Quotulatiousness

October 24, 2020

“So – a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in America?”

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

Arthur Chrenkoff responds to this tweet from Robert Reich:

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was instituted in the post-apartheid South Africa as a way of non-violently and non-punitively coming to terms with the painful racist past. It was a forum where the victims of human right abuses were able to testify about their experiences, and where some of the perpetrators could respond on record – ideally with some contrition – and request amnesty for their misdeeds. It was an exercise in “not forgotten, but possibly forgiven”, a way forward in transition to democracy that would not have to involve mass incarceration of those connected with the old regime. While criticised by many, this model of community healing is thought to have been quite successful in as much as it has been replicated in numerous other countries around the world as a way of dealing with the past and moving on. As the Good Book says, “the truth shall set you free”.

So – a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in America? You don’t have to have actually lived in a totalitarian society (even if, like with yours truly, it helps) to be taken aback at the insensitivity and the sheer tone deafness exhibited by a privileged member of the American elite (Clinton’s Labor Secretary, Berkley professor, 1 million Twitter followers) comparing the last four years in the United States to the four decades of South African apartheid or a quarter of a century of a military dictatorship in some coup-prone South American republic. Are these people really so lacking in self-awareness?

The answer is yes, and in turn it points to a more interesting socio-political phenomenon. For the past few decades, intellectuals (the great majority at various distances to the left of centre) have been looking at activists and dissidents outside of the developed, democratic “First World” – people like Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, Ang Sang Suu Kyi in Burma/Myanmar, academics and trade unionists throughout Latin America fighting against right-wing dictatorships, and to a lesser extent those in opposition to communist dictatorships like the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa in Poland, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, and Sakharov, Sharansky, Solzhenitsyn and others in the Soviet Union – and I think their main, if secret, reaction was envy and guilt.

Guilt because their own lives in the West were by and large safe, secure, privileged and prosperous, while their counterparts (intellectuals, artists, community leaders) in the Second and the Third World (now developing world) were putting their lives, freedom and livelihoods on the line for the principles and ideals they believed in. And envy because, as the stakes were so much higher “over there”, the lives of all these dissidents, oppositionists and human rights activists seemed so much more meaningful – and, yes, exciting. While you were pondering on the next New York Times op-ed you are going to write, while turning up to your monthly faculty meeting in your new Prius, somewhere in Africa or Asia or Latin America a prisoner of conscience was on a hunger strike, actually living the ideas you believed in and not just writing about them. Sure, it’s terrible, yet how much more interesting and consequential than your placid and predictable existence of mortgage repayments and the Monday morning undergraduate class in political theory?

September 29, 2020

The Lamprey Party of America

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that we need a modern Thomas Nast to add to the political menagerie of elephants and donkeys:

“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.

A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.

The 19th century political caricaturist and editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) is famous for identifying Republicans as elephants and Democrats as donkeys. He also created the Tammany tiger, and Santa Claus as we know him today.

Mr. Nast was a handsome and clever fellow, a Bavarian immigrant, to whom we all owe a great deal, but I have long thought that more animals need to be added to America’s political menagerie, none of them as wholesome and savory as elephants and donkeys. Lampreys are eel-like fish, sort of vertebrate leeches or underwater vampires, that attach themselves to larger fish with their circular, tooth-lined mouths, hitching a free ride, punching a hole through the legitimate fish’s flesh, and feeding on its blood. They look and feel (I am informed) slimy and disgusting. The freedom movement needs a cartoonist (I can think of one or two) capable of rendering a cartoon lamprey in all of its horrifying malevolence.

What party would be represented by a lamprey? Well, it has gone by several names, and it’s filled with familiar and despicable figures. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, described as “to the left of all Republicans, except Susan Collins, and … Democrat Senator Joe Manchin” is a lamprey, riding along on the Republican party, parasitically sucking its lifeblood, never contributing anything to advance its progress. She voted with Obama a stunning 72.3% of the time. I could say Murkowski is a “never-Trumper”, but she was a lamprey long before the Donald ever came along. My wife Cathy, first made aware of Murkowski’s malevolent role in American politics, exclaimed, “Alaskans! What the hell is wrong with you?”

Another well-known lamprey is Willard “Mitt” Romney, who viciously opposes all of Trump’s undertakings, foreign and domestic, and whose father George was a leader of the cabal in 1964 who betrayed fellow-Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and helped Democrats and the media stab him in the back, electing that murderous gangster Lyndon Baines Johnson. George Romney would have called Barry a “deplorable” if the term had been current back then, for the same reasons the political elites despise President Trump today. They believe only they are fit to determine how to live your life. The delusion seems to be hereditary.

September 20, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on the politically deranging effects of social media addiction

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

In his latest Weekly Dish installment, Andrew Sullivan decries the extreme polarization of the US electorate and points an accusing finger at social media for making things much worse:

An Electoral College victory for Trump, if he loses the popular vote again, would, in this new elite consensus, prove beyond doubt the centuries’ long grip of “white supremacy”. Some are already calling such a victory illegitimate, even though it would be completely constitutional, under the rules everyone has agreed to. The sickening street violence that the far left has downplayed, and permitted to run riot in major cities could be a mere taste of what is to come — along with ever-stronger white nationalist gangs instigating or responding in kind. (Trump’s toleration of this dangerous right-extremism in the past four years is as unforgivable as the left’s excuses for murderous violence.) But the upshot is the same: we will be lucky if the country doesn’t erupt in large-scale civil violence by the end of all this.

And the reason this dystopian scenario is so credible is not just the fault of these political actors. It’s ours too — thanks to the impact of social media. I think we’ve under-estimated just how deep the psychological damage has been in the Trump era — rewiring the minds of everyone, including your faithful correspondent, in ways that make democratic discourse harder and harder and harder to model. The new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, is, for that reason, a true must-watch. It doesn’t say anything shockingly new, but it persuasively weaves together a whole bunch of points to reveal just how deeply and thoroughly fucked we are. Seriously, take a look.

The doc effectively shows how the information system necessary for democratic deliberation has, in effect, been jerry-rigged in the last decade to prevent any reasoning at all. It’s all about the feels, and the irrationality, and the moment, which is why Trump is so perfectly attuned to his time. And what’s smart about the documentary is that it shows no evil genius behind this unspooling, no sinister plot deliberately to destroy our system of government. One of the more basic motives in American life — making money — is all you now need, the documentary shows, to detonate American democracy at its foundation.

For Facebook and Google and Instagram and Twitter, the business goal quickly became maximizing and monetizing human attention via addictive dopamine hits. Attention, they meticulously found, is correlated with emotional intensity, outrage, shock and provocation. Give artificial intelligence this simple knowledge about what distracts and compels humans, let the algorithms do their work, and the profits snowball. The cumulative effect — and it’s always in the same incendiary direction — is mass detachment from reality, and immersion in tribal fever.

With each passing second online, news stories, graphic videos, incendiary quotes, and outrages demonstrate their stunning utility to advertisers as attention seizers, are endlessly tweaked and finessed by AI to be even more effective, and thereby prime our brains for more of the same. They literally restructure our minds. They pickle us in propaganda. They use sophisticated psychological models to trap, beguile, outrage, and prompt us to seek more of the same.

[…]

And online is increasingly where people live. My average screen time this past week was close to ten hours a day. Yes, a lot of that is work-related. But the idea that I have any real conscious life outside this virtual portal is delusional. And if you live in such a madhouse all the time, you will become mad. You don’t go down a rabbit-hole; your mind increasingly is the rabbit hole — rewired that way by algorithmic practice. And you cannot get out, unless you fight the algorithms to a draw, or manage to exert superhuman discipline and end social media use altogether.

But the thing about algorithms and artificial intelligence is that they don’t rest, they have no human flaws, they exploit every weakness we have, and have already taken over. This is not a future dystopia in which some kind of AI robot takes power and kills us all. It is a dystopia already here — burrowed into our minds, literally disabling the basic mental tools required for democracy to work at all.

If you watch video after video of excessive police force against suspects, for example, and your viewing habits are then reinforced by algorithms so you see no countervailing examples, your view about the prevalence of such excessive force will change, regardless of objective reality. A new study shows how this happens. Watching the videos, even more than reading text about them, raises the percentage of white liberals who believe the cops frequently or always use excessive force by around 20 percentage points. The actual data are irrelevant. The BLM movement this summer was less a racial reckoning, as we’re constantly lectured, than a moment of web-induced mass hysteria.

September 15, 2020

Critical Race Theory

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

Dan Sanchez, Tyler Brandt, and Brad Polumbo discuss President Trump’s recent Executive Memo banning the use of federal government funds for Critical Race Theory training:

Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began as an academic movement in the 1930s. Critical Theory emphasizes the “critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” as Wikipedia states. Critical Race Theory does the same, with a focus on racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.

The “power structure” prism stems largely from Critical Theory’s own roots in Marxism — Critical Theory was developed by members of the Marxist “Frankfurt School.” Traditional Marxism emphasized economic power structures, especially the supremacy of capital over labor under capitalism. Marxism interpreted most of human history as a zero-sum class war for economic power.

“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”

Mises called this view a “conflict doctrine,” which opposed the “harmony doctrine” of classical liberalism. According to the classical liberals, in a free market economy, capitalists and workers were natural allies, not enemies. Indeed, in a free society all rights-respecting individuals were natural allies.

Classical Race Theory arose as a distinct movement in law schools in the late 1980s. CRT inherited many of its premises and perspectives from its Marxist ancestry.

The pre-CRT Civil Rights Movement had emphasized equal rights and treating people as individuals, as opposed to as members of a racial collective. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King famously said.

In contrast, CRT dwells on inequalities of outcome, which it generally attributes to racial power structures. And, as we’ve seen from the government training curricula, modern CRT forthrightly judges white people by the color of their skin, prejudging them as racist by virtue of their race. This race-based “pre-trial guilty verdict” of racism is itself, by definition, racist.

The classical liberal “harmony doctrine” was deeply influential in the movements to abolish all forms of inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to race-based slavery, to Jim Crow.

But, with the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism.

Social life was predominantly cast as a zero-sum struggle between collectives: capital vs. labor for Marxism, whites vs. people of color for CRT.

September 2, 2020

Cold War 2.0 — you’re soaking in it

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell responds to a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Nadia Schadlow:

Dr Schadlow posits that “A new set of assumptions should underpin U.S. foreign policy … [and, concomitantly, the foreign polices of the US led West, including Canada’s, because] … Contrary to the optimistic predictions made in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, widespread political liberalization and the growth of transnational organizations have not tempered rivalries among countries. Likewise, globalization and economic interdependence have not been unalloyed goods; often, they have generated unanticipated inequalities and vulnerabilities [and] although the proliferation of digital technologies has increased productivity and brought other benefits, it has also eroded the U.S. military’s advantages and posed challenges to democratic societies.”

After outlining the rosy assumption made by leaders and policy makers from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton to Barack Obama ~ assumption which I shared, Nadia Schadlow says that “China had no intention of converging with the West [because] The Chinese Communist Party never intended to play by the West’s rules; it was determined to control markets rather than open them, and it did so by keeping its exchange rate artificially low, providing unfair advantages to state-owned enterprises, and erecting regulatory barriers against non-Chinese companies. Officials in both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations worried about China’s intentions. But fundamentally, they remained convinced that the United States needed to engage with China to strengthen the rules-based international system and that China’s economic liberalization would ultimately lead to political liberalization. Instead, China has continued to take advantage of economic interdependence to grow its economy and enhance its military, thereby ensuring the long-term strength of the CCP.” Of course, from a Chinese perspective it might, very reasonably, appear that the liberal, US made (in the late 1940s) “rules based international system” was, in fact, designed to strengthen the US economy and enhance its military and ensure America’s long term strength … and that is not, many would say, a totally unreasonable view.

[…]

America’s allies, including Canada, need to step up and help the USA (and India) with the containment of both China and Russia in several regions: in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, too. Canada is a G-7 nation. It needs to start acting like one.

Australians, Brits, Canadians and Danes need not share Dr Schadlow’s Trumpian view of the world and of Cold War 2.0 to understand that:

  1. It is here. We are in it, like it or not; and
  2. Like its predecessor, it can turn hot if we do not manage it with care.

Now, at this time, the conventional wisdom is that foreign and defence policy must take a back seat to beating COVID-19 and restarting the economy. But, the Chinese and the Russians are not putting their plans on hold while they deal with the pandemic. (Maybe that’s why Justin Trudeau admires China’s “basic dictatorship” so much.) They will both be moving ahead with plans that aim to put the US-led West, including Canada, at a disadvantage. Additionally, now is a good time to announce plans to build more new warships ~ two or three large helicopter carriers, another supply ship (for a total of four) 16 major surface combatants (the new Type 26 ships) and a dozen smaller corvettes … can be and politicians should say will be built here in Canada, by Canadian workers. Defence related projects, when well conceived and directed, can be great long-term job creators. Canada can do both: speed up our recovery from the pandemic and strengthen our global position by making defence procurement a priority for the recovery.

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

August 30, 2020

Andrew Sullivan – “… let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed.”

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

In the latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan finds himself in agreement with Marcus Aurelius: “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

I don’t think I’m the only one, as even the Democrats seem now to realize. And this massive blindspot is not hard to understand. When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about “whiteness”, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk. One of the most devastating lines in president Trump’s convention speech last night was this: “Tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” A cheap shot, yes. But in the current context, a political bullseye.

The key theme of the RNC was reminding people of the American narrative that once was. Yes, it was unbelievably vulgar. Yes, it looked like a cross between a sophisticated CGI video-game and a crude car dealer ad with a dollop of Leni Riefenstahl. But it was extremely effective. To see that, you have to remove your frontal cortex and put it in a jar, accept that it’s all going to be a series of lies so massive they stupefy us into stutters, and then cop the feels. Pence gave us a vision of America that was a souped up Disney special from the early 1960s — from Fort McHenry no less. And look at the icons Trump invoked: Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill. You can mock. But in the midst of a culture being redescribed by the left as a form of foul and relentless “white supremacy”, and in a moment of arson and rioting, it felt like a kind of balm.

All this reassurance played out against a backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, and Minneapolis, where a suicide led to a bout of opportunistic looting, and Washington DC, where mobs of wokesters went through the city chanting obscenities, invading others’ spaces, demanding bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines — guillotines! — in the streets as emblems of their agenda. They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks.

[…]

And let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed. Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.

The pattern is textbook, if you learn anything from history: an economic crisis resulting in mass unemployment; the pent-up psychological disorders a long period of lockdown can and will unleash; a failure of nerve on the part of liberals to defend the values and institutions of liberal democracy, and of conservatives to keep their own ranks free of raw demagogues and bigots. But critically: a growing sense of disorder and violence and rioting as simply the background noise; and a sense that authorities do not have the strength or the stomach to restore order. What most people want in that kind of nerve-wracking instability is a figure who will come in and stamp it out. In Trump, we have someone who would happily trample any liberal democratic norm to do it. And the left seems to be all but begging him to do it — if only to prove them right.

A long time ago, I was mocked for saying that I believed that the election of Donald Trump was an extinction-level event for liberal democracy. But this is where we are. There is no place for liberal debate or dissent, just competing mobs deploying propaganda, intimidation and mutual racial hatred. Norms are trashed, from the shameful cooptation of national monuments for partisan purposes, to violating the privacy and peace of ordinary citizens because they are not in the ranks of agitators. Liberals are now illiberal; conservatives are revolutionaries. The Republican convention we are witnessing makes no pretense of even publishing a platform — all to demonstrate total and unfailing fealty to the leader whose own family is now assumed to succeed him. What about this pattern of events do we not already understand?

August 20, 2020

The attractive nuisance of conspiracy theories

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

In The Critic, Michael Coren pours scorn on the fans of QAnon and other conspiracy theories:

QAnon alleged clues about the NYC bombing, 10 December 2017.
Wikimedia Commons.

For those outside of the increasingly bizarre and surreal loop, something called QAnon is a pretty big thing in the United States, with increasing influence internationally. It’s a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that a secret deep state plot is at work against Donald Trump, who is the only person capable of smashing the power of a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles composed of liberal and Democrat politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and high-profile mainstream media figures. There, nothing at all odd or bonkers about that. It goes on to allege that a planned coup by Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, and – as always – George Soros was only prevented when President Trump hired former FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate.

The people who embrace all of this, and there are a large and increasing number of them, roar all sorts of quasi-religious language in their tweets and posts, speak of “The Storm” and “The Great Awakening” and are convinced that once they’re victorious, thousands of their enemies will be detained, incarcerated, likely sent to Guantanamo Bay, and the military will the take over the nation. Everyone loves a happy ending.

There’s plenty more involved, and every conspiracy theory one can imagine generally comes into play. Dive into social media and you’ll find the Q zealots, but look around a Trump campaign event and their posters and slogans will be just as common. Indeed, Republican candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, a proud believer in QAnon, recently won the congressional nomination in Georgia’s 14th district. In that this area gave its last Republican candidate 76% of the vote it’s virtually impossible that Greene will not be a member of Congress. Many in her party were appalled but Donald Trump tweeted, “Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent. Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!” In other words, this is a serious concern.

Outside of democratic politics, the so-called Pizzagate scandal was part of the QAnon maze of lunacy. False claims were made that hacked personal e-mail accounts had revealed the existence of a child-sex ring involving several leading Democrat politicians. The whole thing was, it was alleged, based in a pizzeria in Washington DC. A North Carolina conspiracy believer then travelled to DC and opened fire in the restaurant with a high-powered weapon.

It’s likely that the people behind the entire Q madness are making a great deal of money and it could be that they’re not even directly politically motivated. Whatever their motives, it’s all gone well beyond its origins and was pushed into high gear when the apparently genuine case of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal came to light. His alleged links to senior lawyers, Democrats, and a member of the royal family, plus a bewildering suicide, were meat and drink to every conspiracy theorist with a mum’s basement worth the name.

Wikipedia says:

QAnon[a] (/kjuːəˈnɒn/) is a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged “deep state” against President Donald Trump and his supporters. The theory began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by “Q”, who was presumably an American individual, but probably became a group of people. Q claimed to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. NBC News found that three people took the original Q post and expanded it across multiple media platforms to build internet followings for profit. QAnon was preceded by several similar anonymous 4chan posters, such as FBIAnon, HLIAnon (High-Level Insider), CIAAnon, and WH Insider Anon.

Q has accused many liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking officials of being members of an international child sex trafficking ring. Q also claimed that Trump feigned collusion with Russians to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the ring and preventing a coup d’état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. “Q” is a reference to the Q clearance used by the U.S. Department of Energy. QAnon believers commonly tag their social media posts with the hashtag #WWG1WGA, signifying the motto “Where We Go One, We Go All”.

August 6, 2020

Congress legislating on high tech is like your Grampa telling you how to play your favourite online game

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brad Polumbo on the notion that the politicians in Washington (or Ottawa, or London, or Canberra, …) are in any way capable of sensibly regulating the high tech sector:

While many principled small-government conservatives, such as Sen. Rand Paul, still back a free-market approach to tech policy issues, Hawley is not an outlier by any means.

Indeed, President Trump has also backed the regulation of social media companies to combat perceived anti-conservative bias. And the most popular conservative media personality in the country, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, regularly rails against Big Tech — even agreeing with progressive proposals to use the heavy hand of government antitrust regulation to break up companies such as Facebook and Google.

So, if major figures from both parties can agree on regulating Big Tech, it must be a good idea, right? Not so fast.

From left to right, the intentions behind these regulatory proposals are often good. After all, most reasonable people would likely share Democrats’ desire to see Big Tech better handle misinformation, “fake news,” and foreign election interference, while conservative Republicans’ calls for political neutrality online are no doubt appealing in the abstract.

Unfortunately, in their haphazard rush to score political points through government action, would-be regulators from both parties are forgetting the inevitable “knowledge problem” that plagues any central planners who try to dictate the minutiae of complicated industries from the halls of Washington, DC.

Economic philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek diagnosed this fatal flaw of government control in his seminal work “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

    “If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place,” Hayek wrote. “It would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.”

    “We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders,” he continued. “We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used.“

July 28, 2020

A rosy hypothetical about the US 2020 elections

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

David Warren‘s not committed to this scenario being accurate, although elements of it are clearly based in reality:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

Arguably, the American people have a handle on this. Their strategy is to support Biden and the Democrats publicly, to save their jobs, discourage doxing, and avoid vicious attacks from “friends” on Facebook. Then come November, they vote for a Republican supermajority, including a Trump sweep of the Electoral College, and a GOP landslide in the House of Representatives. Thanks to the secret ballot, they can say they voted for Biden afterwards, if he is still alive. (Has anyone checked on the dear old guy in his basement?)

That Trump will lose badly will be obvious to everyone until the election results come in. The younger constituency has been thoroughly indoctrinated by the radicals who captured schools and universities, but will, as usual, rarely turn up to vote. There will be a huge volume of fraudulent mail-in ballots — nine-tenths of them Democrat — but the Natted States Postal Service will fail to deliver them on time. Desperate efforts by Antifa and BLM to keep the riots going will substantially reduce the urban leftie vote. The meltdown of the meejah talking heads, on the night of November 3rd, will be even more amusing than their meltdown in 2016. Many will succumb to the Covid virus, by morning.

Not to be political, because I never am — but I did have a long history of correctly guessing election results when I was myself practising the demonic art. (Journalism.) I was, for instance, a polite “never Trumper” even after I’d been deleted by my newspaper employers (who felt they didn’t need “token conservatives” any more). But I did think, against all the odds, that Trump would win. This was because I try not to let my own prejudices interfere with my observations. My reasoning was simple. There were lots of people who loved Trump, and very few who loved Hillary Clinton. Therefore, the latter would lose. (This also explains how I predicted Obama’s victories.)

July 6, 2020

Cold War Two is upon us, but it’s not all Trump’s fault (believe it or not)

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Niall Ferguson on the rapid drop in temperature in US/Chinese relations in the last eight years:

President Donald Trump and PRC President Xi Jinping at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, 29 June, 2019.
Cropped from an official White House photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November.

The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War — between the U.S. and China — had begun. This insight wasn’t just based on interviews with elder statesmen. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I had picked up the idea from binge-reading Chinese science fiction.

First, the history. What had started out in early 2018 as a trade war over tariffs and intellectual property theft had by the end of the year metamorphosed into a technology war over the global dominance of the Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. in 5G network telecommunications; an ideological confrontation in response to Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; and an escalation of old frictions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Nevertheless, for Kissinger, of all people, to acknowledge that we were in the opening phase of Cold War II was remarkable.

Since his first secret visit to Beijing in 1971, Kissinger has been the master-builder of that policy of U.S.-Chinese engagement which, for 45 years, was a leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy. It fundamentally altered the balance of power at the mid-point of the Cold War, to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. It created the geopolitical conditions for China’s industrial revolution, the biggest and fastest in history. And it led, after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, to that extraordinary financial symbiosis which Moritz Schularick and I christened “Chimerica” in 2007.

How did relations between Beijing and Washington sour so quickly that even Kissinger now speaks of Cold War?

The conventional answer to that question is that President Donald Trump has swung like a wrecking ball into the “liberal international order” and that Cold War II is only one of the adverse consequences of his “America First” strategy.

Yet that view attaches too much importance to the change in U.S. foreign policy since 2016, and not enough to the change in Chinese foreign policy that came four years earlier, when Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Future historians will discern that the decline and fall of Chimerica began in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a new Chinese leader drew the conclusion that there was no longer any need to hide the light of China’s ambition under the bushel that Deng Xiaoping had famously recommended.

Time to end US military deployments to Afghanistan?

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

Brad Polumbo reports on the split between Republican voters and Republican Senators on ending the US military involvement in Afghanistan:

Leopard 2A6M in Afghanistan

Applied to the Middle East, the America First framework is intuitive — our military misadventures in countries like Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have cost the U.S. tremendously yet failed to further our interests. Once the party of hawks and idealists, Republican voters are now firmly in the America First camp. According to The Intercept, 81% of 2016 Trump voters support removing troops from Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, this shift in views has not been represented in Congress. Most Senate Republicans just explicitly voted against ending the war in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday evening, Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican, introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have brought our troops home from Afghanistan, given those soldiers who served a bonus, and repealed the authorization of force Congress passed in 2001. But in a 60 to 33 vote, the Senate shot it down, with only three Republicans in addition to Paul — Sens. Mike Lee, Mike Braun, and Steve Daines — backing the amendment.

“Our amendment [would] finally and completely end the War in Afghanistan,” Paul said on the Senate floor. “Over 4,000 Americans have died in Afghanistan and over 20,000 have been wounded. It’s time to bring our soldiers home.”

“It is not sustainable to keep fighting in Afghanistan generation after generation,” he continued. “In fact, we now have soldiers who were born after 9/11 serving in Afghanistan.”

“We’ve been there for 20 years,” the senator said. “How can we characterize withdrawal after 20 years, after we defeated the enemy, as ‘precipitous’? It’s crazy. The American people say, ‘Come home,’ and this is your chance.”

“Afghanistan 2010 43” by david_axe is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

June 14, 2020

The cat’s in the bag … once. Twice is a different matter altogether

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

David Warren discusses some specific cats and bags:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

You can get a cat into a bag twice, as someone said (I think it was me); but the second time it has to be dead. This would be the reasoning behind my prediction that a second general lockdown will not even be attempted; but it must be qualified. For many of the people who imposed the first one were demonstrably insane, and they haven’t yet been removed from public office.

The same could be said about our impending “summer of love,” or hot season of race riots, already endured a half-century ago. That cat has been put into that bag before. This time is bound to be a different story.

It is fairly strictly a party question, now. The “theory” behind the lockdowns — to avoid overloading the hospitals in Manhattan — proved a crock, but there is a more cogent alternative theory. The Democrats in Natted States Merica guessed that destroying the “Trump economy,” and encouraging “peaceful” riots in the cities, was the only way they could defeat Trump, having tried other methods to remove him. And for a party of convinced abortionists, defeating Trump takes priority over mere human lives. We’ll see in November whether their Caracas strategy is the final winner.

To be fair, as they say at Instapundit, the Repubs have historically played along with this, and agreed to take responsibility and blame for almost purely Democrat measures. A good example is race, where the party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, eugenic birth control to reduce the black population, and Jim Crow laws, presents itself to captive media as the champion of the black man against “systemic racism”; while the party of Lincoln apologizes for itself. That the devil is at large in American politics is, to my mind, an irresistible hypothesis.

The refusal of this Trump fellow to play this game, as his predecessors did, drives Democrats berserk. He actually fights back, to their consternation. It didn’t help that they were so proximate to berserk already.

QotD: The seen gains and unseen losses of high tariffs

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

Sure, there are gains to the workers and firms protected by tariff walls from their fellow Americans’ ability to trade freely with foreigners. But these protected firms’ resulting higher outputs are produced with resources from elsewhere in the economy. Output and opportunity in other parts of the economy shrink. American firms diverted by tariff walls into producing, say, more steel, rejoice. But this rejoicing ignores the jobs that these tariff walls destroy elsewhere in America and the loss of output from other domestic industries.

It’s easy to rejoice when a wall, literal or figurative, enriches you. And it’s even easier when the destruction wrought elsewhere by that wall is invisible. When a tariff wall causes people in Louisiana and Oregon to pay higher prices for steel made in Pittsburgh, no one can know how they would otherwise have used the extra funds they now pay to Pennsylvania steel producers. But those funds must be diverted from somewhere.

Yet because those somewheres are many, no one domestic industry suffers any great loss from higher steel tariffs. The destruction wrought by tariff walls is dispersed and, hence, invisible. But the sum of the losses is greater than the gain to domestic steel producers.

Americans on the whole are made poorer.

Don Boudreaux, “Mr. Trump, don’t build those walls!”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 2016-11-22.

June 4, 2020

Trudeauvian “performative sanctimony” on display … again

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

Chris Selley on the Prime Minstrel’s latest attempt to virtue signal on racial issues:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

In agonizing for 21 seconds before answering a question about President Donald Trump’s threat to send the military after civilian protesters in American cities, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likely risked causing as much trouble as he was hoping to avoid. Those who would like to see him denounce the president in full throat might be as annoyed as those who think he should accept there’s nothing Canada can really do to help and look out for our own best interests while the socio-political nightmare plays out.

Trudeau’s response wasn’t anything inspiring or novel or revolutionary. “It is a time for us as Canadians to recognize that we too have our challenges — that black Canadians and racialized Canadians face discrimination as a lived reality every single day,” he said. “There is systemic discrimination in Canada, which means our systems treat Canadians of colour, Canadians who are racialized, differently than they do others.”

He continued: “We need to see that, not just as a government and take action, but we need to see that as Canadians. We need to be allies in the fight against discrimination. We need to listen, we need to learn and we need to work hard to figure out how we can be part of the solution on fixing things.”

But here, at least, he was getting to the nub of the issue: To the extent the federal government can make things better for marginalized Canadians, Trudeau is the guy driving the boat. To read some of his ministers’ pensées, you would think they were just regular folks.

[…]

In the meantime, however, you can bet the farm we will soon learn that the Liberals’ changes to impaired driving laws — allowing police to stop and breathalyze drivers without any suspicion of impairment — have disproportionately affected black and Indigenous drivers in particular. Literally everybody saw it coming except Trudeau and his ministers.

OK, I’m kidding — they saw it coming too. They might want to log off, dial down the performative sanctimony and think on that a while.

June 2, 2020

Antifa

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

Arthur Chrenkoff welcomes the move to designate the Antifa movement as domestic terrorists:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

President Trump’s decision to designate Antifa as a terrorist organisation is long overdue.

Whether you call them a terrorist organisation or a criminal organisation – or both – the underlying facts are the same: Antifa is a network of groups committed to a violent revolution to overthrow the democratic system of government and replace it with some sort of a communist “dictatorship of proletariat”, whoever the current proletariat is supposed to be (which does not in the end matter very much, because it’s all about the party organisation rather than “the masses”). To effect such revolution, Antifa uses tactics of violence against people it considers enemies as well as destruction of property. Remember, these people are not Scandinavian social democrats or even Bernie and AOC-style “democratic socialists” who advocate and follow a democratic and peaceful path of transformation to achieve their objectives of building what they consider a better and more just society. Antifa are thugs who desire to tear down and destroy the current political and economic order and erect their utopia on its ashes. They want to abolish democracy, capitalism, liberalism and all the other existing institutions in favour of a Marxist-Leninist state — or just for the fun of it if they are more of an anarchist rather than communist frame of mind. Groups whose the entire modus operandi is based on breaking law and criminal activity have no legitimate place in a democratic society. Antifa are the political organised crime.

The label Antifa has been used and abused too long to muddy the waters and confuse people — many of whom, granted, want to be confused. Because fascism is objectively bad (and considers so by an overwhelming majority of people), calling themselves “anti-fascist”, Antifa seeks to claim the moral high ground and the role of the good guys who stand up to white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extreme element. But you cannot simply judge people by who their enemies are, or who they say their enemies are — you also have to judge them by their intentions, actions and aims. In the Second World War, the United States and the United Kingdom and their Western allies were anti-fascist, but so was the Soviet Union. Stalin hated fascists (except for a period of two years in 1939-41 when he collaborated with them). This did not make him a good guy, even if for the Allies at the time it made him the lesser of the two evils. Coincidentally, for Stalin the label “fascist” was a very broad one, applying not just to German Nazis and their sympathisers but to anyone opposed to communism and the Soviet Union and so in turn opposed by them, including at times even social democrats and other non-revolutionary socialists {“social fascists” in the Stalinist nomenclature). And so it is for Antifa — we are all fascists, from the few skinheads at the political fringes to all the mainstream parties and ideologies of both the right and the left. Just as in Russia in 1917 onward and all the other communist countries in history, your position on the democratic political spectrum can never give you an ultimate immunity, it only determines the order in which you will be shot (left-wingers and anarchists last, because they can be used the longest by the forces of revolution).

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