Quotulatiousness

September 1, 2023

How the term “the Deep State” morphed from left-wing to (extreme, scary, ultra-MAGA) right-wing jargon

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

Matt Taibbi wants to track the changes in political language in US usage, starting today with “Deep State”:

In July of last year David Rothkopf wrote a piece for the Daily Beast called, “You’re going to miss the Deep State when it’s gone: Trump’s terrifying plan to purge tens of thousands of career government workers and replace them with loyal stooges must be stopped in its tracks.” In the obligatory MSNBC segment hyping the article, poor Willie Geist, fast becoming the Zelig of cable’s historical lowlight reel, read off the money passage:

    During his presidency, [Donald] Trump was regularly frustrated that government employees — appointees, as well as career officials in the civil service, the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service — were an impediment to the autocratic impulses about which he often openly fantasized.

This passage portraying harmless “government employees” as the last patriotic impediment to Trumpian autocracy represented the complete turnaround of a term that less than ten years before meant, to the Beast‘s own target audience, the polar opposite. This of course needed to be lied about as well, and the Beast columnist stuck this landing, too, when Geist led Rothkopf through the eye-rolling proposition that there was “something fishy, or dark, or something going on behind the scenes” with the “deep state”.

Rothkopf replied that “career government officials” got a bad rap because “about ten years ago, Alex Jones and the InfoWars crowd started zeroing in on the deep state, as yet another of the conspiracy theories …”

The real provenance of deep state has in ten short years been fully excised from mainstream conversation, in the best and most thorough whitewash job since the Soviets wiped the photo record clean of Yezhov and Trotsky. It’s an awesome achievement.

Through the turn of the 21st century virtually no American political writers used deep state. In the mid-2000s, as laws like the PATRIOT Act passed and the Bush/Cheney government funded huge new agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the word was suddenly everywhere, inevitably deployed as left-of-center critique of the Bush-Cheney legacy.

How different was the world ten years ago? The New York Times featured a breezy Sunday opinion piece asking the late NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake — a man described as an inspiration for Edward Snowden who today would almost certainly be denounced as a traitor — what he was reading then. Drake answered he was reading Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry by Marc Ambinder, whose revelations about possible spying on “eighteen locations in the Washington D.C. area, including near the White House, Congress, and several foreign embassies”, inspired the ACLU to urge congress to begin encrypting communications.

On the eve of a series of brutal revelations about intelligence abuses, including the Snowden mess, left-leaning American commentators all over embraced “deep state” as a term perfectly descriptive of the threat they perceived from the hyper-concentrated, unelected power observed with horror in the Bush years. None other than liberal icon Bill Moyers convinced Mike Lofgren — a onetime Republican operative who flipped on his formers and became heavily critical of the GOP during this period — to compose a report called “The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight“.

March 20, 2023

“The New American Empire lasted, at most, twenty years, if one counts the two falls of Kabul as brackets”

Filed under: History, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on the brief — and largely unacknowledged by Americans — high-water mark of the 21st century’s biggest empire:

A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com

This century has already seen its fair share of great delusions, society-changing disasters built on wishful thinking: you can loan mortgages to people who obviously can’t pay them back; you can cure pain with an opiate that won’t make people addicted; and now the unstoppable idea of equality of outcomes between races, a project doomed to failure and tragedy.

But none was perhaps so spectacularly disastrous as liberal imperialism. Twenty years ago, George W Bush sent the most powerful military the world had ever seen into the birthplace of Abraham to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and as Niall Ferguson wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time: “the greatest empire of the modern times has come into existence without the American people even noticing”.

The New American Empire lasted, at most, twenty years, if one counts the two falls of Kabul as brackets. This was despite enormous technological supremacy, and genuine goodwill and benevolence among many of the state-builders.

The United States was “born liberal”, as historian Louis Hartz said, even if the crime wave of the late 20th century made that a dirty word, and the “New American Empire” would spread the benefits of liberalism to grateful beneficiaries around the world.

Yet what is so striking about the imperialists of the 21st century, compared to their forebears in the 19th, was just how little interest they seemed to show in the subject people. Their naivety about human nature, and their utopian belief that people around the world just wanted “freedom”, chimed with a lack of curiosity about humanity.

To think that people around the world might not be the same, that they might not want “freedom” nor have the social structure or culture that suited democracy, might be to venture into dangerous territory. To suggest that Iraq was incapable of democracy was insulting to Iraqis, since as the US president said ahead of the war: “There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken.”

Yet the defeated nations in 1945 had very old, well-established institutions and very strong national identities, something Iraq did not. The latter was extremely clannish, something no one seemed to consider. Sovereignty and strong institutions take generations to build, and cannot just be imposed by foreigners working on abstract principles like “democracy”.

Bush was not alone. That same year, John McCain had said: “There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along”. And on March 1, 2003, two weeks before the war started, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, had dismissed warnings about sectarian conflict: “We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they’ve never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together.” On top of that, “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.” He was totally wrong, while in contrast the American Conservative‘s pessimistic warnings about Iraq’s social fabric proved correct.

March 8, 2023

“By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges”, cousin marriage “makes the development of civil society more difficult”

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

Ed West on what he calls the worst western foreign policy disaster since 1204, the Iraq quagmire:

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, better known in the West as “Baghdad Bob” or “Comical Ali”, Iraqi Minister of Information for President Saddam Hussein.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the greatest western foreign policy disaster since the Fourth Crusade. It was the pre-eminent modern-day example of folly, driven by wishful thinking, utopianism and a lack of interest in history and how human societies differ. This was mostly carried out by good people, including our own Tony Blair, and promoted by thoughtful and humanitarian commentators who thought they were making the world a better place.

The White House regime which brought chaos and misery to Iraq were most of all entranced by The Weekly Standard, the now-defunct magazine most associated with neoconservative foreign policy. Had any of them read The American Conservative instead, they might have avoided the whole tragedy. In particular they ought have read Steve Sailer’s “The Cousin Marriage Conundrum“, printed in the run-up to the invasion and in which the author made a seemingly curious argument for why nation-building in Iraq would fail — its high rates of cousin marriage.

Pointing out that between 46 and 53 percent of Iraqis who married did so to first or second cousins, Sailer wrote that: “By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges”, cousin marriage “makes the development of civil society more difficult”. The neocon dream of jumpstarting democracy was therefore clearly doomed to failure.

Even those with a cursory knowledge of the country knew that Iraq was split between Sunni and Shia Arabs, as well as Kurds in the north, each group’s area of dominance roughly corresponding to three former Ottoman provinces. However, these were further subdivided into “smaller tribes, clans, and inbred extended families — each with their own alliances, rivals, and feuds”, in total about 150 tribes comprising some 2,000 clans.

Saddam’s politics were mired in blood, in both senses. He came from the al-Bu Nasir, a tribe comprising some 25,000 people based in the town of Tikrit, and his regime was filled with his relatives. His political career had begun in 1957 when the 20-year-old had joined the revolutionary Ba’ath (“Resurrection”) Party, following his uncle Kharaillah Tulfha, who had fought against the British in the Second World War. Tulfha would become his father-in-law, for Saddam also married his first cousin, although he later took a second wife. Family life wasn’t entirely harmonious, and the man who introduced that couple, Saddam’s food taster, was later stabbed to death by the dictator’s psychotic eldest son Uday at a party thrown by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

The unfortunate food taster was an Assyrian Christian, and within Saddam’s regime religious minorities could rise high, as is often the case in empires, because they presented no threat. His foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was also a Christian, his birth name being Mikhail Yuhanna.

The family was everything in Saddam’s Iraq. Mark Weiner wrote in The Rule of the Clan of countries governed by “clannism” that: “These societies possess the outward trappings of a modern state but are founded on informal patronage networks, especially those of kinship, and traditional ideals of patriarchal family authority. In nations pervaded by clannism, government is co-opted for purely factional purposes.” The inevitable result of clannism is kin-based corruption whereby resources, positions and other rewards are monopolised by family groups. In these societies, Weiner wrote, “the nuclear family, with its revolutionary, individuating power, has yet to replace the extended lineage group as the principle framework for kinship or household organisation”.

The Weekly Standard was called the in-flight magazine of Air Force One, but presumably there weren’t that many White House staffers reading the American Conservative at the time, a publication started by Pat Buchanan, the great Republican critic of neocon foreign policy. So the Coalition blundered into a disastrous invasion that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, wrecking Iraq and leaving many areas newly-divided along sectarian lines, while minorities like the Christians and Mandaeans were driven almost to extinction.

February 26, 2023

The role of Vice President of the United States is, constitutionally, pretty lightweight

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

For most Americans, the Vice President is seen not only as potentially the next President but also as a fairly significant official in the administration, yet this isn’t the way the job was envisioned by the Founding Fathers, as Glenn Reynolds explains:

Vice President Mike Pence (2017-2020) and Vice President Kamala Harris (2021-)

Mike Pence is arguing that the Vice President is a legislative, not an executive, officer. Mike Luttig has a piece in the NYT calling that crazy. (Link is to Josh Blackman’s blog post on same. Luttig’s piece is here, but it’s paywalled.)

Well, as it happens, I had a piece on the topic in the NYT over a decade ago, and I’ve also authored a piece in the Northwestern University Law Review on the topic, and I say he’s not crazy.

Nowadays, we tend to think of Vice Presidents – wrongly – as a sort of junior or co-President, but that’s not actually how it works at all. As I wrote in the Northwestern Law Review piece:

    The Constitution gives the Vice President no executive powers; the Vice President’s only duties are to preside over the Senate and to become President if the serving President dies or leaves office. Traditionally, what staff, office, and perquisites the Vice President enjoyed came via the Senate; it was not until Spiro Agnew mounted a legislative push that the Vice President got his own budget line. The Vice President really is not an executive official. He or she executes no laws — and is not part of the President’s administration the way that other officials are. The Vice President cannot be fired by the President; as an independently elected officeholder, he can be removed only by Congress via impeachment.

In various cases involving the Executive power, the Supreme Court has placed a lot of weight on the question of whether an official can be fired by the President or not.

Continuing:

    Traditionally, Vice Presidents have not done much, which is why the position was famously characterized by Vice President John Nance Garner as “[not] worth a pitcher of warm spit”. That changed when Jimmy Carter gave Fritz Mondale an unusual degree of responsibility, a move replicated in subsequent administrations, particularly under Clinton/Gore and Bush/Cheney.

    The expansion of vice presidential power, however, obscures a key point. Whatever executive power a Vice President exercises is exercised because it is delegated by the President, not because the Vice President posesses any executive power already. The Vesting Clause of Article II vests all the executive power in the President, with no residuum left over for anyone else. Constitutionally speaking, the Vice President is not a junior or co-President, but merely a President-in-waiting, notwithstanding recent political trends otherwise. To the extent the President delegates actual power and does not simply accept recommendations for action, the Vice President is exercising executive authority delegated by the President while being immune to removal from office by the President, unlike everyone else who exercises delegated power. The only recourse for the President is withdrawal of the delegation, with instruction to subordinate officials within the Executive Branch not to listen to the Vice President. However, it seems pretty clear that the President is not allowed to delegate executive power to a legislative official, as that would be a separation of powers violation.

The point of my argument there was to note that, by arguing that Vice President Cheney was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act because he was a legislative official, the White House had raised the question of whether President George W. Bush’s extensive delegation of executive powers to Cheney was unconstitutional. (Hence the title, “Is Dick Cheney Unconstitutional?”)

February 14, 2023

Are you not a PATRIOT? Do you hate FREEDOM?

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

I sometimes wonder if any bill ever gets passed in the United States without a catchy acronym anymore. Rob Henderson notes the anti-patriotic PATRIOT act and the anti-freedom FREEDOM act as examples of bills named in a way to almost exactly invert the true purpose of the legislation:

Many fully-grown adults have never developed the ability to think beyond words. Others are keenly aware of how easily people fall for this language game. And tactically exploit this mental weakness.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. William Shirer, the American journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, described his experiences as a war correspondent in Nazi Germany:

The strangest variant of this way of thinking is the belief that just because a word or a term sounds good, the reality behind it is also unquestionably good.

In October of 2001, the Bush Administration famously decided to expand state surveillance. This allowed federal agencies to monitor domestic telephone conversations, online activity, email, and financial records, among other intrusions, without a court order.

And what did they call this decision? The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.

USA PATRIOT Act.

Better known as the PATRIOT Act. And if you were against it, what did supporters say that your criticisms implied?

In June of 2015, the PATRIOT Act expired. The Obama Administration then restored most of the provisions under the title Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.

USA FREEDOM.

Better known as the FREEDOM Act. And if you were against it, what did supporters say that your criticisms implied?

There’s a country in which the first three names are “Democratic”, “People’s”, and “Republic”. The first and third words essentially mean the same as the middle — this state belongs to the people, and represents them.

In the modern era, government legitimacy is derived from this concept — representation of the people.

So the name of this particular country basically begins: “Legitimate Legitimate Legitimate”. Officially it known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Sounds like a lovely place. It’s more commonly known as North Korea.

The Soviet Union was officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

China today is officially known as the “People’s Republic of China”.

Who could be against entities with names containing words like Republic, Democratic, People’s, and Union? They sound so nice. Even socialist is cleverly named — who could be against anything with the word “social” in it?

There’s a violent organization that calls themselves Antifa. Short for antifascist.

There are people who will say with a straight face that if you criticize Antifa, then you are a fascist. Or they will imply that you harbor fascist sympathies.

Interestingly, as William Shirer notes in the book referenced above, Antifa collaborated with the Nazis to help elect Adolf Hitler. Antifa has its origins in Germany, and, as a communist organization, their primary goal was to accelerate the forces of history. Antifa in the 1930s aimed to bring forth the revolution. They partnered with the Nazis to overthrow the Social Democrats who controlled the Weimar Republic. Antifa supporters believed that a fascist regime was a necessary step to end capitalism and usher in a communist utopia.

During this period, fascist was used as an epithet against capitalist society and anyone opposed to communism. They used this term to describe the center-left party in control of the Weimar Republic. As Stalin put it, “Fascism and social democracy are twin brothers, social democracy is only a wing of fascism.”

December 19, 2022

QotD: When reality fails to follow the model, ditch reality

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

Alexander wept, for he saw there were no more worlds to conquer …

I get that, man. On some fundamental level. But that makes me a generally unhappy guy. So it is, so it has always been.

For whatever reason, the Leftist is able to externalize that. If there are no more worlds to conquer, well, that’s the world’s fault. I remember hanging out with some of the Political Science goofs at Flyover State. For whatever reason, they rank pretty high for Poli Sci — their department developed some measure of whatzit to better analyze the doodad, you know how it goes, the Karl Roves and James Carvilles of the world all use it.

Anyway, this was 2004, when George W. Bush won his reelection campaign against Kerry. Exactly zero of the Flyover State Poli Sci goofs predicted that. They were all certain that Kerry was cruising to victory. When I pointed out that this seems to be a BIG flaw in their precious model — the election wasn’t even particularly close — their response was instructive: It wasn’t the model’s fault. Rather, it’s that the American public chose to throw a temper tantrum.

That’s seriously what they went with. There’s the actual, observed behavior of 70 million people; and there’s your model; and when the one contradicts the other, the only possible explanation is: All those people are idiots.

(One of those grad students I was talking to ended up doing something “unofficial” yet fairly important for the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016; if I’d known that, I could’ve called it for Trump at the very start of election and made a fortune on prop bets).

It’s probably genetic for them, too. Which is either hopeful or depressing, depending, but I think it answers the question: Why does society end up being ruled by Very Clever Boys? They just can’t do anything else. They can’t internalize; they have game the system. Have to. A society that wants to survive must find a system for them to game, somewhere far isolated from the real affairs of people.

Severian, “Me vs. The World”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-14.

August 26, 2022

QotD: The WARG rating – “Wins Above Replacement Goldstein”

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

No totalitarian regime has ever successfully solved what you might call the Emmanuel Goldstein Problem. They just can’t exist without some kind of existential threat to rally around; it’s their nature. In 1984, the Party simply created Goldstein out of whole cloth, but they seemed to believe this was just another temporary expedient — they were counting on technology to do all the heavy lifting of mass mind control, so they wouldn’t have to resort to things like Goldstein and MiniTrue.

Obviously that ain’t gonna work in Clown World, Cthulhuvious and Sasqueetchia being notso hotso on the STEM. They’ll always need a Goldstein, then, and that’s a real problem, because whatever else Bad Orange Man is, he’s also pushing 80 years old. How long would he have, even in a sane world? 10 more years, tops? And the candidates for Replacement BOM are generally a sorry lot … but even if they weren’t, they’re about to get purged, too. The WARG is already going negative …

For overseas readers (and those not conversant with “Moneyball”: Baseball has these weird “sabermetric” stats that purport to compare players from different teams and eras in terms of absolute value. It’s acronymed (it’s a word) WAR, Wins Above Replacement; “replacement” being an absolutely average player. Like all baseball “sabermetrics” it quickly gets ridiculous, but see here. According to this guy, then, Babe Ruth has a per-season WAR of 10.48 in right field. That means Babe Ruth, himself, personally, alone, was worth 10 and a half wins above your “average” player. If Ruth goes down for the season in a tragic Spring Training beer mishap, you can go ahead and take 10 wins off the Yankees’ record that season (assuming they replace the Bambino with some scrub just off the bus, which back then is what would’ve happened).

WARG, then, is Wins Above Replacement Goldstein. I’d say that Orange Man set the bar for Goldsteins, but that’s not statistically useful, since Trump Derangement Syndrome is so far the apex of liberal lunacy. To make statistical comparisons useful — to find a “replacement Goldstein,” as it were — we have to have someone the Left considered an existential enemy at the time, but who didn’t really do much in the grand scheme of things. So I nominate George W. Bush. If Bush is the “Replacement Goldstein,” then his WARG is a nice round zero. Trump would have a Babe Ruth-ian WARG.

This gives us a convenient measurement for looking at various Republicans, both current and historical. Richard Nixon would have a pretty high WARG — he drove them even more nuts than W. did — and Ronnie Raygun would be up there, too. Gerald Ford would have a slightly negative WARG, since not even the New York Times could pretend Gerald fucking Ford was a threat to the Progressive takeover. Your steeply negative WARGs would be those “Republicans” actively working with the opposition, like Bitch McConnell.

I’d argue that Ron DeSantis and maybe Greg Abbott still have positive WARGs … for now. But they’re going to get gulaged here in pretty short order. Who’s the next guy on the bench? Your Marjorie Taylor Greenes and whatnot drive certain segments of the Left insane, but she’s just too ludicrous to have a positive WARG. And then things start getting really pathetic …

The Law of Diminishing Returns makes the WARG problem even more acute. Freakout fatigue is a real thing. The Media will give it the old college try, of course, but you really just can’t convince people that a goof like Greene is some kind of existential threat to Our Democracy. Her WARG goes negative every time she opens her mouth.

Severian, “Salon Roundup”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-20.

January 3, 2022

QotD: The Sisyphean quest of conservatives looking for progressive approval

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

When will Republicans stop trying to kick the Lucy’s football that is liberal approval? It’s never going to happen – no matter how soft, pliable, milquetoast, and Mitty you are, you’re always going to be trying to re-enslave black Americans, toss old people off cliffs, or destroy our democracy. But there is a solution to this problem.

Stop caring what liberals and their media toadies say. Be a conservative and make them pay.

It’s simple, effective, and much more satisfying than trying to get people who hate you to stop hating you.

It’s also more dignified. Look at Chimpy McBu$Hitlerburton. That was what they called George W. Bush back in the day. He was hardly hardcore – the guy was softer than a My Pillow and about 1 percent as based. But they hated him anyway, trashed him, slandered him, and even toobined to their assassination fantasies about him. But he was too gentlemanly to defend himself. Yet, once he retired to paint tacky pictures and began sucking up to the elite, he suddenly became a respected elder statesman. Now you have the Democrats positively orgasmic over his upcoming fundraiser for the doomed reelection bid of the Beltway Cowgirl Liz Cheney, who has likewise earned the temporary reprieve from the hate-tsunami by utterly betraying her fellow Republicans.

So, you can buy yourself some time. The price is your dignity, but if you crawl around on your belly and lick the toes of your vinyl-clad leftist dominatrix – oops, I assumed xis gender! – you’ll get a little less hatred for a little while.

These indisputable facts completely dispel the argument that the problem with conservatives is that they are too scary, that they must be bland and moderate and bipartisan and not upset the erotically-forgone wine women of the suburbs who channel their sexual frustrations into liberal politics. The idea that we will win these people over by not standing up for anything is just silly; how many times do you have to have a plan fail before you admit it’s a failure, GOP?

Kurt Schlichter, “Every Republican Is ‘Literally Hitler’, So Stop Caring What Libs Say”, TownHall.com, 2021-09-29.

November 20, 2021

Twenty years of TSA bullying

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

In Friday’s Reason Roundup newsletter, Robby Soave calls for the end of the Transportation Security Administration after twenty long years of futility on making travel safer but brilliant success in making the travel experience so much worse for passengers:

Exactly 20 years ago today, President George W. Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act into law and created the Transportation Security Administration, better known as the TSA. A response to the 9/11 attacks, the TSA was thought to be a necessary tool for confronting the new reality of terror in the skies.

Two decades later, the TSA has more than 54,000 employees, a budget of $8 billion dollars, and a long track record of harassing passengers for no good reason. Far from contributing to actual safety, the TSA is a stunning example of government failure: Its absurd travel restrictions make air travel no safer, deprive passengers of their civil liberties, and make the process of flying much more costly, time-consuming, inconvenient, and unenjoyable. The agency should never have been created, and its 20th birthday is as good a time as any to abolish it.

For starters, the TSA routinely fails at its main purpose: preventing passengers from carrying deadly weapons onto airplanes. TSA agents constantly miss weapons, drugs, and other illicit items when government agents try to smuggle them in as part of testing.

“TSA screeners failed to detect weapons, drugs, and explosives almost 80 percent of the time,” noted the Heritage Foundation in 2017. “While the exact failure rate is classified, multiple sources indicate it is greater than 70 percent.” During one test, at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, the TSA’s failure rate was 95 percent.

The 9/11 terror attacks, in which a small number of men were able to use crude, simple weapons to hijack airplanes and crash them into important buildings, were a scarring moment for the nation. The U.S. government vowed to be more vigilant. But the truth of the matter is that preventing hijackings is now trivially easy: Pilots can lock the cockpit doors, which are almost impossible for intruders to breach. Prior to 9/11 most airplane hijackings involved detours to different locations; hijackers did not intend to crash the planes, and thus neither crews nor passengers had much reason to fight back. This calculus is forever changed: Would-be plane hijackers will face insurmountable difficulties, whether or not they’ve received aggressive pat-downs from the TSA.

Meanwhile, the TSA’s security theater has made air travel a much more grueling process. It’s not just the ritualistic humiliation of having to remove belts and shoes, empty out backpacks and suitcases, and submit to full-body scanners. TSA agents are also frequently caught stealing from passengers, groping them, and delaying them for no reason. Again, there is no point to any of this. It does not make people safer. If anything, it makes us less safe: It is likely that some people choose to drive to their destination, rather than deal with the hassle. Car travel, though, is far more dangerous than air travel — many more people die in car crashes than in plane crashes each year. And not even COVID-19 could tip the scales in airplanes’ favor, according to The Washington Post.

Enough is enough. There is not a single good reason that Americans should have to endure such misery at the hands of this utterly pointless bureaucracy. The best time to abolish the TSA was right after it was created. The second-best time is now.

Remy made a parody video on the TSA that’s definitely worth a watch. Back in 2010, Iowahawk created some helpful new slogans for the TSA, free of charge.

March 9, 2020

QotD: The wrong lessons learned from World War II

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Americans learned several misleading lessons from World War II. The first and greatest error was overestimating the effectiveness of military force. World War II — the last conflict in which the world’s great powers went toe-to-toe against each other, with no holds barred — created a new understanding of how wars are fought and won. But wars since then have not fit this paradigm, and many of our subsequent military mistakes came as a result of misapplying World War II’s lessons.

Lyndon Johnson led the country into a massive military commitment in South Vietnam in part because of misplaced faith in what the United States could accomplish by force of arms. The Johnson administration convinced itself that fighting modern wars was a branch of management science, akin to running a large corporation like General Motors, and that America’s military was a versatile instrument that could be dialed up or down to deliver precisely calibrated levels of violence, tailored to meet any foreign policy challenge. World War II also led many Americans to conclude that liberal democracy could be imposed on foreign peoples through the application of what George W. Bush’s administration would later call “shock and awe.”

It turns out that, even in the age of precision weapons, military power is a blunt instrument, ill-suited to nation-building, except in rare circumstances and at great cost. Germany and Japan — our preferred examples — are highly idiosyncratic. Liberal democracy flourished in each only after the deaths of millions of citizens and the reduction of their societies to rubble. Americans haven’t shown much stomach for projects of this scope after 1945.

E. M. Oblomov, “The Greatest Generation and the Greatest Illusion: Success in World War II led Americans to put too much faith in government—and we still do.”, City Journal, 2017-12-28.

February 14, 2020

QotD: Canadian youth

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

Based on my own experience, people my age have no business deciding the future of this country. Obviously there’s the knee-jerk socialism inculcated by public schooling, and Canadian media. It seems to be a passing attachment, however, and is often shaken by getting a job, and realizing that earning money is hard work, and is remarkably unrelated to the unquestionably sordid practice of stealing from poor people.

More pernicious, and ultimately, in my view, far more dangerous — should my generation ever locate their polling stations — is a poisonous, systemic anti-Americanism. The young people I know hate the United States, and hate Americans. Many people have seen the infamous poll released last June which indicated that 40% of Canadian teens viewed America as “evil.” Many people were surprised by the results. So was I.

I thought the number was low.

The average youth voter, in my personal experience, has, at most, three political principles:

  • Equality is good. (Usually interpreted as equality of results… equality of opportunity is probably ‘racist’ and ‘greedy.’)
  • Everything is relative. “Good” and “Evil” are anachronistic terms devoid of meaning … they’re just, like, your opinion, man.
  • George Bush is the living embodiment of all that is Evil. He is, literally, the anti-Christ, and he feeds on the blood of puppies and minorities. Plus, he thought our Prime Minister’s name was Poutine.

Joel Fleming, “The Youth Vote”, Joel Fleming, 2005-01-06

August 3, 2019

QotD: The 1968 election and the schizoid break of the American media

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

… in hindsight 1968 was obviously the country’s schizoid break. The Democratic Party didn’t go completely off the rails — cf. all the candidates they ran, 1972-2004, who were the definition of anodyne — but The Media sure as hell did. 1968 was also the year of the Tet Offensive, you’ll recall, with Walter Cronkite proclaiming the war unwinnable. It doesn’t matter if Cronkite was right or not (of course he wasn’t); nor does it matter if his proclamation actually made everyday Americans lose faith in the war. What matters is that The Media believed it, with all their hearts and souls. No profession is dumber, or more addicted to singing hosannas to itself, than journalism. And then they “got” Richard Nixon, and that’s all she wrote — from there on out, The Media decided they were the country’s real rulers, and what they want, they get.

Fortunately for the Democrats, what The Media wanted and what the Democratic Party wanted were in the same ballpark for most of the next three decades. But then Bill Clinton happened, as my students would write. He played The Media’s Messiah fantasies for all they were worth, such that every bobblehead in the country was still defending him as Liberalism’s avatar even as he was governing (in the few odd moments he bothered) as Newt Gingrich’s mini-me and acting like a frat boy on nickel beer night at the strip club.

You just don’t get over something like that.

Which brings us to the elections of 2000 and 2004. Boy do these look different in hindsight! […] I knew The Media was all-in on the Democrat, like they always are. But at the time, I thought that was a tactical decision. That is, I really believed that their attacks on W. were calculated political moves, designed to drag Gore and especially Kerry over the finish line. I thought that only the Mother Jones types were delusional, Iranian mullah-style fanatics.

Nope. The Media — ALL of them — really did see W. as the antichrist, the Twelfth Invisible Hitler (as the Z Man likes to put it) come to destroy the world. So when despite all their sacrifices to Moloch the Chimperor won, The Media went full retard. Like UFO cultists who keep the faith by telling themselves only their fervent prayers staved off the apocalypse, The Media convinced themselves that only more Social Justice would do …

Severian, “The Spirit of ’68”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-01.

May 21, 2019

QotD: Measuring up to the presidency … or, perhaps, down

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

… let’s just look at the presidents of my lifetime: JFK: Adulterer, drug user, made his brother (!) Attorney General, shady mafia connections, stole election. LBJ: Adulterer, much cruder than Trump, started Vietnam War. Nixon: Honestly, better than LBJ but the source of the term “Nixonian.” Ford: Nice guy, failed president. Carter: Nice guy, failed president. Reagan: The GOP gold standard, but a multiply-divorced Hollywood actor whose administration was marked by nearly as much scandal-drama as Trump’s. (Just look up Justice Gorsuch’s mother). George HW: Nice guy, but longtime adulterer and failed president. Bill Clinton: I mean, come on. George W. Bush: Personal rectitude in office, though he’s been a bit of a dick since Trump beat his brother. Iraq War thing didn’t turn out too well. Mediocre judicial appointments and little attention to domestic reforms. Gave us TSA. Obama: Far more scandals, and far more abuse of power, than Trump. And does French forget that Trump was running against Hillary?

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, “I LIKE DAVID FRENCH, BUT THIS IS AHISTORICAL BULLSHIT”, Instapundit, 2019-04-20.

October 27, 2017

The revival of the paranoid style in social media

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

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

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

April 22, 2017

It’s silly to criticize any president for their travel and security expenses

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

Earlier this week, Kevin Williamson lamented critics both on the right and on the left for misguided complaints about the costs of the presidency:

The Obama administration represented a great missed opportunity for conservatives, because conservatives spent so much time criticizing him for the wrong things. It’s not that there wasn’t serious criticism of the president’s thinking and his policies (see eight years worth of this magazine, for starters) but much of the popular/populist criticism was pretty dumb: He plays too much golf, he takes too many vacations, his family spends too much money on fancy hotels and resorts, etc. Some of these stupid criticisms were made in a similarly stupid fashion by similarly stupid people for similarly stupid reasons when George W. Bush was president.

A lot of those stories went something like: “Heavens, it costs $x for the Obamas to spent six days at Martha’s Vineyard!” But that $x is generally misleading, inasmuch as it costs tons of money to keep Air Force One staffed and prepped and ready to fly irrespective of whether the president actually is traveling in it, and we pay those Secret Service (the name of that agency is odious) agents irrespective of whether the president is in the White House or Hawaii. It isn’t lobster tails and upgrades at the Ritz that really drive the cost of presidential travel expenditures: It is the presidency itself.

The presidential entourage is bloated and monarchical, and it is an affront to our republican traditions. But “even if his household entourage does resemble the Ringling Bros. Circus as reimagined by Imelda Marcos when it moves about from Kailua Beach to Blue Heron Farm,” the cost of operating the presidential household is small beans in the context of federal spending. It just doesn’t matter — it is boob bait for Bubba.

Now, we’re getting the same thing about Trump. It costs $x for him to keep moving about from Trump Tower to the White House to Mar a Lago. Some have tried to make hay out of the fact that some $500,000 in Trump campaign funds (not tax dollars, contrary to some claims) has been paid out to Trump-affiliated companies. This is deeply silly criticism: If there is a campaign event at a Trump hotel or another property, then of course the campaign has to pay for it: If it does not, then the Trump Organization almost certainly is making an illegal political donation to the Trump campaign. Trump did not write the rules.

(They’d probably be a hell of a lot worse if he had.)

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