Quotulatiousness

September 6, 2023

Some key planks from Scott Alexander’s presidential platform

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

I was a bit surprised to find that Scott Alexander has decided to toss his hat into not one, but two party primaries for the 2024 presidential nomination:

The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform:

Ensure Naval Supremacy And Reduce Wealth Inequality By Bringing Back The Liturgy

The liturgy was a custom of ancient Athens. When the state needed something (usually a new warship) it would ask for volunteers among its richest citizens. Usually one would step up to gain glory or avoid scorn; if nobody did, the courts were allowed to choose the richest person who hadn’t helped out recently. The liturgist would fund the warship and command it as captain for two years, after which his debt to the state was considered discharged and he was given a golden crown. Historians treat the liturgy as a gray area between voluntary service and compulsory taxation; most rich Athenians were eager to serve and gain the relevant honor, but they also knew that if they didn’t, they could be compelled to perform the same service with less benefit to their personal reputation.

Defense analysts warn that America’s naval dominance is declining:

    Only 25 per cent of America’s 114 commissioned surface combatants (cruisers, destroyers, and littoral combat ships) are less than a decade old. By comparison more than 80 per cent of China’s 141 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes have been commissioned in the past decade. In the same time period, the United States commissioned 30 surface combatants … The nearly 600-ship Navy of the late 1980s deployed only 15 per cent of the fleet on average. Today, with fewer than 300 ships, the US Navy deploys more than 35 per cent to service its global missions, contributing to a material death spiral.

So America is short on warships. But it is very long on rich people with big egos. An aircraft carrier would cost the richest American billionaires about the same fraction of their wealth as a trireme cost the richest Athenian aristocrats. So I say: bring back the liturgy!

The American rich already enjoy spending their money on exciting vehicles — yachts for the normies, rockets for the more ambitious, Titanic submersibles for the suicidal. Why not redirect this impulse towards public service? Imagine the fear it would strike into the hearts of the Chinese when the USS Musk enters Ludicrous Mode in the waters off the Taiwan Strait, with Elon himself at the wheel. Imagine how efficiently the USS Jeff Bezos will deliver its payloads! And does anyone doubt that billionaires – usually careful to avoid taxes — will jump at the chance to do this?

The Athenians had a parallel liturgy for rich people who would select and sponsor theater productions, but I think we can skip this one for now.

[…]

Legalize Lying About Your College On Resumes

Colleges trap Americans in a cycle of burdensome loans and act to reinforce class privilege. I have previously advocated making college degree a protected characteristic which it is illegal to ask people about on job applications. But this would be hard to enforce, and people would come up with other ways to communicate their education level.

So let’s think different: let’s make it legal to lie about your college on resumes (it is already not technically illegal to lie on a resume, but companies can ask for slightly different forms of corroboration which it is illegal to lie on). Everyone can just say “Harvard”, and nobody will have any unfair advantage over anyone else.

Start An Internet-Pop-Up Trade War With The European Union

For too long, Americans have groaned under the weight of foreign cookie-related-pop-ups which they and their elected representatives have no control over. It’s time to fight back.

When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR.

Appoint Donald Trump Constitutional Monarch

This would require a constitutional amendment, but I’m sure I could convince enough people.

The British experience suggests that the role of a constitutional monarch is to flaunt how rich they are, get 24-7 news coverage regardless of whether or not they do anything interesting, and have scandals. Donald Trump is the best person in the world at all three of these things

Trump wants to be on top, but is not that interested in governing. Meanwhile, American liberals (by revealed preference) want to continue thinking about him every hour of every day forever, but also don’t want him to govern. Constitutional monarchy would satisfy everyone’s preferences. If Trump is destined to destroy democracy — and everyone agrees that he is — let’s make it happen as gently and non-destructively as possible.

Obviously the royal family can’t participate in regular electoral politics, which means no Trump would ever be able to run for office ever again. This is the only way we are ever getting rid of them, you know this is true, please don’t throw away this chance.

I would support reverse primogeniture-based inheritance — ie the youngest son takes the throne — just so we can have a “King Barron”.

August 17, 2023

Lawfare as politics by other means

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

Chris Bray explains why getting rid of the Donald Trump candidacy wouldn’t even begin to solve the real problems in US politics today:

Donald Trump has been charged with crimes, so the Republican Party should drop him as a candidate and move on to someone else who hasn’t been indicted. That’ll solve the problem!

It won’t. The problem is lawfare. The Republican governor of Wisconsin defeated a recall effort, so Democratic district attorneys launched a long series of predawn raids on his supporters — until the courts made them stop. The Republican governor of Texas won four terms, but then was indicted by the office of a Democratic district attorney — for a budget veto, an action within his constitutional authority. Again, the courts intervened, and the legally absurd charges were dismissed.

Today, scumbag California Assemblyman Evan Low, a uniquely craven publicity chaser even by the local standards, proudly announces that he’s just introduced a legislative resolution calling for the federal government to open a criminal investigation into Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

So. Get rid of Trump and nominate DeSan— oh, wait. Okay, name someone, anyone: Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, a utility nominee to be named later in exchange for three rookie infielders. Oh no, it turns out that the new nominee is under criminal investigation for [TBD]! As of, uh, tomorrow.

I have mixed feelings about Donald Trump, who supported pandemic lockdowns and school closures and the rushed development of mRNA injections with limited testing. Dumping him as a candidate because he’s been indicted misses the point. No Republican candidate will run for the presidency without being indicted, unless he’s a court-eunuch Mitt Romney figure, too safe to bother attacking.

August 4, 2023

Vivek Ramaswamy as “Trump 2.0”

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

Bari Weiss considers Vivek Ramaswamy as an improved version of Donald Trump, appealing to a similar audience but with less obvious baggage. Here are some excerpts from her recent interview with Ramaswamy:

Vivek Ramaswamy and his family.
Detail of a photo from his campaign website, https://www.vivekramaswamy.com/

BW: Politics is all about storytelling, and the winning candidate — or the candidate that catches fire — is almost always the one with the best story. What is your story, and why is it the story that Americans are craving right now?

VR: Whether Americans are craving it or not, that’ll be for them to decide. But I’ll tell you what my story is. I’m the embodiment of the American dream. My parents came to this country over 40 years ago with almost no money. I’ve gone on to found multibillion-dollar companies that created value by doing valuable things for other people, developing five medicines that are FDA approved today. One of them is a life-saving therapy for kids, another one for prostate cancer. I did it while getting married, while bringing two sons into this world, while following my faith in God, while growing up with the ultimate privilege in this country. And I think the thing that’s extraordinary about that story is that it isn’t extraordinary. It is the story of this country. And I don’t think we’re in decline. I think we are still a nation in our ascent, in the early stages of our ascent actually, a nation whose best days are still ahead. I think it takes someone in my shoes to see our nation that way, too. That’s truly what pulled me into the race.

BW: There’s a lot of people running on a reformist platform. You’re running on a radical or a revolutionary one. You say America needs a second revolution. Many people hear revolution, and they think bloodshed and violence. What do you mean by that, and what does that revolution look like?

VR: To me, it does not mean bloodshed and violence, but it means a revival of the ideals that set this nation into motion in 1776. I do think we live in a 1776 moment. I think that the American bargain was built on the idea that we, the people, determine how we settle our political differences through free speech and open debate in the public square where every person’s voice and vote counts equally. That is self-governance. And I think that there is the Old World vision now rearing its head in multiple forms that says, no, we the people cannot be trusted. The citizens of a nation cannot be trusted to determine what’s actually good for them — so we, the intelligentsia, must make that determination centrally at large. I stand on the side of the American Revolution, the ideals that birthed this nation. I think we live in a moment where we have to confront those radical ideals. I think that the American ideals are very fundamentally radical ideals: self-governance, free speech, like absolute free speech, the idea that you get ahead through unbridled meritocracy, the unbridled pursuit of excellence, the steadfast commitment to the rule of law rather than the whims of men. These are radical ideals, because for most of human history, it was done the other way. I think it is the radicalism of the American Revolution and those ideals that are our last best chance for national unity, because that is what actually binds us together across our diverse attributes. And without embracing that radicalism, I think we’re nothing.

BW: You’re incredibly entertaining. You have a view on everything. You’re a phenomenal talker, which will take you far. And remarkably, as of the latest polls, you’re third behind Trump and DeSantis. But many commentators say that ultimately, you have no shot at the nomination. Why is that conventional wisdom wrong about you?

VR: Everyone seems to be shocked where I am right now. I’m not surprised. This is exactly where we expected to be. The reality is, I think people are hungry for the unfiltered truth. I would rather speak the truth about my own beliefs at every step and lose the election than to play some political Snakes and Ladders. And I believe that our voters across this country have a good sixth sense for being able to tell the difference for somebody who’s actually sharing their true beliefs versus somebody who’s giving them carefully constructed, poll-tested slogans. And that is the competitive advantage. My gut instinct is we’re going to win this election. We’re going to win it in a landslide of a margin similar to what Reagan delivered in 1980.

BW: So you’re going to be the Obama of this race, not the Andrew Yang?

VR: I’m going to be the Vivek Ramaswamy of this race, and that’s what I’m committed to being.

At 7% in the polls at the moment, Ramaswamy is a long-shot to win the Republican nomination, but you’ll know if his chances are improving when the media slow-walks the Bad Orange Man stories and starts criticizing Ramaswamy (or “Bad Curry Man” as some online wits have dubbed him).

May 9, 2023

The Republicans’ moment in the sun rain

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

I joked on Coronation Day that the only people not trying to have a good experience there were the British republicans, but they did get a bit more attention due to their proximity to the Royal Procession than they normally manage:

I mentioned before that it was a happy crowd, with high spirits. The crowd didn’t strike me as remarkable, which is to say, there wasn’t anything particularly notable about it. It was mixed. You’d find every age group and colour there, as well as a smattering of obvious tourists. Lots of people had little Union Jacks they would wave or tuck into the brims of hats or under backpack straps. Some wore full-sized flags as capes. A few young men, who’d obviously been drinking either since early that morning or perhaps the night before, were there in cheap royalty costumes — robes and plastic crowns. The way they were going, I had doubts they’d last much longer. One in particular seemed a bit wobbly on his feet.

One young woman with them had somehow attached a frisbee to her head, in delightfully mockery of the absurd hats women seem to love wearing to royal events. It made me laugh. So begins and ends The Line‘s coronation-related hat commentary.

One of a collection of photos from Kim du Toit’s post-coronation post showing many (perhaps most) of the Republican protestors along the parade route.
https://www.kimdutoit.com/2023/05/08/monday-funnies-post-coronation-edition/

Quite near to the front of the viewing area, just off to the left of Nelson’s Column, was a group of a few dozen republican protesters. I have to remind my North American readers — I don’t mean U.S. Republicans, the of-late MAGA-infused husk of the once Grand Old Party. These are British republicans, an arguably even more baffling breed: these are the people that want Britain to be a republic. They too were a mixed group, but as I wandered over to join them, I did note something interesting. I had expected them to be younger and more ethnically diverse than the rest of the crowd. They weren’t. I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying that they were less diverse, but my sense was that, at least in terms of the age of the crowd of protesters, maybe they were a touch older than the rest? In any case, it would have been a near-run thing, but that was one of the only things that really jumped out at me about the protest. My assumption that they’d be younger, more diverse, more obviously progressive was wrong. If they’d dropped their yellow flags and banners and quit their chanting of “NOT MY KING!”, they’d have blended in with the rest.

It started to rain around this time. It’s England, of course it was raining. I’d come prepared with a rain jacket so wasn’t deterred, but the rain did have one admittedly lousy impact. Umbrellas. I’d been gradually able to work my way up quite close to the front of the crowd — I’d stuck close to the republicans and it seems that many people tried to give them a wide berth, and I’d been able to shuffle my way gradually forward. Nelson’s Column was to the right, behind me. To my right and front was Admiralty Arch. And off in the distance, but not too far, was Westminster Abbey itself. It was a pretty perfect place to view the procession.

But for the umbrellas. Once they opened up, all one could see was umbrellas.

And that’s how it stayed, to be honest. Troops began to march past in perfect ranks. Bands struck up patriotic songs. The crowd cheered and more than a few sang. One loud female voice — a surprisingly lovely one — struck up The Star Spangled Banner — which was either some kind of deliberate prank or just a very historically confused soul getting caught up in the moment. I heard the clopping of hooves and the crowd went absolutely wild, and suddenly, thousands of arms shot up into the air holding smartphones, every person present seeking a better angle for their videos. The arms and the umbrellas made it virtually impossible to see a damn thing. (See this video by a New York Times team: they must have been standing within 50 feet of where I was, a bit off to my left. You’ll see what I mean.)

That was from Matt Gurney’s sleep-deprived view of the procession from The Line (that’s not editorializing on my part — he hadn’t slept on the plane from Toronto and got to London at 7am on Coronation Day). In what seemed like a useful break in the public celebrations, he snuck away to get some sustenance and be out of the rain for a bit. When he returned it was lowlight time for the Republicans:

After I’d polished off the pint, I headed back out, back to the square, and that’s where things got interesting. I figured I’d get back to my former spot near the chanting republicans, and did so, no problem. But I noticed there suddenly seemed to be an awful lot of cops around … all heading that way. As in: right toward me, and the chanting people I was standing near. Oops. I left, working my way around the crowd, heading back the way I came from my hotel, and found myself actually facing a rank of advancing cops. Oops again. One had a badge that said inspector, and I walked right up and told him I was a Canadian journalist just watching things. He grinned at me and said, “Alright, mate, come this way,” and had a security guard walk me through the police. I thus ended up missing what has proven to be a controversial event and perhaps the only unhappy moment I know of during the coronation, at least in my area: a bunch of the chanting republicans were arrested just moments after I got out of dodge, and then large metal screen barriers were thrown up, closing off the square due to, apparently, overcrowding. People could leave but no one new could enter.

My sense, as I walked away, was that there was no reason to arrest anyone. (And as I said, this is proving controversial.) I hadn’t seen anything getting out of hand. There had been some chanting and counter-chanting and even some heckling back and forth, but it had all seemed in good enough spirits. Even some of the boos sent at the republicans — two young men with flags had been hamming it up in the main crowd, apart from the main blob of republicans — had seemed in good humour. I don’t know what the police saw or knew. But I couldn’t tell you why they’d moved then and not before, or later. As for overcrowding, I don’t think so. The square really wasn’t all that full. It seemed less full at that moment than it had been when the procession had passed on the way to the abbey. But the barriers seemed to go up quickly, everywhere. Literally everywhere.

And though I was glad to have avoided getting caught up in the Cops vs. Chanting Republicans, I was now on the wrong side of the barriers.

In The Critic, Kittie Helmick recounts finding herself in the vicinity of the “NOT MY KING!” group:

“You seem to find this whole thing rather amusing,” snapped a short angry man with a Not My King sign, about half an hour into the Republic protest against the coronation of King Charles III. I must admit I did. Kettled into a small enclave just off Trafalgar Square, an angry swell of old school socialists, Twitter anarchists, Lib Dem mums, eccentric vicars, boomer hippies, blue haired students and Covid conspiracists had somehow found themselves part of the coronation spectacle. Before the bells of St Martin in the Fields, the full shouty brunt of British republicanism was aimed at a bewildered stream of Chinese tourists and young families out for a day in London.

The survival of the British monarchy is one of the great wonders of modern history. Spending the morning of the coronation with Republic, it began to seem less mysterious. Despite everything in recent years, the Monarchy is still liked more than most of our institutions and probably every one of our elected politicians. No one gathered there could really explain why. The arguments were articulated in between the shouty chanting: things about “modern Democracy” and a “family of Lizards”, none of which quite landed the blow as the day unfolded around us.

Somewhere beyond the crowds, towards Westminster Abbey, an ageing, eccentric dandyish farmer, who secretly wants to be King of Transylvania, was being anointed in holy oil and crowned by an Archbishop wearing hearing aids in a seven hundred year old chair vandalised by 18th century schoolboys. All the while this ceremony was being fawned over across the world by everyone from Kay Burley to one of the world’s most remote tribes. None of it made sense, and that is precisely the point.

Earlier that morning, the CEO of Republic Graham Smith, a man not even the protestors could name, achieved the greatest success of his kind since Cromwell, by being arrested at the hands of the jobsworth Met. For a brief moment, a shiver of excitement spread through the protest. Whilst the country was entranced by a fugue of sombre ritual and Zadok the Priest, Republic were experiencing their own desired reality unfold on the streets of London. Here was a police state enforcing the will of a “politically illiterate” nation brainwashed by bunting and tabloid journalism. The mask was finally off. The incoherent gaggle of shouty slogans and reddit thread arguments made sense. The fight was here and now.

Except that was all a fantasy too. As stupid as the arrests were, nothing could disguise the fact this was a fringe event for a movement that just can’t seem to take off — a Coronation curio to gawp at. “They’re a bunch of wronguns, aren’t they?” said one bored steward to me as we watched a man larping Les Miserables as he chanted Not My King at a trio of giggling Chinese students. The deeper I dug into the many arguments and protestations offered as an alternative to the “fairytale” of monarchy, the more the core transgressive energy of British republicanism revealed itself. It is itself strangely twee and fantastical. Rid us of the Royals, and everything will become better. Gone will be the “psychological baggage” of Britain’s past holding us back. Democracy will triumph. The crown jewels will be sold off and spent on food banks. The plebs will not worship hereditary blood, but NHS rainbows. Britain will become less racist, elitist and classist. The left might even win an election. We could have a poet president like Ireland, a Lineker or a Stormzy shaking hands with the American president.

February 18, 2023

Nikki Haley’s presidential bid is clearly doomed because … she uses her middle name? Let me read that again.

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

Jim Treacher (whose name I should now probably put in scare quotes because it’s a nom-de-plume) explains why Nikki Haley is a no-hoper in the next Republican presidential primaries:

As I revealed over a decade ago, “Jim Treacher” isn’t my real name. This is just a message-board pseudonym that got way out of hand, and now I guess I’m stuck with it. My government name is Robert Sean Medlock, but my parents have always called me Sean. I don’t know why they didn’t just name me Sean Robert Medlock, but I was in no position to argue my case at the time because I couldn’t talk yet.

So now, every time I need to fill out paperwork somewhere, I have to explain that I go by my middle name. Doctors, dentists, car repairs, insurance, what have you. The routine is kind of annoying, but at this point I’m used to it.

I’m not deceiving anybody by using my middle name. It’s just my name, man. Lots of people go by their middle name.

In other news: This week Nikki Haley announced she’s running for president. I don’t know if she has a shot, but the libs sure seem to think so. They’re already attacking her for … going by her middle name.

Check out this idiot:

She didn’t. Her birth name was Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. Not “Nimrata”, as it’s commonly misspelled by supposedly sophisticated libs:

My goodness. Guess it runs in the family, huh?

The Randhawa family referred to their daughter as Nikki, which is Punjabi for “little one”. And she changed her last name to Haley when she married a man named Michael Haley.

Y’know, like Hillary Rodham did when she married Bill Clinton.

Here’s another dummy, who of course works for CNN:

Yeah. Wait. What?

And if that scandal wasn’t enough to sink Nikki Haley’s chances utterly, CNN’s Don Lemon helpfully points out that she’s way, way, way past her peak:

Now, you know I’m not one to cry sexism often. Frankly, when I found out a hot college professor of mine had been fired for doing a #MeToo, I was offended for not being involved. I’d gone to office hours, for godsakes. But there is sexism this week we have to call out. Nikki Haley announced she is running for president. She’s a reasonable Republican candidate who is, of course, a long shot against Trump. There are plenty of ways to criticize her politics, but for some reason a bunch of people we are meant to respect tried to say that the real problem is that she’s a woman, that she’s not young, and that she’s Indian.

You may think I’m exaggerating.

Here is Don Lemon on CNN: “Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Sorry”, he says, looking to camera, a little smile on his face. “When a woman is considered to be in her prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s …” His co-hosts, both women, balk. (“Prime for what?”) But Lemon keeps going. Watch the extremely stressful video here, where he goes on … and on … about how Nikki Haley, who is 51, cannot criticize Biden’s age. Because women peak in their 20s, and she’s long past that.

Or here’s progressive hero Mary Trump, Donald’s niece, who disavowed him and became a star of the intelligentsia. She decided that the best way to insult Nikki Haley this week was by highlighting that she’s Indian, because Nikki is her middle name. Again, this is a real statement Mary Trump released on Twitter: “First of all, fuck you Nimrata Haley.” Sorry, I’m slow: If you’re a white person trying to insult someone who’s not white and you do it by highlighting their race, what’s that called again? I’m sure there’s a Robin DiAngelo chapter on this somewhere.

February 3, 2023

QotD: Democracy

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

They’re all, Democrats and Republicans alike, playing Washington Bingo, which is the Glass Bead Game for retards — nobody really knows what it is or why anyone bothers, but it keeps them occupied in nice cushy offices, with weekends in the Hamptons.

Democracy always devolves into ochlocracy, as some Dead White Male said, but since the last Dead White Male died centuries before Twitter, he didn’t realize that ochlocracy was just a pit stop on the way to kakistocracy.

“Democracy” only works — if, in fact, it does work, which is a very fucking open question — in a stakeholder society. When Madison and the boys pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other, they meant all of that literally — Washington could well have died a pauper, Alexander Hamilton ordered his cannon to fire on his own house, and so on. They had skin in the game, which is why they were so public-spirited — if they screwed up, they personally would have to live with the consequences. These days, of course, getting “elected” — or even selected to run for “election” — is a free pass to Easy Street. The rules apply only to the plebs, and only so long — and, insh’allah, the day is soon coming — as we have to pretend to let them “vote” on stuff.

Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.

January 12, 2023

How the New York Times describes the Congressional Republican dissidents

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

It’s not the news, it’s the substitution of opinion for reporting:

Here’s the political journalist Mara Gay — currently of the New York Times, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic — explaining what the twenty Republican holdouts were up to in their maneuvering over the selection of a Speaker of the House:

It’s leftie Twitter in human form, with all of the slogans. Angry, hateful voters, disturbed by “diversity”, sent some dumb atavists to represent them in D.C., because they hate government and want to “burn it to the ground”. (“And really, that’s what these people were sent to do.”)

Time magazine, which apparently still exists, comes to much the same conclusion, in a piece that I tragically can’t read in full without creating an account, which I wouldn’t do for a free steak dinner or a blanket future pardon from the governor of my choice:

So the twenty GOP holdouts hate government and want to sow chaos and burn democratic norms to the ground, mainstream political journalists calmly explain. Now, via RedState, here’s a letter from seven of the holdouts listing their actual demands as conditions for their vote. Sample demand:

So the monsters who hate government and want to burn it all down were demanding clearly written legislation that every legislator has time to read and fully debate before casting their vote on it.

    Subject of Journalism: We want bills that are focused and readable

    Journalist: They want to destroy all government because of racism

It’s not even sort of an interpretation or an argument about the thing being discussed — it’s just a wholesale invention, completely severed from the thing that’s allegedly being analyzed. It’s like you ordered a tuna melt, so the waitress broke into your house and mailed your couch to Finland. “There’s your tuna melt,” she says, handing you the receipt from the post office. It’s so aggressive a non-sequitur that it would usually suggest the need for a neurology consult. Have you recently suffered a serious fall, Ms. Gay? Have you experienced dizziness or unexplained nause— oh, wait, I see from your chart that you’re just a political journalist.

December 11, 2022

QotD: Democracy

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

… “democracy” seems to generate a unique kind of idiocy. This too is no unique insight — William F. Buckley meant the same thing when he said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard — but like all obvious things about human nature it’s lethally easy to forget. A politician in a “democracy” is an unholy mix of circus performer and whore. Somehow convinced that the audience’s applause comes from its appreciation of her own superior virtue, not rude biology, she slips further and further into narcissism, never bothering to wonder why, if the house is packed to the rafters every night, she’s still sleeping three to a room while the circus owner has a mansion and rides around in a limo.

Democracy’s founding fictions reinforce this. It’s easy to see yourself as the People’s Tribune, I imagine, if you just look at the numbers. All those people voted for you, which confirms how wonderful you are!

A better analogy is the professional sports team. Lots of people wear the team apparel of the Los Angeles Chargers. You can find lots of online forums passionately devoted to them. Lots of L.A.-area bars are festooned with Chargers’ stuff. The bobbleheads at ESPN talk about the Chargers several times a day. And yet, come game time, the Chargers only get about 32,000 fans at the stadium. Those are the actual voters — the rest is just social media noise. And it’s worse than that, actually. We all know that the vast majority of people who picked up a Chargers’ shirt because it was in the clearance bin, or ordered a drink at a bar with Chargers’ memorabilia on the shelf, would never bother to attend a game. So even people who think of themselves as “Democrats” or “Republicans” barely bother to vote, much less follow “their” team in office. Even the groups that get pandered to the most — old people, veterans, union goofs — don’t turn out in proportionate numbers.

Come election day, the People’s Tribunes are decided by old cranks on loan from the home, a few office drones on their lunch break with nothing better to do, and homeless people lured in with a promise of a short dog and some change.

But since no one without a vast, yawning chasm in her soul would ever submit herself to the indignities of “democracy” in the first place, these newly “elected” fools hie themselves to Washington, where the money boys feed their self-delusion. They read about themselves in the newspapers, see their names on internal party polls, and since none of their “constituents” could pick them out of a police lineup, they learn that the only way to keep the applause coming is by doing what the newspapers and the money boys say.

Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.

November 19, 2022

American political parties from 1865 down to the Crazy Years we’re living through now

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

Severian responds to a comment about the Democrats and Republicans and how they have morphed over the years to the point neither party would recognize itself:

“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.

A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.

I find this extremely useful. I’d add that the postbellum parties do shift ideologies fairly regularly, as PR notes, such that even though they’re still called by the same names, they’re nowhere near the same parties, 1865-present.
I’d add some distinguishing tags for ease of reference, like so:

DEMOCRATS:

The Redeemers of the “Solid South”, 1865-1882, when their main issue was ending Reconstruction and establishing Jim Crow.

The Grover Cleveland years, 1882-1896: Still primarily an opposition party, their main goal was reining in the ridiculous excesses of the Gilded Age Republicans. As one of about 100 people worldwide who have strong opinions on Grover Cleveland, I should probably recuse myself here, so let me just say this: Union Army veterans were to the Gilded Age GOP what the Ukraine is to the Uniparty now. They simply couldn’t shovel money at them fast enough, and the guys who orchestrate those ridiculous flag-sucking “thank you for your service” celebrations before pro sporting events would tell them to tone it way, way down. Cleveland spent most of his presidency slapping the worst of this down.

[How bad was it? So bad that not only did they pass ridiculous giveaways like the Arrears of Pension Act and the Dependent Pension Act — think “Build Back Brandon” on steroids, times two, plus a bunch of lesser boondoggles — but they got together every Friday night when Congress was in session to pass “private” pension bills. These are exactly what they sound like: Federal pensions to one specific individual, put up by his Congressman. Grover Cleveland used to burn the midnight oil vetoing these ridiculous fucking things, which makes him a true American hero as far as I’m concerned].

The Populist Party years, 1896-1912: They were more or less absorbed by the Populist Party — William Jennings Bryan ran as a “Democrat” in 1896, but he was really a Populist; that election hinged entirely on economic issues. They still had the “Solid South”, but the Democrats of those years were basically Grangers.

The Progressive Years, 1912-1968: They picked up all the disaffected “Bull Moose” Republicans who split the ticket and handed the Presidency to Woodrow Wilson in 1912, becoming the pretty much openly Fascist entity they’d remain until 1968.

The Radical Party, 1968-1992: The fight between the Old and New Left, or Marxism vs. Maoism.

The Boomer Triumphalist Party, 1992-2000. It’s an Alanis-level irony that Bill Clinton was the most “conservative” president in my lifetime, if the metric for “conservatism” is “what self-proclaimed conservatives say they want”. This was our Holiday From History, in which “wonks” reigned supreme, tweaking the commas in the tax code while occasionally making some noises about silly lifestyle shit.

The Batshit Insane Party, 2000-Present. The years of the Great Inversion. Today’s Democrats only know one thing: Whatever is, is wrong.

REPUBLICANS:

The Radical Party, 1864-1876: Determined to impose utopia at bayonet point in the conquered South, they started asking themselves why they couldn’t simply impose utopia at bayonet point everywhere. They never did figure it out, and we owe those awful, awful racists in the Democratic Party our undying thanks for that. This is the closest America ever came to a theocracy until The Current Year. Morphed into

The party of flabbergastingly ludicrous robber baron excess, 1876-1896. In these years, J.P. Morgan personally bailed out the United States Treasury. Think about that. FTX, meet Credit Mobilier. You guys are pikers, and note that was 1872. William McKinley deserves a lot more credit than he gets in pretty much everything, but he might’ve been the most fiscally sane American president. Only Calvin Coolidge is even in the ballpark.

The Progressive Party, 1900-1912. For all the Left loves to call Republicans “fascists”, for a time they were … or close enough, Fascism not being invented quite yet. But the Democrats coopted it under Wilson, leading to

The Party of (Relative) Sanity, 1912-1968. Before Warren G. and Nate Dogg, there were Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the only two contestants in the “American politicians with their heads screwed on straight” competition, 20th century division. Alas, superseded by the

Anti-Left Party, 1968-2000. Want to punch a hippie? Vote for Richard Nixon. Or Gerald Ford. Or, yes, the Gipper.

The Invade-the-World, Invite-the-World Branch of the Uniparty, 2000-Present. Wouldn’t it be nice if Bill Clinton could keep it in his pants, and wasn’t a walking toothache like Al Gore? That was the essence of W’s pitch in 2000. Our Holiday From History was supposed to continue, but alas, 9/11. Some very special people at the State Department got their chance to finally settle their centuries-long grudge with the Cossacks, and, well … here we are.

By my count, the longest periods of ideological consistency ran about 50 years … and I’m not sure if that really tells us much, because it makes sense to view 1914-1945, if not 1914-1991, as THE World War, which put some serious constraints on the ideology of both sides.

Trend-wise, what I see is one side going nuts with some huge moral crusade, while the other side frantically tries to slam on the brakes (while getting their beaks good and wet, of course). Antebellum, it was the proslavery side leading the charge, but if they’d been slightly less excitable in the late 1840s, the abolitionist lunatics would’ve done the job for them by the late 1860s. If you know anything about the Gilded Age, you know that they somehow presented the truly ridiculous excesses of the Robber Barons as some kind of moral triumph; this was, after all, Horatio Alger‘s America. Progressivism, of either the Marxist or the John Dewey variety, is just moralizing gussied with The Science™, and so forth.

The big difference between then and now, of course, is that the grand moral crusade of The Current Year is open, shit-flinging nihilism. The “opposition”, such as it is, is also full of shit-flinging nihilists; they just don’t want to go before they’ve squeezed every possible penny out of the Suicide of the West. So … yeah. We’re overdue for a big ideological change. And we shall get it, never fear; we can only hope that we won’t have to see it by the light of radioactive fires.

November 10, 2022

The headscratcher that was the American midterms outcome

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

As the voters went to the polls on Tuesday, it was easy to find doom-and-gloom-mongering among Democratic stalwarts and most of the mainstream media (BIRM), and chest-thumping triumphalism on the right. Both sides seemed to agree that the outcome was going to be somewhere between a red landslide and a red wipeout. So … how do we square the expectations of both sides with what actually happened? Chris Bray makes an attempt:

Eight percent uptake of the much-touted bivalent booster, 75% wrong track sentiment, pretty good night for the party in power. Multiple signs of a total loss of trust and respect for the existing order equals a decision to more or less stay the course.

Tribalism is the first explanation, sure. If you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with a D behind its name, Democrats would vote for it; if you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with an R behind its name, Republicans would vote for it. John Fetterman is headed for the United States Senate. Go ‘way, I’m ‘batin’.

And I agree with the argument that Republicans didn’t offer much of a plan or a vision, a premise you can check by reading Kevin McCarthy’s Commitment to America. More mush from the wimp.

But the other thing, and you can argue with me about this, is that the society of the spectacle madness of messaging without regard to reality actually achieves its purpose, no matter how absurd it is. We have to add $3 trillion in extra debt-funded spending to the economy to reduce inflation! If you vote Republican, they’ll kill our children!

Amazingly, this turns out to work pretty well. The available evidence suggests that we have a sizable population that cannot assess fact claims. I propose that we test this with sample messages to voters: If you vote for bubblegum trees, the sky bees will give you a diamond-crusted ribeye! (Ohh, I have to vote for bubblegum trees!) If you’re out in public, look to your left; then look to your right. At least one of those people thinks Karine Jean-Pierre makes some pretty good points.

Sarah Hoyt strongly believes that the busy midnight vote-finders of 2020 were just as busy on Tuesday night:

As I write this late on the 8th, the tsunami is resolving itself into a wavelet.

Or rather, the tsunami has been overfrauded into a wavelet. And it might be frauded away to a Dem win before I wake tomorrow.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us who were awake and remember this:

And we know damn well it was a Trump landslide before that.

So for the Republicans to have picked up any seat, this was the tsunami to end all tsunamis.

I know the usual idiots are out there, already saying “It was abortion: the Womyns came out in force to vote dem.”

Are there women who are single ticket abortion voters. Sure. Most are older than I and are determined to make sure their actions and choices are validated a posteriori. They’re an ever dwindling minority. Married women vote more and more for the right every time. Single women? Who knows? But I suspect there’s been a shift in that too after the last too years. And most of them don’t see that career path ahead they once did.

Then there’s the other bs which is of course “The people don’t want to be free.” That’s bs. The people, every time they can express their displeasure do so. But having the vote taken away from them via fraud means THEY each individual thinks he or she is alone.

Things like “Let’s go Brandon” sweep the nation, but there’s no major legal or financial movement to protest the fraud, because each person thinks “I guess all these idiots are so beaten down they like beaten down, and I’m the only one who is angry.”

Meanwhile the perpetrators know what the people think, and erect barricades in DC to protect themselves from the anger they sense but can’t seem to bring out into the open.

Yes, we’re getting the house, and probably not the senate. Which means a good five/six seats fraud. I’m in a group right now with people crunching numbers, and the fraud is evident. The races the democrats cared out got flipped by turning just those votes for the dems. That’s the flexibility of Dominion at work, and the way they can turn a vote into the other.

At Founding Questions, Severian is appropriately sanguine about the notion of “adjusted” or “fortified” ballot counts in disputed races:

So the “elections” were fun, eh? By far the best “news” from the Dissident perspective is that they did, in fact, pull out all the stops for S-s-s-Strokey. As I think it was Based 5.0 who quipped below, it looks like dual-passport-holding Muslim carny barkers aren’t going to be making America great again. Here’s hoping they’re stupid enough to fall for the “Dr. Jill” trap twice — now they’re stuck with Strokey the way they’re stuck with Tapioca Joe, because Giselle is Dr. Jill on steroids (perhaps literally). Eh, Dr. Jill had 40 years in [Washington, DC] to get a taste of the finer things; Giselle’s price is probably far lower. But until Strokey resigns for health reasons and is replaced […] the image of a tatted-out, brain-damaged hobo in a hoodie shuffling around the Senate floor is so on the nose, no novelist would dare use it.

[…]

I bet if we look back on it, we’ll see the state (lowercase s) Media freaking out first, dragging the Official State (capital S) Media with them. It makes sense, given the perverse incentive structure of the Media. Stick with me here:

Joe Schmoe (D) is running for Congress in Flyover State. Obviously The Media wants him to win, because (D). And they’re sure he’s going to, because his opponent is some “ultra-MAGA” yahoo. But Reality is what it is, and suddenly the yahoo is getting closer and closer …

At that point, The Media’s perverted incentive structure kicks in. The “reporters” at the biggest local rag in Flyover State, the Toad Suck Times-Picayune, only care about one thing: Getting the fuck out of Toad Suck, trading the Times-Picayune for a slot somewhere higher up the chain. Now, there are only two ways to do that: Be a hard-hitting, straight-shooting newshoun …

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Oh Jesus, I’m sorry, I thought I could type that with a straight face, but I can’t. Give me a minute …

… ok, there’s only one way to move up in The Media, and that’s by proving yourself a more zealous cultist than the next guy. So our Heroic Journalist starts doing what he thinks the Inner Party wants, which is of course “propping up Joe Schmoe for all he’s worth”. But here’s the rub: He’s not privy to what the Inner Party actually wants. Of course he’s not; after all, he’s riding a desk at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune. And of course everybody in a similar position, nationwide, is doing the same thing …

… but they’re all at least kinda sorta privy to the real polls that come down from the big organizations (recall that there are maybe three companies that control all the newspapers in the US), and so he knows things are looking grim for Joe Schmoe. More importantly, he sees that Tapioca Joe himself is out stumping for Democrats, and not in battleground states — they’re putting Brandon out there in supposedly safe Democratic districts.

So our man at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune consults his own personal political tea leaves, and he concludes: We’re gonna lose. The “red wave” is real. So again, he starts doing what he thinks his masters want, the thing he thinks will get him noticed at the higher levels: He admits the truth, or as much as he personally can stomach, and starts laying in the groundwork for #TheResistance, same as in 2020. Oh, Kari Lake is ahead 8% over Abortion Mouse there in AZ (give Ace of Normies this, he coins a good nickname), well obviously that’s because of bigotry MAGA yadda yadda and don’t forget the Russian hacking!

But here’s the problem with that: It does get him noticed by the Big League club, but in the exact opposite way. So long as everyone stays on point, you can brazen it out through the inevitable “fortification”. Had everyone stayed on point, a “worryingly tight race” — they’ll admit that much, for verisimilitude — can easily be turned into one of those 3am miracles the Dems are famous for. Hey, whaddaya know, all the mail in ballots were for Joe Schmoe. What a surprise.

But now that the Toad Suck Times-Picayune is running stories about the challenger being ahead, the Big League clubs have to at least acknowledge it, the school of fish effect takes over, and pretty soon you’ve got the entire Media in panic mode. Which has the further effect of making the freelance riggers even crazier, so that the regularly scheduled 3am ballot drop is being disrupted by mysterious “hiccups” at key locations — you know, “cyberattacks” and whatnot (why the fuck is a voting machine connected to the internet in the first place?), and so on, plus all the mailmen and so forth dumping a whole bunch of ballots from red districts into the nearest streams, culverts, and landfills. Jimmy Hoffa is probably up to his eye sockets in Republican ballots out there in the foundations of Giants’ Stadium…

And so the weird shit we see above, and the odd “had a Narrative all ready” vs. “are clearly scrambling” coverage of different contests.

I can’t think of a better way to really shore up the idea that ALL elections are rigged than that. Wait a minute, the “red wave” was on last week. You guys admitted it. Early Tuesday afternoon, every talking head on tv looked like he was weaving a noose under the “news” desk; you’d expect “journalists” hanging from the rafters by 7pm.

But … ooops! Short of actually being caught on camera throwing Republican ballots in a bonfire, or openly xeroxing Democrat ones — and it’s only mid-morning of the day after, give it time — I can’t think of a clearer way of announcing that it’s ALL rigged than that.

November 6, 2022

How bad do the midterm elections look for the Democrats? Even Andrew Sullivan is voting Republican this time

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

From the free-to-cheapskates excerpt of Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

The day I received my absentee ballot from the DC government, there was a story in the Washington Post about the DC Council’s imminent vote:

    The bill would eliminate most mandatory minimum sentences, allow for jury trials in almost all misdemeanor cases and reduce the maximum penalties for offenses such as burglaries, carjackings and robberies.

Over the past few years, violent crime in DC has been rising fast. Last year the murder rate was the highest since 2003, and this year the death toll is slightly higher so far. Carjackings are up 36 percent and robberies are up 57 percent. Almost all this hideous violence is inflicted on African-Americans, including many children. It permeates outward, creating a deeper public sense of insecurity and out-of-control crime. Tent cities are now all over the city. People suffering from mental illness patrol the streets. You feel the decline in law and order, the slow fraying of the city, every day.

And yet the Council has decided that now is the time to make it harder to prosecute and easier to defend violent criminals, partly in the name of “equity”. Yes, it’s part of a longstanding “modernization” of the criminal code, but they had to include these provisions and now? And this isn’t new. Just before the crime explosion took off, the DC mayor had “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street in letters so large you could read them from a plane, and allowed “Defund the Police” to remain next to it. That summer, woke mobs were allowed to harass anyone in their vicinity, yelling slogans that vilified all police — and the MSM took the side of the bullies. After the summer of 2020, the DC police force dropped to its lowest level in two decades.

So guess what? I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find next Tuesday. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.

There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.

By “we”, I mean anyone not committed to the hard-left agenda Biden has relentlessly pursued since taking office. In my view, he and his media mouthpieces have tragically enabled the far right over the past two years far more than they’ve hurt them. I hoped in 2020 that after a clear but modest win, with simultaneous gains for the GOP in the House and a fluke tie in the Senate, Biden would grasp a chance to capture the sane middle, isolating the far right. After the horror of January 6, the opportunity beckoned ever more directly.

And yet Biden instantly threw it away. In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the center — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the center?

October 1, 2022

American Empire, question mark

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

An interview with Niall Ferguson in the Dartmouth Review by Lintaro Donovan revisits Ferguson’s 2005 book Colossus in light of what has happened during the nearly two decades since it was published:

TDR: In your 2005 book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, you advance the thesis that the United States is an empire in denial and that such denial will be our undoing, both domestically and abroad. Does that thesis still hold in the world of 2022?

NF: I think it has withstood quite well the test of nearly 20 years. If you recall, the analysis was that the United States was trying essentially an imperial enterprise in Afghanistan and Iraq and that there were three deficits that were going to make it fail. There was the manpower deficit, because people really did not want to spend that much time in Afghanistan and Iraq – hence the short tours of duty. There was the fiscal deficit, which was already obviously a problem and has only gotten worse. And then there was the attention deficit. The prediction was that the US [BREAK] public would become disillusioned with these endeavors just as it became disillusioned with Vietnam. And if anything, the surprising thing is how long it took to get out of Afghanistan.

I wouldn’t have predicted it would be 2021. I expected it sooner than that. But I think that the overall framing of the US as an empire-in-denial works because it’s so deeply rooted in the way Americans think about themselves and the language that their leaders use. What was odd was that some neo-conservatives back then really were willing to say, “We’re an empire now”.

Of course, it kind of blew them up politically so that they’re now an irrelevant bunch of never-Trumpers. So I feel that book stood up remarkably well to the test of time. I’d stick by it.

TDR: What I’m hearing from your answer is that our denial is sort of endemic to what Americans are and that there were issues that were already present before the invasion of Iraq. Do you think that there’s any personality in American public life today who might be able to get us out of our denial and fix these issues that you’re talking about?

NF: No, because I think, if anything, the kind of aversion to empire has grown on both the left and the right. And so you have different versions of it.

Those wings, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the Trumpian wing of the Republican Party, are much stronger than they were then. I don’t think we are going to see any revival until the US suffers the kind of attack that it suffered at Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

Until there’s a punch landed, what will happen is that the US will try to exercise power through indirect means like sanctions or getting Ukrainians to fight Russians or arming the Taiwanese. And, in that sense, I think we’ve reverted to a Cold War playbook without calling it a cold war.

The problem is that we aren’t as far ahead [of China] economically and technologically as we were relative to the Soviet Union. If you’re doing a cold war with China, you have to reckon with quite a formidable antagonist, but that I think is where we are.

It’s amazing how far there is now a bipartisan consensus that China’s the problem. The continuities from the Trump to Biden Administration are very striking in that respect. I don’t see that changing until something bad happens, whether it’s a showdown over Taiwan that the US actually loses, or the collapse of Ukraine, which I guess is a conceivable if now unlikely scenario, or another terrorist attack, though I think that’s not especially likely these days.

The other thing to watch out for is the Middle East. Basically, as in the Cold War, you’ve got the potential for a crisis to happen. The problem for the US is that it’s quite overstretched. If there’s a crisis in Eastern Europe and a crisis in the Far East, say Taiwan, and one in the Middle East, then the US is going to be completely unable to respond to all of those.

It’s already in the position that it can’t give Stinger and Javelin missiles to the Taiwanese, because they’ve already been given to the Ukrainians and we can’t actually make that many new ones. It feels like we are doing Cold War but with quite a bit more overstretch than was true certainly in the 1980s.

September 5, 2022

We’ve somehow moved from “women who want to have it all” to “the servant problem” in less than a generation

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

In Ed West’s weekly round-up post, he links to this article by Helen Andrews about the cultural shift for women since the sexual revolution:

People are always more likely to believe a lie if it’s plausible. The lie that women can have it all has as many adherents today as it does because it’s not obvious why it should be a lie. Have a career and a family: why not? There are enough hours in the day. The challenge of refuting the lie that women can have it all — that is, that they can prioritize career and family equally — lies in the fact that the trade-offs that make it impossible are hidden, not obvious, because mathematically it’s not something that should be impossible.

If only employers would do more to accommodate working women, if alternatives could be found to fulfill duties at home that mothers used to do for themselves, like childcare and housework. But the more you start thinking about those accommodations and thinking not just about what it means for any one woman to have it all, but for society to be restructured around women having it all, the more impossible those trade-offs start to seem.

Obviously there are women today in America who are trying to have it all, and many appear to be doing so successfully, at least insofar as they have both demanding careers and children. But look more closely at those households, and almost invariably you’ll see that behind every woman who is balancing work and family, there is an army of low-paid labor, immigrant cleaning ladies, nannies who are paid cash under the table, Door Dash delivery men who deliver the meals that mom never had time to cook. It’s no coincidence that the vast increase in female workforce participation has coincided with the reappearance of something that the more egalitarian America of the early 20th century did not have, and that is a servant class.

America today is more prosperous than it was 70 years ago, and yet it is no longer possible for an ordinary worker to support a middle-class family on a single income. The story of how that happened is bound up into a lie that has become gospel today, which is the lie that women can have it all. Undergirding that lie is a further lie that the Republican Party can have it all. The GOP has very much hitched itself to the idea that it can be the party of stay-at-home moms and girl bosses equally. Again, superficially this seems like it ought to be possible. Live and let live, it’s a free country. But this bargain is unsustainable in practice. We only have to look at the last 30 years to understand why.

The official position of the Republican Party today is that the government’s job is to make it possible for everyone to make the right choice for their family. This rhetoric of maximizing choice requires politicians to talk as if some women will choose to be moms and some will choose to be girl bosses, and it’s really 50/50 which one you end up being. You know, both are equally valid. Who’s to say one is better? But that’s just false, and it’s false according to women’s own preferences. The number of women who say they do not want to have children is very low, in the single digits, around 5% — and that’s just the number who will tell surveys that they predict they won’t have kids when their childbearing years are over. The number of women who actually reach old age and feel satisfied with their life, being just a girl boss with no children to keep them company, is even lower.

Squaring away all this family happiness is and ought to be a higher priority than maximizing women’s career success. It is also a more urgent priority. A woman cannot simply wake up at age 35 and decide she wants to have a family. Everyone says that the sexual revolution was brought about by the advent of the contraceptive pill, which was supposedly ushered in at an amazing new age of a new human experience thanks to science. But it actually changed a lot less than we think. We’ve gotten quite good at not having children when we don’t want to have them, but the science that gave us the pill has not made us very much better at making children arrive when we do.

August 26, 2022

QotD: The WARG rating – “Wins Above Replacement Goldstein”

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

No totalitarian regime has ever successfully solved what you might call the Emmanuel Goldstein Problem. They just can’t exist without some kind of existential threat to rally around; it’s their nature. In 1984, the Party simply created Goldstein out of whole cloth, but they seemed to believe this was just another temporary expedient — they were counting on technology to do all the heavy lifting of mass mind control, so they wouldn’t have to resort to things like Goldstein and MiniTrue.

Obviously that ain’t gonna work in Clown World, Cthulhuvious and Sasqueetchia being notso hotso on the STEM. They’ll always need a Goldstein, then, and that’s a real problem, because whatever else Bad Orange Man is, he’s also pushing 80 years old. How long would he have, even in a sane world? 10 more years, tops? And the candidates for Replacement BOM are generally a sorry lot … but even if they weren’t, they’re about to get purged, too. The WARG is already going negative …

For overseas readers (and those not conversant with “Moneyball”: Baseball has these weird “sabermetric” stats that purport to compare players from different teams and eras in terms of absolute value. It’s acronymed (it’s a word) WAR, Wins Above Replacement; “replacement” being an absolutely average player. Like all baseball “sabermetrics” it quickly gets ridiculous, but see here. According to this guy, then, Babe Ruth has a per-season WAR of 10.48 in right field. That means Babe Ruth, himself, personally, alone, was worth 10 and a half wins above your “average” player. If Ruth goes down for the season in a tragic Spring Training beer mishap, you can go ahead and take 10 wins off the Yankees’ record that season (assuming they replace the Bambino with some scrub just off the bus, which back then is what would’ve happened).

WARG, then, is Wins Above Replacement Goldstein. I’d say that Orange Man set the bar for Goldsteins, but that’s not statistically useful, since Trump Derangement Syndrome is so far the apex of liberal lunacy. To make statistical comparisons useful — to find a “replacement Goldstein,” as it were — we have to have someone the Left considered an existential enemy at the time, but who didn’t really do much in the grand scheme of things. So I nominate George W. Bush. If Bush is the “Replacement Goldstein,” then his WARG is a nice round zero. Trump would have a Babe Ruth-ian WARG.

This gives us a convenient measurement for looking at various Republicans, both current and historical. Richard Nixon would have a pretty high WARG — he drove them even more nuts than W. did — and Ronnie Raygun would be up there, too. Gerald Ford would have a slightly negative WARG, since not even the New York Times could pretend Gerald fucking Ford was a threat to the Progressive takeover. Your steeply negative WARGs would be those “Republicans” actively working with the opposition, like Bitch McConnell.

I’d argue that Ron DeSantis and maybe Greg Abbott still have positive WARGs … for now. But they’re going to get gulaged here in pretty short order. Who’s the next guy on the bench? Your Marjorie Taylor Greenes and whatnot drive certain segments of the Left insane, but she’s just too ludicrous to have a positive WARG. And then things start getting really pathetic …

The Law of Diminishing Returns makes the WARG problem even more acute. Freakout fatigue is a real thing. The Media will give it the old college try, of course, but you really just can’t convince people that a goof like Greene is some kind of existential threat to Our Democracy. Her WARG goes negative every time she opens her mouth.

Severian, “Salon Roundup”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-20.

August 25, 2022

Liz Cheney “got smashed worse than a wine aunt who just lost a national championship cat show”

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

Theophilus Chilton indulges in a bit of gloating over Liz Cheney’s Republican primary loss to a Trump-supported challenger:

Liz Cheney with Robert Aderholt and former Vice President Dick Cheney, 14 November, 2018.
Photo from the office of Robert Aderholt via Wikimedia Commons.

The biggest news in domestic American politics in the past week was the absolutely shattering upset of Liz Cheney by Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman in Wyoming’s Republican primary for its at-large House seat. I mean, she got smashed worse than a wine aunt who just lost a national championship cat show. In a race that should have been hers for the taking, she was instead defeated by 37 points in one of the worst primary losses suffered by a sitting politician in recent history. If I sound like I’m vicariously gloating, it’s because I am.

Yet, if you were to listen to what the world of Never Trump is saying, you’d think that rather than an ignoble defeat caused by poor political decision-making, Cheney’s self-immolation was a glorious act of martyrdom for the cause of our sacred norms. Seriously, their cope for her loss is that she was too brave and too principled to do anything as tawdry as give the actual voters what they want. Cheney and the rest of Never Trump have seemed kind of bitter, like they’re angry at the voters for not getting with the program. At the same time, the current buzz involves Never Trump trying to gin up enthusiasm for a Cheney 2024 presidential run.

So yeah, there are a ton of Never Trumpers out there running with the line that Liz Cheney will be a serious contender to challenge Trump in the 2024 GOP primaries. “Now,” you might be thinking to yourself, “what on earth makes them think that she has a snowball’s chance in the great perdition of breaking even the low single digits?” And you would be correct. There is, in fact, zero chance that “she’s gonna get him next time!” Yet, why are a bunch of people who are supposedly savvy politicos and insiders trotting out such obvious nonsense?

What’s going on here is that these people are being put through a humiliation ritual, a peculiar kind of loyalty test that the Regime will often impose on its enemies, both potential and actual. These savvy politicos don’t really believe that Liz Cheney has any chance at all — but they have to say so if they want to remain in the good graces of the powers that be. Indeed, once you start paying attention to modern politics and culture, it’s amazing to see just how much of what goes on is basically this kind of loyalty test. Are you a Goodthinker who goes along with the sociocultural programming or are you a Badthinker who questions or rejects elements of the Regime’s playbook?

A few years ago, I wrote about the distinction between narratives and reality. There is a great gulf between what the Left says it believes and what actually is. What you see on the news and on social media has no bearing on reality or vice versa. But the thing to keep in mind is that none of this matters to the Left. They don’t actually want to convince or be convinced. The public face of their ideology and their policy decisions most often are not determined by some Rockwellesque ideal of public debate, but by social force.

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