Usually, I cherish in commenting on the videos I post.
This time, I’d like to let this one stand on its own merits.
(Sorry not to embed, but please, do click through. It is worth it. In case the link stops working, here is the original video address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQFU_CU6q18)
Mark Steyn’s struggles run well over a decade long and have been well covered on this blog. Now, we have an update – of sorts.
Mark Steyn is a Canadian journalist who is very intelligent, charismatic as well as eloquent.
And, deliciously sarcastic.
He got himself into trouble by criticizing ‘The Mann’ himself, an extremely litigious individual who is the author of the now long-debunked by (in 2004/2005 by McIntyre and McKitrick, if memory serves me correctly) ‘Hockey Stick Hoax’ that would turn any data entered into an ‘a Hockey Stick’ graph of ‘catastrophic climate change’ and that is still the basis of the current de-carbonization conspiracy that enriches many large businesses while lowering the living standards of human beings.
Twelve or so years in to the litigation (a punishment in itself), in the highly politicized D.C. area of Columbia in the USA (where the jury is suspected of being not exactly impartial), Mark Steyn was found to have caused $1.00 of actual damages to Dr. Mann – and then ordered to pay him $1,000,000.00 plus court costs anyways.
Well, here is an update to the story: not a win as such, but, perhaps a glimmer of a light.
Of course, not before the process caused Mark multiple heart attacks.
Mark Steyn is not the Only Canadian Michael Mann had sued, leading to him earning the colloquial term ‘Canuckaphobic’ up here in my neck of woods.
At least one of the subjects of his lawsuits, also a Canadian (Dr. Tim Ball), had been sued almost literally to death by Michael Mann. Let’s hope there is hope for Mark Steyn and for the future!
In the mean time, I present you with a musical classic: Hide the Decline!
Please, prove me wrong.
There is a lot to unpack with President Donald Trump. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. No, I am not fence-sitting, I am being realistic.
Mercantilism is a better economic model than what Biden’s administration put forth, but, it is seriously inferior to Austrian Economics – even opposed to them at times.
Heck, there is even a really good conspiracy theory (that will never be proven or disproven, because the surrounding data had been systematically destroyed for political reasons, which may or may not have anything to do with theories of economy) that the Austro-Hungarian Prince had been assassinated (leading to Franz Josef being the successor to the crown) precisely because he was a proponent of the Austrian model of economics (think Von Mises) and was planning to put these principles into play upon his rising to the throne.
Yeah, a while ago.
But, this is a valid direction to ruminate in, as Mercantilism was most alive just before then, and was being uprooted by ‘the Austrian School of economics’.
Rooting out inefficiencies and underhanded ways that taxpayer money has been handed over to partisan actors – that is a good thing.
But, the mercantilist mindset is a bitter pill to swallow – if you want to support President Trump.
The most (sadly) interesting thing – from a disinterested 5,000m perspective – is that President Trump’s political opponents are not attacking him on the things that they should: they are being petty and short-sighted, without laying out a reasoned opposition to his mercantilism. It is as if they are working from ignorance, not knowledge.
And that is sad, very sad.
Growing up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, I got a first hand education on the difference between communism and socialism.
Yet, having arrived on the right side of the curtain, and seeing it fall down, I still studied this topic: what differentiates communism from socialism. And, it has been a life-long study – which brought me back to the basics, as I had been taught them, in a communist propaganda school.
Which they actually were truthful about.
Communism can only come around when all of the populace agree to this co-mingling of effort vs benefit. According to Marx, this would mean the State is no longer needed, as the populace will just do what is needed, without anyone telling/directing them to do so.
People will produce things – from food on up – because they want to, and they will not be paid to do so because they love doing what it is they are doing. In return, they will get goods from everyone else, because they too are giving the results of their toil away for free!
In other words, one is expected to work hard, to the best of their abilities – without ever reaping the benefits, as those are reaped by the greater society.
And that should be award enough.
The problem is that this might have worked in our earliest societies – which is what socialism/communism is trying to emulate, even though this does not scale up, as we have seen in history, over and over.
So, what IS the difference between ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’?
VIOLENCE.
Communism can only be achieved by having a 100% brainwashed populace that works towards ‘the common goal’ – whatever that goal is put forth from above.
Socialism is the step before communism: the children are in school, being brain-washed (I was taught it will take a minimum of 5 generations to ‘perfect’ the children), but everyone else has communist ideals imposed on them by force.
This is not frivolous speak – it is what we had been taught in school. Socialism requires force to be imposed, until people are brainwashed enough for the force not to be needed.
In other words, socialism is communism imposed by force.
Yes, it is true – I dislike most music.
Playing music just to drown out the silence, the thinking time – that is how our culture has gone.
But, there are a few songs I do enjoy – and yes, they are political in their nature or I would not find any merit in them. Music is awesome, because it is a most potent vehicle of brain-washing. It is silly not to acknowledge that each and every song is a tool of brainwashing.
We can drill down to folk songs back when they were sung by peasants to make their plight tolerable…yeah, I am a descendant of these peasants and fully understand their songs, for what they are…
Dr. James Lindsay is a Mathematician who, along with friends Helen Pluckrose and Dr. Peter Boghossian noticed that there was a marked lack of rigour and scientific method in highly regarded, peer-reviewed papers published on a particular part of the Social Sciences, derogatorily referred to a Grievance Studies. To see if they were correct, they wrote a number of bogus papers with very poor scientific methods and a lot of popular buzzwords and claims of the Grievance Studies.
Surprise surprise, their papers (like how dog-owners react to male-on-female humping vs male-on-male humping in dog parks and how these reactions ‘prove’ inherent sexism in our culture) began to be published and acclaimed. I actually remember some of these papers being papers being touted in mainstream media (MSM) and rolling my eyes – and it is a sad commentary that so many people accepted them as ‘science’ because they were ‘peer-reviewed’…because none of us quite realized that the ‘peers’ doing the ‘reviewing’ were not scientists but ideologues.
When what they thought were transparently fake and somewhat satirical papers began to be cited and nominated for scientific excellence awards, the trio pulled the plug on the project and revealed what they had done.
Perhaps some of my details of the story are fuzzy by the flow of time, but the major point remains.
Since then Dr. Lindsay has taken a deep dive into the world of Grievance Studies and what were the underlying principles that let to them and their open disdain in rejecting the scientific method and instead treating purely political screeds as ‘science’. He has gone to many primary sources and slugged through them, as well as some excellent analyst like Maj. Stephen Coughlin of Unconstrained Analytics. Here is one of Stephen Coughlin’s ‘briefs’:
Winston Marshall prides himself on being a banjo player in some band, but had to quit because he liked a book written by a journalist who was seriously injured by Antifa. Now, he has a wildly successful program here he interviews the greatest thinkers of our times and helps unlock the complexity of their arguments to those of us just learning about the topic can follow with ease – but they are complex topics.
For example, in the video below, James Lindsay and Winston Marshall delve into what is wokism (best explanation so far is that it is Critical Constructionist Epistemology, where the ‘way of knowing’ is constructed on the foundation of the Critical Theory as evolved from the original Frankfurt School teachings – yes, big words – but they really explain them) and the difference between the ‘woke right’ and the ‘woke left’ as well as the different flavours of conservatism and leftism/progressivism in our current political milieu and how the second coming of Donald Trump to the Presidency disrupts how the various groups are evolving.
It is only an hour-and-a-bit long, but is is distilled information that is made comprehensible and Winston Marshall asks all the questions I would have asked for clarification when the wording got too technical.
Warning: James Lindsay – in any of his videos/podcasts/interviews will stretch your mind. But, Winston Marshall is such a skilled interviewer, he makes it enjoyable.
So, please, do enjoy this video:
Many European countries have adopted ‘proportional representation’ as their means of electing their elected representatives.
Yes, there are many variations of how ‘proportional representation’ is implemented, so, let me be at least a little bit specific.
I am referring to a system where registered parties are listed on the voting ballot and voters (again, the qualifications for who is ‘a voter’ may vary, but that is not a path I want to explore in this post) cast their votes for a specific party.
If ‘Party A’ receives 20% of the vote, they are allotted 20% of the seats in the house/chamber/etc. of the representatives. The party that received that portion of the votes/seats (the translation may not be 100% accurate, but as close as possible without chopping representatives into fractions, figuratively – or time based) then names its members who will take these seats and represent the voters who had chosen this party.
This seems like a very fair system in one aspect: the populace is represented proportionally. If your party got only 8% of the votes overall, that party would still get 8% of the representatives.
Let’s compare one alternative, which is based mostly on the Anglosphere culture: a country is divided up into areas – hopefully representing roughly similar number of voters per area (but, again, this and jerrymandering are topics for another post). Real world is not ideal and burdened with history, but, the ideal would be for each ‘riding’ to represent roughly similar number of voters. Then, the voters chose candidates in ‘their’ riding – where they reside – based on the character and political positions that candidate has put forward.
Some candidates (most, these days) are affiliated with political parties: political parties will actually have internal contests as to who can represent that party in a specific riding. But, independents are just as able to put their name on the ballot, and, if they appeal to enough voters, they can win ‘the seat’ to represent their constituents.
The benefit of this system is that the voters have chosen to represent them in the legislative body – and, that person is personally responsible to them for each and every vote they cast, each and every piece of legislation they put forward.
If their constituents overwhelmingly disagree with the way their elected representative’s party is moving forward, they are (theoretically) free to vote their conscience rather than the party line, because they are (again, theoretically) responsible to the voters in their riding, not the party they are affiliated with. It happens seldom, but it does happen.
It also happens that elected representatives, if their party becomes too extreme, leave their party and sit as independents or members of another party. This is not an everyday thing, nor is it rare or unheard of. The point is, whatever they do, these folks are answerable (theoretically) primarily to the people wo directly elected them, and only secondarily to their party.
The problem with this system is that with multiple parties, a person can win a seat with 30% of the vote in a multi-candidate race and a party can form a government with barely 33% of the popular vote. So, yes, a party with 51+% of the popular vote can lose, if the contested ridings are skin tight loses while the ridings they win in are blowouts. More votes does not translate to more seats, and the seats have it.
In this light, proportional representation sounds rather nice…except that…
In proportional representation, it is the party that gets the seats and appoints its members to it. These members now have no responsibility to any group of actual voters – their only responsibility is to the party, as it is at the pleasure of the party that they have their seats.
Yes, I have used the term ‘theoretical’ rather frequently regarding party vs voter affiliation/responsibility/responsiveness. And, yes, the parties ‘whip’ the vote of members by threats of all kinds, but, the members are still responsible to the people who elected them and a representative that crosses their will too far will be voted out, regardless the party. Not often, but it has been done.
Still, the primary responsibility of an elected representative is to champion the causes the majority of their constituents support.
This is the problem with proportional representation: the sitting member is not responsible to any group of voters, only to the party that appointed them to one of the seats they had won.
Being responsible to voters is one thing. Being responsible to the party that placed you into your seat is quite another.
Yes, in both systems, it is a balancing act.
And, the more powerful parties become, the less responsive representatives will be to their members.
So, let us strive for a system where the majority of representatives are independent of parties as much as possible and responsive to the will of their voters, whom they are supposed to represent.
Vladimir Putin is a bad person – perhaps evil. You do not get to head up the KGB by being nice or kind person – or barely registering as human. So, let me state this from the very beginning.
I have no illusions about who and what Putin is.
But that does not mean that I have to be blind to who and what Zelensky is, and that he might be just as bad – or, perhaps, worse, than Putin.
I have it on good authority that Zelensky’s luxury villa in Italy is on the same street, and only 4 houses down, from Putin’s luxury villa in Italy. If that does not bring things into perspective, I don’t know what will.
Please if you can, prove or disprove this claim in the comments – we all should know.
Perhaps the most ubiquitous coffee chain in Canada is Tim Hortons. It used to be good, got bought our and their fare cheeped out, but it is still a fun neutral place for us Canucks to go grab a coffee or a quick lunch with friends.
Today was such a day.
We are a family politically divided by generations and the friends we were having lunch with are a wonderful couple that is more politically aligned with our son, and have a particular hate on for President Trump and Elon Musk.
To their credit, unlike many people in that camp, they do not look down on us – rather, they engage us in a political discussion in a very amicable way, just as it should be. Just because we do not agree politically does not mean we cannot be friends – something rather lacking in many places today, so I am very grateful for that.
We were having our lunch, sitting at a table with our backs to the ordering line. And, we strode into the Elon Musk DOGE area of discussion where our friends and our son agreed, but my hubby and I defended the idea of rooting out corruption in the Administrative State.
I was even bringing in examples of the Canadian Administrative State overreach that I had witnessed first hand in one of my previous careers (I hopped around a lot – based on my needs at the time…I would start little to spend time with the kids and get suckered in deep, so I’d leave and start little again, get suckered in deep – I have boundary issues and a bit of an alpha thing going).
Re-focusing: we were talking about Musk and DOGE and what they were doing and one of our friends was expressing serious doubts about trusting Elon Musk with, well, anything.
A customer in the ordering line – just behind us – leaned in and laid in to the conversation, saying we need Musk and DOGE here in Canada because our taxpayer money was being used badly and in the wrong places. He got a bit of a push back from our friend, but, to be honest, our friend seemed rather taken aback that a complete stranger at a coffee shop would interject himself into our conversation.
And, our conversation was very civil and with no raised voices – which could not be said for, shall we call him Customer 1, C1 for ease of typing. My hubby and I were giving him silent thumbs up, but, none of us were ready for what happened next.
Another person, let’s call him Customer 2, C2. Well, C2 clearly overheard C1’s comments and took very, very loud issue with them. Including calling C1 and ‘idiot’ and a lot of rude words, to which C1 suggested to C2 that he go ‘f’ himself.
By this point, the whole coffee shop was riveted by their exchange and it looked like things might turn to fistycuffs!
Except that they were both holding Timmy’s coffee, which complicated the potential carnage. Don’t want to spill Timmy’s coffee!
In the end, there was no actual violence and though I may make light of it, it is because the potential for violence was there and very palpable.
This is in Canada.
Not the USA that is dealing with this breakdown in civility first hand.
Makes one wonder how it will all end…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 