Quotulatiousness

June 10, 2024

South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” falters

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

Niccolo Soldo’s weekly roundup included a lengthy section on the recent election results in South Africa and what they might mean for the nation’s short- and medium-term stability:

Being a teen, the issue of South African Apartheid didn’t really fit all that well within the overarching Cold War paradigm. Unlike most other global issues, this one didn’t break down cleanly between the “freedom-loving West” and the “dictatorial, oppressive communist bloc”, as the push to dismantle the regime came from western liberals who were in agreement with the reds.

This slight bit of complexity did not faze most people, as Apartheid was seen as a relic of an older world, one to be consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history. It’s elimination did fit well enough into the Post-Berlin Wall world, one in which freedom and democracy were to reign supreme. This was more than enough reason for almost all people to cheer the release of Nelson Mandela and applaud South Africa’s embrace of western liberal democracy.

In the early 1990s, men once again dared to flirt with utopian ideas, and South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” was to be its centrepiece: out with authoritarianism, racism, ethnocentrism, etc., and in with multiracialism, multiethnicity, democracy and individual liberty. We could all leave the past where it belonged (in the past) and live in peace and harmony, as democracy would defend it, secure it, and preserve it. South Africa would lead the way, and would in fact teach us westerners how it is to be done.

Oddly enough, South Africa quickly fell off of the radar of mainstream media in the West when it failed to live up to these lofty goals. Rather than living up to the hype of being the “Rainbow Nation”, it instead was quickly mired in the politics of corruption and race, showing itself to be all too human, just like the rest of us. South Africa had failed to immediately resolve its inherent internal tensions, whether they be racial, economic, ethnic, or ideological, and by extension it had failed to deliver its promise to western liberals. “Out of sight, out of mind” became the best practice, replacing the utopianism of the first half of the 1990s.

Granted, a lot of grace was given to South Africa by western media so long as Nelson Mandela remained in office (and even after that), but the failures were plainly evident to see: an explosion in crime and in corruption were its most obvious characteristics, ones that could not be brushed under the carpet. The African National Congress (ANC), the party that would deliver the promise of the Rainbow Nation, was instead shown to be little more than a powerful engine of corruption and patronage. Luckily for the ANC, it was fueled in large part by the legacy of Mandela and the goodwill that he had accumulated over the years while he sat in prison.

The post-Mandela era has not been kind to the ANC (nor to South Africa as a whole), as the party could no longer hide behind his fading legacy, and could no longer cash in on the goodwill that came from it. It could “put up”, and would it not “shut up”. The ANC over time became a lumbering beast, too big to slay, but too slow to destroy its opposition when compared to its nimble youth.

What has the party delivered in its three decades of power? It did help dismantle Apartheid, but it did not deliver economic prosperity and opportunity to all. Instead, it simply swapped out elites where it could, preferring to keep the new ones in house. An inability to tame crime and to keep the national power grid running has turned the country into a bit of a joke, especially when it is lumped into the BRICS group alongside Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Despite its abundance of natural wealth, South Africa has been economically mismanaged.

South Africa is an important country to watch for the simple reason that there is so much tinder lying around, ready to be set ablaze. Luckily for South Africans, dire projections of widespread civil strife have not come to pass. Unluckily for South Africans, their national trajectory is headed in the wrong direction. Last week’s national elections saw the ANC lose their parliamentary majority for the first time ever, and the only way to read the results is to conclude that no matter how one may feel about this very corrupt party, it is an ominous sign.

June 9, 2024

Rishi Sunak “promised to run Britain like a start-up. On that account, he has delivered. Over one-third of start-ups crash and burn within two years.”

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

Christopher Gage pokes a bit of goodnatured fun at British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s awful start to his re-election campaign:

This week on the campaign trail might just enter the political history books. Rishi Sunak, the man who themed his cheese-melting campaign on national pride and security, slipped off home early from the D-Day commemorations in France.

World leaders gathered at the event on Thursday to honour the eightieth anniversary of the Normandy landings. You know, the one attended by a dwindling platoon of demigod veterans in what might be the final year graced by their presence. To riot in understatement, this Irish goodbye was inadvisable. Sunak might as well have fed Dame Judi Dench to a ravenous gang of XL bullies.

Our prime minister is one of life’s thoroughbred winners. From one of the most exclusive schools in the country, Sunak went on to Oxford and then to Stanford university. Cultured in our meritocratic petri-dish, Sunak has never failed a thing in his 44 years. Until now.

Twenty-odd points behind Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, Sunak is on course to finish third in a two-horse race.

It gets worse. This week, Nigel Farage announced he would stand for election as the Reform Party candidate in Clacton. That Essex seat is the living, breathing symbol of pissed-off, left-behind, white-working-class, fucking furious Great Britain.

The polls have broken Tory brains. Clamped around the Conservative Party’s noodle neck is Reform’s roid-head paws. The right-wing upstarts trail the Tories by just two points. And that was before Sunak committed the social equivalent of tarmacking over the Princess Diana memorial garden on Mothering Sunday.

Sunak is a one-colour pie chart of hubris. After losing the Tory leadership election to the ludicrous Liz Truss, Sunak got handed the top job by knowing the right string-pullers.

Breathless commentary from back then christened Sunak as a Silicon Valley start-up guru, furnishing the boy wonder with LinkedIn adjectives such as “brilliant” and “dynamic”.

Sunak parrots the pediculous babble beloved of that skulk of Babbitts. With blue-sky thinking, and by sticking to core competencies, Sunak has a plan to deliver. He promised to run Britain like a start-up. On that account, he has delivered. Over one-third of start-ups crash and burn within two years.

What went wrong? Sunak’s indulgent reboots have crashed his operating system. Not so long ago, he was an anti-woke culture warrior reeling off tiresome jibes about trans people. Then came spartan Sunak, trusted centurion of the Telegraph comment section.

Too late. For the best part of two years, Sunak has circulated in meme-form around this teetering island, his existence a boundless source of second-hand embarrassment and ridicule.

With each reboot, Sunak sunk further. Ordinary people have a radar for bullshit. They don’t see such shapeshifting as necessary brand correction to meet market demands. They see duplicity and serpentine salesmanship bordering on fraud. In the plain English of my council-estate youth: Sunak is full of shit.

With his wings smeared in beeswax, Rishi Sunak is Icarus. And Nigel Farage is the sun.

Farage is more than the sun. Farage is Wetherspoon Man.


A quick image search for “Nigel Farage beer” provides lots of evidence for “Wetherspoon Man”

During his visit to Clacton, Farage fittingly visited a Wetherspoon pub. For the unfamiliar, Wetherspoon pubs owe their undeniable success to their reliability and recognition. Wherever you may be in Britain, you know what you’ll get in one of Wetherspoons’ 800-odd cavernous boozers: A decent burger, chips, and a pint for half an hour on the minimum wage, alongside cheap, cheap booze.

Critics scoff. But they’ll never find a Wetherspoon empty at any time of day or on any day of the week.

Farage announced his plans and doubled the Reform vote in Clacton. His appeal relies on the Wetherspoon model. Farage is the same wherever he may be and to whomever he may talk. Dressed like a hobbyist gamekeeper, he sinks pints, smokes fags, and cracks jokes. “Nigel” says what a sizeable swathe of left-behind Britain thinks and wants to hear.

His many detractors don’t get it. How can a privately educated former metals trader claim to speak for the people? For the same reason that populist parties are lapping at the walls of power across Europe: their erstwhile champions are too busy peacocking their pronouns in their Twitter bios.

June 7, 2024

Nigel Farage’s challenge to the Conservatives

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

Ed West perhaps goes a bit far in comparing Nigel Farage and his Reform UK to Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, but he’s not wrong about what the rise of Farage’s party might mean to the already dim re-election hopes of Rishi Sunak’s bedraggled clown posse:

“Nigel Farage” by Michael Vadon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

I imagine that the last remaining serotonin emptied from the bodies of the Tory election team when they heard that Nigel Farage was to return as leader of the Reform Party and stand at Clacton.

The likelihood is that Farage will win that seat, and the reception he received was certainly electric. And Clacton is not even among Reform’s top 20 targets, according to Matt Goodwin.

It’s possible that the party could overtake the Tories in some polls, although I doubt that they will beat them on election day. That is certainly Farage’s aim, and as he said on Monday: “I genuinely believe we can get more votes in this election than the Conservative Party. They are on the verge of total collapse … I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again. I will surprise everybody.”

Contrary to the jokes about Farage failing to get elected, or the criticism that he is a “serial loser“, he is arguably the most successful politician of the past decade. He built up a minuscule party of ‘fruitcakes and gadflies’ to win two successive European elections. He made Brexit happen, and then stood his candidates down in a number of seats to ensure the Leave alliance remained united in 2019, securing Boris Johnson a victory.

For which he didn’t get the thanks he felt was due, something he alluded to at Monday’s press conference. From what I understand the Tory establishment treated him with a snooty disdain which many an outsider has experienced with the British upper class. And for those making the old point that Farage’s private school background bars him from being a true outsider, that’s not how high society works. Populist movements claiming to represent the downtrodden or disenfranchised have invariably been led by people from highly educated or privileged backgrounds, whether of the Left or Right.

Farage’s targeted constituency certainly fits that bill. Clacton is the town that Matthew Parris called “Britain on crutches” in a piece warning the Tories not to desert their traditional middle-class voters. But the problem for the party is that, through a combination of authoritarian vibes and very liberal policies, they have managed to lose both. Rather than making moderate, soothing sounds while using the British executive’s immense power to shape the country around their will, they have done the exact opposite.

The Government’s disastrous polling figures are not some great mystery. Conservatives don’t tend to have the same emotional attachment to their party as the Labour family does. They vote Tory because they want them to do three things: cut immigration, put more criminals away, and lower taxes. It’s nothing more complicated than that, and they’ve failed on all three.

It is obviously the former that has provoked the most bitterness towards the party. I’m a great believer in Stephen Davies’s analysis of alignment in politics, and the central issue in British politics is immigration, multiculturalism and diversity. Labour are unquestionably on one side of this issue; the Tories are broadly pro-multiculturalism and, while issuing soundbites critical of high immigration, have raised it to record levels. If both main parties are seen to be on one side, something else will fill that gap in the market. Political parties are amoral bodies seeking voting coalitions, and the side which is most united in aligning its core groups around primary and secondary issues will win.

June 4, 2024

How Wall Street billionaires are reacting to the verdict against Trump

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

Under normal circumstances, you might think that Trump would find doors closed to him among the big-money folks on Wall Street after his trial ended with 34 guilty verdicts … yet the opposite is reported to be happening and his campaign is being inundated with big financial donations:

My quite strong suspicion is that Leticia James and Alvin Bragg have caused alarm by targeting business records and real estate valuations in corporate borrowing, things that everyone shares in finance, insurance, and real estate, for criminalization and destructive litigation. My bet is that capital is turning hard against lawfare, seeking to disincentivize and punish an attack on the basics of corporate business. People in business are horrified by a flamethrower of a prosecution over old business records.

So Bloomberg’s interpretation is that Wall Street is standing with Trump despite the verdict, but my bet is that Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and other business interests are turning against Democrats because of the verdict — because Democratic prosecutors in New York (and especially Manhattan), America’s financial capital, are doing things like turning seven year-old business record misdemeanors into a long list of Frankenstein felonies.

That interpretation makes capital’s support for Trump self-interested rather than morally outraged, though not over Bloomberg’s explanation of lower taxes, as people who keep business records turn against the party that bizarrely overcriminalizes the handling of business records when the target becomes politically unfashionable. If capital turns against the Democratic Party — if the ATM machine stops spitting out campaign funding — the moment becomes pretty significant, and Alvin Bragg becomes the dog who caught the car.

June 3, 2024

Decoding Nigel Farage’s “hidden agenda” … that isn’t actually hidden at all

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

I’ve been theorizing that the reason Nigel Farage didn’t plunge immediately into the British election campaign was that he was expecting Rishi Sunak to do his very best Kim Campbell impersonation and utterly destroy the Conservatives as a viable political party. It turns out that that’s pretty much exactly what he’s doing:

Nigel Farage at the ULEZ protests in London, 30 August 2023.
Image from JoNova.

The biggest question of all, however, is what Farage wants to do after polling day. For months now, a growing band of Conservative MPs have been agitating openly for him to be admitted to the party; even Rishi Sunak now says he “respects” him.

Close friends of Farage believe his real plan is to wait for the Tories to implode, and in the aftermath arrive as a saviour in waiting. “He doesn’t want to be the person who puts the bullet in the back of their heads, why be seen to alienate Conservative voters?” said one, while a second, a senior Tory, said: “Our party needs to be able to come back with people like Nigel, where we basically go back to be that authentic Thatcherite party — his natural home.”

[Reform UK leader Richard] Tice says he wants to destroy and replace the Conservative Party, but when asked if he feels the same, Farage says: “I certainly don’t have any trust for them or any love for them”. So does he want to change it? “I want to reshape the centre-right, whatever that means.”

Asked directly if his friends are right and he wants to join the Tories, he adds: “Why do you think I called it Reform? Because of what happened in Canada — the 1992-93 precedent in Canada, where Reform comes from the outside, because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here. It took them time, it took them two elections, they became the biggest party on the centre-right. They then absorbed what was left of the Conservative Party into them and rebranded.”

I suggest this sounds a lot like he’s floating a merger. “More like a takeover, dear boy,” he replies, grinning like a Cheshire Cat.

June 1, 2024

Guilty!34

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

The New York City jury did what the presiding judge told them to do and returned a “guilty” verdict on all charges against former US President Donald Trump. Sentencing is apparently going to take several weeks, because … reasons, I guess. eugyppius provides the German media’s gleeful response to the verdicts:

Der Spiegel‘s characteristically dignified, restrained way to present the news.

Yesterday, a Manhattan jury found former US President Donald J. Trump guilty of 34 felony charges. It is impossible to describe this highly contrived case clearly in a single paragraph, but the upshot is that hush-money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels violated campaign spending limits, amounted to tax fraud, or constituted an attempt to unlawfully influence the 2016 election – either all of these things at once, or some mixture of them.

The naked political motivations of the prosecution are so obvious that they preempt all possible commentary. In the United States, the establishment have felt it necessary to fortify their free and open democratic elections against unpalatable outcomes by enlisting the help of the judiciary.

Because the German press are complicit in an essentially identical strategy on this side of the pond, they are thrilled – just thrilled – at Trump’s guilty verdict. Their reporting is as voluminous as it is identical, and it’s hard to keep the different think-pieces, op-eds and articles straight. This one from the Süddeutsche Zeitung is useful mainly for hitting all the common themes:

    Guilty. Criminal. From now on, these are the official trademarks of Donald J. Trump, at least for now. He is no longer just the first former US president ever to be criminally charged, and in four different cases at that. He is now the first former US president and current presidential candidate to be convicted in criminal proceedings – unanimously, at least in the first instance. Guilty 34 times over.

    Trump is a criminal! He is guilty! It feels so good to say that! Guilty guilty guilty!

    After such a judgement, a candidate for the most powerful job in the world should be politically finished. Who can imagine a convicted criminal in the White House? What’s more, Trump is theoretically facing three further and far more important trials. Under civil law, he has already had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for sexual abuse, defamation and illegally inflated assets. But this is the USA of the Trump era, so logic hardly matters …

This is a historic case! It’s hugely important! Even though we’re far from confident it will have any meaningful impact on the election which was the whole point of this farce in the first place!

It was always going to be difficult for someone as polarizing as Donald Trump to get anything remotely like a fair trial, just like poor old Senator Bedfellow in Bloom County:

Mark Steyn, who has had his own bitter experiences with the American “justice” system, on the proceedings of the NYC kangaroo court in the Trump prosecution: “[they wouldn’t] have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead.”

As everybody but the New Guinea tribesmen who ate Joe Biden’s uncle knows by now, Donald J Trump has been found “guilty on all counts” – a quintessentially American expression because, of course, the multiple-counts racket is one of the many perversions of judicial norms that have long disgraced the US courthouse.

[…]

Be that as it may, his legal reasoning would be fine if America were a land of laws, but unfortunately it’s a land of men: whether for the forty-fifth president or a “niche Canadian”, we’re in basic “Who? Whom?” territory, as the Leninists would say. After my own experience of both the New York and Washington appellate benches, I would rate the chances of Trump getting this reversed at the state level as way lower than Mr Otis’s five per cent. It’s the same in my own case: all involved know the DC Court of Appeals is merely an interlude in order to get it wafted up to the US Supreme Court. Likewise with Trump. So we’re betting the farm on John Roberts and that rock-ribbed six-three “conservative” majority on which Republicans have expended so much energy to the exclusion of every other societal lever. And, even were they minded to intervene, as I remarked on-air to Tucker a fortnight before the last so-called election, “A judges’ republic is a contradiction in terms“.

So Mr Otis’s legal arguments have very little real-world meaning in terms of November’s exercise in republican self-government. Meanwhile, back in what passes for reality in the courts of New York, the exciting bit having concluded, we are now back to the leisurely proceduralist folderol: The corrupt Judge Méchant has scheduled sentencing for July 11th. So, for viewers of English courtroom dramas on PBS, there’s none of the traditional “Take him down!”, with the guilty party being led down the steps ten minutes after the verdict to be driven away to begin his sentence. Let me see now, July 11th is, oh, a mere six weeks away, which torpor is also very familiar to me: my own verdict came down in February, but the various post-trial motions keep getting kicked down that endless road.

July 11th is also, as it happens, four days before the GOP convention is due to start in Milwaukee. So, at a time when the presidential nominee should be practising his acceptance speech in front of his bedroom mirror, he will be a thousand miles away waiting to hear whether he is to be belatedly taken down.

Thus, Judge Méchant will have once again subordinated the election calendar to the caprices of his filthy courtroom.

In theory, Trump has been convicted of a crime and could be headed to gaol. Also in theory, his term of confinement could be put on hold pending the outcome of his appeal. But they didn’t do that with Peter Navarro, did they? And it seems highly unlikely to me that they would have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead. If you don’t get that, go over to Larry Hogan’s pad and start cooing over your “respect” for “the rule of law”.

May 30, 2024

The Liberal Party of Canada, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trudeau, Inc.

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

In The Line, Stefan Klietsch ponders the idea that a lot of the problems the Trudeau Liberals are encountering in the run-up to the next federal election are direct or indirect effects of the constitutional changes Trudeau pushed through at the first party general meeting after he became Prime Minister:

With the ongoing and persistent slump of Justin Trudeau’s party in the polls, some observers have looked back at what caused the Sunny Ways team to lose its lustre in their years of governing. Some would point to the prime minister’s harassment of Judy-Wilson Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, an episode in which the prime minister clearly lost the battle for public opinion. One personal grievance of mine is the cynical promise that the prime minister had made of the 2015 election being the last such election under the existing electoral system. Others just point to post-pandemic economic conditions, especially higher interest rates.

But looking back to the very beginning of the Trudeau era, the Liberal leader arguably planted the seeds of his inevitable downfall quite quickly after winning his majority in the 2015 election. I speak here of the constitutional package that Trudeau pushed the Liberal Party of Canada to adopt at its 2016 Biannual General Meeting.

It is a recurring theme in Canadian politics that party leaders who form government tend to become more distant and isolated from their grassroots. But whereas most prime ministers and premiers would be content to delegate management of constitutional party debates to their submissive sycophants, a sitting prime minister took it upon himself to invest his personal brand in an appeal to the party’s convention floor to pass an omnibus “modernizing” constitutional package. Since the prime minister did not again participate in the party’s constitutional debates after 2016, he evidently got everything that he wanted all in one go, and with minimal resistance.

Trudeau’s cynicism here is worthy of mockery. Imagine thinking to yourself, “Just months ago, the rejuvenated grassroots institutions of the Liberal party swept me to power and ended the decade of Liberal decline. Better fix what ain’t broke!” The changes, which included slashing of the influence of Electoral District Associations and of policy conventions, were obviously not intended as some grand exercise in democracy empowerment, but rather were intended to protect an incumbent government from any inconvenient messages and influences from a potentially unruly party grassroots.

Yet it was the same independent party grassroots that had helped bring Trudeau to power in the first place. In the 2015 campaign the Liberals had run on what columnist Andrew Coyne called a “daring” platform, a platform crafted with more input and insight than can be offered by only pollsters and political operatives. The then Liberal platform was obviously a factor in the Liberals’ poaching of supporters from the NDP, which had at times held a lead in the polls. From cannabis legalization to electoral reform to the Canada Child Benefit, where did all the big new Liberal ideas come from? The party grassroots and institutions, of course.

May 28, 2024

Rishi Sunak’s big-brained election-winning strategy: bring back the draft

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

Embattled British Conservative leader Rishi Sunak has had another of his patented brainstorms for a policy that will absolutely win his party huge numbers of “gammon” votes in the July 4th general election:

I thought the misty nostalgia for postwar “National Service” had died out long ago …

Here we go: straight off, let’s get the youth to do some indentured servitude, sorry, National Service.

The Sunday Times reports:

    Every 18-year-old will be required by law to sign up for a year of National Service under plans unveiled by the Conservatives this weekend.

    Rishi Sunak’s first manifesto commitment would see youngsters given the choice between a full-time course (for 12 months) or spending one weekend a month volunteering in their community. There will be sanctions for teenagers who do not take part. Up to 30,000 full-time positions will be created either in the armed forces or in cybersecurity training. The weekend placements could be with the fire or police service, the NHS or charities tackling loneliness and supporting older, isolated people.

    The Tories have pledged to set up a royal commission to design the £2.5billion programme and establish details such as how the cybertraining would be delivered. A pilot will start next year and by the end of the parliament legislation will be passed making it mandatory for all 18-year-olds.

[…]

The Prime Minister says: “This new, mandatory National Service will provide life-changing opportunities for our young people, offering them the chance to learn real-world skills, do new things and contribute to their community and our country.” I doubt very much it will do this. The youth could learn real world skills in a weekend job that they’d actually get paid for but under Tory Rule they must become an indentured servant of the State instead.

It was floated that “the weekend placements could be with the fire or police service, the NHS or charities tackling loneliness and supporting older, isolated people”. Really? The fire and police service having to babysit some surly 17-year-old teenager glued to a mobile phone? Is this really what a police officer wants?

No doubt the vast majority of the youth will be dumped in some NHS hospital to do goodness knows what, or indeed a nursing home. And what about all the people who are currently off work and on anti-depressants “because of mental health”. Will they be forced to volunteer, or let off the requirement?

May 27, 2024

Visual metaphors in the British general election

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

When British PM Rishi Sunak decided to drop the writ for a general election, he must have thought he was boldly seizing the initiative but his timing was characteristically bad:

If your pitch to voters is that Britain needs protection in dangerous and uncertain times, it’s probably best to first show the voters that you can protect yourself.

For example, if it’s raining, you might want to consider demonstrating the good sense to wear a raincoat. Or carry an umbrella. Or if, say, you are the prime minister of an entire country, with an events team at your disposal, you might want to consider erecting a tent of some sort, something that can keep you dry without ruining your visuals.

Or you can be Rishi Sunak, the beleaguered British prime minister, and stand out in the pouring rain, unprotected, and get drenched as you state your case for more time to be the country’s leader, evading the storm only when re-entering the house you will surely be vacating after voters have their say on July the 4th.

To be fair to Sunak, it’s not easy to predict the weather in London. Nor can you always control the timing of events. But when it rains all of the time where you live and you do absolutely control the timing of events, as a British prime minister does when calling an election, it’s unforgivable to be unprepared. There’s a reason most Brits keep an umbrella nailed to their hips, and it’s not style.

And if you think this is to make a mountain out of a molehill, you should check out the front pages of the U.K. papers on the morning after the election call. “Drown & out”, blared The Mirror. “Drowning Street”, chortled another broadsheet. “How long will (Sunak) rain over us,” chirped in a key regional title. Each headline was accompanied by a grim looking Sunak soaked to his whippet-like core. The presentational details matter, especially when you’re putting yourself in the shop window.

Then again, to expect anything more from a Conservative movement that is running on fumes after 14 turbulent years in power is to put hope over experience. It’s been a draining (nearly) decade and a half. There was the austerity and economic uncertainty of the coalition years. The referenda — Scottish and EU — that choked off most debate on other issues in the middle part of the last decade. And then came the double act of COVID and Ukraine, a compounding whammy that hammered supply chains and put up energy and other prices, prompting the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations. It would have been enough to test any leader’s mettle, which is probably why the Conservatives have had five prime ministers during their stretch in government, including three in 2022 alone.

May 26, 2024

Will Rishi Sunak be the British Kim Campbell?

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

The British election is now underway and if the polls are accurate, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are in for one heck of a thrashing. If he’s particularly unlucky, he could come close to former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell’s electoral shipwreck in 1993 (losing a Parliamentary majority and being reduced to two seats in the Commons), but perhaps Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer isn’t quite the <sarc>charismatic juggernaut</sarc> that Canada’s Jean Chrétien was:

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

I’m old enough to remember the sense of optimism, hope and promise felt when Tony Blair was elected back in 1997; not by me, obviously, but I could at least appreciate that other people felt that ‘things can only get better’.

Whether you think they did or not, Blair transformed the country in his own image, just as his predecessor Margaret Thatcher had done during her similarly long reign. No one could say the same of the recent fourteen years of Tory-led governments, a period that has been marked by a continual drift away from conservatism both within civil society and in many ways driven by the administration itself.

As I have said one or two times before, you could have woken up from a long coma and had no idea who had been in charge the whole time. It’s an indication of how far the Overton Window has shifted that proposals to limit student-led immigration are considered way out there despite being mainstream only a decade ago – proposals which the Prime Minister backed out of. One of the benefits of being in government should be the ability to shift the terms of debate, but whereas the rest of Europe is mostly turning Right, Britain under the Tories has gone the other way.

In retrospect, and I have definitely said this more than once or twice, the post-Brexit immigration policy was their biggest mistake. It meant the worst of both worlds for the country and for Tory coalition building, alienating both a large section of cautious voters over leaving the EU, and the many cultural conservatives they picked up in 2019 who saw the referendum as a vote on immigration.

In a parallel universe where the government reduced net migration to five figures, there may well have been immediate pain: struggles to fill vacancies, inflationary pressure caused by rising wages, and universities which now cannot survive without using the immigration system as a funding mechanism. But the Tories would have been on 30% rather than 20%; that they aren’t aware enough to understand this is strange, but then they aren’t an ideological party.

Rishi Sunak’s decision to hold the election early is very curious. Perhaps he was worried that enough letters would be handed in triggering a leadership contest; perhaps he feared that Nigel Farage would reappear and make the Reform Party even more of a problem. Perhaps he’s just impetuous and has had enough, but the announcement itself, in pouring rain and drowned out by a New Labour anthem played by a public nuisance, was fitting.

The prime minister is very unpopular, and the Tories are currently polling at catastrophic levels, but there is little enthusiasm for Labour and more people think the country will get worse than better after they are elected.

May 24, 2024

“Great Britain is not yet a basket case. But we do a rather good impression of a failing state.”

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

Christopher Gage considers the plight of modern day Britain in the context of Rishi Sunak’s political suicide note election call:

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

The ambition for things to get better is a bar so low it’s a carpet. A favoured genre of meme here centres on the dysfunction and general farce of a country with “Great” in its name. That lofty adjective edges perilously close to hilarity, akin to those countries prefixed by “People’s Democratic Republic”. The excitable kind with an AK-47 printed on its flag.

Call the doctor’s surgery at 8 a.m. An automated voice will reveal you are number 49 in the queue. When you eventually wade through, a soft-centred receptionist assures you in therapeutic tones that there’re no appointments left today. Sorry.

Book a same-day train ticket from London to Newcastle. Without a hint of contrition, the train company demands £786.80. That’s a week or two in warmer, healthier, saner Sevilla or three hours and eleven minutes on a train in Great Britain.

House prices and rents are akin to the board game Monopoly, in which your coked-up crypto-addled mate has lined up hotels on Mayfair.

Go to the supermarket. Olive oil, a civilising elixir which once threatened to heave the primitive British palate out of the Mesolithic era, is prohibitively expensive. If modern Britain were a film scene, it would be that of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas: Fuck you. Pay me.

This all-encompassing one-footed waltz feels like the finale of a political satire. Since the 1980s, we’ve parodied America. We’ve nailed the social pathology but not the prosperity. Essentially, Great Britain is an advertising agency with a nuclear submarine.

This election pits two tribes against each other. One tribe pines for 1997. The other yearns for 1979.

For a sizeable swathe of the population, everything is awful, and nothing will ever change. And thank God for that.

Here, a natural law dictates that anyone under 45 who dares suggest things could be better is to be consumed by a radioactive flood of sadistic nostalgia. The mere whiff of dissent conjures through the pavement a battalion of nostalgians who lament the end of Polio.

“You don’t remember the Seventies!” warn those who yearn for the Seventies. ‘Bodies uncollected! Rubbish piled up in the streets!’. In that fateful decade, striking union workers allowed garbage to pile up in the streets. To this hazy memory, the rest of us are serfs to economic juju.

Whenever I point out that a first-time buyer in London must save for 31 years just for a house deposit, a familiar chorus of denial debunks the theory of free will. “You waste your money on flat whites and trips to Rome!” goes the wearisome riposte.

During the 1970s, that prelapsarian idyll when rubbish piled in the streets, when adults caned children at random, and when Bullseye was on the telly, the average house cost four times the average wage. Today, it’s twelve to one.

To point out mathematical reality invokes spasms of uniquely British nostalgia. It’s a negative nostalgia which glories in just how bad everything was.

Churchill was right. The British people are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst. Memory-mongers paint postcards of perfect penury. Back then, children didn’t talk back. There were no phones or elbows on the table. Back then, that famed sense of community slapped any ribbon of dissent out of those who dared dream bigger than the suffocating confines of community life. The past is a foreign country in which children could count their ribs but they was happy.

Such nostalgia serves two purposes. The first indulges one’s triumph over wistfully disfigured adversity. The other bleaches the parlous state of modern Britain with a mop soaked in a very British version of nostalgie de la boue. Nostalgia, truth be told, is a polite form of dementia.

May 16, 2024

The Thüringen Project – “where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the grave threat of ordinary people expressing their political preferences via voting”

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

eugyppius on the brave defenders of German democracy in Thuringia (and Brandenburg and Saxony) who are doing everything they can to ensure that the unwashed masses don’t disturb the stately progress toward their long-dreamed-of utopia:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

To live in Germany in 2024 is to be lectured constantly about democracy. An endless parade of doubtful personalities – pundits, experts and a lot of very shrill women – appear on the television every night to tell you which parties are democratic, which people are democratic and therefore who enjoys democratic legitimacy. As we have seen, however, the whole concept of democracy is very confusing. Those people and organisations who want to mute free expression and ban political parties are all held to be extremely democratic, while those parties that demand more direct democracy and talk constantly about respecting the popular will are the direct modern equivalent of illiberal antidemocratic fascists.

To make all of this even harder, we are told that the upcoming September elections in Thüringen, Brandenburg and Saxony present a grave threat to democracy. To counteract this threat we have things like the Thüringen Project, where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the political preferences of actual voters. Crucially, the very existence of the Thüringen Project means that democracy must still reign supreme in Thüringen. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the democratic police of the Thüringen Project to defend. We therefore need only study Thuringian politics in their present state to gain a better idea of what this mysterious, shape-shifting, elusive phenomenon we call German democracy might be.

We will start at the top. The current Minister President (i.e., governor) of Thüringen is a highly democratic man named Bodo Ramelow:

Ramelow is a member of Die Linke, or the Left Party, which is the direct successor of the Socialist Unity Party (or SED) that used to govern the DDR. That might seem baffling, as the SED and the DDR were anything but democratic. Still more baffling is the fact that the constitutional protectors suspected Ramelow of antidemocratic tendencies and even surveilled him for many years. But democracy as we have learned is extremely complicated, and whatever antidemocratic essence Ramelow may have harboured in the past, he is a stalwart democratic politician today. He is also a huge fan of the mobile game Candy Crush, which he enjoys playing during government meetings. That at least seems unambiguously democratic, and perhaps it is even enough to overcome Ramelow’s political unreliability in other respects.

[…]

In summary: A constitutional protector who owes his office to a Minister President who was appointed to a second term via the anti-constitutional interventions of outsiders is now vowing to use his office to forestall political developments that may deprive his Minister President of power in the future. It is almost like “democracy” in Thüringen is synonymous with left-wing government. Elections which threaten to deprive Bodo Ramelow of office or his left-wing coalition of power are by definition anti-democratic, deplorable and perhaps even illegal.

Thuringians can vote for whichever party they want, but their votes are only democratic if they are cast for those specific parties. If Kramer has his way, Thuringia will soon achieve the democratic end-state – one in which the sad reality of popular sovereignty in practice will be replaced with a theoretical popular sovereignty that exists entirely in an ideal, Platonic form, unchanging and as it ought to be, now and forever.

May 5, 2024

The protests “will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972”

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

Andrew Sullivan, the very model of a never-Trumper, sees the ongoing student protests feeding into a repeat of the 1968 and 1972 US Presidential elections:

“Patriotic students hung up an American Flag at George Washington University after pro-Palestine protesters trashed the campus, defaced the statue of George Washington, and removed an American Flag.”
Twitter image posted by Chaya Raichik – https://twitter.com/ChayaRaichik10/status/1786504098746958103/photo/1

As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying. I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But as I watch the rhetoric and tactics of many — but not all — of these students, I’m struck by how this humane concern is less prominent than the rank illiberalism and ideological extremism among many.

Preventing students from attending classes, taking exams, or even walking around their own campus freely is not a protest; it’s a crime. So is the destruction of property, and the use of physical intimidation and violence against dissenting students. The use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan, and antithetical to non-violent civil disobedience. It’s a way for outsiders to easily infiltrate and a way to escape responsibility for thuggishness. It’s menacing, ugly and cowardly.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and hostages at the forefront of the narrative, and allowed themselves to be arrested proudly on camera and face legal consequences for their actions, as the civil rights movement did. Imagine if they were emphatically non-violent and always open to debate.

But they aren’t, because they are not the inheritors of the Christian, universalist civil rights movement but its illiberal, blood-and-soil nemesis, long curated in the Ivy League. The key group behind the protests, Students For Justice in Palestine, doesn’t mince words. It celebrated the explicitly genocidal murder of Jews on October 7:

    National liberation is near — glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people! … Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.

The “our” is interesting. If you think these protests are only about Gaza — and not America — you’re missing the deeper context. Here’s a masked, keffiyeh-wearing spokeswoman for the UCLA protest:

    Given the fact that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it’s inherently a violent institution. There needs to be an addressment of US imperialism and its ties to the UC system and how it perpetuates war and violence aboard — not only abroad, but also here, locally.

So violence is justified in response. Here’s a keffiyeh-clad spokesman at CUNY:

    This revolution, which includes the mass demonstrations and encampments, are not just exclusively for students. It is for the masses. … It is for the free people of the world who are able to resist however you can — whether it be with a rock and other tools of liberation.

These are not fringe figures; they have been chosen to speak to the public. They believe in violence because there is nothing in their worldview that could prohibit it against certain “oppressor” races of people. As one of the “queer” leaders of the Columbia protest has said: “Zionists don’t deserve to live”, and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists”. He took his classes in decolonization seriously, even if he is now backtracking from their logical conclusion.

The illiberalism is deep and endemic. The civil rights movement was desperate for the press to show up; these thugs follow observers menacingly around, holding up barriers to prevent even fellow students from filming them. The civil rights movement ended physical borders between groups of human beings; these thugs create borders and police dissent. The civil rights movement asked America to live up to its ideals; the woke believe America is a source of evil in the world, and needs to be “decolonized”. “I love Osama [bin Laden]”, one pro-Palestinian demonstrator in New York City said. “I want to suck his dick”. That mix of evil and scatology is a woke trademark.

And these protests are clearly as much about the abolition of the Jewish state as they are the horror of Gaza. They are driven by the neoracist idea that “white-people-are-bad-but-black-and-brown-people-are-good”; they are about a blood-and-soil “anti-imperialism” that requires the abolition of any state not reflective of ancient indigenous populations. (The SJP refers to the US as “Turtle Island”, an allegedly indigenous name.) They are against “cultural appropriation” but prance around in keffiyehs. They glibly use the word “genocide” to trigger and re-traumatize Jews, while ignoring the genocidal goals of Hamas; and chants of “There Is Only One Solution: Intifada Revolution!” ring with echoes of Nazism.

And they will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972.

It tells you something when even Al Sharpton is rattled by these violent fanatics. “How do the Democrats — how do all of us on that side — say January 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses?” he asked on MSNBC. It feels like 2020 again. Replacing Old Glory with the Palestinian flag or defacing a statue of George Washington (see above), is not how you win over the country. But the more you know about these fanatics the more you realize they don’t want to win over the country; they want to destroy it as mindlessly as the pro-Trump fringe. And they’d welcome the even deeper polarization he’d bring.

May 4, 2024

QotD: Why Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton

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

Eight years ago, with the American election reaching fever pitch, no one truly believed that Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton. I certainly didn’t. But then the Clinton team decided to publish her playlist –

(I’m embarrassed just to type that). In one flash, I knew that Trump would win. Not because Clinton’s playlist was lame, obvious, safe, uninspiring … I’m not judging her taste in music, or lack thereof, nor would I count myself qualified to do so. I knew instantly she would lose because it was so clear that no one on earth would ever want to see her playlist. Let alone listen to it. No one on earth would want to know that such a playlist existed, much less care a raspberry fuck what was in it, what genre, what generation, what anything. For all the negative feelings I may have entertained concerning Trump’s personality, moral and ethical nature, honesty, decency etc., etc., I had to confess that I was fascinated to know what might be in his playlist. For all I knew, it could be polka music, soft rock, clawhammer bluegrass, death metal, light classical, Nu-folk, Tesco1, psychedelic funk, Tijuana brass. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was interested. And I knew with a certainty that might be regarded as deeply arrogant that my belief – that a Hillary Clinton playlist was among the least interesting ideas ever proposed – would be a belief shared by most people, whatever their political leanings. It’s not fair on Hillary Clinton that this should be the case, but the case is what it is. We smell it at once. Hillary Clinton’s playlist? No. Therefore, somehow, Hillary no.

Statistics and group theory can take us a long way, but smell takes us further.

Stephen Fry, “The One and the Many”, The Fry Corner, 2024-02-02.

    1. Tesco, as a branch of dance music, does, or at last briefly did, exist. It’s a blend of techno and disco. You knew that.

April 30, 2024

The CDU’s “five-point plan to protect German democracy from … the free and open internet”

Filed under: Germany, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

German mainstream politicians are struggling to keep extreme right populist anti-democratic voices from being heard by innocent and trusting German voters, so the leader of the CDU in Thuringia has a master plan:

The duel between our leading Thuringian politicians was all but unwatchable, as indeed almost all political debates turn out to be. While [AfD leader Björn] Höcke could’ve acquitted himself better, [CDU leader Mario] Voigt’s performance was flat, uninspired and profoundly banal. Among other things, the man suffers from a peculiar rodentine aspect; he bites his way stiffly through bland preformulated arguments like a squirrel chewing a stale nut or a beaver gnawing through saplings. After the event, the CDU took to the press to declare victory, but polls showed that viewers found Höcke on balance more persuasive, which is of course the real reason that everybody told Voigt to avoid the confrontation. Voigt is intensely democratic and therefore extremely right about everything, but somehow – and this is very awkward to discuss – his being eminently righteous and correct in all things does not manifest in an ability to defeat the very wrong and evil arguments of his opponents. It’s very weird how that works, perhaps somebody should look into it.

Stung by this failure, Voigt has set off to find other means of defending democracy. This week, in the Thüringen state parliament, he gave an amazing speech outlining a five-point plan to protect German democracy from that other great menace, the free and open internet:

    So how do we protect democracy in the area of social media? There are five approaches:

    Ideally, we should agree to ban bots and to make the use of fake profiles a criminal offence.

    There is also the matter of requiring people to use their real names, because freedom of expression should not be hidden behind pseudonyms.

    Then there’s the question of whether we should create revocable social media licences for every user, so that dangerous people have no place online.

    We need to consider how we can regulate algorithms so that we can revitalise the diversity of opinions in social networks.

    And we also have to improve media skills.

For all that Björn Höcke is supposed to be a “populist authoritarian” opposed to representative government, I’ve never heard him say anything this crazy. Voigt, meanwhile, is a leading politician for the officially “democratic” Christian Democratic Union (you know they are democratic because the word is in their name), and he’s actually dreaming of requiring Germans to obtain state-issued licenses for permission to post their thoughts to the internet.

Because Voigt’s regulatory regime would entirely abolish online “freedom of expression”, it is unclear how banning bots and pseudonymity could ever defend it. Generally speaking, for a thing to be defended, it must first exist. Equally curious is Voigt’s belief that any “diversity of opinion” will survive his social media license scheme to benefit from the regulation of social media algorithms.

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