Quotulatiousness

April 16, 2023

Raising the minimum retirement age may be necessary, but it will never be politically popular

Filed under: France, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As protests and riots continue against the French government’s attempt to raise the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64, Theodore Dalrymple explains why he finds sympathy with the working poor who will be most directly hurt by the change:

Riot police on the streets of Bordeaux as violent protests against French government plans to raise the retirement age continue.
YouTube screen capture from an AFP report.

As I hope to be able to work till my dying day, I am perhaps not the right person to animadvert on the present disturbances in France about the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64. My work has always been pleasing to me, and it remains so; I even manage to delude myself sometimes that it is important.

I am forced to recognize, however, that not everyone is in the same happy position as I. I am sure that if I had been a dustman all my life, I should not hope to be emptying dustbins at my present age (73), let alone at the age of 85. While my work remains work, and in a certain sense occasionally even hard work, especially when I have to think, what I do is not physically demanding. No one ever got arthritis or fibrosis of the lung by writing a few articles.

The reform of the pension system in France, from my limited understanding of it, is rather unfair. It is true that some reform is necessary: There are ever fewer workers to fund the pensions of ever more pensioners (the system being entirely unfunded by investment). On the other hand, it is those who do the most unpleasant and unremunerative jobs who have to work the longest, and the reform only increases this unfairness. As the old cockney song has it, it’s the rich what gets the pleasure.

Nevertheless, the extreme opposition to the reform, which is hardly a radical one, strikes most foreigners as rather strange. In a way it is also sad, for it implies that a long retirement is the main aim of all that precedes it, which in turn implies that all the work done for several decades before retirement has been an unpleasant imposition rather than something of value in itself. That the quid pro quo for a longer life expectancy is a greater number of years spent working seems not to strike anyone with force.

The demonstrators probably think, no doubt correctly, that the reform is the thin end of a wedge: If it is allowed to pass without a fuss, there will be further such reforms until the retirement age will be 70, 80, or never, depending on life expectancy. As for the younger demonstrators, they do not seem to worry much that it is they who will be paying for the people older than themselves to retire early, the distant prospect of early retirement being more real to them than the far more proximate high rates of taxation.

March 27, 2023

The war against fertility

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

Chris Bray:

The effacement of women’s bodies is changing from a cultural signal to a battlefield maneuver. The acceleration of the presence of men as dominant participants in women’s sports, the growing intensity of casually monstrous blue zone attacks on families and parenting, the emergence of drag queens — men playacting as women, burlesque cartoons about sexual identity — as The Most Important Symbol Ever (and something children should definitely see) …

… and now this:

That’s footage from a Let Women Speak event in Auckland, New Zealand, where women arguing that “women” are “adult human females” were physically attacked by a mob of “transwomen” — by men — and their allies. It’s very progressive when men dressed as women silence women and hurt them. More here, also linked above.

In the opening paragraph of this post, you may have thought that one of the things I mentioned was different than the other things — that the blue state assault on families and parenting isn’t specifically gendered, and is equally an assault on the role of mothers and fathers. And it is. But.

It seems to me that the very very strange thing breaking out all over the world — or all over the Anglosphere, because I don’t see Nigeria and Peru and Singapore going all-in on transgendered everything — is loaded with subtext about a febrile loathing for fertility. In policy, we’re incentivizing childlessness, and disincentivizing childbearing. Birthrates are declining sharply, and were declining even before the mRNA injections, while blue state governments work on laws that tell would-be parents their children can vanish from their custody on political pretexts. Who has the future children while the state says that hey, nice family you have there, be a shame if something were to happen to it?

I suspect the reason so much hate and rage is being directed at women is that their bodies can produce babies, which means that the hate and rage is being directed at the future. Peachy Keenan, who’s all over this stuff in multiple forums, wrote recently about Hicklibs on Parade, describing “how deeply the postmodern, anti-human gender ideology has penetrated into what we used to call ‘middle America'”:

    In Plano, Texas last fall, an “all-ages” drag brunch attracted some unwanted attention from people who thought they lived in a conservative state. At the brunch — which was held at Ebb & Flow, an eatery in an upscale strip mall — a buffoonish man in a dress wearing cat ears sings, “My p*ssy good, p*ssy sweet, p*ssy good enough to eat”, while flashing his underwear.

    In the video from the event, a four-year old girl stares in shock as the “drag” performer twerks and grinds for the ladies in attendance.

    The people in the crowd watching this man systematically strip away a little girl’s innocence look like nice friendly Texans; plump grandmas and families and the types you’d run into at the local Costco. They are not hipsters; they are not edgy. They look normal!

    This is what makes all of this so striking. These slightly downmarket Texan and Midwestern prairie home companion women have, historically, been the only thing holding this rickety old country together.

February 16, 2023

The mass spell to destroy Hogwarts Legacy turns out to be a squib

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

All the angry people on social media had a new thing to be angry about: the release of a new online game based on the works of she-who-must-not-be-named (that’d be J.K. Rowling if you haven’t been keeping up with the woke’s ledger book of cancelled persons). They’d gather in their mighty legions, denounce the evil woman and the tech company would shiver and shake and then apologize for offending them and pull the game from the market, just like so many other companies had fallen to their online rage before.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way, as Tom Knighton relates:

The extreme left, those we term as “woke”, like to think they have a great deal of power. They think they’re the majority of the nation, and that they can shift the world based on their own whims.

And, in the past, it sure looked like it.

They’d get on Twitter and scream in outrage and brands would back down. They’d issue apologies and capitulate with the mob.

Then JK Rowling got on their bad side. She doesn’t think transwomen are women, that they haven’t lived with the struggles that women grow up with.

So, they decided to destroy anything they can associate with her.

That included the new video game, Hogwarts Legacy. Before the game came out, they tried to sabotage it on Steam, describing it as a “genocide simulator”.

I’ll be honest, that made me want to play the game. Apparently, I was far from alone.

    Hogwarts Legacy has got off to a very big start at UK games retail, and is comfortably the No.1 game of the week (GfK data).

    It is the biggest launch for any Harry Potter game ever, with sales 64% higher than the previous best — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from 2001. In fact, the biggest week for a Harry Potter game wasn’t a launch week at all, it was the second week of the Philosopher’s Stone (due to hype around the movie). Even compared to that week, Hogwarts Legacy was still bigger by 2%.

    This result is more impressive when you consider this is just for physical sales. Hogwarts Legacy would have received a substantial number of digital downloads (that data will come later in the week), whereas Philosopher’s Stone didn’t have any digital sales back in 2001. Therefore, the success will be even more pronounced once all the data is in.

In other words, the woke don’t have the pull they like to believe they do.

In a rational world, companies would see this and take it to heart: despite their apparent popularity on some social media sites, the very very woke are a tiny layer of froth on the ocean of non-woke customers. It’s often said that the terminally online think that Twitter is the real world — which is why Elon Musk taking over their preferred online megaphone was so traumatic to so many of them — but they’re mostly bellowing at one another, not at the population as a whole.

February 15, 2023

J.K. Rowling’s critics reach the “Burn the witch!” phase

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Free Press, Megan Phelps-Roper introduces a new audio series featuring extensive interaction with J.K. Rowling herself:

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books were insanely popular among Millennials until she had the temerity to say things the Trans* activists hated. Now, they try to sell customized copies of her books that omit her name completely.

J.K. Rowling is arguably the most successful author in the history of publishing, with the possible exception of God. And “Harry Potter” was a kind of bible for my generation. Since its publication beginning in the late ’90s, the series has taught tens of millions of children about virtues like loyalty, courage, and love — about the inclusion of outsiders and the celebration of difference. The books illustrated the idea of moral complexity, how a person who may at first appear sinister can turn out to be a hero after all.

The author herself became part of the legend, too. A broke, abused, and depressed single mother — writing in longhand at cafes across Edinburgh while her baby girl slept in a stroller beside her — she had spun a tale that begat a global phenomenon. If “Harry Potter” was a bible, then Rowling became a kind of saint.

When she gave the Harvard commencement address in 2008, she was introduced as a social, moral, and political inspiration. Her speech that day was partly about imagination: “the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared”.

“We do not need magic to transform our world,” Rowling told the rapt audience. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.”

The uproarious applause that greeted her in 2008 is hard to imagine today. It’s hard to imagine Harvard — let alone any prestigious American university — welcoming Rowling. Indeed, I’m not sure she’d be allowed to give a reading at many local libraries.

That’s because to many, Rowling has since become a kind of Voldemort — the villain of villains in her own stories.

It all blew up in the summer of 2020.

“‘People who menstruate'”, Rowling wrote on Twitter, quoting a headline. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

She continued: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

It’s hard to capture the breadth of the firestorm that followed.

January 24, 2023

The Vietnam War still has echoes in US politics

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

In UnHerd, Dominic Sandbrook outlines the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War:

From George L. MacGarrigle, The United States Army in Vietnam: Combat Operations, Taking the Offensive, October 1966-October 1967. Washington DC: Center of Military History, 1998. (Via Wikimedia)

In the course of his troubled presidency, Richard Nixon spoke 14 times to the American people about the war in Vietnam. It was in one of those speeches that he coined the phrase “the silent majority”, while others provoked horror and outrage from those opposed to America’s longest war. But of all these televised addresses, none enjoyed a warmer reaction that the speech Nixon delivered on 23 January 1973, announcing that his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had achieved a breakthrough in the Paris peace talks with the North Vietnamese.

At last, Nixon said, the war was over. At a cost of 58,000 American lives and some $140 billion, not to mention more than two million Vietnamese lives, the curtain was falling. The last US troops would be brought home. South Vietnam had won the right to determine its own future, while the Communist North had pledged to “build a peace of reconciliation”. Despite the high price, Nixon insisted Americans could be proud of “one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations”. He had not started the war, but it had dominated his presidency, earning him the undying enmity of those who thought the United States should just get out. But the struggle had been worth it to secure “the right kind of peace, so that those who died and those who suffered would not have died and suffered in vain”. He called it “peace with honour”.

Fifty years on, Nixon’s proclamation of peace with honour has a bitterly ironic ring. As we now know, much of what he said that night was misleading, disingenuous or simply untrue. South Vietnam was in no state to defend itself, and collapsed just two years later. The North Vietnamese had no intention of laying down their weapons, and resumed the offensive within weeks. And Nixon and Kissinger never seriously thought they had secured a lasting peace. They knew the Communists would carry on fighting, and fully intended to intervene with massive aerial power when they did. But then came Watergate. With Nixon crippled, Congress forbade further intervention and slashed funding to the government in Saigon. On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace, and it really was all over.

Half a century later, have the scars of Vietnam really healed? It remains not only America’s longest war but one of its most divisive, comparable only with the Civil War in its incendiary cultural and political impact. The fundamental narrative trajectory of the late Sixties — the turn from shiny space-age Technicolor optimism to strident, embittered, anti-technological gloom — would have been incomprehensible without the daily images of suffering and slaughter on the early evening news. It was Vietnam that destroyed trust in government, in institutions, in order and authority. In 1964, before Lyndon Johnson sent in combat troops after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, fully three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government. By 1976, a year after the fall of Saigon, not even one in four did so.

It was in the crucible of Vietnam, too, that you can spot many of the tensions that now define American politics. Perhaps the most potent example came in May 1970, after Nixon invaded nominally neutral Cambodia to eliminate the North Vietnamese Army’s jungle sanctuaries. First, on 4 May, four students were shot and killed by the National Guard during a demonstration at Kent State University, Ohio. Then, on 8 May, hundreds more students picketed outside the New York Stock Exchange, only to be attacked by several hundred building workers waving American flags.

The “hard hat riot”, as it became known, was the perfect embodiment of patriotic populist outrage at what Nixon’s vice president, leading bribery enthusiast Spiro Agnew, called “the nattering nabobs of negativism … an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterise themselves as intellectuals”. Today it seems almost predictable, just another episode in the long-running culture wars. But at the time it seemed genuinely shocking. And with his brilliantly ruthless eye for a tactical advantage, Nixon saw its potential. When he invited the construction workers’ leaders to the White House two weeks later, he knew exactly what was doing. “The hard hat will stand as a symbol, along with our great flag,” he said, “for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country”.

January 17, 2023

QotD: The Activist-Wanker Caste

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

As the activist delight in vandalism and traffic obstruction has cropped up in the comments, along with their bizarre rationalisations, I thought it might be worth revisiting some earlier rumblings on the subject.

For instance,

    It’s interesting just how often “social justice” posturing entails something that looks an awful lot like spite or petty malice, or an attempt to harass and dominate, or some other obnoxious behaviour. Behaviour that, without a “social justice” pretext, might get you called a wanker or a bitch. A coincidence, I’m sure.

It is, I think, worth pondering why it is that these supposed displays of righteousness routinely take the form of obnoxious or bullying or sociopathic behaviour, whereby random people are screwed over and dominated, and often reduced to pleading. Pleading just to get home, to children, or to work, or to get to the doctor’s surgery. Even ambulances and fire engines can be obstructed, indefinitely, with moral indifference. Among our self-imagined betters, it seems to be the go-to approach for practically any purported cause. Which seems terribly convenient. Almost as if the supposed activism were more of a pretext, an excuse, a license to indulge pre-existing urges.

And what kind of person would have urges like that?

David Thompson, “Make Way For The Activist-Wanker Caste”, DavidThompson, 2022-10-16.

January 16, 2023

“The Commission has no power to find liability. Its report will not bind the government”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Donna Laframboise continues to cover the Emergencies Act inquiry submissions, including one from Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Shortly after the Emergencies Act commission finished listening to witnesses, he authored a grim opinion piece in the Toronto Sun.

His expectations are exceedingly low. In his words, the commission’s

    mandate is not to rule on the legality of the government’s actions but to inquire into “the circumstances that led to the declaration being issued and the measures taken for dealing with the emergency”. The Commission has no power to find liability. Its report will not bind the government. The Commission is ritual, and the purpose of ritual is performance not outcome – to make it appear that there is accountability without having to provide it. [bold added]

Let us hope he’s mistaken, and that Commissioner Paul Rouleau has a pleasant surprise in store for us. Whatever happens, Pardy’s article provides a useful history lesson. It describes the series of events that prompted the use of similar legislation the last time around:

    Between 1963 and 1970, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) committed hundreds of bombings and several robberies, killing six people, including Quebec deputy premier Pierre Laporte. In response, Pierre Trudeau’s government invoked the War Measures Act.

Six murders – including the politically motivated kidnapping and execution of a deputy premier. Seven years of violence. Hundreds of bombings. Compare and contrast to the three-week festive, bouncy-castle, hot-tub trucker protest in which not a single person was robbed, bombed, or murdered.

Times sure have changed. Today, the same Canadian federal government that talks constantly about equity, diversity, and inclusion failed to do a single thing to make the protesting truckers feel as though their concerns, perspectives, or lives mattered. Diversity is something the government preaches, but doesn’t practice. Disagree with the Prime Minister and you’re a fringe minority with unacceptable views. Inclusion is a fancy word that makes politicians feel good about themselves, but it isn’t a principle that informs their actual behavour.

January 13, 2023

“Forced teaming”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay provides us with our new term of the week:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

I learned a new term this week: “Forced teaming“. It describes what happens when a group of people — say, gay men and lesbian women — are forbidden from breaking ranks with some larger constituency, such as (in this case) the LGBT movement.

The example I’m discussing here is one that Quillette writers have been exploring for several years now. As author Allan Stratton noted last year, the central ideological fixation of many transgender-rights activists is the negation of biological sex as a meaningful marker of human identity. The true source of sexual attraction, they will insist, isn’t the reality of sexed male and female bodies; but rather an abstract gender spirit lodged within our souls, which somehow broadcasts itself in a way that prospective romantic partners are able to sense and interpret. As Stratton notes, this mythology isn’t just flagrantly wrong. It’s also homophobic to such extent that it denies the sexually defined nature of gay identity. Moreover, this homophobic element can’t be excised from gender ideology without fatally undercutting the (typically unspoken) mission of many biologically male trans activists, since giving up this claim “would be to admit that a lesbian isn’t going to be attracted to a male body, no matter how many times she is assured that the body in question belongs to someone who identifies as a woman.”

On Wednesday, Montreal-based Substacker Eliza Mondegreen provided an eyewitness report that helps illustrate what the “forced teaming” of ideologically non-compliant LGB men and women now looks like. The Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (CHRLP) at McGill University had planned to host a January 9th talk about the tension between sex and gender identity, to be delivered by Robert Wintemute, a professor of Human Rights Law at King’s College London. According to the event page, he was to discuss “whether or not the law should be changed to make it easier for a transgender individual to change their legal sex from their birth sex, and about exceptional situations, such as women-only spaces and sports, in which the individual’s birth sex should take priority over their gender identity, regardless of their legal sex.”

Though Wintemute seems the furthest thing from a bigot (or even a conservative), he is loathed by many trans activists due to what they see as an act of unforgivable apostasy. In 2006, Wintemute co-authored something called the “Yogyakarta Principles“, an international manifesto demanding that unfettered self-identification be recognized as the one and only means of distinguishing men from women. But he later recanted, declaring that “a key factor in my change of opinion has been listening to women”. Needless to say, many of Wintemute’s former activist friends then began treating him like Lord Voldemort. And Montreal’s Gazette newspaper, echoing such denunciations, darkly warned readers that the visiting human-rights professor had “ties to LGB Alliance, an advocacy group described by various LGBTQ2+ organizations and activists as a transphobic hate group”. (In truth, the LGB Alliance is simply a British charity that, as its name suggests, signal-boosts lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals who believe that the interests of L, G, and B are now sometimes at cross-purposes with T.)

British feminists, who by now are well used to progressive mobs shutting down speaking events in the name of trans solidarity, may guess the rough contours of what happened next. A self-described “transfeminist sapphic activist” named Celeste Trianon compared Wintemute to a “cannibal”, and announced a protest, suggesting that followers should “bring out the pitchforks”.

December 13, 2022

Unacceptable Views trailer

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Donna Laframboise:

Unacceptable Views is a fantastic new documentary film about the Freedom Convoy protest. All 100 minutes of it can be watched for free on Rumble here. Sharp, marvelous footage. Great interviews with truckers who went to Ottawa.

One of my favourite scenes occurs around the 19:20-minute mark. A Polish immigrant talks about being arrested as a teenager in Poland during the 1981 freedom protests in that country. She looks into the camera and says:

    I’m so proud that the young generation finally have balls and they stand up for the freedom …

The next gentleman who appears on screen, a Sikh, denies witnessing any misogyny, racism, anger, or violence in Ottawa. Instead, he describes the protest as “heaven on Earth, the energy was supreme”.

(more…)

November 30, 2022

The widespread anti-lockdown protests in China … and how Apple is helping suppress them

Filed under: China, Government, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

N.S. Lyons admires what can only be described as potentially revolutionary protests across many of China’s big cities and resisting further lockdowns by the government:

Something extraordinary happened in China over the weekend. Not long ago I wrote at length, if in a rather different context, about the vital importance of courage in the defense of the true and the human against the cold, mechanistic evil that is nihilistic technocracy, the machine whose Conditioners forever lust after total control – not only over men, but ultimately over reality itself. Well, now we have just seen a stunning example of such courage in the streets of China, where people rose up to reassert their human dignity in the face of the most dehumanizing machine of control in the world today: the Chinese Communist Party’s “zero-Covid” terror-state.

For three years now, the Chinese government has maintained its policy of draconian city-wide lockdowns, endless daily mass testing and biomedical surveillance, digital Covid-passes that arbitrarily govern every aspect of daily life, vast camps to house those dragged into quarantine for weeks (or longer) at a time, and, more recently, such innovations as “closed-loop” factories, where workers are forced to work, sleep, and “live” completely isolated from the outside world so that they can continue to produce your iPhones.

But now over the past several days protests have erupted in at least a dozen cities and 79 universities across the country, with spontaneous demonstrations – often begun by only a handful of people, or even a single individual – quickly drawing crowds of hundreds, even thousands, of people willing to fearlessly demand an end to the zero-Covid nightmare.

In Wuhan, where it all began, swarming crowds smashed down containment barriers and “liberated” locked-down neighborhoods:

[…]

All across the country, many thousands of these protesters spontaneously echoed many of the same lines:

    We don’t want PCR tests. We want to eat.

    We don’t want Cultural Revolution. We want reform.

    We don’t want lockdowns. We want freedom.

    We don’t want a Great Leader. We want the vote.

    We don’t want lies. We want dignity.

    We aren’t slaves. We are citizens.

These are conspicuously the same lines as those of a banner hung from a Beijing bridge by a lone (since disappeared) protester, Peng Lifa, on the 13th of October, just ahead of the CCP’s 20th Party Congress and Xi Jinping’s re-coronation as Chinese leader for life.

Now, as recordings of the anti-lockdown protests are swiftly censored online, Chinese netizens have often simply been replying with “We saw it” – a phrase referring not just to the protests, but to Peng Lifa’s message.

His final and most striking line, on a second banner, happens to have been:

    “Refuse to go to class. Go on strike. Remove the traitor Xi Jinping.”

And indeed in many protests over the last few days the people’s frustration with zero-Covid tyranny translated into something more: an outpouring of raw anger against the CCP and Xi.

Of course, China’s ruling Communist regime isn’t without its loyal supporters and useful idiots like Apple:

Maybe something will come of the COVID lockdown protests in China. Maybe not, if you’re old enough to remember the guy who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, and who was never identified nor ever seen again. More likely, the Chinese Communist Party will crack down again, and the people of China will become compliant again.

And the West will turn a blind eye. Again.

Here’s what was in the latest iPhone update, according to Zachary M. Seward of Quartz:

    Hidden in the update was a change that only applies to iPhones sold in mainland China: AirDrop can only be set to receive messages from everyone for 10 minutes, before switching off. There’s no longer a way to keep the “everyone” setting on permanently on Chinese iPhones. The change, first noticed by Chinese readers of 9to5Mac, doesn’t apply anywhere else.

In other words, Chinese iPhone users can’t do or say anything without the CCP knowing about it. Dissent can be quashed before it even starts. The Chinese people can be kept under the CCP’s thumb. And Apple is helping.

November 29, 2022

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, expert projectionist

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Donna Laframboise on part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s performance last Friday at the Public Order Emergency Commission’s hearings in Ottawa:

There’s a concept in psychology known as projection – accusing others of your own shortcomings. Last week Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, told an Emergencies Act hearing that Freedom Convoy protesters didn’t just want to talk. They wanted, he said, to be obeyed.

That was a strange word for him to use. About people he’d never spoken to. Yet it sums up his own posture rather nicely: Don’t bother trying to change my mind. I’m in charge, you must obey. Conversation over. Case closed.

According to Mr. Trudeau, the Freedom Convoy didn’t deserve a face-to-face meeting with his government because it wanted to change public policy. How terrible that free people, in a free country might want some influence over the increasingly draconian COVID rules they were required to follow. How unreasonable for them to come to Ottawa in an attempt to communicate the depths of their desperation.

A Prime Minister who received less than 33% of the votes cast during the federal election a mere four months earlier chose to thumb his nose at these protesters. Get lost, peasants. You will not be changing public policy.

[…]

We need to recognize what has happened here. The same federal officials who meet with corporate lobbyists by the thousands refused to have a single meeting with the truckers.

This, ladies and gentleman, is the state of Canada’s democracy.

November 28, 2022

It’s not a “conspiracy theory” if you’re just repeating the words they say themselves

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

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann on the clear declarations of climate activists that abolishing capitalism is part of their overall goal:

For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life’s purpose was to save the world from climate change. Now she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow “the whole capitalist system”, which she says is responsible for “imperialism, oppression, genocide … racist, oppressive extractionism”. The “activists” of the doomsday cult “Last Generation” say quite openly that their goal is the abolition of capitalism.

Examine the standard work of anti-capitalist climate change activists, and you will quickly see what I mean. Naomi Klein, the popular critic of capitalism and globalization, admits she initially had no particular interest in the issues surrounding and related to climate change. Then, in 2014, she wrote a hefty 500-page tome called This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.

Why did she suddenly become so interested in climate change? Well, prior to writing this 2014 book, Klein’s main interest was the fight against free trade and globalization.

She admits in her writing: “I was propelled into a deeper engagement with [the topic of climate change] partly because I realized it could be a catalyst for forms of social and economic justice in which I already believed.” And she hopes for “a new kind of climate movement to take up the fight against so-called free trade”. She strictly rejects highly efficient solutions, such as climate-friendly nuclear energy, because she is not at all interested in solutions within the framework of capitalism.

Klein writes that she recognizes that climate change presents a chance to “collectively use the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now” and “that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change … it could be the best argument progressives have ever had … to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals … to open borders to migrants.” The climate crisis could “form the basis of a powerful mass movement”, and this movement should set itself the following objectives:

  • to “radically expand the commons” (i.e., state-owned property and resources)
  • to introduce a “carefully planned economy”
  • to “change pretty much everything about our economy”
  • to introduce “new taxes, new public works programs”
  • “reversals of privatizations”
  • “extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known — the oil and gas industry”
  • government guidelines on “how often we drive, how often we fly, whether our food has to be flown to get to us, whether the goods we buy are built to last … how large our homes are”
  • “a fundamental reordering of the component parts of Gross Domestic Product”
  • “less private investment in producing for excessive consumption”
  • “increased government spending”
  • “a great deal more redistribution”

Klein embraces a suggestion that the well-off 20 percent in a population take the largest cuts in order to create a fairer society. She argues that “our economic system and our planetary system are now at war”, and the only suitable response is “revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony”.

November 15, 2022

New Zealand’s “splintered reality”

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

Earlier in 2022, when most of us were distracted by the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, New Zealand was having its own populist protest moment, as Chris Bray recounts:

Back in February, protesters gathered outside New Zealand’s parliament began warning that police were using LRAD sound cannons to disrupt their protest. To the news media, it was evidence of how stupid and crazy the protesters had become, and still more proof of the obvious silliness of the anti-vaccine mandate protests in general.

Here are the first three paragraphs of that news story, laying it on thick with baseless claims and tinfoil hats:

    Wellington anti-mandate protesters have been seen wearing tin foil hats, as some baselessly claim they are being targeted by “tech weapons” directed at them.

    A video posted on Facebook on Thursday under the name Carlene Louise has attracted attention on social media.

    In the video, the protester said people at the occupation site in Wellington are getting ill and claims without any evidence that the cause is “EMF machines”, “radiation machines” and “technological weapons” being directed at the occupation.

Four months later, police confirmed that they had used LRAD cannons against the protesters, though they claimed they didn’t use them until March. See, so it totally was a baseless conspiracy theory. Tinfoil hatted morons! Falsely claiming that the police did … what they … did. Hold on a second.

This nice bookending of claims and facts, and many other extraordinarily insightful juxtapositions, comes from a short documentary that, unfortunately, appears to only be available on YouTube:

In just half an hour, this is the whole thing, a perfect depiction of the “disinformation” project as it works everywhere. Note the moment when a news anchor and New Zealand’s bizarre prime minister are having an exchange about the viciousness and terrifying blood thirst of the far-right anti-government protesters, and the camera cuts away to show the protest, undercutting the description in real time. Note the moment when the disinformation expert tells an interviewer that she has determined that the protests are violent and dangerous, and then explains that people inside the protest believe that they’re engaged in a project of peace and love — a frightening example, she explains, of the splintered reality these people occupy inside their echo chamber. Note the moment when a member of parliament warns that anti-mandate protests are “fascist”.

And note, above all, how confused the news media figures are as they discuss the way their accurate and factual reporting from the perimeter of the protest, responsibly informed by experts and authorities, is being irresponsibly contradicted by livestreaming from inside the protest.

November 8, 2022

“Just Stop Oil” and other nihilistic doomsday cults

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Tom Slater says we have to accurately label groups like the Extinction Rebellion spin-off “Just Stop Oil” rather than giving them the rather anodyne label of “protest groups”:

We need to stop calling Just Stop Oil a protest group. Protesters is far too positive a word to describe this strange assemblage of middle-class agitators, with their cut-glass accents and self-parodying bohemian names (shouts out to Indigo Rumbelow), who have been gluing themselves to roads and throwing soup at great works of art in an attempt to end oil and gas production. This thing is a doomsday cult, masquerading as a political campaign. There’s really no denying it any longer.

Take the case of that 24-year-old woman who climbed up one of the gantries over the M25 this morning, in order to bring all the ignorant, carbon-spewing plebs to a standstill. She posted an unnerving video online. In it, she is fighting back tears. She gives vent to a seemingly sincere apocalyptic terror. “I’m here because I don’t have a future!”, she says, in between sobs. She accuses the government of murder, of fuelling a “climate crisis” she seems to be convinced is killing millions, for having the temerity to exploit oil and gas to keep the UK’s lights on.

That what she’s saying is alarmist nonsense should be obvious to anyone. The truth is almost the inverse of what she is saying. Thanks to economic development, fuelled by cheap and reliable energy, annual deaths worldwide from climate-related disasters have plunged by more than 95 per cent over the past century. She also implies that the floods in Pakistan are the fault of fossil fuels, even though those feted IPCC reports say there is insufficient evidence to show that climate change is making floods more frequent, lengthy or intense. What would be considerably more murderous would be for our government to shun reliable oil and gas supplies as the nation’s pensioners head into a harsh winter, amid sky-high energy prices and talk of blackouts.

Such blithe disregard for the details reminds us that these people don’t really care about climate change. They’re hysterical about climate change. They’re apocalyptic about climate change. They aren’t taking to the streets, motorways and art galleries because they are convinced of a particular scientific view with regards to the environment and think something really ought to be done about it. They are in the grip of a fact-lite and doom-laden narrative that insists literally billions will die in short order, that the twentysomethings of today might not live to see their dotage, because of our damnable desire to live comfortable and free lives.

All of this is why environmental protest – with Just Stop Oil and the various other Extinction Rebellion offshoots to the fore – has become so much weirder in recent years. And that’s saying something. Beyond all the crying and talk of having no future, there’s also the setting of arms on fire, the pouring of human shit over memorials to Captain Sir Tom Moore, the throwing of soup over great works of art … it’s all become rather visceral, iconoclastic, scatological. In a word, it’s all become rather creepy. These are the acts not of future-oriented protesters keen to shape and change the world, but of cultists convinced that doomsday is almost upon us.

As someone else pointed out recently, there’s more than a bit of a resemblance between the kind of actions taken by protest groups like “Just Stop Oil” and the tantrums of very small children.

October 23, 2022

“It’s starting to be noteworthy how often people in government record their important conversations”

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

From the kindness of his heart, Paul Wells decided to make this column available to cheapskate non-paying subscribers like me because he feels it needs to be seen by a wider audience. The topic is the ongoing inquiry into the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act and it’s certainly promising to stay entertaining for a while (unlike the vast majority of such inquiries):

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The goal of it all is to permit Rouleau to decide whether the Emergencies Act was used properly when it was invoked, for the first time in its 34-year existence, by the Trudeau government to end the mess in Ottawa’s Centretown. But it’s also a deep dive into conflicting ideas of police doctrine, the best look we’ve had at the stressed and dysfunctional city administration in Ottawa. And while we haven’t yet heard much about the Trudeau government’s processes, that’s coming. The prime minister and seven of his senior cabinet ministers, with their deputies, will testify soon.

Nobody can keep up with it. For Ottawa reporters it’s as though we’ve dragged ourselves for a decade through a desert of talking points and euphemisms into an oasis of unbelievable information bounty. The temptation is to gorge. I took Wednesday off, only to learn that Diane Deans, the city councillor who was heading the Ottawa Police Service Board when the mess began, secretly recorded the call in which she informed Mayor Jim Watson that she’d gone ahead and negotiated the hiring of an interim police chief Watson had never heard of. […]

Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have written it better. Deans tells Watson she’s found a new police chief for him in the middle of the worst public-security crises of their lives. He tells her it’s a terrible plan. She asks whether he’ll vote to remove her from her post and he won’t say, which of course is the same as saying. They talk about what to do next, in a way that leaves room for each to have an understanding of what they agreed that’s incompatible with the other’s. It’s gold. The consensus on Thursday among Parliament Hill people I talked to who’d heard the tape was that conversations like this happen all the time in workplaces across the capital, as of course they happen around the world. It’s just that usually in governments, as in most large organizations, any sign of their existence is buried under lakes of Novocaine.

It’s starting to be noteworthy how often people in government record their important conversations. Almost as though people were increasingly worried they might be lied about. When Jody Wilson-Raybould did such a thing three years ago, it was possible for her ex-colleagues to clutch their pearls and protest that such a thing just isn’t done. But after months of claims and assertions about what RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki told the RCMP detachment in Nova Scotia, nine days after the worst mass murder in Canadian history, it’s handy to have a recording, isn’t it.

By this emerging standard, Patricia Ferguson is old-fashioned. As far as we know she didn’t record her meetings. But she did break open a notebook methodically, like clockwork, to write detailed longhand notes after her conversations. Those notes are hard to reconcile with the portrait Deans painted in her testimony a day earlier, of Peter Sloly as a lone good man, standing up for proper policing in the face of heckling and even racism from the city’s old guard.

In Ferguson’s version, it sounds like Ottawa’s cops were all reasonably good but they were cracking and colliding under immense pressure.

Ferguson described an Ottawa Police Service already worn down by the beginning of this year. There had been retirements, resignations, a high-level suspension and a suicide before and during the COVID lockdowns, followed by Black Lives Matter protests with the attendant internal soul-searching and external scrutiny every North American police corps faced.

And then the convoy hit. And then it stayed. This last was more of a surprise than it should have been.

The late stories out of Wednesday’s testimony were from Pat Morris, an Ontario Provincial Police superintendent in charge of intelligence-gathering. He dumped a bunch of old OPP “Project Hendon” reports, a term of art for the force’s intelligence-gathering operations, onto the commission server. Those reports were sent regularly to the Ottawa police as the various truck convoys approached the capital. Ferguson testified that she didn’t become aware of them until just before the trucks arrived. Which is too bad. What the OPP had found was a very large group of protesters from all over. They did not pose an organized threat of violence, though the Hendon reports acknowledged that confrontation can always escalate and that “lone wolf” extremists could well be tempted to join the crowd. But all the trucks represented a huge problem anyway, because they had rapidly growing funding — and no plans to go home at any point.

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