Quotulatiousness

March 7, 2023

Getting rid of the SAT won’t help low-income or minority students – in fact, it’ll hurt them

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

Rob Henderson explains why the notion of getting rid of SAT requirements will to the opposite of what is being claimed, based on his own experience:

US Navy Seaman Chanthorn Peou takes the SAT aboard USS Kitty Hawk, 23 February, 2004.
US Navy photograph by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Jason T. Poplin via Wikimedia Commons.

I graduated in the bottom third of my high school class with a 2.2 GPA. Didn’t think of myself as “smart”. I thought a lot and read a lot. But I hated homework, teachers, rules, etc. I thought “smart” meant kids who did their homework and raised their hand in class. Those types.

My senior year of high school I took the required test to join the military — the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). Half my motivation to take this test was because I got to skip class. I spent the night before with my friends drinking Four Loko and playing Fight Night Round 3 on Xbox 360. Woke up with a hangover, chugged 20 ounces of Rockstar energy drink, and took the test. Afterwards, the Air Force recruiter showed me how to convert ASVAB to SAT scores. I got the same score as my smartest friend who always got straight-As and was headed for college. What the fuck? I thought.

At the time, I wasn’t aware these tests are thinly veiled IQ tests. The SAT, ASVAB, and the ACT are all highly correlated with IQ at about r = .8.

A study on Army recruits found that scores on an intelligence test, along with 2-mile run time, were the best predictors of success in infantry training.

Research on tank gunners found that replacing a gunner who scores around the 20th percentile with one who scores around the 55th percentile improves the likelihood of hitting a target by 34 percent.

To qualify, potential military recruits must score higher than roughly one-third of all who take the ASVAB. The lowest acceptable percentile score to join is 36 for the Air Force, 35 for the Navy, 32 for the Marine Corps, and 31 for the Army. By definition, the worst test taker who makes it into the military still scores higher than one-third of his or her peers. The military slices off the bottom third of standardized test-takers, not allowing them to join.

The psychologist and intelligence researcher Linda Gottfredson has written:

    IQ 85 … the U.S. military sets its minimum enlistment standards at about this level … The U.S. military has twice experimented with recruiting men of IQ 80-85 (the first time on purpose and the second time by accident), but both times it found that such men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs.

In the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara launched Project 100,000 which lowered the testing requirement. This allowed people at the 10th percentile (80~ IQ) — a standard deviation lower than the previous standard — to join.

Supposedly, the aim was to alleviate poverty. LBJ had recently begun his War on Poverty program. The story was that getting more recruits into the military would help them move into the middle class. And they needed more recruits for the Vietnam War. Lowering recruitment standards was an easy way to get them.

Recruits of Project 100,000 were 9 times more likely to require remedial training and training took up to 4 times longer to complete compared to their peers who had entered under the higher score requirement. In Vietnam, men recruited under the lower testing threshold were 2.5 times more likely to die in combat.

Did the veterans who made it home achieve upward mobility? No. Compared to civilians with similar attributes who were not recruited, McNamara’s Morons (as they were later termed) were less likely to be employed, less likely to own a business, and obtained less education. Later, the policy changed to improve the talent pool of the armed forces. Higher ASVAB score thresholds were reinstated. Along with additional rigid requirements.

Today, eight out of ten Americans between 17 and 24 are ineligible for military service. Mostly due to obesity, medical issues, and criminal records.

Anyway, seeing my ASVAB score was the first time I learned I could have been a good student. It was possible. How many kids out there are like this. Kids who have fucked up lives and get bad grades which mask their underlying potential. Potential that a standardized test could reveal.

The SAT is a “barrier” according to that NYT op-ed. But it’s also a gateway. Most poor kids don’t take the SAT. Or any other standardized test. More should.

January 21, 2023

QotD: Farmers’ markets are a scam

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The first thing I saw was a number of individuals taking photographs of purple carrots and multi-coloured tomatoes to doubtless upload them to Instagram. Customers were shoved out of the way so they could achieve the perfect shot. I can imagine the description that would be added to the images: “At my local market. Buying all organic produce to juice and buying a load of Guatemalan coffee beans to support local farmers. #FoodIsMood”

Carefully navigating the Bugaboos, words leapt out at me from the stalls: “gluten free”, “vegan”, “no added sugar”, “no saturated fats”. It was more like advice from a doctor than things to eat. At the cheese stall I admit I was tempted by the chilli jam accompaniment, as it was described as “rich, tangy tomato with purple shallots and plump sultanas”, but all I needed to do was look at the price — a startling £10 for the small jar with a handwritten label — to decide that the Branston pickle sitting in my store cupboard would do just fine.

An older woman standing by the cheese stall looks as if she is about to pass out. It’s not the heat; rather she has just been informed by the vendor, a young woman with green hair and several face piercings, the price for a piece of Brie and a couple of small goat cheeses. And to add insult to injury, when the customer hands over the £20 to pay she is told, “We only take cards.”

So much for a local, friendly community space. The truth is, these markets are a rip-off, aimed at posturing fools with more money than sense, and food snobs that believe if food isn’t prohibitively expensive for the masses, it’s not good enough to take home and store in their gigantic Smeg fridge.

Julie Bindel, “Mugged by a mud-caked spud”, The Critic, 2022-10-15.

December 8, 2022

Orwell wrote about the dangers of letting well-worn phrases do most of your writing for you back in 1946 – it’s still valid today

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

I posted a short paragraph from Orwell’s brilliant “Politics and the English Language” essay as a QotD entry earlier this year:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

As Chris Bray shows, things are, if possible, even worse today than in Orwell’s day:

We do not advance. The dominion of the ready-made phrase doesn’t provide a path for advancement. It provides a locked language for a long stalemate that edges into steady decline.

(Stella Morabito covers this ground in a new book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer, excerpted here in a short package of tremendously useful ideas about the way we shape ourselves to the prevailing discourse to avoid the feeling of isolation.)

So Tracy Beth Høeg graduated from medical school in 2006, and later completed a PhD in epidemiology, then a medical residency. She does medical research and treats patients; you can go to her clinic and get medical help. Another person who went to medical school but then decided not to complete a residency or treat patients or publish peer-reviewed research casually dismisses her as “this Hoeg hag”.

In the dominion of the ready-made phrase, the many prevailing and easily grasped terms of social disapprobation provide comfort. The well-known denunciatory words and phrases give credentialed but unaccomplished people who live with social panic and status anxiety a way to elevate themselves by standing on someone else. That fucking hag, that anti-vaxxer bitch! Something something Koch Brothers something something! This ritual use of social denunciation as a status signal is precisely the dynamic Milan Kundera described in a series of novels about the social practices of late communist societies. The grab bag of social ruin trigger terms is easy for mediocre minds, which are empowered by the ability to shit on people for status without having to do much work.

It’s a psychological wall: white nationalism Fox News anti-vaxxers Koch brothers! You can be important and powerful without doing anything, by performing the degradation of someone who has — using the useful shortcut of the ready-made phrases. You don’t have to do or be; you can signal and display. Status is a performance of familiar words directed at the usual and useful targets. It’s lazy, it’s mindless, and it gets a good number of people through their days. Imagine being the 34,567th public intellectual to slam a Covid vaccine critic on Twitter. So fresh! So brave!

November 23, 2022

QotD: Humour and political correctness

Filed under: Books, Humour, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As a bumptious adolescent in upstate New York, I stumbled on a British collection of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams in a secondhand bookstore. It was an electrifying revelation, a text that I studied like the bible. What bold, scathing wit, cutting through the sentimental fog of those still rigidly conformist early 1960s, when good girls were expected to simper and defer.

But I never fully understood Wilde’s caustic satire of Victorian philanthropists and humanitarians until the present sludgy tide of political correctness began flooding government, education, and media over the past two decades. Wilde saw the insufferable arrogance and preening sanctimony in his era’s self-appointed guardians of morality.

We’re back to the hypocrisy sweepstakes, where gestures of virtue are as formalized as kabuki. Humor has been assassinated. An off word at work or school will get you booted to the gallows. This is the graveyard of liberalism, whose once noble ideals have turned spectral and vampiric.

Camille Paglia, “Hillary wants Trump to win again”, Spectator USA, 2018-12-04.

October 21, 2022

“The function of elected officials in California is the performance of symbols, the narcissistic status dance”

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

Chris Bray on the essentially performative nature of law-making in California:

That mayor is gone, now, but her rotating crop of replacements aren’t noticeably more committed to the quotidian reality of the city, 3.4 square miles of crumbling streets. They’re busy with the climate action plan, and with their very very serious regional outreach to achieve social justice and climate justice and, you know, something something justice something. They are performing their symbols.

So start with this premise: The function of elected officials in California is the performance of symbols, the narcissistic status dance.

Doing just that, the bumbling halfwit Richard Pan, a pediatrician turned Big Pharma water-carrier, has succeeded in the passage of his “disinformation” bill, AB 2098. Here’s how the legislative counsel explains the bill:

    Existing law requires the applicable board to take action against any licensed physician and surgeon who is charged with unprofessional conduct, as provided.

    This bill would designate the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or “COVID-19,” as unprofessional conduct.

But, as Igor Chudov notes, the bill — now the law — defines away its purpose, declaring that misinformation is “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care”. (And disinformation, the law says, is merely misinformation spread with “malicious intent”, disagreeing with the consensus plus being mean and bad.)

Being a longtime admirer of Richard Pan’s unique mind, I adore the definition of falsehood as something contrary to the consensus. It’s true, you moron, ’cause lots of people believe it! (The earth is at the center, and the sun revolves around it! Go to your room!) But back to Chudov’s good catch: The law evaporates if you can show that the consensus isn’t, and European public health regulators, among others, are doing that work. So if a doctor violates the consensus by telling a patient that the mRNA injections don’t prevent infection or transmission … okay, hold on a second.

So Senator Pan wishes to burn the witch, but he defines “witch” in such pudding-soft language that he gives the witch-burners nowhere to stand without sinking and vanishing. His declared purpose evaporates in the sloppiness of his mind. But he gets the symbol, declaring that he has declared that the witch should be burned. He gets his tweet.

October 19, 2022

Luxury beliefs in action

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

In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank looks at the young vandals, er “activists” who decided that throwing soup on a famous painting was a totally sensible and reasonable thing to do in order to direct our attention to their luxury beliefs:

On Friday Phoebe Plummer, a 21-year-old graduate student and activist, threw a tin of soup over a Van Gogh painting in the National Gallery, before proceeding to glue herself to the wall. “What is worth more, art or life?” she shouted in a manner reminiscent of an especially tiresome student at the Oxford Union. Whilst Phoebe didn’t exactly make it to Oxford, she was the beneficiary of a £15,000 a year boarding school education. Having rich parents probably helps if your lifestyle involves dying your hair pink, covering yourself in glitter and getting glued to a succession of defaced public monuments. The legal fees alone must be a headache.

That said, perhaps the organisation she cheerfully acts in the name of — Just Stop Oil — can foot the bills. After all, it’s a registered charity funded by the US-based organisation The Climate Emergency Fund. The Fund boasts on its website that “We provide a safe and legal means for donors to support disruptive protest that wakes up the public and puts intense pressure on lawmakers”, not to mention “Our robust legal team”. The charity comes with endorsements by high profile organisations such as fashion magazine Marie Claire and the backing of donors like the group’s co-founder, oil heiress Aileen Getty who is quoted as saying, “Don’t we have responsibility to take every means to protect the Earth”.

I can think of other organisations that provide “A safe harbour for donors” and put “intense pressure on lawmakers”, not to mention having “robust legal teams” — though they generally feature rather more Italian accents and bodies dumped in the river, and rather fewer celebrity endorsements (Frank Sinatra could not be reached for comment).

The Just Stop Oil organisation itself is even more explicit about its willingness to countenance potentially illegal means. In its FAQ section it calls for people to “use tactics such as strikes, boycotts, mass protests and disruption to withdraw their cooperation from the state”, and announces that they “are willing to take part in Nonviolent direct action targeting the UK’s oil and gas infrastructure should the Government fail to meet our demand by 14 March 2022”. Well the date has past. “Will there be arrests?” the next section asks. The answer? “Probably”.

Quite why organisations that openly fund illegal — sorry “disruptive” — protest, and hire teams of lawyers to avoid the legal consequences, are allowed to enjoy charitable status, let alone avoid investigation by the authorities, is beyond me. Nor is it clear to me how attacks on works of art, or stopping traffic in the road, can attract support for environmental causes, or challenge those who profit from ecological destruction.

The answer lies with the nature of the radical environmental movement, which is often starkly at odds with many of the finest traditions of ecological and anti-industrial thought. Early critics of industrial capitalism like Ruskin and Morris were as concerned with the protection of traditional culture as they were with the destruction of the natural world. Their humanist challenge to industrialism was to call for the return of craft, the embrace of localism, a built environment on a human scale, and an economy that fed the spiritual as well as material needs of mankind.

Theodore Dalrymple on the mindset of the perps:

Youth is often said to be an age of idealism, but if my recollection of my own youth is accurate, it could also be characterized as an age of self-righteousness liberally dosed with hypocrisy, at least when it has known no real hardship that isn’t of its own making.

The two girls who threw a tin of soup at a Van Gogh in the National Gallery in London and then glued themselves to the wall certainly evinced a humorless self-righteousness and self-importance: indeed, they seemed almost to secrete it as a physiological product. They were part of a movement of dogmatic and indoctrinated young people called Just Stop Oil that’s currently making a public nuisance of itself in this fashion in Britain, holding up traffic and causing misery to thousands, in what it believes to be the best of all good causes, saving the planet.

[…]

Youth suffers from both fevered over-imagination and a complete absence of imagination. This is the natural consequence of a lack of experience of life, in which limited experience is taken as the total of all possible human experience. Youth accepts uncritically its own wildest projections and doesn’t know the limitations of its own knowledge. It believes itself endowed with moral purity and allows for no ambiguity, let alone tragic choice. It’s sure of itself.

The young women who threw soup at the Van Gogh probably didn’t know that, even if the man-made climate change hypothesis were wholly correct, they lived in a country that produced about 1 to 2 percent of the alleged greenhouse gases in the world, so that even if their action put a complete end to that contribution (a most unlikely outcome) it would make absolutely no difference whatever to the fate of the planet. Their action certainly caused the public irritation and expense, and its most likely long-term outcome is a costly increase in surveillance and security at the gallery because the two of them were able to do what they did with such ease.

However, they were probably dimly aware, or had the good sense to know, that it would have been inadvisable for them to make their gesture in some country responsible for a far greater proportion of the alleged causation of climate change than their own—China, for example. Cowardice, after all, is the better part of self-righteousness.

October 15, 2022

Freeland does a good job of “talking the talk”, but the government is doing anything but “walking the walk”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney reluctantly agrees that at least some of what Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland covered in her recent speech to the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC was logical, sensible and well-crafted. What he finds mind-croggling is the chasm between what Freeland talks about and what the government she’s deputy leader of is actually doing:


Screencap from the CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland’s speech this week.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland went to Washington this week, to give a speech at the Brookings Institution. It is a very interesting speech. Truly — it’s interesting. You should read it.

Is it a good speech, though?

In some ways, yes. You could even go so far as to say it’s a very good speech. Freeland lays out a stark but convincing critique of more than 30 years of Western foreign policy and economic assumptions, and offers some worthwhile Canadian initiatives that seek to address what we got wrong. We were wrong to believe that history had ended, Freeland said, and must now accept that we’re going to have to fight for the world we want to live in, and to win hearts and minds. We can’t just sit around and wait for the arc of history to bend things our way — we must work consciously and deliberately with our allies to make the Western alliance stronger, richer and safer, better able to withstand the hostility of our enemies and win over the undecideds of the world.

That’s the good stuff. There is, however, some bad news.

[…]

Freeland’s speech is full of little examples like this, where the value of her ideas collides bodily with the reality of her government’s competency problems. She is saying the right things. She is also saying the things that her government could already have been doing, but either hasn’t wanted to or isn’t capable of actually pulling off.

So we’re going to spend some domestic political capital to help draw the democratic allies together, eh? That sounds great. But what if they want to sell us some cheese or fancy butter? Are we going to spend some domestic political capital on that, or nah? Freeland says we must “deepen and expand” NATO and our other alliances, which also sounds super, but we’re already seeing signs that our allies are increasingly cutting us out of the loop and forming new Canada-free forums because we simply aren’t interested in deepening or expanding anything, and don’t add anything but an extra meal tab when we show up for the family photo. Freeland says that adapting to our changing world order is “one of our most urgent tasks”. Okay! Again, that sounds fantastic, but are we going to do a defence policy review? A foreign policy review? Are we going to spearhead any new initiatives? Are we going to build out our military, expand our diplomatic corps, and invoke that famous convening power in a way that tangibly helps? Or is this one of those things where the urgency is in the saying aloud before a well-heeled crowd, but not so much in the doing?

Indeed, this goes well beyond what I’d call this government’s meta-failure: a strong preference for saying the right things in place of doing the right things, but still expecting full credit for said things, as if they’d actually pulled it off. That problem is bad enough, but on top of that is layered the very real concerns I and many others have about our state capacity. Even if we chose to spend political capital to get things done, and then tried really hard to succeed, could we? I know it’s a bit of a deep cut now, but I wonder if everything Freeland wants to do will be charitably deemed “underway with challenges” by the time the war in Europe enters its second year, or fifth, or tenth.

There’s a line in Freeland’s speech that really jumped out at me. Early on, she’s talking about the assumptions many of us in the West had about the “end of history” — the proclaimed permanent triumph of democracy and capitalism after the end of the Cold War. “It is easy to mock the hubris and the naiveté which animated that era”, she said.

She’s right! Here’s the thing, though: it’s equally easy to mock the hubris and naiveté of a Canadian deputy PM who flies to Washington to lay out a vision of allied solidarity and hard work that her own government has yet to demonstrate the slightest interest in putting into action. Her government’s own record undercuts her (truly) very fine words. Canada could be leading by example here. Instead, Freeland is giving a speech about the things we ought to be doing, and could already be doing, but aren’t. The D.C. audience may not know enough of her government’s record to mock the hubris and naiveté; we Canadians have no such luxury of ignorance.

I’ll say this for Freeland: I believe she is sincere. I believe she means what she says, I believe she has thought about these issues long and hard, and despite my previously acknowledged quibbles, it is a damn good speech. The problem, in this case, isn’t the message, or even the messenger. The problem is who the messenger works for.

September 26, 2022

Canada, a confessed “ongoing” genocidal state, has no moral grounds to criticize China, Russia, or Iran

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay expresses his frustration as Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s performative moral posturing and virtue signalling for his globalist comrades comes back to bite him in the ass … again:

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

… [Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi] also threw in an attack on Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, declaring that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school.”

The issue of supposed unmarked Indigenous child graves dominated the Canadian media in the latter half of 2021. But as I reported in Quillette several months ago, no “mass graves” were ever found. In fact, even the Indigenous groups that initially reported ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey results consistent with the possible presence of unmarked burial sites weren’t talking about “mass graves”. Rather, the invented mass-graves claim was popularized by a badly botched New York Times May 28th, 2021, story written by reporter Ian Austen. (For a definitive debunking, see Terry Glavin’s account in Canada’s National Post).

In the 16 months that have passed since the unmarked-graves story broke in late May 2021, not a single body has been found, nor any human remains. And so even the less sensational allegation that 215 individual unmarked child graves lie buried under the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, now seems doubtful. Nor have bodies or human remains been recovered at any of the other former residential-school properties where GPR surveys were conducted.

Yet that didn’t prevent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from lowering flags on Canadian public buildings for more than five months, nor from speaking publicly as if bodies were already being dug up. And aside from the National Post, not a single major Canadian media outlet has admitted its role in feeding the unmarked-graves social panic that exploded last year, and which often included lurid speculation that the supposed grave sites not only contained the remains of Indigenous children, but that these children had been murdered through methods worthy of a horror-movie plot.

Given this, what can Canadian public figures say to Raisi now that he’s throwing spurious moral equivalences into our faces? Nothing. In making the false claim that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school”, the man is merely reading our own officially sourced misinformation back to us.

This isn’t the first time that Trudeau has managed to maneuver Canada into this kind of mortifying position vis-à-vis the world’s tyrants. Last year, when Canadian lawmakers voted to denounce China’s treatment of Uighurs in western Xinjiang as a form of genocide, Trudeau and his Cabinet abstained. The suspected reasons for that move were complex. But they included the fact that Canada was, by its own description, morally compromised on the genocide file: Back in 2019, Trudeau had explicitly acceded to the (absurd) claim that Canada, too, was guilty of “genocide” — this one against Indigenous women. Indeed, according to the official report that precipitated Trudeau’s mea culpa, this supposed Canadian genocide remains ongoing.

August 30, 2022

QotD: The secret language of tattoos

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

There’s a fascinating old book called Codes of the Underworld, that discusses things like face tattoos on convicts. He makes an obvious — yet almost entirely unobserved — point: The kind of folks who do things like that have totally given up on “straight” society. Those tattoos, and other mob-type behaviors, aren’t intended to communicate with normal folks; they’re signals to other lowlifes. To normal society, they convey only one message: “I am dangerous; stay away.” But to their fellow scumbags, prison tattoos and the like contain a wealth of vital information. Only people who are part of that world can understand.

We normal folks have the same problem when confronted with Leftists. Just to stick with a theme, consider tattoos. A quick googling suggests that something like 20% of Americans ages 18 and older have at least one tattoo. This Federalist piece doesn’t cite its source, but the claim that 40% (!!!) of those aged 18-29 are tatted up sure feels right — anecdotes aren’t data, of course, but I taught college for years; I’ve got lots of anecdotes. Kids these days are slathered in garish, gaudy ink.

Now, it’s probably safe to assume that those tats don’t mean anything criminal … but how would you know? Back when only sailors and military types had tattoos — you know, those dim dark days before about 1994 — tats had fairly obvious meanings. Globe and anchor — Semper Fi, buddy. But these days they seem entirely random. Which is the point — if you catch yourself wondering “What kind of idiot would get that permanently etched into his flesh?”, then by definition the message isn’t for you. But think about how much time, effort, and money is expended on tattoos. They mean something, I promise you.

Dealing with Liberals is like that. Every element of every tattoo is recognizable, but the meaning of the whole is utterly opaque. So it goes with Leftist language, Leftist gestures. We understand all the words that they say, and they do all the things normal people do, but not for any reason any normal person can figure out. We don’t live in their world.

Actually it’s worse than that. We think we know what they’re doing. We’ve got a cute label for it: “Virtue-signaling”. But that doesn’t go far enough. What virtue, specifically, are they signalling? Figure that out, and we might be able to find a way to break it.

I suggest that the key to understanding Leftism is: Conspicuous consumption. I think it’s the point of all those weird college-kid tattoos, too. The whole point of the exercise is to show that you have the resources — the money, tight young skin, and above all time — to undergo such a laborious process. Time is the most precious commodity of all. All the money in the world won’t buy you a single second more. Every second you spend worrying about your pronouns is a second you can’t spend doing anything productive … which is, I submit, the entire point of worrying about your pronouns. Only the young, or those stuck in permanent adolescence, can be so profligate with time.

Severian, “Skin in the Game”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-10-28.

June 1, 2022

Trudeau’s new gun control plans will do nothing to reduce criminal use of firearms … and he doesn’t care

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The proposed new rules will impose costs on legal gun owners and restrict their access to certain firearms, and almost certainly do nothing at all to reduce the headline-grabbing crimes that supposedly prompted the new rules in the first place:

A 2018 Toronto Police Services publicity photo of guns seized in a recent operation.

In my 15 years or so of writing about firearms policy, here’s been a constant problem: gun policy is complicated, the broader public doesn’t know much about it, and it’s hard (impossible?) to make any coherent arguments without laying out the context, both of the specific proposals and the broader background. Working through what was announced yesterday, and how this clarifies a worrying shift in how the Liberals approach gun control, is going to be a bit of a process.

Get comfy.

As of Tuesday morning, we are short a lot of details, because the Liberals chose to make their high-publicity announcement before they provided any technical briefings. (We’ll come back to that later.) At first glance, it seems that lot of what the Liberals announced is stuff they’d either already committed to do or, in fact, already exists. (The Liberals?! Re-announcing stuff? Well, I never!) There is currently confusion about the ammunition magazine capacity limit — most non-gunnies won’t know the difference between an internal magazine and a detachable one, but it’s a huge difference, and the proposed legislation is unhelpfully vague. So stay tuned. But the actual centrepiece of the proposal, I have to admit, made me burst out laughing. On Twitter, I called it “peak Liberal”. It really is a pretty perfect example of what’s wrong with how the Liberals govern, but why they’re great at politics.

One of the jokes about Justin Trudeau when he entered politics was that he’d be much better suited to playing the role of political leader on TV than he would in real life. Several years later, the joke is on the Canadian voter because that’s turned out to be exactly the case: Trudeau loves posturing and pontificating for the cameras, and early in his first term as prime minister he became notorious for “unplanned” photo ops (despite being constantly accompanied by at least one staff photographer/videographer everywhere he went). I think this is one of the reasons the Liberals have been justly mocked for constantly re-announcing policies and programs — it looks good on camera.

The big reveal was a “freeze” on handgun sales in Canada, and their importation. Existing owners can keep theirs. It’s not clear exactly when this will go in effect, so I imagine gun stores across the land are going to set sales records in the next few days. Once in place, the sale or transfer of a handgun — from either a store to an individual or between individuals — will be eliminated. Again, “frozen”, as the Liberals call it.

At the most basic level, new government policies are intended to solve a problem: you see something that’s wrong with the status quo, and you try to enact a policy to improve it. Parties tend to wrap their policies in lots of rhetorical flourishes, but if you tune out what the politicians are saying and look at what they’re doing, you can get a decent sense of what their actual goal is. And there’s been an interesting shift in what the Liberals have been doing with gun control these last few years. Monday’s announcement is perhaps the ultimate example of this yet, the purest form of the new normal we’ve yet seen.

The Liberals are making a series of announcements that won’t actually change, at all, how safe Canadians are from gun violence. The announcements do get a lot of attention, though. Because, clearly, getting the attention is itself the goal. The public-safety talking points are just the PR frosting on top of what is an entirely political exercise. Why else make the announcement before you give the press the technical briefings? The sequence tells you all you need to know.

Trudeau’s general governing style might best be described as “provocatively performative”. If you think of him just portraying what he thinks a Prime Minister should look like, much of his performance makes more sense. As I joked on social media the other day “It’s about time Trudeau took decisive steps to crush these MAGA-hatted, gun-toting, pickup-truck-driving rednecks who keep coming into Toronto and gunning down innocent drug dealers, pimps, and aspiring rap artists who were just turning their lives around! ” It’s a theatrical performance on the political stage … but unfortunately ordinary Canadians are going to be forced to put up with his playing up to the urban and suburban voting galleries.

Note that while the government is puffing its collective chest for this “tough on guns” announcement, they are also pushing a bill in Parliament that would reduce or eliminate many “mandatory minimum penalties” for things like smuggling firearms into the country. This is apparently intended to address the “overincarceration rate” of First Nations and other “marginalized Canadians”. So, on the one hand, they’re planning to penalize legal gun owners and on the other hand, they’ll reduce the penalties that can be imposed on criminals who smuggle illegal weapons into the country. That only makes sense if it’s all a theatrical performance.

May 27, 2022

QotD: Elite overproduction and Canada’s managerial class

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In Ages of Discord, Peter Turchin describes the consequences of elite overproduction. Middle-class youths strive for a college degree to ascend the social ladder. But because the true elites are always a small group, an excess of college graduates saturates the job market with mid-level managers. As these managers fight for scarce spots at the top, intra-elite jockeying becomes more fierce. Tests of ideological purity become a way of winnowing the competition. Those most insecure in their elite status do the most virtue signaling, and punch down on the “unenlightened” lower white classes as a way of confirming their rank. Ultimately, these people end up filling the ever-increasing number of mid-level positions in government, media, and universities.

The managerial class in Canada is much more powerful than that in the U.S., for several reasons. First, the managerial class makes up a much larger share of Canada’s population, because far more Canadians go to college. Whereas 51.9 percent of Americans between the ages of 25–34 have tertiary education, in Canada it is almost 65 percent. While America’s elites are decentralized (Wall Street and Silicon Valley are very different), Canada’s elites are concentrated in the Laurentian corridor of Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. And there is a revolving door between the managerial institutions. Since Lester Pearson, prime minister from 1963 to 1968, every leader of the Liberal party has begun his career as either a civil servant, academic, professional party hack, Bay Street lawyer, or leader of one of Canada’s Laurentian “continental corporations” — or as the son of one of these. These institutions receive generous federal funding. So does the Canadian media, which is now financially dependent on the federal government. Because these institutions are regionally concentrated and rely on symbiotic relationships with one another, Canada’s managerial classes hold hegemonic political power.

Canada’s vassalage to the U.S. intensifies the harmful effects of this situation. Once Canada surrendered its British character and integrated itself into the American empire, it became part of the continental system of elite overproduction. Ambitious Canadians seeking the top-tier education that will gain them elite status quickly discover that Canada’s universities are, as one professor once told me, “frustratingly above-average”. The most talented young Canadians therefore tend to jump ship and move to the U.S. The sine qua non for their success is mastering the American empire’s language, which is the language of liberalism. Every ambitious Canadian learns that to ascend, you must talk like American liberal elites. The Canadians who become fluent succeed: They get a top-tier U.S. degree and join the prestigious American networks. By and large, these people do not then want to move back to the imperial backwater. The few who do — such as former Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff, who taught at Harvard, and the current Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who studied at Harvard and married a New York Times reporter — return home confident that they will be the big fish in the small pond. Hence Canada suffers a protracted brain drain to the U.S.

Nathan Pinkoski, “What Led To Canada’s Crisis”, First Things, 2022-02-24.

May 8, 2022

“It’s like these guys watched Anne Hathaway on WeCrashed and convinced themselves they can ‘elevate the world’s consciousness’ through arts grants. “

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte brings us up to date on the latest adventures of the Canada Council for the Arts:

The Canada Council for the Arts held its annual public meeting March 30 and a video of it is now up on YouTube where, as of Thursday night, 321 people had tuned in to see CEO Simon Brault’s new shoelaces.

It’s not time for another deep dive into the ameliorative ambitions of Canada’s leading arts funding agency. We’ll just note that everything I observed in SHuSH 139 is on abundant display in this video, from the exhaustive land grant acknowledgment to non-stop discussion of equity, climate change, and Ukraine to a (mercifully short) speech by council chairman Jesse Wente, most of it dedicated to his usual one-note Indigenous activism (you’re supposed to rep all artists, Jesse).

Cheque-mailer-in-chief Brault, who obviously finds the real work of his position boring as fuck, says his immediate and long-term priorities (at a time when most of the nation’s artists and arts organizations have been economically devastated by the pandemic) are “elimination of racism and discrimination … and focusing on decolonization in people’s minds, in systems, and in institutions.”

Every square on the bureaucratic buzzword bingo card is covered: “intentionality”, “innovation”, “risk-taking”, “sustainability”, “inclusivity”, etc.

It’s like these guys watched Anne Hathaway on WeCrashed and convinced themselves they can “elevate the world’s consciousness” through arts grants.

Will they succeed? Given that they can’t match the production values of local cable despite a half-billion budget, odds are long.

Anyway, their not-quite-viral symphony of sanctimony is an experience. Give it a watch.

March 29, 2022

Giving up vegetables for Lent

Filed under: Food, Health, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Felipe Fernández-Armesto on updating the traditional Christian observance of Lent for our virtue-signalling, social media age:

“Bruegel the Elder, Fight between Carnival and Lent, detail 6” by f_snarfel is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

For Lent, I am abstaining from vegetables. It may seem counter-intuitive, because “Carnival” or “Carni Vale” — which the English in their glum way call “Shrove Tuesday” and the French, more cheerfully, call “Mardi Gras” — means “Goodbye to Meat”.

The worldly, historic purpose of Lent is to eke out deficient livestock, doomed, unless slaughtered, to die, emaciated and inedible, on sparse or frozen pastures. Nowadays, however, vegetables seem a sacrifice both reasonable and pious.

If I wanted to be lampooned in Private Eye, I’d say that vegetables are the new meat: marketed as dietetically superior, and flattering to a moral form of snobbery.

Like meat in the old days, they are the preferred food of people who want to look down on the rest of us. Flesh and fish are now humbling meals, consumed in self-abasement. “Veganuary” and “Dry January” — wicked, secularist attempts to subvert the sanctity of Lent — repel me from conventional kinds of penance.

I want to defy the absurd propaganda of meat-haters, who try to shame the ill-informed into vegetarianism with mendacious allegations about the environmental cost of carnivorism. Scientifically, they’re on a par with Pythagoras’s denunciation of “passion proteins” and the meat-phobic campaigns of the nineteenth-century evangelists who hawked joyless, overpriced breakfast cereals.

I also want to expose the folly of people who, in flight from the butcher’s shop, grab textured soy concentrate from supermarket shelves: theirs is the idiocy of the ersatz. If you want something like meat, have meat. If you don’t want meat, have something unlike it. My sacrifice would be greater, of course, if I disliked rare steaks and juicy roasts. But I like vegetables, too. So that’s all right.

March 12, 2022

So much for all that “end of history” hopefulness

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:40

I admit I never bothered to read Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, because I strongly disagreed with the notion — whether advanced by the author or imputed by critics and reviewers — that there ever could be an “end” to history, as long as there are still human beings around. Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine seems to have also broken the spell for many other westerners, as Jen Gerson points out:

Screen capture of a 1990 CBC report on the first McDonald’s in Moscow.

[After recounting the tale of the very first McDonald’s to open in Moscow in 1990] by all accounts, Russians went wild for McDonald’s — as did much of the world — and hundreds have since opened, including one within walking distance of the Red Square. Nothing could better symbolize the end of the bad, old Soviet era than this. A Russia that is peaceful, prosperous and at least a little open to the West was one in which a worker from the Kremlin could grab an American hamburger at lunch.

At least, they once could.

McDonald’s this week was one of several Western companies to announce that it was temporarily halting operations in Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Coca-Cola, Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut, Ikea, Shell, BP, Exxon, credit card companies, accounting firms, even airline companies are cutting Russia off, to greater or lesser extents.

I pick on McDonald’s because that chain became so ubiquitous that it has served as a kind of foreign policy truism: For a generation, it was said that no two countries that possessed a McDonald’s had ever gone to war. And so, it was assumed, this would likely remain the case. We’re not talking about skirmishes or civil wars, or local incursions or proxy wars, mind you. But the general theory largely held: as economies globalized and became more interdependent, the costs of one country truly going to war with another would grow so insurmountable that it would soon be unthinkable. Shared prosperity would reduce the need for wars of resources; meanwhile, the more economically interdependent nations became, the more self-defeating and even suicidal the prospect would grow. Economic liberalization and globalization would therefore undoubtedly bolster the long peace. For a generation this has, mostly, held true.

It is this same logic that has underpinned Europe’s growing dependence on Russia’s oil market, for example. After all, no one would risk — well — what Russia is now risking. It is certainly not in that country’s best interest to retreat into a hermit kingdom, to suffer incredible privations, and to revert to a quality of life akin to what its people knew in the ’50s. And for what? Glory? Honour? Territorial expansion? What, does Russia need more land?

This is why the war in Ukraine has caught Westerners off guard, and shook countries that once existed in the Soviet sphere of influence.

History was supposed to be over, when the Western democracies reached their ideal end-state of civilizational evolution. War — true, grand, civilizational war — was far too costly to seriously contemplate. So we allowed our military capacity to atrophy and our strategic dependencies on hostile nations grew.

With hindsight we can see the glaring flaw in the logic adopted by some of the world’s most powerful people. Those wingnuts and lunatics who warned about the danger of making ourselves more dependent on Putin proved correct. Note how quickly Canada’s safe, reliable, democratic oil supply is enjoying a rebrand. Shared prosperity is no panacea to war.

February 8, 2022

Neil Young and the rebellion of “the Grumpy Old Woke Bros”

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

Julie Burchill on the (one hopes) last opportunity for elderly, wrinkly 60s and 70s rock stars to virtue signal their protests to a rapidly diminishing body of fans:

For a while now the generation gap has been making a comeback in politics in a way not seen since the youthquake of the 1960s. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” has become “OK Boomer”. Oldsters have been demonised for everything from Brexit to Covid. Personally, at 62, looking at the lives today’s teenagers can expect, I thank my lucky stars that I was young in the 1970s and 80s, when you could say what you liked and go where you wanted. But this dwindling of fun and freedom has as much to do with the stifling nature of woke culture as it does with the other virus.

So I wouldn’t blame teenagers if they were cross. But those doing the most to promote the alienation of young and old aren’t hot-blooded bright young things. They are old men who appear to identify as young, despite sharing the same unsavoury grey whiskers. Of course, if someone with a penis can be a woman, a greybeard can be a teenager. They’re the Grumpy Old Woke Bros.

We can trace this unhappy breed from the then 68-years-young Ian McEwan spluttering at an anti-Brexit rally in 2017: “A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth. By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.” Since then the likes of Alexei Sayle, Billy Bragg and Stewart Lee have joined in from the monstrous regiment of woke entertainers, adding Damon Albarn (a youthful 53 – and an OBE, the rebel!) to their rankled ranks last week when he said of Taylor Swift “She doesn’t write her own songs”. (This isn’t the first time Albarn has had beef with young female pop stars. He said of Adele in 2015: “She’s very insecure”, to which she replied “It ended up being one of those ‘Don’t meet your idol’ moments … I was such a big Blur fan growing up. But it was sad, and I regret hanging out with him.”)

Though we think of grumpiness as being an English trait, let’s not forget Neil Young (76) who spat his dummy out last week over sharing Spotify with Joe Rogan. Young is a latecomer to the wonderful world of wokeness, whose welcome to the spotless ranks was somewhat marred by the emergence of a 1985 interview in which he backed Ronald Reagan’s gun control policy and added for good measure, AIDS having recently been discovered, “You go to a supermarket and you see a faggot behind the cash register – you don’t want him to handle your potatoes”.

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