Quotulatiousness

June 12, 2021

Canadian “Conservatives” start listing their preferred pronouns

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

Mark Steyn surveys the “conservatives” in the UK, the US, and last-and-least, Canada:

Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill (preferred pronouns she/her).
Photo attributed to “Michelle Staff” via Wikimedia Commons.

So much for UK conservatism. What of Canada? The two most rock-ribbed “right-wingers” in the Dominion’s politics, Doug Ford of Ontario and Jason Kenney of Alberta, have taken the position that conservatism is an indulgence you can’t afford in a pandemic: Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no conservatives in lockdowns.

At the federal level, the cautious and eventually stalled incrementalism of Stephen Harper was followed by the unprincipled hollowness of Andrew Scheer and, after his predictable failure, the everything-must-go massive-storewide-clearances of Erin O’Toole. Even so, I was startled by a tweet from Michelle Rempel Garner, an Alberta MP whom I knew only as an occasionally lively thorn in the side of Justin & Co. Ms Rempel Garner was responding to the appalling killings of a Muslim family in London, Ontario, which within minutes had been seized on by the media-left alliance for the usual purposes, notwithstanding that the perp does not appear to fit the desired narrative. Nevertheless, the outbreak of vehicular “Islamophobia” was taken by Michelle Rempel Garner as the perfect opportunity for an express checkout:

    I humble myself and ask forgiveness, and seek to make things right.

    I have privilege; I am cis/straight/white. But I am also a woman who works in a system dominated by white maleness.

    But no excuses. I will do what I can.

Seeing the above at the great Kate McMillan’s website, I assumed it was a giant leg-pull by Ms Rempel Garner, as did many other of Miss McMillan’s readers. So, as she clarified, no, sorry, it’s for real. The Tory member’s Twitter account now shows her pronouns: “she/her” (at the time of writing). In 2019 it was a big deal when Kamala Harris, at the start of a Democrat debate, announced her pronouns. Less than two years later, “conservative” politicians want a piece of the pronoun action too. Already a key player in O’Toole’s shadow cabinet, the she/her move could make Michelle a shoo-in for Deputy Prime Minister.

Except, of course, that that would require the Tories to win an election.

Guys, it was a joke that modern conservatism is just progressive policies on a five-year delay … please stop taking it seriously!

June 11, 2021

The concept of philanthropy is another one with conflicting meanings to the left and to the right

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

In the Daily Chrenk, Arthur Chrenkoff has a bit of fun outlining the recent kerfuffle over Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s attempt to use her grandmother’s situation in Puerto Rico for scoring political points, and then explains why the notion of philanthropy is a very different thing to progressives than it is to conservatives:

“Charity in the dictionary” by HowardLake is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Well may we laugh about (and be disgusted by) the hypocrisy, corruption and indifference shown by prominent members of the left towards the very people they supposedly care about. But it would be to miss the broader point relating to how the left views the world, the role of politics, and the place of the individual.

It might surprise many that the caring and compassionate left isn’t actually all that big on philanthropy and charity, i.e. people helping other people. What could be wrong with that? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if even more people helped even more other people? Well, no, the left would say, because it’s not something that people should be doing in the first place; it’s not their responsibility. It is up to the state to solve all the social and economic problems; our role as citizens (as well as, thanks to the open borders advocates, non-citizens) is to be the grateful recipients of the government’s largesse. For the more elite group (no pun intended) – “the rich” – their role is to pay for all this with their taxes. Private initiative is by its very nature limited and patchy; only the all-seeing and all-powerful state can ensure that everyone who needs “free” assistance (and that’s literally everyone) gets it in a comprehensive, uniform and fair way. Hence, AOC won’t lift a finger to help her grandmother because it’s the state’s duty to help everyone rebuild their lives after a natural disaster. Occasional Cortex already contributes with her taxes on the hard-earned Congressional salary, and in any case, she’s not some billionaire, you know.

With that attitude, needless to say, you won’t be surprised to learn that much of what goes for the left-wing philanthropy does not actually go to help those in need to solve their problems and provide them what they are lacking. Instead, it is largely channels to finance political agitation by the activist-industrial complex to make the government (whether through lobbying, campaigning or helping elect sympathetic law-makers) take responsibility instead. That’s what people like Soros, Laurene Powell-Jobs (Steve Jobs’ widow) and MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos’ ex) are all about – billions spent to create more activist jobs to agitate for the state to create more public sector jobs to run the “Big Daddy”.

But it goes deeper than that, back to Marx himself in fact and to his analysis of what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. According to Marxism, both in its original class-based iteration and the more recent race/gender/sexuality variants, every society is divided into two mutually antagonistic groups: the powerful oppressors and the powerless oppressed, with the society structured in the interest of the former by facilitating in every possible way the exploitation and keeping down of the latter. Thus, all the problems, ills and injustices are “systemic” in nature; they are a feature, not a bug. To solve them and so to help the downtrodden you need to overthrow the entire old unjust system and build a new one that benefits the masses. Based on this sort of understanding of the world – to which, coincidentally, people like AOC and BLM founders all subscribe – any private charity is bound to be ineffectual and shortcoming. After all, what can a person, however generous with their money and time – even if there are multitudes of them – do to solve problems that are the direct (and intended) consequence of the way the society has been set up? Nothing, of course. You can’t mend it, you have to end it. But not only is it naïve and pointless to try, it’s actually counter-productive and therefore positively wrong. Because while no philanthropic effort can solve systemic problems, it can actually provide some limited and temporary relief. Such relief, however, by its very nature is a band-aid solution, i.e. not a solution at all. All it does it momentarily numbs the pain, and that is bad, because the oppressed masses need to feel the pain and feel it good in order to spur them into revolutionary action to overthrow their oppressors and on the ruins of the old build the utopian new society of equality and justice. This is the far-left’s accelerationism: the worse it gets, the better it gets (for the prospects of radical change).

May 10, 2021

QotD: Against the notion of the “Social Contract”

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

As a modern conservative, [Roger] Scruton defends a form of democracy unknown to Aristotle. Following David Hume and Edmund Burke, however, he opposes the idea that the “political order is founded on a contract.” For Scruton, the state of nature is a chimera — an invention of modern political philosophers who had forgotten the debt and gratitude owed to our predecessors. The fictitious state of nature — so central to philosophical liberalism — obscures the fact that membership in a community, with its requisite duties and obligations, is a precondition for meaningful freedom. “Absolute freedom” — doing whatever one wants — is always an invitation to anarchy or tyranny. In the modern world, the nation is the political form that guarantees membership and self-government.

In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984‘s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive — it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.

Daniel J. Mahoney, “Beyond the Culture of Repudiation”, Claremont Review of Books, 2018-06.

March 29, 2021

QotD: Modern conservatism is merely progressive policies on a ten-year delay

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

In 2000, when the Vermont Supreme Court mandated same-sex “civil unions”, American conservatives were outraged. By 2010, when the left had moved on to gay marriage, conservatives were supportive of civil unions but insisted marriage was an ancient institution between a man and a woman. Now, the left having won that one and moved on to transgenderism, conservatives profess to be a bit queasy about transitioning grade-schoolers.

So you can take it to the bank that by 2030 rock-ribbed Republicans will be on board with penises in the girls’ changing rooms, but determined to hold the line against whatever the left’s next cause du jour is: human cloning, mandatory transitioning for delinquent boys, voting rights for animals.

There really isn’t much point to conservatism that’s just leftism ten years late, is there? It’s like that ITV+1 satellite service they have in Britain that offers you the ITV schedule but an hour later, in case you were caught in traffic heading home. If you’re considering on which side to bestow your tribal loyalty, the left is right quicker; the right is left behind — but only for a few years until they throw in the towel. If you’re all headed to the same destination, why not ride first class on the TGV instead of the creaking, jerking stopping service? Justin Trudeau’s vapid modishness was perfectly distilled by his campaign catchphrase of four years ago: “Because it’s 2015.” But that beats waiting till 2025 to say “Because it’s 2015”.

Mark Steyn, “Catch-Up Conservatism”, SteynOnline, 2020-12-17.

March 28, 2021

“Canadians are largely full of shit on climate change”

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

The Line wraps up the week with, among other things, an explanation of why they didn’t cover anything to do with the “Conservative” Party’s virtual convention:

We said in last week’s dispatch that we were monitoring the Conservative Party of Canada’s virtual convention, and that we’d bring you any commentary that it warranted. We brought you no such commentary this week. Draw your own conclusions.

We will say, this, though. We think the kerfuffle about the party delegates’ vote to not affirm their belief in climate change is overblown, for two big reasons. The first is that Canadians are largely full of shit on climate change. Yes, it’s true that polls indicate we are concerned about the issue — Very Concerned, even. But polls also show how much we’re actually willing to do about it, and the answer is, not a fuck of a lot.

The second point we’d make is that every Conservative convention comes with warnings of deep splits within the party, with long features by Toronto- or Ottawa-based writers explaining how out of touch Tories are with “mainstream Canadians” like them, how unelectable they are outside their western base, and so on and so on. We agree that the Tories have problems, and it’s clear that not everybody is happy inside that big blue tent (or any big tent). But the Conservatives won the popular vote last time, and though Brownface Trudeau did a lot of the heavy lifting don’t forget: Andrew Scheer was the CPC leader. Can we suggest that one comes out a wash?

Don’t read too much into the doom and gloom that surrounds every CPC convention. There are always stories just like the climate change one, and if you don’t believe us, just recall that long-ago era of, ahem, one week ago, when all the coverage was warning that pro-life insurgents in the party were going to hijack the agenda and cause a meltdown by chanting about abortion all weekend.

Didn’t happen. Went nowhere. We suspect the coverage of the climate change issue, though unhelpful and awkward, will vanish just as quickly now that the chattering classes, ourselves included, have filed the obligatory quota of “convention stories” and moved on to something more interesting (which is almost anything).

March 10, 2021

How wide is the gap between extreme partisanship and sectarian violence?

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

Sarah Hoyt says she really didn’t want to write this post, and I completely understand why she feels that way:

The next American Civil War will be fought in a lot of places, in sudden flare ups and unexpected bursts of rage. But where most casualties will occur is in the home.

America’s civil war will be fougnt many places, but mostly in living rooms: siblings against each other, parents against children, children against parents, husband against wife, wife against husband.

If you live with a convinced leftist, how safe is your life, should the balloon go up?

And before you say “The first civil war was also between brothers!”

Sure, it was. There were mixed families. Mostly upper crust mixed families. But the war was largely a regional war, the country riven on regional lines.

Now? Bah. Now it’s a war of ideology. A war of beliefs.

And a lot of people are sleeping with the enemy, hanging out on weekends with the enemy. Visiting the enemy. Having lunch with the enemy.

At this moment a lot of you are sitting back there and going “My wife/husband/elementary school friend is not an enemy. Sure, he/she/it drank the Marxist koolaid from a hose but in every day life, in our normal interactions, in non-political things, we are very close, the best of friends.”

And maybe you are. Maybe you can trust them with your life.

But I will remind you we live in a nation where the capital is surrounded with razor wire to defend themselves from people who voted for the guy. I will remind you there are troops occupying our capital and that our secret services have so far been corrupted they keep inventing internet conspiracies (or probably referring to their very own black ops) to justify it.

I will remind you that your favorite progressive has allowed himself to be moved from “strong welfare net” to “we need full on communism, with favored races” within the last 12 years (or was indoctrinated into that state in schools.) I will remind you — and the conversations related back to me don’t help me think otherwise — that your favorite leftist thinks you’re racist/homophobic/evil. NO MATTER HOW MANY indications to the contrary.

And I can hear you sniffling: “But I love him/her/it/fuzzy.” Well, yes, and ten years ago that would have been me. I had very good friends I just classed as political idiots. I don’t wish the last 10 years on anyone, but at least they’re not living with me, 90% of them don’t know where I live. And I’ll be out of here in hopefully no more than 4 but maybe ten months, and maybe we have that long. Also, most of my close friends/acquaintances aren’t likely to cause any damage, being … not the type. On the other hand two dozen of them (easy) are friends with people who WILL.

Now to be clear: do I expect all of you in mixed political families to be in danger?

No. Any number of your spouses, relatives and friends are leftist because that’s “what good people are.” And they will turn on a dime, too, if half the crap about what the left has been doing for the last couple of decades comes out unvarnished and unspun. (The left knows it too. They’re perhaps more scared of these people than they are of us.)

Others are leftist and might hate your guts if things go hot, but simply don’t have it in them to hurt anyone. These are the “slippery” ones, because if you had asked me, even two years ago, if the media and the left (BIRM) could spin these people into wishing death on someone for not wearing a mask, when the person is not sick; there’s no proof of asymptomatic transmission (there’s reports from China but NOWHERE ELSE); and the actual disease (it’s not hard to find) might be a little more lethal than the flu but only at ages past about 80, I’d have said “no. They’re politically insane, but not stupid.” However they are “group oriented.” Turns out the type of gaslighting we’ve been enduring works really well on people who live for others’ opinions. (Which explains whey Southern Europe is still mired in the fricking crazy. Uniformly. And why women in general are more susceptible to the completely irrational gaslighting than men.) And they already believe a bunch of crazy crap. The reason that they think QANON is right main stream, it’s because it’s the mirror image of their actual main stream.

Are you sure they’ll remain inoffensive if the ballon goes up and the gaslighting switches to “If you know a Trump voter, he/she is dangerous?” How about “Turn them in, so they can be sent somewhere nice for their own protection?”

Look, guys, I hope none of this is ever needed. I still have friends on the other side, I’m just not in touch and we work on the very long finger. And there are people I no longer consider friends but whom I like very much who are buying into the entire insane bull excreta of “attempted coup” and evil “white nationalists.”

But like Peter Grant, I think we’re way past the ballot box, and just waiting for a precipitating incident.

I desperately hope she’s wrong about this, because an actual shooting war in the United States would be a disaster for western civilization.

Update: It’s apparently time to Immanentize the Eschaton!

I’m of the firm opinion that the Progressive Left believed that once Obama won his second term they were set. The eschaton night not be immanent, but it was imminent. Hillary was going to be another “great leap forward” towards the heaven on Earth promised by Karl Marx. […]

“Politics” it is said, “is the art of compromise.” “War,” said von Clausewitz, “is politics by other means.” I have repeated and repeated the observation that has made itself manifest in the nearly 18 years I’ve been writing this blog: Charles Krauthammer noted in 2002 that “To understand the workings of American politics you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”

You don’t debate with evil. You don’t negotiate with evil. You don’t compromise with evil. You don’t tolerate evil. You DESTROY evil. You pat it on the head until you can find a rock big enough to bash its skull in.

And control of the culture, education, and the government makes for a big damned rock.

Here’s the tinfoil yarmulke part of this essay: The preparations are underway. When debate and compromise are no longer possible, then force is the only thing left. They know it, and they’re projecting it on their enemy, us.

The Progressive Left has created and exercised its Sturmabteilung (yes, I know I risk Godwinization, and they loathe such comparisons, but this one’s apt. Their outfits are black instead of brown, but the actions are the same.) They’ve been set loose in the Pacific Northwest and some other cities and have been allowed to riot, commit arson, loot and occasionally murder with little to no legal consequence (violence, after all, being free speech you know.) Andy Ngo has studied Antifa, itself with roots in radical Socialism, in depth, and says that they are preparing for war, generously supported by the more mainstream Progressive Left. Black Lives Matter, an organization founded by two open Marxists, is also part of the preparations, but these are in my opinion just the Progressive Left’s “useful idiot” shock troops – the first to go against the wall after the Revolution.

February 24, 2021

QotD: Margaret Thatcher

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

I know I’m supposed to hate Margaret Thatcher. I know that someone with my politics is meant to detest her as a union-busting, milk-snatching, women’s-lib-baiting, Belgrano-sinking, Section-28-devising, society-destroying nightmare. I know that when Gillian Anderson was cast as Thatcher in series four of The Crown, I should have played up a shudder of disgust at Gillian Anderson, who is good, playing Thatcher, who is bad.

But here’s the thing: I don’t hate Thatcher. It’s not that I’m a huge fan of her legacy or anything (although anyone who thinks that industrial relations were doing fine before her or that the Falklands were some kind of unjustified expedition is clearly a fantasist), it simply doesn’t matter whether I like her or not because she is just too interesting.

Thatcher wasn’t the first woman to lead a country, but unlike her predecessors, Indira Gandhi in India or Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina, she didn’t arrive sanctified by a political dynasty. She was, as Prince Phillip snobbily points out to the Queen in The Crown, a grocer’s daughter. In real life, such condescension came strongly from the Left. The Blow Monkeys, one of the bands involved in the Red Wedge tour to support Labour, released an album called She was only a Grocer’s Daughter in 1987; and even though several pop songs fantasised about her death, that never seemed quite as ugly as supposed defenders of the working class announcing that Thatcher was just too common to rule.

Sarah Ditum, “How Thatcher rejected feminism”, UnHerd, 2020-11-15.

February 17, 2021

QotD: Protectionists, left and right

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

Conservatives who embrace protectionism thereby embrace both the fear that businesses, entrepreneurs, and workers in their country are simply not up to the task of competing against foreign rivals, and the belief that among the steps in making their country “great” is for their own government to restrict the freedom consumers in their country.

“Progressives” who embrace protectionism share conservatives’ low opinion of their country’s businesses, entrepreneurs, and workers, but also mistakenly believe that protectionism “sticks it to” corporate oligarchs when, in fact, it creates corporate oligarchs.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2018-09-10.

February 10, 2021

“Did you know that seventy years ago, our grandparents were having an underpolarization crisis?”

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

Scott Alexander reviews Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, beginning with the underpolarization crisis of the mid-20th century:

In 1950, the American Political Science Association “released a call to arms … pleading for a more polarized political system”. The report argued that “the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why”. Everyone agreed with each other so much, and compromised so readily, that supporting one party over the other seemed almost pointless.

In 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to support abortion restrictions. That same year, a poll found that “only 54% of the electorate believed that the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party”; 30% thought there was no difference. As late as 2004, about equal numbers (within 5 pp) of Democrats and Republicans agreed with statements like “government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” and “immigrants are a burden on our country”. Between the late 60s and early 90s, Democratic presidents deregulated the airlines and passed welfare reform; Republican presidents pushed immigration amnesties and founded the EPA.

What happened between then and now? Klein has two answers: a historical answer, and a structural answer.

The historical answer is: the Dixiecrats switched from Democrat to Republican.

When the North won the Civil War, it had grand plans to remake the South into a paradise of racial equality and universal love. After Lincoln’s death, his successor Andrew Johnson decided this sounded hard and gave up. Within a few decades, the South was back to being a racist, paramilitary-violence-prone one-party dictatorship. That one party called itself “Democrat”, but had few similiarites to the Democrats in the North. The Southern Democrats (“Dixiecrats”) and northern Democrats disagreed on lots of issues, but the South hated the Republicans so much after their experience with Lincoln that they caucused with the northern Democrats anyway. This turned into a stable coalition, with northern Democrats agreeing to support the South against civil rights for blacks, and the Dixiecrats supporting the northern Democrats whenever they needed something.

But since the Democratic party contained both northern Democrats (relatively liberal) and Dixiecrats (relatively conservative), it didn’t want to take a coherent party-wide stance on liberalism vs. conservatism. And by the median voter theorem, that meant the Republicans also didn’t want to take a coherent stance on liberalism vs. conservatism. So both parties ended out centrist and identical.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act threatened the Dixiecrats’ key issue. It wasn’t quite as simple as “Democrats were for it, Republicans were against it” – in fact, 80% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats supported it. But that year’s presidential election pitted heavily pro-CRA Democrat Lyndon Johnson against anti-CRA Republican Barry Goldwater, beginning Southerners’ defection to the Republican Party.

Klein says this successfully got all the conservatives on one side of the aisle and all the liberals on the other, allowing polarization to begin. Essentially, he believes polarization is a natural process, which the odd coalitions of the early 20th century temporarily prevented. Once the coalitions were broken, it could begin to do its work. He spends the rest of the book talking about why exactly polarization is so natural, what aspects of modernization have made it worse, and what sort of feedback loops make it keep going

February 8, 2021

QotD: The deeply rooted anti-Americanism in Canadian politics

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

… in 2011, the only time Conservatives have managed to win a federal majority in the last three plus decades, they ran one of the most effective campaigns in recent memory against Michael “just visiting” Ignatieff by waging a patriotic campaign against him. In Ignatieff the Conservatives had the perfect rival to attack; a patrician member of the Laurentian new class. But the campaign against Ignatieff wasn’t just effective because it successfully portrayed him as an elite, it was effective because in attacking the time Ignatieff had spent aboard and at Harvard especially, they actually managed to make the Conservatives the champions of Canada, and the Liberals the more American party.

Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.

February 4, 2021

Ace reads the upper middle class out of the conservative movement

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

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace himself explains why he doesn’t consider anyone who evinces loyalty to “the mores of the upper middle class” to be in any way, shape, or form “conservative”:

Never once do these bougie “cons” notice that the class whose class markers they are so eagerly collecting like Cub Scout merit badges are entirely created by progressives.

I’m going to say this more straightforwardly than I’ve ever said it. I’ve hinted around it, I’ve never said it straight up.

But here goes:

People loyal to the mores of the upper middle class are left-liberal. Period.

They should have no place in the leadership and “thought” leadership of any “conservative” movement. They are not conservative.

They are all pro-gay marriage.

They are all pro-abortion.

They are all in favor of shipping out every single working-class job to China, and, for those few remaining jobs which must be performed in America, shipping in workers from the third world to displace Americans.

They are all supporters of a soft version of the SJW progressive stack. They all believe in “White Privilege,” for an obvious reason — as the rich children of the prosperous upper-middle class, they’re actually the ones born to privilege, but they wish to obscure that fact. So they buy into the left’s claims about the “White Privilege” of 63% of the country, instead of focusing on the wealth privilege of 10%.

Jake Tapper will entertain he shares a kind of privilege with two thirds of the country but he will never acknowledge his real privilege, one shared by only 10% of the country.

And the social-climbing “conservative” media class is almost entirely born from the same prosperous class. They too do not want to talk about real privilege.

I always want to ask these guys, so desperate to peonize the working class: How far back in time do you have to go to find an ancestor who had a job which caused callouses to form on his hands?

Was it two generations ago? Three? It’s obvious the “conservative” media class has never had to work a shovel in their lives. The toughest job they’ve ever held was working in their dad’s law office, or valet parking Beemers at the country club.

And yes, they support the leftwing SJW claims about race. Bullshit like “minorities can’t be racist,” or at least not racist in a way that should be held against them.

That’s why they all rushed to defend notorious, swaggering racist Sarah Jeong, and refuse to even acknowledge the eyebrow-singing anti-white racism seen every single day in the media.

To acknowledge there’s such a thing as “anti-white racism,” and that it ought to be condemned, is, they’ve decided, an “alt-right” idea, and the alt-right is a lower class phenomenon, and, as I’ve noted, they really, really really need you to know they are not lower class.

The only way in which they are arguably “conservative” is that … they are in favor of oligarchical fascism directed by the billionaires signing their paychecks.

Which is of course not “conservative” at all. But that’s the one category in which they can make an arguable case for their “conservatism” — in always championing the Ruling Class’ right to rule over the downscale Dirties.

Is that the “conservatism” we want? A gonzo left-liberalism which is also thoroughly anti-republican, anti-egalitarian?

Also at Ace of Spades H.Q., OregonMuse quoted this rather timely Barry Goldwater statement:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests”, I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

January 10, 2021

Has the United States reached the same tipping point Canada reached in 1982?

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

David Warren considers the 1982 tipping point in Canada to have been the implementation of Pierre Trudeau’s Constitution:

Queen Elizabeth II signs Canada’s constitutional proclamation in Ottawa on April 17, 1982 as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau looks on.

There are two principal political parties in modern America (in which I include up here). In the Natted States, the population is divided roughly equally between those of “progressive” and “regressive” habits of mind; in the Canadas, the former have come to dominate.

The tipping point was reached much earlier up here, and the new “metapower” (Foucault’s term) was seized, politically, from within the Liberal Party. The strategy was to disenfranchise the “conservative” half of the electorate, by undermining all national institutions, and hosing down Canada’s previous identity. I’d count, say, 1982, as the point of no return. That identity was replaced, definitively, under a revised Trudeau constitution, with a new “multicultural” identity, in which citizens were themselves redefined, from free persons whose rights were inalienable, to interchangeable clients of an omnipotent State, which could dispense rights whenever it was in the mood — and withdraw them whenever the mood changed; however frequently.

This is the Democrat strategy in the larger, and still less amenable, country next door. As Andrew Breitbart and Antonio Gramsci might agree, this is an essentially cultural process. Politics are visible at the tip of the iceberg, but “progress” requires a more thorough “cleansing,” of old cultural norms. The cancer metastasized more from Hollywood, than from Washington DC. The takeover of the Democratic Party as the vanguard “agent of change” was only part of the institutional takeover of America. As important was the takeover of the mass media, and even corporate boardrooms. Those who weren’t “progressive” would now be “cancelled”: must cease to be.

All cultural change has a religious dimension. The Democrat representatives of the “powers and principalities” mentioned by Saint Paul, are characteristically godless, themselves. But they depend on a massive, core constituency of low-information, low-intelligence, easily manipulated urban voters.

Those who can still see the stars at night tend to remain in the ancient, God-fearing default. In the cities, where the masses may not grasp that milk comes from cows, let alone that someone must milk them, the belief that the economy is based on government cheques is more common. That is the god of the populous cities, and for most city-dwellers, not voting for their “godless god” of progress, seems a kind of heresy.

The idea that such heretics should be deprived of their freedom, starting with freedom of speech, does not appeal to the “rural” voter, including people like me — a “country hick” type who paradoxically lives in the city. The idea that laws and constitutions should be flexible, to accommodate the latest schemes of a progressive technocratic élite, doesn’t flourish among us country bumpkins. But to the efficiency experts in the city, what is our problem?

November 11, 2020

QotD: Appeasement and shifting allegiances between the wars

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

Although it was in every way more pardonable, the attitude of the Left towards the Russian régime has been distinctly similar to the attitude of the Tories towards Fascism. There has been the same tendency to excuse almost anything “because they’re on our side”. It is all very well to talk about Lady Chamberlain photographed shaking hands with Mussolini; the photograph of Stalin shaking hands with Ribbentrop is much more recent. On the whole, the intellectuals of the Left defended the Russo-German Pact. It was “realistic”, like Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, and with similar consequences. If there is a way out of the moral pigsty we are living in, the first step towards it is probably to grasp that “realism” does not pay, and that to sell out your friends and sit rubbing your hands while they are destroyed is not the last word in political wisdom.

George Orwell, “Who are the War Criminals?”, Tribune, 1943-10-22.

October 21, 2020

“Canadian conservatism often suffers from a unique form of self-loathing”

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

In his latest essay for The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden reviews an old book by Peter Brimelow and how it influenced the Canadian conservative scene at the time and why the book’s insights mattered so much to Stephen Harper:

Published in 1986, The Patriot Game captures the ideas and sentiment of an entire generation of Canadian conservatism. One quick note on Brimelow. He’s a controversial figure and has been called a “leader within the alt-right.” He’s also the founder of VDARE, an American anti-immigration website. I’m not getting into a back and forth with anyone about how best to describe his views, I’ll just say that none of this means his older work like The Patriot Game should be discounted or ignored, especially given the influence it’s had.

The game Brimelow is describing is the manufacturing of a new national identity that was undertaken by what he terms “Canada’s New Class.” This is a term he borrows from Irving Kristol. It refers to Canada’s politicians, civil servants, academics, business elites, writers, and journalists, who have a disproportionate influence shaping public discourse and national consciousness.

The manufacturing of a new national identity by this class, centred on the Liberal Party, was one that both rejected our heritage and replaced it with a self-serving and contradictory ideology that serves the interests of this New Class. The strategy of the Canadian New Class throughout Canada’s history has been “to concentrate rents from a resource-based economy in Central Canadian hands.”

The nationalism they manufactured to do this was an entirely artificial one, built around multiculturalism, bilingualism, anti-Americanism and heavy federal government involvement in the economy. At its core Brimelow’s argument is that 20th-century Canada is the creation of the Liberal party, but ultimately that it is fake and built to serve the interests of the New Class. This was done especially by placating Quebec at the expense of the West, and attempting to construct a new national identity that could unite English and French Canada.

This game played by Canada’s elite to enrich them and their bases of support in places like Quebec not only took money from the West and transferred it elsewhere, it dragged down the Canadian economy by crippling it in overbearing and burdensome regulation and the heavy hand of government involvement.

The most interesting, and clarifying part of the book to me is Brimelow’s description of the identity and nationalism that he thinks the Liberals consciously destroyed and then replaced with their own. Brimelow thinks that the New Class are consciously and actively anti-British, not just anti-American, and that this new identity was built as both a rejection of British heritage and the cultural affinities English Canada has with “North American identity.”

According to Brimelow “All of Anglophone Canada is essentially part of a greater English-speaking North American nation … Canada is a sectional variation within this super nation.” Our British heritage is at the core of who we are along with our common Anglo affinities with Americans, and this new national project is doomed to failure. Brimelow suggests that “Canada’s fundamental contradictions cannot be resolved in the present Confederation” and while English Canada is currently in a strange period of identity agnosticism, it will eventually recover and “assert its North American identity.” This process will only be accelerated by regional tensions within Canada that expose the futility of this new Liberal national identity. Modern Canada, in short, is a fraud and doomed to failure.

September 27, 2020

QotD: The persuasive power of the newspapers

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

It is a standard part of the mythology that newspapers tell their readers what to believe — and the readers believe them. This is why the left keeps shrieking about the barons controlling the press, it could only be that poisoning of the minds of the proletariat which keeps said left from sweeping all before it in politics. The actual study — you know, science — of how this works is that newspapers follow the prejudices of their readers. The Sun is not socially conservative and rightish in its views because Rupert Murdoch is so but because a large portion of the British working class is so.

Or, as we might put it, the reason the left doesn’t sweep the board with the votes of the proletariat is because large numbers of the proletariat think the left either don’t represent them, or are aware that the left are nuts.

Tim Worstall, “This Will Be An Interesting Test – Geordie Greig To Daily Mail Editor”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-06-08.

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