Mark Steyn is a brave man. He doesn’t talk about his death threats or his security measures, but his public life speaks for itself. For the fifth anniversary of the Muhammad cartoon controversy, he stood on a stage in Copenhagen with the Danes who were not yet in hiding along with Lars Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist who had survived physical attacks, arson, at least three assassination plots, and an Al Qaeda hit list. Steyn returned for the tenth anniversary observance, a few months after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but by then no cartoonists were left — they were all in hiding, including Vilks, after yet another attempt on his life.
“I’m always willing to stand with the guys in Denmark,” says Steyn. “But the reason all these left-wing Europeans end up on a stage with an eccentric right-wing Canadian like me is that no real A-list stars will agree to be there. At the tenth anniversary both the American State Department and the British Foreign Office even issued official warnings to their citizens to stay away from the Danish Parliament, where we were holding the ceremony. What kind of signal does that send? Why don’t the artists show up for these things? Why aren’t the movie stars there? When Theo Van Gogh was assassinated, no one at the Oscars had a word to say about it. They didn’t even put him in the obituary montage. And yet they congratulate themselves on their moral courage. George Clooney wears a Je suis Charlie Hebdo pin. Helen Mirren wears a brooch. But they were not with Charlie. Those guys died alone. This is gesture politics. No one would stand with them. I honour the genuine courage of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan’s point is absolutely right — in the end you have to share the risk. Charlie Hebdo supported the Danish cartoonists, but the rest of the world didn’t. If every newspaper had published those cartoons, there would have been no point in killing anyone because there would have been too many people to kill. Instead, nobody stands with them, and so the small publication that does ends up massacred. The writer of the comic strip Doonesbury in America [Garry Trudeau] attacked the decision of PEN to honour Charlie Hebdo. Well, they were lying on the floor, bleeding and dying. I don’t think they noticed.”
The Danish cartoon controversy was actually the first moment the American press had been challenged by Islam and could do something in response — and their reaction was a spectacular failure of will and principle. In several countries around the world, it was actually against the law to publish the Danish cartoons, but many editors stepped up, published them anyway, and suffered the civil and criminal consequences. In the United States — where there was no such law — no major publication would print them.
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
June 12, 2019
QotD: Militant Islam and the Western media
June 9, 2019
People who call for higher taxes are almost always hypocrites
And the numbers prove it:
There are many people who tell us that taxation in the UK is too low. Just think of all the gorgeously bureaucratic things that could be done if only the government had more money! Then there’s the number of people who actually do pay more tax on the basis that they think the government should have more money. The second being a rather smaller number than the first.
Which does bring us to that basic point that economists do insist upon making. Revealed preferences are a much better guide to what people do in fact believe than are expressed. Or, as folk wisdom has it, talk is cheap. That many shout that taxes should be higher – usually to insist that them over there should be taxed more – is interesting and amusing. But the actual number of people who really believe taxes should be higher is the number of people who voluntarily offer up more of their own hard earned to the government.
Which means that, according to the aggregate views and actions of the population of Britain taxes last year were too low by exactly the amount of £11,069. Everyone else is just virtue signalling:
Donations to the Treasury have dwindled in recent years, however, even as the country’s debt remains relatively high. There were just 14 donations and bequests to reduce the national debt in the 2018-19 tax year, totalling £11,069, the UK Debt Management Office said.
That is the revealed preference of us all in aggregate.
It’s not just the UK where the number of people demanding higher taxes don’t actually put their own money where their mouths are — it’s true in Norway, the USA, and even the City of Toronto.
For ultra generous Canadians, Her Majesty will happily accept your donations here. To prove that you’re even more devoted to the challenge, you can even forego the tax credit, too!
June 8, 2019
The sad economics of recycling
Kim du Toit on the actual economic value of most recycling efforts:
Turns out that aluminum cans are actually worth recycling — in that they are 100% recyclable (requiring nothing other than melting and reformulating) and it costs less — much less — to recycle than to produce new aluminum.
That’s almost true of newsprint too, except that while pulping it is fine — hardly any energy is used for that — the pulp also has to be bleached, and in the pulping / bleaching process, about 15% of the original paper is lost. And as raw paper production (i.e. from logged wood) has become more efficient over the years, and as trees can be grown to replace those felled, the only real benefit from recycling paper is that overall paper production is less vulnerable to hiccups in supply of fresh wood — such as caused by forest fires, disease and drought.
And, he added, when it comes to recycling other stuff, glass is little better than plastic — which surprised me, but it actually costs much more to recycle glass than simply to produce it new. And the old “plastic into park benches” spiel is likewise stupid, because it costs so much to produce such stuff, and creates so much atmospheric pollution thereby, that it’s easier just to toss plastic into a properly-lined landfill and let nature take its course.
Knowing all that, I’ve always been skeptical of the benefits of recycling — it’s always been about feeewings rather than utility
April 29, 2019
Banning single-use plastics won’t make much (if any) difference
My local high school is suddenly all about the proposed ban on single-use plastics — where student-made posters used to proclaim their dedication to gender equality, they’re now all about the evils of plastics. It’s almost like it’s a co-ordinated campaign that originated somewhere else…
But despite the students’ new-found environmental awareness, the ban they favour would make little or no difference to plastic items ending up in the oceans, because the vast majority of the plastic there comes from only ten rivers, none of them in North America (this is from a World Economic Forum report). Jason Unrau reports on his trip up the Yangtze River in China twenty years ago that illustrates the breadth of the problem:
Beginning in Shanghai in the summer of 1999, I boarded a large flat-bottom boat with around 300 other passengers. It would be the first of about a dozen different vessels, that over two weeks ferried me 2500 kilometres to Chongqing.
After taking my first meal in the ferry’s mess hall, served in a Styrofoam box, I searched everywhere for a garbage can. There were none – passengers simply tossed their garbage overboard and without an alternative, I joined in the littering.
The banks of the Yangtze are home to more than 200 million Chinese who treat the waterway as commuter corridor and as I soon discovered, a dump. I took the trip to get a glimpse the fabled Three Gorges, before a hydro-electric project and dam would change the watershed forever. As my trip progressed, however, so did my treatment of this historic river as trash receptacle.
The closer I got to Chongqing, the narrower the river became and the smaller the ferries got. About 10 days into the trip, I exited the dining hall of a different vessel to engage in the daily ritual of reckless Styrofoam abandonment, but to my surprise there was a garbage bin.
Delighted at the prospect that my littering ways on the Yangtze were through, enthusiastically I added my box to a near overflowing bin. As if on cue a kitchenhand exited the dining hall, gathered up the bag and heaved the entire thing overboard.
Like I experienced and begrudgingly participated in creating, the World Economic Forum’s report describes “rivers of plastic” – its analyses of respective outputs and comparisons to garbage island and other samples, could be traced back to their source.
According to the economic forum eight of these rivers are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.
February 26, 2019
Laissez-faire versus “Fairtrade”
In the Guardian, a sad tale of the fading bright hopes of the (relatively small number of) affluent westerners who passionately supported the “Fairtrade” movement:
When, in 2017, Sainsbury’s announced that it was planning to develop its own “fairly traded” mark, more than 100,000 people signed a petition condemning the move. Today, on the eve of Fairtrade Fortnight, the fact that most supermarkets have moved away from the standards developed by the Fairtrade Foundation is worrying.
While some grocery chains have sought the foundation’s stamp of approval, many have gone their own way. This means most consumers have little sense of which organisation is doing what to protect the wages and rights of developing world workers. Over the next two weeks, the foundation plans to focus its publicity efforts on cocoa farmers in west Africa and the way the Fairtrade mark can improve their lives.[…]
That is a sad situation. After the great financial crash of 2008, a commodity boom that lasted from 2013 to 2017 turned into a slump that has robbed farmers and developing world governments of vital cash. Just as they were managing to stabilise their finances and set aside money to invest, the world price tumbled and wiped out their profit. Fairtrade practices protect farmers from this sort of setback and allow them to plan for the future.
Of course they have their critics. These are most mostly from the US – people who favour unfettered markets and seek to undermine the Fairtrade ideal, saying it is a form of protectionism that dampens innovation and ultimately ruins farms.
Theirs is an almost religious adherence to the free market that discounts the gains in stability and security that Fairtrade provides, and the scope of the community premium to promote universal education and the rights of women.
But without large employers making strides to adopt the standardised and transparent Fairtrade practices put forward by the foundation, it will be left to consumers to drive the project forward.
At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall responds:
The Guardian tells us that the Great White Hope of global trade, Fairtrade, isn’t in fact working. On the basis that no one seems to be doing very much of it. To which the answer is great – for the only fair trade is laissez faire.
This does not mean that Fairtrade should not have been tried – to insist upon that would be to breach our basic insistence upon the value of peeps just getting on with doing what they want, laissez faire itself. But the very value of that last is that we go try things out, see whether they work and if they don’t we stop doing them. If they do then great, we do more of them.
[…]
So, trying out Fairtrade, why not? Let’s go see how many other people feel the same way? In exactly the same way we find out whether people like Pet Rocks, skunk or Simon Cowell. Product gets put on the market we see whether it adds to human welfare or not. If people value it – and revealed preferences please, by actually buying it – at more than the use of those scarce resources in other uses then that’s adding to human welfare and long may it thrive. If it doesn’t, if it’s subtracting value from the human experience, then we’ll stop doing it as those trying go bust.
This is not an aberration of the system it is the system and it’s why laissez faire works. Peeps get to do whatever and we keep doing more of what works, less of what doesn’t.
Fairtrade? No, I never thought it was going to work as anything other than virtue signalling for Tarquin and Jocasta but that’s fine. Why shouldn’t Tarquin and Jocasta gain their jollies by virtue signalling? As it turns out, now that we’ve tried it, no one else gives a faeces*. So, we can stop. Except, obviously enough, for those specialist outlets like the Co Op where the odd can still gain their jollies. It being that very mark of a laissez faire, liberal, society that the jollies of the odd are still catered to in due proportion to the desire for them.
*From Gibbon, all the fun stuff’s in Latin.
September 6, 2018
Trans-partisan planning
At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer offers a plan to address man-made climate change, pitched to avoid being dismissed as “typical” of one or the other side:
While I am not deeply worried about man-made climate change, I am appalled at all the absolutely stupid, counter-productive things the government has implemented in the name of climate change, all of which have costly distorting effects on the economy while doing extremely little to affect man-made greenhouse gas production. For example:
- Corn ethanol mandates and subsidies, which study after study have shown to have zero net effect on CO2 emissions, and which likely still exist only because the first Presidential primary is in Iowa. Even Koch Industries, who is one of the largest beneficiaries of this corporate welfare, has called for their abolition
- Electric car subsidies, 90% of which go to the wealthy to help subsidize their virtue signalling, and which require more fossil fuels to power than an unsubsidized Prius or even than a SUV.
- Wind subsidies, which are promoting the stupidist form for power ever, whose unpredictabilty means fossil fuel plants still have to be kept running on hot backup and whose blades are the single largest threat to endangered bird species.
- Bad government technology bets like the massive public subsidies of failed Solyndra
Even when government programs do likely have an impact of CO2, they are seldom managed intelligently. For example, the government subsidizes solar panel installations, presumably to reduce their cost to consumers, but then imposes duties on imported panels to raise their price (indicating that the program has become more of a crony subsidy for US solar panel makers, which is typical of these types of government interventions). Obama’s coal power plan, also known as his war on coal, will certainly reduce some CO2 from electricity generation but at a very high cost to consumers and industries. Steps like this are taken without any idea of whether this is the lowest cost approach to reducing CO2 production — likely it is not given the arbitrary aspects of the program.
These policy mess is also an opportunity — it affords us the ability to substantially reduce CO2 production at almost no cost.
August 7, 2018
Grasping at straws to virtue signal
Richard Morrison points out just how banning plastic straws will not do anything meaningful to save the environment, but will definitely have a negative impact on consumers:
Of all the consumer products one might have expected to become a flashpoint for political controversy, the humble plastic drinking straw is an unlikely contender. Leap into the headlines it has, though, with communities like Seattle and San Francisco recently enacting bans on disposable straws. The city council of Santa Barbara, California, initially voted for a ban that would have punished restaurant workers with up to six months of jail time for giving out a disposable plastic straw, but city officials agreed to revisit the ordinance when it appeared to also ban the sale of straws at supermarkets.
[…] the case against the plastic straw is exceedingly weak. There aren’t as many plastic straws thrown away as claimed, and only a tiny portion of U.S. straws end up anywhere near the oceans — the vast majority of municipal solid waste in this country ends up either buried in landfills, recycled, or burned up in incinerators, far from any congested sea turtles.
The vast majority of plastic waste in oceans actually comes not from advanced countries like the U.S. but from countries like China and Indonesia that consume a large volume of plastic products but lack our modern waste collection infrastructure. Much of their plastic waste ends up washed into major river systems that empty into the oceans. A study published last year in the journal Environment Science & Technology by three German researchers found that 90 percent of the plastic debris found in the world’s oceans is dumped there by just ten of the world’s rivers — none of which are in the Western Hemisphere, much less the United States.
Beside the fact that U.S. consumers are contributing very little to the ostensible problem is the other side of the equation: the benefits of the straws themselves. I suspect many Americans who were initially receptive to the idea of a ban were genuinely surprised to learn that disposable drinking straws are very important to people with certain disabilities. British disability rights activist Penny Pepper recently commented in the Guardian about how she depends on plastic straws — and other single-use, disposable products like baby wipes — writing “I don’t have the luxury of a plastic-free life.” The durability, convenience, cleanliness, low price, and resistance to heat of disposable plastic straws make them irreplaceable to people with many different physical limitations.
Vancouver, as any Canadian would have guessed, was the first Canadian city to pick up on this particular variant of virtue signalling.
July 23, 2018
QotD: The revolution of the proletariat wouldn’t play out the way Marx imagined
I remember a friend telling me that multi-culti was knocked out of his young skull when he got a job as a construction worker for the summer. Marxism too. He said if revolution came from the proletariat, the resulting society would view wife beating as a sort of little hobby, on the side, nothing bad, just a little indulgence on Saturday night. (Mind you this was not in the US. The US working class is by and large better than this.) And all those prejudices against other races/sexual orientations/etc? Yeah, the working class had no problems with those. Only a privileged twit like Marx could think that the working class all over the world wanted to unite. They tend to be rather more nationalistic than their “betters” after all. More all sorts of “ists” too (racist, sexist and homophobic[ist for completism]). It’s what works at their level, and virtue signaling buys them nothing.
Sarah Hoyt, “A Very Diverse Cake”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-31.
May 11, 2018
March 26, 2018
February 27, 2018
Many Americans feel that the elites have “betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing”
ESR on the fraught subject of US immigration policy:
Crime is a real issue. Legal immigrants have a slightly higher criminal propensity than the native born (the difference is small enough that its significance is disputed) but illegals’ propensity is much higher, to the point that 22% of all incarcerees are illegals (that’s 92% of all jailed immigrants).
But the elephant in the room is the impact of illegal immigration on social trust.
Diversity erodes social trust, trust being that extremely valuable form of social capital that enables people to make handshake deals, leave their doors unlocked, and trust institutions to treat them fairly. Sociologist Robert Putnam was so shocked to discover this that he sat on his results for seven years before publishing. In diverse communities trust drops not only between ethnolinguistic groups but within them. It’s insidious and very harmful – low-trust societies are bad, bad places to live.
The U.S. has a proud tradition of assimilating legal immigrants into a high-trust society, but it succeeds in this by making them non-diverse – teaching them to assimilate folk values and blend in. Putnam’s work suggests strongly that without the ability to rate-limit immigration to be within some as yet undetermined maximum, the harm from erosion of trust would exceed the benefits of immigration.
We are probably above the optimal legal immigration rate – the highest compatible with avoiding net decrease in social trust over time – already (later in this post it will become obvious why I believe this). There is little doubt that we would greatly exceed it without immigration controls.
Anyway, even if ending border enforcement were a good idea (and I conclude that it is not, despite my libertarian reflexes) it’s a political nonstarter in the U.S. Trump got elected by appealing to sentiment against illegals, and beneath that is a phenomenon one might call Putnam backlash; everywhere outside a few blue-state enclaves, Americans sense the erosion of social trust and have connected it to illegal immigration.
And on the very strong divergence of opinion between the elite (very pro-immigration) and non-elite (becoming much more anti-immigration over time):
One of the major forces currently poisoning our politics is a breakdown in trust between people like you and me – the cognitive elites – and the rest of America. Deplorables. Flyover country. Brexit, and Trump’s election, slapped me upside the head. I’ve been forced to confront some uncomfortable truths.
They think we’ve betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing. On the left: identity politics, PC, and open borders justified on multiculturalist grounds. On the right: free trade and open borders justified on laissez-faire principle.
They have a point. I’m seeing that now.
I mean, I might still think free trade is a good idea and have lots of arguments for it. But my arguments don’t mean fuck-all to a Rust-Belt steelworker who’s watched his livelihood get exported and the community around him wither and has nothing left but a cheap high on opioids. Nor to an unskilled black or legal-immigrant urbanite who can’t get a job because the restaurants can hire illegals for cheaper.
We owe these people more than we have given them. What we owe can’t mainly be paid in money. It’s compassion; a fair hearing. Respect. Not dismissing them as trash or troglodytes because they don’t love the brave new globalized world that gives us options but – too often – closes off theirs.
I don’t have easy solutions to these problems. But is it too much to ask that people like you and me should stop being arrogant assholes about them?
December 31, 2017
A contrarian view of hijabs, niqabs, and burqas
Western views of full-coverage clothing, including hijabs, niqabs, and burqas, may be concealing a hidden benefit to those who choose to wear such clothes voluntarily:
Hijabs, niqabs, and burqas — different sorts of coverings worn by Islamic women — are divisive apparel in the West, associated with patriarchal oppression, cultural outsiders, and even suicide bombers. Yet few accounts actually discuss the experiences of the women wearing the veils, and the freedom and anonymity coverings can afford if worn voluntarily.
Born in Pakistan and educated in America, Rafia Zakaria is the author of Veil, a new book which explores the history and shifting meanings of female coverings in Islamic countries and Western secular society. In a wide-ranging conversation, she talks with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie about the theological underpinnings of veils, their use as a means of controlling female sexuality, and how they have become markers of socio-economic status and virtue signaling.
Veils present a particular conflict for Western feminists. On the one hand, veils — especially burqas — are emblematic of regimes that are particularly oppressive to women. Feminists and others have moved to ban the wearing of veils in public in the name of female empowerment. But if a Muslim women wants to wear one, is she endorsing patriarchy and setting back the women’s rights movement or simply owning her own choices, especially in a culture that might itself be anti-Islamic?
September 26, 2017
When virtue signalling is more important than tens of thousands of jobs
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill slams the (mostly left-leaning) critics of Uber for their blatant two-faced attitudes:
The satire writes itself these days. For the past 16 months, ever since voters said No to the EU, the supposed liberal set has been signalling its virtue over migrant workers. These Remainer types have filled newspaper columns and dinner-party chatter with sad talk about foreigners losing the right to travel to and work in Britain. Yet now these same people have chortled as London mayor Sadiq Khan and his pen-pushers at Transport for London (TfL) have refused to renew Uber’s licence in the capital. Which means 30,000 people will lose work. Many of them migrants. They cry over migrant workers one day, and laugh as they lose their livelihoods the next.
Anyone would think their overriding concern is less with migrants’ right to work than with their own insatiable need to engage in political posturing. And right now, when it’s trendy to be anti-capitalist, to sneer at Silicon Valley fat-cats who make apps that employ people in far from ideal conditions, the posture that guarantees one’s spot in liberal circles is to be Uberphobic. Sticking it to Uber, making a spectacle of one’s haughty disdain for the vagaries of life in 21st-century capitalist society, takes precedence over concern for workers themselves. Welcome to 2017, where it’s cool to be anti-capitalist but not pro-worker.[…]
One of the ugliest sentiments behind Uberphobia is the idea that this service is a threat to the public, especially women. Darkly, the new left is at one with the anti-migrant hard right on this question: both have cheered Uber’s licence loss on the basis that women of London must be protected from unregulated drivers. Let’s get this into perspective. Last year it was revealed that between February 2015 and February 2016 there were 32 allegations of sexual assault against Uber drivers in London. There were a total of 154 allegations against all taxi and car firms, meaning Uber made up a minority of complaints. What’s more, there are millions of Uber journeys in London every year, so the chances of assault are minuscule. It’s the same in the US. There was scandal when it was revealed that Uber had received complaints from women who said they had been raped by drivers. It received five complaints between 2012 and 2015, which means 0.0000009% of car journeys involved an alleged act of rape. Uber is very safe indeed.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, from both leftish feminists and the hard right, the panic about Uber is driven partly by fear of unregulated foreign men driving around our cities. The state must regulate, they say — and they mean it must regulate both business and foreigners, both fat cats and untrustworthy outsiders, both moneymen and migrants. Cheering as migrant workers lose their work and being complicit in the depiction of migrant drivers as a rapacious threat: sections of the liberal-left have really exposed their prejudices through their posturing against Uber. The tragedy of Uberphobia is that it confirms that even anti-capitalism is now virtue-signalling. It is no longer a serious call to improve working people’s lives; it is just the fleeting thrill of shouting ‘Down with Uber!’ without ever letting the issue of its drivers’ livelihoods cross your pristine, virtuous mind.
December 21, 2016
Mapping the new western caste system
An interesting re-map of India’s caste system to modern day western society:
I move professionally in circles where lib-left “virtue signaling” is taken for granted, especially inside the US. (Academia outside the US, while no less in the grip of a collective moral superiority complex, at least tolerates dissenters to some degree.)
As I was perusing Trump’s cabinet list in the Times of London the other day, I was struck not so much by the names — some ‘feck yeah!’, some ‘well, OK’, some ‘meh’ — as by what wasn’t there. The ‘Brahmandarins™’ had been left behind, as it were. Allow me to expand.
Traditional society in India has myriad little jatis (“births”, freely: castes), but they ultimately derive from four (plus one) major varnas (“colors”, freely: classes). While caste membership and profession are more fluid than generally assumed by Westerners, these five major groupings do exist to the present day, and are mostly endogamous. From top to bottom, the varnas are:
- Brahmins (scholars)
- Kshatryas (warriors, rulers, administrators)
- Vaishyas (merchants, artisans, and farmers)
- Shudras (laborers)
- Finally, the Dalit (downtrodden, outcasts — the term “pariah” is considered so offensive it has become “the p-word”) are traditionally considered beneath the varna system altogether, as are other “Scheduled Castes” (a legal term in present-day India, referring to eligibility for affirmative action).
The upper three varnas bear some resemblance to the three Estates of the French ancien régime: clergy, nobility, and the bourgeoisie (le tiers état, the Third Estate). American society used to be a byword for social mobility (“the American dream”) — but a stratification has set in, and it takes little imagination to identify strata of Dalit, Shudras, and Vaishyas in modern American society. The numerically small subculture of military families could be identified as America’s Kshatryas. So where are the Brahmins? (No, I’m not referring to the old money Boston elite.) And why am I using the portmanteau “Brahmandarins” for our New Class?
In India one was, of course, born into the Brahmin varna, and they actually delegated the messy business of governance to the varna below them. In China’s Middle Kingdom, on the other hand, not only was the scholarly Mandarin caste actually the backbone of governance, but in principle anyone who passed the civil service exams could become a Mandarin.
Originally, these exams were meant to foster a meritocracy. Predictably, over time, they evolved to select for conformity over ability, being more concerned with literary style and knowledge of the classics than with any relevant technical expertise.
Hmm, sounds familiar? Consider America’s “New Class”: academia, journalism, “helping” professions, nonprofits, community organizers, trustafarian artists,… Talent for something immediately verifiable (be it playing the piano, designing an airplane, or buying-and-selling,… ) or a track record of tangible achievements are much less important than credentials — degrees from the right places, praise from the right press organs,…
