Quotulatiousness

March 6, 2025

As Trump’s tariffs begin to bite, Canadians strike back at … King Charles and Wayne Gretzky?

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

As if more evidence were needed that Canadians aren’t well-served by our political leaders, social media personalities and legacy media types are pointing at uninvolved figures to be rounded up as the targets of maple-flavoured Two Minutes’ Hate sessions:

Canada’s latest Emmanuel Goldstein replacement, “The Great One” aka Wayne Gretzky

You can’t have an outburst of nationalism without purity tests coming into play, and two prominent Canadian figures have failed theirs in the court of chattering-class opinion: Wayne Gretzky and King Charles III, of all people.

In recent consecutive days, hilariously, The Globe and Mail‘s website published the following headlines to its online readers’-letters pages: “Wayne Gretzky’s fall from grace is a long time coming”; “Let Wayne Gretzky feel some pain”; and “Wayne Gretzky has always been held in the highest regard … now, he is dead to me”.

Gretzky is friendly with President Trump, you see, which is unacceptable. And if Gretzky isn’t willing to publicly disavow Trump, he should be using his influence to sit Trump down and explain that Canada will never be the 51st state … at which point, presumably, something useful is supposed to happen. It’s never clear what that useful thing would be, beyond a cheap nationalist thrill.

Gretzky’s Yankeeism was confirmed when he served as honorary captain of Team Canada in the final game of the 4 Nations tournament in Boston. (Imagine if he hadn’t served as honorary captain!) He gave the American players a thumbs up — which in any other context would have been considered simple good sportsmanship. He didn’t wear a Team Canada sweater, but rather a suit — which in any other context wouldn’t even have been noticed. He didn’t wear his Order of Canada pin — well, now we’re just grasping at straws.

It’s funny that the same kind of people who have no time for the Crown under normal circumstances (even if they’re not quite out-and-out republicans) are delighted to pile on to any accusations that King Charles isn’t doing … something … to fight off the Bad Orange Man for us:

This brings us to our head of state, and the baffling calls in recent days for him to shake his sceptre toward Washington and declare that Canada shall never never never be the 51st state. If these calls were coming just from anti-monarchists, it would be understandable (though it’s odd to hear them suddenly demanding that the sovereign speak on our behalf). But all kinds of otherwise reasonable people jumped aboard as well, as if this was something the King should self-evidently be doing.

It is self-evidently not what the King should be doing — certainly not before receiving advice from the Canadian prime minister, and probably not at all. Charles’s mother wouldn’t have mouthed off, and I have to wonder if she would have gotten the same criticism were she still alive to see this mess.

Indeed, I think a moment like this is precisely when having an apolitical head of state — maybe even one that doesn’t live here — is most valuable. We have more than enough people, elected and unelected, completely and vocally embroiled in the Trump Tariff Wars, pursuing some combination of national, partisan and personal gain. Isn’t it nice to have precisely the sort of democratic constancy the United States now lacks? You don’t throw away an anchor, however rusty, with a gale on the horizon.

March 5, 2025

Trump’s next target – Europe

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle thinks that the next step of Donald Trump’s culture war will be highlighted by a struggle over freedom of speech with the UK and the regulators of the European Union:

British PM Keir Starmer talks with US President Donald Trump in the White House.

New battle lines are forming in the culture war. While the woke movement appears to be in retreat, the forces of authoritarianism are regrouping for a fresh assault. Rather than maintaining a straightforward conflict between right and left, the next phase of the culture war will most probably be waged between Europe and the United States. It has all the qualities of a novel by Henry James for the digital age, with the distinctions between the old world and the new brought once again into sharp focus.

Free speech will be the key issue. Most of us will have seen the footage of vice-president J. D. Vance last week in the Oval Office taking Keir Starmer to task for the “infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British” but also “American technology companies and by extension, American citizens”. Starmer pushed back, saying “in relation to free speech in the UK, I’m very proud of our history there”. It’s a bit like Hannibal Lecter boasting about his ongoing commitment to vegetarianism.

The word “history” was apt, given that Starmer’s government is seemingly determined to ensure that free speech is consigned to the past. One of its first acts after seizing power was to ditch the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. In February, Angela Rayner revealed her plans for the establishment of a sixteen-member council on “Islamophobia” which could see the criticism of religion criminalised. Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper has been staunchly defending the police for recording “non-crime”, while the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, has suggested that the best approach to tackling the controversy is to simply rename “non-crime hate incidents” as something more palatable. Apparently Lord Herbert believes that the problem is the nomenclature, not the fact that citizens are being investigated by the armed wing of the state for lawful behaviour.

All of this is before we get to Starmer applying pressure to the judiciary to mete out draconian sentences for offensive posts and memes on social media, and the government’s determination to crack down on online “disinformation”. Ours is an authoritarian government, and Starmer’s Orwellian denial of the truth of his position in the Oval Office is to be expected. Autocrats throughout history have enacted censorship “for the public good”. Today, they target “disinformation”, a term so vague that it can be applied to anyone who questions the narrative of the ruling class.

And so, as I say, the new front of the culture war will most likely be transatlantic. The US government will simply not tolerate the widespread censorship of its citizens by laws passed overseas. Jim Jordan, chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, has already issued subpoenas to eight US tech companies to divulge all communications they have had with the UK government regarding “content moderation” (i.e., censorship). Jordan is particularly concerned about the Labour government’s intention to empower OfCom to regulate social media, and he has specifically mentioned UK officials who “have already threatened to use UK laws to police American speech”.

N.S. Lyons suggested in the latest post at The Upheaval that Vice President J.D. Vance’s real message to the European leaders can be rephrased as “Give Up the Information War and GTFO”:

The political elite of Europe and the Anglosphere appeared shocked by J.D. Vance’s wonderfully blunt speech in Munich last month. The U.S. Vice President declared Washington’s top security concern to be “the threat from within” the NATO alliance and castigated assembled leaders for their increasingly brazen assaults on “democratic values”, including censoring speech, suppressing popular opposition parties, and canceling elections. But if this shock isn’t feigned then it is rather remarkable, given that these elites were in their own way already effectively at war with the United States. All Vance did was point out the nature of this hidden conflict.

Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” globalist liberalism is over. The United States, he indicated, now has a core interest in seeing a Western world that is collectively strong because its sovereign nations are strong, with the self-confidence to independently defend themselves physically, culturally, and spiritually. His emphasis on promoting free speech and democratic legitimacy tied into this message, but was about far more than the importance of “shared values” or even Washington’s new friendliness to nationalist parties. Practically, it was an implied warning that the role Europe has been playing as a proxy actor in the political and ideological conflicts raging in the United States will no longer be tolerated. More specifically, it was a declaration that ongoing transatlantic institutional, technological, and legal support for America’s embattled left-wing deep state must end – or else.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fueled by “low-information voters” and their consumption of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, including from foreign actors, and that if their “information diet” could just be controlled then they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton would later put it, social media platforms had fundamentally changed the information environment and “if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control”.

This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the U.S. Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the “wrong” information on the internet, but “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”, as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.

Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of “independent” (state-funded) “fact-checking” organizations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was, as one federal judge later described it, effectively “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”.

A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the U.S. Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries around the world. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could for example force internet companies the world over – including U.S. companies – to change their behavior in order to comply and avoid losing access (this imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the “Brussels Effect”, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century).

March 4, 2025

Canada’s nasty authoritarian streak shows up in the “deprive Musk of his citizenship” online mob

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

In The Line, Leonid Sirota explains why we can’t just arbitrarily deprive a Canadian of his citizenship rights just because Charlie Angus has riled up a social media mob to demand it:

Elon Musk wrapped in the Canadian flag – created with Grok.

One other incontrovertible fact about Mr. Musk is that he is a Canadian citizen. His mother was born in Canada — which made her a citizen — as are her children, even though they were born abroad.

A large number of Mr. Musk’s and my fellow Canadians find the coexistence of these facts to be obnoxious. Whether out of anger or embarrassment, they are lining up to sign a petition to Parliament to demand that he be deprived of his Canadian citizenship. As of this writing, the petition has been signed by about 300,000 people. (In theory, these are Canadian citizens or residents, though on the Internet, nobody knows you didn’t actually watch the McDavid goal 97 times on loop.) At least one member of Parliament, the NDP’s Charlie Angus, is supportive.

This is appalling. The reasons given for depriving Mr. Musk of his Canadian citizenship are fundamentally authoritarian, as is the contempt for both the substantive and the procedural legal requirements involved in deprivation of citizenship that the petition manifests. That a member of Parliament is supporting this abomination is especially disturbing (and one reason this whole mess is worth caring about).

To start with the substantive point, the idea that a Canadian could be deprived of his citizenship for political reasons ought to be beyond the pale of polite discussion. It is the sort of thing the Soviets did to Mstislav Rostropovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others. Is Mr. Musk a Solzhenitsyn? Well, no. But so what? The principles at stake here are universal. They do not depend on whether one is a martyr or a millionaire, a genius or a jerk. (Solzhenitsyn, at any rate, was both jerk and genius. So is Mr. Musk. Not that it matters.)

More to the point, do you want the Canadian government to have the power to deprive people of their citizenship for their political beliefs, statements, or activities? If you are okay with a government led by a Justin Trudeau or a Mark Carney having this power, do you agree that one led by Pierre Poilievre should? (Or, of course, vice versa.)

And yes, no matter how patriotic and indignant the people who sign the petition, or support it, may feel, the demand to take away Mr. Musk’s citizenship is political. The first recital of the petition accuses him of having “engaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada”. I think the accusation is well-founded. But it is a political accusation: the national interest is a political concept. The petition then claims Mr. Musk “has used his wealth and power to influence our elections”. If he has, that is political action that Canadian citizens are entitled to take, subject to applicable laws, which the petition isn’t even alleging Mr. Musk broke. Finally, the petition claims that Mr. Musk “has now become a member of a foreign government that is attempting to erase Canadian sovereignty”. Stipulated. But the actions of this foreign government, no matter how dishonourable, distasteful, and dangerous for Canada, have so far stayed within the realm of politics.

QotD: Twitter-thought and the basic university student

Filed under: Education, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Like most people, I gave [Twitter] a look-see when I first heard about it. I quickly concluded that it wasn’t for me. Not because it was vapid garbage, you understand — Facebook was always vapid garbage, but it had some utility for all that, as Twitter does — but because I just don’t think in discrete chunks the way Twitter requires. I just can’t process the fact that “replies” are their own distinct utterances, devoid of all other context, that can come in at random times. A Twitter “thread” is a mad babble of people shouting past each other; it’s not “communication” in any sense my brain can handle, so I dropped it …

Alas, Twitter is still a thing that exists, so even though I tried it for about five minutes and promptly forgot all about it, my students didn’t … which explains, like nothing else can, their bizarre approach to classwork. For every quiz I gave, no matter how straightforward the question, I’d have at least one barracks lawyer coming to me afterwards, trying to weasel her (always her, mentally if not biologically) way back into some points, with some elaborate rationale why her picking the wrong answer was really my fault, because in class I said “The Russians won the Battle of Stalingrad” and the question on the quiz was “Who lost the Battle of Stalingrad?” and how is she supposed to be expected to recognize that “lost” is the opposite of “won” when it comes to battles and blah blah blah (thanks, Greta!).

Or the other depressingly common thing, which was when that same kid, who went to the fucking mattresses for one point on one quiz — which amounts to something like 0.01% of her final semester grade — just didn’t turn in the term paper. This happened at all academic levels, from community college (where you often lose half a class or more by the end of a semester) all the way up through the SPLACs, which cost something in the neighborhood of $70K a year all in. I never could figure this out — I mean, how can they not know that the term paper is 30% of your final grade, while all the quizzes put together amount to 10%? — but then it hit me: Twitter.

Everything on social media has, of necessity, equal weight, in that whatever’s in your feed at the present time is the only thing that exists. So when Snowflake was in “schoolwork” mode and missed that one question on that one quiz, it was the only thing that mattered in her world. My quiz was at the top of her Twitter feed, so she had to put all her energy into battling me for it. By the end of the semester, though, she was in “sorority” mode, or “getting ready for that kickass ski vacation” mode, or “beefing with that basic bitch Becky” mode, so my term paper barely registered — if she bothered to turn anything in at all, it was copy-pasted straight from wikipedia, because who cares, when Becky is out there on Twitter, h8ing?

Severian, “Also Sprach Froggy”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-30.

February 22, 2025

QotD: Modern journalism

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

We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant to boot.

They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.

It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces. Here’s the typical resume of one of these hacks:

  • Went to high school, and never went to parties
  • Went to college, majored in journalism, and never went to parties
  • Went to journalism grad school, and never went to parties
  • Works in the media, and goes to Manhattan/Georgetown cocktail parties

This apparently qualifies them to explain to people like us who have actually done something in our lives how stuff is supposed to work.

Kurt Schlicter, “Our Super Smart Elite Shines During This Pandemic!”, TownHall.com, 2020-04-02.

February 21, 2025

Tech enshittification continues

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

Ted Gioia notes that even the world’s biggest search engine provider is doing almost everything it can to make your search experiences worse and worse:

Almost everything in the digital world is turning into its opposite.

  • Social media platforms now prevent people from having a social life.
  • ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with anybody.
  • Relationship apps make it harder for couples to form lasting relationships.
  • Health and wellness websites make it almost impossible to find reliable health advice — instead peddling products of dubious efficacy.
  • Product review sites now prevent people from reading impartial reviews by actual users of the product, instead operating as pay-for-play vehicles.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

You can often tell by the name. PayPal will never pay you a penny, and it’s certainly not your pal. Microsoft Teams only works if you stay away from your team. If you keep using Safari, you will never go on an actual Safari.

But the worst reversal is happening with search engines. They now prevent you from searching.

I’ve known Google up close and personal from the start. I initially found the company quirky and endearing — but those days ended long ago. The company is now clueless and creepy.

Almost every day I read some ugly news story about Google. Here are a few headlines from a typical week:

This company goes out of its ways to do mischief. Messing with people is in its DNA.

Meanwhile, its base business is degrading at an alarming rate. The company doesn’t seem to care.

In a strange turnaround, search engines don’t want you to search for anything. That’s because searching leads you on a journey — and Google doesn’t want you to leave their platform.

The search engine was invented as your gateway to the web. The inventors of this technology tried to index every page on the Internet — so that you could find anything and everything.

That was an exciting era. Search engines were like train stations or airports. They took you all over the world.

At Google today, the goal is the exact opposite. You never leave the station.

Techies once described the Internet as a digital highway. But we need a different metaphor nowadays. Web platforms want to trap you on their app, and keep you there forever.

So, instead of a digital highway, we have a digital roach motel. They let the roaches check in — but not check out.

February 17, 2025

A maple-flavoured DOGE? Maxime Bernier proposed this in 2020

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

It’s both amusing and alarming seeing the kind of things the US government has been pouring money into, as the young auditors of Elon Musk’s DOGE dig into the accounts. Some folks on social media have been asking for a Canadian version of DOGE, but they’re nearly five years behind PPC leader Maxime Bernier:

Did you know that the Canadian government is spending $143,000 to help the African country of Senegal implement a “sectorial gender strategy” in its armed forces?

Or $46,793 to improve healthcare for intersex people in the Chinese province of Shandong?

What about $4.6 million to develop programs promoting a “positive masculinity” in Cuba?

There are hundreds of such crazy programs costing Canadian taxpayers billions of dollars every year to fund the Liberals’ woke ideology in other countries.

Many people on social media just found out that these programs exist last week, after they started looking for them on the website of the Government of Canada.

They were inspired by similar crazy programs that Elon Musk has unearthed with his DOGE team in Washington.

The DOGE – or Department of Government Efficiency – was created by President Trump and has already cut tens of billions of dollars in frivolous spending after only a few weeks.

I’m being asked if I support having the equivalent of a DOGE in Canada.

Not only do I support it, but I didn’t wait for Trump and Musk to do it to propose one. I did years ago!

In 2020, I stated that a PPC government would have a Minister of Government Downsizing to examine every federal program and cut or abolish everything that is inefficient, wasteful or not essential.

And speaking of DOGE, Coyote Blog shares some thoughts about some of the reasons Democrats are critical of the organization’s efforts:

… having thought about this longer, I think this is about more than just money. It is also about class. Just listen to how the cool kids in the media talk about Musk’s group of young weirdly-nicknamed geeks. This is fairly typical:

    He was speaking specifically about a Trump executive order that decrees that the Department for Government Efficiency can force federal agencies into firing four people for every new hire. “Who the hell voted for Mr. Musk?” Begala raged. “Who the hell voted for — excuse the phrase — a guy who calls himself Big Balls? A 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists. It’s, it’s appalling.”

This is moderately hilarious from a) a party who still has not told us which unelected people really were making decisions behind the curtain for a senile Joe Biden; and b) an individual (Begala) who wielded immense power and influence across all departments of the Clinton Administration. The department staffs in DC are 99.99% people who are both unelected and unconfirmed by Congress. The issue is not that they are unelected, the issue is that they are “the wrong sort”. I am reminded of the British aristocracy in the 19th century that would tolerate almost any sort of governmental incompetence or malfeasance as long as the people were “the right sort” — meaning of their class.

The mention of Victorian England reminds me of another way that class is likely involved here. In the English aristocracy the oldest son inherited the title and often all the land and income (which was entailed to the title). This left little for any additional sons, so an income had to be found somewhere for them in a profession that did not require them to sully themselves with “trade” (daughters were handled a different way, through the marriage market). Reading for the law was an acceptable profession for a son with brains, and the army or navy were outlets for many. But most families needed a way for their sons without too much brains or ability and not militarily inclined to make a living. A position in the Church was often the solution.

Modern American blue-blood parents are no different — they need a way to secure a living for their kids who won’t or can’t land a job in the modern elite career choices (law, consulting, investment banking, or a sexy startup). Unlike in Victorian times, the military or the Church are no longer preferred elite options. So what to do with your 22-year-old gender studies major? The parents need her to get an income and they need her to do it in a context that they can proudly report to their friends — Paul Begala does not want to tell his friends that his son’s job is maintaining distributor pricing lists (anyone who does not believe the latter criteria should have been at my Princeton or Harvard Business School 25th reunions).

The solution? Get them a job at a non-profit, the modern American version of going to the Church. As Arnold Kling noted once, non-profits tend to have much higher status than do for-profits. And without competition they don’t have to carry the same performance standards as for-profits. And they are incredibly susceptible to trading a position for your kid in exchange for a nice donation.

The employment rosters of non-profits and NGO’s are stuffed with the children of privilege. So much so that there are many non-profits that seem to do nothing EXCEPT employ and pay the travel expenses of 20-something kids from rich and/or influential families. I have been writing about the non-profit scam for years. As I wrote then:

    From my direct experience, I would go further. There is a tranche (I don’t know how large) of non-profits that are close to outright scams, providing most of their benefits to their managers and employees rather to anyone outside the organization. These benefits include 1) a salary with few performance expectations; 2) expense-paid parties and travel; 3) myriad virtue-signalling opportunities; 4) opportunities to build personal networks. This isn’t just criticizing theoretical institutions — people I know are in such jobs in these organizations.

The spending that DOGE is going after at USAID and other departments likely threatens the income of a number of under-qualified elite kids. So I will update my meme:

January 24, 2025

When the law schools went woke

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

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Ilya Shapiro’s book Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites:

As Donald Trump begins his second term as president with a mandate to undo the damage done to the country by leftist ideology, incompetence, and corruption, one of the many stables that most need cleaning up is academia – which is, of course, the source of virtually all of the most misbegotten ideas that have sent America astray.

To be sure, some parts of academia are more desperately in need of reform than others. As a rule, the elite universities, especially those in the Ivy League, are more poisoned by the new progressivism than most state schools, especially those in the heartland. Humanities and social science departments are worse off than STEM departments. And as Ilya Shapiro points out in his important new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elite, the introduction of woke thinking into law schools is singularly damaging.

Yes, writes Shapiro, it’s unfortunate enough if, say, a sociology faculty is selling ideology rather than fact, for it represents “a loss to the richness of life and the accumulation of human knowledge”. But for a law school to head down the same road is far more perilous. For these schools turn out the lawyers, politicians, and judges who will serve as “the gatekeepers of our institutions and of the rules of the game on which American prosperity, liberty, and equality sit”.

And the sad fact, alas, is that in too many American law schools today, a preponderance of students are the products of classrooms in which, as Shapiro puts it, “the classical pedagogical model of legal education” has been abandoned in favor of “the postmodern activist one” – a process that has been underway for decades but that was greatly accelerated during the Covid pandemic and in the wake of the irrational nationwide hysteria over the killing of George Floyd. Hence those students swallow such dangerous notions as critical race theory and its corollary, critical legal theory, and therefore believe that colorblind justice, due process, and freedom of speech aren’t desiderata but tools of white supremacy.

Lawless has its roots in Shapiro’s own hellish encounter with this ideological leviathan. It happened like this: on January 26, 2022, the day that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, Shapiro tweeted that the “best pick” for a replacement was Sri Srinivasan, who, if appointed by President Biden, would be the “first Asian (Indian) American” on the Court. Yet because Biden had promised to name a black woman, lamented Shapiro, “we’ll get [a] lesser black woman”. After sending off the tweet, Shapiro went to bed – and awoke in the morning to discover that his comment had caused pandemonium in the legal community, where he was being viciously attacked as a racist and a sexist. Shapiro immediately deleted the tweet and issued an apology for expressing his opinion in such an “inartful” manner.

But that wasn’t the end of it. As it happened, Shapiro, who had just left the Cato Institute, was scheduled to take up a new position at Georgetown University’s school of law in five days. And unluckily for him, the dean of the law school, William M. Treanor, was a wimp of the first order, the kind of craven academic administrator who’s quick to cave to the noisiest and most radical elements. On January 27, Treanor issued a statement in which he represented Shapiro as believing that “the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman”.

This was the height of disingenuity: it was clear that Shapiro simply meant that Biden shouldn’t limit the pool of possible nominees on the basis of sex or race – a view shared by three-quarters of the American public. But as Shapiro would soon discover, under the current dispensation at woke law schools “what matters is not the objective meaning of a given statement or even its intent but its effect – not the facts but the feelings”.

So it was that Treanor ordered an elaborate and expensive “investigation” by a top-dollar law firm into Shapiro’s tweet – yes, an investigation into a tweet. Ludicrously, it took more than four months – during which Shapiro’s new job was put on hold. In the end, the “investigators” concluded that Shapiro had indeed expressed an offensive opinion but permitted him to start work at Georgetown. Wisely, Shapiro decided that, given everything that had happened, Georgetown would not be a comfortable fit for him – at least not with Treanor at the helm – and chose instead to accept a job offer from the Manhattan Institute, where he works today.

January 20, 2025

Substack

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I subscribe to a lot of other folks’ Substack blogs and I’ve been linking to a lot of posts there over the last year or so. It’s a very good site and you’re bound to find things of interest there if you like some of the things I’ve been linking to.

If you would like notifications/summaries of posts here but don’t want to check in every day, you can subscribe to my Substack at https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson as I mail out a daily update with links to all of the day’s blog posts. For example, yesterday’s summary looked like this:

January 8, 2025

QotD: “Striver” lifestyles for each generation

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

Our forefathers, the Boomers, competed for social status the old fashioned way — bigger houses, fancier cars, trendier job titles, younger / hotter / tighter trophy wives, that kind of thing. When Gen X entered the workforce, we couldn’t compete with that, and not (just) because of Boomer narcissism; there were just too few of us. So we invented the “lifestyle striver” method of social competition. We made fun of the corporate ladder-climbers (anyone else remember “die yuppie scum” from the late 80s?) and embraced “authentic” experience.

That’s why everything was suddenly so Xxxtreeeeem!!! in the early 90s through the Naughts. We can’t afford to fly to Gstaad for a ski weekend, but we can buy a snowboard. Dad might be on Wife 3.0 at that point, and she’s younger than us, but our girlfriends — marriage is for squares — are so much more environmentally friendly. We can’t compete with their high-end clothes, so we’ll push for “business casual” in the office, homeless-casual in our personal lives (everyone can afford thrift store flannel). And so on.

The Millennials and Gen Z, lacking the wherewithal to do even that (what with the six figure college debt and all), invented the “persona striver” as their means of intra-group social competition. For the low low price of a smartphone and a data plan, you too can pretend to be The Most Interesting Persyn in the World online. I’m told there are entire subcultures online, “cottagecore” and the like, revolving around aping the style and mannerisms of prior eras. “Anonymous” seems to think that these kids are actually, physically doing this stuff — that the “cottagecore” lesbians really are moving into little houses on the prairie to bake bread by hand — but it’s obvious that’s not necessary, as this is an entirely online thing and Photoshop exists.

Either way, it’s sufficient for our purposes to note that the cost of entry keeps dropping, while the “totalization” (for lack of a better word) of the lifestyle keeps growing. An old-fashioned, conspicuous-consumption style striver was free to be an individual. Yeah, sure, they were all “yuppies”, but there were Protestant yuppies and Catholic yuppies (and atheist yuppies and everything in between). There were Liberal yuppies and Conservative yuppies (and Libertarian yuppies and everything in between). You might find the same few standard books on all their shelves — management meatball crap; the novels of Danielle Steele and Sydney Sheldon — the same way you’d find the same basic kinds of clothes in their closets, but there was still a lot of individual variety within those broad constraints. You could predict a few broad, superficial things about a yuppie from his business card, but there were no safe bets on anything else.

The lifestyle and persona strivers, on the other hand, are much more narrow. While the yuppie might go to Molokai this summer on vacation, next summer to Italy, because why not?, the lifestyle striver was pretty much trapped in his niche — it’s trail hiking or bust. And the persona striver can’t afford to go anywhere, so xzhey have to make up elaborate justifications for it (“by staying home and baking these muffins from an original 18th century recipe, I’m being completely carbon neutral”). It’s no accident, in the Marxist sense, that marathons and Crossfit and all that shit really took off after the turn of the century, as well as the whole “animal rescue” deal — it’s both a lifestyle and a persona, and it costs next to nothing, and you can, indeed must, do it all day every day.

Severian, “Striving for Revolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-11.

December 18, 2024

Justin Trudeau at bay

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

However much you may dislike the man — and there’s just so much to dislike — it’s impossible to write him off no matter how bad the situation may look. In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains to non-Canadian audiences what has been going on in the Deranged Dominion lately:

Justin Trudeau’s government could be at the point of collapse. And a social media post from Donald Trump about tariffs may have set off the latest in a chain of dominoes for Canada’s prime minister.

On November 25, Trump posted on his platform Truth Social that, as one of his first executive orders, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders”. Four days later, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump for dinner. Although the content of their discussion has not been made public, Trump’s tariff threat may have landed a death blow to Trudeau’s cabinet.

On Monday morning, Trudeau’s most important ally — his number two, finance minister Chrystia Freeland — resigned in a fiery letter directed at her boss, which she posted on X.

“Our country today faces a grave challenge,” she wrote. “The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 percent tariffs. We need to take that threat extremely seriously.” She continued: “That means pushing back against ‘America First’ economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring”.

The same morning, Trudeau’s housing minister Sean Fraser also announced his departure, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. This brings the total number of cabinet members who’ve resigned under Trudeau in 2024 to nine. But a walkout from Freeland, his most trusted lieutenant, who was expected to release her fall economic statement Monday, is by far the biggest. That such a loyal servant who has worked for Trudeau since 2015 would resign so publicly shows just how deep the rot is these days. Freeland stood by the prime minister as his popularity began to tank in February 2022 when Canadian truckers protested his harsh Covid vaccine mandates. She even authorized the debanking of those protesters, freezing their bank accounts as a means of punishment [NR: with no legal authority, it must be noted].

Now, her resignation is feeding feverish speculation that the longtime progressive darling could finally be on his way out, amid his sinking popularity and the country’s economic slump. By Monday night, a prominent member of Trudeau’s Liberal Party, Anthony Housefather, went on TV to say the prime minister is “past his shelf life“.

The modern Furies

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Greek mythology, the Erinyes (the Furies) — euphemized as the Eumenides (the “Gracious ones”) were the goddesses of vengeance. You may dismiss the ancient Greeks and their beliefs, yet they often encapsulate hidden wisdom for those who know how to interpret their stories. Today, as Janice Fiamengo points out, we have no need for mythological Furies, as they’re frequently embodied in otherwise ordinary women:

The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies
Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862, in the Chrysler Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Feminist uproar over Trump’s election was easy to predict, and not long in coming. Within ten days of the election, Clara Jeffery wrote in Mother Jones that “Women are furious — in a Greek mythology sort of way“. Taking examples from TikTok, Jeffery chronicled abundant “sorrow, disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage”, which many women vowed to exorcise on men: “‘If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue‘”, she quoted one.

In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.

No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.

At least one group of women gathered physically in Wisconsin to shout their angst and anger at Lake Michigan, and there have already been tentative (though apparently less enthusiastic than formerly) plans for a revival of the anti-Trump Women’s March protests, in which women with vulgar placards and pink hats exhibited their “collective rage“.

Women’s rage is all the rage.

It is not enough, it seems, for these women to say that they are disappointed by Trump’s win, and certainly inadequate for them to state strong disagreement with his policies or style. Expressing evidence-based positions is the sort of thing a rational person would do, and significant groups of women appear increasingly uninterested in rational talk or behavior. Instead, they reach for the most extreme language, tone of voice, postures and actions to express what feminist journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called the “visceral” “body horror” produced by the Trump victory, including the “profound physical revulsion” Cosslett and many of her sisters allegedly feel simply as a result of seeing one of Trump’s tweets (talk about fragility!).

Like so many feminist pundits telling us of women’s “horror” and “fury“, the emphasis is squarely on feeling and the female body, as if to bypass the intellect and the will altogether. The idea some feminists once scorned — that women are less reasonable and self-controlled than men — seems to have become a feminist axiom.

[NR: Edited to fix the broken URL.]

December 14, 2024

Matt Gurney’s final thoughts from the Halifax International Security Forum

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the things I regret about being totally broke is that I can’t pay for a full subscription to The Line, which is one of Canada’s best sources of (relatively) unbiased commentary on current events both in Canada and around the world. This is the third instalment of Matt Gurney’s report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum (earlier parts linked here and here):

This next one is going to be very brief, since it’s really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of “The world is currently a mess”. Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can’t speak to what I didn’t see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.

A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas’s attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I’d like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims’ phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.

“I thought I had seen the worst,” the doctor told the assembled audience. “But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes.”

Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.

He also discussed his own professional path which he regrets didn’t include a lot of traditional on-the-spot reporting on tragedies and interviewing survivors, as he feels he doesn’t have a good “game face” for those times when he now finds himself doing that kind of work:

I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I’m not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine’s history, but I have absolutely no doubt who’s the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I’ve also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.

I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.

But I have concluded that they’re screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn’t have the heart to tell them that. I don’t even know how I’d begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.

During a meal in Halifax, a woman who’d flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn’t been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn’t remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they’d happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.

And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren’t even of sympathy. I wasn’t overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I’d get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain’t a war zone.

This woman doesn’t get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.

History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.

And alas, we’ll deserve it.

December 9, 2024

“… liberalism has become a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses”

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

Freddie deBoer patiently explains why outrageous over-the-top emoting isn’t a useful or productive way to argue for your political views:

I’ve written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. I’ve focused on it not because I necessarily think the issue itself is particularly important, but rather because it’s so emblematic of what liberalism has become: a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses, a collection of well-intentioned people who mistake the responsibility to fight discrimination for a broad, vague duty to shield certain groups of people from any criticism.

For the book I’m currently writing, I’m talking to a ton of people in the broad world of mental health — psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, policymakers, journalists, fellow patients — and I’ve brought up the TikTok DID community over and over again. Remarkably, not one person defends the phenomenon as a true expression of genuine illness, not even a few disability rights activists I’ve talked to, who usually have an ethic of never questioning a disability claim. Countless normie liberals I’ve chatter with, over the past several years, have also accepted my basic position that these young women don’t actually have dissociative identity disorder. But, also, almost no one is willing to affirmatively say anything about this dynamic themselves. Indeed, The Verge reported that many experts have decided that the costs of speaking out about that whole culture just aren’t worth it. And so you have a set of behaviors that no one defends but that no one feels comfortable criticizing, thanks to the pathologies of 21st century liberalism and online rage. That’s what I’m really here to talk to you about today.

I don’t, of course, want to be too harsh on the individual young women who have turned a debilitating and controversial disorder into an opportunity to put on vertical video fashion shows; they’re just kids and kids do stupid shit, sometimes even genuinely offensive shit. What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off“. I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious. First, despite whatever vibe shift we may be living through, it remains the case that in progressive discursive spaces, saying the wrong thing is still very fraught and can result in accusations of bigotry that are personally and professionally damaging. Second, liberals have trained themselves to avoid any position at all that might be construed as siding with the enemy, as a matter of in-group identification. Take it from me: “A lot of people in Gen Z appear to be lacking in emotional resilience, in a way that’s unhealthy for them” has become, in the internet-soaked mind, “Gen Z is a bunch of snowflakes”, and so a ton of liberals recoil at that idea. Can’t appear to make a concession to the enemy! I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.

All of this is bad, and you only have to look at how incredibly harsh certain slices of “queer fandom” can be to see what I’m talking about.

November 29, 2024

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya nominated as Director of the US National Institutes of Health

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

From the point of view of the establishment, the barbarians are well and truly inside the gates, as President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee as Director of the National Health Institutes.
Photo by Taleed Brown, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons.

Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists”.

Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.

As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.

Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.

“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.

Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)

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