A self-confident culture, like the Victorian, can handle ambiguities. It has a healthy respect for hypocrisy, which, as I think Snoop Dogg once said, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. It’s ok with concepts like legal-but-forbidden and illegal-but-tolerated. Prostitution was the former, homosexuality the latter, and so far was it illegal-but-tolerated that feminist icon Naomi Wolff got herself into a spot of bother over it, the kind that only a feminist icon can (i.e. “the kind that even the most basic research would’ve disproven in about five minutes“). The point of the statutes isn’t so much to regulate behavior, as it is to express society’s mores.
Only in the modern period do we feel we need black-letter law for everything. And once we’ve got formal law, of course, the very next thing we do is start carving out penumbras and emanations, because we are so far from a self-confident culture that we must constantly prove to ourselves what clever, clever boys we are …
Severian, “Barely Legal”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-21.
May 6, 2024
QotD: Confident cultures … unlike our modern one
April 17, 2024
Pay no attention to what “tax me more” folks say – instead watch what they do
One way for an a wealthy person to get a lot of free media attention is to performatively declare that they should be paying more taxes. This ostentatious virtue-signalling is frequent enough that Tim Worstall has been writing the occasional article about it for quite some time:
For there is this:
Public donations to pay off the national debt have hit their highest level in at least a decade amid growing concern about the UK’s soaring debt mountain.
Members of the public handed almost £700,000 over to the Government through six individual bequests and donations last year, according to Debt Management Office (DMO) figures obtained via a Freedom of Information request.
The amount for the 2023-24 financial year was the highest in at least a decade, with the biggest single payment to help pay off Britain’s £2.65 trillion debt pile coming from a £500,000 bequest, according to the DMO, which did not provide names of individual donors.
One way to think of this — an entirely correct way to think of it too — is that an entire 6 people last year thought that inheritance tax was too low. Which, out of the about 600k deaths (not looked it up but that’s right order of magnitude, it’s not 6 million and it’s not 60k) is not actually a lot. 0.001% in fact.
One of the grand insistences of economics is that watching what people do gives more information about their true beliefs than listening to what they say – revealed preferences, not expressed. So, by what people actually do we have 0.001% of the people leaving estates of any size whatever who think that the tax on estates is too small. This is not a large majority in favour of higher taxes upon estates being left.
But back to the far more important subject, me.
As far as the UK is concerned I did start this off. The reporting on how much people voluntarily leave to the government. Who pays extra that is – who makes a voluntary donation to government. Back in 2006 in fact, back in the depths of the Brown Terror:
LAST YEAR there were five people in Britain who thought that their taxes were too low. No, this isn’t the number of people who have called for higher taxes. Rather, it is those who were so convinced of the righteousness of state spending that they voluntarily sent extra money to the Treasury.
The Americans have been doing this since 1843. It’s always been possible to pay extra to HM Treasury — Stanley Baldwin actually handed over one fifth of his estate while he was still alive. Admittedly, he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury at the time and was asking for donations to aid in paying down war debt but still, props for money where mouth is.
Cheques, by the way, should be made out to “The Accountant, HM Treasury”, and sent to 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ. A 2nd-class stamp is sufficient and you are encouraged to add a covering note so that your donation is spent in the way you like.
I wrote that piece for The Times simply because I thought it would be a cute thing to do — and I wanted the £200 that went with writing it. As ever with freelance journalism, my money is important.
I also know that that was the first piece that appeared in UK journalism on this point. For when I asked the Treasury they’d no idea at all how many had in fact paid extra. Took them months to find out too. The donations had happened before, but no one had been writing about it. At least, not since Baldwin’s generation.
His Majesty King Charles, in right of Canada, would also be happy to accept any unwanted sums of money above your mandatory tax rate here. Go wild, wealthy and patriotic Canadian multi-millionaires!
April 5, 2024
QotD: When the faculty lounge turned nasty over the electric vehicle charging stations
Not because academics are worried about anything so prole as hypocrisy — as we know, cognitive dissonance only affects the Dirt People — but because eggheads operate on a different scale of values. Bentleys etc. are what those people drive … so professors have to kick it bobo style. Thus the faculty lot is filled with Priuses (Prii?), Teslas, and so forth. Back when The Simpsons was funny, it had a throwaway joke about Ed Begley Jr. driving a car so eco-friendly, it was powered entirely by his own sense of self-regard. If they actually marketed those, every professor in America would have one … but since they don’t, the “eco-pimp my ride” competition continues unabated.
Which is hilarious for two reasons. First, there isn’t — there won’t be, there can’t be — sufficient infrastructure to support more than a token few electric vehicles (EVs). Flyover State is nothing if not eco-friendly, though, and so they fell all over themselves giving the faculty charging stations … but see above: All they could manage was one charging station per level, in one parking garage. Which naturally led to much agonizing in the Faculty Senate, not to mention the student newspaper, the town newspaper, and every boutique coffee place and head shop in College Town. How can charging station time be most equitably distributed? Does the Lesbian Negress outweigh (supply your own joke here, please) the White FTM tranny? What about the genderfluid hemophiliac Inuit? Where does the wingless golden-skinned dragonkin rank?
Severian, “Luxury Beliefs”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-03.
March 28, 2024
Justin Trudeau never misses an opportunity to make a performative announcement, even if it harms Canadian interests
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an announcement last week that the Canadian government was cutting off military exports to Israel … except that Canada buys more military equipment from Israel than vice-versa:
Israeli Spike LR2 antitank missile launchers, similar to the ones delivered to the Canadian Army detachment in Latvia in February.
Wikimedia Commons.
When the Trudeau government publicly cut off military exports to Israel last week, the immediate reaction of the Israeli media was to point out that Canada’s military was far more dependent on Israeli tech than was ever the case in reverse.
“For some reason, (Foreign Minister Melanie Joly) forgot that in the last decade, the Canadian Defense Ministry purchased Israeli weapon systems worth more than a billion dollars,” read an analysis by the Jerusalem Post, which noted that Israeli military technology is “protecting Canadian pilots, fighters, and naval combatants around the world.”
According to Canada’s own records, meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces were only ever purchasing a fraction of that amount from Canadian military manufacturers.
In 2022 — the last year for which data is publicly available — Canada exported $21,329,783.93 in “military goods” to Israel.
This didn’t even place Israel among the top 10 buyers of Canadian military goods for that year. Saudi Arabia, notably, ranked as 2022’s biggest non-U.S. buyer of Canadian military goods at $1.15 billion — more than 50 times the Israeli figure.
What’s more — despite Joly adopting activist claims that Canada was selling “arms” to Israel — the Canadian exports were almost entirely non-lethal.
“Global Affairs Canada can confirm that Canada has not received any requests, and therefore not issued any permits, for full weapon systems for major conventional arms or light weapons to Israel for over 30 years,” Global Affairs said in a February statement to the Qatari-owned news outlet Al Jazeera.
The department added, “the permits which have been granted since October 7, 2023, are for the export of non-lethal equipment.”
Even Project Ploughshares — an Ontario non-profit that has been among the loudest advocates for Canada to shut off Israeli exports — acknowledged in a December report that recent Canadian exports mostly consisted of parts for the F-35 fighter jet.
“According to industry representatives and Canadian officials, all F-35s produced include Canadian-made parts and components,” wrote the group.
March 7, 2024
“The traditional answer to this is to leave those inheritees be and they’ll blow it all on hookers and coke soon enough”
Tim Worstall tackles the ongoing angst about “the wrong sort of people” getting their sweaty mitts on family inheritances and then backhands the ostentatiously super wealthy demanding to be taxed more heavily as “Full Of Shit. Obviously”.
This has to be one of the least sympathy inducing articles ever — rich kids worried about their inheritances. We’re about to have that grand generational shift apparently, trillions upon trillions are going to move from the people who made it to the Lucky Sperm Club.
Woes.
The traditional answer to this is to leave those inheritees be and they’ll blow it all on hookers and coke soon enough. The standard deviation of soon enough is pretty big — the folk tale is clogs to clogs in three generations but the Hervey’s managed to wait until the 7th Marquess for it all to get — quite literally in that case — blown. But, you know, it does eventually happen. There are no really old fortunes.
This isn’t, perhaps, enough for the hurry hurry of the modern world. Thus we get people like this:
Tax, of course, could — should — play a huge part in all this. “Philanthropic donations are a drop in the ocean compared to what even quite minor tax increases on the richest in society would provide,” Lewis says. Patriotic Millionaires is calling for a hike in taxation for the super-rich — and its members aren’t limited to millennials. They include Guy Singh-Watson, founder of Riverford Organic Farmers; Graham Hobson, founder of Photobox; the Perry family, from the posh ready-meal business Cook; and Ian Gregg, whose father founded Greggs.
“At the moment philanthropic donations amount to about £10 billion per year,” Lewis says. “A wealth tax of 1 to 2 per cent on assets over £10 million, which would affect only the wealthiest in the UK, would raise more than double that. Closing tax avoidance loopholes would raise much more than this.”
As I pointed out in the same newspaper, The Times, two decades back, this is purest bollocks. For it’s entirely easy to pay extra tax if that’s what you wish to do:
Cheques, by the way, should be made out to “The Accountant, HM Treasury”, and sent to 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ.
Job’s a good ‘un. Except, back then, near no one did. I managed to get the numbers out of The Treasury for the previous year — it took some months as they were amazed that anyone had even thought of checking this — and a whole 5 people had paid that extra tax. Four of whom were dead, leaving bequests. That is, the UK, that year, contained one whole person willing to pay higher tax than duly and justly levied upon them. Some flood of patriotic millionaires there was not.
Matters do not seem to have improved greatly:
But something is not working. The accounts of the Debt Management Office for the year ended 31 March 2020 show that it received donations or bequests totalling just £48,957. While that’s a large percentage increase on the £11,069 received during the year ended 31 March 2019, by any standards these figures are tiny.
Not the sorts of amounts likely to make a great impact upon a lifetime’s supply of coke and hookers, is it?
One correct answer to these claims by the Patriotic Millionaires is therefore that they’re full of shit. In slightly more technical language they’re doing ethical performativity. There’s always a difference between expressed preferences — what people say — and revealed preferences, what people do. What people really believe is in what they do — but it’s entirely possible that saying the right things, even if not doing them, will get you invited to the right sorts of parties. You know, the ones where someone else pays for the hookers and coke. So, people say things they don’t do for reasons of societal enrapture. Hardly an uncommon human activity, that.
I seem to remember linking to an article of Tim’s on the old blog, but that’s long been offline. More recently, we’ve seen this exact scenario play out in Norway, the UK, the United States, and the City of Toronto.
His Majesty King Charles, in right of Canada, would also be happy to accept any unwanted sums of money above your mandatory tax rate here. Go wild, wealthy and patriotic Canadian multi-millionaires!
February 12, 2024
QotD: The Golden Rule of Canadian Politics
Tristin Hopper, “‘Stick a fork in me; I’m done’: Inside the thoughts of the carbon tax”, National Post, 2023-11-11.
February 1, 2024
QotD: English hypocrisy, spoken
Alas, this indirect way of speaking, always tinged with irony and humour, has almost disappeared in favour of a cruder and less amusing manner of communicating. Literal-mindedness has replaced subtle codification, and with it, a people who were once subtle, if sometimes perfidious, have become crass and often aggressive. Irony, which the whole population once both understood and employed, and was so strong an aspect of the national character, has now disappeared, replaced by a disposition to querulousness and indignation.
Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.
January 24, 2024
QotD: Boomer hypocrisy
Severian, “Hoist on Their Own Petard”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-19.
January 20, 2024
Looking for some kind of consistency in political commentary
In The Line, Matt Gurney notes that the reactions to a former National Post columnist seeking the nomination for the Conservatives in a 905-area seat fall into depressingly predictable patterns on partisan lines:
Anyone have a standard they can apply consistently in each of these cases? If so, should we maybe write it down or something?
Here’s my take: Each of these cases posed some problems, but none of them fatal, because I think the fear of influence peddling and favour currying actually has the flow reversed: media figures don’t skew their on-air or in-print work to seek political opportunities, but political parties absolutely actively recruit like-minded people with large media profiles.
Maybe I’m wrong. Okay. Just tell me the rule, then, and I’ll go with it.
And then, oh Lord, there’s the rest of it.
Maddeaux’s announcement was met with some, uh, interesting responses. Liberal MP Pam Damoff went right after Maddeaux over a column she’d written on gun control; Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier took umbrage with Maddeaux’s comments on bilingualism. This is fine; Maddeaux has stepped into the political arena and political attacks on her are fair game. But what was stupid was how Conservatives and their numerous social media proxies rushed to play the misogyny card.
Check out this, by long-time CPC staffer and now comms professional Laura Kurkimaki. Kurkimaki tweeted “[S]everal Liberal ministers attacked a young woman today on social media who had just announced she’s running for a @CPC_HQ nomination … Interesting, the same people who say add women change politics, feminist government, sunny ways etc. Embarrassing. Desperate.”
I hope Kurkimaki doesn’t feel picked on here; I chose her comment as a representative example of the eye-rolling array of responses for two reasons: it’s one of the less gross examples of the rush to portray Maddeaux as a victim of sexism; I’d rather not link to the dumber ones. Further, I actually mostly agree with Kurkimaki’s broader point: the Liberals do seem really rattled by Maddeaux’s announcement, and that’s interesting.
But back on topic: is Maddeaux a fair target for reasonable criticism, or does she get some kind of protected status because she’s a woman?
I vote the former! And I suspect that her Liberal critics, from cabinet ministers right on down to the #IStandWithTrudeau crowd on X, would agree. The problem, of course, is that those very same people, again from the cabinet right on down to Trudeau’s social media proxies, are probably mostly — all? — guilty of reacting with exaggerated outrage and cries of misogyny when certain other women are attacked. Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, Maryam Monsef … I can tell you from personal experience that if you make even reasonable and narrow criticisms of the policies and political performance of those three women, or other prominent Liberals who tick at least one DEI box, you will be swiftly informed that you are, in fact, simply a prejudiced white man.
Oh.
Of course there is sexism in our politics. And other forms of prejudice. And social media is absolutely flooded with rank misogyny and every other disgusting societal cancer you can imagine. Freeland, Joly and Monsef have all been, and will continue to be, targeted with absolutely appalling stuff. Just as Maddeaux has been, and will continue to be. All of it is disgusting.
But for all that, some of what people have to say about these women and their professional performance will be fair, or at least reasonable, and it is incumbent on all to not fake being idiots who cannot tell these two things apart. It’s dumb when it’s Conservatives pretending that Maddeaux is being attacked because she’s a woman, it’s dumb when the Liberals do the same to protect Freeland et al, and, in what I think was the uber-example of this kind of brainrot, it was really dumb when Trudeau responded to credible reports of Chinese electoral interference in Canada, which his government had basically ignored, by lecturing everyone about anti-Asian racism.
November 18, 2023
Believe all women … unless they’re Israeli
In The Line, Kristin Raworth and Ariella Kimmel protest against the objectively pro-Hamas silence of so many feminist organizations about the terror attacks of October 7th:
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and committed the worst massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. More than just a massacre, Hamas tortured their victims, including brutally raping women, young and old. Yet the silence of many women’s organizations and leading voices who stand tall, claiming to be “strong feminists”, is deafening.
When the #MeToo movement started, the mantra was “believe all women”. As high-profile women spoke out, the feminist movement stood with them. So why, in the wake of the most horrific terrorist attack in Israel’s history, which included rape, do these women not deserve the same solidarity?
A month later it is not just the complete silence of the women’s organizations that causes pain, it is the active justification and gaslighting of the Jewish community, which has including denying the truth of what happened on October 7th, by demanding proof, rather than believing survivors. Many may recognize these tactics as those used as abusers against their victims in cases of domestic and sexual violence, a tactic that has become known as “DARVO” — Deny, Attack, and Reverse, Victim Offender.
When reports first surfaced of the sexual assaults committed by Hamas, many of us took to Twitter, the only place where we knew to raise our voices. Immediately our replies were filled with folks who otherwise would believe survivors, but were seemingly comfortable demanding immediate forensic evidence in this case. Survivor accounts were not enough; even a video released by the Israeli government that painted a clear picture of Hamas’ brutality was not enough. Hamas terrorists themselves recounting their actions was not enough.
Sarah Jama, an MPP in Ontario, has gone so far to publicly state that the accounts of rape are a lie pushed forward by the “zionist lobby”.
We have seen people like Ghada Sasa, a former board member of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, going on a podcast and not just claiming that Hamas treated civilians fairly, but that Israel was to blame for the massacre at the Nova music festival.
Meanwhile member of Parliament Niki Ashton claimed that a “feminist government” would call for a ceasefire; yet she has not once condemned the use of rape by Hamas as a war crime. This is a highly selective read of feminism.
November 13, 2023
Winners and losers of the “sexual revolution”
Janice Fiamengo missed her trip to London this week due to illness, so she also missed a panel discussion at the ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) Conference that raised her ire:
On the subject of widespread sexual promiscuity, family breakdown, and fatherless homes, pundits Jordan Peterson, Louise Perry, Mary Harrington, and Stephen Blackwood carefully ignored the hulking feminist elephant in the room, arguing that the primary victims of the sexual revolution have been women (and children as well, as something of an afterthought). The primary beneficiaries have been a few psychopathic men who have left a trail of broken hearts and rudderless children in their wake. It’s a convenient thesis in a culture terminally averse to criticizing women, but it avoids some important facts.
The whole discussion, actually, begins from a false premise. If there was ever a sexual revolution in which we all simply consented to do what we wanted sexually, as Louise Perry claimed, that revolution ended over 30 years ago when Anita Hill complained before a Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas, former chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, should not be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice because he had once joked to her about a pubic hair floating on his Coke. At that point, the alleged sexual vulnerability of women, whose sensitive ears must not be subject to comments by male colleagues about pornography or penis size — and the need for legislation to protect and accommodate them at the expense of male freedom of expression — reasserted itself with a vengeance. The feminist claim that women merely wanted equal rights and an end to sexual double standards was exposed as a feeble lie.
Sexual harassment legislation soon made it a potential firing offence for a man to make a female workmate uncomfortable, whether by standing too close, looking too intently, or making the wrong joke or comment. Later, the #MeToo movement proclaimed it righteous that any man who had ever been sexual with any woman (or even just any man, who didn’t even have to know the woman smearing his name) could be accused of sexual misconduct, fired from his job, and permanently disgraced (the DAMN Handbook contains an extraordinary list of celebrity men destroyed by allegations in 2017 alone; see pp. 8-17). Free love, if it ever existed, has been dead for a long time, and some of the same women who cheered on the idea of sexual freedom were the ones who killed it.
But #MeToo, false allegations, the ever-expanding territory of sexual misconduct, and the anti-male tenor of nearly every public discussion about sex—these were emphatically not the focus of the ARC panel, which zeroed in on female sexual victimization. The goals that countless women have proclaimed necessary—sexual freedom, abundant birth control, single motherhood—were criticized as harms for women. We heard that the medium to long-term well-being of women and children has been sacrificed to the short-term gratification of a minority of men; and that these men also tend to be, according to Peterson, possessed of psychopathic, Machiavellian, narcissistic, and sadistic tendencies. Amongst the fallout are the 50% of British children raised in homes without fathers.
It was stirring stuff, certainly, though not exactly a new proposition. Radical feminists like Sheila Jeffries have long argued (in her book Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution and elsewhere) that the sexual revolution merely affirmed and updated the victimization of women by men while conservative non-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly pointed out how feminist policies and laws have disadvantaged women.
Yet even those of us without doctorates in psychology might wonder how it could be true that so many women have been the innocent and unwitting victims of men even when they themselves chose those men. Are there not women who engage in abundant casual sex with as much blithe indifference as the men; some of them too psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian and cruel? Why have so many women over the years championed the loosening of sexual mores — including the availability of abortion, never mentioned by any of the panelists — if it was not in their own best interests to do so?
Or are these panelists saying that women cannot be trusted to know their own best interests and those of their children? Why do so many women continue to embrace sexual hedonism, abortion, and divorce? In reality, the epidemic of fatherlessness, as nobody on the panel was interested in exploring, is not the result of the sexual revolution per se, but was made possible specifically by the rise of no-fault divorce and child support laws that, in feminist-compliant family courts, made it highly attractive for women to discard their husbands while still living off his earnings (divorce is today initiated by women in about 70% of cases, and is one of the major reasons so many young men today are averse to marriage). It may well be that nobody’s long-term well being is served by this reality, but it is what women have been choosing with their eyes wide open for many years, and it is a bit rich now to pretend it was something done to them without their consent.
November 7, 2023
The “slopes of Lyle”, and why they matter
In The Line, Matt Gurney explains what Paul Wells christened the “slopes of Lyle” and why Canadian political discourse is so hypocritical so often:
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the (pick your team’s preferred term) [protest | insurrection] in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
It was a bit over a year ago when Paul Wells, in one of the best pieces of his I’ve ever read, created the concept of the “slopes of Lyle”. The “Lyle” refers to some polling published by Greg Lyle, of Innovative Research Group. I won’t spend a ton of time recapping the polling or what Paul drew from it, beyond the necessary: Lyle found and could graph what amounts, in effect, to political hypocrisy. Using the example of whether governments should meet with protesters, even if those protesters have broken the law, Lyle found that one’s opinion on the matter hinged less on any overall value-neutral philosophical belief and more on the specifics of the protesters. Left-leaning Canadians (NDP and Liberal voters, in Lyle’s poll) were a lot more sympathetic to a government that would meet with Indigenous Canadians (and supporters) protesting a new pipeline than they were with the Ottawa convoy protesters. CPC-supporting Canadians — and who’da thunk it?! — felt the reverse. Graphing out these positions resulted in those slopes Paul noticed — left-wing and right-wing support for governments meeting with protesters tanked when you changed who the protesters were.
The slopes of Lyle.
It’s been basically a month since the appalling assault by Hamas into southern Israel. Israel’s war against Hamas grinds on, and is producing the kind of horrible collateral damage we all feared. People across the West, including very much here at home in North America, are devastated by what they’re seeing, hearing and reading, and of course they are. It’s awful, every bit of it. There have been large rallies and protests and from them, we’re starting to see some of those Lyle-ian slopes emerge. It’s predictable, but it’s still bad, and it’s worth noting. Because we can do better, and it’s not hard to try.
Consider one issue: whether or not a protest is defined by the worst elements within it. Personally, I say no. Any large group of people necessarily becomes impossible for any organizer to control, and if terrible people show up to wave terrible signs, chant terrible slogans and do terrible things, I don’t think that reflects badly on everyone who showed up. That’s my overall philosophical view on such matters. I felt that way about the convoy in Ottawa, as some of you may remember — I tried really hard in my pieces from the capital to hammer home how the crowd there was a blend of the nasty and the harmlessly well-meaning. At the time, many were portraying the entire event as harmless — just a bunch of bouncy castle fans, folks! Others were portraying every last one of them as Confederate Nazis. Neither was accurate, and I said so then, and I’ve said so since.
Ditto with the protests we’re seeing in Canadian cities of late. I have no problem agreeing that many, probably even most, of the people showing up are good people, motivated by genuine concern over the plight of the Palestinian people, both in the broader sense of their aspirations for a better future but also over their current endangered state, as the war grinds on around them. I’m also not blind to the fact that some of what we’ve seen — some of the flags, some of the chants and slogans, some of the signs being waved, and some of the behaviour — has been wildly inappropriate, perhaps even illegal, and has absolutely gone well beyond simple criticism of Israel into outright antisemitism. There’s just no way to deny that we’ve had antisemites marching through our streets, saying and doing antisemitic things. Loud and proud, out in the open.
And yet I’ve noticed some, ahem, difficulty in admitting this or acknowledging this. And that’s interesting, because some of the very same people who will go to their deathbed believing the convoy was a Nazi uprising get very upset at the suggestion that there’s much to be worried about in the anti-Israel protests or that we should read much into people who want Jews killed for the mere fact of their Judaism.
So that’s a conundrum, eh? I don’t care what side you take. I really don’t. I just want you to be consistent. So I’ll just ask the question: does the presence of a radical group with a larger protest invalidate the protest and even tarnish the cause, or nah? Again, I don’t care which way you vote. But kindly put yourself on the record.
July 15, 2023
Environmental fanatics want to impose “austerity on steroids”
Brendan O’Neill points out the hypocrisy of the progressives who protest against anything smacking of government austerity — often merely a slowing down in the rate of increase of funding that they condemn as “cuts” — yet fervently desire to impose a form of austerity that would literally lead to hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths:
There are countless contradictions on what passes for the left these days. We’re against sexism, they cry, and then they’ll while away entire days hounding every uppity broad who dares to question the trans ideology. We’re anti-racist, they say, even as they yell “Uncle Tom” at any person of colour who deviates from their white liberal orthodoxies. Be kind, they tweet, in between their venomous crusades against TERFs, gammon, boomers, deplorables, “semi-fascists”, you name it.
We’re against austerity, they insist, and yet then they agitate for an austerity of apocalyptic proportions. This, surely, is the most stark incongruity of the modern left. They rail against every library closure or reform of welfare payments as an intolerable assault on people’s living standards, and then they take to the streets in their thousands in support of a degrowth agenda that would plunge vast swathes of humankind into penury. They’re far meaner than any right-wing penny-pincher they claim to oppose.
[…]
Environmentalism is austerity on steroids. Consider one of JSO’s key demands: “No new oil or gas”. This would be – there’s no other word for it – psychotic. Not only would such a crazed policy instantly throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, by decommissioning the rigs and mines where they make their living – it would also make it all but impossible to keep society going. The infantile moralism of modern greens would have us believe that vile oil and gas are only used to propel 4x4s and airplanes packed with the rich and other “bad things”. In truth, every facet of our lives requires energy from oil and gas. The delivery of foodstuffs, house-building, schools, hospitals, life-support machines, heaters to protect the elderly from death in winter – all need energy derived from fossil fuels. Or consider libraries. The left wept when Osborne’s cuts led to library closures, but you try running a library in your post-fossil-fuel dystopia. Without oil, gas, electricity and trees torn down to make books, libraries would cease to exist.
As Alex Epstein argues, to “rapidly eliminate fossil-fuel use” would make the world “an impoverished, dangerous and miserable place for most people”. Fossil fuels provide 80 per cent of the world’s energy. Just three per cent comes from solar and wind power, so beloved of green anti-modernists. And even that measly slice of global energy production is, in Epstein’s words, “totally dependent on fossil fuels, especially natural gas, for 24/7 back-up”. That is, if the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, we have to crank up the fossil fuels. Ours is a world in which three billion people still use less electricity than your average American fridge. Agitating for less energy production in such a time is callous beyond belief. It would issue a death sentence on the world’s poor. George Osborne is Father Christmas in comparison with these crusaders against the gains and wonders of modernity.
June 15, 2023
Ketman, in theory and practice
I first encountered the idea of Ketman in an article by Severian on his old Rotten Chestnuts site (no longer online, alas). He was talking about it in the context of university:
I got into the higher ed biz fully intending to practice what Milosz calls “aesthetic ketman“. [“paying lip service to official ideology while secretly subverting it”] I loved my subject, but my subject was recondite enough, I figured, that I could keep the SJW bullshit to a bare minimum. I don’t remember what they called “intersectionality” back then, but whatever it was, I’d just make a few brief nods to it, then get on with my work in relative peace. Throw a few quotes from Foucault, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, and the like in my dissertation intro, and that was that.
The problem, though, is that the sour pleasure of ketman is addictive, and like any addiction, you need to keep upping the dose to feel the same effect.
In The Critic, Colette Colfer discusses “gender ketman” today:
Ketman is a game of acting. It involves outwardly performing in compliance with a dominant belief system whilst inwardly rejecting it. Ketman is a form of self-protection, particularly when living under strict religious or totalitarian rule. Today, the game of Ketman is played as a way of hiding real opinions about gender ideology.
I first came across the concept of Ketman in Csezlaw Miłosz’s powerful 1953 book The Captive Mind, about life in Poland under Nazi right-wing and Stalinist left-wing totalitarian control. Miłosz dedicates one full chapter to Ketman. To play Ketman is to wear a mask, to simulate the behaviour that is required to fit in with the masses, to avoid the consequences of speaking up against a dominant ideology.
When the UK trade union for academics and lecturers, the University and College Union, released a video last month of their 2023 congress, it showed a crowded room of people loudly chanting in unison “trans rights are human rights”. They were holding up identical cerise-pink signs with words in all-caps, “TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS”. I wondered, as I watched the clip, how many in that room were practising Ketman.
Miłosz came across the idea of Ketman in a book by Count Joseph-Arthur Gobineau (1816–82), entitled Religions and Philosophies in Central Asia. Gobineau served as a French diplomat in Persia during the mid-19th century, and he reckoned that the masses in Persia were practising Ketman. Gobineau also wrote about the “Allah lexicon” that included expressions such as inshallah and mashallah and insisted that scarcely one out of twenty Persians believed what they were saying.
Although Miłosz considered Gobineau a “rather dangerous writer”, he recognised Gobineau’s description of Ketman in the behaviour of people in Poland under Stalinist rule. The person practising Ketman must keep silent about their true convictions and must sometimes engage in trickery to deceive their adversaries. This can mean participating in rituals, waving banners, saying words or phrases to deceive others, and writing books filled with ideas the authors themselves don’t believe.
Miłosz said there were many different varieties of Ketman. Versions outlined in The Captive Mind include Metaphysical Ketman, which involved pretending to have no religious beliefs; and Ethical Ketman, which resulted from inwardly opposing the ethics of the “New Faith” of Stalinist communism, such as informing on neighbours.
However, practicing Ketman comes at a cost:
Miłosz points out that when a person plays Ketman for an extended period of time, they end up unable to distinguish their real self from the self they simulate. It’s almost like they begin to believe the lie. This level of association with the role being played gives some relief however, as the person no longer has to worry about dropping their guard when in conversation with others.
Severian, as you’d expect, has a more direct way of explaining it:
But more importantly, there’s the pleasure of ketman. So long as I make a few radical noises, I can get you sheep to believe anything I say. I used to tell people I studied transgendered potato farmers in the Kenyan uplands. I told this obnoxious girl from the Gender Studies department my dissertation was on resistance strategies of Eskimos in the Waffen-SS. I cited Alan Sokal’s hoax paper on the social construction of gravity in every seminar taught by a radical feminist, and no one ever called me on it. Anyone who thinks I’m kidding obviously hasn’t been on campus in the last 20 years or so. It was fucking hilarious …
… for a time. And then it got sad, then nauseating, because I eventually realized I was no different from the fools who swallowed my bullshit. It doesn’t matter if you’re being exquisitely ironic when you tell a room full of freshmen that “gender is a social construction”. They can’t recognize irony anyway, and even if they could, parroting the phrase “gender is a social construction” is still required to pass the class. More importantly, what if they did recognize it? I’m up there thinking I’m a shitlord, speaking truth to power to anyone smart enough to figure it out, but all they see is another fat, middle-aged sellout parroting nonsense. If I were serious about my shitlordery, they think, then I’d quit. But I don’t quit, which must mean my so-called “principles” are worth … what? We’ve already established you’re a whore, madam; now we’re just haggling over the price.
June 14, 2023
QotD: In hindsight, calling it “Operation HONOUR” was quite ironic
Loyalty up, remember?
As a young soldier, I had actually worked for this particular NCO. He was an artifact of the Old Army and had a reputation as a hardman. He liked to brag about picking Friday night fights in Native bars out on the Prairies (he wore weighted gloves for extra knock-out power). He described to us in detail what he would do to his wife after a training weekend. He told us she would never say no, followed up with a chuckle and “like she has a choice”. If you were weak in his eyes, he’d belittle you publicly as a “queer” or a “faggot”. The funny thing was that this guy was overweight and never showed up for ruck marches or PT tests. His annual conduct-after-capture briefing was basically forty minutes of “you’re gonna get raped but that doesn’t make you gay”. One of his favourite war stories was about stray dog duty in Bosnia. He’d lure in the strays with peanut butter on the end of shotgun then blow their brains out. Riveting stuff.
Overnight I had gone from from being this man’s subordinate to being his superior, so when the General said we had a duty to report, I did my duty. The next week I was in front of the Regimental Sergeant-Major being asked why I was interfering with a strong NCO’s career prospects. That’s when I learned that loyalty up meant loyalty to the Regiment, and that sensitive matters such as this were handled internally and off the record. That one-way conversation was a major push towards putting in my application for the Regular Force. I didn’t want to be around that type of nonsense (“oh my sweet summer child” says the peanut gallery). Not long after I left, my former supervisor sexually assaulted the mess steward.
[…]
In February 2021, an investigation was opened into General Jonathan Vance, who had just finished his tenure as Chief of Defence Staff. Major Kellie Brennan, a subordinate of Vance at various times, accused him of a preventing her from disclosing their long-running affair. Since their relationship began in 2001, Vance had been married twice. DNA testing confirmed that Vance was the father of one of Brennan’s children, but he had never acknowledged or taken responsibility for the child. Vance plead guilty to obstruction of justice in March 2022 and received a conditional discharge with twelve months of probation.
The heat and light generated by an investigation of the outgoing Chief of Defence Staff led to an unprecedente level of scrutiny on the CAF’s senior leadership. In 2021 alone, the Governor General of Canada, the Minister of National Defence, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, the Vice Chief of Defence Staff, Commander Canadian Special Operations Command, and Commander Military Personnel Command, amongst others, would resign, retire, or be re-assigned amidst allegations of impropriety. Since 2021, recruiting and retention levels have continued to free fall and the federal government has set aside $900 million in class-action lawsuit compensation for current and former CAF members who experienced sexual harassment, assualt, or discrimination. The social trap has been sprung.
“Shady Maples”, “A Question of Loyalty”, The Powder Horn, 2023-03-12.
