Quotulatiousness

December 1, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard versus the Democratic establishment

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

At Spiked, Tim Black calls the establishment’s anger and rage at the Democratic presidential candidate “Gabbard Derangement Syndrome”:

Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the “People’s Rally” in Washington DC on 17 November, 2016.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.

… the Democratic establishment and its media cheerleaders seem to have become fixated on her. She annoys them. She riles them. And it’s not just because of her ambivalence towards identity politics and the other aspects of her Sanders-style progressivism – indeed, she endorsed Sanders in 2016, much to the chagrin of the Democratic establishment at the time. No, it’s also because of her uncompromising opposition to the “counterproductive regime-change wars” pursued with such ignorant zeal by the likes of Democratic grandee Hillary Clinton. It’s because of her willingness to question the narratives that have justified Western intervention in Syria, including a secret fact-finding mission to Damascus, and a meeting with Bashar al-Assad in 2017. And it’s because she does all this not as a woolly pacifist, but as a war vet.

So where her small but growing band of supporters see a principled 38-year-old, armed with a progressive policy platform, and, above all, a strong commitment to anti-interventionism, her powerful opponents are determined to present her as something altogether more sinister. They talk of her being a poster girl for white supremacists and the alt-right, of her being a Republican stooge in Democratic clothing, and of her being some sort of Russian asset.

It’s genuinely crazy stuff. Last week, the New York Times even laid into her for wearing a white pantsuit for a TV debate, claiming it was somehow cult-like. But that is as nothing compared to the constant innuendo and sometimes outright claims that Gabbard is being backed by Russia and Putin, the seeming power behind all world disorder.

Gabbard’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination are slim, but her recent online spat with Hillary Clinton probably won her a lot of fans outside the establishment:

Then, of course, there’s Hillary Clinton herself, a woman who, since losing to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, is no longer able to go near a bed without spotting reds under it. Gabbard, unsurprisingly, does not escape Clinton’s conspiracist gaze. “I’m not making any predictions but I think [the Russians have] got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary, and they’re grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians”, Clinton continued. “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

That’s right. Clinton thinks Gabbard is a Russian plant. She thinks Gabbard is “being groomed” by the Kremlin. She thinks she is being manoeuvred, by Putin and Co, out of the Democratic Party and into a third-party position, so as to split the Democratic vote in 2020. And she thinks that will hand victory once again to Russia’s Manchurian Candidate, Donald Trump, just as she thinks that Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, was also a Russian asset, used to split the vote three years ago and deprive Hillary of the election victory she still believes should be hers. The entitlement underwriting her deranged conspiracy theory is breathtaking.

September 2, 2019

QotD: The abolition conspiracy of the 1850s

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

… the “slave power conspiracy” was a misnomer. Oh, the Southern senators all voted together, but that’s not a conspiracy. “Conspiracy” implies an end, a goal, and the slave power simply didn’t have one. Their actions were purely negative, and if that meant absolutely nothing got done, well, so be it. They were deeply skeptical of federal power anyway; if vetoing anything and everything that might somehow affect slavery meant that the nation would simply drift along, directionless, that suited them just fine.

But there was another conspiracy afoot in the 1850s: The abolition conspiracy. You don’t hear about this one in high school history because the victors write the textbooks, but it was quite real. And this one really was a conspiracy, in that they had a clear goal: The end of chattel slavery. And it was a conspiracy in a more fundamental sense, in that it was illegal. The so-called “slave power conspiracy” was obstructionist to the bone, but it’s perfectly legal for legislators to vote against proposed legislation. It’s not legal to advocate armed insurrection but that’s what the abolitionists did.

On October 16, 1859, a lunatic abolitionist named John Brown led a partisan band in an attack on the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He wanted to distribute the stolen guns to local slaves, thus sparking a race war. We know this because Brown was captured alive, and the great state of Virginia put him on trial, as they were legally required to do. Being a fanatic, and knowing that he was a dead man already, Brown took the opportunity to advertise his cause to the world …

At which point it became obvious that not only did Brown have the financial backing of several prominent Northerners, but he had the moral backing of a large segment of the Northern population. Brown became a martyr, literally — he was frequently compared to Jesus Christ in Northern periodicals. The important thing to note is this: Brown was captured in armed insurrection against the United States, and lots of the country was ok with it. This man simply decided that the legal processes could never result in the outcome he deemed morally necessary, so he took the law into his own hands — with the active connivance of prominent Northern financiers and intellectuals, and the avid approval of many Northern citizens.

Remember that, and Southern belligerency makes a whole lot more sense. The North was obviously ready to go to the gun in 1861, because they’d already gone to the gun in 1859. The “John Brown Moment,” then, is the point at which violence becomes inevitable, because one significant, influential segment of the country not only passively tolerates it, but actively cheers it.

Severian, “The John Brown Moment”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-16.

August 30, 2019

Communist Revolution in America? – The Red Scare 1919 I THE GREAT WAR 1919

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

The Great War
Published on 29 Aug 2019

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The American intervention in the Russian Civil War, the economic hardships of workers and returning veterans and the strikes all over the US in 1919 created a hysteria that we know as Red Scare today. But how realistic was the idea of a Bolshevist revolution in America really?

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» SOURCES
US Congress. Senate. Bolshevik Propaganda: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary. 65th Cong., 3rd sess., February 11, 1919, to March 10, 1919
Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Revised edition. South End Press, 1997.
Hanson, Ole. Americanism versus Bolshevism. New York and London: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1920.
United States Department of Justice. Red Radicalism as Described by Its Own Leaders, Exhibits Collected by A. Mitchell Palmer, Including Various Communist Manifestos, Constitutions, Plans, and Purposes of the Proletariat Revolution, and Its Seditious Propaganda. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920.
Cocks, Catherine, Peter C. Holloran, Alan Lessloff. The A to Z of the Progressive Era. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009.
Dick, William M. Labor and Socialism in America. New York: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Gould, Lewis L. The Progressive Era. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1974.
Hagedorn, Ann. Hope and Fear in America: 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Jaffe, Julian F. Crusade Against Radicalism: New York During the Red Scare, 1914-1924. New York: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Kornweibel, Jr., Theodore. “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. Indianapolis: Indiana Press University, 1998.
Hawley, Ellis W. The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933. New York St Martin’s Press, 1979.
Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study of National Hysteria, 1919-1920. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.
Powers, Richard Gid. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. Yale University Press, 1998.

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July 10, 2019

Fake news, whacky conspiracy theories, and the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein

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

In The Week, Matthew Walther uses the Epstein case to illustrate why many so-called “low information voters” tend to believe all sorts of odd things like Pizzagate:

The arrest of the apparent billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein at a New Jersey airport on Saturday on federal charges for crimes he was accused of during the Bush administration should not be surprising to anyone who has followed the news carefully. He may have escaped in 2008 with a ludicrous one-year stint in a county jail that he was allowed to leave six days a week, but his name has never quite been out of the headlines. Between 2008 and 2015 Epstein reportedly settled more than a dozen lawsuits from Jane Does alleging sexual assault; the youngest of his alleged victims was 14 years old.

Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The only question is why did it take this long? Why was the ludicrous deal that gave Epstein and his fellow conspirators immunity in exchange for a slap-on-the-wrist jail sentence ever allowed to go through in the first place?

[…]

We should keep all of this in mind the next time we feel inclined to sneer at so-called “low-information voters,” especially the kookier sort. You know the people I mean. Wackos. Gun nuts. 8channers. Conspiracy theorists in Middle America who watch InfoWars (one of the few journalistic outlets to discuss the issue of pedophilia regularly) and post about QAnon and “spirit cooking” and the lizard people. The news that a globalized cabal of billionaires and politicians and journalists and Hollywood bigwigs might be flying around the world raping teenaged girls will not surprise them in the least because it is what they have long suspected. For the rest of us it is like finding out that the Jersey Devil is real or turning on cable news and finding Anderson Cooper and his panel engaged in a matter-of-fact discussion of Elvis’s residence among the Zixls on the 19th moon of Dazotera.

Among other things, the Epstein case forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions about the real meaning of “fake” news. There is, or should be, more to being informed than fact-checking formalism. If you have spent the last few years earnestly consuming mainstream left-of-center media in this country you will be under the impression that the United States has fallen under the control of a spray-tanned Mussolini clone who is never more than five minutes away from making birth control illegal. If you watch Fox News and read conservative publications, you no doubt bemoan the fact that Ronald Reagan’s heir is being hamstrung by a bunch of avocado toast-eating feminist witches. Meanwhile, Alex Jones’s audience will tell you that America, like the rest of the world, is ruled by a depraved internationalist elite whose ultimate allegiance is not to countries or political parties or ideologies but to one another. These people believe in nothing. They will safeguard their wealth and privilege at any cost. They will never break rank. And they will commit unspeakable crimes with impunity, while anyone who dares to speculate openly is sued or hounded out of public life as a kook.

June 16, 2019

The “NBA” unveiled

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Just before his mysterious disappearance (police are baffled, no clues have been found, etc., etc.), Colby Cosh filed a bizzare rant with his newspaper that they somehow forgot to spike:

Kawhi Leonard of the Toronto Raptors about to attempt a free throw during game 2 of the 2019 NBA Finals.
Photo by Chensiyuan via Wikimedia Commons.

By the time you read this, I may be dead. The newspaper industry’s taboo against openly discussing the scriptwriters who create the elaborate soap operas we call “professional sports” is a strong one, and viciously enforced. The money we make from pretending that sports aren’t fake is too important to our bottom line. Good people who have tried to write articles like this have found their careers and lives cut short.

No doubt it will be so with me, but I feel that the geniuses behind the “National Basketball Association” — rumoured to be a tight-knit group of a half-dozen or so fiction veterans recruited from Hollywood, the manga industry, and, in at least one case, Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. — deserve credit. Decades of planning went into this ambitious, implausible Toronto Raptors story line. The conquest of Canada now seems complete.

For decades no one thought that basketball, as a theatrical production, could make headway in Canada against the National Hockey League. The NHL’s scriptwriters were thought to be too naturally, intuitively in touch with Canada’s Victorian and Protestant values. And Canada, owing to its geography, had a natural market corner on “athletic” performers who could skate. The league could always come up with a backstory and an affable personality for a “Wayne Gretzky” (actually a figure skater from Swift Current named Kevin Feinberg) or “Alexander Ovechkin” (born Dennis Brian York in Nepean, Ont.)

Unfortunately, the NHL, its creative staff increasingly laden with third- and fourth-generation mediocrities, started to spin its wheels as any monopolistic institution does in the end. It became the CBC of sports. Head showrunner Gary Bettman adopted an ambitious strategy of colonizing new American markets, but failed to bring new blood into the writing room. He was left with increasingly cheap, desperate moves like inventing the “Vegas Golden Knights” and injecting them directly into the Stanley Cup final.

Accounts of when and how the so-called “National Basketball Association” decided to exploit this weakness remain cloudy. They say one of the writers was thumbing through the sport’s “bible,” the binder every television program keeps on hand to guarantee continuity, and noticed that basketball’s creation myth actually involves a Canadian inventor-hero, “James A. Naismith.” (This has always invited suspicion among the punters. How many Naismiths do you run across?)

May 15, 2019

“Our” intellectuals and how they got that way

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

Over at Rotten Chestnuts, Severian says we should blame the eggheads:

Because its goals were impossible, The Revolution didn’t go as planned. For every two self-deluded fools who thought the Soviet Union was a new civilization, there were five who knew exactly what the Communists were about. Bomb-throwing anarchists had terrorized European cities for years before 1917, and Red atrocities during the Civil War were no secret. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look, then, that horrors like the White Sea Canal were features, not bugs, of Communism.

If you’ve read your Festinger, you know what happened next. The True Believers searched frantically for any “explanation” that wouldn’t invalidate their precious Marxism, and Antonio Gramsci gave it to them. Though he didn’t coin the term “false consciousness” (Georgy Lukacs did), Gramsci weaponized it. The reason the Bolsheviks are forced to do all that awful stuff — which we don’t admit they actually did! — is that The People lack the proper revolutionary consciousness. They still believe in stuff like “God,” “free speech,” “not getting starved to death while the Party fatcats drive around in limos,” etc.

And where do they get this “false consciousness,” comrades? Why, it’s the same place the Western proles get theirs, which is also why the Western proles haven’t joined The Revolution (yet!), in fulfillment of the scriptures. Gramsci called the false consciousness installation process “hegemony.” There are a zillion unread academic tomes covering all the nuances, but the basic idea is simple enough: The ruling class controls the institutions; the institutions transmit culture; therefore, the culture takes ruling class values for granted.*

The solution, therefore, is as simple as the diagnosis: Capture the institutions, change the culture.

I trust y’all see where this is going. The best conspiracy theories are the ones that are actually true, and this one is. You want a grand conspiracy to destroy Western Civ? Here it is, laid out as openly as Marxist prose can express it, in excruciating detail. If anything, I’m being unfair to Antonio Gramsci. He put it all together in true kommissar style, but these ideas were everywhere on the Left in the early 20th century. In America, for instance, Progressives like John Dewey had been maneuvering to get control of elementary schools since the late 19th century. Progressives just looooove putting their hands on children. Have you noticed?

Every single insane, culture-destroying, gulag-enabling idea the Left has had in the last 200 years, starting with Karl Marx’s sub-Hegelian flatulence itself, can be traced directly back to some fucking egghead. I’ll repeat that: DIRECTLY. You can find their works, and quote them, because this stuff is in every syllabus of every Humanities class of every college in the Western world. The prose is opaque as only PoMo prose can be, but the main ideas are easy enough to decipher….

…I wrote “ideas,” but there’s really only one “idea.” Since The Revolution obviously ain’t gonna happen — it seems even Leftists can acknowledge one tiny aspect of reality, if you give ’em twelve decades and 100 million bodies — the Left’s entire program, top to bottom, stem to stern, is shit-flinging nihilism. Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go — not because it’s Western, but because it’s Civilization.

February 17, 2019

Lyndon LaRouche, RIP

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

When I was first active in the Ontario and federal Libertarian parties in the mid-1970s, I’d sometimes get accused of being a follower of Lyndon LaRouche. Not by fellow Libertarians, I hasten to add, but by random members of the public. At that time I’d never heard of LaRouche, and I have no idea why some Canadians thought he had anything at all to do with libertarian philosophy or politics. He was, as Jesse Walker points out, pretty much the definition of an ANTI-libertarian in US politics:

Ordinarily I’m fond of cranks, maybe excessively so. You say extremist; I say charmingly kooky freethinker. You say cult; I say fascinating young religion. You say lunatic conspiracy theory; I say spooky new addition to America’s homegrown mythology. But even my tolerance has its limits, and one of those limits is Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche, who died Tuesday at age 96, was a despicable old fraud, and the warmest feeling I’ve ever been able to conjure for his devotees is pity. Fiercely authoritarian in both his political ideals and his personal life, LaRouche fed his followers a stream of lies, psychological abuse, and paranoid fantasies. Those fantasies featured a big cast of villains, from the queen of England to Aristotle to “Dope, Inc.” to gay people, not to mention whichever follower or ex-follower was the designated scapegoat of the moment. One such scapegoat, Ken Kronberg, committed suicide after the denunciations turned his way.

LaRouche didn’t limit his abuse to the people who chose to cast their lot with him. He aimed it outwards too — most infamously during “Operation Mop-Up,” when his followers in several cities used fists, bats, chains, and nunchuks to attack members of the Communist Party and other leftist groups. When those assaults began in 1973, LaRouche considered himself a part of the radical left; Operation Mop-Up, he hoped, would establish his “hegemony” over the competition. But a few years later he was aligning himself with Klansmen and the far-right Liberty Lobby. He had a habit of flipping positions like that.

He also had a habit of running for president — first as the 1976 nominee of the U.S. Labor Party, then as a recurring contender for the Democratic nomination. His biggest successes came in the North Dakota primary of 1992 and the Michigan primary of 2000, when he managed to outpoll everyone else on the ballot. This sounds less impressive when you learn that (a) in both cases, for quirky reasons, none of the major candidates were actually on the ballot, and (b) LaRouche still managed to lose both primaries. In North Dakota he was beaten handily by some write-in votes for Ross Perot, and in Michigan he was outvoted by “uncommitted.”

Most people’s direct encounters with LaRouchism came in one of two ways. The first was to stumble on one of the candidate’s prime-time infomercials, in which he’d inform viewers that Walter Mondale is a Soviet agent, that the government should “quarantine” people with AIDS, or whatever other idea had caught his fancy at the moment. (LaRouche pushed his AIDS idea with a front group called — I swear I am not making this up — PANIC, for the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee.) The second was to run into his followers as they handed out literature in public places. My most memorable encounter with LaRouchie leafletters was in Ann Arbor in the early ’90s, where they had made a big sign that said “EATING ARAB BABIES ISN’T KOSHER.” (I’ve heard people call LaRouche a “coded” anti-Semite. In that case you didn’t have to work hard to crack the code.)

So, LaRouche’s ideas were all over the authoritarian map, but he must have been a really dynamic, engaging speaker to fascinate so many different people for so many years, right? One of those orators that just grabs the attention and plays on it like a fine musical instrument?

There are LaRouche TV specials that consist of nothing but LaRouche himself talking, but I didn’t want to inflict one of those on you. You know why? Because when he’s not saying something utterly crazy, the man is boring. Lyndon LaRouche was a child of the American Weird, but he was too dull to excel even at raving like a lunatic.

September 5, 2018

The continuing paranoid style in American politics

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

John Gray discusses the mass psychosis that gripped the left in November 2016 and still has not slackened that grip:

Visiting New York a few weeks after Trump’s victory in the presidential election, I found myself immersed in a mass psychosis. The city’s intelligentsia was possessed by visions of conspiracy. No one showed any interest in the reasons Trump supporters may have had for voting as they did. Quite a few cited the low intelligence, poor education and retrograde values of the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him. What was most striking was how many of those with whom I talked flatly rejected the result. The election, they were convinced, had been engineered by a hostile power. It was this malignant influence, not any default of American society, that had upended the political order.

Conspiracy theory has long been associated with the irrational extremes of politics. The notion that political events can be explained by the workings of hidden forces has always been seen by liberals as a sign of delusional thinking. A celebrated study by the political scientist Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), linked the idea with the far Right. Yet in New York in December 2016, many of the brightest liberal minds exhibited the same derangement. Nearly two years later, they continue to reach to conspiracy theory as an explanation for their defeat.

The former lead book reviewer at the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, devotes several pages to Hofsfadter’s work in her short polemic, The Death of Truth. Citing him approvingly, she notes that “the modern right wing” has “tended to be mobilised by a sense of grievance and dispossession”. As Hofstadter put it, they feel that “America has been largely taken away from them.” The charm of this citation is the lack of self-awareness it reveals. It would be difficult to find a better description of the anguish of liberals such as Kakutani, who feel they have been robbed of their historically appointed role as the moral and intellectual leaders of society.

For those who embrace it, a paranoid style of liberalism has some advantages. Relieved from any responsibility for the debacles they have presided over, the liberal elites that have been in power in many western countries for much of the past 30 years can enjoy the sensation of being victims of forces beyond their control. Conspiracy theory implies there is nothing fundamentally wrong with liberal societies, and places the causes of their disorder outside them. No one can reasonably doubt that the Russian state has been intervening in western politics. Yet only minds unhinged from reality can imagine that the decline of liberalism is being masterminded by Vladimir Putin. The principal causes of disorder in liberal societies are in those societies themselves.

September 3, 2018

Planes, Trains, and… Actually, just Trains

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Knowing Better
Published on 18 Sep 2016

The railroad has affected your life more than you may have realized. From starting the mail order business to creating some of America’s greatest landmarks, see how this simple transportation system shaped the country we live in today.

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—

Why Trains Suck in America – Wendover Productions – https://youtu.be/mbEfzuCLoAQ

Photo Credits –
American Waterways/Canals are edits of images I used to teach in 2011 – The originals were from Wikicommons and have long since been removed or updated. No Copyright Information can be found.
The Three Proposed Railroad Routes are edits of images I used to teach in 2013 – The originals were from Wikicommons and have long since been removed or updated. No Copyright Information can be found.

I don’t normally add comments about the daily 2:00am videos, but there are a couple of things in this video that I think needed to be addressed. First, he rather casually skips over the vast increase in American railway building even before the enabling legislation for the transcontinental lines, and misses a great opportunity to explain how important they were in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Second, and rather more irritatingly, he blithely asserts the common myth about the “Big Oil” conspiracy to buy up and shut down municipal light rail (streetcars, interurban railways, and radials). The various streetcar systems had almost all been economically shaky since the Great Depression (many had to be taken over by the municipalities involved to keep them out of bankruptcy), and the huge increase in private car ownership after World War 2 was the coup de grâce that finished off most of the rest. During the same time, bus routes were encroaching on the streetcar’s territory and had the huge advantage of not being tied to rails (allowing relatively easy re-routing without huge construction costs).

I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

January 15, 2018

The postwar “international order”

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

Niall Ferguson on the notion of a post-1945 international liberal order:

The phrase international order reminds me of the phrase Western civilization. As Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi wittily replied when asked about Western civilization, “It would be a good idea.” The notion that international order exists or has ever existed seems highly questionable to me. The notion of a liberal international order is even more questionable because it is neither liberal, nor international, nor very orderly.

It is often claimed by political scientists that the liberal international order came into existence in 1945. The argument goes that American and British statesmen, having learned from the terrible mistakes of the 1930s and 1940s, decided to make the world anew by creating a series of remarkable international institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and later the World Bank. According to this narrative, Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016 was a wrecking ball directed at the liberal international order created by the generation of 1945.

Yet this is a fairy tale. For one thing, there was nothing very liberal about the economic order that was established in 1945. It was devised by people – notably John Maynard Keynes – who had repudiated classical liberal economics and believed that international trade should be limited and capital movements controlled.

It was also not a truly international order. After 1945, it very quickly became a bipolar order that divided the world. There was nothing international about the Cold War. It was a battle between two empires and two ideologies, and the rest of the world’s nations had to choose sides.

In short, the notion of a liberal international order, born in 1945, is a historical fantasy. The reality is that it was only in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended that it was possible to create a liberal international order. The era of truly free trade, truly free capital flows and large-scale migration across borders did not begin until the 1990s.

December 21, 2017

UFOs? Again?

Filed under: Media, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I must admit I share Colby Cosh’s just disproven belief that we were done with the UFO craze:

Yeah, I know: wrong UFO

There can no longer be any doubt: every fashion phenomenon does come back. I, for one, really thought we had seen the last of UFO-mania. When I was a boy, the idea of stealthy extraterrestrial visitors zooming around in miraculous aircraft was everywhere in the nerdier corners of popular culture. If you liked comic books or paperback science fiction or Omni magazine — and especially if those things were among the staples of your imaginative diet — there was no getting away from it.

Anyone remember the NBC series Project U.F.O. (1978-79), inspired by the USAF’s real Project Blue Book program? As the anthology show’s Wikipedia page observes, most episodes had the plot of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, only backwards: they would end with the investigating protagonists discovering that UFOs remained impenetrably Unidentifiable, but must be “real” craft capable of physically improbable manoeuvres. (I know citing Wikipedia will savour of pumpkin-spice holiday laziness on my part, but the Scooby thing is a truly perceptive point by some anonymous Wiki-genius.)

Then, at the end of the show, a disclaimer would appear on-screen: “The U.S. Air Force stopped investigating UFOs in 1969. After 22 years, they found no evidence of extra-terrestrial landings and no threat to national security.”

[…]

There are very good reasons for a superpower’s military apparatus to devote a little money to following up UFO sightings. “Threat Identification”? Sure, whatever. Plenty of U.S. military flyers have seen UFOs, and these people ought to be comfortable reporting odd occurrences without ridicule. But if I were American, I would definitely want most of that budget to go to Scully rather than Mulder. Don’t throw cash at someone who really, really wants to believe.

What I find vexing is that most of the response to the Times story has been in the spirit of “Whoa, aliens!” rather than “Taxpayers got robbed.” Young people may know on some level that ubiquitous good-quality cameras have all but eliminated civilian UFO sightings. But they lack the personal memory of a live, thriving UFO fad, one that bred quasi-scholarly international UFO-study associations along with a whole publishing industry devoted to UFO tales. I wonder if the Times’ piece on UFO research, by the very virtue of its flat-voiced Grey Lady objectivity, is having the same weird effect as that disclaimer they showed at the end of Project U.F.O.

December 14, 2017

QotD: Terrorism and mental illness

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

In the West, the conviction that you must kill people in order to receive 72 virgins in paradise would be considered a mental illness. In Islam, it’s a mainstream belief. 89% of Pakistanis believe in genies. But then again genies are present in Islamic scripture. 89% of Tunisians believe in witchcraft. 72% of Iraqis believe in the “evil eye”. 1 in 5 Afghanis have witnessed an exorcism. Half of Pakistanis believe in fairies.

Saudi religious police have a special Anti-Witchcraft Unit and there are actual witch trials. Majorities of Muslims don’t believe that Muslims carried out the 9/11 attacks. 40% of Pakistanis believe that fathers have a right to kill their daughters if they engage in premarital sex. Half of British Muslims think that the Jews are in league with the Freemasons. A third believes that Princess Diana was murdered to stop her from marrying a Muslim.

Ideas and behaviors associated with mental illness in the West are mainstream in parts of the Muslim world which exist in a pre-rational medieval universe brimming with conspiracy theories, paranoid delusions, lack of personal responsibility, erratic emotions and an inability to apply reason to reality.

Western psychiatric benchmarks don’t mean much in the Muslim world where witchcraft is a major problem, Jewish conspiracy theories abound and genies are responsible for psychiatric problems. Killing your daughter or just non-Muslims in general is socially approved behavior. The Muslim world has fundamentally different social norms than we do. And that means very different concepts of sanity.

Misattributing Muslim terrorism to madness is convenient, but meaningless. It’s a way for us to avoid dealing with the difficult questions posed by Islam. And that avoidance is also a form of insanity.

Daniel Greenfield, “Insane Muslim Terrorists”, Sultan Knish, 2016-05-13.

October 27, 2017

The revival of the paranoid style in social media

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

During the Clinton presidency, the conspiracy theorists were limited to the reach of their printed-and-mailed newsletters and fringe radio to spread the word (because so relatively few people were online yet). By the time George W. Bush was president, the paranoia had gone digital but had switched sides … now it was the left’s turn to fret about shadowy quasi-governmental organizations amassing arms caches and plotting to throw everyone into prison camps. Then Obama was elected, and the far-right conspiracy theorists re-emerged, bringing in the racist fringe to spice up the crazy. Now Trump is president, and both left and right are free to get their total paranoia on. This is a wonderful example of the type:

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

October 17, 2017

This is how conspiracy theories begin and persist

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith handily illustrates how conspiracy theories get started and why they can last for so long (the use of the term “false flag” is a definite tell):

This is where I came in (does that even mean anything anymore?). Something terrible happens at the hands of a “lone gunman” (in this case, five dozen innocent individuals are randomly and cold-bloodedly murdered, and several hundred are hurt, inexplicably by a rogue multi-millionaire). The usual politicians respond by threatening to punish everyone who didn’t do it, by ripping away great chunks of their human, natural. civil, and Constitutional rights. The event is quickly veiled in an impenetrable cloud of contradictory lies which will not be parted, not for decades, and probably never. We have seen this all before, over and over again.

Look: I have no idea what happened in Las Vegas, neither do you, nor does anybody else I know, but based on what we’ve seen since 1963 in Dallas (or 1865 at Ford’s Theater), what I’ve read, and what I’ve heard, and everything like it that’s happened since, I would bet good money that the person or persons actually responsible collect a government paycheck. I keep hearing talk about Manchurian candidates and MK-Ultra, and each time, I’m closer to believing it. I try to keep in mind that, the more the truth is concealed, the more people will tend to make up their own truths. I only know that future historians are going to have a field day with the 20th and 21st centuries.

I’d like very much to know the truth. I’d like to know what invisible forces and events are shaping the world my grandchildren will live (and possibly die) in, but I have given up any expectation I ever had of such a thing happening. The “real facts” about the John F. Kennedy assassination are supposed to come out soon, but again, I’m willing to bet they will only confuse and obscure things. Those future historians I mentioned will probably be swimming in their own sea of bovine excrement.

I do know one perfect, gigantic fact, and it is nothing that anybody ever told me. It is something I figured out for myself. It is this: these things happen because some people have the power to make them happen and to cover them up, afterward. (I never believed the official story about 9/11, not from the first thirty seconds it was launched.) They happen because those with power want more power, and we let them take it — from us. The craving for power and unearned wealth is a deep sickness, a severe form of mental illness, and you can see the effect it has on people. In the end, I’ll bet that Luke Skywalker would have ended up shrunken and shriveled, first like the Emperor, and finally like Yoda. Possibly green, as well. The Force does that to people, apparently.

Now, take a look at George Soros.

October 9, 2017

Reviewing Democracy in Chains as speculative fiction, rather than as history

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

James Devereaux critiques the recent book by Nancy MacLean which was intended to tarnish the reputation of James McGill Buchanan by tracing the intellectual roots and influences that shaped Buchanan’s life and work.

Nancy MacLean, in her new book Democracy in Chains, has allegedly revealed the master plan of right-wing political operatives, funded by the Kochs and inspired by James McGill Buchanan. MacLean pulls no punches as she describes a right-wing conspiracy meant to bring about “a fifth column movement the likes of which no nation has ever seen.” (page 127) Alas, the major problem with her account, as her fellow Duke Professor Mike Munger summarized, is it is “a work of speculative historical fiction.” MacLean’s contribution is a failure of academic discourse more likely to increase unfounded paranoia and division than to reveal any hidden agenda. MacLean’s bias bleeds into nearly every aspect of this book and taints her interpretation of the facts and sources beyond any reasonable interpretation could support. At one point she ponders the genius of Buchanan but determines it to be an “evil genius” for his work, much of which discusses the difficulties of democracy (page 42).

Why, one may feel justified in asking, dwell on speculative fiction? Unfortunately, when speculative fiction enters the popular culture, is applauded, and treated as fact, a measure of scrutiny is required. MacLean has received a fair share of positive press. NPR wrote that Democracy in Chains is “a book written for the skeptic; MacLean’s dedicated to connecting the dots.” That is if the dots were points on a corkboard tied together with red yarn. Oprah’s book club put it in their “20 books to read this summer” list. The Atlantic’s review praised the book as “part of a new wave of historiography that has been examining the southern roots of modern conservatism.” Slate also wrote a review.

A Deluge of Error

MacLean’s revelation regarding this “stealth plan” for a “fifth column movement” focuses on the relatively obscure, but well-respected, founder of public choice economics Nobel laureate James McGill Buchanan. MacLean weaves a fascinating tale but one that paints Buchanan and sympathizing libertarians as radicals determined to undermine democracy for the purpose of satisfying elitist urges, squashing the underdog, burdening the minority, and exploiting the poor. Unfortunately for MacLean, and those heaping praise, it is clear this tale rests on ransom-note-style citations, cutting and pasting together portions of phrases to change the meaning and support her narrative. In certain places it appears she has woefully misunderstood the source material or did not care – the notes do not match the claims. By cobbling together this mish-mash of selective quotes and speculation MacLean errs twice: first in describing Buchanan’s views and second in describing the motives of Buchanan and anyone sympathetic to his view.

A litany of scholars have examined the book and revealed a deluge of error. Russ Roberts wrote that MacLean owed Tyler Cowen an apology, courteously gave her room to respond, which she used to double down on her claims despite the obvious selective use of unfairly parsed phrases which attributed a view to Cowen he did not hold. Steve Horwitz, Michael Munger, Jonathan Adler, and David Bernstein have found issues with her citations and claims (Adler aggregated them at the Washington Post). Most thoroughly, Phil Magness has dissected numerous errors, misquotes, and general failures of citation found within the book, it appears to be an ongoing project. The errors which have compiled are such that they undermine credibility in the reading. As others have listed her poor citations, mangling of quotes, and selective editing, this will not be the focus of this review.

Since the publication of Maclean’s book, Don Boudreaux at Café Hayek has been hammering her work on an almost daily basis.

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