Quotulatiousness

August 9, 2020

Canadian Art magazine’s “woke suicide pact”

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

As a cultural barbarian and all-around Neanderthal, it will come as little surprise to both my readers that I’d never even heard of Canadian Art magazine. As a result, the recent decision to cease publication due to the unresolved (and almost certainly unresolvable) issues of needing to be funded by rich white people:

These evils were explained in a long article published by Canadian Art‘s former editor-in-chief, David Balzer (self-described “gay, fag, queer. Ambivalent Libra“), in which he complains that the progressive agenda of the magazine he edited was forever being undercut by the need to solicit funds from wealthy white donors. Or, as he describes it, the pursuit of: “white, liberal money — the champagne socialists.”

Shockingly, these donors are not especially fond an incessant slew of articles with titles such as Drop the Charges and Defund the Police, Says New Artists’ Letter for Black Lives, Give Us Permanence — Ending Anti-Black Racism in Canada’s Art Institutions, and A Crisis of Whiteness in Canada’s Art Museums.

Balzer’s analysis of the growing tension between establishment donor and do-good editor is spot on:

    Most boards, which are also majority white, are [interested] in going to where they believe the money is. So the argument goes: It takes a certain talent, panache, to be president, director, or CEO, to open those pocketbooks, and without these skills, culture cannot run. This argument implies that culture cannot run if its backrooms are not white … Many corporate partners make possible the lavish, yearly fundraising galas that cultural organizations host: ostentatious displays of whiteness and wealth that are the public-facing versions of the aforementioned work done by white presidents, directors and CEOs.

It’s a problem that every charity, art outlet, and activist organization in Canada will face. Supporting the arts is rarely an act of pure altruism. It has always been a status flex by the well-connected barons and baronesses of privilege. At its most cynical, arts funding is a high-class game of reputation laundering.

August 3, 2020

QotD: History or “Her” story?

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

In another land, a long, long time ago, I was a student of languages. It was there that I came across the American left’s obsession with corrupting the language.

In my last year in college, I had American Literature taught by a Fullbright exchange professor. I will never forget the moment the poor man — talking to a class of 36, all women as such classes often are — let slip the innocent word “him” to mean an indeterminate gender. He paused, went white, his eyes widened, and he said, “I mean, I mean, he or she.”

Meanwhile, the class of 36 was staring at him in puzzlement. It took us a while to take it all apart and realize he thought we’d be offended by the use of “he” to mean someone generic, of indeterminate gender.

I think we patted him kindly on the shoulder and told him that no, really, we weren’t offended. The usage was the same in Portuguese and we’d been told it was the same in most Indo-European languages. And who on Earth would get offended over semantics? The language was the language. It meant nothing about us personally.

This was of course before I married, came to the U.S. and found that for the American woman circa 1985, the language was not just personal, it was personally offensive.

I remember standing in horror underneath a bookstore section proudly labeled Herstory.

Of course the etymology of the word history is not his + story, the sort of pseudo-clever deduction about language that I was used to from the near-illiterate elderly people in the village. (It would be too complex and involve Portuguese, but there was this old farmer who had somehow deduced from the Portuguese word for farmer that farmers were the only ones who would be saved at the end of time.)

History, of course, is not originally an English word. It comes from the Latin historia — meaning a relation of events — by way of the French estoire, meaning story. Note please that in neither of those languages does “his” mean “belonging to him.” And that making the same sort of illiterate assumptions about the French word, we’d get “It is oire.”

I thought that the store must have hired an illiterate employee, but no, over the next ten years, in various circumstances, and possibly still except for the fact that I’ve learned to silence such fools with a death glare, I’ve come across the same smug-idiot assumption and “corrections” of the English word, so as to “fight against the patriarchy.”

That this is done by people who paid more money than I make in a couple of years for a college degree, and who, doubtlessly, think that etymology is a dish made with onions, or perhaps a conspiracy of the patriarchy fills me with a sort of dull rage that has no outlet.

Sarah Hoyt, “The Semantic Whoredom of the Left”, PJ Media, 2018-05-11.

August 2, 2020

Words are verbal tools, but tools can be weaponized

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

In this week’s newsletter, Andrew Sullivan analyzes the roots of wokeness:

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous — and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes.

Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters, pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it. And for many of us regular readers, we’ve just gotten used to brand new words popping up suddenly to re-describe something we thought we knew already. We notice a new word, make a brief mental check, and move on with our lives.

But we need to do more than that. We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this theory — or rather an interlocking web of theories — that is nonetheless changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy.

What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity, by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose. It’s as deep a dive into this often impenetrable philosophy as anyone would want to attempt. But it’s well worth grappling with.

What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning — from Christianity to Marxism — postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason — whether the Enlightenment version or even the ancient Socratic understanding — is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” reason whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently — even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth — even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach — is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized.

During the 1980s and 1990s, this somewhat aimless critique of everything hardened into a plan for action. Analyzing how truth was a mere function of power, and then seeing that power used against distinct and oppressed identity groups, led to an understandable desire to do something about it, and to turn this critique into a form of activism. Lindsay and Pluckrose call this “applied postmodernism”, which, in turn, hardened into what we now know as Social Justice.

July 29, 2020

The Equity, Inclusivity, and Diversity Industrial Complex

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden comments on a Ross Douthat column on the “antiracist” demands of our modern protestariat (the hordes of un- or under-employed university-educated young liberals and socialists):

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

… the most interesting aspect of this lockdown-induced outpouring of collective rage hasn’t been the protests, or the cancellations, but the woke job creation that is going on. The ideology behind things like “white fragility” is increasingly being transformed into what can be described as an equity-inclusivity-diversity (EID) industrial complex that might end up being the most significant long term structural change that emerges out of the protests.

One of the most common responses in elite institutions as they promise to address systemic racism has been the creation of new jobs and positions that will supposedly help to do so. For instance, the Washington Post created a set of new positions that will be focusing on racial issues. This included hiring a “Managing Editor for Diversity and Inclusion.” At Princeton, the administration announced, like many other elite universities, new courses (which means new teaching opportunities) focused on racial injustice, as well as new projects and funding for research to explore and address racial issues. Stanford has created a new Centre for Racial Justice at its law school.

This direct job creation is just the tip of the iceberg. The real EID industrial complex is in the creation of a vast number of new jobs dedicated to the promotion and advancement of the basic tenets of this ascendant ideology through the expansion of human resource departments to deal with these issues, the creation of new EID bureaucrats and administrators in universities, corporations, government departments, the rise of EID consulting and mandatory courses and workshops for employees, new jobs and potential litigation for lawyers, as well as courses and modules in law schools to teach aspiring lawyers about these things.

In the bestselling Ibram X. Kendi book How To Be An Antiracist, one of Kendi’s central solutions is to pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution and permanently establish and fund a Department of Anti-racism. This department:

    would be comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

The radical tendencies of the bourgeois bolsheviks in the streets might make them seem like true revolutionaries, but what this movement seems to actually want to create, with remarkable success, is new employment opportunities for true believers in the new anti-racist creeds. Racism won’t so much be solved by tearing society down, but by massively expanding new professional and managerial jobs that can guarantee full employment for the credentialed class of true believers.

O’Boyle’s thesis is that the revolutions that swept across European cities in 1848 were because a large surplus of resentful and overeducated men felt society was denying to them what they were rightfully owed. O’Boyle looks at Germany, where university education was cheap, and was “emphasized as an avenue to wealth and power.” This ending up producing an excess of ambitious, but resentful and frustrated men who felt society was not allotting them the status and comfort they deserved. The same was true in France. But in Britain, the opportunities produced by industrialization that had yet to fully materialize on the continent kept this excess surplus of overeducated men much smaller, and helped insulate Britain from revolution.

What if the EID industrial complex actually helps to reduce the scarcity of opportunities in elite fields and institutions that will put a lid on the unrest that overproduction breeds? The EID industry is worth billions of dollars, and in a way it might be the solution liberalism offers to both the radical progressivism of this ideology, and to the challenge posed by elite overproduction.

July 22, 2020

How the left lost its sense of humour

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

Matt Taibbi outlines the way “the right” used to be the humourless scolds and omnipresent busybodies demanding the government trample the rights of people they didn’t like, then points out that the progressives have become exactly the people they used to poke fun at:

The old Republican right’s idea of “humor” was its usual diatribes against Bad People, only with puns thrown in (are you ready for “OxyClinton”?). As a result the Fox effort at countering the Daily Show, the 1/2 Hour News Hour — a string of agonizing “burns” on Bush-haters and Hillary — remains the worst-rated show in the history of television, according to Metacritic. The irony gap eventually spelled doom for that group of Republicans, as Trump drove a truck through it in 2016. However, it’s possible they just weren’t as committed to the concept as current counterparts.

Take the Smithsonian story. The museum became the latest institution to attempt to combat racism by pledging itself to “antiracism,” a quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture created a graphic on “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture” that declared the following white values: “the scientific method,” “rational, linear thinking,” “the nuclear family,” “children should have their own rooms,” “hard work is the key to success,” “be polite,” “written tradition,” and “self-reliance.” White food is “steak and potatoes; bland is best,” and in white justice, “intent counts.”

The astute observer will notice this graphic could equally have been written by white supremacist Richard Spencer or History of White People parodist Martin Mull. It seems impossible that no one at one of the country’s leading educational institutions noticed this messaging is ludicrously racist, not just to white people but to everyone (what is any person of color supposed to think when he or she reads that self-reliance, politeness, and “linear thinking” are white values?).

The exhibit was inspired by white corporate consultants with Education degrees like Judith Katz and White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who themselves echo the work of more consultants with Ed degrees like Glenn Singleton of Courageous Conversations. Per the New York Times, Courageous Conversations even teaches that “written communication over other forms” and “mechanical time” (i.e. clock time) are tools by which “whiteness undercuts Black kids.”

The notion that such bugbears as as time, data, and the written word are racist has caught fire across the United States in the last few weeks, igniting calls for an end to virtually every form of quantitative evaluation in hiring and admissions, including many that were designed specifically to combat racism. Few tears will be shed for the SAT and ACT exams, even though they were once infamous for causing Harvard to be overpopulated with high-scoring “undesirables” like Jews and Catholics, forcing the school to add letters of reference and personal essays to help restore the WASP balance.

The outcry against the tests as “longstanding forces of institutional racism” by the National Association of Basketball Coaches is particularly hilarious, given that the real problem most of those coaches are combating is the minimal fake academic entry requirement imposed by the NCAA to help maintain a crooked billion-dollar business scheme based on free (and largely Black) labor. The tests have been tweaked repeatedly over the years to be more minority-friendly and are one of the few tools that gave brilliant but underprivileged kids a way to blow past the sea of rich suburbanites who feel oppressed by them … But, fine, let’s stipulate, as Neon Bodeaux put it, that “them tests are culturally biased.” What to make of the campaign to end blind auditions for musical positions, which the New York Philharmonic began holding in the early seventies in response to complaints of discrimination?

Before blind auditions, women made up less than 6 percent of orchestras; today they’re half of the New York Philharmonic. But because the change did not achieve similar results with Black and Hispanic musicians, the blind audition must now be “altered to take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences.” This completes a decades-long circle where the left/liberal project went from working feverishly to expunge racial stereotypes in an effort to level the playing field, to denouncing itself for ever having done so.

This would be less absurd if the effort were not being led in an extraordinary number of cases by extravagantly-paid white consultants like DiAngelo and Howard Ross, a “social justice advocate” whose company billed the federal government $5 million since 2006 to teach basically the same course on “whiteness” to agencies like NASA, the Treasury, the FDIC, and others.

It’s unsurprising that in the mouths of such people, the definitions of “whiteness” sound suspiciously like lazy suburban white stereotypes about Black America, only in reverse. They read like a peer-reviewed version of Bill de Blasio’s infamous joke about “CP Time.”

July 15, 2020

Wilfred Laurier University – from university to indoctrination centre

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

In the National Post, Barbara Kay notes how things are changing from general support of freedom of speech to cracking down on “dissent” of any nature, with WLU being a leading example:

Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. This photo taken from University Avenue shows the Maureen Forrester Recital Hall and John Aird Centre, 23 September, 2005.
Photo by Radagast via Wikimedia Commons.

My editor, a man in his prime, recently tweeted bemusement that his older readers often preface their emails to him with allusions to their age (“as a 75-year old man …” “I’m an 82-year old woman …”).

I know these readers. Or others like them.

When my oldie readers introduce generation markers in their emails, it’s generally a semaphore signifying bewilderment at a cultural landscape so utterly changed from their youth, they cannot find their bearings. I empathize with these readers because, an oldie myself, I share their anxiety at the continual erosion of classic liberal principles we took for granted as permanent. Especially the freedom to dissent from popular views.

[…]

If you had told us in our youth that one day students would be screaming obscenities and blaring horns to prevent presentations by visiting speakers whose opinions they dislike, as happens frequently in American universities and occasionally in Canada, we would have been shocked. If you had told us that someday a graduate student who exposed her class to a range of opinions on a controversial subject — the norm in my university experience — would be officially censured for including the views of a conservative commentator because his views might “harm” students, we would have been gobsmacked.

Lindsay Shepherd’s 2017 recording of her disciplinary session at Wilfrid Laurier University for the crime of exposing her students to Jordan Peterson’s views on compelled speech brought her to national attention. (Peterson was compared to Hitler by one interrogator. A defamation lawsuit by Peterson against WLU is in progress.) The broadcast of the ruthless performance that reduced Shepherd to tears was a pivotal teaching moment in the illiberalism that governs academia in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Shepherd was the only adult in that room. But she was already an exception to the rule in her cohort, and the chances of another such act of dissidence by a WLU graduate student are slim to vanishing.

July 14, 2020

Then they came for the nursery rhymes

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

James Lileks illustrates just how easy it is to construct a case to cancel a children’s song:

Image from The Kindergarten English Blog, https://markblogsfromjapan.wordpress.com/page/4/

At some point the mob will run out of things to cancel. All the low-hanging fruit1 will have been plucked to make smoothies for the commune. Wrongthink professors, authors, movies, newspaper columnists — easy enough. After that? Well, if you’re really going to root out systematic systemism, everything has to go. This means someone will eventually be tasked with canceling children’s songs, or recasting them for the new era. Pity the person who has to find the problematic problems in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

It’s not that hard. Take the first line: The very idea that stars are supposed to twinkle locks them into a societally prescribed mode of behavior. Expecting a star to twinkle is like telling a strange woman on the subway to smile. Strong, troublemaking stars explode! The very idea that we want “little” stars to engage in performative “twinkling” negates the life experience of massive gas giants like Betelgeuse. In fact “twinkling” itself strips the star’s identity and expresses it through the eyes of the beholder, who mistakes the effect of the atmosphere on star observation for the star’s true nature.

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Whew! Turns out there’s a lot to unpack.

How I wonder what you are.

Well, you wouldn’t if there weren’t racism in STEM that kept people out, but no, that’s not right. STEM is bad because it uses the Western empirical model to determine “facts.” Better: The speaker’s questions about the star arise from the suppression of the rich history of Arab astrological knowledge. So it’s a lesson in the ways Islamophobia prevents a greater understanding of the world. Next!

Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky . . .

Hold on, hold on … okay, got it. The star’s remoteness is a metaphor for the entrenched power system and encourages a sense of powerlessness. The choice of a “diamond” is intentional, reminding the child of the commodification of natural resources and the brutal economies of the industries that extract them …

1. Just this morning, I saw a call to cancel the expression “low-hanging fruit” because it might remind people of lynching.

July 11, 2020

The “Puritan Moment” of The Current Year

Filed under: Britain, History, Liberty, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Nigel Jones on the long history of struggle between British puritans and libertarians:

Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.

Behind the wave of Wokeism that has swept and is now swamping Anglo-American Culture, is a pattern that has recurred throughout British History since the early 17th century. This is the pendulum that regularly swings between periods of joyful Libertarianism and purse lipped Puritanism.

Puritanism takes its name from the Calvinist religious movement that arose during the Protestant Reformation, partly in reaction to the explosive cultural Renaissance of the Elizabethan era – the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ralegh and John Donne.

The Puritans exported their austere doctrines to America aboard the Mayflower, where they eventually became one of the building blocks of the USA, and briefly achieved political power in England after the Civil War in the forbidding guise of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

We all have a mental picture of the Puritans in action. Sombrely dressed in black and grey, smashing the statues of saints, preaching their varied versions of the scriptures, and policing and banning anything when they suspected people of enjoying themselves, from Christmas festivities, to theatres, to fornicating for pleasure rather than reproduction. The Puritans endeavoured to dictate what people could think, speak and write. If this rings any bells with Wokeism, that is surely not coincidental.

There was an inevitable vengeful reaction to this po-faced culture of control and repression, and it soon came with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. King Charles II exemplified in his own libidinous person, with his myriad mistresses and tribe of illegitimate children, the loose culture of license that spread out from his court like a stain. This was the easy going Age of Lord Rochester and Nell Gwynn, so disapprovingly, if hypocritically, frowned on in the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. More darkly, the Puritan Regicides who had beheaded Charles’s father were hung, drawn and quartered along with Cromwell’s exhumed corpse.

The Libertarianism ushered in by the Restoration had a much longer run than the initial rule of Puritanism had enjoyed. It lasted through the Georgian Age of the 18th century, culminating in the decadence of the Regency bucks and Queen Victoria’s “wicked uncles”. Puritanism made its comeback with the accession of Victoria herself, with her eponymous reign infamous for its crinolines, covered piano legs, cruel persecution of that supreme Libertarian Oscar Wilde, and its massive hypocrisy – a constant adjunct of Puritanism when it comes up against the incontrovertible facts of life and human nature.

Neatly coinciding with the reign of Victoria’s despised eldest son, Libertarianism returned in the portly shape of Edward VII in the opening decade of the 20th century to which he gave his name. As during the Restoration, the ruling elite again set the tone of the Edwardian era with their shooting and hunting, their discreet adultery at country house weekends, and their lavish clubs and parties.

July 10, 2020

Freedom of speech – a tool to be discarded when your opponents try to use it

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

Arthur Chrenkoff discusses the recent uproar among progressives over an open letter calling for respect for free speech … when the “wrong kind of people” started signing on:

Godfrey Elfwick’s disturbingly accurate summary of free speech support among the woke.

So how did it come to this on a meta-level – how did the left, which for a long time championed ideas like freedom of speech, come to be the new censors and book burners?

The answer is short and simple: power.

Thanks to its Marxist heritage, the left is all about power. Who has it, who doesn’t (Lenin’s famous ur-question “who whom?”), how to get it. Power and power relationship is the ultimate touchstone and lodestar, the prism through everything else is seen and judged. Everything, including morality – what’s right, what’s wrong – flows from the position in this binary system (and with power it is a zero-sum game: you either have it all or you have none).

Turkish Islamist president Recep Erdogan has once famously said “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.” The stop – the end – is power; democracy is the mean to the end.

So it is with the left and freedom. The left was pro-freedom when it was on the way up. Being pro-freedom helped them achieve their objectives. Freedom of speech, for example, was important because it guaranteed them the ability to spread their ideas.

Now the left has the power, if not in all respects and in equal measure, certainly as far as culture is concerned, where it enjoys near hegemony. Being on top it doesn’t need freedom of speech anymore. Quite the contrary: freedom of speech now enables its critics to challenge their ideas and their position. Debate is a waste of time and effort, much better and more efficient is to silence any dissenting voices.

It’s never about principle – it’s about the side (yours) and power (yours to gain and keep).

July 7, 2020

L. Neil Smith on the Progressive agenda

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

His latest article in the Libertarian Enterprise:

For the full length of the last century, Western culture has been commanded by the blind, deaf, but never speechless entities who see things stubbornly as they prefer to see them, and “dream the impossible dream”, rather than see them as they really are. This mental habit has led to various messes that we find ourselves in today. To any extent that it might help us to get out of those messes, it might help to understand how we got into them.

Don’t look to the wrong assistance. Psychology, for example, is nothing at all like a science and those who practice it are nothing at all like scientists. Mostly they’re hyper-opinionated liberals. No two shrinks ever agree on a diagnosis, and official definitions of various mental illnesses are a grammatical and logical laugh riot. The great truth of life is that understanding character is an art, best left to master novelists and story-tellers.

Although they’ll seldom admit it, even to themselves, so-called Progressives know by now that they are wrong, that they have always been wrong. You might say that their wrongness has stood the test of time. So what is it that they really want? Their high-flown theories and values having failed them embarrassingly — a good example of that is the minimum wage, which destroys employment for entry-level and minority youth — rather than seeking new theories and values that might serve them and everybody better, they have turned to a kind of bitter nihilism. They hate and fear the society that has stubbornly refused to bend to their wills, and so it must die. Every single policy recommendation that they make — like the $15 minimum wage, for example, or defunding the police — is directed to that purpose.

Another good example would be “gun control”, which its opponents correctly label “victim disarmament”. As unconstitutional political pressures on private gun ownership increased, and self-defense culture was forced to organize itself (contrary to liberal belief, gun companies and the National Rifle Association were followers in this, not leaders) existing gun laws were gradually weakened. It became easier to obtain and carry a weapon — and necessary, in the view of those of us “delorables” who were constantly being threatened by left-wing political figures. During the Obama-Biden regime, at least 100 million guns were sold. And as they were, violent criminality began to decrease in double digits.

Today, except for many liberal-dominated hell-holes like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and a dozen others, Americans are headed to 19th century crime levels. Did Progressives ever notice or admit that crime had diminished? They did not. The process conflicted with their erroneous belief system, so they still call today for various measures punishing firearms manufacturers and retailers, and disarming individuals who have solved the problem that the politicians and the police have only made much worse for decades.

And so it goes, in all such matters as economics, education, the environment, nutrition, and everything else. Psychologists (who, like a broken clock, are right just this once) call the phenomenon projection: if Progressives can’t run their own lives (and very largely, judging from the kids they raise, they can’t), naturally that makes them and the rest of the bizarre menagerie that was typical of the Obama-Biden Administration qualified to run everybody else’s lives. And because Progressive policies are (at least one hopes) unconsciously suicidal, the rest of us are in for a rough ride.

July 6, 2020

QotD: The special moral insight of children

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

The idea that children, in their innocence, have special moral insight goes back a long way in Western culture — perhaps to the biblical injunction that, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” It has, of course, always warred with some variant of the belief that “children should be seen and not heard” — that children are not yet ready to hold up their end in adult conversations.

So when does the special moral insight of children manifest itself? When they are telling us that algebra is a stupid waste of time and the drinking age should be 14? No, funnily enough, children are only gifted with these special powers when they agree with the adults around them. Our long-standing cultural dichotomy lets adults use them strategically in political arguments, to push them forward as precious angels speaking words of prophecy to make a point, and then say, “hush, they’re just kids” when the children mar that point by acting like, well, children.

Adult organizations helped organize the walkouts, while casting them as a pure expression of youthful insight. Liberal communities proudly enabled the walkouts; liberal parents posted gushing accounts of their children’s protests on Facebook; liberal elite universities rushed to assure kids that walking out wouldn’t hurt them on college applications. Conservative communities, meanwhile, threatened to enforce the rules against disrupting class time. So the protests often ended up a better reflection of adult priorities than childish wisdom.

[…]

That is not to say that gun-control advocacy is stupid. But if you wouldn’t be swayed by a 17-year-old’s passionate advocacy for a lower drinking age — or for that matter, their ideas about Federal Reserve policy — then you should probably apply those same cautions to their other views, especially when they’re under so much pressure to conform. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Wednesday’s mass walkouts. But there’s nothing especially right about them either.

Megan McArdle, “The student walkout said more about adults than kids”, Washington Post, 2018-03-15.

July 3, 2020

Back to the Future Middle Ages

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

At Spiked, Dominic Frisby takes us back to a time when today’s progressive temper tantrums would fit in perfectly with accepted behaviours of the age … the Middle Ages:

A social media heretic faces trial

How much of what went on in the Middle Ages and early-modern periods do we look back on with abhorrence and a certain amount of perplexity? Burning witches at the stake, lynch mobs, self-flagellation – what possessed people to do such things, we wonder.

But take a step back, look about and you see many of these practices are still flourishing today, though they go by different names.

Here are just some of them.

Let’s start with excommunication. Excommunication meant so much more than being banned from taking communion. It involved you being shunned, shamed, spiritually condemned, even banished. Only through some kind of heavy penance – often a very public, lengthy and humiliating contrition – could you and your reputation be redeemed.

Excommunication became a powerful political weapon. It was dished out to enemies of the faith to destroy their legitimacy. Often it was used as a punishment for sins as minor as uttering the wrong opinion.

What are No Platforming and cancel culture if not a modern form of excommunication? Qualified, competent professionals are hounded out of their jobs and publicly shamed just for uttering the wrong opinion, often simply for a misjudged choice of words. Even just the wrong pronouns.

As often as not, their employer wants a quiet life, so he bows to activist pressure and sacks the target of the witch hunt. Cancel culture is excommunication.

Today’s religions, however, are not the many sects of Christianity that once perforated Europe, but climate change, education, the NHS, gay rights, trans rights, the European Union and multiculturalism. Even coronavirus and the lockdown have become sacrosanct.

Intellectuals of the right and left, from Polly Toynbee to Nigel Lawson, have described the NHS as Britain’s religion. It has replaced the Virgin Mary as the divine matriarch. Why this worship? I suggest it goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the state began to replace the church as the main provider of education, welfare and healthcare. After 1945, it was just a matter of time before the welfare state achieved altar status.

June 26, 2020

Progressive hate for nuclear power

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

In Quillette, Michael Shellenberger discusses the demands of some climate activists who also reject the best solutions to the problems they foresee:

For the last decade I have been obsessed with a question: Why are the people who are the most alarmist about environmental issues also opposed to all of the obvious solutions?

Those who raise the alarm about food shortages oppose expanding the use of chemical fertilizers, tractors, and GMOs. Those who raise the alarm about Amazon deforestation promote policies that fragment the forest. And those who raise the alarm about climate change oppose nuclear energy, the largest source of zero-emissions energy in developed nations. Why is that?

It is not an academic question for me. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an energy expert for 10 of them. I was adamantly against nuclear energy until about a decade ago when it became clear renewables couldn’t replace fossil fuels. After educating myself about the facts, I came to support the technology.

Over the last five years, I have campaigned, as founder and president of my small and independent nonprofit research organization, Environmental Progress, to expand the use of nuclear energy. During that time our main opponents have not been climate skeptics or even the fossil fuel industry but rather other climate activists.

This is the case around the world. It is climate alarmist Democrats and Greens who are seeking to shut down nuclear plants in the US and Europe. Greta Thunberg last year condemned the technology as “extremely dangerous, expensive, & time-consuming,” which is false. And Green New Deal architect Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has advocated closing the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York, which is now being replaced with natural gas.

In nearly every situation around the world, support for nuclear energy from climate activists like Thunberg and AOC would make the difference between nuclear plants staying open or closing, and being built or not being built. Had Thunberg spoken out in defense of nuclear power she likely could have prevented two reactors in her home nation of Sweden from being closed. Had AOC advocated for Indian Point rather than condemned it as dangerous, it could likely keep operating, for at least 40 years longer.

That’s because the main problem facing nuclear energy is that it’s unpopular — and far more among progressives than conservatives, and far more among women than men. There are no good technical or economic reasons that nations from the US and Japan to Sweden and Germany are closing their nuclear plants. Center-left governments are closing them early in response to the demands of progressives and Greens — the very same people who are claiming climate change will kill billions of people.

Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington, Ontario.
Photo by Óðinn via Wikimedia Commons.

Some prominent environmental groups have a pecuniary interest in replacing existing nuclear generating stations with natural gas and “renewable” energy sources, but money isn’t the only reason for the widespread opposition to nuclear power:

Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF have worked to shut down nuclear plants and replace them with fossil fuels and a smattering of renewables since the 1970s. They have created detailed reports for policymakers, journalists, and the public purporting to show that neither nuclear plants nor fossil fuels are needed to meet electricity demand, thanks to energy efficiency and renewables. And yet, as we have seen, almost everywhere nuclear plants are closed, or not built, fossil fuels are burned instead.

Thomas Malthus.
Portrait by John Linnell, 1834, via Wikimedia Commons

But it’s not just about money. It’s also about ideology. Anti-nuclear groups have long had a deeply ideological motivation to kill off nuclear energy.

Policymakers, journalists, conservationists, and other educated elites in the ’50s and ’60s knew that nuclear was unlimited energy and that unlimited energy meant unlimited food and water.

We could use desalination to convert ocean water into freshwater. We could create fertilizer without fossil fuels, by harvesting nitrogen from the air, and hydrogen from water, and combining them. We could create transportation fuels without fossil fuels, by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to make artificial hydrocarbons, or by splitting water to make pure hydrogen gas.

Nuclear energy thus created a serious problem for Malthusians — followers of widely-debunked 18th-century economist, Thomas Robert Malthus — who argued that the world was on the brink of ecological collapse and resource scarcity. Nuclear energy not only meant infinite fertilizer, freshwater, and food but also zero pollution and a radically reduced environmental footprint.

In reaction, Malthusians attacked nuclear energy as dangerous, mostly by suggesting that it would lead to nuclear war, but also by spreading misinformation about nuclear “waste” — the tiny quantity of used fuel rods — and the rapidly decaying radiation that escapes from nuclear plants during their worst accidents.

There is a pattern: Malthusians raise the alarm about resource depletion or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. In the late 1700s, Thomas Malthus had to reject birth control to predict overpopulation. In the 1960s, Malthusians had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And today, climate activists reject nuclear energy in order to declare a coming climate apocalypse.

June 22, 2020

According to the tenets of Critical Race Theory, it is impossible to be “non-racist”

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

A fascinating — and depressing — explanation of the core beliefs of those who subscribe to Critical Race Theory:

Haha, yes. “Non-racist” means racist.

You have to understand that one of the primary axioms of this worldview is that everyone with racial privilege of any kind (including light-skinned black people, non-black people of color, etc.) is by definition always and constantly racist.

This is because they have defined “systemic racism” to mean more or less everything that happens, and, so long as there are any differences on average in racial outcomes, the system must be racist (privilege hierarchy noted: Asians and Jews doing well doesn’t count for anything).

You will have noticed that this means “systemic racism” in practice creates a state of perpetual victimhood for the “racially oppressed.” Anything that happens at all that isn’t to some complainer’s liking must have been the result of racism, and it’s their job to find it.

As we hear from Robin DiAngelo and her colleagues: “The question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but ‘how did racism manifest in this situation?'” The racism is absolutely certain to have taken place somewhere, according to this Woke worldview.

This is what “understanding race” and “racism” means when the Woke say it. What you have to understand is that everything contains racism, and a sufficiently skilled complainer can find it and leverage it against you. So, maybe they’re right. You have to understand race/racism.

Thus, more specifically, if you think you are “non-racist” or “less racist,” you’re not just racist, you’re the worst kind of racist. Robin DiAngelo says that in White Fragility explicitly. No exaggeration. That’s her definition for a white progressive or a “good white person.”

A lot of the relevant literature rails on “good white people” (there’s even a completely mental book by this title), “white liberals,” and “white progressives,” who are identified as the worst kinds of racists because they believe they’re not.

Good White: Translations From The Wokish

This entry in ‘Translations from the Wokish’ is an explanation of the term “Good White.” https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-good-white/

So, everyone under this insane rubric has to accept that they are racist and then decide how “anti-racist” they want to be. So, you can be a racist who is a little “anti-racist,” a lot “anti-racist,” or not “anti-racist,” but you cannot be “not racist” or “less racist.”

No matter how “anti-racist” you are, it will not make you not-racist in the end, even if you do it perfectly (impossible, explicitly) for your entire lives (required minimum time commitment, again, explicitly). And these people say their goal is to end racism. Seems odd.

You can’t even become “less racist” in this ideology. There’s no such thing, and to believe you are that is to make yourself more racist because you’re less aware of your need to constantly acknowledge your racism and try to dismantle the system in which it’s embedded.

Robin DiAngelo tells us that the goal is to become “less white,” not “less racist.” I’m not making that up. It’s right there in White Fragility, which millions of people are reading (and being forced to read) right now. Whiteness is the racist system, so that’s the goal.

Of course, all the literature also points out that it’s not possible to avoid benefiting from racial privilege (including white skin or white-passing appearance or light skin or white adjacency), so being “less white” is also impossible. It’s a self-shaming project instead.

Go back and read that like five times. It’s really the theory.

So when you take up “anti-racism,” you’re just signing on to a program they’ve outlined that has absolutely nothing to do with making people less racist, which is impossible. It’s crucial to understand this. “Social Justice” explicitly says it’s only about groups and systems.

Quote: “If democracy is about individual rights (justice for individuals), then social justice is about group rights (justice for groups). And for me there is a fundamental difference between the general notion of justice and the notion of social justice.”

Social Justice
This entry in ‘Translations from the Wokish’ is an explanation of the term “Social Justice.” https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-social-justice/

So, “Social Justice” and thus “anti-racism” in that context is about making *the system* less racist, which is also impossible because the advocates of this Theory only measure by examining outcomes while looking for any and all problems in it.

Since “interest convergence” is one such problem, it’s sure to be found. This is the problem that makes it racist even for a racially privileged person to take up anti-racism. So, even being “anti-racist” increases one’s “racism” and the amount of “systemic racism” in the system.

Interest convergence is core Theory — mainstream Critical Race Theory, not fringe stuff. It says that racially privileged people only “do the right thing” by racially oppressed groups when it is also in their own self-interests. This is cynical in the extreme. Also, useless.

Interest convergence always moves the discussion of racism into hidden, terrible motivations and thus is an impediment to solving any problems of racism. Such impediments, though, are the fault of the racism in the system, not the terrible Theory, according to Theory.

So, even by trying ON THEIR (rather sadistic) TERMS you’re guaranteed not to be able to fix the racist system because fixing it is in the interests of racially dominant people which automatically perpetuates the racism in the system.

You’re also sure to notice that trying to fix a system is always guaranteed to leave out many, sometimes most, of the actual human beings within the system, at least if you still have a bit of your cortex outside of this paranoid way of thinking.

Why? The amount of knowledge and information processing necessary to perfect complex human systems vastly exceeds the processing power of any existing supercomputer, for starters. It just can’t be done.

Of course, our supercomputers vastly exceed the processing power of people who went to college to learn how critical thinking and systematic organization are features of white supremacy and not to be learned. So… there’s that.

So, even “anti-racism” is “racism,” and the whole thing is a giant fraud that’s being used to shake-down our institutions and corporations for the power and grift of the hustlers pushing it. Good people should be livid at this.

Have a nice day.

H/T to Aaron M. on MeWe for the link.

June 18, 2020

The fall of olde timey “liberalism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren on the way “liberalism” was dissected, consumed, digested, and excreted by progressivism:

From different angles, from Tocqueville to Schumpeter to a thousand reporters on the ground, it has been observed that liberalism defeats itself. I mean by this real liberalism, not the poison candy version that is offered to children by our academic Left. The real thing celebrates liberty as the central political good, and equality of opportunity versus equality of result. It frees up economies and societies, by cancelling hidebound rules and regulations. When much younger and under the influence of my father and his war-veteran generation (his was World War II), I considered myself a “liberal,” for views that activist mobs would now consider to be deeply “conservative,” or as they say, “fascist.”

Opposition to totalitarianism was a key to that generation. They weren’t shy about using arms. A true liberal was an enthusiast for the War in Vietnam, and other global initiatives. Liberals were “open society” in an explicitly anti-communist, 1950s way. They loved “civil rights,” and opposed the Nanny State, although incoherently. They wished to accommodate the women’s movement. Their instinctive suspicion of social programmes, and revulsion for “ideology,” were slipping away; or had already slipped, to a longer historical view.

To be tediously economic, they were intoxicated by the view that, “now we are rich we can afford to have some fun.” They had long been bored with the absolute moral judgements that their ancestors (to whom neither divorce nor contraception were thinkable) took for granted — based on a Protestant Christianity that had been abandoned by sophisticated intellectuals a century before. “Church versus State” was no longer an issue, and because it wasn’t, morality became a statist “construct,” even without action from the Marxists.

When Ross Douthat writes a book on “decadence,” he is treating it as a temporal trend: something that comes and goes through the decades. His arguments are themselves decadent: something for the chattering classes to play, in the spirit of badminton. It is a topic for upmarket wit; no horror lurks beneath it. The old Gibbonesque “decline and fall” narrative has evaporated with classical culture, and been replaced by a dry happyface from which the wrinkles of serious history are botoxed. The “whig view of history” survives, but only by cliché.

What isn’t defended, is soon killed off, in nature but also in metaphysics. Leftism flourishes today, not because it has won any argument, but by eating everything on the liberal side. Even the word, “liberal,” went down with a soft burp. It now represents the denial, or reversal, of everything that liberals once stood for. Gentle reader may prove this to himself, by reading old magazines.

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