Quotulatiousness

June 10, 2024

South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” falters

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

Niccolo Soldo’s weekly roundup included a lengthy section on the recent election results in South Africa and what they might mean for the nation’s short- and medium-term stability:

Being a teen, the issue of South African Apartheid didn’t really fit all that well within the overarching Cold War paradigm. Unlike most other global issues, this one didn’t break down cleanly between the “freedom-loving West” and the “dictatorial, oppressive communist bloc”, as the push to dismantle the regime came from western liberals who were in agreement with the reds.

This slight bit of complexity did not faze most people, as Apartheid was seen as a relic of an older world, one to be consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history. It’s elimination did fit well enough into the Post-Berlin Wall world, one in which freedom and democracy were to reign supreme. This was more than enough reason for almost all people to cheer the release of Nelson Mandela and applaud South Africa’s embrace of western liberal democracy.

In the early 1990s, men once again dared to flirt with utopian ideas, and South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” was to be its centrepiece: out with authoritarianism, racism, ethnocentrism, etc., and in with multiracialism, multiethnicity, democracy and individual liberty. We could all leave the past where it belonged (in the past) and live in peace and harmony, as democracy would defend it, secure it, and preserve it. South Africa would lead the way, and would in fact teach us westerners how it is to be done.

Oddly enough, South Africa quickly fell off of the radar of mainstream media in the West when it failed to live up to these lofty goals. Rather than living up to the hype of being the “Rainbow Nation”, it instead was quickly mired in the politics of corruption and race, showing itself to be all too human, just like the rest of us. South Africa had failed to immediately resolve its inherent internal tensions, whether they be racial, economic, ethnic, or ideological, and by extension it had failed to deliver its promise to western liberals. “Out of sight, out of mind” became the best practice, replacing the utopianism of the first half of the 1990s.

Granted, a lot of grace was given to South Africa by western media so long as Nelson Mandela remained in office (and even after that), but the failures were plainly evident to see: an explosion in crime and in corruption were its most obvious characteristics, ones that could not be brushed under the carpet. The African National Congress (ANC), the party that would deliver the promise of the Rainbow Nation, was instead shown to be little more than a powerful engine of corruption and patronage. Luckily for the ANC, it was fueled in large part by the legacy of Mandela and the goodwill that he had accumulated over the years while he sat in prison.

The post-Mandela era has not been kind to the ANC (nor to South Africa as a whole), as the party could no longer hide behind his fading legacy, and could no longer cash in on the goodwill that came from it. It could “put up”, and would it not “shut up”. The ANC over time became a lumbering beast, too big to slay, but too slow to destroy its opposition when compared to its nimble youth.

What has the party delivered in its three decades of power? It did help dismantle Apartheid, but it did not deliver economic prosperity and opportunity to all. Instead, it simply swapped out elites where it could, preferring to keep the new ones in house. An inability to tame crime and to keep the national power grid running has turned the country into a bit of a joke, especially when it is lumped into the BRICS group alongside Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Despite its abundance of natural wealth, South Africa has been economically mismanaged.

South Africa is an important country to watch for the simple reason that there is so much tinder lying around, ready to be set ablaze. Luckily for South Africans, dire projections of widespread civil strife have not come to pass. Unluckily for South Africans, their national trajectory is headed in the wrong direction. Last week’s national elections saw the ANC lose their parliamentary majority for the first time ever, and the only way to read the results is to conclude that no matter how one may feel about this very corrupt party, it is an ominous sign.

May 28, 2024

Trudeau is at his very best in tackling imaginary problems

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

Tristin Hopper calls attention to just how much of the federal government’s attention is focused on problems that don’t actually exist, except in the Prime Minister’s vivid imagination, like the notorious “hidden agenda” of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives to turn Canada into the world of The Handmaid’s Tale by banning abortion (and undoubtedly forcing women to wear the distinctive red-dress-and-bonnet uniforms, too):

In Trudeau’s fevered imagination, this is what the Tories want Canadian women to be wearing in future.

The Trudeau government has initiated another round of warning that Canadian abortion access is at risk.

“Women’s rights, reproductive rights, and equality are non-negotiable,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared at a recent speech, as Liberal Party social media accounts broadcast accusations that their opponents endanger a “woman’s right to choose”.

This would all make perfect sense in the United States, which has indeed seen a wave of new state-level laws effectively banning abortion outright.

But the Liberals are talking about Canada, a country that has no abortion laws whatsoever, and no political inclination to create any.

Polls show an incredible 80 per cent of Canadians supporting a “woman’s right to an abortion”. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t once touch abortion during his nine-year tenure.

As noted, Canada literally has no legal language dealing with the whole abortion issue … and therefore any Conservative government would have to create a new law to even begin to address an issue that a super-majority of Canadians are already against “fixing”. Conservatives can be incredibly dumb at times, but that would be stupidity of a very high order indeed.

Then, there’s Trudeau’s determination to link Poilievre with Diagonal, er, Dialagon, er, Dialysis, I mean “Diagolon”, which is apparently some super-powerful secretive extreme right-wing conspiracy to … do something diagonal-ish? I dunno. I’d never heard of ’em until Trudeau started trying to tie Poilievre to them:

Earlier this month, the Liberal’s main attack against the Conservatives was that they were in thrall to Diagolon, a supposed white supremacist militia with designs on destroying Canada from within.

“What has not been answered by the leader of the Opposition is why he chooses to continue to court extreme right nationalist groups like Diagolon,” said Trudeau in the House of Commons on April 30, one of several times he would slap down a question from the Conservatives by bringing up Dialogon.

Poilievre’s alleged ties to Diagolon are pretty tenuous. At a Nova Scotia fundraiser, among the attendees who queued up to shake Poilievre’s hand was Diagolon founder Jeremy MacKenzie, who claimed he did it just to get Poilievre in trouble. More recently, Poilievre visited an anti-carbon tax encampment where one of the RVs had a small Diagolon logo scrawled on its front door in permanent marker.

What’s more, multiple police investigations have concluded that Diagolon isn’t even a group, much less an organized anti-government militia.

It’s basically three guys on a podcast and their followers — whom they’ve occasionally met for BBQs. According to an RCMP profile of Diagolon put together at the height of Freedom Convoy, it was “exceedingly difficult” to nail down Diagolon as “a distinct group, with common ideology, a political agenda, and the cohesion necessary to advance such an agenda.”

The bought-and-paid-for Canadian media, of course, haven’t done much to point out just how ludicrous these accusations are, because even if they’re not, y’know, true, they are “truthy”. It’s not likely to change, as the legacy media still hate and fear anyone who might threaten their cosy subsidy deal with the Liberals.

And then there’s the Liberals’ fixed belief that Canada is the most racist country to ever have existed and that our entire culture is based on white supremacy and oppressing the “global majority” at all times:

Derived from the U.S. academic dogma of critical race theory, anti-racism holds that Canada’s basic structures — from its police forces to its justice system to its parliaments — are all fundamentally white supremacist. As such, they can only be remedied by “deliberate systems and supports” favouring “equity-seeking groups”, according to official Government of Canada literature.

The Trudeau government has established an Anti-Racism Secretariat, they’ve poured tens of millions of dollars into race-specific grants and they’ve subjected every arm of the federal government to anti-racism mandates and training.

Agencies such as the Canada Research Chairs program now openly screen for candidates based on ethnicity and other immutable characteristics. And perhaps most infamously, it was a federal anti-racism program that paid more than $500,000 to Laith Marouf, a virulent antisemite who has repeatedly referred to his benefactor as “Apartheid KKKanada”.

All of this has proceeded on the core assumption that Canada is — and always has been — a country defined by “systemic racism”. This was stated most plainly in an internal Canadian Armed Forces report which declared “racism in Canada is not a glitch in the system; it is the system”.

There’s a lot of (imported) fretting and huffing and puffing about this “issue”, yet there is almost no evidence for any of it being true in Canada. It would be statistically more likely to be true that much of our government and business organizations are actively over-hiring and over-promoting people on the basis of them not being white or male or heterosexual than the reverse.

May 25, 2024

Another thing for progressives to obsess about – “horticultural appropriation”

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

In Spiked, Lauren Smith wonders if your garden — yes, your garden — is a nest of racist appropriation:

Is your garden a bed of racist colonialism?

Is your garden racist? As incredible as this may seem, it’s a question many gardeners are being forced to ask themselves. The innocent act of planting a few flowers can now get you branded with the r-word.

A piece in the June issue of the BBC’s Gardeners’ World magazine claims that the weeds of racism have sprung up in some unlikely places. Landscape designer Jackie Herald argues that choosing to plant non-native species in British gardens can constitute “horticultural appropriation”, because they were originally brought to the UK as a result of colonialism.

Herald writes: “Embedded within cross-cultural borrowing is horticultural appropriation, something that’s all too easy for our nation of gardeners to carry on regardless. In many cases, the abundant plant selections that we now take for granted did come via free-willing exchanges, but were sourced by plant hunters during years of colonialism and power-grabbing global trade.”

So, instead of picking out plants willy-nilly, Herald tries to choose plants that “connect to my client’s cultural heritage”. That means you had better check your 23&Me results before filling your flowerbeds, otherwise you could be horticulturally appropriating plants that don’t align with your racial heritage.

Uprooting racism from your garden might be more tricky than you’d think. Not least as some of the UK’s best-loved flowers are products of “colonialism”. Magnolias, for example, came from colonial Virginia and camellias from China.

Apparently, the most problematic perennial of all is wisteria, that inoffensive purple plant you often see hanging around the doors of posh houses. In 2022, Transport for London published a sightseeing guide called Art on the Underground, which claimed that wisteria has “colonial roots” (presumably no pun intended). This is because it was brought to England in the early 19th century from China. The guide also highlighted the supposedly racist nature of using words like “exotic”, “native” or “invasive” to describe plants. According to TfL, these can cultivate painful memories of “histories of conquest” and are best avoided.

QotD: “Dirt Theory”

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

Moving is racist, when white people do it. When a white person chooses to relocate, the consequences are racism. To understand this, you have to understand what Steve Sailer dubs “Dirt Theory”: Any geographical location where black or brown people live is “Tragic Dirt”, afflicted by poverty and violence, and the only solution to their problem is to move them to white-occupied “Magic Dirt”, where everybody is rich and all the kids have high test scores. At least, this is how liberals seem to believe the world works, and have made “Dirt Theory” the basis of their attitude on such issues as immigration. In their disordered minds, people like Harvard Professor Raj Chetty believe that analysis of geographic data about poverty, crime, etc., will yield insights about the causes of these phenomena — places matter more than people.

Robert Stacey McCain, “New Form of Racism Has Been Discovered”, The Other McCain, 2024-02-04.

May 23, 2024

The “post-national” entity formerly known as “Canada”

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

You have to hand it to the Trudeau family (and all their sycophantic enablers in the legacy media, of course). What other Canadian family has had such an impact on the country? By the time Justin Trudeau’s successor is invited to form a government, Canada will have changed so much — to the point that he could describe us as the first “post-national” country thanks to his unceasing effort to destroy the nation. At The Hub, Eric Kaufmann points the finger at Trudeau’s “Liberal-left extremism” as the motivating factor in Trudeau’s career:

Justin Trudeau has always had a strong affinity for the symbolic gesture, especially when the media are around to record it.

Canada is currently suffering from left-liberal extremism the likes of which the world has never seen. This excess is not socialist or classically liberal, but specifically “left-liberal”. It is evident in everything from this country’s world record immigration and soaring rents to state-sanctioned racial discrimination in hiring and sentencing, to the government-led shredding of the country’s history and memory. Rowing back from this overreach will not be the work of voters in one election, but of generations of Canadians.

The task is especially difficult in Canada, because, after the 1960s, the country (outside of Quebec) transferred its soul from British loyalism to cultural left-liberalism. Its new national identity (multiculturalist, post-national, with no “core” identity) was based on a quest for moral superiority measured using a left-liberal yardstick. Canada was to be the most diverse, most equitable, most inclusive nation in world history. No rate of immigration, no degree of majority self-abasement, no level of minority sensitivity, would ever be too much.

In my new book The Third Awokening, I define woke as the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. Woke cultural socialism, the idea of equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for totemic minorities, represents the ideological endpoint of these sacred values. Like economic socialism, the result of cultural socialism is immiserization and a decline in human flourishing. We must stand against this extremism in favour of moderation.

The woke sanctification of identity did not stem primarily from Marxism, which rejected identity talk as bourgeois, but from a fusion of liberal humanism with the New Left’s identitarian version of socialism. What it produced was a hybrid which is neither Marxism nor classical liberalism.

Left-liberalism is moderate on economics, favouring a mixed capitalism in which regulation and the welfare state ameliorate the excesses of the market, without strangling economic growth. Its suspicion of communist authoritarianism helped insulate it from the lure of Soviet Moscow.

On culture, however, left-liberalism has no guardrails. When it comes to group inequality and harm protection, its claims are open-ended, with institutions and the nation castigated as too male, pale, and stale. For believers, the only way forward is through an unrestricted increase in minority representation. They will not entertain the idea that the distribution of women and minorities across different occupations could reflect cultural or psychological diversity as opposed to “systemic” discrimination. This is the origin of the letters “D” and “E” in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Rather than seeking to optimize equity and diversity for maximal human flourishing, these are ends in themselves that brook no limits.

Left-liberals fail to ring-fence the degree of sensitivity that majority groups are supposed to display toward minority groups. Their emphasis on inclusivity through speech suppression rounds out the “I” in DEI. From racial sensitivity training (starting in the 1970s) to the “inclusive” avoidance of words like “Latino” or “mother” that offend and create a so-called hostile environment that silences subaltern groups, majorities are expected to police their speech.

May 21, 2024

Idi Amin would have loved MMT

Filed under: Africa, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jon Miltimore talks about the economic disaster of Idi Amin’s Uganda after Amin and his predecessor decided to nationalize most big businesses in the country and then to print money to cover the government shortfalls in revenue that resulted:

Ugandan dictator Idi Amin at the United Nations, October 1975.
Detail of a photo by Bernard Gotfryd via Wikimedia Commons.

Idi Amin (1923-2003) was one of the most ruthless and oppressive dictators of the 20th Century.

Many will remember Amin from the 2006 movie The Last King of Scotland, a historical drama that netted Forest Whitaker an Academy Award for Best Actor for his depiction of the Ugandan president.

While Western media often mocked Amin, who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979, as a self-aggrandizing buffoon, they tended to overlook the atrocities he inflicted on his people. He murdered an estimated 300,000 Ugandans, many of them in brutal fashion. One such victim is believed to be Amin’s fourth wife, Kay, whose body was found decapitated and dismembered in a car trunk in 1974, shortly after the couple divorced.

While historians and journalists have tended to focus on Amin’s dismal record on human rights, his economic policies are atrocities in their own right and also deserve attention.

A Brief History of Uganda

Uganda, a landlocked country in the eastern part of Central Africa, received its independence from the United Kingdom on Oct. 9, 1962 (though Queen Elizabeth remained the official head of state). The nation’s earliest years were turbulent.

Uganda was ruled by Dr. Apollo Milton Obote — first as prime minister and then as president — until January 1971, when an upstart general who had served in the British Colonial Army, Idi Amin Dada Oumee, seized control and set himself up as a dictator. (The coup was launched before Amin, a lavish spender, could be arrested for misappropriation of army funds.)

Among Amin’s first moves as dictator was to complete the nationalization of businesses that had begun under his predecessor Obote, who had announced an order allowing the state to assume a 60 percent stake in the nation’s top industries and banks. Obote’s announcement, The New York Times reported at the time, had resulted in a surge of capital flight and “brought new investment to a virtual stand still”. But instead of reversing the order, Amin cemented and expanded it, announcing he was taking a 49 percent stake in 11 additional companies.

Amin was just getting started, however. The following year he issued an order expelling some 50,000 Indians with British passports from the country, which had a devastating economic impact on the country.

“‘These Ugandan ‘Asians’ were entrepreneurial, talented and hard-working people, skilled in business, and they formed the backbone of the economy,” Madsen Pirie, President of the UK’s Adam Smith Institute, wrote in an article on Amin’s expulsion order. “However, Idi Amin favoured people from his own ethnic background, and arbitrarily expelled them anyway, giving their property and businesses to his cronies, who promptly ran them into the ground through incompetence and mismanagement.”

Even as he was nationalizing private industry and expelling Ugandan Asians, Amin was busy rapidly expanding the country’s public sector.

The Ugandan economy was soon in shambles. Amin’s financial advisors were naturally frightened to share this news with Amin, but in his book Talk of the Devil: Encounters With Seven Dictators, journalist Riccardo Orizio says one finance minister did just that, informing Amin “the government coffers were empty”.

The response from Amin is telling.

“Why [do] you ministers always come nagging to President Amin?” he said. “You are stupid. If we have no money, the solution is very simple: you should print more money.”

May 17, 2024

Lies my teacher taught me

Filed under: Cancon, Education, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

A Peel District School Board teacher using the pseudonym “Igor Stravinsky” explains the sort of indoctrination high school students are receiving about First Nations and the development of Canada:

Previously in this series, I have discussed some of the things students are learning, and not learning, about Indigenous people in the Peel District School Board:

  • Indigenous people are the true owners of the land; the rest of us are just settlers
  • Indigenous people should be able to continue to practice their traditional ways while being provided all the amenities commensurate with living in a modern, first world country
  • Indigenous people are victims, other Canadians are oppressors
  • The disproportionately poor quality of life which characterizes the lives of many Indigenous people today is the result of past and current injustices by non-Indigenous people, chiefly the Indian Residential Schools
  • Life was good for Indigenous people, who were wise and peaceful, before Europeans showed up
  • The goal of the Europeans who arrived in Canada was the genocide of Indigenous people
  • The settlers failed in their quest for genocide due to the courage and resilience of the Indigenous people

As I have demonstrated, all of the above is simplistic, misleading, or false.

Why teach students a false narrative?

The ahistorical Indigenous genocide narrative started out in academia where Grievance Studies (Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Fat Studies, etc.) have a massive presence. These post-modernist inspired programs, collectively referred to as “Critical Theory” have influenced all areas of academia and spread to Canadian institutions generally. Grievance studies programs can only exist so long as there are grievances, which necessitates re-writing history and putting people into oppositional groups of victims and oppressors. Academics had to either get on the bandwagon or keep their mouth shut if they disagreed with this new paradigm. Those who did not, such as Frances Widdowson, were attacked and paid a massive price for speaking freely about the lies on which grievance studies programs are based.

Left-leaning politicians have been keen to get on board with Critical Theory. It wins them support from the academics and well-meaning (but poorly informed) members of the public who want to be “on the right side of history”. Even conservative politicians tend to look the other way, seeing taking on the well-organized, well-funded, academia-based activists as an overall vote loser. After all, they can count on the conservative vote. To whom else can such voters turn? Consequently, school boards and the authors of school curricula are captured by Critical Theory and teachers are expected to tow the line. Anyone who doesn’t is said to be “causing harm” and faces harsh discipline.

Entrenchment of the Indigenous genocide narrative ensures ever increasing payments from Canadian taxpayers in the form of rent and compensation. The lion’s share of these payments go to the Grievance Industry Tzars- Corrupt Indigenous leaders and their non-Indigenous allies, with little trickling down to the average Indigenous person. That is why, in spite of the fact that an ever-increasing part of our federal budget is dedicated to payments to Indigenous groups (to reach 7.7% – $74.6 billion annually by 2026-27), many Indigenous people live in squalor on reserves without basic amenities like clean water, while many others live on the street in urban areas. How can this be happening when taxpayers are handing over more than $40 thousand per year per each Indigenous person?

Is it reasonable for people who want to live in remote areas engaged in low value hunting, gathering, and horticulture activities, declining to integrate into the modern Canadian socio-economic system, to expect 21st century amenities and services paid for by other Canadians? If non-Indigenous people balk at funding this economically unviable mode of existence, does that make us guilty of racism or genocide? That is the impression kids in school are left with after the “education” they receive on the matter.

May 5, 2024

Trudeau’s shameful role in promoting “the blood libel against Canada”

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

Conrad Black believes that Justin Trudeau owes Canadians an apology for his role in pushing the most extreme version of the Residential Schools propaganda:

A very well-informed friend of many years, a contemporary of mine, wrote me the other day that “The blood libel against Canada of this monstrous fiction of thousands of secretly buried Indigenous victims of residential schools may be the single worst injustice this country has suffered in our lifetimes. It is now a conspiracy of silence involving both federal and provincial governments, the RCMP (shameless and useless as ever), and the media, and ‘let’s be frank’, (quoting a Soviet diplomat many years ago whom we both always found rather entertaining in the utter nonsense he used to recite at international meetings), a large section of the public, which knows this to be a falsehood but chooses to side with the silent forces”.

Almost all readers will be aware of the tidal wave of self-mutilating hysteria that inundated this country when, on the basis of apparent anomalies detected by underground radar close to a former Indian Residential School site at Kamloops, British Columbia, a couple of years ago. Immediately, the theory took hold that thousands of native children in those schools had died because of negligence or outright homicide, were buried secretly in unmarked graves, their deaths never recorded and no account given to their families. There is no evidence to support this, yet the prime minister led the nation in an almost medieval circular mass pilgrimage of self-flagellation. In order to impress upon ourselves and the entire world the profundity of our self-humiliation, all official Canadian flags everywhere were lowered to half-mast and maintained in that condition for an unheard-of period of six months.

Parliament voted to spend $27 million to conduct the excavations necessary to verify or otherwise the existence and extent of these graves. This work could have been accomplished by a small group for a few thousand dollars, but the suggestion of actually establishing what happened set up the customary cacophony of complaints about the sacred untouchability of burial grounds, even though it was not clear that there was burial ground at the Kamloops site, and if it was it was rank speculation about who might be buried there if it was. It is not conceivable to me that the country could dress itself out in sackcloth and ashes and flay the flesh off its own back before the bemused or astonished eyes of the entire world and then produce no evidence whatever of the unspeakable outrages that allegedly occurred and gave rise to this conduct, and then simply lapse into Sphinx-like incommunicability: a pristine silence of perfect ambiguity followed a near-terminal St. Vitus dance of window-rattling ululations of national guilt, shame, and self-hate.

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

Various parts of this macabre fable have been precisely and publicly put to rest: children in residential schools were not buried secretly and records were not destroyed; residential school students were accounted for and if they died while at the schools the reason was typically provided and it was almost invariably as a result of illnesses that were not as well treated in those times, and particularly tuberculosis. Beyond that, there has been silence: the febrile allegations of hideous wrongdoing vituperatively hurled at Canadian history and society – at the ancestors of English and French Canadians, at the main Christian churches, at the principal founder of our country whose distinguished name (John A. Macdonald) has been taken down from public buildings, statues of him overturned or removed, and effigies of him burned at festivities of confected righteous anger from coast to coast; all just mysteriously stopped. It is a sonic version of the celebrated poem by Shelley about the fallen monument of a once great King: “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the loan and level sands stretch far away.”

May 3, 2024

So, what Richard Hanania is really saying is “US civil rights law is bad”

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

Scott Alexander reviews Richard Hanania’s recent book The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics:

The Origins Of Woke, by Richard Hanania, has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for.

The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:

he other thesis, the one it actually argues for, is “US civil rights law is bad”. On its own, this is a fine thesis. A book called Civil Rights Law Is Bad would – okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days. We’ll never know, because Richard chose to wrap his argument in a few pages on how maybe this is the origin of woke or something. Still, the book is on why civil rights law is bad.

Modern civil rights law is bad (he begins) for reasons baked into its history. The original Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supposed to be an ad hoc response to the outrageous level of anti-black racism going on in the South, which protests and TV news had finally brought to the attention of the white majority. There was broad support for a bill which was basically “don’t be the KKK”.

Sex discrimination got tacked on half as a joke, half as a poison pill by its enemies to make the bill unpalatable (fact check: true – but there’s a deeper story, see this Slate article for more details). Ideas about “affirmative action” and “disparate impact” weren’t tacked on at all; the bill’s proponents denied that it could be used to justify anything of the sort, and even agreed to include language in the bill saying it was against that. Still, after the bill was passed, a series of executive orders, judicial decisions, and bureaucratic power grabs put all those things in place.

The key point here is that “quotas”, or any kind of “positive discrimination” where minorities got favored over more-qualified whites, were anathema to lawmakers and the American people. But civil rights activists, the courts, and the bureaucracy really wanted those things. So civil rights law became a giant kludge that effectively created quotas and positive discrimination while maintaining plausible deniability. This ended up as the worst of both worlds. Hanania specifically complains about1:

Affirmative Action

Hanania’s take on affirmative action involves the government sending companies a message like this:

  1. We notice your workforce has fewer minorities than the applicant pool.
  2. If this remains true, we’ll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next time we check, your workforce had better have exactly many minorities as the applicant pool.
  3. But you’re not allowed to explicitly favor minority applicants over whites. You certainly can’t do anything flagrant, like set a quota of minority employees equal to their level in the applicant pool.
  4. Have fun!

(here “the applicant pool” is an abstraction, often but not always the same as the general population, which is poorly defined and which bureaucracies can interpret however they want. It’s definitely not the same thing as the actual set of qualified applicants to the business!)

This satisfied the not-really-paying attention white electorate, because politicians could tell them that “quotas are illegal, we’re sure not doing anything like that”. And it satisfied civil rights activists, because inevitably businesses/departments came up with secret ways to favor minorities until representation reached the level where they wouldn’t get sued.

A recent case illustrates the results of this double-bind. The FAA hires air traffic controllers. They used to judge applicants based on a test which measured their skills at air traffic control. This resulted in comparatively few black air traffic controllers. Various civil rights groups put pressure on them, and they replaced the test with a “biographical questionnaire”. The questionnaire asked weird unrelated questions about your life, and you got points if you gave the answer that the FAA thought black people might give (for example, if you said your worst subject was science). This still didn’t get them enough black employees, so they secretly told black communities exactly what answers to put on the questionnaire to go through.

It’s easy to blame the FAA here, but (Hanania says) civil rights law almost forces you to do something like this. People tried simpler things, like keeping a test but giving minority applicants extra points. The courts and civil rights bureaucracy struck these down as illegal. The almost-explicit policy was that you had to get more minority employees, but you had to hide it carefully enough that the American people (who were still against racial preferences) wouldn’t catch on.

    1. I’ve included three of Hanania’s four civil rights law subtopics. The book covers a fourth, Title IX (mostly focusing on women’s sports in college). Although the book provides lots of examples about how the laws here are unfair and outrageous, I can’t bring myself to care about college sports enough to give it the same subtopic status, as, say, the hiring process for all the corporations in America.

April 19, 2024

Humza Yousuf, the “Thug King of Scotland”

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

I don’t know what Scotland did to deserve Humza Yousuf as their first minister, but it must have been really bad:

Not what you were hoping for.

Assuming he doesn’t get removed by a leadership coup before voters sink the leaking Tory battleship, Sunak will be gone by January of 2025 at the latest. That just leaves Humza Yousuf, characterized by Morgoth as The Thug King of Scotland: a post-ideological, apolitical opportunist interested purely in power for its own sake and quite happy to use the absurd public morality of the despised rubes that he rules over to keep the wretches in their place.

And boy, does he despise them.

Yousuf first came to the Internet’s attention in 2020, when he was filmed ranting in the Scottish parliament about how disgustingly racist it was that most of the high public offices in a country with an overwhelmingly White population were occupied by presumptively racist White cavebeasts:

    The Lord President is white, the Lord Justice Clerk is white, every High Court judge is white, the Lord Advocate is white, the Solicitor General is white, the chief constable is white, every deputy chief constable is white, every assistant chief constable is white, the head of the Law Society is white, the head of the Faculty of Advocates is white and every prison governor is white.

    That is not the case only in justice. The chief medical officer is white, the chief nursing officer is white, the chief veterinary officer is white, the chief social work adviser is whiteand almost every trade union in the country is headed by white people. In the Scottish Government, every director general is white. Every chair of every public body is white. That is not good enough.

If you haven’t watched the video, you should. You need to hear the contempt dripping off of his tongue, the way he spits out the awful word “White” like bitter venom.

In the immediate aftermath of this angry foreigner’s tirade, a sane country would have immediately marched their ill-mannered guest out of parliament, stripped him of office and citizenship, thrown him on a rusty fishing vessel, hauled him up north of the Orkneys, tossed him into the North Sea wearing nothing but a life preserver, and sent him on his way with a cheery wave and a reminder to mind the orcas.

Instead, they gave him the keys to the kingdom.

But while the infamous White Speech might not have prevented his elevation to the highest office in the land – indeed, given the derangement of our elites, if anything it smoothed his ascent – it has come back to haunt him. Thin-skinned and insecure as he is, Yousuf’s first priority on taking office was to ram through a new hate speech law with which to prevent the contemptible White worms from critiquing him or his noble tribe of vape-shop owners, cabbies, and grooming gang pimps. The law was ridiculously broad and invasive: one could be reported for the criminal offence of hate speech merely for making a remark in the privacy of one’s home, around the dinner table, with no one present but one’s kith and kin.

The day that the bill was finally forced through the Scottish parliament, and predictably enough for anyone who glanced at the law and had a passing understanding of the Scottish national character, the Scottish people responded by DDoSing the police with a deluge of hate crime reports, a very large number of which were reporting Yousuf’s rant as a hate crime … which, apparently, under the strict interpretation of the new law, it certainly was, with the only thing standing between Yousuf and indictment under his own half-baked law being that his ill-considered harangue took place prior to the law being passed. Which hasn’t stopped the Scots from taking the piss and continuing to report him.

It turns out that the Scots really do not like a ban on bantz, not one bit, and respond to demands that they cease the bantz by cranking up the bantz. Yousuf, being a humourless Pakistani who is confused and angered by this entirely foreseeable reaction, has risen to the occasion with all the grace, poise, and wit you would expect. In an attempt to stem the savage tide of mockery, Yousuf has tried claiming that reporting his hate speech is hate speech (lulz); has ordered Scottish police to read verbatim a prewritten transcript defending him each time his hate speech is thrown back at him (because that doesn’t look ridiculous); and faked a hate crime against himself by having his house sprayed with graffiti (did anyone fall for this?).

The next Scottish general election is two years away. Whether Humza survives the interim as First Minister, and if so whether he is able to guide the “Scottish” “National” Party to victory, remains to be seen. I don’t fancy his chances. He is a cunning and ruthless brute, to be sure. But he is also clumsy, clueless, and very stupid. Yousuf’s popularity has already plummeted. I’m sure he can find ways to plummet further. I believe in you, Yousuf. You can do it!

March 21, 2024

QotD: South Africa under Thabo Mbeki

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[During Nelson Mandela’s presidency, Thabo] Mbeki quickly began to insist that South Africa’s military, corporations, and government agencies bring their racial proportions into exact alignment with the demographic breakdown of the country as a whole. But as Johnson points out, this kind of affirmative action has very different effects in a country like South Africa where 75% of the population is eligible than it does in a country like the United States where only 13% of the population gets a boost. Crudely, an organization can cope with a small percentage of its staff being underqualified, or even dead weight. Sinecures are found for these people, roles where they look important but can’t do too much harm. The overall drag on efficiency is manageable, especially if every other company is working under the same constraints.

Things look very different when political considerations force the majority of an organization to be underqualified (and there are simply not very many qualified or educated black South Africans today, and there were even fewer when these rules went into effect). A shock on that scale can lead to a total breakdown in function, and indeed this is precisely what happened to one government agency after another. Johnson notes that this issue, and particularly its effects on service provision to the rural poor, pit two constituencies against each other which many have tried to conflate, but are actually quite distinct. The immiserated black lower class (which the ANC purported to represent) didn’t benefit at all from affirmative action because they weren’t eligible for government jobs anyway, and they vastly preferred to have the whites running the water system if it meant their kids didn’t get cholera. The people actually benefited by Mbeki’s affirmative action policies were the wealthy and upwardly-mobile black urban bourgeoisie, a tiny minority of the country, but one that formed the core of Mbeki’s support.

That same small group of educated and well-connected black professionals was also the major beneficiary of Mbeki’s other signature economic policy: Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Oversimplifying a bit, BEE was a program in which South African corporations were bullied or threatened into selling some or all of their shares at favorable prices to politically-connected black elites, who generally returned the favor by looting the company’s assets or otherwise running it into the ground (note that this is not the description you will find on Wikipedia). The whole thing was so astoundingly, revoltingly corrupt that even the ANC has had to back off and admit in the face of criticism from the left that something went wrong here.

What made BEE so “successful” is that it was actually far more consensual than you might have guessed from that description. In many cases, the white former owners of these corporations were looking around at the direction of the country and trying to find any possible excuse to unload their assets and get their money out. The trouble was that it was difficult to do that without seeming racist, because obviously racism was the only reason anybody could have doubts about the wisdom of the ANC. The genius of BEE is that it allowed these white elites to perform massive capital flight while simultaneously framing it as a grand anti-racist gesture and a mark of their confidence in the future of the country.

This is one particular instance of a more general phenomenon, which is that at this stage pretty much everybody was pretending that things were going great in South Africa, when things were clearly not, in fact, going great. But this was the late 90s and early 00s, the establishment media had a much tighter hold on information than it does today, and so long as nobody had an interest in the story getting out, it wasn’t going to get out. Everybody who mattered in South Africa wanted the story to be that the end of apartheid had resulted in a peaceful and harmonious society, and everybody outside South Africa who’d spent decades supporting and fundraising for the ANC wanted this to be the story too.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.

March 18, 2024

QotD: Self-hatred (aka “false consciousness”)

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

The expectation that a commentator’s views must be in lockstep with his or her ethnic, religious, or sexual identity is always distasteful — particularly when blacks, women, gays, or Jews are labeled “self-hating” when they refuse to toe the perceived party line.

Cathy Young, “When Jews wax anti-Semitic”, Boston Globe, 2005-02-07.

March 17, 2024

Problematic art, again

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

David Thompson calls to our attention yet another outbreak of problematic racist white supremacy in … landscape paintings?

Hampstead Heath by John Constable, 1820.

Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.

The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour”. And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative”. Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white”, or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.

But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

QotD: Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany never had a “long game” … but Stalin did

Filed under: Germany, History, Japan, Military, Quotations, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Though both the Germans and the Japanese had every intention of starting major wars, as everyone knows they seemingly put zero thought into what they’d do once they won. I know, I know, [Himmler] had his sweaty wet dreams about Wehrbauern on the vast Russian steppes, but all but the most rudimentary post-victory planning seems to have been beyond the Third Reich’s capacity — the Reich Resettlement Office, for instance, was tiny even when the war looked like it would be over by Christmas. The Japanese were, if anything, even dumber — they honestly seemed to believe they could run China, all of it, and even India Manchukuo-style.

The Russians, meanwhile, never stopped playing the long game. While Goebbels made a few token gestures at rapprochement with “the West” (yeah, they called it that), and to sell Nazism to ditto, his heart wasn’t in it, any more than the Japanese’s heart was in their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” hooey. Stalin, by contrast, was always pimping Communism to the West — even in the deepest, darkest days of the war, when it looked like the Wehrmacht was about to march into Moscow, the propaganda directed at the West continued full blast.

Like the German and Japanese aircraft industries, the German propaganda industry was ideologically locked into its core mission: To sell Nazism to Germans. And they were aces at it, no doubt … but then the mission changed. The smart thing for the Germans (and Japanese) to have done with their conquered territories was, in the context of the war, to ease up on the Nazi shit for the duration. The Nazis could’ve had zillions of Ukrainians fighting for them in 1941 just as the Japanese probably could’ve waltzed into India in 1941 had they not been so … well, so Japanese, in the rest of the Pacific rim. Stalin would’ve done it in a heartbeat, had the situation been reversed, and to hell with “authentic” Marxism-Leninism. Win the war first; square the ideology later.

As this is running way long, one example should suffice. Goebbels approached the task of selling Nazism to Germans in the most German way possible: He created the Reich Culture Chamber, which controlled all newspapers, radio broadcasts, film distribution, etc. And it worked, as far as it went — Goebbels deserves his “evil genius” rep — but as we’ve seen, that locked the leadership into an ideological straightjacket. Telling the Wehrmacht to ignore the Commissar Order and buddy up with the Ukrainians would’ve been the smart thing to do, militarily, but it was culturally impossible. Goebbels did his job too well … and then the mission changed.

The Soviets had a similar problem inside the USSR, but — here’s Stalin’s evil genius — they had free reign in propagandizing the West. Goebbels hardly bothered, but the Soviets poured massive resources into it. Forget, as far as you can, everything you think you know about “Nazism” […]. Even if you look at it as objectively as possible, it still seems ridiculous, and there’s a simple explanation for that — it’s not for you. Unless you were a pure blooded Aryan, actually living in Germany (or within Germany’s potential military reach), [they] couldn’t care less about you. Which made being a “Nazi” in, say, America uniquely pointless — you just look like a bigot at best, a traitorous bigot at worst.

Being a “Communist”, though? That was universal. Indeed, that made you a Smart person, a very very smart person, and morally superior to boot. Why? Because you care so much that you’ve mastered this large body of deliberately esoteric doctrine, comrade … all straight out of the NKVD playbook. And if actual life as it was lived in the Soviet Union didn’t quite measure up to the promises, well, that’s because they didn’t have the right people — people like YOU — running things. It’s fucking brilliant — a totally ideologically closed, indeed brutal, system at home, presented as the most open-minded, enlightened, tolerant one possible abroad.

Which is why Joey G. needed a huge Reich Culture Chamber that never came close to justifying its budget, and Stalin needed, effectively, nothing. Being so very, very Smart, wannabe “elites” in the West were happy to spread Commie propaganda for free. The NKVD, let alone the Gestapo, ain’t got shit on the Junior Volunteer Thought Police of Twitter and Facebook …

… which forces us to confront the question: Which model of propaganda are our rulers using? Has the one morphed into the other? Is it real, or is it just “German efficiency”?

Severian, “The Myth of German Efficiency”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-26.

March 11, 2024

Google’s “wild success and monopolistic position has made it grow fat, lazy, and worst of all, stupid”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Google has long been the 500lb gorilla in the room as far as search engine dominance is concerned, despite a significant and steady drop in the quality of the search results it returns. Niccolo Soldo suggests that Google has gotten fat and lazy in the interval since the release of its last huge success — Gmail — and the utter catastrophe of Gemini:

It’s become passé to complain about Google’s search engine these days, because it’s been horrible for years. We all recall its early era when its minimalist presentation effectively destroyed its competition overnight. Only us olds remember AltaVista‘s search engine, for example. So ubiquitous is its core function that the word “google” entered our lexicon.

Roughly 85-90% of the readers who have subscribed to this Substack have used a gmail address to do so. It’s a great product, although it could be better. Like many of you, I have several gmail addresses, and use email services from other providers like Protonmail. Gmail is incredibly easy to use, and works very well on all the devices that we operate on a daily basis.

Google is a tech behemoth, and is in a monopolistic position when it comes to both of these services. It has used this position to hoover up an insane amount of cash, taking a battering ram to many other businesses in the process, especially news media outlets that rely on advertising revenue. Yet it has not scored any big victories since its rollout of gmail all those years ago. Pirate Wires says that it hasn’t had to for some time … until now. The explosion of AI tech means that its core business is now at threat of extinction unless it can win the AI arms race. Its first foray into this war via its rollout of Gemini has been an absolute disaster. Mike Solana chalks it up to many factors, primarily the “culture of fear” that seems to permeate the tech giant.

The summary:

    Last week, following Google’s Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google’s life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken’s market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

The product rollout was so incredibly botched that mainstream media outlets friendly to Google (and its cash) are doing damage control on its behalf.

Gemini’s ultra-woke responses to requests quickly became a staple of social media postings.

Multiple issues:

    This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator’s Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody’s in charge.

It’s human nature to want to boil issues down to one single cause of factor, when it’s usually several all at once. We humans also have a strong tendency to zoom in on one factor when presented with many, mainly because the one that we focus on is something that we know and/or are passionate about.

Of course, Google’s engineers didn’t do this accidentally. They’ve been very intently observed by the most woke of all, the HR department:

As we all know, HR Departments are the Political Commissars of the Corporate West.

Stupid stuff:

    Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I’ve obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir”, “ey/em”, “xe/xem”, and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There’s no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress