Here’s the “official” definition of “passive-aggressive”:
Passive-aggressive behavior is characterized by a pattern of passive hostility and an avoidance of direct communication. Inaction where some action is socially customary is a typical passive-aggressive strategy (showing up late for functions, staying silent when a response is expected). Such behavior is sometimes protested by associates, evoking exasperation or confusion. People who are recipients of passive-aggressive behavior may experience anxiety due to the discordance between what they perceive and what the perpetrator is saying.
There’s definitely a lot of that going around, but it doesn’t describe the behavior of the apple polishers, or the people who have issued themselves the Asshole License. You know the ones I mean: SJWs, of course, but also CrossFitters, vegans, cyclists … basically, anyone who takes up a certain cause or lifestyle seemingly for the sole purpose of being an enormous douchebag about it in every possible social situation. Neither I nor anyone else would have a problem with vegans, say, if they really were doing it for their health, as they so often claim, because if they really were doing it for their health, they’d bring it up once, and then forever shut the fuck up about it.
But they don’t. Similarly, nobody would have a problem with bike riders if they’d just follow the goddamn rules of the road. But they don’t, and the more “cyclist” shit they own — the racing bikes made out of space station parts, the lycra bodysuits, the helmets that look like cranial jockstraps — the less the rules of the road apply to them. Spot one of those fuckers in full kit, and you’re guaranteed to see him weaving in and out of four lanes, turning abruptly without signaling, and blowing through stop signs at full speed, with nary a glance at cross traffic. They’re possessors of the Asshole License First Class, you see, so obviously the rules don’t apply when they’re doing their Official Asshole Thing.
See what I mean? That’s not “passive-aggressive”. But it’s not “active-aggressive” either. They’re not trying to pick a fight. It’s like virtue-signaling, in that you, the audience, are absolutely necessary, but unlike the standard virtue-signal, which is strictly an intra-Leftist competition, this one entails hostility towards the rest of the world, not just toward fellow Leftists …
Severian, “The Passive-Aggressive Society”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-24.
September 26, 2024
QotD: The Asshole License, First Class
September 25, 2024
Freddie deBoer on “deference politics”
In the first of a series of articles, Freddie deBoer discusses the phenomenon of “deference politics” practiced by many (most?) progressives in the United States (and equally in Canada):
When I talk about deference politics, I’m referring to the tendency of left-leaning people to substitute interpersonal obsequiousness towards “marginalized groups” for the actual material change those groups demand.
If you’ve lived in any left-aligned spaces in the past decade, you’ve encountered deference politics many times. A white person in a humanities seminar, an organizing meeting, an industry convention, a workplace gathering, etc., who makes the conscious decision to avoid engaging or to engage from a position of proactive apology towards various identity groups is engaged in deference politics. Someone who insists that members of “dominant groups” should censor themselves or speak softly or avoid speaking too much or defer to or otherwise “make space” for members of minority identities is advocating for deference politics; someone from a dominant group who tells others in that group that they should defer is practicing (self-aggrandizing) deference politics. “Maybe men should just shut up for awhile,” voiced by a man, is quintessential deference politics. “I sat my white ass down and listened” is deference politics. “Teach me how not to oppress you,” spoken at an academic conference by a straight person to LGBTQ people on a panel, is deference politics. Avoiding sharing a challenging opinion on an issue of controversy for fear of running afoul of the wrong kind of identity accusation is deference politics.
The infamous image above, of Democratic leaders wrapped in kente cloth and taking a knee in memory of George Floyd, actually preceded a meaningful attempt at material change, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. While that bill would not have been a sufficient overhaul of America’s criminal justice system — it’s hard to use the federal government to reform policing, which tends to be governed by state policies and influenced by local conditions — it would have been a good start. The Democrats, sadly, were not able to pass the bill in two tries, though perhaps it could still be revived. That the party simply didn’t have the votes to make the bill law isn’t something that we should be particularly hard on the Democrats about, but the contrast between its failure and the theatrics that attended its announcement is deference politics in its essential form: at a moment of mass discontent over the state of race and policing, Black Americans got the absurd performance from Congressional leaders but not the substance of better policy. And this is core to the critique of deference politics; the point is not that the good intentions of the people who practice them are worthless but that the people who practice deference politics never seem to recognize that all of the deferring never makes positive action more likely. Like many great political crimes, deference politics privileges the communicative and the emotional over the material and the actual.
It’s important to point out that many Black activists and writers recoiled at the deference politics practiced after George Floyd’s death and pointed out that they had never asked for such theatrics.
Is “deference politics” just a way to say “woke”?
No. Deference politics could conceivably be practice or demanded in any given political context and by members of any given political tendency. Conservatives do occasionally advocate for deference politics, such as when they insist that only veterans should comment on issues of war and peace. Nor do woke people assertively practice deference politics all the time; in fact, for various demographic reasons most people practicing social justice politics are themselves members of dominant groups, and they have a tendency to assert their own superior right to speak rather than to defer to others. The term “deference politics” should likewise not be used to refer to all cringey elements of “allyship”, which involves a diverse suite of questionable tactics and attitudes, but certainly deference politics are core to the behavior of the modern ally. The practice epitomizes the modern liberal obsession with defining politics as a matter of interpersonal niceties rather than as the systems through which human values are expressed in material terms in the real world.
September 22, 2024
Canada’s latest moral preening on the international stage includes a partial arms embargo against … the USA?
In the National Post, Conrad Black points out that the Canadian government’s tedious and never-ending virtue signalling has reached a new and barely believable low:
It is the usual pious and cowardly humbug that causes Ottawa to announce it is suspending the sales of some non-lethal military equipment to Israel because it has the effrontery to opine that the Israeli Defense forces are insufficiently protective of the lives of civilian Palestinians in Gaza. But it is breathtaking that Canada should include in this practically irrelevant step an embargo on some equipment to the United States that it suspects the Americans might pass on to Israel. This initiative is a trifecta of fatuous error. First, it is clear from thoroughly available evidence that Israel has achieved an unprecedentedly low ratio of civilian to authentic military casualties for modern urban counter-guerrilla warfare. This is especially difficult as the enemy in this case, Hamas, proudly states that civilian casualties are useful to its propaganda campaign (which has brainwashed our foreign policy-makers), and which habitually embeds its terrorist cadres in and near schools, hospitals, and places of worship to incite as much collateral damage on its own population as possible.
Second, it departs completely from any real concept of the nature of war. The invasion of Israel on October 7 and the slaughter of more than a thousand Israeli, mostly civilians, was intended and received as an act of war. Wars are not fought by dropping pamphlets or posturing with trivial gestures. As General Douglas MacArthur famously said during the Korean War, “In war there is no substitute for victory”. This is particularly the case in the current war in Gaza as Hamas has made it clear that it will never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. As long as that condition prevails, there can be no peace and Israel’s pledge to exterminate Hamas as a terrorist force enables it accurately to be described in the Wilsonian phrase: “a war to end war”. Canada’s government is engaged in a contemptible assertion of moral relativism between the heroic and democratic state of the long wronged Jewish people and a ragtag of vicious terrorists happy to be the cannon fodder of the principal terrorism-promoting state in the world — the primitive racist totalitarian theocracy of Iran.
Finally in the trifecta, in the bankruptcy of their imagination, our foreign policy makers have taken up the trite evasion of the outgoing Biden administration, that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, but we reserve the right to coach it on how to do that and this effectively limits self-defence to the expulsion of invaders but muffled and insulated retaliation against the invaders after they have been evicted from Israel. This is a formula for perpetual conflict and is a moral and military under-reaction to the enormity of Hamas’ provocation. What our government imagines it is accomplishing with this pallid, torpid, and ludicrous gesture surely escapes the imagination of all interested parties.
It must slightly bemuse the United States government that it is boycotted by Canada, which has benefited from an American guarantee of our security since President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking at Queen’s University in Kingston in 1938, said that the United States would not “stand idly by” if Canada were invaded by any power from another continent.
August 31, 2024
QotD: Celebrity activism
Brian Micklethwait, “Minnie Driver and the changing meaning of goodness”, Samizdata, 2005-08-01.
July 13, 2024
Did you blink and miss Gender Empathy Gap Day?
Don’t worry, unlike so, so many other formal days (or months, or seasons …) in the calendar devoted to this or that or the other real and imagined causes, celebrations, or acknowledgements, Gender Empathy Gap Day isn’t observed anywhere:
Remember these examples of virtue signalling? Can you imagine them doing the same for boys or young men?
Image from The Fiamengo File.
Few people have heard of Gender Empathy Gap Day, a day inaugurated in Germany in 2018 to raise awareness about our societies’ remarkable indifference to the suffering of men and boys. Not surprisingly, it has no official status in any country.
Most people, if asked, will insist that it is women and girls who suffer. We expect men and boys to apologize for their advantages and educate themselves about issues affecting women and girls. Animus against men is socially acceptable, even approved. “I bathe in male tears” is a popular feminist slogan, and university professors write mainstream opinion pieces with unironic titles like “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”
The Gender Empathy Gap Day doesn’t advocate a contest over which sex has it worse. It does advocate recognition of our collective inability or unwillingness to see the full humanity of men.
Academic researchers Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic have compiled data showing that both females and males tend to have more positive associations with women than with men. Researchers have also confirmed a much higher in-group bias amongst women, meaning that women feel more empathy towards other women than towards men, while men also feel more empathy for women.
Whether it’s homelessness (61% male), homicide (78% male victims), suicide (79% male), workplace fatalities (93% male), prison incarceration (93% male), or a host of other issues, men and boys do suffer. Yet according to the research of Dr. Tania Reynolds, we tend to associate agency with maleness and the capacity for victimhood with femaleness, seeing men and boys as active doers rather than as sufferers deserving concern.
As a result, we are tolerant of harsh punishments for male criminal offenders, but not for women. In 2012, Sonja Starr, a professor of Law, published the results of her study of discrepancies in criminal sentencing that showed a very large gender gap in the punishment of women for the same crimes committed by men. Starr’s extensive study found an average 63% sentencing gap that harshly disadvantaged men. She also discovered that “Female arrestees are […] significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted”.
The gap in punishment results because we all — including prosecutors, judges, and juries — incline to the belief that women who commit crimes were led into their law-breaking by others, usually men, and had limited choices because of poverty, childhood abuse, mental illness, or addiction. We hesitate to deprive young children of the care of their mothers, while we are content to see fathers behind bars. As Starr points out, however, male offenders have also “suffered serious hardships, have mental health or addiction issues, have minor children, and/or have ‘followed’ others onto a criminal path”.
Author Glen Poole has noted that such indifference to male difficulties is built right into the stories our society tells about itself. He points out that when a large number of men are killed — whether in war, accident, or natural disaster — mainstream news sources report on people killed, making the sex of the victims invisible. It is not news when men and boys die.
When women or girls are killed or harmed, they are rarely if ever referred to as people. Their suffering is news.
July 8, 2024
QotD: The Potlatch
The point, of course, is to show off how rich you are by showing off how much crystallized labor you are able to destroy. This pattern is not an uncommon one across human societies — a lot of human and animal sacrifice, while ostensibly religious in motivation, has this sort of showing off as an undertone. But what makes the potlatch especially interesting is its competitive nature. The Indians believe that as the goods are consumed by the blaze, every other wealthy man is “shamed” unless he comes back and burns objects of equal or greater value. It’s value destruction as a contest, like a dollar auction for status where the final price is set on fire rather than being paid to somebody, a negative-sum machine for destroying economic surplus.
Good thing our culture is way too civilized to do anything like that.
I don’t remember when it was that you told me I had to read this book about VIP “models and bottles” service at nightclubs, but I’m glad you did because it’s sort of like the Large Hadron Collider but for human social practices. By analyzing behavior under these extreme conditions, certain patterns that are normally obfuscated (often deliberately so) emerge with stark clarity. Much of your research focuses on “disreputable exchange” — the ways people buy and sell things while hiding the fact that they’re buying or selling something. Have you been able to get the NSF to pay for a night out in South Beach yet?
Gabriel: I should start off by disclosing that I’m friends with Ashley. However I don’t think that biases my opinion since the reason we are friends is that I admire her work.
Potlatch is one of the most interesting cultural practices in the world and the keystone upon which both economic anthropology and economic sociology are built. Indeed, you left out just how amazing it is in that not only did the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest destroy property in the form of salmon, blankets, and copper; but also wealth in the form of human beings, as they would use the occasion to both free and kill slaves. To us 21st century WEIRD Americans, murdering a slave and manumitting a slave seem like opposites, because manumission is humane and human sacrifice is brutal. But from the logic of status competition, they are alike in that both demonstrate that one is so wealthy that one can afford to give up the value of some of one’s slaves. Thus we see that not only the Tlingit but also the Romans would both murder and free slaves in funerary contexts.1 Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death has some very interesting material on this and is generally the greatest work of comparative scholarship on economic institutions since Max Weber — I hope to review it with you or Jane some day.
Now imagine it’s your job to describe one of the most interesting things to have ever happened, a ritual of passive-aggressively inviting rivals to parties that gavage your guests and culminate in wealth bonfires and human sacrifice, and the only thing you find worth emphasizing about it is how mean the Canadian government was to suppress the practice. This is how the Gene Autry Museum here in Los Angeles describes it, and you see similar emphasis at other museums that follow the curatorial heuristic of maximizing pious status redistribution and involvement of the descendants of the community being described, while avoiding at all costs anything that would serve as such a near occasion of awesome as to lead your internal monologue to roll tape for the Basil Poledouris score to Conan the Barbarian.
So now that we know what potlatch 1.0 is, why do I describe the models and bottles scene as a douchebag potlatch? There’s no human sacrifice, and the rivalry is a bit more friendly, but otherwise bottle service has a lot in common with a traditional potlatch. Most obviously, it is a ritual of competitive feasting where powerful men show off how much they can waste. The nightclubs are well aware of this and actively encourage “bottle wars”, where different tables compete to see how many bottles they can order. The service the club offers is not intoxication, but the spectacle of other clubgoers (and the home audience on Instagram) seeing how much the customer can spend. And so they don’t merely send a busboy or a waitress to quietly deliver the bottle, as would be the case at Applebee’s, but a bottle girl carrying bottles festooned in sparkler fireworks and, in one particularly decadent instance, the manager dressed as a gladiator and riding a chariot pulled by busboys. And once the bottles are drained, the bottles remain at the table. At a normal bar or restaurant, uncleared dishes would be a sign of lazy staff, but at a bottle service club the debris is an accumulating trophy that makes visible to all the consumer’s glorious expenditure.2
John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.
1. Gladatorial ludi were originally funerary in nature. And we know from the Lex Fufia Caninia that by 2 BC funerary manumission was considered to be in such an escalatory spiral that it would ruin estates absent sumptuary laws limiting the practice.
2. Another example of garbage as testament to the host’s opulent generosity is the “unswept floor” mosaic motif common to many Hellenistic and Roman triclinia.
July 2, 2024
The virtue-signalling Olympics … aka “Glastonbury”
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill documents the awesomely awful human beings at the Glastonbury music festival this year (like most years):
“Sign of the times @ Glastonbury Festival” by timparkinson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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Virtue-signalling reached its nadir on Friday night. It was at the Glastonbury music festival. Of course it was. A swaying crowd of the time-rich, turbo-smug thirtysomethings who make up Glasto’s clientele passed around an inflatable dinghy filled with dummies designed to look like migrants crossing the English Channel. As some band you’ve never heard of sang a song about “beautiful immigrants”, the audience hoisted the blow-up boat above their heads and basically crowd-surfed it. What a gauche display of phoney virtue. What an orgy of hollow vanity. Surely it would have been cheaper to rustle up a banner saying, “Aren’t we fucking wonderful?”.
It will surprise not a living soul that the boat was the handiwork of Banksy, every posh twat’s favourite graffiti artist. Banksy has never once seen a moneyed, mostly white audience that he didn’t want to titillate with platitudes about Tory scum and cruel capitalism, so it was only natural he would gravitate towards Glastonbury. He knows it’s rammed with people called Archie and Poppy who lap up his unsubtle stencils about the rat race that is neoliberal society and how dreadfully frightful war can be. So who better to dragoon into his boat stunt than these folk who likewise love advertising to the world how much they care about migrants and stuff?
Let’s leave to one side how unbelievably crude it is for a rich graffitist and Brits who can afford to fork out £355 to listen to crap music for five days to celebrate boat journeys that often end in death. One wonders if any of the audience members who cheered illegal immigration later retired to one of Glasto’s luxury yurts, which contain not only “proper flushing toilets” but also toilet attendants. You can hire one for £5,000, which, ironically, is around the same amount of money dirt-poor migrants are forced to stump up to criminal gangs for a seat on one of their perilous crossings that the righteous of Glasto think it’s a hoot to sanctify.
No, even worse than the sight of the well-off of Worthy Farm using the wretched of the Earth to burnish their moral credentials is the fact that if any Channel-crossing migrant were to rock up to Glastonbury they’d be cuffed and shoved in the back of a paddy wagon faster than you could say “What time’s Dua Lipa on?”. Glastonbury is one of the most fortified zones in Britain. It is surrounded by a fence that is 4.12m high and 7.8km long and which has numerous “unique high-security features”, including an “external roadway to prevent tunnelling”, a “45-degree overhang to prevent climbing” and “zero nuts and bolts to stop the fence being tampered with”. “No borders!”, cry the virtuous of Glasto while surrounded by a border fence that the screws of Alcatraz would have envied.
June 19, 2024
Toronto “atones for slavery” by renaming Yonge-Dundas Square. They chose … poorly.
In the never-ending quest for moral superiority, the City of Toronto decided to rename a downtown landmark — Yonge-Dundas Square — after allegations were made that British Home Secretary Henry Dundas was against the abolition of slavery in the 1790s. (In fact, it was partly his efforts to mediate between the abolitionists and their opponents that actually got the first anti-slavery bill through Parliament, but who cares about his actual work when we can issue blanket condemnations hundreds of years later?)
In a twist worthy of the Babylon Bee, it turns out that the new and improved name proposed has a much more direct connection with slavery:
The Yonge-Dundas Square sign on the southeast corner of the intersection in downtown Toronto.
Detail of an image from Google Street View.
There is a lot wrong both with the name that Toronto city council chose to replace Yonge-Dundas Square and the burden that the name change will place on taxpayers.
Originally budgeted at $335,000, the new estimate is $860,000 — and who is to say it won’t go higher? That would be a lot of money even for a desirable name, but the name the city chose, Sankofa Square, is problematic.
The term is Ghanaian and means “learning from the past.” But while it is intended to replace the name of Henry Dundas, who some blame for delaying the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the term “Sankofa” has its own connection to the slave trade.
Slavery was rife throughout Africa, and much of the world, for centuries past, but Ghana’s version included the execution of the slaves of chiefs who died, so that they could serve him in the afterlife. […]
The basic fact, ignored by Toronto’s mayor and city councillors, is that the Gold Coast, the earlier name for Ghana, was a notorious slave society. Leading Ghanaians were prominent in the slave trade and were themselves slave owners. For years after slavery was abolished elsewhere, they fought its abolition in Ghana. It wasn’t until 1874 that the slave trade in Ghana was abolished — nearly a century after Britain.
Compare Ghana’s record with that of Ontario, where a process of gradual abolition was started in 1793, 81 years before Ghana. That, notably, was thanks to the efforts of Upper Canada’s first lieutenant governor, John Graves Simcoe, an appointee of Henry Dundas, no less.
So Dundas was not only instrumental in getting slavery abolished in Scotland, acting as a lawyer in the appeal of a case dealing with a runaway slave, he also sent a dedicated abolitionist to Upper Canada to take the top post. He deserves a better square than Yonge-Dundas!
April 27, 2024
“… when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy”
eugyppius explains how Angela Merkel’s government reacted to the Japanese Fukushima disaster in a sane, measured, and sensible way … naw, I’m pulling your leg. They looked at all the options and then selected the dumbest possible reaction available to them:
German anti-nuclear protest in Cologne, 26 March 2011.
Photo by Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Nordrhein-Westfalen via Wikimedia Commons.
All of our countries are crazy in various ways, but when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy.
In 2011, a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. If you check a map, you’ll notice that Fukushima is in a country called Japan, which it turns out is a different country from Germany. The Fukushima disaster had zero to do with the Federal Republic, but then-Chancellor Angela Merkel felt the need to solve the problem of Fukushima by phasing out nuclear power in Germany, even though tsunamis and earthquakes are not a problem in Germany, because Germany is a country in Central Europe and not an island nation in Asia.
That is crazy enough, but it gets much crazier. Months before announcing the nuclear phase-out, Merkel’s government had passed energy transition legislation to secure Germany’s path towards a zero-emissions future. We resolved to ditch our most significant source of emissions-free power, in other words, just months after resolving an energy transition to emissions-free power. At this point you would be justified in wondering if Germany suffers from some kind of shamanistic cultural phobia of electricity in general, that is how crazy this is. These insane choices had the near-term consequence of increasing our dependence on Russian natural gas. Otherwise, they ensured that power generation in Germany would be vastly more expensive than necessary and also vastly more carbon intensive than necessary.
Now, crazy demands explanations, and observers have proposed various theories for the German climate nuclear crazy. Two of them deserve mention here:
1) The 1968 generation in Germany suffered from unusual radicalism, sharpened by moral anxiety over National Socialism, and resolved to outcompete all others in the project of self-abnegating virtue. Our culture developed a deranged anti-nuclear movement that in a fit of typical German thoroughness also came to embrace opposition to nuclear power. The Chernobyl disaster radicalised the pink-haired anti-nuclearists still further, and these cretins grew up to become news anchors, school teachers and book authors, effectively indoctrinating the next generation according to their parareligious delusions.
2) German politicians after the Cold War – especially Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel – harboured a subtle and not entirely unreasonable desire to strengthen ties with resource-rich Russia. They decided that the anti-nuclearists and the Green Party could be instrumentalised towards this end. The energy transition and the nuclear phase-out increased our dependence on Russian gas, and this was a feature more than it was a bug.
These are mutually supporting theories, but I don’t think either of them can fully account for the bizarre phenomenon before us. Germany energy crazy is a very deep problem and it will keep historians busy for many generations.
In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Germany under Merkel’s successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, decided along with the rest of the liberal West that Russia was bad, bad, bad and that evil Putin had to be punished with self-immolating sanctions, sanctions, sanctions. This new spasm of high-minded moralising further attenuated our energy situation, ushering in an entirely self-made energy crisis. The Greens, now in government, were determined to proceed with the last stages of the nuclear phase-out, even with our natural gas supplies in doubt. Only when they saw themselves staring into the abyss of political doom did they grudgingly agree to give our last nuclear plants a three-and-a-half month lease on life. We Germans and our energy policy had out-crazied everyone else, we had made ourselves the laughing stock of the entire world, that is how crazy we were.
April 17, 2024
Pay no attention to what “tax me more” folks say – instead watch what they do
One way for an a wealthy person to get a lot of free media attention is to performatively declare that they should be paying more taxes. This ostentatious virtue-signalling is frequent enough that Tim Worstall has been writing the occasional article about it for quite some time:
For there is this:
Public donations to pay off the national debt have hit their highest level in at least a decade amid growing concern about the UK’s soaring debt mountain.
Members of the public handed almost £700,000 over to the Government through six individual bequests and donations last year, according to Debt Management Office (DMO) figures obtained via a Freedom of Information request.
The amount for the 2023-24 financial year was the highest in at least a decade, with the biggest single payment to help pay off Britain’s £2.65 trillion debt pile coming from a £500,000 bequest, according to the DMO, which did not provide names of individual donors.
One way to think of this — an entirely correct way to think of it too — is that an entire 6 people last year thought that inheritance tax was too low. Which, out of the about 600k deaths (not looked it up but that’s right order of magnitude, it’s not 6 million and it’s not 60k) is not actually a lot. 0.001% in fact.
One of the grand insistences of economics is that watching what people do gives more information about their true beliefs than listening to what they say – revealed preferences, not expressed. So, by what people actually do we have 0.001% of the people leaving estates of any size whatever who think that the tax on estates is too small. This is not a large majority in favour of higher taxes upon estates being left.
But back to the far more important subject, me.
As far as the UK is concerned I did start this off. The reporting on how much people voluntarily leave to the government. Who pays extra that is – who makes a voluntary donation to government. Back in 2006 in fact, back in the depths of the Brown Terror:
LAST YEAR there were five people in Britain who thought that their taxes were too low. No, this isn’t the number of people who have called for higher taxes. Rather, it is those who were so convinced of the righteousness of state spending that they voluntarily sent extra money to the Treasury.
The Americans have been doing this since 1843. It’s always been possible to pay extra to HM Treasury — Stanley Baldwin actually handed over one fifth of his estate while he was still alive. Admittedly, he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury at the time and was asking for donations to aid in paying down war debt but still, props for money where mouth is.
Cheques, by the way, should be made out to “The Accountant, HM Treasury”, and sent to 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ. A 2nd-class stamp is sufficient and you are encouraged to add a covering note so that your donation is spent in the way you like.
I wrote that piece for The Times simply because I thought it would be a cute thing to do — and I wanted the £200 that went with writing it. As ever with freelance journalism, my money is important.
I also know that that was the first piece that appeared in UK journalism on this point. For when I asked the Treasury they’d no idea at all how many had in fact paid extra. Took them months to find out too. The donations had happened before, but no one had been writing about it. At least, not since Baldwin’s generation.
His Majesty King Charles, in right of Canada, would also be happy to accept any unwanted sums of money above your mandatory tax rate here. Go wild, wealthy and patriotic Canadian multi-millionaires!
April 11, 2024
QotD: North America will never be a “bicycle” culture
I’m deliberately discounting bicycles as a means of locomotion, you’ll notice, because look: America is a car society. Our cities are designed for cars. Indeed, given the vast distances involved over here, cars are what make our lifestyle possible. Europeans who haven’t been here, or who only visit the big tourist pits like NYC and LA, don’t get this. Even if you’ve seen the maps, it doesn’t really register until you experience it. I’m just guessing here, for purposes of explanation, but it really does seem to be the case that if it were possible to hop in your car and drive two hours due east from downtown Paris, you’d pass through three or four countries. There are lots of American cities where, if it were possible to hop in your car and drive two hours straight from downtown, you’d still be in that same city. The continental US is just mind-bogglingly huge; only Russians and maybe Australians share our mental maps. When you’ve got daily commutes that run an hour, hour and a half on freeways, setting anything up with bicycles in mind is just ludicrous.
Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.
April 5, 2024
QotD: When the faculty lounge turned nasty over the electric vehicle charging stations
Not because academics are worried about anything so prole as hypocrisy — as we know, cognitive dissonance only affects the Dirt People — but because eggheads operate on a different scale of values. Bentleys etc. are what those people drive … so professors have to kick it bobo style. Thus the faculty lot is filled with Priuses (Prii?), Teslas, and so forth. Back when The Simpsons was funny, it had a throwaway joke about Ed Begley Jr. driving a car so eco-friendly, it was powered entirely by his own sense of self-regard. If they actually marketed those, every professor in America would have one … but since they don’t, the “eco-pimp my ride” competition continues unabated.
Which is hilarious for two reasons. First, there isn’t — there won’t be, there can’t be — sufficient infrastructure to support more than a token few electric vehicles (EVs). Flyover State is nothing if not eco-friendly, though, and so they fell all over themselves giving the faculty charging stations … but see above: All they could manage was one charging station per level, in one parking garage. Which naturally led to much agonizing in the Faculty Senate, not to mention the student newspaper, the town newspaper, and every boutique coffee place and head shop in College Town. How can charging station time be most equitably distributed? Does the Lesbian Negress outweigh (supply your own joke here, please) the White FTM tranny? What about the genderfluid hemophiliac Inuit? Where does the wingless golden-skinned dragonkin rank?
Severian, “Luxury Beliefs”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-03.
March 7, 2024
“The traditional answer to this is to leave those inheritees be and they’ll blow it all on hookers and coke soon enough”
Tim Worstall tackles the ongoing angst about “the wrong sort of people” getting their sweaty mitts on family inheritances and then backhands the ostentatiously super wealthy demanding to be taxed more heavily as “Full Of Shit. Obviously”.
This has to be one of the least sympathy inducing articles ever — rich kids worried about their inheritances. We’re about to have that grand generational shift apparently, trillions upon trillions are going to move from the people who made it to the Lucky Sperm Club.
Woes.
The traditional answer to this is to leave those inheritees be and they’ll blow it all on hookers and coke soon enough. The standard deviation of soon enough is pretty big — the folk tale is clogs to clogs in three generations but the Hervey’s managed to wait until the 7th Marquess for it all to get — quite literally in that case — blown. But, you know, it does eventually happen. There are no really old fortunes.
This isn’t, perhaps, enough for the hurry hurry of the modern world. Thus we get people like this:
Tax, of course, could — should — play a huge part in all this. “Philanthropic donations are a drop in the ocean compared to what even quite minor tax increases on the richest in society would provide,” Lewis says. Patriotic Millionaires is calling for a hike in taxation for the super-rich — and its members aren’t limited to millennials. They include Guy Singh-Watson, founder of Riverford Organic Farmers; Graham Hobson, founder of Photobox; the Perry family, from the posh ready-meal business Cook; and Ian Gregg, whose father founded Greggs.
“At the moment philanthropic donations amount to about £10 billion per year,” Lewis says. “A wealth tax of 1 to 2 per cent on assets over £10 million, which would affect only the wealthiest in the UK, would raise more than double that. Closing tax avoidance loopholes would raise much more than this.”
As I pointed out in the same newspaper, The Times, two decades back, this is purest bollocks. For it’s entirely easy to pay extra tax if that’s what you wish to do:
Cheques, by the way, should be made out to “The Accountant, HM Treasury”, and sent to 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ.
Job’s a good ‘un. Except, back then, near no one did. I managed to get the numbers out of The Treasury for the previous year — it took some months as they were amazed that anyone had even thought of checking this — and a whole 5 people had paid that extra tax. Four of whom were dead, leaving bequests. That is, the UK, that year, contained one whole person willing to pay higher tax than duly and justly levied upon them. Some flood of patriotic millionaires there was not.
Matters do not seem to have improved greatly:
But something is not working. The accounts of the Debt Management Office for the year ended 31 March 2020 show that it received donations or bequests totalling just £48,957. While that’s a large percentage increase on the £11,069 received during the year ended 31 March 2019, by any standards these figures are tiny.
Not the sorts of amounts likely to make a great impact upon a lifetime’s supply of coke and hookers, is it?
One correct answer to these claims by the Patriotic Millionaires is therefore that they’re full of shit. In slightly more technical language they’re doing ethical performativity. There’s always a difference between expressed preferences — what people say — and revealed preferences, what people do. What people really believe is in what they do — but it’s entirely possible that saying the right things, even if not doing them, will get you invited to the right sorts of parties. You know, the ones where someone else pays for the hookers and coke. So, people say things they don’t do for reasons of societal enrapture. Hardly an uncommon human activity, that.
I seem to remember linking to an article of Tim’s on the old blog, but that’s long been offline. More recently, we’ve seen this exact scenario play out in Norway, the UK, the United States, and the City of Toronto.
His Majesty King Charles, in right of Canada, would also be happy to accept any unwanted sums of money above your mandatory tax rate here. Go wild, wealthy and patriotic Canadian multi-millionaires!
January 13, 2024
Troubled by Rob Henderson
Stephanos Bibas reviews Rob Henderson’s autobiography Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class for the University of Chicago Law Review:
Life at the bottom is troubled. Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and many others have long shown us that. To understand criminal justice, education, and family law, we lawyers typically look to social scientists, and their external expertise does teach us much. But we often neglect lived experience. Occasionally, we should toggle from the dry regressions and clinical detachment of social science to the internal perspective and expertise of those who live through family breakup, foster care, disrupted schooling, drugs, and crime. And that is what Rob Henderson’s breakout memoir, Troubled, gives us: a window on troubled youth.1
Henderson, a brilliant young psychologist, illumines how harmful childhood instability is by reflecting on his own experience. He never knew his father, was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, and bounced around foster care. After squandering much of his early education and drowning his rage in alcohol, drugs, fights, and vandalism, he managed to make his way through the Air Force to Yale and now Cambridge. But few of his friends escaped the wounds from their childhoods; many wound up unemployed, in prison, or dead. His eye is as keen as his intellect, recalling and reporting how adults in his life kept abandoning him and his fellow foster children and how they in turn acted out. As an outsider to the elites who dominate the Ivies, he also turns his critical eye on the groupthink and victimhood culture that is strongest among the most privileged. And building on literary historian Paul Fussell’s work, Henderson develops his own critique of the shibboleths that educated American elites use to set themselves—ourselves—apart while ignoring the harm to the rest of society.2
Henderson has much to teach us lawyers and legal scholars. He shows us how much we miss by focusing public policy on educational attainment and cost-benefit analysis, overlooking what is priceless: love and emotional attachment. The most important things in life can’t be quantified; at best, outcomes are mere proxies for them. We are more than our résumés! His account undermines our persistent habit of viewing humans as fully informed rational actors — a habit that makes much more sense in corporate law than in criminal law and the like. He showcases how poorly used adult autonomy harms children, leading to broken homes, drug addiction, numbness, and rage.
Lastly, Henderson critiques “luxury beliefs”, the term he coins for sociological opinions that are popular only among those who need not worry about their own survival. These beliefs are status signals to the educated elite who are not harmed by the fallout from any cultural shifts they might cause. But these beliefs corrode the social structures that children need to develop. (He could do more to develop the causal nexus to social harm, but his claims are still powerful.)
In short, Henderson’s memoir powerfully challenges prevalent views of education, family policy, and class. It shows how we hyperfocus on educational outcomes and other quantifiable goals at the expense of softer emotional goods. And it does it all in a plainspoken, understated voice that illustrates his points from his own lived experience and that of his buddies. Many will disagree with Henderson’s conclusions, of course, but scholars should grapple with his challenge.
Part I of this Review summarizes Henderson’s long journey from foster care to Yale. Part II canvasses his argument that adult instability breeds chaotic childhoods, leaving neglected kids to raise themselves in Hobbesian competition, impulsive indulgence, or reckless rage. Part III then develops Henderson’s signature concept of luxury beliefs and how nonjudgmentalism backfires on those at the bottom. Though one can quibble with some of his causal claims, his thrust is compelling. Finally, Part IV considers how Henderson’s account suggests reorienting some criminal justice, education, and family law reforms toward children’s need for stable structures to guide them.
1. Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (forthcoming 2024) (on file with publisher). All further citations to this work are by page number in parentheticals in the text.
2. See generally Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983).
January 4, 2024
QotD: Displays of intelligence as a status good
And then that changed, in what is a cultural eye-blink. Forget the crazy slogan. Humans don’t like change. Particularly they hate change that challenges their status. Unable to actually increase their net worth (within the prescribed realms in which noblemen could do such) or stop spending, the nobility instead went for displays of wealth. Big and extravagant ones. And the wigs were … quite, quite insane.
So what does that have to do with Facebook?
For a few generations, since the left captured the academia, entertainment and the industrial-news complex, aka, the opinion makers, to be a leftist has been synonymous with being smart.
And being smart, since the renaissance, but definitely since the world wars has been the greatest social “good” there is.
No, I’m not saying the left was smart. Increasingly, most of them weren’t, because as it became a matter of social display, the easily led started imitating it.
No, I’m saying that to parrot leftist ideas was to be considered smart. Partly because of the left’s conceit that Marxism was “scientific” there has always been, attached to the modern left the idea that to believe as they do is “rational” and “smart” and that their opponents are stupid.
Not only did they hold onto this while their ideas were proven wrong by reality over and over again, but having captured academia, they pushed leftist ideas as synonymous with being educated. I mean, if you’d attended an elite school, you received these ideas, and the way to signal you’ve attended the school is to parrot it. Thus leftism became the old school tie (mostly around the neck of our economy, but never mind.)
While they had full control of the media, be it entertainment or informational, they could reinforce the message, as well as revile anyone who challenged them as stupid, wrong and illiterate, and GET AWAY WITH IT.
With intelligence being the highest status-good in our society, the left had secure status. Forever, they thought.
The change has been very rapid. The fall of the USSR and [the rise of] talk radio were the beginning, and since the internet took off, they’ve been trying to hold on to the tail of the comet, as it streaks away from them.
I’ve said it before and I maintain it. If Mr. Obama had been president in a country where the information tech was the same as in the 30s, all his failures would have been hidden, and people would believe him a staggering genius, instead of the little man who wasn’t there. Because that’s how the industrial-media complex presented him.
And then … And then they went all in for Hillary! They were “With her” 300%.
Unbelievably, it didn’t work.
I think they’d suspected, before, that things had changed. But they could still tell themselves stories, dismiss the opposition, preen on having all the power. And then … it failed.
Since then they’ve been running scared with social insecurity. They display their “brilliance” for all the world, and it didn’t work? Oh. Must signal louder, larger, crazier.
All the “Wokeness” over everything possible (and mostly imaginary) in the last few years? That’s social signaling by a social group losing power and trying to regain it.
The less it works, the more extravagant it will get. I am in premonitory awe over what will happen should Trump beat the margin of fraud in 2020. You thought the Democratic Socialist meeting was funny? You ain’t seen nothing yet. They won’t be able to open their mouths without announcing “point of personal privilege” and their pronouns, and interrupting each other with ever finer intersectional victimhood.
If you think having a woman who won an SF award malign the person the award is named after with a bunch of ahistorical nonsense, and seeing the institution cave within days was peak wokeness, you’re deluding yourself.
Soon and very soon the “Wokeness” displays will be the equivalent of having live birds in your hair.
Because in their subconscious, if they just signal loud enough they’ll regain their status as “smart” and “educated”.
Meanwhile, we’ll be buying popcorn stocks and saying “Is that a ship on your head, or are you that insecure?”
Sarah Hoyt, “Is That A Ship On Your Head?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-09-01.
