither of their parties were listening to their ideas.

Last week, Centre Ice announced that it would explore the possibility of registering as a political party. It did this following both an external opinion survey of 2000 Canadians, which found that 32% of those polled would likely consider voting for a centrist party in the next election, and a callout to its roughly 2000 supporters, which saw most respondents approve of the concept.

A working group headed by Peterson and New Brunswick MLA Dominic Cardy is now investigating the idea, including a draft constitution, fundraising and a new name, until September 20, at which point Centre Ice will formally decide whether it goes down that road. Observers posit that it could “disrupt the political system”, evoking memories of the Reform Party which did the same thing thirty years ago.

[…]

There’s another saying which management seems to have overlooked: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”. Leaders traditionally neutralized their opponents by keeping them busy and giving them reason to be loyal. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney made a place for former rival Joe Clark; Stephen Harper brought Peter MacKay into cabinet. In the Liberal camp, Jean Chretien had Paul Martin helm the Finance Portfolio; Trudeau gave Marc Garneau Transport and then Foreign Affairs.

That type of thing hasn’t happened in the current scorched earth climate. Animated by Twitter, where we’ve all said things we regret, it has instead produced a toxic purity test that excommunicates anyone who challenges the party line or criticizes the leader. Only the worthy are allowed in the tent.

That applies equally to the Liberals, who draw lines in the sand for their faithful on all manner of issues from abortion to gun control to internet regulation. Which is why the Centre Ice movement isn’t just about the Conservatives. Many of the people signing up on the organization’s website aren’t members of any party, but they would like to be. But they don’t like the climate of fear in either of the main parties.

They want to be able to express an opinion without being trolled. They want a place that eschews groupthink for group discussion. Whether such a party can exist in today’s politics, or whether it could make any headway in an election, is an open question.

What isn’t in question is that both federal parties have become polarized to their respective ends of the political spectrum: wokeism and populism. That is more unusual for the Liberals than for the Tories – the Liberals were traditionally the party of the centre, derided as the “mushy middle” for their ability to morph into whatever voters wanted at the time, as well as conflating their brand with the image of Canada (tolerant, multicultural, bilingual) in a way the Conservatives did not manage to do.

April 8, 2023

“The evidences of history and human nature are very clear: the Enlightenment was a tremendously bad idea”

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

Theophilus Chilton tries to persuade conservatives and libertarians that Classical Liberalism has failed:

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

The premise for this article might seem surprising to many who are used to believing that the Fukuyaman “end of history”, with its proposed ultimate victory of liberal democracy and market capitalism, is a done deal. After all, we look around the world and see the spread of democracy (even if by military force) taking place, as well as seeing the world seemingly integrated into a global economy characterized by complete fungibility of capital, resources, and labour. Yet, while this may be the façade which we are presented, it is manifestly obvious that most of what is called “democracy” is a sham and most of what is called “capitalism” is merely a cover for cronyism at the highest levels. This is the case even in the United States. We can no longer call our system “liberal” in any sort of classical sense when you can be jailed for referring to someone with the “wrong” pronoun and where the supposedly “free” press is effectively only the propaganda arm of one political party.

All over the world, classical liberalism is being supplanted by socialism and progressivism. This is obvious. What is even more obvious is that classical liberalism has been completely unable to prevent this from occurring. While there are some places where the tide is at least being slowed, this is due to the efforts of nationalists and others calling for stronger government along reactionary and traditional lines, not by those advocating for Reaganism, Thatcherism, or other manifestations of modern classical liberalism. Indeed, the two primary expressions of modern classical liberalism – libertarianism and American-style conservatism – are basically failures in every way. Libertarianism has devolved into a clown show of competing virtue signals, while conservatism (which has yet to actually conserve anything) has fastened onto itself the straitjacket of ideological dogmatism dictated to it by neo-conservatives and K-Street lobbyists.

We should not be surprised, however, that this has been the case. Classical liberalism itself was doomed from its inception. The reason for this is that classical liberalism derived directly from the sort of shoddy and shallow philosophies that drove the so-called “Enlightenment”. The Enlightenment – which we were all told was a good thing by our publik skoolz – represented a marked departure by Western civilisation from traditional realities upon which successful Western cultures were built. In contrast to the traditional values of the West, Enlightenment values represented a very skewed, unrealistic form of wishful thinking. Once these departures began to be codified into practice at the national level, it was only a matter of time before the leftward drift affected even the most morally well-insulated nations.

Below, I would like to discuss four basic areas where classical liberalism as an Enlightenment philosophy was set up for failure from the beginning.

On a somewhat less polemic level, Andrew Potter wonders if the sense of civilizational decline and dissolution many of us are feeling is down to the lack of community:

Here are some charts that were going around the social media the other day:

Boyle — a partner at Andreessen Horowitz — paired these charts with links to a series of reports and studies connecting these declines to a clutch of modern day problems, in particular rising levels of anxiety and depression, despair, most notably amongst the young.

As the boomers used to say, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. The Western world is in a bit of a funk.

Our political systems have become impossibly polarized, our economies stagger from one crisis to the next, and the welfare state is bumping up against the limits imposed by escalating costs and diminishing state capacity. All of this comes as people are losing faith in the institutions that have served for decades as the building blocks of a cohesive society. Our reserves of social capital are depleted as numerous countries report falling levels of patriotism, religiosity, and community-mindedness. Everyone’s more or less given up on having kids, while close to a third of men aged 18-30 haven’t had sex in the past year.

These stats vary from country to country, and some places are obviously doing better than others. But the trends are grim across the board; there’s no question that, in general, people in the West are in a bad way. The debate revolves around the cause or causes of these phenomena. Is it social media? The pandemic? Housing prices, debt and precarious employment?

One possibility is that the problem lies with the modern world itself. That the basket of rights-based political individualism and consumer-driven economic capitalism might provide us with all manner of creature comforts and technological wonders, but it doesn’t give us meaning. At the dark heart of liberalism lies nihilism.

This is not a new charge, it has been around as long as there has been liberalism. Yet there’s a bit of disagreement over exactly where the problem lies. For some, from Dostoevsky to the existentialists, the worry was deeply metaphysical: that in the absence of a god, or some comparable external source of absolute morality, the only alternative is raw moral relativism.

For other critics, the complaint is more aesthetic. The consumer goods and individualistic values that liberalism promotes are seen as terribly shallow and narcissistic, with the vulgar virtues of television and cheeseburgers supplanting the higher arts of opera and the terroir.

But there’s another argument, that sort of splits the difference between the metaphysical and the aesthetic worries. This is the idea that for all its promotion of radical pluralism, liberalism is actually hostile to true difference and diversity, of the sort that permits the flourishing of distinct communities. This was the central complaint of the Canadian philosopher George Grant, whose anti-American nationalism was based not on any sense that Canada was intrinsically worthwhile, but that its more collective approach to public life would foster a communitarianism that was not possible in the United States.

March 22, 2023

QotD: “[T]he Conservatives were a party whom its enemies need not fear and its friends did not trust”

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

[Theresa May’s] party is deeply divided on the question of Brexit, and the situation is eerily reminiscent of that which followed Joseph Chamberlain’s sudden conversion from Free Trade to protectionism in 1903. Though the times then were generally prosperous (judged by their own and not by subsequent standards), Chamberlain argued that unfair foreign competition was harming, and even destroying, British agriculture and industry. The solution that he proposed was protectionism within the then extensive British Empire.

The Conservative Party, led (or at least, headed) by the highly intellectual Arthur Balfour, was deeply divided on the question. It appeared not to be able to make up its mind; as one brilliant young Conservative Member of Parliament, Harry Cust put it, “I have nailed my colours to the fence”. Balfour, the Prime Minister, refused to express himself clearly on the subject, for fear of alienating one or other of the factions of his own party, and thereby bringing the government down. Intellectually brilliant as he was, he proved incapable of exercising any leadership.

In the election that followed Chamberlain’s conversion to protectionism, the Conservatives were swept from power. Neither free-traders nor protectionists trusted them, and the opposition Liberal Party, which at least was clear on this question, soon became a government of reforming zeal. For many years, the Conservatives were a party whom its enemies need not fear and its friends did not trust.

Theodore Dalrymple, “On Brexit, Remember that Politics Is Not a Dinner Party”, New English Review, 2018-03-11.

March 3, 2023

Conservatives keep re-enacting the Charlie Brown “kick the football” scenario

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

Theophilus Chilton on the evergreen Charlie Brown and Lucy impersonations of the conservatives and progressives in western political struggles:

If there is one thing that becomes apparent when you talk to a lot of normie conservatives, it is that they have absolutely no idea how or why they keep getting rolled over by the radical Left. They work and they work and they work to win elections, they invest their time and money to get “their guy” into office, only to find him selling them out on the first important issue within a month of taking office. They pass laws, only to be thwarted in the courts. When they win in the courts, they get thwarted by the bureaucracy. They try and try to force government to abide by the Constitution, but find that this document applies in one direction only. No matter what they do, they simply cannot keep Cthulhu from swimming left.

Why is this?

It’s because they fundamentally don’t understand how power actually works. In a sense, normie conservatives long for a world that never existed. They desperately want to “keep” a republic where politicians work for the public good and where government is truly restrained by its founding document. So it’s something of a bitter pill for them to swallow when they finally accept that such a thing doesn’t exist, and really hasn’t existed in any reasonable form in the United States since the Civil War. America has continued to move left for the past 150 years because the Left has been perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to win. The Left has become adept at “manipulating procedural outcomes,” by which is meant the ability to game the system to make an existing structure which is “supposed” to operate one way bring about outcomes which were never really intended (or even considered possible) by the people who put it into place.

How do you get around constitutional restraints on, say, gun laws or federal encroachments on state prerogatives? Well, one example would be to use fraud and deceit to subvert the Constitution’s provision for elections to get your people in office, who then use the Constitution’s provisions for nominating and approving judges to get friendly judges in power, who then use the (dubiously) constitutional provision for judicial review to decide that whatever laws you want to pass are “constitutional.” Other than the initial fraud (which, since you run the show now, isn’t going to be challenged in any substantive way), everything you did was “technically” in line with the Constitution, even though the results are quite the opposite of what was actually intended. Wanna pack the Supreme Court? Technically, it’s legal! Ban political speech you don’t like? Call it “hate speech” and enforce it under provisions in administrative law that have already been allowed to stand by your judges. The Left has become very adept at appearing to “follow the rules” while working the system to undermine that same system for its own ends.

So that’s “how” the Left always seems to beat conservatives, even when conservatives manage to win an election. But WHY does this happen?

It happens because conservatives ALLOW it to happen.

Let’s be brutally honest here – normie conservatives are saps. They continue to play a rigged game, no matter how often they lose. And they do so because they believe it is virtuous to hold onto “principles” which inevitably lead to failure after failure. They never consider that if “holding to their principles” means the destruction of everything they profess to hold dear, then those principles are terrible principles that should perhaps be reconsidered. If you pat yourself on the back for your virtue in “playing by the rules” even as your house burns down around you and the neighbours are making off with all your stuff, then you’re the source of the problem. Don’t blame somebody else for capitalising on your stupidity.

January 8, 2023

Conservatives “vote harder”, progressives take advantage of “procedural outcome manipulations”

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

Theophilus Chilton on a key difference between progressives and conservatives in how they address perceived problems with “the system”:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Over the past decade or so, many folks on the broad Right have noticed that practically all of our institutions don’t really work as they should. The natural tendency on the part of normie conservatives is to chalk this up to incompetence and corruption. Granted, those do come into play – and will continue to do so increasingly. Yet structurally speaking, our institutional dysfunctionality runs a lot deeper than a little graft or some skimming off the top. Our institutional failures are both purposeful and towards a specific end.

Normies can perhaps be forgiven for not immediately coming to this conclusion. After all, as the name suggests, they’re the norm. They’re the mainstream. They’re not out on the “fringe” somewhere, for better or for worse. These are conservatives who have been conditioned by decades of playing by the rules to trust the rules and the processes under which government and institutions operate (even if they think they “distrust government” or whatever). They’re the ones who believe we have to keep voting harder because voting is the only “proper” way to act in our system. And yet, many times they end up being mystified that not only do the institutions and procedures not “work right” but that nobody in power (even their own so-called representatives) seems the least bit bothered by this.

Yet, purposeful it truly is. There is a concept about our institutions that I wish every conservative understood, which is that of “manipulating procedure outcomes”. Basically, what this refers to is the process by which bad actors will take an established procedure — a rule or statute, an institution inside or outside of government, a social or political norm — and subvert it to their own use while still “technically” adhering to procedure. However, the process of doing so completely warps the results from those which “should” happen had the procedure been played straight. This intentionality explains why our institutional failures always seem to tend in one direction — Cthulhu always seems to swim left, so to speak. The American Left are masters at manipulating procedural outcomes, while the American Right rigidly tries to adhere to “the way things oughta be” and end up getting outmanoeuvered every time.

Allow me to give some examples of this; seeing them will start to train the eye towards recognising other instances of this process.

Let’s take, for example, the recent revelations of government censorship of dissident ideas and individuals that we saw in the Twitter files. Now, we all know that the government can’t censor speech and ideas because of the First Amendment. So this means that they’d never do so … right? (LOL) Well, as the Twitter files revealed — and which absolutely assuredly applies to every other major tech company in the field — FedGov and the alphabet agencies simply use companies like Twitter as a way to work around the 1A. They can’t censor directly, but they can rely upon a combination of selective pressure on tech companies and ideologically friendly personnel within these companies to censor and gather information about right-leaning, and especially dissident Right, users all the same. And technically, none of this is illegal, because muh private company and all that. So a functional illegality nevertheless remains within the boundaries of “procedure”.

The same type of manipulation is underway with regards to the Second Amendment, too. Again, the plain wording of the 2A, as well as a long train of prior judicial interpretive precedence, militates against federal and state governments really being able to restrict the gun rights of Americans (not that they don’t try anywise). They can’t make it illegal to buy or own guns. Schemes like prohibitively taxing ammo won’t pass muster either. So if you’re a left-wing fruitcake who hates the Constitution and badly wants to disarm your fellow Americans for further nefarious purposes, what do you do?

Well, you make it too legally dangerous for gun owners to actually use their guns for anything beyond target shooting. You install a bunch of Soros-funded prosecutors in all the jurisdictions that you can so that you can go light on criminals but throw the book at gun owners who defend themselves from criminals. You creatively interpret laws to mean that harming someone while defending yourself is a crime or, barring that, open up self-defenders to civil attack from the criminal’s family. From a self-defence perspective you set up an anarchotyrannical regimen that can be used against ideological enemies. This is basically the same thing the Bolsheviks did when they were consolidating their power as “Russia” transitioned to “the Soviet Union”, as recorded by Solzhenitsin in The Gulag Archipelago. They used administrative courts and ideological judges to punish people who legitimately defended themselves against criminals. If you injured someone who was attacking or robbing you, you went to the gulag. Of course, as we’re also seeing today, these criminals were functionally agents of the Regime by that point.

December 17, 2022

Capital punishment

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

Tam at View From The Porch expresses some of her concerns about the death penalty and government’s fitness to carry out such punishments fairly:

“Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park” by August Rode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I’ve written numerous times that I’m pretty ambivalent about capital punishment. There are some crimes so heinous that you can’t just walk back from them and say “Hey, I’m sorry I ate grandma’s face with some fava beans and a nice chianti, but I was off my meds. I’m feeling better now and ready to be a productive member of society!” I’m comfortable with the concept of having society’s lifeguard blow the whistle and order that dude out of the pool.

Thing is, it turns out that a lot of people wind up on death row for Felony Being Black In A Lineup with a further count of Aggravated Having A Bad Lawyer. It’s bad enough having to try to make things right with a dude you’ve locked in a cell for years by mistake, but it’s impossible to do with a dude you’ve put in a coffin.

Conservatives don’t trust the government to do most anything right, from writing & enforcing gun laws to delivering the mail, but when it comes to making sure they strap the right guy in Ol’ Sparky, suddenly y’all act like the government couldn’t possibly screw up.

So while in theory I’m pretty okay with the idea of capital punishment, in some frictionless setting where all cows are spherical and have equal mass and libertarianism works, here in the real world I just don’t trust people to implement it right.

If we as a society screw up and off the wrong dude, who gets the sentence for that? Or do we all get ¹⁄₃₃₃,₀₀₀,₀₀₀ of a sentence?

December 5, 2022

Edmund Burke

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

At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin republishes part of a much older post out as background on Edmund Burke (who I haven’t yet read):

Portrait of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), circa 1770-1780 after a painting of 1774 by James Northcote.
Original in the Royal Albert Museum & Art Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

When I first started reading Edmund Burke, it was for the political wisdom his writings contained. Only many years later did I start to benefit from noticing that the Burke we know – the man proved a prophet by events and with an impressive legacy – differed from the Burke that the man himself knew: the man who was a lifelong target of slander; the one who, on each major issue of his life, gained only rare and partial victories after years or decades of seeing events tragically unfold as he had vainly foretold. Looking back, we see the man revered by both parties as the model of a statesman and thinker in the following century, the hero of Sir Winston Churchill in the century after. But Burke lived his life looking forwards:

  • On America, an initial victory (repeal of the Stamp Act) was followed by over 15 years in the political wilderness and then by the second-best of US independence. (Burke was the very first member of parliament to say that Britain must recognise US independence, but his preferred solution when the crisis first arose in the mid-1760s was to preserve – by rarely using – a prerogative power of the British parliament that could one day be useful for such things as opposing slavery.)
  • He vastly improved the lot of the inhabitants of India, but in Britain the first result of trying was massive electoral defeat, and his chosen means after that – the impeachment of Warren Hastings – took him 14 years of exhausting effort and ended in acquittal. Indians were much better off, but back in England the acquittal felt like failure.
  • Three decades of seeking to improve the lot of Irish Catholics, latterly with successes, ended in the sudden disaster of Earl Fitzwilliam’s recall and the approach of the 1798 rebellion which he foresaw would fail (and had to hope would fail).
  • The French revolutionaries’ conquest of England never looked so likely as at the time of his death in 1797. It was the equivalent of dying in September 1940 or November 1941.

It’s not surprising that late in his life he commented that the ill success of his efforts might seem to justify changing his opinions. But he added that, “Until I gain other lights than those I have“, he would have to go on being true to his understanding.

Burke was several times defeated politically – sometimes as a direct result of being honest – and later (usually much later) resurged simply because his opponents, through refusing to believe his warnings, walked into water over their heads and drowned, doing a lot of irreversible damage in the process. Even when this happened, he was not quickly respected. By the time it became really hard to avoid noticing that the French revolution was as unpleasant as Burke had predicted, all the enlightened people knew he was a longstanding prejudiced enemy of it, so “he loses credit for his foresight because he acted on it”, as Harvey Mansfield put it. (Similarly, whenever ugly effects of modern politics become impossible to ignore, people like us get no credit from those to whom their occurrence is unexpected because we were against them “anyway”.)

Lastly, I offer this Burke quote to guide you when people treat their success in stealing something from you (an election, for example) as evidence of their right to do so:

    “The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least, it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments – success.”

October 27, 2022

Rishi Sunak becoming PM apparently – wait for it – proves that systemic racism is still a thing in Britain

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

You’d think the first non-white British PM would help dispel the constant claims that British society is still deeply racist, but as Theodore Dalrymple shows, that underestimates the political need to use “racism” as a rhetorical stick to beat the electorate with:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

The new British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is the son of Punjabi immigrants from East Africa. You might have thought that this would satisfy, or at least please, the anti-racism lobby, by demonstrating that British society is an open one, not completely sclerosed by racist prejudice: but you would be wrong.

An opposition member of parliament called Nadia Whittome, herself of Indian origin, tweeted that Sunak’s appointment to the highest political position was not a victory for Asian representation.

This follows the assertion not long ago by Rupa Huq, another Member of Parliament of Indian subcontinental origin, that Kwasi Kwarteng, former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s short-lived Chancellor of the Exchequer, was only “superficially black” because he spoke what in England is called the King’s English. She said that, listening to him on the radio, one would not even know that he was black. Instead, he spoke like the highly educated person he was, which in Huq’s opinion was incompatible with being black. Whites are not the only racists.

The remarks by these two female politicians, all the more significant because they were spontaneous rather than deeply considered, reveal something about the nature of modern identity politics: that the function of minorities (whether racial, sexual, or other) is to act as vote-fodder for political entrepreneurs of a certain stripe. It’s therefore the duty of minorities to remain the victims of prejudice against them and not to rise in the social scale by their own efforts: To do so is to betray the cause and above all their supposed leaders.

The reason that Whittome considers that Sunak’s appointment isn’t a victory for Asian representation is that, although of Asian origin, his parents (his father was a doctor) had him expensively educated and Sunak is now a multimillionaire, unlike most people of Asian origin — to say nothing of most whites.

There are, of course, other ways in which he isn’t representative of the Asian, or any other, population, the most important of which is that he’s of far above-average intelligence. (I must here point out also that while a certain level of intelligence is a necessary condition for a successful political career, it’s far from being a sufficient one.)

Representative government doesn’t mean that the representatives in the legislature or government must reflect the population demographically, such that — for example — 5 percent of them must have IQ’s of less than 70, though increasingly it may appear that they do. Nor are a person’s political or social views straightforwardly a reflection of his or her own economic position: If they were, Engels (who was a factory owner and rode to hounds) would never have been Marx’s collaborator, and Marx himself would not have written Capital, for he was no more proletarian than is King Charles.

October 25, 2022

Rishi Sunak becomes Britain’s latest Prime Minister

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

I don’t know how the oddsmakers rate the new PM’s chances, but there’s bound to be money made and lost on how long he sticks around. In The Line, Andrew MacDougall wishes Rishi Sunak good luck in his new post:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.
Wikimedia Commons.

It says something about the current dysfunction in British politics that the elevation of a third prime minister in a matter of just two months — without a single vote cast, by anyone — is seen as a relief. So all hail the new PM Rishi Sunak, a.k.a. the man who lost to Liz Truss eight weeks ago, as he takes the wheel of this drunken nation.

Sunak won the leadership of the Conservative Party — and through it, the premiership of the country — in the short and sharp race triggered by the spectacular end of the Trussterfuck all of (checks notes) four days ago. With the declared support of nearly 200 of his Parliamentary colleagues, Sunak was able to see off challenges from former prime minister Boris Johnson and current House Leader Penny Mordaunt. Both Mordaunt and Johnson declined to seek a vote by the party membership, prioritizing “party unity” instead.

It will now be up to the 42-year old Sunak, an MP for only seven years, to deliver that party unity. And good luck, as they say, with that. Because the Tories are now riven into warring factions which appear to have no more in common with each other than Jagmeet Singh does with success.

Yeah, it’s that bad.

A good first step for Sunak would be to not repeat the errors of the Truss … era? When you’re in a hole, stop digging, etc. Thankfully, Sunak already has credibility here, having spent the summer telling everyone that Truss’s economic policies would be disastrous. The former chancellor of the Exchequer is, thank Christ, well acquainted with economic reality and is expected to continue the new course set out by Jeremy Hunt, the current chancellor, who has spent his time erasing all of the dick-and-ball doodles Truss scribbled onto the economy. This will surely please the international bond markets, who are the actual rulers of the United Kingdom. It will also please mortgage holders, whose payments are now expected to go up less than during Trussonomics.

But it won’t please everyone.

Robert Hutton in The Critic, for one, welcomes the new robot PM:

The morning had been hugely enjoyable, hours of watching Tory MPs rushing to endorse Rishi Sunak while there was still time. Boris Johnson had suddenly disappeared from view, claiming that he could have won, easily, but had decided not to try. Penny Mordaunt tried her best, and claims to have come within touching distance of the 100-nomination threshold, but, just before Sir Graham Brady was going to announce the result, she issued a statement saying that she hadn’t made it. It was, of course, significantly more gracious than Johnson’s. For all the claims that his time on holiday has made him a more thoughtful and humble figure, his Sunday evening statement suggests he is as much of a petulant man-child as he ever was.

And so to the desk-banging. In fairness, the appointment of Rishi Sunak as leader and prime minister-in-waiting was, for a lot of Tory MPs, an unexpected and huge relief. People who six long weeks ago thought they’d never see the inside of a ministerial car again now glimpse a future bright with possibility, at least as far as they personally are concerned.

[…]

The oddity to the day was that we hadn’t heard from our incoming prime minister. In fact, he didn’t seem to have spoken a word in public since the start of September. Finally he popped up, and we worked out why they’d been keeping him away from the cameras.

It was a brief statement, throughout which he stared at a point just off camera, giving the impression to the viewer that he was looking over your left shoulder, hoping to catch the eye of someone more interesting who was standing behind you.

He opened by paying tribute to Liz Truss “who has led with dignity and grace through a time of great change”. Or, as the rest of us call it, “September”. His delivery was awkward, as though he had read about public speaking in a book, with frequent random pauses. “I am,” he said. “Humbled. And honoured. To have the support of my parliamentary colleagues. And to be elected as leader. Of the Conservative. And Unionist Party!”

Sebastian Millbank, on the other hand, sees Sunak as heralding the end of British sovereignty:

Sunak will be praised, despite being arguably the most privileged man in British politics, as being a triumph for diversity and social mobility, Britain’s first ethnic minority Prime Minister. But he’s also our first Californian Prime Minister — a man who believes heart and soul in the Silicon Valley “Californian ideology“, and boasts of his time in Stanford as a formative experience that gave him a “bigger, more dynamic approach to change”.

In choosing Rishi Sunak in a panicked attempt to retain power and calm the markets, Tory MPs have signed away what is left of British sovereignty over our own affairs. You will hear claims that “this is how the British system works”, that in a parliamentary democracy he need only win the confidence of parliament, and does not need to go to the country.

This is sheer and utter nonsense. The Conservative majority was elected, in its current form, on the basis of the 2019 manifesto, with its promises to strengthen the public sector, heal regional inequality, and reclaim sovereignty over our borders, law and finances. If Sunak and his party no longer intend to honour those commitments, they must win a fresh mandate in a general election.

October 21, 2022

The brief career of Liz Truss as British Prime Minister

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

As I was typing the heading for yesterday’s post on former British Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, it occurred to me that I might need the same phrasing for the Prime Minister … but I expected her to stumble on a few more weeks or months rather than following Kwarteng out the door this quickly:

Edmund Burke – one of the great theorists of the state – argued that for a government to rule successfully, it must have consent. Liz Truss lacked that consent; she moved like Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, ruling with an iron fist towards her economic vision without the consent, explicit or implicit, to rule in that manner and pursue that agenda.

Her economic programme was wholly unsuitable for the climate and deeply damaging. The result was that her reign, like Hobbes’ state of nature where nobody had the political legitimacy to rule, was nasty, brutish and short. It has left the mantle impossibly difficult for her successor.

Liz Truss has become the first prime minister since Neville Chamberlain to never face a general election whilst in office, and her successor will be under immediate pressure to call one. The economic situation is far more dire than it was before her disastrous mini-budget, and trust is shattered. This is before expected interest rate increases could tip millions into unaffordable mortgages, and the expiry of the energy support scheme (except for targeted support). Whoever takes over will face crises on multiple fronts that may prove impossible to arrest.

There’s rarely been a political downfall that didn’t merit at least a nod to the famous bunker scene:

If you haven’t seen Downfall, you’ve almost certainly seen its most famous scene. As shells fall on Berlin and the Red Army advances, Hitler sits in his bunker and listens as his generals lay out exactly how bad the situation is. One by one, his options are whittled away until eventually it sinks in that all that awaits is total defeat, humiliation, and annihilation.

On an entirely unrelated note, as Liz Truss returns to her bunker underneath the big table in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, difficult conversations are happening in Downing Street. It’s 11am on a Thursday morning …

Penny Mordaunt attempts a cheerful smile. She does not succeed. “Prime Minister – the Labour party has made a breakthrough across a wide front. In the South they are taking Bedfordshire and Norfolk. In the North, the Red Wall is broken. In the East and West, losses are limited because fish don’t vote. But indications are that even the haddock are pretty gloomy about your prospects.”

Truss waves this away. “Don’t worry. Kwasi’s resignation will bring it under control.”

The Cabinet exchanges uneasy glances. Mordaunt steps forward from the crowd. “Prime minister … Kwasi …”

Jacob Rees-Mogg finishes the thought. “Kwasi is briefing against you in the Times. He says you have weeks remaining in office.”

An awkward silence develops, extends. In this room, time now has no meaning. Glaciers run like rivers. The sun and moon flicker across the sky. Empires rise and fall, newly sapient species emerge, flourish, and die off. Eventually the universe undergoes total heat death, frozen into stasis until a spark suddenly appears; a second big bang. Energy. Light. The reinvention of particle physics, and eventually an earth, evolution, Britain, and

“Prime Minister?”

“Yes. I see.”

A second pause, blessedly shorter. Mordaunt and Rees-Mogg glance nervously at each other. Eventually, Truss settles on a response: “Would everyone who has briefed against me in the last week please leave the room.”

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill makes the argument that Britain is now a political wasteland:

So Liz Truss is out. After just 44 days her premiership is no more. “I’m a fighter, not a quitter”, she said in parliament yesterday, and now she’s quit. Her premiership deserves to live in ignominy. Not necessarily because her blunders were so spectacular – though many of them were – but because of what this strangled-at-birth stint in Downing Street tells us about British politics more broadly. Which is that it’s a wasteland. An ideological void. A dustbowl of ideas. The lack of even the faintest glimmer of leadership material anywhere in the Westminster circus is horrifying to me. Trussism is but a symptom of a wider malady afflicting our political class.

[…]

Let’s go beyond Truss and Hunt and ask what this all tells us about the Conservative Party. This is the oldest political party in Europe, arguably the world. It’s the party that gave us Peel, Churchill, Thatcher, properly historic figures. Which birthed so much of the legal and political order we live under. Which The Economist aptly called “the world’s most successful party”. And which once reached, through Conservative Associations, the Church and other formal and informal networks, into communities across the land.

Now it’s a hollow machine, bereft of strategy, in dire want of ideas, out of touch with the public, disorientated, and infamous for having a PM who couldn’t last a naff, paltry 50 days in Downing St. The factional Tories cheering Truss’s demise are fools. Your entire party is indicted by this shitshow. And by the fact that your big replacement for lame Liz – Hunt – is a man so disconnected from British people, British history and British politics that he prefers EU oversight to national sovereignty, technocracy to belief, and “competence” to passion. Congrats!

To see the true state of the Tory Party, look no further than a comment piece penned by one of its former leaders, William Hague, this week. “Ideology is dead: it’s competence we need now”, the headline said. In short, you’ve had your fun with Brexit and Boris and the mad populist experiment – now it’s time for the adults to come back into the room and take control. Not only is this undemocratic (14million people voted for Boris to be PM, no one voted for Hunt to be de facto PM). Not only is it anti-political. Not only is it bureaucratic, stiff and unabashedly concerned more with making the trains run on time than with inspiring the people with proposals for a genuinely better life. It is also an admission that they have no ideas left. That the once great Conservative Party is completely out of steam. That Westminster itself is knackered. “Competence” is the last refuge of the visionless. They’re finished. Kaput. Clueless. Not just Liz, all of them. The need for a political overhaul has never been so pressing and so great.

Despite the “bad optics”, as Tristin Hopper points out here, this is what’s supposed to happen when the PM gets it totally wrong, and Canadians have no grounds to criticize Britain here:

October 10, 2022

Janice Fiamengo on the #MGTOW affair – “In short, men who ‘go their own way’ have decided that they need women even less than the mythical fish needed its wheeled transport”

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

Recently, much impassioned wailing and howling has been directed at new Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre for his media team’s use of the notorious, misogynistic, coded-hate-speech metatag #MGTOW on postings to social media. Janice Fiamengo calls out the bold hypocrisy of most of the critics:

Remember “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle?”

Popularly credited to feminist icon Gloria Steinem, the slogan embodied the insouciance and independence claimed by Second Wave feminists. Women could get along just fine without men (though not without their tax money, as it turned out — more on this later) and lesbian feminists like Adrienne Rich (in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”) explicitly called on all women to withdraw their caring from men as an act of female solidarity.

Nice, eh?

Anyone who objected to the anti-male rhetoric was dismissed as an apologist for patriarchal oppression (“Do you have a problem with equality?”), and generations of young women were given the message that wanting to love and be loved by a man was a betrayal of the sisterhood. What else was one to make of Professor of Law Catharine MacKinnon’s claim, in her 1989 essay for the journal Ethics, that “The major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it” (p. 336-337).

For decades, feminists in Canada have been given a free pass to vilify men as a group. In 1978, women’s groups held the first “Women Reclaim the Night” march in downtown Vancouver. It was a raucous, aggressive, property-destroying affair culminating in the symbolic murder of a stuffed male “Rapist” mannequin who was “literally stomped to shreds” by woman warriors.

[…]

So it is rather rich, now, five decades into the feminist revolt, to see pundits and political commentators huffing and puffing in outrage about MGTOW, dubbed a “misogynist men’s rights movement” or a “far-right misogynistic online movement”, and calling on newly-minted Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre (who, alas, seems eager to oblige) to disavow them. MGTOW stands for Men Going Their Own Way, and it was a happy day for the mainstream feminist-left when Global News allegedly discovered that Poilievre’s team had tagged many of his videos with the acronym.

The hypocrisy is off the charts.

It’s doubtful that any of the commentators getting on their high horses knows anything about MGTOW except the hysterical nonsense feminists have cooked up. MGTOW is not an official movement, far less an “organization”, as Poilievre mistakenly called it. It has no recognized leadership, no designated spokespersons, no political program, no lobbying power, and no public presence. It is not actually interested in “men’s rights” except to point out that men don’t have any. It has no philosophical connection with incels. It is basically a loose (mainly online) affiliation of men who have decided to check out of women’s lives.

Aren’t feminists always saying that they want men to stop dominating them, subjugating them, pestering them, harassing them, controlling them, and making them uncomfortable? That’s what MGTOW are all about.

October 8, 2022

First BoJo “Miss me yet?” meme time?

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

Dominic Sandbrook on the terrible, awful, very bad start to Liz Truss’s Premiership:

If you believe the mainstream media, it has been yet another cosmically dire week for the Conservatives. But let’s stop going on about all the little things that went wrong, and concentrate instead on what went right. Nobody died. Liz Truss got through her speech without losing her voice, losing her mind or falling off the stage. The pound is back up to its level before Kwasi Kwarteng’s Fiscal Event. And maybe, just maybe, things are going to come right after all.

The winter energy crisis won’t be as bad as everybody fears. Inflation will start to come down. By the spring, that enormous Labour poll lead will be a fading memory. And as the next election approaches, ordinary people across the land will throw their caps in the air and cheer the name of Good Queen Liz …

No. No, I can’t do it. Tempting as it is to tilt against the conventional wisdom, sometimes you just have to face facts. The conference was awful. The speech was awful. This has been the worst start to any premiership, I think, in recent history — perhaps even in all British history.

Perhaps some readers will think this very harsh. But one close Truss ally, speaking off-the-record to the Financial Times, didn’t seem to think so. “I just went back to my hotel room and cried,” he said. “It’s a total disaster.” That’s pretty much what the general public think, too. In focus groups this week, the words that came up again and again were “incompetent”, “useless”, “untrustworthy”, “dangerous” and “clueless”. The punters aren’t always right, of course. But this time they are right, aren’t they?

“Our policy is great,” Penny Mordaunt told a fringe conference audience a couple of days ago, “but our comms is shit.” But if your comms really is shit, then who cares about the policy? Who even knows about it? Communicating your policy is the very essence of politics. If you can’t do it, you’ll never win another election.

I watched Truss’s speech through my fingers, embarrassed not just by the sheer lack of content, but the comically wooden and childlike delivery. It speaks volumes that in their desperation to find something, anything, nice to say about it, sympathetic papers applauded her for staying calm after she was interrupted by hecklers. Only somebody who had never heard of Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair — all of whom were brilliant at dealing with interruptions — could have possibly thought this worth applauding.

For although academics and activists often prefer to talk about the abstractions of ideology or the nuts and bolts of policy, performance really, really matters in politics. To some extent, in fact, performance is politics. Even in a parliamentary system, you need a messenger who embodies the message, a leader who can charm and explain. Watch Thatcher talking to Robin Day in 1984, or Jim Callaghan being interviewed by Thames TV’s This Week in 1978, and it’s like entering a different world. Whatever their ideological differences, Thatcher and Callaghan are seasoned, accomplished performers, at the top of their respective games. They think about the questions. They talk in complete sentences, even complete paragraphs. They give long, considered, serious answers. They seem like impressive, well-informed, formidable people. Then watch Truss again, and try not to weep.

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