Quotulatiousness

April 15, 2012

Implying a link between Walmart stores and hate groups

Filed under: Business, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

This is custom-made for drawing lazy conclusions:

Study Says The More Walmarts In The Area, The More Hate Groups There Are

This one’s sure to boil some blood over at Walmart headquarters: A new study says there’s a significant correlation between the amount of Walmart stores in an area and the number of hate groups existing in that same area. As the big-box stores proliferate, so do the groups.

LiveScience.com cites the study by professors at Penn State University, New Mexico State University and Michigan State University, which says that the amount of Wal-Mart stores in a county was more statistically significant than other factors usually associated with hate group participation. For example, the unemployment rate, high crime rates and low education.

As I’m just as lazy as the others who’ll jump on that eye-catching headline, here’s another lazy conclusion: because Walmart locates their stores in areas with growing population, so Walmart stores will also correlate with any number of other phenomena that require a minimum (but increasing) population.

April 10, 2012

Mark Steyn: Derbyshire should not have been fired

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:46

On the National Review Online‘s “The Corner” blog, Mark Steyn expresses the unpopular-even-among-Republians thought that John Derbyshire’s sins did not amount to a firing offence:

… for what it’s worth, I regret the loss of John Derbyshire to National Review. Short version: Didn’t like the piece, but don’t think NR should have hustled him into the drive-thru guillotine on the basis of 24 hours of hysteria from the Internet’s sans-culottes.

[. . .]

On the career-detonating column, I don’t have anything terribly useful to add. But Derb’s wife is Chinese and his children are biracial. And I can see why, in a world in which a four-time mayor of America’s capital city can disparage your own family’s race (“these Asians coming in . . . those dirty shops . . . they ought to go”) and pay no price, a chap might come to resent the way polite society’s indulgence of racism is so highly selective.

[. . .]

The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities. He knew that mentioning the Great Unmentionables would sooner or later do him in, and, in an age when shrieking “That’s totally racist!” is totally gay, he at least has the rare satisfaction of having earned his colors. Yet what are we to make of wee, inoffensive Dave Weigel over at Slate? The water still churning with blood, the sharks are circling poor old Dave for the sin of insufficiently denouncing the racist Derbyshire. Weigel must go for not enthusiastically bellowing, “Derbyshire must go!” Come to think of it, I should probably go for querying whether Weigel should go.

April 4, 2012

QotD: Mike Riggs refutes Van Jones on “so-called Libertarians”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

I’m going to have to mic check you there, Mr. Jones. You’re not talking about so-called libertarians, but your former boss and current president. See, it’s Barack Obama who supports “traditional marriage”; Barack Obama who supports a drug war that sends an alarming number of black men to prison and destroys their employment prospects; Barack Obama who supports a foreign policy that kills children; Barack Obama who supports regulatory barriers that require the poorest of the poor to borrow their way into the workforce; Barack Obama who supports an immigration strategy that rips apart families and sees the children of undocumented workers put up for adoption.

Whether Obama’s support for those policies means he hates gays or brown folk is not for me to say. As the scriptures tell us, “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?”

Libertarians, on the other hand, love brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, and immigrants. Many of us, after all, fit rather neatly into those categories, and we show our affection for ourselves and our neighbors by supporting the right of all peoples to live free of state-sponsored violence, discrimination, undue imprisonment, and theft; as well as the entirely predictable consequences of both left-wing and right-wing social engineering.

Mike Riggs, “Van Jones on ‘so-called Libertarians’: ‘They say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings'”, Hit & Run, 2012-04-03

March 30, 2012

“Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Brendan O’Neill on Britain joining China and Iran in punishing free speech:

This week, Britain became a fully paid-up member of that clique of illiberal intolerant, tweeter-harassing states.

On Tuesday, at Swansea Magistrates Court in Wales, Liam Stacey, a student, was imprisoned for 56 days for writing offensive tweets.

Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting. It needs to be spelt out like that in order to show how shocking it is that in the 21st century, in a nation that gave us such great warriors for freedom as The Levellers and John Stuart Mill, a young man has now been banged up for expressing his thoughts.

Stacey’s thoughts were far from pleasant ones. In fact they were offensive and repugnant.

What kind of freedom of speech do you have when you can be punished for expressing unpopular and idiotic sentiments? None whatsoever. When you’re only free to mouth the mainstream popular opinions — or what the state tells you is acceptable — you don’t have freedom of speech at all.

When other tweeters complained to Stacey about his off-colour comments, he started to use racist language. He told his detractors to “f**k off”, and hurled pretty much every racial slur under the sun at them.

The Twitterati reported him to the police. And sure enough he got a visit from the cops, was charged with committing a racially aggravated public order offence, and now finds himself in the clink alongside burglars and rapists.

Yes, Stacey’s comments were horrible. But this was speech rather than actions, the use of words rather than the use of fists, and there should never be any state involvement, certainly not arrests and showtrials, in the arena of speech.

In finding himself incarcerated simply because he refused to “Pray for Muamba” and then expressed nasty racist thoughts, Stacey has effectively been punished for committing a thoughtcrime, or perhaps its modern equivalent: a tweetcrime.

December 28, 2011

The racist origins of the drug war

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

Back in the dim, distant past when Ron Paul was running for President on the Libertarian Party ticket, he outlined the reasons for the start of the war on drugs. Ryan Grimm summarizes the situation in the late 1980s:

Ron Paul’s presidential campaign has spent the last two weeks dealing with the political consequences of the reemergence of racist newsletters that went out under his name in the 1980s and ‘90s. During that same time period, however, Paul also laid out an historical analysis of the racist roots of the drug war that accurately and honestly reflects its origins.

In 1988 Paul made a presidential campaign stop at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws while running on the Libertarian Party ticket. “What was so bad about the period from 1776 to 1914?” Paul wondered, referring to a time in American history when drugs were legal on the federal, and, in many towns, local level. “In the 20th Century, the doctors, like all business people, decided that there ought to be a monopoly. ‘If you wanted a little bit of codeine in your cough medicine, it would be much better if you come to me so I can charge you $25 for a prescription.’”

Paul, in a speech aired at the time on C-SPAN went on. “Before the 20th Century there was none of that and it was the medical profession as well as many other trade groups that agitated for the laws. And you know there’s a pretty good case made that this same concept was built in with racism as well. We do know that opium was used by the Chinese and the Chinese were not welcomed in this country,” Paul said. “We do know that the blacks at times use heroin, opium and the laws have been used against them. There have been times that it has been recognized that the Latin Americans use marijuana and the laws have been written against them. But lo and behold the drug that inebriates most of the members of Congress has not been touched because they’re up there drinking alcohol.”

December 26, 2011

Brian Doherty doesn’t think the Ron Paul newsletters matter very much

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Over at Hit & Run, Brian Doherty outlines why he doesn’t think the Ron Paul Newsletter kerfuffle matters:

Many voices whose accomplishments I otherwise respect think that the fact Ron Paul had associates who, for a brief period over a decade in the past, wrote some mean-spirited, nasty, and dumb stuff rooted in race and sexual orientation under his name is the most important thing to discuss about Ron Paul, and that the public condemnation and humiliation of those supposedly responsible is the most important public policy issue surrounding Paul’s campaign now.

Part of this seems to be based on a so-far completely imagined belief that this particular repetition of the newsletter story cycle is somehow destroying Ron Paul’s campaign and that such name-naming or “grappling with the past” is necessary to save that campaign. While this may become true (and the consistent harping on and reminding people of it can’t help), there’s no evidence for it yet; Paul’s still gaining in polls. Note this Fox story headlined “Newsletters, Statements Cause Campaign Problems for Ron Paul” where the only voices they can find who actually thinks it’s an important issue belong to Paul’s opponent Newt Gingrich and GOP apparatchik Karl Rove and National Review editor Rich Lowry (whose own publication’s history has worse to answer to in terms of racial insensitivity combined with actual expressed support for legal actions against the rights of African-Americans, which leads Paul fans to believe that none of this has to do with actual objections to anyone with connections to past awful race-based comments, but with scuttling what is good about the Ron Paul campaign).

[. . .]

By any standard of political or moral judgment that I can respect, that is what is important about Ron Paul and the story of Ron Paul now. And from my five years of experience reporting on the Ron Paul movement that’s arisen since 2007, both for Reason and for my forthcoming book, I can assure any old libertarian worried about old libertarian movement business that it is the good things about Ron Paul that have won him the support and love he has won, and that this old business is irrelevant to them, and thus irrelevant to the actual important political and cultural story about Ron Paul now.

December 6, 2011

The GOP field, in brief

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Really, it’s no wonder that GOP voters are seriously unimpressed with the field of candidates they’ve got to put up with. L. Neil Smith sums up the “front-runners” on the way to explaining why Herman Cain’s bid was quashed:

I don’t write about race very often, because it’s unimportant to me. But allow me to preface this by admitting I never liked Herman Cain.

Not as a presidential candidate. It had nothing to do with his color, of course. I can think instantly of three black men (Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Richard Boddie) who would make excellent candidates, and Cain, for all his mercantilist baggage, would have made a better President than that crypto-Democrat Mitt Romney, or America’s answer to Benito Mussolini, Il Douchebag himself, Newt Gingrich.

I leave Rick Perry undescribed only because I can’t summon up an adjective adequate to deal with this dull-witted second-rate George Bush imitation, a walking, talking violation of the Law of Natural Selection.

Cain, however, did not find himself jettisoned from the American electoral process because of his opinions on policy (at least not directly), his past association with the Evil Menace of Fast Food, or even because of the naughty things he was accused of having done with women by three specimens of highly questionable believability and a million braying jackasses of the government-approved news-generating industry.

Cain got the boot because—well, let me tell you a story …

October 28, 2011

Malthus provides “cover” for racism

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Tim Black explores why Thomas Malthus’ ideas have never been more popular than they are today:

Lisping, reclusive and reviled by the working class of his day, the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) — the man behind the idea that the ‘lower orders of society’ breed too quickly — would probably be surprised by his current popularity. Because that’s what he is today: popular. Commentators, activists and academics positively fall over themselves in the rush to say, ‘you know what, that Malthus had a point. There are too many people and, what’s more, they are consuming far too much.’

Earlier this summer, a columnist for Time magazine was in no doubt as to the pastor’s relevance. The global population is ‘ever larger, ever hungrier’, he noted, ‘food prices are near historic highs’ and ‘every report of drought or flooding raises fears of global shortages’. ‘Taking a look around us today’, he continued, ‘it would be easy to conclude that Malthus was prescient’. Writing in the British weekly, the New Statesman, wildlife lover Sir David Attenborough was similarly convinced: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this Earth than can be fed.’ Not to be outdone, the liberal-left’s favourite broadsheet, the Guardian, also suggested that Malthus may have been right after all: ‘[His] arguments were part of the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and they have validity in the natural world. On the savannah, in the rainforests, and across the tundra, animal populations explode when times are good, and crash when food reserves are exhausted. Is homo sapiens an exception?’ The melancholy tone whispered its answer in the negative. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman was less coy: ‘Malthus was right!’ shouted the headline.

Given the encomia that are currently coming the way of Malthus you may well wonder what exactly it was that he was meant to be right about. To find the answer to this it is worth actually taking a look at the work, first published in 1798, on which his supposed prescience is based: An Essay on the Principle of Population. It makes for surprising reading.

September 10, 2011

Opposing the EDL as a way of expressing class hatred?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:50

The English Defence League (EDL) has come in for a lot of criticism for its provocative approach to expressing their concerns about issues like immigration. The critics, however, are not all pure in their opposition, however:

This video, currently causing a stink on Twitter, rather confirms what draws many young middle-class liberals towards anti-English Defence League campaigning: it provides them with a semi-legit cover for expressing their fear and loathing of the white working classes.

In the video, two well-bred kids say things about working-class EDL supporters that could have been lifted straight from the pages of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, that exposé of early twentieth-century snobs’ disdain for vulgar little people. The anti-EDL campaigners describe a female supporter of the EDL as “the most tattooed, horrible scrote of a woman” they have ever seen and then laugh as they talk about how she was “kicked up the arse” by a left-wing protester. It’s not normally okay to hit women, they admit, but you can make an exception when it comes to female EDL supporters because “they aren’t women — they’re dogs”.

The video has proved enormously embarrassing for Left-wing campaigners against the EDL, who are desperately trying to distance themselves from the naked class hatred expressed by these two twits. Yet the fact is that a great deal of anti-EDL protesting is driven by a barely disguised hatred for that apparently ugly, uncouth, un-PC blob of white flesh that inhabits inner-city council estates. The two guys in the video have only stated it in a more explicit fashion.

August 21, 2011

Obama has to fight reductions in government spending

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Christopher Taylor explains why (in addition to the mere philosophical issues) Obama will have to resist any cuts to government spending:

In other words, to fix the debt, we have to lose jobs. To trim the debt down and reduce government spending to a sane and survivable level lots of federal jobs are going to be lost. That’s an inevitable consequence of the federal government bloat over the last few decades; lots of new jobs added, each costing money. When you cut the spending, jobs will be lost. And because a lot of that debt was created by adding new jobs, the direct and obvious solution is to snip those jobs away.

And it gets worse. Blacks are disproportionately represented in government jobs. In fact, hiring blacks in federal jobs is so out of norm with the general population that NASA has the smallest over representation by only hiring 49% more blacks than are in the general population. Blacks make up about 10% of the United States population, but make up about 20% of the federal government jobs according to a 2010 study by the Office of Personnel Management.

So we’re faced with a brutal dilemma: in order to lighten the pressure of the federal government on the economy and businesses so both can breathe and prosper, we’re going to have to slash the government down in size which will result in many people losing jobs in a time of dire unemployment. And many of those lost jobs will be black jobs.

Now, which politician wants to stand up and actually do that? Which politician will vote and fight to slash jobs and fire lots of black people? And if that actually somehow takes place, what exactly do you think will happen in the press and in black America? How do you think that will be portrayed by a media which already is incredibly hostile to the idea of cutting anything in the federal government?

H/T to Gerard Vanderleun for the link.

June 29, 2011

“Yes, of course, there is racism in Canada”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:24

Publius has a go at a silly speech by Senator Don Oliver on the idea that black Canadians need to “rise up and address the deep racism in this country that keeps them out of positions of power”:

Yes, of course, there is racism in Canada. As there is where ever different racial groups are present. Some portion of the humanity will always insist on thinking in tribal terms. Of all the countries in the world where such attitudes are least persistent it is in Canada. Senator Oliver then goes onto make this utterly absurd statement:

     Oliver blames Canada’s experience with slavery for much of the black community’s inability to support each other and for the stereotypes old-stock Canadians continue to show.

    “It really flows from the days of slavery . . . because of the slave mentality,” he explained, when someone got ahead, they would get dragged down by the group.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians don’t even know slavery existed in this country. The Senator even alludes to this in the interview. So you’re influenced by something you thought happened elsewhere? To say nothing of the risible notion that old-stock Canadians are more bigoted than newer group. Seriously? Groups that spent generations slaughtering each other over trivial differences in physical appearance, religious beliefs and language are suppose to show up in Canada and have no problem with blacks? Is the Senator aware of the Indian caste system? Is he aware of the prejudice shown in many Caribbean countries for darker blacks by lighter skinned blacks? There is likely more systematic racism, if we can call it that, in Jamaica than Canada.

[. . .]

The vast majority of Canadian blacks, or their parents, emigrated to Canada in the last forty years. They came here like most Canadians and there ancestors were never held as slaves on Canadian soil. Many of those who came to Canada before 1970 did so to escape the systematic racism of the American South. While this country was hardly a picture of tolerance by modern standards, it was far preferable to what else was on offer.

June 22, 2011

QotD: Who’s more smug than Bono? The “Bono Pay Up” protesters

Filed under: Africa, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

[T]he Bono Pay Up lobby, far from challenging Bono’s gobsmackingly paternalistic attitude towards Africa, is encouraging him to put his money where his mouth is. Its message is effectively: Stop talking about saving Africa and go out and actually save it! The campaign group claims that it is because of individuals like Bono, who export bits of their business overseas in order to avoid paying high taxes at home, that Africa is a mess. Some of that tax could be used for the foreign aid budget, you see. Not only is this a spectacularly naïve view of the massive structural problems facing underdeveloped nations in the Third World — as if their woes could be magically fixed by Bono and others stumping up a bit more tax — but it also suggests, explicitly, that it is up to rich white men to save downtrodden Africa.

According to Bono Pay Up, if Bono paid his taxes in a more “ethical” fashion, he could help to alleviate “suffering in the developing world”. Unless the protesters succeed in shifting Bono’s personal habits, “the poor will always be with us”, they claim. In short, all it takes for the poor to be lifted up from their empty-stomached, teary-eyed existences is for a few good men — white ones, naturally — to behave more ethically and caringly. It’s the White Tax Man’s Burden. In focusing on Bono’s alleged hypocrisy, the protesters are actually trying to bridge the gap between the Bono persona (saviour of Africa) and the Bono reality (he pays his taxes in a weird way). That is, they want him to become what he claims to be — the Moral Viceroy of Africa — and to show the Dark Continent how to reach the light. A plague on both their houses. If there are any African bands playing at Glastonbury I hope they lay into the Bono Pay Up lobby, and then use its silly placards to wallop Bono.

Brendan O’Neill, “The ‘Bono Pay Up’ protesters have achieved the remarkable feat of being even more smug than Bono”, The Telegraph, 2011-06-22

May 27, 2011

Colby Cosh: It wasn’t a market failure that caused the sub-prime fiasco

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

He’s quite right, not that the powers-that-be will take away the correct lesson from the experience:

What I see when I look at the origins of the financial pandemic is the story “government-sponsored enterprises that subsidize crazy lending practices and puppetize legislators fail.” Mortgage-writing institutions did things throughout the late 1990s and early oh-ohs that weren’t just likely to turn out badly; they made enormous amounts of loans that were practically certain to go bust in the short-to-medium term, loans that your mother could have told you would go sour. It wasn’t a “free” market that relaxed mortgage underwriting standards to the point of annihilation; it wasn’t a “free” market that put unskilled workers in million-dollar homes in the Sand States, or that spent too long ignoring the rising default rates that resulted.

We know this, in part, because we know how slightly freer mortgage markets traditionally behaved; they “redlined” the living heck out of low-income neighbourhoods. Because redlining resulted in racial discrimination — critics would just say it is racial discrimination — there has been a concerted attempt among economists to absolve the major U.S. anti-redlining statute, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, from any role in creating the housing bubble. Obviously it won’t do to pin the crisis on a 1977 law, but there is such a thing as the straw that broke the camel’s back; the CRA was followed by an even more intense fusillade of statutory and regulatory measures consciously designed to increase home ownership in America without making homes less expensive and valuable per se.

January 26, 2011

QotD: The elephant in the living world

Filed under: Economics, Japan, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Here in peaceful and progressive Canada, it is so easy to feel smug towards larger countries that get their hands dirty in the world arena. Especially that one country built on the conquest and near eradication of its peaceful natives who have received hardly any compensation or even an apology. You know, the one founded on belligerent exceptionalism and manifest superiority over other cultures that was turned into a national religion that has historically led to imperialist conquest and mass slaughter. This country still has an actual federal law that requires all foreigners to carry their papers with them at all times, or risk being deported by any policeman who can, simply on a whim, question and detain them. The country so primitive and barbaric that it actively uses the death penalty, shrugging off international protests about it just as coldly as it does in important environmental issues. Its provincial masses bitterly cling to their traditional values while their media feeds them a constant diet of mindless pap and actively hushes up embarrassing facts. They rarely travel abroad, being not just obsessed with ethnic purity and deeply suspicious, even afraid, of anything foreign, but also unapologetically sexist and classist, especially towards this one minority they consider dirty, criminal and less evolved. We can only sigh in relief that sun is finally setting on the once so unstoppable economic juggernaut… of Japan.

Ilkka, “The elephant in the living world”, The Fourth Checkraise, 2011-01-20

January 15, 2011

Indian model photoshopped against her will

Filed under: Health, India, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

It’s no secret that most of the images used for magazine covers have had a healthy dose of Photoshoppery, but this is a few filters too far:

Leave it to ELLE Magazine to photochop the world’s most beautiful woman. Aishwarya Rai, the reigning queen of Indian cinema, model and classically trained dancer is currently on the cover of ELLE India — several shades lighter. Rai’s skin has been lightened and her dark brown hair appears to have a red tint to it.

The Times of India reported the former Miss World is “furious with the bleaching botch-up” and is considering taking legal action against ELLE.

ELLE’s mission is to make women “chic and smart, guide their self-expression, and encourage their personal power,” but their recent covers could lead readers to believe that “chic, smart and personal empowerment” only comes to those with light skin.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

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