Quotulatiousness

October 24, 2021

Andrew Sullivan – “They are the Dana Carvey church ladies of our time, except instead of saying ‘Could it be Satan?!’ when confronting some cultural or moral transgression, they turn to the camera, clutch their pearls, and say ‘Could it be whiteness?!'”

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

Andrew Sullivan on what he titles “The Betrayal Of Our Gay Inheritance”:

It was, as it turned out, a bit of a non-event. The walkout by transgender Netflix employees and their supporters to demand that the company take down and apologize for the latest Chappelle special attracted “dozens”, despite media hype.

But the scenes were nonetheless revealing. A self-promoting jokester showed up with a placard with the words “We Like Jokes” and “We Like Dave” to represent an opposing view. He was swiftly accosted by a man who ripped the poster apart, leaving the dude with just a stick, prompting the assailant to shout “He’s got a weapon!” Pushed back by other protestors, he was then confronted by a woman right in front of him — shaking a tambourine — and yelling repeatedly into his face: “Repent, motherfucker! Repent! Repent!”

This is the state of what’s left of the gay rights movement in America. Judgmental, absolutist, intolerant, and hysterical, it looks to shut down speech it dislikes, drive its foes out of the public square, compile enemies’ lists of dangerous writers, artists, and politicians, and cancel and protest anything that does not comport with every tiny aspect of their increasingly deranged ideology.

The generation that now leads the movement does not seem to know the actual history of the gay rights movement, or the centrality of free expression to gay identity. They also seem to have no idea of the history of the movement against gay rights. Because if they did, they might be shocked at the ironies involved.

Anti-gay forces, hegemonic for centuries, were just like these trans activists. They were just as intent on suppressing and stigmatizing magazines, shows, and movies they believed were harmful. They too targeted individual artists and writers for personal destruction. They too believed that movies and comedy needed to be reined in order to prevent social harm. They protested in front of movie theaters. They tried to get shows canceled. And if you’d marched in any gay demo or Pride in the 1990s, you’d always be prepared to confront a grimacing Christianist yelling “Repent! Repent!” in your face.

In fact, it’s hard not to see the trans far left as a farcical replay of the Religious Right of the past. They are the Dana Carvey church ladies of our time, except instead of saying “Could it be Satan?!” when confronting some cultural or moral transgression, they turn to the camera, clutch their pearls, and say “Could it be whiteness?!”

This was never, ever the spirit of the gay rights movement in the past. In fact, it was America’s guarantee of free expression and free association that made the gay rights movement possible. It was the First Amendment, and the spirit of the First Amendment, that was easily the most important right for gays for decades. From the fledgling Society for Human Rights, formed in Chicago in 1924, and its pioneering magazine, Friendship and Freedom, to the struggles against censorship in the 1950s, with One Magazine, and erotic Physique pamphlets under siege, it was the First Amendment that, especially under Oliver Wendell Holmes, allowed gay people to find each other, to develop arguments for their own dignity and self-worth, and to sustain free associations when the entire society viewed them as perverts and undesirables and child molesters.

October 22, 2021

Explaining why British police clearly favour road-blocking protestors over the rights of ordinary Britons

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Andrew Tettenborn believes it can be traced back to a change in the oath that new police constables take and the changed emphasis in police training to support that change:

Metropolitan Police at G20 protests in London, 2009-04-01
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Last week Insulate Britain magnanimously announced it would suspend its forcible road-blocking campaign. Apart from noting the impudence of this announcement (remember the IRA sanctimoniously calling its Christmas ceasefires, as if this were something we should be grateful for?), commentators on Twitter, the tabloid press and indeed many of the general public, have found another question troubling. Why, in the face of deliberate criminality aimed at discommoding ordinary people (most of whom will have been less well-off than many of the protesters), did the police hold back, at times apparently chatting with the obstructionists and threatening with arrest any exasperated driver who tried to take steps to remove them? We aren’t told, but we can make some educated guesses.

[…]

Nearly twenty years ago in 2002, there was a subtle, little-reported but very symbolic change in the oath sworn by all constables on appointment. Instead of the 19th century undertaking to serve the Queen “without fear or favour, malice or ill-will” in the course of keeping the peace and preventing crime, there is now a much more tendentious promise preceding the duty to keep the peace: namely, to act with “fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people”. This requirement, thoroughly reflected as it is in police training today and imbued in policing culture, has two effects.

One is that all officers must keep at the front of their minds not only the law of the land but also two other guidelines: considerations of fairness and equality (whatever those mean), and human rights laws — something peculiarly complex and frequently opaque, even to lawyers. Human rights laws involve a subtlety well beyond the average constable called out to police a tense situation. Put yourself in the position of a policeman, faced with a choice whether to intervene in a case involving illegality and an intent to inconvenience people, but where no-one is actually engaging in violence — exactly the situation with Insulate Britain or Extinction Rebellion. You might well think that, if you wish to avoid future trouble and possible complaints of discrimination or unfairness, discretion and inaction would be the better part of valour.

Thanks to the pervasiveness of human rights culture, the constable’s traditional function of upholding the law ceases to be a black-and-white matter, and becomes a potential mire of conflicting duties. Even if the letter of the law says you should arrest a middle-aged protester or at least drag them off the M25 to prevent them obstructing it, there is always a possibility that someone somewhere will hold that this was contrary to their human rights. Once again, a cautious police officer intent on avoiding disciplinary hearings and a possible black mark, may well conclude that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie (at least for the moment), condone the illegality and avoid possible violence.

The police constable on the scene is extremely well advised to avoid doing anything that might possibly be construed as infringing on the human rights of everyone at the scene, for fear of becoming the scapegoat if clever lawyers convince a judge or jury that the police acted contrary to their revised oath.

October 19, 2021

Sarah Hoyt on getting #teamheadsonpikes to trend

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt considers the people who are still desperately hoping that if they just vote harder, the next election will fix everything:

Normalcy bias is YUGE in America. It is a testament to the founders’ vision that after a century of attempts to wrench us away from a constitutional republic, after a massive, in the open election steal, people are still counting on elections to right this mess.

They’re right and wrong.

Look, I’m holding up my lighter with tears in my eyes, and whispering hopefully “Team heads on pikes”. Because I think a brief, brutal convulsion is our best hope to come back to ourselves as ourselves.

In the end we win, they lose, but the gradual road is in the end more costly. Perhaps the butcher’s bill will be hidden. You won’t see heads on pikes and bodies on overpasses. But the squid farms on Mars, the unborn babies, the uninvented conveniences, the–more costly. Because socialism kills, either fast or slow, and the longer we play footsy with it, the more lives will be lost. In that case, probably lives that don’t exist.

And frankly, though #teamheadsonpikes might not eventuate, I still see a brief and violent convulsion in our future. Understand “violent” here does not refer to the butcher’s bill. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be the Junta and their toadies, as I think there will be a few Romanian Christmas Gift events, but MOSTLY? MOSTLY there will be a lot of retirements, if we’re lucky a few prison sentences, almost for sure a lot of people taking themselves overseas for retirement (I’m hoping the Obama posse and their cronies are dumb enough to run to China. (Looks heavenward. Lord, if I’m a very good girl for the rest of my life …) our institutions will turn over so fast you’d think they were on wheels. They might retain the name but that will be the last resemblance. People will lose all faith in government (we’re mostly there) and this bizarre idea of scientific governance will be finally put to bed with a shovel. About 100 years after it should have been, but hey.

Why do I think that? Why do I expect an uprising at all? Americans are supine and taking it and reeeeeeeee.

Will someone PLEASE get me my eyes? The cats aren’t here, but the floor is covered in dust and paint chips. That can’t be good.

Two things: Normalcy bias. As I said, most people who aren’t political animals (Party like it’s 1776, yo) are still waiting for the elections to fix everything. Hell, I’ve seen people who are political animals waiting for it. And the left is lying to itself very hard and half believes their wins are legitimate. (AH!)

And: IF there is a rebellion and the news doesn’t report it, would you know about it?

Hell, the world has been in more or less open rebellion for 5 years, and our news sits on it, like it’s their favorite thumb. And most people don’t see it, except for things like Brexit, or Trump’s election. Ask them about German farmers driving their tractors to city hall and they’ll look at you like you’re nuts.

So now?

October 17, 2021

Just about the least likely 2021 issue … protesting a school principal for her musical taste

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

In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh reports on some St. Catharines, Ontario parents who apparently just woke up from a 40-year long stasis pod:

Adrian Humphreys has a short item in today’s Post about an attempt to petition against a St. Catharines, Ont., public school principal because of her off-hours fondness for Britain’s ancient heavy-metal act Iron Maiden. NP Platformed can only applaud the success of what is clearly a disguised ploy for global publicity: Maiden, now 46 years into a busy life of recording and touring, released its first new studio LP in six years last month.

Then again, it is vaguely possible that the petition was started out of genuine concern by the “parents”, who claimed to have authored it, none of whom have stepped forward to own their objections to principal Sharon Burns. (She is, perhaps wisely, not giving interviews herself.)

If you’re about Burns’s age, you can only marvel at the operations of Father Time. When we and Burns and Iron Maiden’s (mostly intact) classic lineup were all still young, the band was one whose symbols you might draw on a Duo-Tang to annoy and disquiet a prissy teacher. How the tables have turned, as tables will.

Burns’s Instagram account contained photos of her going to concerts and wearing Iron Maiden merchandise of the sort that has made the group incalculable fortunes. Her gear included some references to 1982’s The Number of the Beast, which critical consensus considers to still be the finest of the group’s studio albums.

This was seen by the anonymous petitioners as signalling an allegiance to Satanism, and perhaps it’s natural for a very sheltered parent to have become upset. (The school, as Humphreys explains, has a distant background as a Mennonite Bible school.) But getting angry at Iron Maiden in 2021 feels a little like getting angry at McDonald’s. Even on a surface level, Maiden, a “new wave” metal group that did its most innovative work in the 1970s and ’80s, has been succeeded by several generations of metal groups and entire subcultures that take the violence, noise, crudity and obscenity into realms we old farts never dreamt of.

October 12, 2021

The Southwest canary in the coal mine?

Filed under: Business, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jim Treacher wonders, based reactions from the self-imagined elites, if they consider airline pilots to be slaves now:

I’m one of the pesky minority of Americans who are both pro-vaccine and against vaccine mandates. The evidence overwhelmingly proves that these vaccines are effective against the coronavirus, and I will continue to encourage everyone to get vaccinated. And, also, in addition to that, vaccine mandates are not only un-American but counterproductive. In addition to all the other dishonest, lame-brained, self-negating messaging we’ve heard during this pandemic, telling Americans what to do just doesn’t work. That’s not how we’re built.

And just on principle, vaccination is your decision as an individual. That’s how it’s supposed to work in this country. This is still a republic, if you can keep it.

Which is why it’s interesting that now this is happening:

Southwest is the only airline cancelling so many flights. Is that because the employees, including the pilots who are needed to fly the planes, are refusing to comply with the company’s new vaccine mandate?

The airline is saying otherwise:

“Disruptive weather”? Wouldn’t that affect all the airlines, not just one?

In any case, the smart fellers seem to think it’s about the vaccine. And they ain’t happy:

Oh, is that how it works? Those pilots are no longer individual human beings, with individual thoughts and opinions? They must subsume themselves into the corporation? The government throws money at everything in sight, and therefore all that stuff is owned by the government? All those people are owned by the government?

And these clowns call us fascists?

Airline pilots aren’t slaves. If they don’t want to work because of an employer’s mandate, that’s between them and the employer. If they get fired, that’s their problem. But nobody owns them, let alone entitled @$$holes like Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Of course, you can always trust The Babylon Bee (America’s Most Trusted News Source™) to get to the heart of the matter:

October 10, 2021

“The NSBA letter is a blood libel against America’s dissenting parents”

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

In this Substack essay, C. Bradley Thompson calls the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) demand that the federal government treat dissenting parents as “domestic terrorists” a declaration of war against ordinary American citizens:

On September 30, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration denouncing the nationwide parental protests taking place at school board meetings against Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, pornography in the classroom, mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and remote learning. It turns out that parents all over the country are upset about the indoctrination and censorship in America’s government schools. An army of moms (and dads) have been asserting their parental responsibilities and their constitutional rights by showing up to school board meetings and voicing — sometimes angrily — their contempt and disgust for those school boards and teachers promoting and sanctioning ideas and ideologies opposed by the parents.

The NSBA letter (see here) begins rather ominously by declaring that “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat” and that “immediate assistance” is therefore “required to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.” The NSBA is essentially declaring a “State of Emergency” for America’s government school system. Let that sink in for a moment.

[…]

Let’s be clear about what the NSBA letter means in practice: first, it is dog-whistling a message which says that protesting parents are engaged in “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” (including, presumably, against their own children); and, second, it is requesting that the Biden administration use the full coercive power of the United States government — power that it has only previously been used against Islamic terrorists and foreign enemies of the United States — to monitor, investigate, arrest, interrogate, prosecute, convict and jail upset parents who are protesting AGAINST the teaching of systemic racism (i.e., CRT), pornography in the classroom, and the unscientific mask mandates for children.

The NSBA letter is saying, in effect, that complaining parents are the moral equivalent of jihadi terrorists, who are out to commit acts of violence and terror against America’s school board members, its teachers, and, yes, even the children. As such, these parents should be treated as a national security threat, and they must be dealt with by all means necessary.

The NSBA letter is a blood libel against America’s dissenting parents. In a decent, free, and just society such a letter would be condemned and dismissed out of hand, but that is not the kind of society in which we live today.

Rather than tossing the NSBA letter in the trash where it belongs, the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, read it and immediately ordered the FBI and America’s National Security State to mobilize its immense power against parents whose only real crime is to take seriously the education of their children. He did this within just a few days of receiving the NSBA letter.

I encourage you to read — and to read slowly — Garland’s official memorandum sent to the Director of the FBI and to various other law enforcement agencies, offices, and divisions.

Garland’s letter is a moral, political, and constitutional abomination. To say there are serious problems with the Attorney General’s Orwellian letter would be an understatement. The letter asserts, for instance, that “there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” It claims as fact a “rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel”. Neither the NSBA nor the Justice Department have provided any credible or meaningful evidence to support this unfounded claim, nor does Garland’s passive-aggressive letter specify what it classifies as “criminal conduct” or “domestic terrorism”. (Not surprisingly, Garland’s letter neglects to mention that some school board members and the teachers’ unions have been harassing and threatening parents for months. See here, here, here, here, and here.) The simple fact of the matter is that virtually no violence has occurred at school board meetings this year.

In support of the NSBA request, Garland’s memorandum announced that he has directed the FBI and each U. S. Attorney to convene meetings immediately with “federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district” in order to “facilitate the discussion of strategies” for dealing with threats against school officials. The Department of Justice will also “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response”. In other words, the government will establish “snitch” lines against parents. If a school board member doesn’t like what they hear in a public meeting, they will be able to report (presumably anonymously) threats of harassment and intimidation.

October 9, 2021

You need to ask yourself “Am I the crazy one?” (and hope you don’t hear yourself answering…)

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson considers the widely predicted epidemic of mental health issues the experts thought would follow the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic as it faded:

That warning doesn’t seem to have panned out, exactly. As this more recent op-ed in the Atlantic pointed out, rates of depression and anxiety spiked at the beginning of the pandemic, but then receded. Rates of life satisfaction are near pre-pandemic norms. And the suicide rate has actually declined for reasons no one can quite pin.

“The pandemic has been a test of the global psychological immune system, which appears more robust than we would have guessed. When familiar sources of enjoyment evaporated in the spring of 2020, people got creative. They participated in drive-by birthday parties, mutual-assistance groups, virtual cocktail evenings with old friends, and nightly cheers for health-care workers. Some people got really good at baking,” the authors wrote, optimistically.

I think they’re wrong. Or, rather, I think we proved to be resilient in all the ways that the authors were looking at, and far more fragile in the ways they weren’t.

I think we’re in the middle of the mental-health pandemic right now; I think we’re in it so deep that we can’t even see it anymore. And I think we can’t see it because the crisis is not taking the form we expected it to take.

We expected the post-pandemic mental-health crisis to look the way they used to look — invisible. The depressed sister who hasn’t called for months. The anxiety-ridden best friend who drowns her tics in pills and alcohol. For the majority of the population that doesn’t suffer from a diagnosable mental-health issue, mental-health crises are often hidden. We expected a traumatic post-pandemic mental-health crisis to look a lot like this — another person’s problem — but on a grander scale.

This assumption leaves our entire framework with a missing link. A mental-health pandemic isn’t necessarily going to show up on a self-reported survey about anxiety and depression levels.

It’s going to show up in behaviour — and often behaviour that can be rationalized.

Because crazy people don’t think they’re crazy. You can’t see it when you’re in it.

Look around; are people acting normal lately? Think of the protests we saw during the election, or the anti-vaccine marches through our downtown cores. Think of the mom wearing two masks who screamed because your kid got too close on the playground — was that rational, grounded, sane behaviour?

Something is happening to a lot of people, and you see it in both the COVID deniers and also those who have made a religion out of the dangers of the disease. There are people out there that still can’t collect the mail without taking “precautions”. How about the people who are still sanitizing their groceries? That might have been reasonable in the Spring of 2020, when we weren’t sure how COVID spread. Now it looks a lot more like OCD.

Have you not noticed that some of the most brilliant people, after spending months devoid of much human contact, are now acting like raving loons on outlets like Twitter? Increased dependency on a gamified and polarizing social media for socialization during periods of extended isolation seems to have broken the ability to think clearly or behave civilly. This is hard to quantify, but I can’t be the only one to feel as if social media has grown palpably worse over the last year.

September 25, 2021

Samizdat from “Ozcatraz”

Through some miracle of invisible ink, blind mail drops, and all the necessary modern cloak-and-dagger technical equivalents, James Morrow manages to get some news out of locked-down-to-the-nth-degree Australia:

You really have to feel for the poor people at Tourism Australia.

Having spent decades happily if not particularly creatively pitching their product to the world with the time honoured formula of “beaches, Opera House, outback, crocs”, they now have to figure out how to sell a country that looks more and more like a tropical North Korea.

That is, of course, if the federal government ever lets visitors in again without forcing them to first spend a week or two quarantined in some prefab hotel or desert facility in the name of “keeping Australians safe”.

The question thus becomes, both for those of us trapped here in Ozcatraz as well as bemused outside onlookers, how did a free and easy land of opportunity become gripped by a neurotic covid puritanism that truly believes any sort of fun or joy or sociability is deadly, and a place where protesters and cops are having pitched battles in the street over mandatory vaccinations?

If you don’t believe me, consider that in Melbourne — ground zero for Australia’s covid madness, the city just crossed the line to become the most locked-down city in the world — the state premier ordered playgrounds shut and had concrete bollards hoisted into skate parks to stop kids from riding their bikes.

A few weeks ago, after some wags took advantage of a loophole that allowed bars to offer takeaway cocktails and organised an al fresco pub crawl, outdoor consumption of alcohol was banned always and everywhere.

Even a tiny loosening of restrictions there to allow beleaguered residents to meet up for a brief, vaccinated, socially distanced picnics left the prohibition on alcohol in place, all in the name of the Holy Blessed Science.

In Sydney, which is comparatively sane and where there is at least a decent plan to get back to some sort of vague simulacrum of normal over the next few months, everyone still has to “mask up” when outdoors, even if not around anyone else. The only socialising allowed is under very limited outdoor circumstances, among the fully vaccinated, who are not allowed to travel too far to meet up with one another.

What makes it most bizarre is that even the state’s health minister recently admitted outdoors was the safest place to be and everyone understands that the mask rule was imposed largely to shut up a depressingly totalitarian press gallery that wasn’t going to shut up until everyone was welded into their homes Wuhan-style.

Yet, as Sydney moves into summer, every weekend sees Twitter flooded with photos of sunbakers on local beaches asking WHY IS THIS ALLOWED? and demanding police action.

On any given Monday in the local park where I exercise my spaniel, my very earnest bourgeoise-left neighbours grumble about it all not being “in the spirit” of the health orders while rabbinically parsing whatever latest decree has just come down from the Temple, er, Ministry of Health.

Update: Alex Berenson confirms much of the situation in Oz (h/t to SDA for the link).

Americans have the wrong idea about Australia.

Thanks to some brilliant tourism branding and Crocodile Dundee, we think of it as rough-n-ready frontier country, Montana with bigger beer cans. The dingo ate my baby!

In reality it’s Canada with a mean streak. The Karens are in charge and they are mad.

[…]

So when Covid rolled in, the Australian government (and lots of Aussies) saw it as just another ugly export from China that needed to be beaten back at all costs. To its credit, Australia pushed hard for an independent investigation of the origins of Sars-Cov-2 last year (the Chinese pushed back, going so far as to call for a boycott of Australia’s delicious wine).

But Australia also went cray-cray — the technical term — for the fantasy of zero Covid. It effectively closed its borders not just to other countries but to its own citizens. For most of the last two years, they have had a hard time coming home — and an even harder time leaving.

[…]

Until the last couple of months, the frogs were not just luxuriating in the pot but asking for a little more heat! Australians were so pleased to be Covid-free — for the entire first half of 2021, they had only one Covid death — that the majority happily tolerated these restrictions.

Yes, a few rabble-rousers complained, but even videos of police arresting people inside their homes or attacking (truly) peaceful protestors didn’t dent support for the creeping police state.

But in the last couple of months, and especially the last few days, the equilibrium has shifted. And — inevitably — the response of Australia’s fearless leaders has been to try even harder to stamp down unrest. As a result, the situation is increasingly unstable.

September 24, 2021

From Handmaid’s Tale cosplay to eco-terrorism

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

Connor Tomlinson outlines the many performative and disruptive projects of Roger Hallam:

Insulate Britain gluing themselves to the M25 for a week has already produced a four-car collision, with victims airlifted to hospital, and delayed a mother’s treatment, leaving her paralysed by a stroke. Despite these events, activists claim they “don’t accept that we put lives at risk”. It’s vital that legal and cultural action is taken to insulate Britons from this dangerous brand of eco-extremism.

As Dan Wootton’s interview with activist Liam Norton explained, the endangerment of lives to exercise political pressure would classify Insulate Britain as ecological terrorists. The action Insulate Britain wishes to force government to take is “to produce within four months a legally binding national plan to fully fund” the insulation of all Britain’s 29 million homes with taxpayer cash. Essentially, they’re sitting in the motorway, blocking your work commute, so the state can take and spend more of your pay-check.

Insulate Britain is another in a long line of activist vanity projects engineered to make headlines by founder Roger Hallam. Starting with “Stop Killing Londoners” in 2017, Hallam went on to co-create Extinction Rebellion; before being ousted over his comments concerning the Holocaust. But Hallam’s alarmist and extremist rhetoric preceded this insensitive remark. In, 2019, Hallam said “forcing the governments to act” or “bring[ing] them down and create[ing] a democracy fit for purpose” will require “some [to] die in the process”. This “democracy” would, paradoxically, be a “socialist project”, with Hallam in the ideological driving seat.

Hallam’s prior protests demonstrated a similar indifference to human suffering. Hallam was arrested at Heathrow Airport for aiming to fly drones into active airspace and ground commercial flights. His “Heathrow Pause” protests constituted a terror threat, in that drones could cause flights to be grounded or collide and crash. Again, Hallam was willing to risk lives to make headlines.

All of these movements claim the sole solutions to apocalyptic emergencies are the appointment of Hallam himself to a position of public power which lets him implement whichever solutions he deems necessary. His PhD at Kings College on “civil disobedience” exposes Hallam’s own egoism in comparing himself to MLK and Gandhi. This was also an indictment of modern university radicalism; echoed by Dr. Charlie Gardner of the University of Kent making the same comparison in a lecture, calling himself “a hero of our times”, and refusing to disavow Hallam when I challenged him on it.

When I first heard of the M25 protests, I thought they’d be allowed to carry on for a token amount of time to get their actions into the media and then they’d be cleared off by the police. I was quite astonished to find that they were permitted to stay in place for several hours and that the police were being quite solicitous of their health and protecting them from any attempt at counter-protest by the stranded motorists. I’m now worried that the next time they try this, the motorists will have learned that the police aren’t there to enforce the law and be tempted to take it into their own hands.

September 18, 2021

“Martin Gurri’s The Revolt Of The Public is from 2014, which means you might as well read the Epic of Gilgamesh

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

In another of his interesting series of book reviews, Scott Alexander looks at a book from 2014 that seems to have done a great job of predicting the situation today, but doesn’t help in looking forward from today:

… It has a second-edition-update-chapter from 2017, which means it might as well be Beowulf. The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact. I picked up the book on its “accurately predicted the present moment” cred, but it predicted the present moment so accurately that it’s barely worth reading anymore. It might as well just say “open your eyes and look around”.

In fact, I can’t even really confirm whether it predicted anything accurately or not. Certainly everything it says is true. Anyone who wrote it in 2000 would have been a prophet. Anyone who wrote it in 2020 would have been stating the obvious. Was writing it in 2014 a boring chronicle of clear truths, or an achievement for the ages? I find my memories are insufficiently precise to be sure. It’s like that thing where someone who warned about the coronavirus on March 1 2020 was a bold visionary, but someone who warned about it on March 20 was a conformist bandwagoner — except about the entire history of the 21st century so far. Maybe the best we can do with it is read it backwards, as an artifact of the era when the public was only ambiguously revolting, to see how the knowledge of the coming age arose and spread.

We remember the Arab Spring, those few months in 2011 when revolts spread across various Arab countries and longstanding regimes were toppled by protesters with smartphones and Twitter accounts. Gurri hits the relevant beats, but doesn’t limit himself to the Middle East.

In Spain, a vague formless group called the indignados (or Real Democracy Now, or Youth Without A Future) took to the streets. For months, they filled public squares, streets, and tent cities. Some protests attracted tens of thousands of participants; a few, hundreds of thousands. Some of them were vaguely socialist, but it wasn’t exactly a socialist protest; in fact, the government they were protesting was dominated by the Socialist Workers Party. They were just sort of vaguely angry. From their manifesto:

    Some of us consider ourselves more progressive, others more conservative. Some are believers, others not. Some have well-defined ideologies, others consider ourselves apolitical … but all of us are worried and outraged by the political, economic, and social landscape we see about us. By the corruption of the politicians, businessmen, bankers …

And so on.

At the same moment, hundreds of thousands of people were marching through the streets of Israel. The apparent trigger was a 25-year-old video editor named Daphni Leef who couldn’t afford an apartment near her job. She started a Facebook page saying people should protest the cost of living, one thing led to another, and soon 300,000 people were marching through the streets of Israel and Leef was a national hero.

[…]

Gurri argues all of this was connected, and all of it was a sharp break from what came before. These movements were essentially leaderless. Some had charismatic spokespeople, like Daphni Leef in Israel or Tahrir-Square-Facebook-page-admin Wael Ghonim in Egypt, but these people were at best the trigger that caused a viral movement to coalesce out of nothing. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, he built an alliance of various civil rights groups, unions, churches, and other large organizations who could turn out their members. He planned the agenda, got funding, ran through an official program of speakers, met with politicians, told them the legislation they wanted, then went home. The protests of 2011 were nothing like that. They were just a bunch of people who read about protests on Twitter and decided to show up.

Also, they were mostly well-off. Gurri hammers this in again and again. Daphni Leef had just graduated from film school, hardly the sort of thing that puts her among the wretched of the earth. All of these movements were mostly their respective countries’ upper-middle classes; well-connected, web-savvy during an age when that meant something. Mostly young, mostly university-educated, mostly part of their countries’ most privileged ethnic groups. Not the kind of people you usually see taking to the streets or building tent cities.

Some of the protests were more socialist and anarchist than others, but none were successfully captured by establishment strains of Marxism or existing movements. Many successfully combined conservative and liberal elements. Gurri calls them nihilists. They believed that the existing order was entirely rotten, that everyone involved was corrupt and irredeemable, and that some sort of apocalyptic transformation was needed. All existing institutions were illegitimate, everyone needed to be kicked out, that kind of thing. But so few specifics that socialists and reactionaries could march under the same banner, with no need to agree on anything besides “not this”.

August 27, 2021

QotD: Music corporations, musicians, and hypocrisy

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

“A good song should make you wanna tap your feet and get with your girl. A great song should destroy cops and set fire to the suburbs. I’m only interested in writing great songs.”

So says Tom Morello, guitarist for the Los Angeles-based band Rage Against the Machine. He and his bandmates are not simply against cops and the suburbs, of course. They also stand for the Zapatistas and the Shining Path, for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, for giving California back to Mexico, and for destroying stores where rich people like themselves shop.

That’s pretty strong stuff coming from work-for-hire employees of one of the great cogs in the global capitalist machine, the megaconglomerate Sony, which wholly owns and distributes Rage’s music and even is a co-owner of the group’s publishing. Since 1992, Rage has sold nearly 7 million records, and it’s safe to say that nobody has benefitted more from that commerce than the band’s unabashedly capitalist paymaster.

Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason, 2000-10.

August 17, 2021

Early American Whiskey

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Townsends
Published 3 Apr 2017

Today Brian Cushing from Historic Locust Grove takes us on a tour of their new distillery and its history. #townsendswhiskey

Locust Grove Website ▶▶ http://locustgrove.org/ ▶

Help support the channel with Patreon ▶ https://www.patreon.com/townsend ▶▶

Twitter ▶ @Jas_Townsend
Instagram ▶ townsends_official

August 9, 2021

The modern-day threat of being made an “unperson” is real and very dangerous

Sean Gabb explains why even libertarians need to consider the non-state power in the hands of corporations that can — and does — force people out of their jobs, their homes, and even deprive them of the ability to communicate or to access financial services merely for expressing unpopular opinions. As I said in a different venue, it’s a short step from “no fly lists” to “no eat lists”, especially when the enforcing entity is a nominally private organization:

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

The old pressures to conform were wrong. So are the new. And they are wrong simply because they are pressures to conform. I find myself at last appreciating a part of Mill’s essay On Liberty for which I never used to have much time. Until recently, I would insist that the only real oppression was by the State: all else was the working of private choice. If the authorities fined a man £5 for having sex with another man, that was outrageous tyranny. If his tastes became public knowledge, and he was unable to find work, that was merely unfortunate. This is, I still believe, essentially true. Indeed, I could argue that, without a State having centralised and corporatised powers of discrimination that ought to be widely distributed, there would be no problem — or there would be a problem that was bearable. But these powers were centralised and corporatised a long time ago. They are now being used to achieve a uniformity of opinion outside the home in which the formal organs of compulsion have no obvious part. This is not the “tyranny of the majority” that worried Mill. I find it inconceivable that anything close to a majority could believe the insane drivel pouring from the regime media. Neither, though, is it the kind of oppression against which liberal bills of rights have traditionally been written. Because of this —

    when society is itself the tyrant …, its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them …

    (J.S. Mill On Liberty, 1859, “Introductory“)

We need protection indeed. But the protection we need is not yet another law telling the police to leave dissidents alone. We already have a stack of these, and they are protections against a threat that largely does not exist. The answer, I suggest, is an amendment to the anti-discrimination laws to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of what may be loosely called political opinion.

I say hardly anyone read my original essay. Sadly, most of those who did read it stand in the more wooden reaches of the libertarian movement, and these set up a cry that I had become a Communist. I was suggesting that private organisations should be coerced in their choices of whom and whom not to employ, and even in their choices of customer and supplier. I had abandoned the non-aggression principle. Here, briefly expressed, is my answer to these claims.

I run the Centre for Ancient Studies. This provides a range of tuition services in Greek and Latin. It is a sole tradership. As such, I reserve the unconditional right to decide what services I offer and to whom. If I dislike the colour of your face, or the status of your foreskin, or your tastes in love, or anything else that I may think relevant, it should be my right not to do business with you. It may be that only a fool turns away customers with money to spend, and I am not that sort of a fool. Even so, I do claim at least the theoretical right, and I ground it on my right to do as I please with my own. But I claim these rights as a human individual. A limited company is not a human individual. Whatever entrepreneurship may exist in them, these companies are artificial persons and creatures of the State. Their owners have the privilege of limited liability. That is, they have the right, in the event of insolvency, not to pay the debts of a company if these are greater than the assets of the company. If this were not a valuable right, there would not be so many limited companies. There are almost no large companies, and none lasting more than a single generation, that do not have limited liability.

This being so, limited companies benefit from a grant of privilege from the State, and are legitimate subjects of regulation by the State for as long as they are receipt of this privilege. No doubt, some forms of state regulation are bad in their objects, or bad as regards the means to their objects. But regulation is not in itself an aggression by the State. It follows that, whether or not we can get it, libertarians should not feel barred from demanding laws to prevent limited companies from discriminating against their employees on the grounds of political opinion, and to require them to do business with customers and suppliers regardless of political opinion.

I appreciate that I am asking for more than the regulation of limited companies. The anti-discrimination laws we have make no distinction between incorporated and unincorporated associations. Even so, the extension of these laws to cover political opinion would mainly affect only the larger limited companies. At the same time, there is an obvious and overriding public interest in the protection of political opinion. People are now scared to speak their minds. Whether intended or just revealed, this is part of the strategy. The reason why the collapse of both freedom and tradition is gathering pace is because no one dares stand up and protest. In the absence of protest, everything will carry on as it is. Given a restored right of protest, there is a chance of stopping the collapse. The only way to lift the blanket of fear that now lies over all but approved opinion is somehow or other to get a law making it clear that no one who speaks his mind can be loaded with shadow punishments.

“Somehow or other!” In a sense, I am making a fool of myself. I am asking the politicians to make a law against what they themselves may not be doing, but that has no effect on their main reason for being in politics, which is to fill their pockets. I am asking them to take on the entire mass of the non-elected Establishment. I am asking a lot of these people. On the other hand, the politicians still need to be elected, and that was the weak point in the Establishment’s plan to stay in the European Union. We had to spend four years voting and revoting, but we did eventually get what we wanted. It is conceivable that, if enough of us call loudly enough for protection, some kind of protection will be granted.

Short of that, we are lost.

July 7, 2021

The “Squirrel!” distractions will end when it’s convenient for certain people and groups

Jay Currie considers the constant barrage of distractions that appear to be preventing most people from noticing what is actually going on in Canada:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

The remarkable thing about all of these little snippets of news is that they seem to be regarded as business as usual. Being taxed by an inflation rate which is well into the double digits does not cut through the COVID hype. Vandalism and arson purportedly in rage over residential school deaths which we have known about for decades attracts very little comment – though many First Nations people are not very happy that reservation churches which have served their communities for years are being burnt. People seem to shrug off the heat wave deaths and ambulance delays.

I expect very little from government at any level. A reasonably sound currency, a degree of public order and emergency services which can deal with the inevitable surges in demand.

The emergency services issue is probably the most easily fixed. Yes, having more para-medics is part of the solution but planning a reponse to these sorts of surge emergencies which tries to avoid the need for an ambulance in the first place is important too. Most of the dead were old, in many cases, very old. It should not be impossible to identify those older people and have a plan for these sorts of emergencies. Something as simple as a “Helpful Neighbour” program on a voluntary basis would be a good first step.

Restoring public order is more complicated. First, you have to have the political will to actually take on the problem. As we saw a couple of years ago, when it comes to people purporting to act on behalf of First Nations/environmental causes that will is absent. But even if the politicians decided that enough was enough there needs to be an investigation and an understanding of how the “spontaneous” vandalism and arson and blockades are driven. That is going to require rooting around in the activist community which will be, to say the least, difficult. The people who are actually creating the public disorder pay close attention to operational and communications security. Suffice to say this stuff is not being organized on a Facebook page.

Restoring order is also going to require a look at who benefits from disorder. To take an example: was it co-incidence that the sad fact of the Kamloops residential school graveyard came up just as the inquiry into Canada’s Winnipeg Lab’s connection to the Wuhan virology lab was heating up? The fact of there being a graveyard had been know for decades. The ground radar was being used to determine the boundaries so a new fence could be built. Yet, somehow, the number of bodies became headline news. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this was no accident. Public order will be restored when disorder is no longer in anyone’s interest.

June 8, 2021

If you were trying to destroy American cities from within … what would you be doing differently?

Sarah Hoyt’s latest Libertarian Enterprise post considers the state of US urban areas after more than a year of Wuhan Coronavirus lockdowns, social controls, and medically “justified” repression:

“Homeless encampment above the 101 @ Spring” by Steve Devol is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Look, I’m sure this was suggested by China, and the dunderheads are totally buying it under their Compleate Illusions system.

Sure climate change. Climate change can justify anything. If we told them they needed to burn people alive to prevent climate change, they’d already been building the pyres.

But that’s just sort of a reflexive thing, like a Moslem saying “Insh Allah“. It’s not actually involved in their thinking as such. Or their thinking is not involved in it. whichever.

The truth is that they realized that the Covidiocy has destroyed the cities.

You see they had everything planned. They were going to force more and more of us into the city, because they were going to make running an internal combustion engine so hard. So if you had a job, you’d live in the city. Where you’re more easily controlled. And where they could make you believe bullshit like overpopulation and that — look at all the homeless — we needed more and more welfare. Their idea of their perfect world is the 1930s version of the future. Just megalopolisis, isolated, with people completely controlled. It has the bonus of leaving pristine wilderness outside that, for the elites to build their dachas.

And part of the problem is that they never understand other people have agency and respond to circumstances.

I don’t know what they expected when they went full fashboots and — in the case of Polis, and I bet not the only one — gave homeless the right to camp in every public land, and defecate in public as well as freeing a bunch of felons.

Did they expect this would just scare people more, and they’d lock themselves in, in fear and trembling, allowing the idiots to design society.

Instead, people left. Americans are on the move. I swear half of my friends are moving from more locked to less locked, from bluer to redder. Some demographers have caught on, seeing through the smoke and mirrors, and are confused — most of them being leftist — because Americans are in the middle of a full migration. As full and as all pervading as the movement west. Or after the civil war the movement of black people North.

Some of this must have penetrated the granite-like heads of the ruling left. Or at least the planning left.

They somehow didn’t expect—possibly because they don’t really get technology. I mean, I have my moments, but I swear most democrats were disappointed when laptops started being made with no “cup holders”. They’re at that level of stupid — that a tech that hasn’t been fully implemented, giving us the ability to work from home, would be kicked into high gear from the covidiocy.

I guess they expected people who work mostly from their computers to sit at home watching panic porn on TV and not work?

More importantly, I don’t think they expected people who have to work in person to follow that migration because, well … if you owned a restaurant that the covidiocy killed, you might, for instance, pay heed to the fact people are driving everywhere because, duh, masks on planes, and therefore build a roadside diner or perhaps find a small town that’s underserved and start anew there.

Oh … a lot of people are changing jobs too, and the jobs are no longer binding them to big cities.

Honestly, the only way for big cities to save themselves is to become touristic centers. NYC was halfway there when the covidiocy hit. Only not fully there because lefty governance sucks at making a city safe.

If I were a lefty governor or mayor right now, I’d aim the fashboots at crime and disorder, get rid of the homeless, spruce up the place, and go all out in courting tourism. Then people would move in to cater to the tourists, and eventually other businesses would move in, because that’s where people are.

But leftists don’t think that way. Carrot and incentive is beneath them (of course.) Their idea is rather that they will force those unwashed peasants to do what they want.

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