Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2023

Crime on Toronto’s public transit system is merely a symptom of a wider social problem

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

As posted the other day, Matt Gurney’s dispiriting experiences on an ordinary ride on the TTC are perhaps leading indicators of much wider issues in all of western society:

“Toronto subway new train” by BeyondDC is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Caveats abound. Toronto is, relatively speaking, still a safe city. The TTC moves many millions of people a week; a large percentage of whom are not being knifed, shot or burnt alive. And so on. We at The Line also suspect that whatever is happening in Toronto isn’t happening only in Toronto, but Toronto’s scale (and the huge scope of the TTC specifically) might be gathering in one place a series of incidents that would be reported as unconnected random crimes in any other city. A few muggings in Montreal or Winnipeg above the usual baseline for such crimes won’t fit the media’s love of patterns as much as a similar number of incidents on a streetcar or subway line.

Fair enough, duly noted, and all that jazz.

But what is happening out there?

Your Line editors have theories, and we’ve never hesitated to share them before: we think the pandemic has driven a portion of the population bonkers. We’d go further and say that we think it has left all of us, every last one, less stable, less patient, less calm and less empathetic. For the vast majority of us, this will manifest itself in many unpleasant but ultimately harmless ways. We’ll be more short-tempered. Less jovial at a party. Less patient with strangers, or even with loved ones. Maybe a bit more reclusive.

But what about the relatively small majority of us that were, pre-2020, already on the edge of deeper, more serious problems? What about those who were already experiencing mental-health issues, or living on the edge of real, grinding poverty?

It’s not like the overall societal situation has really improved, right? COVID-19 itself killed tens of thousands, and took a physical toll on many more, but we all suffered the stress and fear not just of the plague, but of the steps taken to mitigate it. (Lockdowns may have been necessary early in the pandemic, but they were never fun or easy, and that societal bill may be coming due.) Since COVID began to abate, rather than a chance to chill out, we’ve had convoys, a war, renewed plausible risk of nuclear war, and now a punishing period of inflation and interest-rate hikes that are putting many into real financial distress. We are coping with all of this while still processing our COVID-era stress and anxiety.

The timing isn’t great, is what we’re saying.

And on the other side of the coin, basically all our societal institutions that we’d turn to to cope with these issues — hospitals, social services, homeless shelters, police forces, private charities, even personal or family support networks — are fried. Just maxed out. We have financial, supply chain and, most critically, human-resource deficits everywhere. The people we have left on the job are exhausted and at their wits’ end.

This leaves us, on balance, less able to handle challenges than we were in 2020, due to literal exhaustion of both institutions and individuals. Meanwhile, against the backdrop of this erosion of our capacity, our challenges have all gotten worse!

It’s not hard to do the mental math on this, friends. It seems to us that in 2020, the policy of Canadian governments from coast to coast to coast, and at every level, was to basically keep a lid on problems like crime, homelessness, housing prices and shortages, mental health and health-care system dysfunction, and probably others we could add. One politician might put a bit more emphasis on some of these issues than others, in line with their partisan priors, but overall, the pre-2020 status quo in Canada was pretty good, and our political class, writ large, basically self-identified as guardians of that status quo, while maybe tinkering a bit at the margins (and declaring themselves progressive heroes for the trouble of the tinkering).

But then COVID-19 happens, and all our problems get worse. And all our ways of dealing with those problems get less effective. It doesn’t have to be by much. Just enough to bend all those flatlined (or maybe slightly improving) trendlines down. Instead of homelessness being kind of frozen in place in the big cities, it starts getting worse, bit at a time, month after month. The mental-health-care and homeless shelter systems that weren’t really doing a great job in 2020, but were more or less keeping big crises at a manageable level, started seeing a few more people fall through the cracks each month, month after month. Those people are just gone, baby, gone.

The health-care system that used to function well enough to keep people reasonably content, if not happy, locks up, and waitlists balloon, and soon we can’t even get kids needed surgeries on time.

The housing shortage goes insane, and prices somehow survive the pandemic basically untouched.

The court system locks up, meaning more and more violent criminals get bail and then re-offend, even killing cops when they should be behind bars.

None of these swings were dramatic. They were all just enough to set us on a course to this, a moment in time where the problems have had years to compound themselves and are now compounding each other.

Here’s the rub, folks. The Line doesn’t believe or accept that any of the problems we face today, alone or in combination, are automatically fatal. We can fix them all. But we need leaders, including both elected officials and bureaucrats, who fundamentally see themselves as problem fixers, and who understand right down deep in their bones that that is what their jobs are, and that they are no longer what they’ve been able to be for generations: hands-off middle managers of stable prosperity.

January 22, 2023

One year later

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

Last year, the Freedom Convoy 2022 from all parts of Canada began to assemble and move toward Mordor, er, I mean Ottawa. Patrick Carroll remembers:

It’s hard to believe, but the one-year anniversary of the Canadian Freedom Convoy is upon us. It was January 22, 2022 when the convoy began to form across the country. Over the following week, thousands of trucks made their way to Ottawa, and on January 29 they arrived in the nation’s capital, loud and determined as ever.

The following month was one of the most tumultuous times in modern Canadian history. Downtown Ottawa was completely gridlocked, bridges were blocked, and politicians along with the media took every opportunity to smear the protesters.

Four weeks later, it ended quite a bit faster than most people expected. Armed with special powers from the never-before-invoked Emergencies Act, the government successfully dismantled the protest in a matter of days.

In hindsight, the practical effect of the protest on legislation is difficult to detect. Some Covid policies were probably relaxed a few months earlier than they otherwise would have been, but for the Convoy organizers, this was far from a decisive victory.

A debate has been raging in Canada ever since: were the protestors within their rights to do what they did? Those who support the convoy argue that they were, since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly. Those who oppose the convoy largely agree with these freedoms, but argue that such freedoms should be subject to certain reasonable restrictions. Major obstructions to traffic, and especially obstructions to critical infrastructure such as bridges, are simply going too far in their view. Is the government supposed to stand by and let a group of hooligans bring the country to its knees?

That’s certainly the line the governments (city, provincial, and federal) generally chose to take and the media were almost chanting the governments’ line in unison. Of course, the governments were not all that well synchronized, which led to some blatant examples of deliberate misinformation/disinformation/gaslighting from one or another level, as Donna Laframboise points out:

During the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, witnesses talked about misinformation as if it were a problem confined to contrarians on social media. But the Closing Submission of former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly shows that government officials are, themselves, a fertile source of misinformation.

If someone in our federal government had demonstrated genuine leadership by going out and talking to the truckers, the protesters would likely have dispersed after the first weekend. Instead, a government that meets with professional lobbyists on 24,000 occasions a year refused to have a single meeting with working people who’d driven thousands of miles to the nation’s capital. Rather than being a grownup, the Prime Minister called them names. Rather than negotiating with the protesters, he told police to get rid of them.

According to Chief Sloly, the Ottawa force was understaffed at the best of times. Even after cancelling vacations and days off, there still weren’t enough personnel to deal with a significant, extended protest on top of normal duties.

From the beginning, the media failed to behave responsibly. It whipped up hysteria. It smeared and sneered. It sowed suspicion and fear of small town Canada, of those who see the world differently, of people who’d reached their breaking point. Big surprise a portion of the public did, in fact, become hysterical. As the protest dragged on, the pressure became intense. In lieu of pursuing a political resolution to what were clearly political grievances, slimy politicians pointed fingers at the Ottawa police. While simultaneously hamstringing them behind the scenes.

Page 43 of Chief Sloly’s Closing Submission says federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino falsely told the world — on February 3rd — that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had provided all the resources the Ottawa police had asked for. Four days later — on February 7th — he insisted 250 RCMP officers had been dispatched to Ottawa.

But the reality was quite different. Until mid-February, say his lawyers, the maximum number of RCMP officers available to the Ottawa force on any given day was 60 — far less than the number required.

It was the same story with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). On February 6th, Ontario’s Solicitor General Sylvia Jones falsely stated in an official document that “more than 1,500” OPP personnel had already been sent to Ottawa. In the words of Chief Sloly’s lawyers, this was “grossly inaccurate” (pages 80, 107).

Government ministers at both the provincial and federal level, they insist, made misleading statements about the degree of assistance Ottawa police had received. Statements that were “clearly incorrect” (page 53).

Which means Cabinet ministers were spreading misinformation. Misinformation that just happened to deflect blame away from themselves. That just happened to make the Ottawa Police Service look incompetent while turning the chief into a scapegoat. Ottawa’s first black police chief, a Jamaican immigrant, got thrown under the bus.

January 20, 2023

“… any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Government, Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander wants to sign up — like so many of us — for a post-Davos world:

The whole World Economic Forum/Davos experience is one part Bond villain parody, one part clout seeking billionaires, one part megalomania, a heaping cup of greed, and a dash of rent seeking.

In 2023 things have reached the point where any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion. Amazing to see people who claim to be American conservatives or lovers of liberty attending in an non-ironic, non-protesting capacity.

This wannabee gaggle of quasi-oligarchs and autocrat throne sniffers represents everything that is wrong with the human desire for control, power, and to crush the individual for fun and profit.

They pretend to be the world government in waiting that no one asked for, no one wants, and trust me on this — no one wants to live under. Being unaccountable to the people is their ideal state.

If you don’t know what I am referring to above, shame on you. Google it yourself, but I couldn’t help but giggle when I read the title from this article by Gideon Rachman at The Financial Times; Geopolitics threatens to destroy the world Davos made.

Really? It is? Then by all means let’s have MOAR!

    …the 2023 WEF — the first to take place in its regular winter location since the pandemic began — could be seen as signalling a return to normalcy. However, China’s sudden abandonment of its zero-Covid policy has raised fears that a new wave of variants could emerge.

    And, even if a fresh pandemic phase is avoided, Covid has left its mark on the way governments and businesses think about globalisation. The assumption that goods and commodities can always be shipped easily around the world has been shattered.

Except for the mentally fragile few and those who leverage power through them, the world is over COVID like it is over the flu. The last three years has been a clarifying event bringing in to stark relief those autocracy worshipers and hypocrites who hold individual rights in contempt. It also helped us see the existential danger a free people can face when they put themselves at the mercy of governments who see a crisis opening a door for an easy grasp at additional powers they will never want to give back.

The past the Davos set desired failed the future that is our present, but that doesn’t give pause to any of them. The Davos view of the future where everyone (except for those at the top) lives in a pod, eats bugs, owns nothing but is “happy” is at best dystopian, at worst justifies at some point if they are not stopped, open global revolt against the ruling class with all the violence and blood that comes with it.

[…]

Simply unacceptable in democratic nations that the will of the people might promote change in political leadership. Next thing you know, they might want even more free speech and redress of grievances.

    Those world leaders who are present might do well to take the funicular up to the Schatzalp Hotel, which served as Mann’s model for the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain. The hotel’s view is the best in Davos — it may offer a chance for quiet reflection on how to prevent war and natural disaster from once again engulfing the global economy

Unspoofable.

Perhaps they should reflect on how they encouraged Russian aggression and European vulnerability to hydrocarbon blackmail? Should they take a moment to see how they look the other way as the PRC engages in wholesale oppression of their Muslim minority? Are they proud of their dividends derived from almost unimaginable levels of air and water pollution flowing out of PRC’s slave labor run factories?

Unlikely — they might miss out on the next party.

A post-Davos world?

How do we bring it here faster?

January 15, 2023

One last dance for Davos?

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the “walls closing in” but this time it isn’t “on Trump”, but it might be “on the World Economic Forum” and their enablers:

Klaus and his gang were in full egomaniacal flight last week in Davos. I wonder how secretly scared they were, swanning around in their $30,000 Loro Piana topcoats dreaming of what … a nice quiet prison? Their liability for this latest attempt to escape the whirlwind through forced pharmaceuticals and the construction of the Biomedical Security State, must be dawning on them. It was always a possibility, but they figured the populace — thanks to their equally witless behaviourists — were so dumb they’d consent to being permanently damaged and think it was the fault of the extreme right. And climate change.

[…]

In Australia, the more Covid shots you’ve had, the more Covid you get and the more you die. The unvaccinated sail by relatively unperturbed.

Did you know that Big Pharma takes between $8 to $10 Trillion out of the US economy every year? GDP is only $23 Trillion. That’s a lot of money to claw back by every injured person, every family who lost a wage earner, a mother, a treasured child. This is a profit center for the great unwashed unmatched in human history. A massive transfer of wealth from the .01% to us.

They are all liable: every executive, every celebrity, every film producer, every hospital chief, every newspaper publisher, every television station owner, every multinational media company, every medical center, every university, every employer, every politician who forced and bullied people. Their wealth is about to become ours.

January 7, 2023

Propaganda to support the narrative

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray is definitely possibly most likely not kidding around here:

We can’t award the gold medal yet, because the contestants are still showing up at the starting line.

Elsewhere at Substack, A Midwestern Doctor recently highlighted some of the most egregious vaccine propaganda that appeared during the current forever-pandemic, in a piece that has the potential to safely and effectively vaccinate your mind against bullshit:

But now we need to add a new example from the current week, because Peter Hotez exists and keeps publishing. His latest piece of analysis calmly warns that the new variant is maybe possibly or not the Most Worstest Evuh, in a huge rhetorical first that tries to overcome Covid exhaustion with louder hysteria:

tHiS oNe iS diFFeReNtttttttttt&#*$*$%^#&@, Version 957,1095,397.02. Your next winter of severe illness and death will be everything you were promised in your first winter of severe illness and death, we swear. If you died last time, JUST WAIT UNTIL YOU DIE AGAIN THIS TIME, FOOL.

How can you spot propaganda? Like this, from a paragraph near the bottom of Hotez’s latest:

    Unfortunately, XBB.1.5 is still too new to have clinical data in-hand to show exactly what vaccines mean in terms of warding it off. At the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, we, like other groups, are scrambling to look at our own vaccine’s effects on XBB.1.5. However, the writing is on the wall here — boosting is your best bet at protecting yourself and your loved ones.

First sentence: We have no data about this. Third sentence: The thing we have no data for is your best bet to do the thing that we have no data for.

Every claim Hotez makes is a version of this maybe-definitely-uncertainty-certainty soup, telling you he doesn’t know while telling you that he knows

December 13, 2022

Unacceptable Views trailer

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Donna Laframboise:

Unacceptable Views is a fantastic new documentary film about the Freedom Convoy protest. All 100 minutes of it can be watched for free on Rumble here. Sharp, marvelous footage. Great interviews with truckers who went to Ottawa.

One of my favourite scenes occurs around the 19:20-minute mark. A Polish immigrant talks about being arrested as a teenager in Poland during the 1981 freedom protests in that country. She looks into the camera and says:

    I’m so proud that the young generation finally have balls and they stand up for the freedom …

The next gentleman who appears on screen, a Sikh, denies witnessing any misogyny, racism, anger, or violence in Ottawa. Instead, he describes the protest as “heaven on Earth, the energy was supreme”.

(more…)

December 8, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meta (the artist formerly known as Facebook) moves to clamp down on political discussions in the workplace

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

Tom Knighton on an uncharacteristic corporate move by the artist formerly known as Facebook:

My favourite reaction to Facebook rebranding as “Meta”.

It seems there are certain words employees aren’t really supposed to bring up in the workplace.

    Meta (formerly Facebook) has reportedly told its employees not to discuss sensitive issues like abortion, gun control, pending legislation and vaccine efficacy at workplace.

    According to a report in Fortune, citing a leaked internal memo, Meta has banned employees from discussing “very disruptive” topics, including abortion, gun rights, and vaccines as part of new “community engagement expectations”.

    “As Mark mentioned recently, we need to make a number of cultural shifts to help us deliver against our priorities,” read the company memo.

    “We’re doing this to ensure that internal discussions remain respectful, productive, and allow us to focus. This comes with the trade-off that we’ll no longer allow for every type of expression at work, but we think this is the right thing to do for the long-term health of our internal community,” it added.

Unfortunately for Meta, employees hammered them on the fact that they could talk about Black Lives Matter, immigration, and trans rights.

Now, they’re not really wrong to call out the hypocrisy, but this sounds like just a first move, and it’s a step in the right direction.

What would have been a better move is simply prohibiting discussing politics with your coworkers unless it directly pertains to your job. For example, if you are responsible for content moderation and a new bill will impact how you conduct that moderation, that’s one thing.

But topics ranging from Black Lives Matter to gun control are all contentious issues, and while Meta might have allowed that discussion in the past, they probably won’t indefinitely.

This is interesting to me, in part because we’ve seen the woke in the technology sector essentially bully employers into following along with the left’s agenda. Yet when they tried that with Netflix, the streaming giant basically told them to suck it up.

That was in May, but it may have triggered companies to realize that they didn’t have to play the woke game.

Last week, in the weekly wrap-up, I included this story about how Disney’s returning CEO Bob Iger is trying to have the company step back from the political ledge. Iger is far from a conservative, mind you, but he’s come to realize that his personal political agenda isn’t going to sell.

Granted, he started them along that path, but he’s recognized it’s not a great road to go down.

Now, we have Meta that may be venturing on a similar path to Netflix, setting the stage for what’s appropriate and what isn’t.

November 30, 2022

The widespread anti-lockdown protests in China … and how Apple is helping suppress them

Filed under: China, Government, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

N.S. Lyons admires what can only be described as potentially revolutionary protests across many of China’s big cities and resisting further lockdowns by the government:

Something extraordinary happened in China over the weekend. Not long ago I wrote at length, if in a rather different context, about the vital importance of courage in the defense of the true and the human against the cold, mechanistic evil that is nihilistic technocracy, the machine whose Conditioners forever lust after total control – not only over men, but ultimately over reality itself. Well, now we have just seen a stunning example of such courage in the streets of China, where people rose up to reassert their human dignity in the face of the most dehumanizing machine of control in the world today: the Chinese Communist Party’s “zero-Covid” terror-state.

For three years now, the Chinese government has maintained its policy of draconian city-wide lockdowns, endless daily mass testing and biomedical surveillance, digital Covid-passes that arbitrarily govern every aspect of daily life, vast camps to house those dragged into quarantine for weeks (or longer) at a time, and, more recently, such innovations as “closed-loop” factories, where workers are forced to work, sleep, and “live” completely isolated from the outside world so that they can continue to produce your iPhones.

But now over the past several days protests have erupted in at least a dozen cities and 79 universities across the country, with spontaneous demonstrations – often begun by only a handful of people, or even a single individual – quickly drawing crowds of hundreds, even thousands, of people willing to fearlessly demand an end to the zero-Covid nightmare.

In Wuhan, where it all began, swarming crowds smashed down containment barriers and “liberated” locked-down neighborhoods:

[…]

All across the country, many thousands of these protesters spontaneously echoed many of the same lines:

    We don’t want PCR tests. We want to eat.

    We don’t want Cultural Revolution. We want reform.

    We don’t want lockdowns. We want freedom.

    We don’t want a Great Leader. We want the vote.

    We don’t want lies. We want dignity.

    We aren’t slaves. We are citizens.

These are conspicuously the same lines as those of a banner hung from a Beijing bridge by a lone (since disappeared) protester, Peng Lifa, on the 13th of October, just ahead of the CCP’s 20th Party Congress and Xi Jinping’s re-coronation as Chinese leader for life.

Now, as recordings of the anti-lockdown protests are swiftly censored online, Chinese netizens have often simply been replying with “We saw it” – a phrase referring not just to the protests, but to Peng Lifa’s message.

His final and most striking line, on a second banner, happens to have been:

    “Refuse to go to class. Go on strike. Remove the traitor Xi Jinping.”

And indeed in many protests over the last few days the people’s frustration with zero-Covid tyranny translated into something more: an outpouring of raw anger against the CCP and Xi.

Of course, China’s ruling Communist regime isn’t without its loyal supporters and useful idiots like Apple:

Maybe something will come of the COVID lockdown protests in China. Maybe not, if you’re old enough to remember the guy who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, and who was never identified nor ever seen again. More likely, the Chinese Communist Party will crack down again, and the people of China will become compliant again.

And the West will turn a blind eye. Again.

Here’s what was in the latest iPhone update, according to Zachary M. Seward of Quartz:

    Hidden in the update was a change that only applies to iPhones sold in mainland China: AirDrop can only be set to receive messages from everyone for 10 minutes, before switching off. There’s no longer a way to keep the “everyone” setting on permanently on Chinese iPhones. The change, first noticed by Chinese readers of 9to5Mac, doesn’t apply anywhere else.

In other words, Chinese iPhone users can’t do or say anything without the CCP knowing about it. Dissent can be quashed before it even starts. The Chinese people can be kept under the CCP’s thumb. And Apple is helping.

November 6, 2022

The ArriveCAN farce as the poster child for Canada’s vastly diminished state capacity

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

In The Line, Andrew Potter considers the expensive, ineffective ArriveCAN app the government tried to impose on international travellers as a symptom of Canada’s decreasing state capacity:

There is perhaps no clearer poster child for the current crisis of state capacity than the ArriveCAN app, which was a bad policy initiative, poorly implemented, at great cost, and whose ultimate effect was not to keep Canadians safe and healthy, but rather to annoy users and generate a great deal of hostility towards the government.

The question of state capacity (or more frequently, its absence) became an issue of popular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic when governments, both in Canada and elsewhere, struggled to accomplish basic tasks of pandemic management. Whether it was sourcing enough PPE for the health-care system, scaling up testing or contact tracing, securing the borders, properly staffing long-term-care facilities, taking care of temporary foreign workers, and so on … the authorities struggled to get their act together. This is a well-documented story.

But this all came at a time when we had already started a national conversation about whether Canada had become a place where it was impossible for government to get anything done. Pipelines were the big issue, but we seemed to have turned into a country where crumbling infrastructure and slow and ineffective public services had become simply accepted as a fact of life. “State capacity” just put a name to something that had been in the air for a long while.

And so the pandemic served to both exacerbate and accelerate the concern over state capacity, for two main reasons. First, it raised the stakes. Before the pandemic, the failure of state capacity manifested itself as a slow-motion and genteel sort of generalized decline. With the arrival of COVID-19, it quickly became a matter of life and death. But second, the gusher of money the government printed during the pandemic helped put a point on the problem: the problem didn’t originate in a lack of funds. Indeed, what transpired during the pandemic was a bit of a spin on the old Woody Allen joke about the restaurant with terrible food and such small portions: There was so much government, and so much of it was bad.

So what is state capacity anyway? And why is it so important?

As I’ve said many times, the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything. More government is worse government … and I’m not even being a pedantic libertarian here, I’m talking objectively about the outcomes of pretty much every new government action.

November 4, 2022

Amnesty “literally means a pardon, i.e. the absence of punishment … for a crime committed in the past“

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

Sarah Reynolds considers the implications of what Emily Oster wrote in her Atlantic article suggesting a Covid-19 amnesty:

Now “amnesty” is a very specific word. It doesn’t mean forgiveness, it literally means a pardon, i.e. the absence of punishment … for a crime committed in the past.

It is a stark and loaded word indeed when used to refer to anything Covid-related because it establishes two parties: victims and perpetrators. Group 1: Those who committed crimes and could be in the legal sense pardoned of the criminal behavior they engaged in; and Group 2: those who will consequently not get justice.

The implication of such a dichotomy (if one were to appear) is horrifying.

The author alludes to the appeal and inevitability of forgiveness; I posit in contrast that forgiveness is a spiritual concept, one that may be inextricably linked to a religious belief for some, so she’s jumping the gun here because Forgiveness would be the stage after Justice, and only for those whose religion, faith, or spiritual practice also inspires or compels it.

Use of the word amnesty is terribly concerning to me because it insinuates that grave injustice has been committed. And if some horrible truth is coming out soon, her piece in the Atlantic serves as a way to beta test our/society’s future reaction to it — acting as the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

In other words, if we’re this outraged now knowing only what we know so far, how outraged will we be then, after this (speculated by me) coming newsflash triggers national indignation from coast to coast?

The most revealing part of the Professor’s piece in the Atlantic is this statement:

    The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

No, vacuums are complicated. All those attachments.

Tyranny is quite straight-forward, in contrast.

Years ago, I read a book that taught the reader that people are often confessing and how to detect it. If you look at and listen to their word choices, you can sometimes find what it is they did in the past, what they fear will happen in the future, and clues about whether or not they are capable of remorse. Many of you who have watched my youtube or read my blog before I got on substack know how I like to do a communication analysis, and delineate a) what’s literally being said, b) what the person really meant, and c) the third and most important/revealing part, what’s being left unsaid. And I rarely hear people say, “it’s complicated”, unless they are feeling profound regret, fear of the consequences of those “complicated choices”, and plenty of denial of the emotional origin of that particular word choice. They don’t even know why they were compelled unconsciously to use that word … but we do. The stark truth would likely be anything but complicated and possibly horrifying. (For example, what if Oster got on twitter tomorrow and tweeted out, “I don’t think I feel regret or remorse like other people. Intellectually, I get it: the Pandemic response caused human beings unbearable pain and society irrevocable damage but it doesn’t really bother me per se and sometimes I even feel gratified by it, especially when I witness overt force (mandates) replace emotional manipulation (shame).” Now I’m sure Oster is a wonderful person with a fully intact moral compass who’s 100% able to empathetically relate to others!! But … IF … on the off chance it were a true statement so she did declare it on twitter, it might seem complicated to her, but to us it would be the simplest most logical explanation for her actions. We’d go, oh! She’s a sociopath! Oh my God, now it all makes perfect sense! Hahahahaha I get it now hahahahaha because we live in hell!!)

H/T to Chris Bray for the link.

November 3, 2022

Amnesty? How about “no”.

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

Tom Knighton on the recent trial balloons being sent up by certain media folks to test the willingness of us proles to “forgive and forget” their authoritarian cheerleading over the last two+ years:

Recently, a story over at The Atlantic proposed an amnesty over what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was that we just let bygones be bygones and no one holds anyone else accountable for what happened.

Lives were ruined, people died alone and miserable — and in some cases, because they were alone and miserable — but we’re supposed to ignore all of that.

At Spiked, Lauren Smith says that the nasty authoritarian tendencies of those in power during the pandemic should absolutely not be forgotten:

As the Covid-19 pandemic fades from view, some may be tempted to forget those miserable two years of lockdowns, social distancing and other restrictions on our liberties. This is certainly the view of a widely shared article in the Atlantic, which calls for a “pandemic amnesty”. American economist Emily Oster asks us to “forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid”. It quickly becomes clear why Oster would prefer us to move on.

During 2020 and 2021, Oster was very much on the side of lockdown. And she supported vaccine mandates in universities and for workers. In fairness to Oster, she did not support every Covid measure. She did, for instance, criticise how long it took for schools to re-open in the US back in the summer of 2020. Yet ultimately, she belonged to the side that was happy to criminalise meeting a friend for coffee or to separate people from their dying loved ones.

Now, with hindsight, Oster regrets some of her positions. The crux of her argument is that the people baying for more lockdowns, harsher restrictions and vaccine mandates couldn’t possibly have known any different at the time. She says that they couldn’t have known that outdoor transmission of Covid was rare, that schoolchildren were always a low-risk group and that cloth masks were virtually useless in preventing viral spread.

Many, however, did know these facts, including back in the spring of 2020. But those who said them out loud were quickly turned into pariahs.

Although Oster admits that those on the anti-lockdown side got many things right, she says this was merely a question of “luck”. But it should not have taken any great foresight to see the danger of lockdowns. They were responsible for the most significant loss of liberty in the history of the democratic world. Their impact on economic output was as profound as that of any war. Not since the days before universal education had so many kids been shut out of school. Worse still, those who did warn of these inevitable and dangerous consequences were met with derision and censorship.

This is a pretty representative viewpoint of the lockdown mindset:

October 7, 2022

The “two movies on the same screen” effect: most Canadians see impending collapse but our “elites” think everything’s peachy

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

Tara Henley contrasts the reality many Canadians are facing day-to-day with the out-of-touch “laptop elites” who, as a class, did great through the last two and a half years and who have no clue at all why anyone would see the state of the country as anything like a collapse:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

There has been much discussion lately about the state of our nation — and whether or not we, as a society, are in decline.

Former journalist and Justin Trudeau speechwriter (and current Substacker) Colin Horgan published a provocative essay at The Line last month, arguing that our country is vulnerable to extremists who believe that “the current system of liberal democracy is inherently corrupt and corrupted, verging on collapse, and that, in the extreme, its downfall can and should be hastened by acts of violence”.

Horgan worries that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre — who’s been actively speaking to this ambient vibe of distress and dissatisfaction — could accelerate such destabilization.

Poilievre does not say extreme things, Horgan concedes, but Poilievre’s message is “still poison” because “what he telegraphs is the vision of a social order at a tipping point, with the suggestion that it can be easily pushed over”.

In short, Poilievre has tapped into “an Internet language of decline”.

There’s a thriving cottage industry in the Canadian legacy media doing everything they can to tar Poilievre as a Canadian Hitler and to continue the re-typing and re-phrasing of government talking points for the mass market. The government subsidies to “approved” media outlets will help keep the lights on a bit longer as they continue to lose audience share — and trust.

Our quality of life has been eroded for some time now. Wages have been stagnant for decades. Precarious work is the order of the day, both for the working class and professionals. Rents and property prices are through the roof; according to the Globe and Mail, since 2000, domestic home prices have increased by 420 percent. Inflation is high. Gas is expensive. Food costs are up. We are coping with a crisis of social isolation. Our opioid epidemic rages on.

Meanwhile, pandemic policy has benefited the laptop class and harmed the most vulnerable among us. (See lockdowns and school closures, for starters.)

Indeed, there has been extreme winners and losers during the COVID era, which saw a massive transfer of wealth upwards. Billionaires in this country, in fact, saw their wealth increase 68 percent during the pandemic.

Should we be surprised that those on the losing end are expressing their frustration?

[…]

Things have only gotten worse as the pandemic has dragged on and citizens have been hit with high inflation and rising interest rates (while also staring down other looming financial catastrophes).

According to an Angus Reid poll out this week, nine out of ten Canadians have cut their household budgets due to inflation and high prices. And 46 percent of Canadians say their personal finances are worse off now than they were at this time last year.

But if the material conditions in this country are dire, so too is the national mood.

In fact, there is a gaping wound at the centre of our national psyche.

Essential workers have laboured throughout the COVID crisis, endangering their health and that of their families, in order to keep society running. In return for their heroic efforts, the unvaccinated among them — many of whom previously contracted COVID and have natural immunity — have seen themselves ostracized and smeared as racists and misogynists. Their fundamental values have been mocked in the public square, and their basic rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression, have been compromised. Some have lost jobs, social lives and more for declining vaccination.

To comprehend the human toll this has taken, one need only look to the grassroots #TrudeauMustGo campaign on Twitter.

The consequences of vaccine mandates should have been covered in great depth by our national press. But instead, the Canadian media largely fell down on this story, often generating coverage that uncritically reproduced the Liberal party line.

Trust in the Canadian news media is now at its lowest point in seven years.

And judging from the reader mail I get, the Liberals’ decision to turn vaccine mandates into a wedge issue has had significant social consequences — tearing apart families, communities, and workplaces in ways that may take years to recover from.

All told, what we are witnessing is not merely a state of decline. It is a form of collapse. A collapse of the social contract. A collapse of the expectations we grew up with — that if you worked hard and respected the law, you could have a home, a family if you chose, and, crucially, a say in our democracy.

What we are living through is a collapse of life as we knew it in Canada.

What was once a stable, prosperous, diverse democracy is now a nation divided, rife with fear and anger, and financial and social instability.

Not only has our Prime Minister failed to grasp this, but he’s actively stoked tensions.

September 11, 2022

“Learning is something we humans do, while schooling is something done to us”

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

Kerry McDonald refutes the “learning loss” narrative we’ve been inundated with:

“Abandoned Schoolhouse and Wheat Field 3443 B” by jim.choate59 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There are mounting concerns over profound learning loss due to prolonged school closures and remote learning. New data released last week by the US Department of Education reveal that fourth-grade reading and math scores dropped sharply over the past two years.

Fingers are waving regarding who is to blame, but the alleged “learning loss” now being exposed is more reflective of the nature of forced schooling rather than how children actually learn.

The current hullabaloo over pandemic learning loss mirrors the well-worn narrative regarding “summer slide”, in which children allegedly lose knowledge over summer vacation. In 2017, I wrote an article for Boston NPR stating that there’s no such thing as the summer slide.

Students may memorize and regurgitate information for a test or a teacher, but if it has no meaning for them, they quickly forget it. Come high school graduation, most of us forget most of what we supposedly learned in school.

In his New York Times opinion article this week, economist Bryan Caplan makes a related point: “I figure that most of the learning students lost in Zoom school is learning they would have lost by early adulthood even if schools had remained open. My claim is not that in the long run remote learning is almost as good as in-person learning. My claim is that in the long run in-person learning is almost as bad as remote learning.”

Learning and schooling are completely different. Learning is something we humans do, while schooling is something done to us. We need more learning and less schooling.

Yet, the solutions being proposed to deal with the identified learning loss over the past two years promise the opposite. Billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds are being funneled into more schooling and school-like activities, including intensive tutoring, extended-day learning programs, longer school years, and more summer school. These efforts could raise test scores, as has been seen in Texas where students receive 30 hours of tutoring in each subject area in which they have failed a test, but do they really reflect true learning?

As we know from research on unschoolers and others who learn in self-directed education settings, non-coercive, interest-driven learning tends to be deep and authentic. When learning is individually-initiated and unforced, it is not a chore. It is absorbed and retained with enthusiasm because it is tied to personal passions and goals.

September 10, 2022

Magical Monetary Theory (MMT) – You’re soaking in it

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Kellen McGovern Jones outlines the rapid rise of MMT as “the answer to everyone’s problems” in the last few years and all the predictable problems it has sown in its wake:

“Inflation & Gold” by Paolo Camera is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was the “Mumble Rap” of politics and economics in the late 2010s. The theory was incoherent, unsubstantial, and — before the pandemic, you could not avoid it if you wanted to.

People across the country celebrated MMT. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat Congresswoman from New York heralded MMT by proclaiming it “absolutely [must be] … a larger part of our conversation [on government spending].” The New York Times and other old-guard news sources authored countless articles raising the profile of MMT, while universities scrambled to hold guest lectures with prominent MMT economists like Dr. L. Randall Wray. Senator Bernie Sanders went as far as to hire MMT economists to his economic advisory team.

The most fundamental principle of MMT is that our government does not have to watch its wallet like everyday Joes. MMT contends that the government can spend as much as it wants on various projects because it can always print more money to pay for its agenda.

Soon after MMT became fashionable in the media, the once dissident economic theory leapt from being the obscure fascination of tweedy professors smoking pipes in universities to the seemingly deliberate policy of the United States government. When the Pandemic Hit, many argued that MMT was the solution to the pandemics problems. Books like The Deficit Myth by Dr. Stephanie Kelton became New York Times bestsellers, and the United States embarked on a massive spending spree without raising taxes or interest rates.

Attempting to stop the spread of Covid, state and federal governments coordinated to shut down nearly every business in the United States. Then, following the model of MMT, the federal government decided to spend, and spend, and spend, to combat the shutdown it had just imposed. Both Republican and Democrat-controlled administrations and congresses enacted trillions of dollars in Covid spending.

It is not hard to see that this spray and pray mentality of shooting bundles of cash into the economy and hoping it does not have any negative consequences was ripe for massive inflation from the beginning. Despite what MMT proponents may want you to believe, there is no way to abolish the laws of supply and demand. When there is a lot of something, it is less valuable. Massively increasing the supply of money in the economy will decrease the value of said money.

MMT economists seemed woefully unaware of this reality prior to the pandemic. Lecturing at Stoney Brook University, Kelton attempted to soothe worries about inflation by explaining that (in the modern economy) the government simply instructs banks to increase the number of dollars in someone’s bank account rather than physically printing the US Dollar and putting it into circulation. Somehow — through means that were never entirely clear — this fact was supposed to make people feel better.

In reality, there is no difference between changing the number in someone’s bank account or printing money. In both cases, the result is the same, the supply of money has increased. Evidence of MMTs inflationary effects are now everywhere.

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