What’s happening to pop culture is a reflection of our age. We’ve been turned into Pandas by a smothering, soft totalitarianism. The feminization of the culture means we’re ruled by mothers, who refuse to ever let us wander from the nest, physically, spiritually, creatively or intellectually. That has had all sorts of effects, like the drop in sperm counts and the collapse of popular culture. A deracinated people, kept in adult daycare centers and tended to by belligerent spinsters is not going to have a lot to celebrate or live for.
“The Z Man”, “The Soundtrack Of This Age”, The Z Blog, 2018-03-15.
June 18, 2020
QotD: The feminization of culture
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May 8, 2020
The Wuhan Coronavirus lockdown – “perhaps the worst policy mistake ever committed by Western governments during peacetime”
Toby Young on the fall of “Professor Lockdown”, the former top advisor to the British government on the response to the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic:
The reason for looking into the political affiliations of the scientists and experts who’ve been advising governments across the world during this crisis is that it may throw some light on why those governments have made such poor policy decisions. Will the vast majority of those advisers turn out to be left-of-centre, like Professor Ferguson? I’m 99% sure of it, and I think that will help us to understand what’s happened.
I don’t mean they’ve deliberately given right-of-centre governments poor advice in the hope of wrecking their economies for nefarious party political reasons or because they’re members of Extinction Rebellion and want to destroy capitalism. Nor do I believe in any of the conspiracy theories linking these public health panjandrums to Bill Gates and Big Pharma and some diabolical plan to vaccinate 7.8 billion people. I have little doubt they’ve acted in good faith throughout – and that’s part of the problem. The road they’ve led us down has been paved with all the usual good intentions.
The mistakes these liberal policy-makers have made are depressingly familiar to anyone who’s studied the breed: overestimating the ability of the state to solve complicated problems as well as the capacity of state-run agencies to deliver on those solutions; failing to anticipate the unintended consequences of large-scale state interventions; thinking about public policy in terms of moral absolutes rather than trade-offs; chronic fiscal incontinence, with zero inhibitions about adding to the national debt; not trusting in the common sense of ordinary people and believing the only way to get them to avoid risky behaviour is to put strict rules in place and threaten them with fines or imprisonment if they disobey them (and ignoring those rules themselves, obviously); arrogantly assuming that anyone who challenges their policy preferences is either ignorant or evil; never venturing outside their metropolitan echo chambers; citizens of anywhere rather than somewhere… you know the rest. We’ve seen it a hundred times before.
More often than not, the “solutions” these left-leaning experts come up with make the problems they’re grappling with even worse, and so it will prove to be in this case. The evidence mounts on a daily basis that locking down whole populations in the hope of “flattening the curve” was a catastrophic error, perhaps the worst policy mistake ever committed by Western governments during peacetime. Just yesterday we learnt that the lockdowns have forced countries across the world to shut down TB treatment programmes which, over the next five years, could lead to 6.3 million additional cases of TB and 1.4 million deaths. There are so many stories like this it’s impossible to keep track. We will soon be able to say with something approaching certainty that the cure has been worse than the disease.
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May 1, 2020
Theodore Dalrymple on the authoritarian innovations we’ve so meekly accepted thanks to the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic
Getting back to “normal” is going to be much more difficult now that the powers-that-be know for certain that we’re all quite comfortable tugging the forelock and bending the knee given the right kind of orders:
Armed Metropolitan Police near Downing Street in London.
Photo by Stanislav Kozlovskiy via Wikimedia Commons.
As for the collective or political lessons of the epidemic, I fear them more than rejoice in them. They seem to me likely to reinforce a tendency to authoritarianism, and to embolden bureaucrats with totalitarian leanings. One of the surprising things (or perhaps I should say the things that surprised me) was how meekly the population accepted regulations so drastic that they might have made Stalin envious, all on the say-so of technocrats whose opinions were not completely unopposed by those of other technocrats. There was, as far as I can tell, no popular demand for the evidence that supposedly justified the severe limitations on freedom that were imposed on the population. I suppose an encouraging interpretation of this readiness of the population to do as it was told is that it demonstrated that, all the froth and foam of opposition to political leaders notwithstanding, fundamentally the authorities were trusted by the population to do the right thing. Much as we lament, therefore, the intellectual and moral level of our political class, there are limits to how much we despise it. In other words, we believe that our institutions still work even when guided or controlled by nullities.
A less optimistic interpretation, as usual, is possible. Our population is now so used to being administered, supposedly for its own good, under a regime of bread and circuses, that it is no longer capable of independent thought or action. We have become what Tocqueville thought the Americans would become under their democratic regime, namely a herd of docile animals. Only at the margins — for example, the drug-dealers of banlieues of Paris — would the refractory actually rebel against the regulations, and that not for intellectual reasons or in the name of freedom, but because they wanted to carry on their business as usual. (I should perhaps mention here that I number myself among the sheep.)
In Britain, at any rate, the epidemic revealed how quickly the police could be transformed from a civilian force that protects the population as it goes about its business into a semi-militarised army of quasi-occupation. This transformation is not entirely new, alas; it has been a long time since the policeman was the decent citizen’s friend. Under various pressures, not the least of them emanating from intellectuals, he has become instead a bullying but ineffectual keeper of discipline, whom only the law-abiding truly fear.
I first sensed this development many years ago this when a traffic policeman asked to see my licence. “Well, Theodore …” he started, calling me by my first name when a few years before he would have called me “Sir.” This change was significant. I had gone from being his superior, as a member of the public in whose name he exercised his authority, to being a kind of minor, whom it was his transcendent right to call to order. He was now the boss, and I was now the underling.
The change in uniform, too, has worked in the same direction. Traditionally, since the time of Sir Robert Peel, the uniform of the British policeman was unthreatening, deliberately so, his authority moral rather than physical. Now, he is festooned with the apparatus of repression, if not of oppression, though in effect he represses very little of what ought to be repressed in case it fights back. The modern police intimidate only those who do not need deterring; those who do need it know that they have nothing much to fear from these whited sepulchres, these empty vessels. Incidentally, the French police have undergone a similar deterioration in appearance: gone is the reassuring képi in favour of the moron’s baseball cap, and some of them now dress in jeans with a black shirt with the word POLICE across its back, which is not difficult to imitate and makes it impossible to know whether a policeman really is a policeman or a lout in disguise.
French Gendarmerie at the Eurockéennes of 2007.
Photo by Rama via Wikimedia Commons.The Covid-19 epidemic has come as a great boon to the British police. Increasingly criticised for their concentration on pseudo-crimes such as hate speech at the expense of neglecting real crimes such as assault and burglary, to say nothing of organised sexual abuse of young girls by gangs of men of Pakistani origin, they could now bully the population to their heart’s content and imagine that in doing so they were performing a valuable public service, preserving the law and public health at the same time. Thus they transformed their previous moral and physical cowardice into a virtue.
Of course, in bullying the average citizen who was very unlikely to retaliate they took no risks, unlike with genuine wrongdoers and law-breakers, who tend to be dangerous; but the fact remains that most individual policemen joined the force motivated by some kind of idealism, a desire to do society some service, though they soon had these naïve fantasies knocked out of them by the morally corrupt or bankrupt leadership of the hierarchy which owes its ascendency to its willingness to comply with the latest nostrums of political correctness. The faint embers of the policeman’s initial idealism were no doubt rekindled by the opportunity to prevent the spread of the virus, as they supposed that they were doing, but some of them, at least, far exceeded even their flexible and vaguely-defined authority and began to inspect citizens’ shopping bags to determine whether they were hoarding goods that might be in short supply. This was a step too far, and at last there were protests; the police desisted.
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April 30, 2020
CITIZENS! Report any non-socially-distanced deviationist behaviour to this number immediately!
In Maclean’s, Jen Gerson admits that she has not (yet) reported any of her neighbours for their failure to obediently follow the rules of social distancing. She must be reported to the appropriate state authorities!
Commemorative badges of the German Democratic Republic’s Ministry of State Security (Stasi).
Wikimedia Commons.
Look, I know I’m going to get flak for this, but someone needs to say it: think twice before you narc on your neighbours.
Snitching may work, but the downsides to citizen-policing are grim — to say nothing of the historical antecedents.
Firstly, “you can play havoc with somebody just by snitching on them with an anonymous snitch line,” noted Sharon Polsky, the president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada. In addition to the risk of malicious reports, if people of colour aren’t disproportionately subject to snitching, I’d be shocked.
Totalitarian states turned neighbour against neighbour and family against family, in order to maintain the illusion of social cohesion.
Authoritarians use this tactic because there are never enough police or soldiers to force compliance upon an entire population, not unless everyone consents to become an agent of his or her own mutual oppression.
The term “fascism” has an innocent history. It comes from the Roman term “fasces,” which means a bundle of sticks bound together. One stick breaks, but the fasces remains strong. It’s another term for unity. That’s what makes it so seductive, especially in times of uncertainty and mortal dread. We’re all in this together. Nary a stick shall stray.
“We are now living amid the very tactics that the West [once] criticized,” Polsky added. “With state controls on commerce, industry, speech, and media.”
The federal government, for example, is already considering legislation that would bar the spreading of misinformation about COVID-19 online.
“Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures and it is about protecting the public,” Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc told reporters with a line that should give any student of history the creeps.
“This is not a question of freedom of speech. This is a question of people who are actually actively working to spread disinformation, whether it’s through troll bot farms, whether [it’s] state operators or whether it’s really conspiracy theorist cranks who seem to get their kicks out of creating havoc.”
No doubt LeBlanc et al are operating under the noblest of intentions. But repressive measures buy conformity at a terrible price. Snitch lines turn us against one another. They teach us to fear the people we need to survive, thus making us more dependent on the apparatus of the state.
April 29, 2020
“If it saves just one life…”
Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan on the rallying cry of the Karens of all genders:
In times of crisis, politicians want to look like they’re doing something, and don’t want to hear about limits on their authority. In times of crisis, people want someone to do something, and don’t want to hear about tradeoffs. This is the breeding ground for grand policies driven by the mantra, “if it saves just one life.” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo invoked the mantra to defend his closure policies. The mantra has echoed across the country from county councils to mayors to school boards to police to clergy as justification for closures, curfews, and enforced social distancing.
Rational people understand this isn’t how the world works. Regardless of whether we acknowledge them, tradeoffs exist. And acknowledging tradeoffs is an important part of constructing sound policy. Unfortunately, even mentioning tradeoffs in a time of crisis brings the accusation that only heartless beasts would balance human lives against dollars. But each one of us balances human lives against dollars, and any number of other things, every day.
Five-thousand Americans die each year from choking on solid food. We could save every one of those lives by mandating that all meals be pureed. Pureed food isn’t appetizing, but if it saves just one life, it must be worth doing. Your chance of dying while driving a car is almost double your chance of dying while driving an SUV. We could save lives by mandating that everyone drive bigger cars. SUVs are more expensive and worse for the environment, but if it saves just one life, it must be worth doing. Heart disease kills almost 650,000 Americans each year. We could reduce the incidence of heart disease by 14 percent by mandating that everyone exercise daily. Many won’t want to exercise every day, but if it saves just one life, it must be worth doing.
Legislating any of these things would be ridiculous, and most sane people know as much. How do we know? Because each of us makes choices like these every day that increase the chances of our dying. We do so because there are limits on what we’re willing to give up to improve our chances of staying alive. Our daily actions prove that none of us believes that “if it saves just one life” is a reasonable basis for making decisions. Yet, when a threat like the coronavirus emerges, we go looking for an imaginary cure that will save lives without tradeoffs.
April 26, 2020
“If it saves just one life…”
Hector Drummond illustrates the moral failure of falling back on the “if it saves just one life” trope as a justification for any and all restrictions on free people:
Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.
Let me ask you a question. Would you give up your job, your savings, your kids’ economic future, your pension, your parents’ current pension, your house, and your mental health, if I told you that doing so may possibly extend my old, sick grandfather’s life by a year or two? I don’t suppose you’d be too keen, would you? In fact, even the most mild-mannered of people is likely to get angry at the sheer effrontery of such a request.
What if I told the world the same thing? What if I told the world that if everyone in every country gave up their wordly possessions, and spent the rest of their lives in grinding poverty, then it’s possible that my grandfather might get to see Christmas? And suppose that there was some bare plausibility to this, based on a computer model developed by scientists at Imperial College. What do you think the world is likely to say to me? The polite response would be, “Sorry to hear about your grandfather, but we’re not going to do this”. The less polite response would be more like … well, just incredulous laughter, and slammed doors.
The reason I bring up these hypothetical scenarios, though, is that all over social media we are hearing about the Covid-19 lockdown being “worth it if it saves just one life”. But would the people saying this really be willing to give up, say, their own house, car and possessions and teenage daughter to someone who is suicidally depressed over their lack of prospects in life? No. Would they be prepared to serve ten years in jail if it saved the life of someone at risk of being killed by gangsters? No. Would they be happy with having the government forcibly remove a kidney from them to extend the life of someone with failing kidneys? No. Economic ruin and loss of liberty is not something we generally regard as a fair trade for a stranger’s life. Generally even the bleeding hearts among us will say, and rightfully so, “I’m sorry for this person, but they are not entitled to this, and I will not damage my life to any great extent for them”. Charitable donations are one thing. So is volunteer service. But that’s it.
Another thing I am seeing is people who say, “Anything is worth it if it saves lives”. Anything? Really? Shall we ban alcohol then? Because some people die from alcohol. Cars? Paracetamol? Steak knives? Shall we ban mobile phones, because terrorists might use them to communicate with? Shall we lock up for life anyone convicted of a minor juvenile crime, in case they turn out to be a killer? The whole idea is too ridiculous for words, yet all over the world there are fearful people hiding in their homes and posting such thoughts. It is one thing to feel sorry for them, but their stupid ideas shouldn’t pass unchallenged.
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April 21, 2020
Homeschooling is bad and should be tightly regulated or banned, says Harvard Professor of Karenism
An article in Harvard Magazine draws heavy fire from people who do not automatically demand to speak to the manager:
Illustration from Harvard Magazine via Twitter.
Harvard Magazine decided that this moment was the PERFECT time to take a gigantic shit on homeschooling parents. Author Erin O’Donnell decided write a piece on Elizabeth Bartholet, a “professor” who knows the best way to handle child education, and that is to turn them over to the State, immediately. Her rationale? Parents are simply too stupid to educate children without the state looking over their shoulder.
Yet Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, sees risks for children — and society — in homeschooling, and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice. Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.”
“We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Bartholet asserts. All 50 states have laws that make education compulsory, and state constitutions ensure a right to education, “but if you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.” Even apparent requirements such as submitting curricula, or providing evidence that teaching and learning are taking place, she says, aren’t necessarily enforced. Only about a dozen states have rules about the level of education needed by parents who homeschool, she adds. “That means, effectively, that people can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves.” In another handful of states, parents are not required to register their children as homeschooled; they can simply keep their kids at home.”
This practice, Bartholet says, can isolate children. She argues that one benefit of sending children to school at age four or five is that teachers are “mandated reporters,” required to alert authorities to evidence of child abuse or neglect. “Teachers and other school personnel constitute the largest percentage of people who report to Child Protective Services,” she explains, whereas not one of the 50 states requires that homeschooling parents be checked for prior reports of child abuse. Even those convicted of child abuse, she adds, could “still just decide, ‘I’m going to take my kids out of school and keep them at home.'”
Bartholet goes on to cite an example of one woman, who was raised by “Idaho survivalists” and was working in the family business instead of getting an education. Conveniently, while lauding “teachers and other school personnel” as mandated reporters, Bartholet fails to cite or even acknowledge that there is plenty of child abuse that happens on school property, by school employees, and maybe there are just evil people who do evil things to children because they have the opportunity to do so. Giving someone the title of “mandated reporter” does not magically make them into an upstanding citizen and defender of children.
Bartholet – and by extension, O’Donnell – makes no rational argument against homeschooling. It’s only her gut feeling that if the nanny state isn’t over the shoulder, trying to mold “young skulls full of mush” (as Rush Limbaugh has said more than once) into educated and functional adults, then there could be shenanigans afoot! Why, these children might end up RELIGIOUS. *GASP!*
Shruti Rajagopalan noted that the original illustration (which appears to have been corrected since the image at the top of this post was published) included the word “ARITHMATIC” on the spine of one of the books.
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April 12, 2020
Minimum alcohol pricing – a policy so good you have to lie about it
Scotland has had legal minimum prices for alcoholic beverages since mid-2018. If you read a random selection of mainstream media coverage, you’d know that it’s been a huge success, with vastly improved public health results at a price to consumers measured in mere pennies. As with all propaganda efforts, if you tell the lies often enough, people may believe you:
There has been all sorts of rubbish written about minimum pricing since it was introduced in Scotland in May 2018. Nicola Sturgeon has lied about in the Scottish Parliament. The BBC has gone to extraordinary lengths to spin the policy as a success. The public have been told that alcohol-related hospital admissions have gone down when they have gone up. We have seen the media fall for blatant cherry-picking. We have been told that rates of problem drinking have gone down when we don’t have any evidence either way.
One of the few solid facts — that there were more alcohol-related deaths recorded in Scotland in 2018 than in 2017 — has been sidelined. Instead, the media have focused on a disputed, and relatively small, decline in alcohol sales as if that were an end in itself. Any port in a storm (fortified wine sales have definitely benefited from minimum pricing).
Figures from the calendar year of 2018 are of limited use because minimum pricing didn’t begin until May 1st. Today, for the first time, I can reveal the monthly mortality figures for Scotland, England and Wales. They show that there was no difference between the change in annual death rates from alcohol-related causes, regardless of whether the country had minimum pricing in place. Both England/Wales and Scotland saw a decline between May and December of seven per cent (compared to the previous year).
This graph is published in a new briefing paper I have written for the IEA. It summarises all the evidence gathered to date on deaths, hospitalisations and sales, plus exclusive new data.
Importantly, it contains estimates of the costs to consumers. Among the more outlandish claims made by the Sheffield modellers was the idea that moderate and low income consumers would be barely affected by minimum pricing. They predicted that a low income moderate drinker would only pay an extra 4p a year! This was never realistic, not least because it was based on the minimum price being set at 45p and they defined a moderate drinker as someone consuming the equivalent of just two pints of lager a week, but it worked from a PR perspective because it quelled politicians’ fears about the policy being regressive.
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April 8, 2020
If the Wuhan Coronavirus panic feels oddly familiar … there’s a good reason for it
Warren Meyer explains why his skepticism about the dangers of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic kicked in quickly because it followed a very familiar pattern:
I have been skeptical about extreme global warming and climate change forecasts, but those were informed by my knowledge of physics and dynamic systems (e.g. feedback mechanics). I have been immensely skeptical of Elon Musk, but again that skepticism has been informed by domain knowledge (e.g. engineering in the case of the hyperloop and business strategy in the case of SolarCity and Tesla). But I have no domain knowledge that is at all relevant to disease transfer and pathology. So why was I immediately skeptical when, for example, the governor of Texas was told by “experts” that a million persons would die in Texas if a lock-down order was not issued?
I think the reason for my skepticism was pattern recognition — I saw a lot of elements in COVID-19 modelling and responses that appeared really similar to what I thought were the most questionable aspects of climate science. For example:
- We seem to have a sorting process of “experts” that selects for only the most extreme. We start any such question, such as forecasting disease death rates or global temperature increases, with a wide range of opinion among people with domain knowledge. When presented with a range of possible outcomes, the media’s incentives generally push it to present the most extreme. So if five folks say 100,000 might die and one person says a million, the media will feature the latter person as their “expert” and tell the public “up to a million expected to die.” After this new “expert” is repetitively featured in the media, that person becomes the go-to expert for politicians, as politicians want to be seen by the public to be using “experts” the public recognizes as “experts.”
- Computer models are converted from tools to project out the implications of a certain set of starting hypotheses and assumptions into “facts” in and of themselves. They are treated as having a reality, and a certainty, that actually exceeds that of their inputs (a scientific absurdity but a media reality I have observed so many times I gave it the name “data-washing”). Never are the key assumptions that drive the model’s behavior ever disclosed along with the model results. Rather than go on forever on this topic, I will refer you to my earlier article.
- Defenders of alarmist projections cloak themselves in a mantle of being pro-science. Their discussions of the topic tend to by science-y without being scientific. They tend to understand one aspect of the science — exponential growth in viruses or tipping points in systems dominated by positive feedback. But they don’t really understand it — for example, what is interesting about exponential growth is not the math of its growth, but what stops the growth from being infinite. Why doesn’t a bacteria culture grow to the mass of the Earth, or nuclear fission continue until all the fuel is used up? We are going to have a lot of problem with this after COVID-19. People will want to attribute the end of the exponential growth to lock-downs and distancing, but it’s hard to really make this analysis without understanding at what point — and there is a point — the virus’s growth would have turned down anyway.
- Alarmists who claim to be anti-science have a tendency to insist on “solutions” that have absolutely no basis in science, or even ones that science has proven to be utterly bankrupt. Ethanol and wind power likely do little to reduce CO2 emissions and may make them worse, yet we spend billions on them as taxpayers. And don’t get me started on plastic bag and straw bans. I am willing to cut COVID-19 responses a little more slack because we don’t have the time to do elaborate studies. But just don’t tell me lockdown orders are science — they are guesses as to the correct response. I live in Phoenix where it was sunny and 80F this weekend. We are on lockdown in our houses. I could argue that ordering everyone out into the natural disinfectant of heat and sunlight for 2 hours a day is as effective a response as forcing families into their houses (initial data, though it is sketchy, of limited transfer of the virus in summertime Australia is interesting — only a small portion of cases are from community transfer. By comparison less than a half percent of US cases from travel).
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April 6, 2020
The Precautionary Principle – “If it saves only one life…”
A guest post at Catallaxy Files on the madness of taking the Precautionary Principle as your guide:
Slide from a presentation by Patti Gettinger, 2011-07-11.
Original slideshow at https://fr.slideshare.net/regsgridlock/the-precautionary-principle-8656034
In the unprecedented trampling of rights characterised by the response to the global pandemic of COVID-19, the common justification is that it will save lives, as though no measure is too great to save even one life.
This has echoes of the Precautionary Principle, which has pushed aside ubiquitous risk management principles in such areas as climate change, invariably to justify unlimited spending which risk management principles would otherwise limit. In other words, it’s a principle which can be used to justify any measure. And here we are.
One fundamental difference between the competing principles is the concept of marginal benefit, which, simply put, is the point where the benefits of an action no longer outweighs the cost. Our new “rules” from the newly formed National Cabinet, of which no legal or constitutional standing exists, has far surpassed the point of marginal benefit.
A person fishing off the coast alone in a small boat is in breach of the rules, as is a person playing golf alone, or a person sunbathing on a rock in the outback, yet in none of these examples can any measurable likelihood of spreading it or catching the disease be identified. These situations would fail any risk management approach, but not the Precautionary principle. Any risk, that is, any potential risk that can not be confidently identified as absolute zero, is a risk not worth taking, but that is not how we live our lives, because we understand that everything involves risk. Driving a car, catching public transport, having a job, not having a job, leaving your house or indeed staying in it involves some level of risk.
Also central to risk management is the concept of mitigation; the potential actions that can reduce, transfer or eliminate identified risks. In the case of COVID-19, many mitigation measures have been identified, and implemented. Such mitigations implemented are travel bans (belatedly), banning large crowds (belatedly), temperature screenings, washing hands, social distancing, pandemic announcements (belatedly, again), face masks (very belatedly), and fit-for-purpose hospitals (you guessed it). All of these easily demonstrate a benefit greater than worst-case scenario costs, yet after being bystanders for weeks, leaders across the globe then overreacted far beyond the demonstrable benefits. At least benefits to us.
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March 3, 2020
Michael Bloomberg, self-appointed nanny
Via Instapundit, Karen Kataline shares a look at the things that bother Michael Bloomberg about you:
Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona on 1 February, 2020.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Take Michael Bloomberg … please! What drives this man with the freedom to enjoy his wealth in 65 billion different ways, to spend his time trying to curtail the freedoms and choices of others, even down to the size soda they drink and the amount of salt they ought to be allowed to sprinkle on their spinach?
Coloradans know all too well that the former New York Mayor and Democratic Presidential Candidate spent boatloads of cash pushing state legislators to clamp down on their God-given right to defend themselves and their families. He has pushed freedom-sucking and blatantly biased “Red Flag” bills in numerous other states around the country.
Mayor Busybody simply can’t stop telling others what to do. It seems to be an obsession with him — or maybe, a compulsion too. I gained insight into this when I returned to a New York Times article from 2009 that described Bloomberg’s eating habits.
“He dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot. And his snack of choice? Cheez-Its.”
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is about control. Controlling one’s out-of-control thoughts, feelings, and behavior by attempting to control his external environment. Consciously or unconsciously, those afflicted do this in vain, to the point where they feel unable to control the compulsion as well (as in excessive hand-washing).
Most sufferers aren’t dangerous unless they have 65 billion dollars and a God-complex.
The Times went on to report this delicious insight:
“… he (Bloomberg) is known to grab food off the plates of aides and, occasionally, even strangers. (‘Delicious,’ he declared recently, after swiping a piece of fried calamari from an unsuspecting diner in Staten Island.)”
Behavior like this exhibits a staggering and extreme lack of boundaries. The Times seems to only snicker at this, but it’s painfully clear that Bloomberg has great difficulty respecting the basic boundaries of civil society. No wonder it’s so easy for him to help himself to your freedoms and your choices when he can’t stop helping himself to your calamari.
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November 17, 2019
QotD: Socialist beliefs about “capitalism”
- Wealth is either fixed in amount, or, while it might be destroyed or diminished by certain human activities (such as war), if wealth grows this growth occurs largely independently of human ideas, choices, actions, and institutions;
- trade and commerce, therefore, are largely zero-sum – that is, each exchange situation pits a party who will win against one who will lose;
- trade and commerce, in turn, involve activities are thus, at best, suspect; trade and commerce too often reward greediness and duplicity while penalizing generosity and honesty;
- the “distribution” of wealth – whether conceived as financial flows or assets, or as access to real goods and services – is determined largely by power;
- prices set on markets are largely arbitrary; prices seldom play any role beyond determining how much one party “wins” from trade and how much the other party “loses.”
- each of a handful of large groups of people, mostly as conceptualized by intellectuals with no understanding of economics, has its own “interests” – interests that are shared by all members of the group and that are at odds with the interests of other groups; for example, “labor” has interests that are are shared by all workers and that are at odds with the interests of “employers”;
- while the state can be captured by ill-intentioned people, the state – especially under unlimited majoritarian rule – is also the only possible savior of the powerless against the predations and frauds of the powerful;
- absent vigorous state intervention, ordinary people – people whose main asset is the value of their own labor – lack both the power to get their fair share of society’s wealth and the intelligence or self-discipline to use wisely whatever share of wealth they do manage to secure;
- social progress is achieved by the powerless grabbing power under the leadership of men and women of singular vision, intelligence, and courage; “the People” will be led to the Promised Land – can be led to the Promised Land – only if they faithfully follow their caring messiahs;
- those who argue in favor of free markets are either soulless mercenary cronies for the powerful propertied class or they are ideologically blinded dupes for this class; no intelligent and decent person could possibly deny the enormous benefits available to “the People” when the state is empowered to work on their behalf against the propertied few.
Don Boudreaux, “Some Links”, Café Hayek, 2017-10-08.
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September 25, 2019
QotD: Big government is not human
Guvmint agents themselves — the cells and their switches — are task-oriented. Each signed off his right to make humane judgements when he took the job.
We used to have reactionary courts, to restrain the creature. Now we have progressive courts, to urge it on.
Among the foibles of democracy, is the notion that “the peeple” are somehow in control. The people, however, consist of persons, with their quite various moral flaws, which tend to cancel each other. They elect politicians for show. This helps them put a human face on the enterprise, so they have someone to blame at the electoral intervals. It is true that a government with a majority and a will can alter the course of history: usually by putting more sharks in the tank. And that the policy wonks are, arguably, human. But they are cells themselves, within Leviathan.
We live, I say from time to time, in an age of “total war” and “total peace.” The one condition resembles the other: a command economy, focused on results. We have, as it were, totalitarianism with a human face. It is a kind of smiley face, painted on the tip of the missile.
David Warren, “Notes from the sheepfold”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-08-11.
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August 14, 2019
QotD: Proto-progressive thought
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Southey’s Colloquies on Society”, 1830.
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July 11, 2019
The genesis of the administrative state during the Great Depression
Leonid Sirota provides some interesting background on the rise of the administrative state during the 1930s:
Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.
To a degree that is, I think, unusual among other areas of the law, administrative law in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Canada is riven by a conflict about its underlying institution. To be sure there, there are some constitutional lawyers who speak of getting rid of judicial review of legislation and so transferring the constitution to the realm of politics, rather than law, but that’s very much a minority view. Labour unions have their critics, but not so much among labour lawyers. But the administrative state is under attack from within the field of administrative law. It has, of course, its resolute defenders too, some of them going so far as to argue that the administrative state has somehow become a constitutional requirement.
In an interesting article on “The Depravity of the 1930s and the Modern Administrative State” [PDF] recently published in the Notre Dame Law Review, Steven G. Calabresi and Gary Lawson challenge the defenders of the administrative state by pointing out its intellectual origins in what they persuasively argue was
a time, worldwide and in the United States, of truly awful ideas about government, about humanity, and about the fundamental unit of moral worth—ideas which, even in relatively benign forms, have institutional consequences that … should be fiercely resisted.
That time was the 1930s.
Professors Calabresi and Lawson point out that the creation of the administrative state was spearheaded by thinkers ― first the original “progressives” and then New Dealers ― who “fundamentally did not believe that all men are created equal and should democratically govern themselves through representative institutions”. At an extreme, this rejection of the belief in equality led them to embrace eugenics, whose popularity in the United States peaked in the 1930s. But the faith in expertise and “the modern descendants of Platonic philosopher kings, distinguished by their academic pedigrees rather than the metals in their souls” is a less radical manifestation of the same tendency.
The experts, real or supposed ― some of whom “might well be bona fide experts [while] [o]thers might be partisan hacks, incompetent, entirely lacking in judgment beyond their narrow sphere of learning, or some combination thereof” ― would not “serve as wise counselors to autonomous individuals and elected representatives [but] as guardians for servile wards”. According to the “advanced” thinkers of the 1930s, “[o]rdinary people simply could not handle the complexities of modern life, so they needed to be managed by their betters. All for the greater good, of course.” Individual agency was, in any case, discounted: “the basic unit of value was a collective: the nation, the race, or the tribe. Individuals were simply cells in an organic whole rather than ends in themselves.”
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
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