Drachinifel
Published 1 Dec 2018Title says it all really, we look at something that was definitely worth doing, which really should have been done much sooner.
September 3, 2021
Anti-Slavery Patrols – The West Africa Squadron
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August 28, 2021
QotD: Social media capitalizes on “the biggest Faculty Lounge Fallacy of them all”
… Twitter (etc.) are specifically set up in such a way as to discourage any real-world action. Basically it’s the faculty lounge writ large. If you’ve been to college in the last half-century, you surely noticed that the faculty are Very Very Concerned about all kinds of stuff … but that the stuff they’re Very Very Concerned about is always happening to some obscure group thousands of miles away.
Even when they’re pretending to Care Very Much about, say, “systemic racism” in “America”, it would never occur to them to go down to the ghetto that, in many notorious cases, is literally right next door to do anything about it. They could find out everything they ever wanted to know — and then some!! — about “the Black Experience” by driving down MLK Blvd. at three in the morning, but somehow they never do. The way you win at victim bingo in the ivory tower is you find the most obscure group, the furthest away, to chastise your peers for not caring enough about. If what you say could possibly have any real-world application in the lives of anyone anybody you know had even the possibility of ever meeting, you lose.
Such is Social Media, so it’s no surprise that the Twitterati all fall victim to the biggest Faculty Lounge Fallacy of them all: That saying something is the same as doing something. Or, in other words, and not to put too fine a point about it, they act like passive-aggressive little bitches, like cat ladies around the company water cooler. You could get Johnny from Accounting to stop leaving his half-eaten sandwich in the lunch room fridge by simply asking him to stop … or you can have daily hen parties about it for weeks, months, years, squawking about how some people need to get some common courtesy … and meanwhile Johnny from Accounting goes on doing it, oblivious.
The genius of Facebook, Twitter, etc. — and it IS genius; sick, evil, twisted genius — is that they figured out how to monetize this.
Severian, “Internet Tough Guys”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-10.
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August 27, 2021
Updating Rahm Emanuel’s notion about not “wasting” a crisis — don’t let a crisis end
In City Journal, John Tierney considers how political leaders and public health officials across the western world are going Rahm Emanual one better by continuously extending the Wuhan Coronavirus crisis:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.
So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.
But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.
The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world. The hypocrisy was deftly captured in a tweet by Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.”
Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. In fact, the current mortality rate among American children with Covid is lower than it was last year — and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with Covid is 99.995 percent. But instead of emphasizing these reassuring statistics, public-health officials like Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general, keep looking for new ways to scare parents and children.
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QotD: Music corporations, musicians, and hypocrisy
So says Tom Morello, guitarist for the Los Angeles-based band Rage Against the Machine. He and his bandmates are not simply against cops and the suburbs, of course. They also stand for the Zapatistas and the Shining Path, for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, for giving California back to Mexico, and for destroying stores where rich people like themselves shop.
That’s pretty strong stuff coming from work-for-hire employees of one of the great cogs in the global capitalist machine, the megaconglomerate Sony, which wholly owns and distributes Rage’s music and even is a co-owner of the group’s publishing. Since 1992, Rage has sold nearly 7 million records, and it’s safe to say that nobody has benefitted more from that commerce than the band’s unabashedly capitalist paymaster.
Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason, 2000-10.
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August 23, 2021
Canada is extremely good at posturing on the international stage … not so good at performing
Kevin Newman on the continuing failure of the Canadian government and Canadian Armed Forces to protect and retrieve the people in Afghanistan we’ve promised to help:
On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.
It is impossible to piece together, or understand, why no one from Canada would come out of the military protection of the airport to speak to them over the past two days. Because there must have been a whole lot of talking happening on the safe side of the razor wire barrier separating the Afghans from the terminal. Late Friday, a Canadian C-17 carrying more soldiers and a few diplomatic and immigration staff arrived at Kabul’s military air terminal. They had a plan to work with American forces to get some of the gas station people out of the country. There seemed to be renewed confidence expressed in media interviews by Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino that, finally, things would happen.
Instead the Americans started executing rapid-retrieval missions into Kabul to get their own people out, sealed the entrance where Canada’s gas station people were waiting, and co-operation with Canadian forces seemed to disintegrate.
In the meantime, there was a game of numbers to play. With so few Canadian cases on that C-17 ready to return to a third country, the big grey plane was loaded with Afghans that other countries had successfully brought to the airport. A picture and story was fed to political reporters on the campaign trails in Canada declaring broadly that “106 Afghans have been flown out on a Canadian C17” – but National Defence would not reveal if any of those passengers had been Canadian cases.
According to the Globe and Mail‘s Stephen Chase there had been none on the only other Canadian flight of 175 to leave the airport twenty-four hours earlier, even as the government boated of another “success”. For weeks, the Prime Minister and his besieged cabinet had also been talking about 20,000 refugees coming to Canada. That too was misleading in is vagueness, according to Global News’ Mercedes Stephenson, as all but a handful are coming from outside Afghanistan and even then, it’s over many years.
There is zero evidence from multiple Afghan sources around the airport that any of those the Prime Minister boasts they’re “rescuing”, (LGTBQ2, human rights advocates, women and journalists) have come from Kabul or any part of Afghanistan in the past month.
With all that, the government continues to claim a C-17 will come and go each day. But do the math. If even a hundred daily Canadian cases make those flights, (no where near that many have so far), there is no way the vast majority of applicants will make it here before the window closes for evacuations. Canada’s commitment of men and materials in no way matches the need. So, will Immigration officials those with no hope now of rescue and admit that they won’t get out in time? That number is likely in the thousands. They need to develop a more realistic way to survive the Taliban.
The mystery in this deadly absurdity is the government’s obsession with paperwork. Even today Canadian officials on the safe side of the airport controlling who might get through were reported by eyewitnesses to be taking an “extremely strict” approach to paperwork verification. Only those granted full Canadian citizenship under the government’s Special Immigration Measure are being told they qualify to leave. That requires a lot more work to process and is perhaps less than a tenth of all the Afghans who are known to have applied and are in various stages of completing multiple forms.
Other countries have also been willing to grant refugee status to their interpreters and families, which doesn’t guarantee citizenship, but is it is a much faster way to process many more people, and it gives Afghans more choices should air rescue be impossible. In a news conference, Mendicino claimed his department’s agent in Kabul has authority to overlook the passport and biometric fingerprint requirements. But the evidence on the ground suggests he is being ignored.
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August 21, 2021
In this matter Canada apes the US rather than following the great example provided by France
In The Line, Kevin Newman highlights the stark difference between what France has been doing to rescue their own citizens and Afghani civilians with ties to France with the utterly feckless Canadian government’s “effort”:
On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.
Ten buses screamed out of France’s embassy in Kabul early this week, past every Taliban checkpoint along the way, and according to eyewitnesses, zipped confidently through a back-entrance gate and straight onto the chaotic tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Five hundred exhausted and terrified passengers were then loaded onto a French military aircraft which quickly took off.
And then it happened again on Thursday, four buses this time, under the guard of French special forces. As with the first convoy, Paris newspapers reported the buses carried French nationals stranded in Kabul, and hundreds of Afghans and their families the French embassy had given shelter to since before the Taliban roared into and re-occupied the city. Two ballsy airlifts took them to safety at a French military base in the United Arab Emirates, where hundreds of desperate people were given a hot meal, questioned about their identities and had their documents confirmed. Most were then sent on to Paris, where they received physical and mental-health support as well as cash, clothing, and places to stay as they begin their new lives.
On those same days in Kabul, another country tried to rescue its citizens and hundreds of Afghan interpreters and their families hiding throughout the city. I’ve pieced together what happened to them from texts and video Canadian veterans have been receiving every hour from people they know in Kabul, and I am sharing them with permission. I have verified each of these facts (from the peace of Canada) with multiple sources on the ground.
There were no buses, soldiers or escorts for these terrified people. Thursday they received a short text from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). They were instructed (in English only) to urgently head to the airport on their own, try to find a way through multiple Taliban checkpoints searching for them, and then if they survived that kilometres-long trip, figure out a way through thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee. They were told by IRCC to carry documents to identify themselves to a gate agent, but because those same documents would be used to identify them by the Taliban, it was up to them to decide whether to carry them. With that, IRCC wiped its hands of responsibility. No direction on where to avoid Taliban checkpoints, no specific gates to head to (there are eight), and no Canadians on site to help. In fact there hadn’t been any Canadian officials in Kabul for a week, and when a few arrived hours after that text blast, reporters said they had travelled on an American military flight because their Canadian C-17 needed servicing somewhere else.
Needless to say, no one got through the airport, so they returned to their safe houses — wondering if their last flight to freedom had left without them.
It hadn’t. It never existed. Later that night another set of blasts went out again telling Afghans to move on their own to the airport. This time they were told to shout “Canada” and hope a soldier would hear them and help them through the airport gates. Taliban guards could hear them as well there, which would ensure that the target on their backs they had been trying to hide came completely into focus.
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August 9, 2021
L. Neil Smith – “[P]ut not thy trust in would-be princes”
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith recounts the sad record of US political parties who claim to support causes but uniformly shrink from actual support of those causes or their advocates:
A late newspaper columnist named Sam Francis (ultimately denounced by the left as a racist, of course) once said that America is ruled by an Evil party (the Democrats) and a Stupid party (the Republicans). To “stupid”, I would rush to add “cowardly”: when the GOP finally got a leader with a spine and testicles and guts (extremely rare qualities among Republicans), they were so terrified of of the man that they betrayed and abandoned him. A third political party, the Libertarians, seems determined to be even more spineless, balless, and gutless; they have specialized for years in nominating con-men and crooks for President.
They also don’t seem to know who their friends are, or how to treat them when they’ve found them. A case in point is one Norma Jean Almadovar, a former police officer and professional sex-worker who wanted to advance the Libertarian Party’s cause and recognition. The party that had always claimed it wanted to legalize prostitution was embarrassed to be confronted by the beliefs they claimed to advocate, and froze her out.
Now the once-admirable conservative youth organization Turning Point USA has faced an almost identical “crisis” and has failed almost identically. The Internet pornography-star Brandi Love (look her up), was originally scheduled to speak at their recent convention — against sex-work — but she was suddenly disinvited and chucked out into the cold, just like Norma Jean. Words like “graceless”, “churlish”, petty, “mean”,and “pusillanimous” come immediately to mind. It appears that competition has worked just as Adam Smith predicted. TPUSA is just as cowardlly and stupid as the LP.
Years ago, I took it on myself to write to Norma Jean to tell her how deeply ashamed I was of the Libertarian Party; it was just one of many reasons that I eventually left the party. Now I’m writing this little ditty in the faint hope that Brandi (whose real name is Tracey Lynn Livermore) will see it. I mean to tell her the same thing about Republicans that’s true of the Libertarians. Sorry sweetie, put not thy trust in would-be princes.
There was a movie, some years ago (it was about police corruption; I don’t remember anything else about it), where the phrase “you’ve lost the meaning” recurred several times. The Libertaran Party and the GOP lost whatever meaning they had long, long ago. Unfortunately, the Marxists, Stalinists, and Maoists we’re up against never lose their meaning. To quote another movie (Die Hard) they want to kill you and cook you and eat you. Not necessarily in that order.
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August 4, 2021
Canadian tourist dollars are helping keep Cuba’s struggling economy afloat
In Tuesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh praises a CBC News (!!!) article on the massive impact of purely Canadian tourist income on Cuba:
A billboard in Havana, showing Camilo Cienfuegos, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Fidel Castro, 4 November 2014.
Photo attributed to Tumpatemcla~commonswiki via Wikimedia Commons.
NP Platformed returns today with that rarest of things in the National Post: an absolutely unironic recommendation to read a CBC News report. The article in question comes from Evan Dyer, and it’s headlined: “How Canadian Tourism Sustains Cuba’s Army And One-Party State“. And it is, we have to confess, a masterpiece of precision. We appreciate the small, uncomfortable barb, for example, concealed in this phrase: “in normal years far more Canadians enter and leave Cuba than citizens of any other country — including Cuba itself.”
Why is Canada a quintessential source of the tourism dollars that flow directly to the Cuban army, or in some cases to partnerships between foreign hospitality providers (like Toronto’s Sunwing Travel Group) and the Cuban army? Last month the world was reminded by Cuban protesters how fragile and miserable the communist island’s economy really is. As people stormed into the streets pleading for food and medicine, sympathizers abroad continued to sing from their moth-eaten hymnal and blame America’s long-standing trade embargo (which allows even American citizens and companies to sell, wait for it, food and medicine to Cuba).
And yet, within Canada, there is no sign of any social stigma attaching to Cuban travel. Perhaps it’s because Latin America is one huge undifferentiated wad in our minds, and if we began to get fussy about the governments of various Caribbean countries (most of which let people leave if they like), we might be forced to … we dunno, winter in Costa Rica or Bermuda or someplace weird like that. Cuba can’t find the cash to keep a fresh coat of paint on a hospital, but the empire of affordable resorts and jineterismo continues to expand. Some of you helped build it.
There is nothing new about this — except the obvious willingness of ordinary Cubans to risk wounds and death to protest against their communist rulers, as Michael Totten reported more than seven years ago:
Cubans in the hotel industry see how foreigners live. The government can’t hide it without shutting the hotels down entirely, and it can’t do that because it needs the money. I changed a few hundred American dollars into convertible pesos at the front desk. The woman at the counter didn’t blink when I handed over my cash — she does this all day — but when she first got the job, it must have been shattering to make such an exchange. That’s why the regime wants to keep foreigners and locals apart.
Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact, they’re an elite class enjoying privileges — enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while — that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month — 30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba.
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July 27, 2021
Kurt Schlicter on the gimps of the White House press corps
At TownHall, Kurt Schlicter expresses his disregard for the media who are supposed to be covering the White House and are voluntarily muzzling themselves and acting more like the ministry of propaganda than the free press. At least in Canada, they have the excuse that they’re paid prostitutes for whatever their federal pimps want them to say … in the United States that’s not (yet) the case:
You gotta love the lib reporters meekly accepting the delicious iron discipline of black-clad Mistress Psaki as she demands “Why do you need to have that information?” when asked about the number of infectos in the petri dish that is the * White House. The only way that kink-fest could have been more on the nose with regard to who our esteemed journalismers actually are is if her severe black outfit was vinyl. Apparently, getting flogged by the Democrat dominatrix turns their collective crank because they just took it. They always just take it. And our Fourth Estate will eagerly beg for more.
Now, it’s not even the gross double standard at play here that’s significant – imagine the fussy fury of the lib-simps if one of Trump’s vanilla spokespeople publicly abused them like that. We’ve learned that the lib-press is immune to shame, at least the kind that comes from having their rank hypocrisy exposed by conservatives. No, it’s that when their Dem domme cracks the whip, they just take it, meekly, obediently, like the groveling submissives they are.
Someday, someone will look back on this pathetic abdication of the media’s dignity and write a history of how the ink-stained wretches of the past became the craven conformists of today, and how now they revel in their own subjugation. Call it 50 Shades of the Gray Lady; when you read the hot scene in the forbidden White House press playroom at page 247, you’ll want to draw a warm bubble bath, light a lavender-scented candle, and pour yourself a goblet of Trader Joe’s screw-top chardonnay. Grrrrrrrr.
Imagine being these people. You can’t? Okay, then take a shot of Dickel Rye and try again to imagine being these people. They all grew up wanting to be the crusading Woodward and/or Bernstein – who themselves were less ace reporters than eager conduits for a disgruntled bureaucrat hack who exploited the callow correspondents to settle his personal scores – and instead they grew up to be the Gimp in the less interesting version of Pulp Fiction that is the DC milieu.
They aren’t breaking stories. They aren’t uncovering wrongdoing. They certainly are not comforting the afflicted or afflicting the comfortable. They are the ruling caste’s janitors. They are drones, thralls to their elite masters, marching in grim conformity in step to the official narrative, never complaining, never questioning, never dissenting. These are licensed, registered, regime journalists.
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July 22, 2021
Conservative cancel culture?
Kurt Schlichter addresses the notion that “cancel culture” is alive and well among conservatives as much as it is among progressives:
“A little Black Rifle Coffee pour over this morning.” by jonmrogers is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Is there a conservative cancel culture? No. What there is now is a consensus among conservatives that we will refuse to subsidize institutions and entities that hate us. “Cancel culture,” properly understood – in this time of words meaning whatever they need to mean at any given moment, I’m going to have to insist on fixed definitions – is the attempt to use formal and informal sanctions to stop people from expressing dissenting views. But conservatives don’t care what the conservatives who cry about it when they are caught shafting us – hi Kristi! – think; conservatives care about what these people do or don’t do. Labeling our rejection of squishes and RINOs as “cancel culture” is a cheesy attempt to stop us from insisting that conservatives actually conserve. If the left, and the GOPuffballs, want to call this act of self-preservation “cancel culture” and shame us into unilateral disarmament in the name of some sort of pseudo-consistency, let them try. We’re not tying ourselves up with alleged “principles” anymore; ideological bondage is not our scene.
[…]
There was a certain coffee company created by vets that embraced a kind of vet-bro/gun vibe and it worked hard to cultivate a following in the conservative community. And then they stamped their combat boots hard on their own tender beans. Black Rifle Coffee Company’s problem provides an important lesson not just for companies seeking to operate on the conservative tip, but for GOP politicians as well.
What happened? BRCC gave an interview to The New York Times that many cons saw as taking sides against us conservatives. Did it or didn’t it take sides against us? The company denies it and is trying to repair the damage, but the facts of the case are not the point we are discussing here – the point is how conservatives, the cheated-on wives of American politics, reacted when they felt, rightly or wrongly, betrayed.
The conservatives went nuclear. Here’s the thing a lot of people seem to not understand. No faction has been screwed over by its own side more than conservatives. How many politicians, when they had the power to do the conservative things they ran on, opted for favorable WaPo coverage over keeping their promises? The incentives to cooperate are huge … like coverage in the DC paper of record explaining how one has “grown”. But we’re done with the bait-and-switch. We’re super-sensitive and super-suspicious, because we’ve been burned before.
So, conservatives have a hair trigger for perceived betrayal – if they even suspect it, they go off. Those seeking our support should act accordingly, as cons have been serially betrayed for decades. Take W, please, back to his ranch to paint his paintings. But before you do, remember what he did to all of us who defended him when he refused to defend himself – he talked smack about us as he partied with his new pals the Clintons and Obamas.
The Ahoy Crew used to at least pretend to be with us – Cap’n Bill Kristol, David Aptly-Named French, Jonah Heavy G Goldberg, and the rest turned on us the second they perceived their sinecures were in peril due to our swelling demand for actual victory.
Them or us. Pick one. But you can’t choose both, or neither.
Update: The CEO of the company is either in desperate damage control mode or genuinely upset at the misrepresentation of his views by the New York Times:
Let’s get the air cleared right away. Black Rifle Coffee’s founder and CEO has spoken out and is disputing how his comments were presented by the New York Times and represented by those reacting to the article, who were led to believe that Black Rifle Coffee bashed conservatives.
Evan Hafer decided to set the record straight regarding the “significant amount of misinformation being put out on the internet” about Black Rifle Coffee and about statements that he has made.
Hafer quickly debunked the notion that he made derogatory remarks about BRCC’s customers or conservatives and then proceeded to explain how the New York Times deliberately twisted his words and took them out of context. According to Hafer, his conversation with the NYT Magazine reporter was in the context of racism and anti-Semitism in America in light of Hafer being the target of an organized attack last year because of “my last name and my heritage.”
“We were purely discussing that,” Hafer says, and he was not conflating those groups with conservatives.
“The New York Times, as we know, the chances of them being objective were fairly slim, but we gave them the opportunity,” he added. He went on to mention veterans issues he hoped to bring attention to. But, unfortunately, the New York Times chose to go with “the salacious headline” about the company instead.
Hafer reiterated that racists and anti-Semites have no place in his company.
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July 19, 2021
Talk is cheap, as a pizza chain CEO demonstrates brilliantly
John Miltimore examines the claims of the CEO of the &pizza chain in the Washington DC area that his stores have no problem getting staff because he pays them a “living wage”:
As far as PR goes, Lastoria gets an A+. He was profiled by Business Insider, CBS News, and other media outlets. His economics grade, however, is another story.
First, the notion that &pizza’s wages are uniquely generous is wrong. The minimum wage in the nation’s capital, after all, is $15.20. Considering that Washington, DC has one of the highest costs of living in the US, it’s not unreasonable to assume that &pizza is paying workers what amounts to the market wage of their labor (i.e. the price they’d get in the absence of a wage floor). This is a stark contrast to other parts of the United States. Fifteen dollars in DC translates to roughly $24 in Florida, $25 in Alabama and Tennessee, $26 in New Mexico, and $27 in Louisiana.
Second, Lastoria decries the alleged “shortage of business owners willing to pay a living wage.” But it should be pointed out that &pizza is one of those businesses.
While there is no objective standard to determine what a living wage actually is, MIT has a Living Wage Calculator that allows readers to compute living wages based on the formula created by Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier.
To say that &pizza doesn’t pay its employees a “living wage” is an understatement. The living wage for a single mom with one child is $38.48 in Washington DC. For a single mother with two children, it’s $47.89. Indeed, even for a married couple with just one child, the living wage is $20.69 — nearly $5 an hour more than the average pay of Lastoria’s workers. (It’s unclear why Lastoria is having fewer problems hiring workers than other businesses, but it’s most likely attributable to local factors, such as the fact that he’s servicing nine of the twenty wealthiest counties in America.)
Finally, Lastoria’s claim that higher wages increase productivity enough to improve a company’s bottom line — the efficiency wage hypothesis — has problems logically and empirically. First, it implies that companies not currently paying an efficiency wage are willing to take less profit simply to make workers poorer. Moreover, efficiency wages have been shown to reduce employment, similar to minimum wage laws.
Lastoria might see the $16 an hour average wage as exceedingly generous — especially when he compares it to lower nominal wages paid in other parts of the country — but it’s a far cry from a “living wage”, according to the model used by living wage advocates.
I asked Lastoria how he’d respond to those who say restaurants like his should be required to pay each worker a living wage. He didn’t respond.
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June 20, 2021
L’Affaire Annamie Paul – “… it’s like every Liberal across the land forgot about politics”
The weekly wrap-up from The Line wonders why Canadian media outlets pay so much attention to the Green Party (far in excess of their political influence normally), but recent Green Party fratricidal bun-fighting merits attention just because of the injured bystander, the Prime Minister of the current year:
The background of all of this is complicated, and we’re not going to bother recapping it. If you care enough about Canadian politics to follow the Greens, you know it all already. What’s interesting to us — and funny as all hell — is how angry the PM’s die-hard fanbase was, how shocked and sincerely surprised they were, when Paul turned her guns on the PM instead of her own rebelling party executives and grassroots:
“To the prime minister, Justin Trudeau,” Paul said at a press conference, “I say to you today, you are no ally. And you are no feminist. Your deeds and your words over these past weeks prove that definitively. A real ally and feminist doesn’t end their commitment to those principles whenever they come up against their personal ambition.”
And, gosh. Liberals everywhere were just stunned.
It was cute. As we said, it’s like every Liberal across the land forgot about politics. And that’s ridiculous. Canadian Liberals are the most ruthlessly effective vote winners precisely because they are relentlessly amoral and craven. We don’t even mean this as an insult! Your typical Canadian Liberal constitutes the purest sample of raw partisanship known to human science — which is why they’re so good at winning.
And that’s why they should have instantly understood what Paul was doing when she attacked the PM. She was picking a fight she could win because she’s losing the one she’s actually facing. Paul is a black woman. She’s Jewish. She’s obviously lost control of her own party. The only chance in hell she has of surviving is to lay every possible identity group card down on the table, declare herself the champion of those oppressed groups, and then dare her own party to purge her. She’s adopting the mantle of the WOC woke champion. It’s a lot easier for Paul to fight that battle against the PM than it is for her to fight it against her own party.
As much as Liberals hate to admit it — and they really, really, really hate to admit it — the PM is vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy on the feminism and racial equality files. Obviously.
Paul is desperate. She’s in a fight for her political life, and she seems to be losing. So she’s picked a fight with a powerful white man to play up her own “voice of the oppressed” credentials. It’s cynical and desperate. Frankly, the Liberals ought to be honoured. What’s that they say about imitation and flattery?
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June 11, 2021
The concept of philanthropy is another one with conflicting meanings to the left and to the right
In the Daily Chrenk, Arthur Chrenkoff has a bit of fun outlining the recent kerfuffle over Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s attempt to use her grandmother’s situation in Puerto Rico for scoring political points, and then explains why the notion of philanthropy is a very different thing to progressives than it is to conservatives:
“Charity in the dictionary” by HowardLake is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Well may we laugh about (and be disgusted by) the hypocrisy, corruption and indifference shown by prominent members of the left towards the very people they supposedly care about. But it would be to miss the broader point relating to how the left views the world, the role of politics, and the place of the individual.
It might surprise many that the caring and compassionate left isn’t actually all that big on philanthropy and charity, i.e. people helping other people. What could be wrong with that? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if even more people helped even more other people? Well, no, the left would say, because it’s not something that people should be doing in the first place; it’s not their responsibility. It is up to the state to solve all the social and economic problems; our role as citizens (as well as, thanks to the open borders advocates, non-citizens) is to be the grateful recipients of the government’s largesse. For the more elite group (no pun intended) – “the rich” – their role is to pay for all this with their taxes. Private initiative is by its very nature limited and patchy; only the all-seeing and all-powerful state can ensure that everyone who needs “free” assistance (and that’s literally everyone) gets it in a comprehensive, uniform and fair way. Hence, AOC won’t lift a finger to help her grandmother because it’s the state’s duty to help everyone rebuild their lives after a natural disaster. Occasional Cortex already contributes with her taxes on the hard-earned Congressional salary, and in any case, she’s not some billionaire, you know.
With that attitude, needless to say, you won’t be surprised to learn that much of what goes for the left-wing philanthropy does not actually go to help those in need to solve their problems and provide them what they are lacking. Instead, it is largely channels to finance political agitation by the activist-industrial complex to make the government (whether through lobbying, campaigning or helping elect sympathetic law-makers) take responsibility instead. That’s what people like Soros, Laurene Powell-Jobs (Steve Jobs’ widow) and MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos’ ex) are all about – billions spent to create more activist jobs to agitate for the state to create more public sector jobs to run the “Big Daddy”.
But it goes deeper than that, back to Marx himself in fact and to his analysis of what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. According to Marxism, both in its original class-based iteration and the more recent race/gender/sexuality variants, every society is divided into two mutually antagonistic groups: the powerful oppressors and the powerless oppressed, with the society structured in the interest of the former by facilitating in every possible way the exploitation and keeping down of the latter. Thus, all the problems, ills and injustices are “systemic” in nature; they are a feature, not a bug. To solve them and so to help the downtrodden you need to overthrow the entire old unjust system and build a new one that benefits the masses. Based on this sort of understanding of the world – to which, coincidentally, people like AOC and BLM founders all subscribe – any private charity is bound to be ineffectual and shortcoming. After all, what can a person, however generous with their money and time – even if there are multitudes of them – do to solve problems that are the direct (and intended) consequence of the way the society has been set up? Nothing, of course. You can’t mend it, you have to end it. But not only is it naïve and pointless to try, it’s actually counter-productive and therefore positively wrong. Because while no philanthropic effort can solve systemic problems, it can actually provide some limited and temporary relief. Such relief, however, by its very nature is a band-aid solution, i.e. not a solution at all. All it does it momentarily numbs the pain, and that is bad, because the oppressed masses need to feel the pain and feel it good in order to spur them into revolutionary action to overthrow their oppressors and on the ruins of the old build the utopian new society of equality and justice. This is the far-left’s accelerationism: the worse it gets, the better it gets (for the prospects of radical change).
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June 9, 2021
Bill C-10 – “… what occurred yesterday was far worse than a blunder. It was a betrayal.”
In another country it might be a fascinating and amusing thing to watch Steven Guilbeault faff about pretending to understand what his own bill says and how it will cause havoc for ordinary Canadians, but being in Canada the humour is lacking as Michael Geist shows:
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.
Several weeks after Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault introduced Bill C-10, I started a 20 part blog post series called the Broadcasting Act Blunder (podcast edition here). The series examined many of concerns with the bill, including issues such as over-broad regulation and discoverability requirements that would only garner public attention many months later. I thought about that series yesterday as I watched Guilbeault try in the House of Commons to defend the indefensible: a gag order on committee review of the bill, the first such order in two decades. While the bill is in dire need of fixing, what occurred yesterday was far worse than a blunder. It was a betrayal. A betrayal of the government’s commitment to “strengthen Parliamentary committees so that they can better scrutinize legislation.” A betrayal of the promise to do things differently from previous governments. A betrayal of Canada’s values as a Parliamentary democracy.
The 23 minute and 30 second question and comment period – the House Speaker ruled there could be no debate and that the period could not extend beyond 23 minutes and 30 seconds – notably featured NDP MP Peter Julian and Green MP Elizabeth May, two of the longer serving MPs in the House as among the first to speak. Julian was first elected in 2004, when Guilbeault was only a few years removed from activist stunts such as climbing the CN Tower. Meanwhile, May became the founding Executive Director of the Sierra Club in 1989, the same year Guilbeault started as a university student. It seemed to me that both had a message for an inexperienced cabinet minister elected less than two years ago, namely that some things are bigger than single bill. Bills come and go, but principles – or betrayal of those principles – endures.
Guilbeault clearly did not get it, wondering how the NDP could possibly reject the gag order and effectively support potential delays to his bill. Both the NDP and the Greens may ultimately vote for Bill C-10, but both understand that defending democracy and the freedom of expression of MPs (much less the freedom of expression of all Canadians) is far more important than a delay to any single bill. As May noted, the gag order will do real long term damage. One day it will be a different government on a different issue seeking to use the same procedure to cut short committee study. And the Liberals will have no credible response with no one to blame but themselves.
But we don’t need to look far into the future to see the consequences of the Guilbeault gag order. This past weekend, the Canadian government joined with other countries to criticize the Nigerian government for blocking Twitter and establishing registration requirements for social media. Yet calls for respecting freedom of expression rings hollow when you are shutting down Parliamentary debate on a bill with profound implications for freedom of expression. Indeed, Canada’s lost moral authority on Internet freedoms is an undeniable consequence of Bill C-10 and the Guilbeault gag order.
May 21, 2021
Mission creep – to “make the web giants pay”, the feds will “need” to regulate everything Canadians view or post online
Michael Geist explains why we can safely discount any new lies that the Heritage Minister spews about his Bill C-10 censorship bill:
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has tried to deflect public concern with the regulation of user generated content under Bill C-10 by claiming the intent is to make the “web giants” pay their fair share. Yet according to an internal government memo to Guilbeault signed by former Heritage Deputy Minister Hélène Laurendeau released under the Access to Information Act, the department has for months envisioned a far broader regulatory reach. The memo identifies a wide range of targets, including podcast apps such as Stitcher and Pocket Casts, audiobook services such as Audible, home workout apps, adult websites, sports streaming services such as MLB.TV and DAZN, niche video services such as Britbox, and even news sites such as the BBC and CPAC.
The regulations would bring the full power of CRTC regulation over these sites and services. This includes requiring CRTC registration, disclosure of financial and viewership data, Canadian content discoverability requirements (yes, that could mean Canadian discoverability for pornography services), and mandated payments to support Canadian film, television, and music production. The list also notably identifies potential regulation of Youtube Music, Snapchat Originals, and other social media services whose supposed exclusion has been cited as the rationale to extend regulation to user generated content.
The document was obtained by Postmedia journalist Anja Karadeglija, who first reported it last weekend, focusing on departmental warnings about the importance of excluding user generated content from the scope of regulation in Bill C-10 and the necessity of Sections 2.1 and 4.1 (Section 4.1 was removed by the government). The memo states:
Social media services like YouTube and Facebook greatly expand the number of individuals and other entities that can be said to be transmitting programs over the Internet. This provides an important limitation on the application of the Act by ensuring that under the Act the CRTC cannot regulate the audio or video communications of individuals (or other entities) simply because they use a social media service.
The government obviously ignored the warning and removed the limitation. The document continues by identifying a non-exhaustive list of services that “are likely to regulated under the Act.” The department acknowledges that some services may be exempted by the CRTC, though there are no specifics in the bill that identify thresholds for exemptions. Even if exempted, services may still be required to register with the CRTC and provide confidential commercial data in order to obtain an exemption. Indeed, the default approach is that all services are subject to Canadian regulation, leading to a dizzying array of regulated services identified by the department.
Emphasis mine.
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