Quotulatiousness

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.

June 12, 2019

QotD: Militant Islam and the Western media

Filed under: Europe, Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

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 9, 2019

People who call for higher taxes are almost always hypocrites

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

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

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

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

Filed under: China, Environment, India, Pacific — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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”

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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

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

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

The impact of universities on Generation X

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

Last month, Aaron Clarey explained why (in his view) the 1980s were so much better than the 1990s:

For example if you went to the gas station you would buy gas there. If you went to Target you bought staples and everyday supplies. If you went to the coffee store they would serve you coffee. And if you went to a movie theater they would show you a movie. They were simpler times and it made my halcyon childhood days very enjoyable. But then something started happening in the 90’s that would end these blissful, innocent times.

College.

Well, not college unto itself necessarily, but the propaganda…err..umm… “education” my generation (Gen X) would receive in college. For you see, while we were all told we “had to go to college” because it was necessary for us to have any sort of career or professional life at all, at the same time some very conscious and very intentional people in academia had a political agenda. And it was to make sure that we not so much had skills that would land us jobs in the future, but more importantly (to them anyway) that we placed more value on social and political agendas than profit, production, efficiency and reality. So that by the time Gen X graduated from college, and inevitably started taking over the reigns of control of the economy (which we have), we would not be so much concerned with offering the best product at the best prices possible, but what I like to call “Profit Plus Purpose.”

Politics Politics Everywhere! In Your Soup and in Your Hair!

You see this “Profits Plus Purpose” every day in western economies. It is literally unavoidable. If you go to a hotel there is always a sign asking you to “save the planet” by reusing your towels. If you go to a coffee store they cannot help themselves from bragging about their organicfairtradefreetradegaiaunicorn credentials. When you walk into a Target they’re always bragging about how they give back 5% to the community. Even British Petroleum tells you about how environmentally friendly they are at their gas pumps, while Exxon Mobil actually has a “corporate social responsibility page.” Matter of fact, this propaganda is so thorough and so complete Generation Z will be the first generation to be brought up where there has ALWAYS been some kind of secondary political message forcefully embedded into nearly every product and service sold in America.

The reason “Profits Plus Purpose” propaganda was so COMPLETE and UNIVERSALLY successful can be found in its genius genesis. It capitalizes on the egotistical and lazy nature of human beings. Leftist academics and politicians started propagandizing Generation X in college with the beginnings of things like “diversity,” “feminism,” “environmentalism,” “global warming,” etc. (you could almost pinpoint it to the date Captain Planet first aired). Whether you believe in the veracity of these “isms” or not is moot, because their ulterior purpose was to give then-naïve-and-egotistical Gen X’ers immediate gratification, purpose, morality, and ego in exchange for their life-long leftist political loyalty and further advancing said political agendas well into the future.

Why, you weren’t just some rank and file Mechanical Engineering major. You were an environmentalist Mechanical Engineering major.

Why, you weren’t some mass produced business major. You were an empowered, feminist, future business leader.

You weren’t some worthless, math-avoidant liberal arts degree major. You were a pro-refugee activist utterly unemployable liberal arts degree major.

Thus, whereas learning a real skill from a real degree took deterring work, effort, and rigor, immediately subscribing to some kind of moral leftist political crusade was effortless, yet provided immediate value and agency. Gen X couldn’t sign up fast enough and thus virtue signaling and Social Justice Warriors were born.

H/T to SDA for the link.

March 26, 2018

QotD: Virtue signalling

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

It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement would be obvious, as it is with Whole Foods. Anger and outrage disguise your boastfulness.

One of the occasions when expressions of hate are not used is when people say they are passionate believers in the NHS. Note the use of the word ‘belief’. This is to shift the issue away from evidence about which healthcare system results in the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. The speaker does not want to get into facts or evidence. He or she wishes to demonstrate kindness — the desire that all people, notably the poor, should have access to ‘the best’ healthcare. The virtue lies in the wish. But hatred waits in reserve even with the NHS. ‘The Tories want to privatise the NHS!’ you assert angrily. Gosh, you must be virtuous to be so cross!

Comedians make use of virtue signalling of the vituperative kind. With the right audience they can get laughs scorning the usual suspects: Ukip, the Daily Mail, Eton, bankers and the rest. The audience enjoys the caricaturing of all of these, sneering at them and, in the process, joining together as a congregation of the righteously contemptuous. What a delight to display your virtue, feel confirmed in your views, enjoy a sense of community, let off some anger and have a laugh all at the same time! It is so easy, too!

No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs. There was a time in the distant past when people thought you could only be virtuous by doing things: by helping the blind man across the road; looking after your elderly parents instead of dumping them in a home; staying in a not-wholly-perfect marriage for the sake of the children. These things involve effort and self-sacrifice. That sounds hard! Much more convenient to achieve virtue by expressing hatred of those who think the health service could be improved by introducing competition.

James Bartholemew “The awful rise of ‘virtue signalling’: Want to be virtuous? Saying the right things violently on Twitter is much easier than real kindness”, The Spectator, 2015-04-18.

February 27, 2018

Many Americans feel that the elites have “betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing”

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

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?

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