Quotulatiousness

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”.

January 23, 2022

“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has become the world’s first Influencer Nation”

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

In the free-to-cheapskate-free-subscribers version of The Line‘s weekly Dispatch, they look at how the Liberal government’s approach to social media has evolved from a useful way to stay in contact with the voters to, effectively, the primary communication channel to flatter themselves and conduct industrial-strength virtue signalling sessions:

Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”

When Justin Trudeau and his merry band of iPhone-packin’ Liberals came to power in 2015, they quickly established themselves as world leaders in the use of social media to backscratch, logroll, big-up, and otherwise tell one another, and the world, how awesome they thought they all were. We at The Line found it all pretty obnoxious out of the gate, but given Trudeau’s repeated electoral successes, it’s clear that YMMV on this sort of stuff.

But one thing that has happened over the past seven years is that social media has gone from a significant vehicle for the branding and promotion of the Liberal government, into something close to an end itself. It’s not clear when the shift happened, but at some point the Liberals went from Twitter being used as a way of selling policy, to policy being little more than a device for getting the shamrock Twitter army riled up. Similarly, where once Instagram was a way for Liberal ministers to show off while doing Liberal minister-y things, it’s pretty clear that now, the only rationale for a Liberal minister to do anything is if it serves the imperatives of the ‘gram.

To put it plainly: Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has become the world’s first Influencer Nation.

Understanding that Canada’s federal government is now little more than a social media account is the best — nay, only — way we have found of making sense of what Trudeau’s Liberals are up to. For example, earlier this week the Prime Minister’s Office sent an email around that contained a “readout” (that is, a more or less invented summary) of a conversation Trudeau allegedly had with some of his ministers and senior officials. The subject matter was “the latest developments in Ukraine,” and it is absolutely the sort of thing the prime minister of Canada ought to be discussing with his minister of defence, his minister of foreign affairs, and the clerk of the privy council.

But as the sort of thing that you would summarize as a readout and mail to members of the press gallery, it’s utterly preposterous. Paul Wells of Maclean’s, bless his heart, found the time and energy to chapter-and-verse it, and please do read the whole thing. But we would draw your attention to the second last paragraph of the readout:

    Together, the Prime Minister and ministers raised the need to find a peaceful solution through dialogue. They reaffirmed Canada’s steadfast support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and considered current and future assistance to Ukraine. Prime Minister Trudeau emphasized that any further military incursion into Ukraine would have serious consequences, including coordinated sanctions.

Does this sound like any conversation you’ve ever had, or overheard? Is anyone credulous enough to think this is remotely how the discussion went? This isn’t the summary of an actual cabinet meeting; at best, it’s a placeholder bit of boilerplate for someone hell bent on trying to write an Aaron Sorkin movie about Canadian politics. But what it really is a sort of reverse New Yorker cartoon contest: It’s the caption for an Instagram post that you’re supposed to imagine in your mind’s eye.

January 4, 2022

QotD: Status signalling

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

The second thing they have wrong, and what I urge you to realize as soon as you can: They are not the “oppressed.” No, I don’t mean by that that there is no oppression in our society. Any human society has people with more power than others. It’s just that the groups and ideas that the left and their violent lap-wolves Antifa have cast as victims aren’t the victims.

In fact, their philosophy — the Marxist ideology they propound and the craziness behind it — has been in control of society, on top, since at least the seventies.

Being a leftist is a mark of being “good” and also well educated. The same way that in Elizabethan England poor mad Christopher Marlowe wrote his stage directions in Latin, to show that he had had an excellent education and deserved respect, so too the leftists of today pepper their works, from movies to TV to books to art, with odes to the oppressed and paeans to the coming revolution. It’s how you show you’re high-class and exquisitely educated.

All the old families, all the rich, all the captains of industry and power brokers signal left as hard as they can, because that’s where the power is — and in my field, the awards, the professorships, and the acclaim. Heck, remember what Trump signaled just to be allowed to do business.

And that’s why I’ve been watching in amusement the left going through the motions of kabuki theater revolution against a society … they control.

Sarah Hoyt, “We’re Seeing the Death Rattle of the Revolution, Not Its Birth”, PJ Media, 2020-07-28.

December 31, 2021

QotD: Justin Trudeau … “virtue-signalling made flesh”

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

Are there any photos of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau where he isn’t in blackface? I’m struggling to remember the last time I saw one. There he was again yesterday, this wokest of world leaders, this darling of centrist Twitter, covered in black facepaint and sticking his tongue out. You know, like those dark-skinned foreigners do. The pic is from an Arabian Nights fancy-dress party – man, the bourgeoisie are weird – that Trudeau attended in 2001, when he was 29. Twenty-nine. If you’re on the cusp of 30, at the dawn of this new millennium, and you still don’t know it’s wrong to don blackface, there’s something wrong with you.

This is only the latest in a long line of Trudeau blackface scandals, of course. The man appears to have spent a significant chunk of his younger years blacked up. There are three blackface incidents that we know of. There could be more. As one headline put it: “Trudeau says he can’t recall how many times he wore blackface make-up.” Imagine blacking up so often you can’t remember all the times you did it. Trudeau’s defenders say it was youthful daftness. Really? I don’t know a single person who has ever blacked up. I know people who have done daft things, of course. But not that.

Trudeau’s penchant for blackface is very odd. He puts it down to the fact that he has always been “more enthusiastic about costumes than is sometimes appropriate“. Riiight. It is mostly a matter for Mr Trudeau and his conscience, of course, as to why he was black-painting his face – and, in one incident, his tongue too – well into his twenties. But it’s a matter for all of us who inhabit the online world as to why Trudeau has never been cancelled, or even seriously threatened with cancellation, for doing something that would be ferociously denounced as racist if anyone else on earth had done it.

Brendan O’Neill, “The never-ending ridiculousness of Justin Trudeau”, Spiked, 2021-09-21.

December 12, 2021

“[T]oday’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself”

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

Andrew Sullivan on the racism of modern “anti-racist” movements and his hope that Hispanic Americans may provide a way out of the current political deadlock:

Of all the acronyms, euphemisms and sophisms pioneered by critical theory, one of the most revealing is the term “black and brown people”. You hear it all the time now. Whether it’s about “the lack of Black and brown representation in Hollywood”, vaccine hesitancy in “Black and brown neighborhoods in large cities”, the right to vote for “Black and brown people”, or “allyship between Black and brown people”, the “B&b” formula is now yet another ubiquitous media virtue-signal. It’s subtler than some others. It doesn’t shriek woke like “BIPOC”; it isn’t as instantly risible as “2SLGBTQIA+”; it gives “Black” a Capital Letter, and “brown” feels a bit like a lower-case add-on — but at least it uses actual English words, and doesn’t end in an X.

Still: what does it tell you that a staggering and brilliant array of totally different ethnicities, races, religions, histories and cultures can now routinely be reduced to just two drab colors?

I think it speaks to two things. The first is that today’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself. A whole kaleidoscope of immigrant difference — from Kurds and Mexicans and Somalis to Dominicans, Chileans, Nigerians, and Pakistanis — has now been turned into one monochrome racial “brown” — just to fit into an oppressor/oppressed, white/black narrative.

Equally, a diverse African diaspora — ranging from Nigerian immigrants to descendants of Southern slaves to biracial men and women with mainly European ancestry who go back to this country’s miscegenated origins — is now just “Black”. And this new racial unit has one politics: left-Democrat. Individuals disappear; diversity of opinion within groups evaporate; all that matters is a single skin color and oppression.

The second aspect of critical theory that “B&b” helps reveal is that the crude binary of “black” and “white” simply has less salience with every passing day, as more and more races, ethnicities and cultures complicate and enrich our society, and render it structurally, demographically and culturally unrecognizable from even the recent past. To give one example: 60 years ago, four percent of Americans approved of inter-racial marriage; today, it’s 94 percent. Or check out the rapid decline in the “white Christian” share of the population — from 80 percent in 1996 1976 to 44 percent today. Look around you and you’ll see how the crude rubric of “white supremacy” is, in fact, wildly out of date.

This is why so many of the most passionately woke are so obsessed with history in America, and the further back the better, as the 1619 Project shows. The past is a world they are much more comfortable in than the present, a place where the racial divide was infinitely simpler, and racial inequality both brutal and actively enforced by the government. Before the Civil Rights Act in 1964, before mass non-white immigration began in 1965, before mass non-white illegal immigration since the 1990s, the “white supremacy” rubric had some lingering traction.

But in the 21st Century, it’s been hopelessly compounded by layer upon layer of mass immigration from every conceivable corner of the planet. The Latino population in the US is now larger than the African-American one; and Asians, of many different varieties, are now immigrating in higher numbers than Latinos. Before too long, the black/white dynamic may disappear into the multi-colored, multi-hued background entirely.

November 7, 2021

Prime Minister Look-at-my-socks loves the limelight at COP26

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Environment, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jen Gerson on Canada’s fundamentally unserious Prime Minister Photo-Op grandstanding at the climate love-in in Glasgow:

In a rare moment of unity, both Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and NDP opposition leader Rachel Notley objected to Trudeau’s announcements.

“I don’t know why they would make an announcement like this without consulting with the province that actually owns the overwhelming majority of Canada’s oil and gas reserve,” said Kenney.

I mean, yeah. He’s right.

When asked for actual details about this brave new plan at COP26, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault didn’t have much to share … because the plan doesn’t exist yet. It’s a plan to make a plan.

“We will need to be developing this, and that’s exactly what we will be doing in the coming months,” Guilbeault said, according to the CBC. Both he and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson have asked the net-zero advisory board to help them come up with a plan. “Specifically, we seek your advice on key guiding principles to inform the development of quantitative five-year targets,” they said in a letter sent on Monday.

There’s no path, here. There’s been no discussion; no consultation, nothing. There’s not even a draft of an idea.

So why is Trudeau getting on a stage in front of the world’s leaders half-cocked with ambitious promises for an emissions cap before he’s worked out the details at home?

To quote Line co-founder Matt Gurney during our weekly meeting: “To ask that question is to answer it.”

Trudeau is signalling what he cares about and what he doesn’t. He’s more concerned with how the audience abroad perceives him than he is about the finer points of governing. It’s about getting back-pats by the Davos set, not actually running our embarrassing, open-pit G7 backwater.

It was hard to avoid the sense during the last election that Trudeau didn’t have his heart in the fight; that he’s more invested in acting the part of prime minister than being it.

I put little stock in rumours that the Liberal leader will soon leave his role — if you’re going to act a part, after all, there are few better. And what a great platform it provides for a launch to better things. But I do wonder: If someone offered him a ranking job at the UN or the WEF or something else with a suitably impressive acronym and a travel expense account, how long would he stick around?

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