Quotulatiousness

August 14, 2020

From protests to riots to …

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

In the Claremount Review of Books, Angelo M. Codevilla looks at historical patterns that may prefigure what is going on in major urban areas today:

Hagia Sophia in the Faith district of Istanbul, 18 November 2004.
Photo by Robert Raderschatt via Wikimedia Commons.

The Americans who confess other people’s racism absolve themselves inexpensively by a moral mechanism common to humanity: the more I profess to hate evil, the more I showcase my own goodness. Such confessions, however, have a particular history of tragedy in Christian civilization. Again and again over the centuries, persons who have imagined themselves cleansed by ritual confessions have believed themselves elevated above the rest of humanity and, hence, entitled to oppress or even annihilate those around them. Today’s self-purifiers, arms outstretched in supine submission, who then countenance violence against persons, property, and cultural symbols, are mostly unwitting protagonists in yet another chapter of a hoary history.

Although Judeo-Christianity teaches that perfection is not of this world, nevertheless the Old Testament (see the Book of Daniel) and the New (Revelation, chapter 20) refer tangentially to a final state in human affairs in which all evil will have been defeated and the virtuous will have triumphed over their enemies. In the Book of Revelation, this final stage is to last for a thousand years. Jesus Christ’s warnings notwithstanding, people have hearkened periodically to “false prophets” who brandish the prospect of ultimate vengeance over evil. Between the 11th and 16th centuries, any number of movements of this sort used ritual confessions to cleanse themselves, and energized the mobs that waged Europe’s bloodiest wars of that age. Thereafter, though such movements secularized their terms, they fit into the same moral and intellectual categories. Now as ever, they are about destroying civilization in the name of altering the human condition.

But whereas revolutionary movements from the Middle Ages to roughly the middle of the 20th century opposed the ruling classes wholeheartedly and found no friends among them, this generation’s movements have intense, problematic relations with those classes, about which more below.

Today we see scenes of monuments which had stood for decades, now destroyed and defaced, as well as the forceful cancellation of names from circulation. Smashing others’ idols was, and remains, a staple of tribal warfare. The Old Testament recalls the divine command to destroy idols, and the clashes between Christian and Muslim armies always aimed as much at symbols as at people. The Song of Roland contains a lyrical account of Charlemagne’s iconoclasm in his campaign against the Saracens. In the 6th century, Emperor Justinian made Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia cathedral the Christian world’s biggest and most important church. The Muslims who added that city to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 killed its priests, toppled its statues, and made it into the principal mosque of the Muslim caliphate at war with Christendom. In 1923, Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s modernizer, turned the building into a museum in order to end that war. But in July 2020 Turkey’s Islamist president Recep Erdogan, consistent with his hostility to Judeo-Christian civilization, turned it into a mosque again and began covering up what remain of the Christian frescoes on its walls. Destroying symbols, however, has had no place within Christian civilization. As the equivalent of torturing dead men, it has always been the work of cowards likelier to run from living enemies. On the other hand, war against statues, paintings, books, biographies, etc., has been a defining feature of civilization’s revolutionary enemies, consistent with their chosen identities as alien tribes.

What follows is a glance at the bloody history of this little-known flaw. It is a tale whose cautionary moral Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn best expressed: the line between good and evil runs not between persons — never mind between parties, classes, or races — but down the middle of every human heart. That is central to our civilization.

H/T to David Warren for the link.

August 9, 2020

Canadian Art magazine’s “woke suicide pact”

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

As a cultural barbarian and all-around Neanderthal, it will come as little surprise to both my readers that I’d never even heard of Canadian Art magazine. As a result, the recent decision to cease publication due to the unresolved (and almost certainly unresolvable) issues of needing to be funded by rich white people:

These evils were explained in a long article published by Canadian Art‘s former editor-in-chief, David Balzer (self-described “gay, fag, queer. Ambivalent Libra“), in which he complains that the progressive agenda of the magazine he edited was forever being undercut by the need to solicit funds from wealthy white donors. Or, as he describes it, the pursuit of: “white, liberal money — the champagne socialists.”

Shockingly, these donors are not especially fond an incessant slew of articles with titles such as Drop the Charges and Defund the Police, Says New Artists’ Letter for Black Lives, Give Us Permanence — Ending Anti-Black Racism in Canada’s Art Institutions, and A Crisis of Whiteness in Canada’s Art Museums.

Balzer’s analysis of the growing tension between establishment donor and do-good editor is spot on:

    Most boards, which are also majority white, are [interested] in going to where they believe the money is. So the argument goes: It takes a certain talent, panache, to be president, director, or CEO, to open those pocketbooks, and without these skills, culture cannot run. This argument implies that culture cannot run if its backrooms are not white … Many corporate partners make possible the lavish, yearly fundraising galas that cultural organizations host: ostentatious displays of whiteness and wealth that are the public-facing versions of the aforementioned work done by white presidents, directors and CEOs.

It’s a problem that every charity, art outlet, and activist organization in Canada will face. Supporting the arts is rarely an act of pure altruism. It has always been a status flex by the well-connected barons and baronesses of privilege. At its most cynical, arts funding is a high-class game of reputation laundering.

August 1, 2020

“All style and no substance made it the perfect match for Trudeau”

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

Andrew Lawton on the Prime Minstrel’s performance in “explaining” his role in the WE scandal:

“Don’t look at me – I’m just the prime minister.”

That about sums up Justin Trudeau’s defense in a Canadian scandal starring grifters, shell corporations, virtue signallers and a federal ethics probe.

The WE-Scam, as it’s come to be known in Canadian circles, is, on its surface, a simple one.

Trudeau’s government created a $912 million government program to pay students to volunteer – formerly known as “working” if memory serves – and outsourced the administration of it to WE Charity, one of those purported international development charities more known for holding glitzy, celebrity-filled parties than digging any wells in Africa.

All style and no substance made it the perfect match for Trudeau.

WE would have netted about $44 million from the program had the government not pulled the plug amid the backlash. The charity would also have had a budget to pay teachers up to $12,000 each to funnel their students into the paid volunteer channels.

The program itself was a boondoggle, but bad policy became a scandal because Trudeau and virtually everyone in his immediate family have personal and financial connections to WE, as do at least two of his cabinet ministers, not to mention his chief of staff – all of whom say their relationships had nothing to do with WE getting the sole-sourced contract.

After weeks of ducking scrutiny from his political opponents, Trudeau made a rare appearance before the parliamentary finance committee Thursday, though his testimony was heavy on the sanctimony and light on the details.

July 13, 2020

Sarah Hoyt on noblesse oblige

Filed under: Education, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains how noblesse oblige can and is used as a tool to benefit the powerful:

Of all the traps a culture can fall into, the fact that Americans tend to fall into Noblesse Oblige traps says very good things about us. It also doesn’t make the trap any less dangerous.

Noblesse Oblige, aka “nobility obligates” was a way that the excesses of a hierarchical society was kept in check. While the peasants were obligated to obey the nobleman, the nobleman was obligated to look after them/not put extreme demands on them/behave in certain paternalistic ways. (One of these days I need to do a post on paternalistic versus patriarchal. remind me.)

It is what is notably lacking from ideologically driven totalitarianisms and hierarchies, probably because their basis being atheistic they don’t seem the humans they have power over as being worth anything or commanding any duty from them. This is why in places like Cuba, Venezuela or China, the officials of the “democratic” government give themselves airs as long-suffering public servants while treating the people under their power worse than any of us would treat a stray animal (let alone a pet.)

In the US — where the citizen is king! — we have evolved a form of noblesse oblige best described as “Them who can, do what they can for those who can’t.”

[…]

But the noblesse oblige that affects the common individual in America is the foundation of worse traps.

Most of the idiotic compliance with ridiculous Winnie the Flu rules and restrictions hooked directly into Noblesse Oblige. For instance, the brilliant idea that you should wear masks to show you care even though we pretty much know they are completely ineffective and quite deleterious for a vast swath of people.

The idea that our kids should be forced to perform “volunteer” labor to graduate school, to “teach them to care for others.” The idea that you can always do a little more/sacrifice a little more for “those worse off” (Who often aren’t.)

When Noblesse Oblige turns into toxic altruism, it can take society apart.

Much of the “Green” mania is part of the noblesse oblige trap. They’re trying to convince us that if we just do these little things — most of them counterproductive, like, say recycling, which uses more resources and causes more issues than just using stuff — we’ll make it better for everyone.

In a bigger sense, they’re trying to make it so that we commit polite suicide so that “others live better.”

It can result in truly horrible racism, too. A great part of the left’s being convinced, say, that meritocracy is white supremacy comes from the fact that, being white, (and racist) they assume that they’re more competent than any other race, and therefore following “merit” causes white people to rise to the top.

June 17, 2020

“We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”

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

Theodore Dalrymple on the use of badges within the NHS to virtue signal and compel compliance in the unwilling:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

In Britain’s highly-centralized, almost Soviet-style healthcare system, the National Health Service, staff are being encouraged all over the country to wear little rainbow-coloured metal badges to show that they are homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual-friendly, and do not discriminate against them. The wearing of these badges is voluntary, but about 3,000 of the staff of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals, for example, now wear them. The self-congratulatory website of those ancient hospitals — St. Thomas’ is over 800 years old and Guy’s was founded in 1721, now combined into one administrative unit — says:

    The badges are just one way to show that Guy’s and St Thomas’ is an open, non-judgmental and inclusive place for people that identify as LGBT+ [which] stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender). The + simply means we are inclusive of all identities, regardless of how people identify themselves.

This language, which combines the unctuous with the bureaucratic, is typical of the way British hospital administrators express themselves nowadays. And if, as Buffon said, the style is the man himself, we may justly fear for a semi-totalitarian future.

By implication, the badges bully the staff, for if any of them refuse to wear one, their refusal is likely to be taken to mean that their minds are closed, judgmental (in the sense of being censorious, for even the attempt to avoid making judgments is itself based on a judgment), and exclusionary. It is to imply that they would deliberately treat any patients in the above mentioned categories differently and worse from all other patients. Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.

This is an insult to all those people who worked before the advent of the badges (or who now refuse to wear them) who strove and continue to strive always to treat patients to the best of their ability, irrespective of the many categories into which any individual patient falls. In my experience, the great majority of doctors have always tried to do this.

Let me give an example. Working as I did as a doctor in prison, I met many men who had done terrible things. I treated them, as a matter of course, to the best of my ability. I remember, for example, a man who had strangled three children and then impaled them on railings. Though I did not think he was a good man, and in that sense passed a judgment on him within the privacy of my mind, I treated him for his bronchitis exactly as I would have treated anyone else with bronchitis. I did not find this difficult in the least and do not claim any special merit for having done so, for it is only what all my colleagues in the profession did — as a matter not only of course, but of principle.

A couple of years ago, I read the diary of one of Marshal Pétain’s doctors during the latter’s imprisonment after World War II. The doctor had been a member of the Resistance and had no reason to love Pétain, to say the least: Pétain’s supporters would have had not a second thought about killing him if he had fallen into their power. Yet, as the diary makes clear, the doctor treated Pétain, who by then was demented, with the greatest humanity. Moreover, the doctor refused to publish his diary, despite the financial advantage of doing so, because he thought that publishing it would be to break patient confidentiality. It was only after his death, and more than half a century after Pétain’s, that the diary was published. The doctor’s adherence to his medical ethics was impressive, and he needed no badge to proclaim his virtue.

June 4, 2020

Trudeauvian “performative sanctimony” on display … again

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

Chris Selley on the Prime Minstrel’s latest attempt to virtue signal on racial issues:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

In agonizing for 21 seconds before answering a question about President Donald Trump’s threat to send the military after civilian protesters in American cities, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likely risked causing as much trouble as he was hoping to avoid. Those who would like to see him denounce the president in full throat might be as annoyed as those who think he should accept there’s nothing Canada can really do to help and look out for our own best interests while the socio-political nightmare plays out.

Trudeau’s response wasn’t anything inspiring or novel or revolutionary. “It is a time for us as Canadians to recognize that we too have our challenges — that black Canadians and racialized Canadians face discrimination as a lived reality every single day,” he said. “There is systemic discrimination in Canada, which means our systems treat Canadians of colour, Canadians who are racialized, differently than they do others.”

He continued: “We need to see that, not just as a government and take action, but we need to see that as Canadians. We need to be allies in the fight against discrimination. We need to listen, we need to learn and we need to work hard to figure out how we can be part of the solution on fixing things.”

But here, at least, he was getting to the nub of the issue: To the extent the federal government can make things better for marginalized Canadians, Trudeau is the guy driving the boat. To read some of his ministers’ pensées, you would think they were just regular folks.

[…]

In the meantime, however, you can bet the farm we will soon learn that the Liberals’ changes to impaired driving laws — allowing police to stop and breathalyze drivers without any suspicion of impairment — have disproportionately affected black and Indigenous drivers in particular. Literally everybody saw it coming except Trudeau and his ministers.

OK, I’m kidding — they saw it coming too. They might want to log off, dial down the performative sanctimony and think on that a while.

May 30, 2020

David Warren reports from “the High Doganate” (Parkdale, Toronto)

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I haven’t lived in Toronto for many years now, but as David Warren highlights in his Essays in Idleness posts, things haven’t changed much in all that time:

The Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto.
Map by Alaney2k via Wikimedia Commons.

We continue to be well-as-can-be-expected, up here in the High Doganate, though stir-crazy, and over-informed about the Batflu (also known as the Kung Flu, or Peking Pox). The housefinches on our balconata persist in their social distancing, and at street level, the dogs continue to walk their masters. The brave, without a dog, may go out, without a mask, if they can stand up to the Virtue Signallers (or as I prefer to call them, the Smugly Foocklings). But that is in the respectable parts of town, at least three miles away, where designer masks are now de rigueur. There are plenty of trolleys, but they travel mostly empty. This is because the transit authorities are “committed to keeping customers and staff safe.” Knowing that most of the public health measures are fraudulent, and/or counter-productive, is not helpful to one’s peace of mind.

These measures would include the vast public doles which our guvmints have been generating, electronically. It could be taken as pay, for those who’d otherwise riot. Eventually, the guvmints hope to electronically rake it back, both from those who were paid and those who were not, in the form of much extended taxes. To understand the Batflu response, is to understand the welcome it gave to bureaucrats and their patrons, wherever the Left won the last election. They do not surrender such powers lightly.

Most of the people I hang out with are their particular targets — from freelance giguers to flea marketeers to those with religious vocations. Such people naturally resist the Kafkaesque arrangements our progressives relish and demand. The Batflu “crisis” put as many as possible of these statistically inconvenient people out of work. (Many are compulsive tax-evaders, after all!) These “little people,” especially those trying to support uncool, old-fashioned, frankly heterosexual families, are the ones for whom I most pray, as they and their children face the “green” future, which will exclude them in the name of “diversity.”

But also I think of the vast slave armies, in the “service economy,” with their idiotizing jobs, from flipping hamburgers to humping boxes in the Amazon warehouse — pinned to their minimum wages until their functions can be mechanized. (When they unionize, this happens faster.)

The “professional classes,” who can work from home, because they do nothing of value, needn’t go months without revenue, while their debts are piling up. They sneer at those who oppose a lockdown, that is perfectly comfortable for the professional classes, who at worst save money by dining in, or must order what they want through Amazon.

May 18, 2020

Safetyism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matthew Crawford:

Safetyism is a disposition that has been gaining strength for decades and is having a triumphal moment just now because of the virus. Public health, one of many institutions that speak on behalf of safety, has claimed authority to sweep aside whole domains of human activity as reckless, and therefore illegitimate.

I suspect the ease with which we have lately accepted the authority of health experts to reshape the contours of our common life is due to the fact that safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. At the level of bureaucratic grasping, we can note that emergency powers are seldom relinquished once the emergency has passed. Together, these dynamics make up a kind of ratchet mechanism that moves in only one direction, tightening against the human spirit.

Acquiescence in this appears to be most prevalent among the meritocrats who staff the managerial layer of society. Deferring to expert authority is a habit inculcated in the “knowledge economy”, naturally enough; the basic currency of this economy is epistemic prestige.

Among those who work in the economy of things, on the other hand, you see greater skepticism toward experts (whether they make their claim on epistemic or moral grounds) and less readiness to accept the adjustment of social norms by fiat ­– whether that means using new pronouns or wearing surgical masks. I am regularly in welding supply stores, auto parts stores and other light-industry venues. Nobody is wearing masks in these places. They are very small businesses: an environment largely free of the moral fashions and corresponding knowledge claims that set the tone in large organisations. There is no HR in a welding shop.

A pandemic is a deadly serious business. But we would do well to remember that bureaucracies have their own interests, quite apart from the public interest that is their official brief and warrant. They are very much in the business of tending and feeding the narratives that justify their existence. Further, given the way bureaucracies must compete for funding from the legislature, each must make a maximal case for the urgency of its mission, hence the necessity of its expansion, like a shark that must keep moving or die. It is clearer now than it was a few months ago that this imperative of expansion puts government authority in symbiosis with the morality of safetyism, which similarly admits no limit to its expanding imperium. The result is a moral-epistemic apparatus in which experts are to rule over citizens conceived as fragile incompetents.

But what if this apparatus were revealed to be not very serious about safety, the very ideal that underwrites its authority? What then?

May 15, 2020

Wuhan Coronavirus muzzles mandated by “politicians who are completely-fall-down-drunk on Chateau d’House Arrest”

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Laura Rosen Cohen at Steyn Online:

Hello again, and welcome to week eleventy billion gazillion of CCP-Style Lockdown in the Allegedly Free World.

Another week of hypocrisy from the politicians who are completely-fall-down-drunk on Chateau d’House Arrest.

And another week of me feeling like I look rather like this penguin when attempting to articulate how disgusted I am with the governments of western countries – my own country and province in particular.

I don’t want any more “we’re all in this together” e-mails. I don’t want to hear “Covid-19” uttered in a morose, yet sadistically gleeful, tone with odd, demonic-like smiles. I don’t want to see any more playgrounds taped up. I don’t want to see any more “Stay Home” notices. And I most certainly will refuse the “new normal” being offered to us by the power-drunk politicians and nanny-craving, safe space lunatic multitudes.

I was talking to my wonderful and brilliant partner-in-crime Kathy Shaidle about why we hate masks. (Oh go on, just admit it, you hate them as well). First of all, like with the WuFlu, we have no exact science about them, and the reasons for wearing or not wearing keep changing, just like the reasons for continued lockdown. For a while now, I’ve been looking at them as a kind of pandemic virtue signalling device. Like a Health & Safety Boy Scout badge. But I couldn’t articulate exactly what else was bothering me about them. She sent me this:

and said ‘leave it to a Hitchens to articulate it’. Bingo.

I replied to my dear Kathy that they are indeed like a burkah, something that anonymizes you and that renders normal civil discourse and interaction, like smiles, conversation and flirtation impossible. She added that they are also a kind of affront, a dare to others who you imply are inferior for not wearing yours. Then I saw this: indeed it is, the Corona Niqab. Nuts to that. And if you think I’m pissed, I urge you to listen to this interview with novelist Lionel Shriver who puts it better than I ever could. Shriver delivers the outstanding righteous fury we need to hear, a level of outrage matched and raised to a new level each day by my gracious and prophetic host himself.

January 2, 2020

“Modern ‘virtue signalling’ has deep Victorian roots”

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Warren on the work of the late Gertrude Himmelfarb and the era she documented:

The historian, Himmelfarb, is particularly good at revealing the often generational decline in “liberal values,” for instance from helping the poor through such institutions as the Salvation Army, to using them for moral posturing at no personal cost. This corresponds to a loss of religious faith, and its replacement by moralizing. Modern “virtue signalling” has deep Victorian roots.

Unfortunately we now live in a time that is narrow, and for the most part thinkers are ignored, or reduced to single sound bites. For our time, and in our universities, so great a student of philosophy as Leo Strauss, of literature as Lionel Trilling, of social research as Irving Kristol (the brilliant man Himmelfarb married) are dismissed unread as “neo-conservatives” and worse, when in fact they were engaged with the whole Western tradition. Today, the contemptible Washington Post associates them with a rightwing “backlash,” as if they were shouting slogans. Impressive Jewish thinkers are casually compared to “white nationalists” or “supremacists,” in the frothing malice of the SJWs.

Yet the characters rejected were once themselves Leftists (though anti-Stalinists), and their perceived voyage to the Right was a steadiness as the waters passed them by.

I was thinking this just now while reading the first essay in Himmelfarb’s latest and possibly last book of essays: Past and Present. It is about Strauss (another formative influence). What a paradise it would have been to be among the “Ivy Leaguers” of the post-War and ‘fifties; during a long-lost American adventure into the world of ideas. Himmelfarb was the last of that team of adventurers, I was thinking; the landscape now is, intellectually, barren. Even to participate in “high culture” — what Matthew Arnold innocently called, “the best that has been thought and said” — is to put a professor at physical risk.

Leo Strauss explained somewhere, or in several places, that the student of the past must be prepared to learn something — “not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.”

Today’s student (if any are left in the humanities), replies with incomprehension. What an affront it is, to a later academy, in which the only purpose for the past is to judge it, by the asinine prejudices of the present day.

October 3, 2019

The Puritans, then and now

Filed under: Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Severian thinks on churchiness and churchianity in our times:

The most striking fact about the Middle Ages from a modern perspective is their love of lists, categories, forms. This is partly practical — Church art all looks the same because it has to communicate a consistent message to the aforesaid illiterate peasantry — but lots of it isn’t. They were simply obsessed with forms, with outward order, to the point that even the few true individuals were hard to tell apart — William of Ockham and Thomas Aquinas were as different as two thinkers could possibly be, but unless you’re a subject matter expert, their writings look identical.

“Individuality,” on the other hand, comes from inward experience. What, if anything, did the medieval peasant believe when he went to Mass? Impossible to say, but one of the reasons that’s so is because the form of his “piety” was so all-encompassing. Some years back, a Jew wrote a funny book about trying to live his life by the letter of the Mosaic law. One could do the same thing with medieval Catholicism. Take a gander at the liturgical year — hardly a day goes by without a feast, a commemoration, a celebration. Do all of that, and you’ll hardly have time for anything else. They were so focused on the outward show, at least in part, because there was so much showing to do.

When the Reformation shitcanned all that, piety turned inward. There are zillions of sources for what the Reformed believed (or, at least, said they believed), because the Reformation was a middle-class pursuit and the middle classes were literate … and, crucially, had the free time to be literate. I’m guessing here, but since people are people and always have been, I’m pretty sure that your medieval peasant loved the show of his religion, because it gave him a little much-needed time off from his hourly grind of back-breaking, ragged-edge-of-survival physical labor.

Your middle-class incipient Calvinist, on the other hand, was bored to tears with stuff like “creeping to the cross” — all those billable hours lost (surely no one is surprised that Calvin, Knox, et al were all lawyers or merchants). In their vanity, they insisted it wasn’t enough to seem pious; you actually had to be pious, which meant putting the time you would’ve spent doing public penance into contemplating the state of your soul. Check out The New England Mind — once you fight through prose, you’ll see that the vaunted Puritan piety was little more than Special Snowflakism with a New Testament twist. They’re “individuals,” all right, but only because they’re as obsessed as Tumblrinas with their very own pwecious widdle selves.

The point of this isn’t just to bash Puritans, fun as that is (and as richly as they deserve it). The point is that, as Current Year America is a thoroughly Puritan nation, we have to realize just how historically contingent Puritanism really is in order to beat them.

Puritans desperately wanted to be individuals in a world that couldn’t support very many individuals. You need a lot of free time to be a Puritan, and in the 16th century free time was almost inconceivably expensive. Whatever else it was, Puritanism was gross conspicuous consumption — Puritans announced to the world that they alone had the free time to indulge in expensive educations, books, Bible study, and the endless hours worrying about whether or not it’s Biblically justified to paint the altar. In a world where most everyone still knows someone who knows someone who starved to death, that’s one hell of a statement.

September 11, 2019

Environmental virtue signalling – it’s other people who need to change, not me

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

Heather Mac Donald notes that, as with so many other things, young people who like to virtue signal about their environmental concerns don’t consider it incumbent on them to change … it’s always other people whose habits must be changed, by force if necessary:

FridaysForFuture Demonstration, 25 January 2018 in Berlin.
Photo by C. Suthorn via Wikimedia Commons.

The claim about youth’s transformative commitment to radical environmental change is — based on informal observation — bunk. The cardinal rule when it comes to environmental virtue-signaling is that people give up what they’re willing to give up. Young people are no different. If being environmentally sound required sacrificing anything that a self-described environmental warrior actually valued, the conversation would quickly change to a different topic. One’s own habits are necessary; it’s everyone else’s that need to change.

This always-unreached threshold for environmental sacrifice is particularly notable on the part of celebrity Greens, with their fortress-like SUVs, multiple residences, and massive carbon footprints — whether it’s the cavalcade of yachts and private jets that brought such luminaries as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Zuckerberg, and Katy Perry to Google’s three-day climate-change summit in Sicily this July; environmental crusaders Prince Harry and Meghan Markle jetting off to Elton John’s French estate; or Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter’s “quick day trip” to Los Angeles from New York just ahead of the CNN climate-change debate. A police caravan drives New York City mayor Bill de Blasio 11 miles from his mayoral mansion in Manhattan to his favorite gym in Brooklyn. “Everyone in their own life has to change their own habits to start protecting the earth,” he has intoned, but taking the subway is not one of those changes appropriate for him.

Most young people have not yet reached such a flamboyant level of energy use, but if they could, they undoubtedly would, with as little sense of anachronism as that of Al Gore in his energy-guzzling mansion. These are the consumers who keep football fields of computer servers buzzing round the clock to support their social media habits. If being green meant turning off one’s phone for 22 hours a day or foregoing the latest smartphone upgrade, the reasons why such sacrifices are not required would spout from every Gen Z-er and millennial’s lips. Students from the University of California, Irvine, constantly run their air-conditioners in the apartment complex where I spend summers, regardless of how cool the temperature outside is. They drive with their windows sealed and the car AC on, no matter how fresh the day (this is the new driving norm for almost everyone now). The meteoric rise of food-delivery apps, producing torrents of plastic and paper waste and a constant circulation of cars and electric bikes, has been fueled by young people’s demand for convenience and instant gratification. Cooking is apparently unthinkable. At best, one buys precut and washed food in the inevitable plastic containers. A daily Starbucks habit is deemed consistent with railing against environmentally destructive corporate greed.

New York’s tap water is among the purest in the world. Yet a young neighbor of mine in New York, like progressives throughout the city, receives towering deliveries of bottled water, entailing huge energy outlays to package and transport, not to mention generating flotillas of discarded plastic. The swim team members in my gym turn on their showers in the locker room, then walk away or do nothing other than chat as water gushes down the drain. Uber drivers in college towns report that students regularly call a car to get to class, rather than walk or ride a bike.

June 28, 2019

What does £1 trillion buy you?

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

Not much, apparently:

Tory MPs have been told by CCHQ to share this graphic boasting about their new commitment to make the UK carbon-neutral by 2050. No other major country has committed to the pledge although Theresa May is planning a desperate attempt at the G20 to talk other leaders into it. The fact that developed countries going ‘net zero’ simply means they’ll outsource all their emissions to the developing world instead seems to be completely lost on her…

The pledge will cost the UK at least £1 trillion, much of which will be borne by individuals and businesses rather than the exchequer, we don’t know the true cost as May hasn’t even done a proper Treasury analysis. Eco-fanatics love to talk about the burden this generation is placing on children and grandchildren. For a fleeting PR stunt Tory MPs are being told to boast about piling on mountains of economic harm for future generations by a leader who won’t be in office to deal with the consequences…

This is exactly the sort of virtue signalling that Justin Trudeau indulges in … I imagine he’s quite miffed that Theresa May got there first.

June 27, 2019

“Raise our taxes!” cried the hypocritical virtue signallers

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

We’ve been over this ground before. Some very rich people are getting fawning media coverage for their “selfless”, “virtuous” demand that the government raise their taxes. Except they’re far from selfless: they’re demanding that other people be forced to pay more tax, but they’re very much not putting their own money where their bleating mouths are. Most governments are happy to accept more money from you than your formal tax liabilities:

… are all very eager to accept your contributions. But most people don’t take advantage of this mechanism, especially the ones garnering headlines for their “altruism”. Because they’re virtue signalling, and almost certainly don’t actually want to be taxed more. Don’t believe what people merely say they want, watch what they actually do (economists call this “revealed preference“). Hypocrites, the lot of them.

June 17, 2019

“We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks”

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

Brendan O’Neill follows up on the disturbing story of two lesbians who were physically assaulted on a London bus:

Talk about ungrateful. Brits, and people around the world, offered empathy and solidarity to the two gay women who were battered by thugs on a London bus. And yet now one of the women has turned around and told us we only care about them because they are white. It’s only because they are “two attractive, white, cisgender women” that so many people and organisations gave a damn about them and tweeted about them, apparently. Thanks a bunch. We offer our human concern for your wellbeing and you tell us we’re being racist. We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks.

The woman in question, who goes only by the name “Chris”, has written a piece for the Guardian. Natch. The intro lets us know what we’re in for: “The photo of me and my date went viral – but only as we’re white, feminine and cisgender.” Translation: you racist, transphobic idiots wouldn’t have cared half as much if this had been two bloodied and bruised black women or trans women. The “commodification” of “my face” came at the “expense of other victims whose constant persecution apparently does not warrant similar moral outrage”, says Chris.

What is most striking about her piece is that she flagellates herself for her privilege. Yes, this woman who last month was badly beaten allegedly on account of her sexuality is now beating herself up in the national press over her privileged identity. She says she has “evaded much of the violence and oppression imposed on so many others by our capitalist, white-supremacist, patriarchal system because of the privileges I enjoy by dint of my race, health, education, and conventional gender presentation”. What a strange, self-hating mindset it must take to be victimised for your sexuality and then to say: “God, I’m SO privileged.”

Chris even does us the service of providing a list of people who are far less privileged than her and who us phoney empathisers should finally start noticing. It is “open season”, she says, on “people of colour, indigenous people, transgender people, disabled people, queer people, poor people, women and migrants”. This is classic virtue-signalling. She is engaging in the Oppression Olympics while making it clear she doesn’t deserve any gold medals in said Olympics because she is white, educated, cisgender, etc. A masterclass in identitarian showboating.

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