NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: A Victorian World.
Archive for 2022
July 4, 2022
THE MARK OF A TRUE CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERTARIAN: The willingness to listen to other views. Here’s a link to a blog post from a law professor friend of mine (Josh Silverstein) at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He’s pro-choice and yes, almost always votes Democrat, but he’s living proof that not all Democrats are bat-shit crazy people interested in “geometric equity” or “racial disparities in chlorophyll synthesis of house plants.” Here’s his not-unhinged take on the Dobbs decision:
“I will add that neither pro-lifers nor pro-choicers are hypocritical when it comes to abortion vis-à-vis their other moral views. For example, pro-lifers are often accused of hypocrisy because they oppose abortion rights but support the death penalty. But that position is easy to justify: guilty criminals have forfeited their right of life; innocent unborn children have not. Likewise, pro-choicers are often accused of hypocrisy because they favor abortion rights but oppose the death penalty. But that position is easy to justify as well: the fetus is inside a woman, thus implicating bodily autonomy; criminals are not inside another person.”
Of course, recent history tells us that rational voices are most likely ignored. They don’t provide enough outrage.
Toyota Motor Corp.’s leader criticized what he described as excessive hype over electric vehicles, saying advocates failed to consider the carbon emitted by generating electricity and the costs of an EV transition.
Toyota President Akio Toyoda said Japan would run out of electricity in the summer if all cars were running on electric power. The infrastructure needed to support a fleet consisting entirely of EVs would cost Japan between ¥14 trillion and ¥37 trillion, the equivalent of $135 billion to $358 billion, he said.
“When politicians are out there saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this?” Mr. Toyoda said Thursday at a year-end news conference in his capacity as chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association.
It’s not so much that they don’t understand as that they don’t care.
WAIT, PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME THIS ONLY HAPPENS IN AMERICA: At least 2 people dead, several shot at shopping mall in Copenhagen.
GLENN LOURY: “The Case for Black Patriotism.” (From January of this year.)
CHANGE: Britain Mandates Single Sex Bathrooms: No Forced Sharing.
The British government is expected to announce that all new office buildings, schools, hospitals and entertainment venues must have separate male and female lavatories, as a means of avoiding the “forced sharing” of gender-neutral facilities, according to The Telegraph.
The Telegraph reported the government wants to preclude non-residential buildings from being built solely with “universal” lavatories.
This construction mandate will involve changes to building regulations and planning guidance.
Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch spearheaded the plans that were quietly approved by ministers last month, after Badenoch learned that some children were avoiding using lavatories at school, since the facilities were gender-neutral.
Badenoch insists that it is both legal and “important” to provide single-sex spaces for men and women.
More like this please, gov’nor.
GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: Albany’s business as usual with Hochul continuing the pay-to-play corruption.
The Times Union’s Bragg has performed a remarkable public service, illuminating Albany influence-peddling at the retail level, and underscoring the ethics deficit that has informed Kathy Hochul’s Albany tenure.
She was a second-tier player in Western New York when Andrew Cuomo — the prince of Albany pay-to-play — picked her for lieutenant governor in 2014. Whereupon two things swiftly happened: Her husband Bill, a former federal prosecutor with no obvious relevant experience, was named general counsel to Buffalo-based casino-entertainment giant Delaware North — and Delaware North began lobbying the lieutenant governor’s office.
Subsequently, Hochul engineered an $850 million taxpayer-funded cash bath for a pro football stadium in Buffalo — a deal from which, serendipitously or otherwise, Delaware North stands to make a bundle as the stadium’s concessions holder.
None of this appears to have been illegal, so perhaps it’s just further evidence of the Hochul administration aiming to serve — whomever.
But it’s definitely the Albany way. There’s so much discretionary “economic development” money floating around the capital city that shenanigans are inevitable. The second-most-powerful man in the Andrew Cuomo administration went to prison for development-related bribe-receiving. Plus federal prosecutors spent much of the former governor’s tenure probing look-alike schemes and scams up and down the Mohawk River-Hudson River corridors.
Hochul lived through much of this, so one would think she’d be sensitive to the optics of ethical corner-cutting — if not to its actual substance.
One would be wrong.
Earlier: New York Democrats Undermine Supreme Court 2nd Amendment Ruling In New Legislation.
As always, coastal Democrats party like it’s 1859.
Much like the Democratic Party’s policies today, it was good for the folks at the top, and bad for the middle and working classes.
ME IN NEWSWEEK: How to assassin-proof the Supreme Court.
IN THE WORDS OF MOE AT THE DELI, IT COULDN’T HOIT: COVID-Fueled Teen Depression: Could Swing Dancing Help?
Maybe something like this?
https://youtu.be/Cp-IQroPNIM?t=198
THIS IS ONE SNAKEBIT ADMINISTRATION: Viewers Noticed Something Off About Kamala Harris’ Interview in Louisiana. “Yep, whether it was Essence Fest or the West Wing that had final approval over the backdrop, the typo went unnoticed by everyone…until it was too late. There, as Harris and Palmer talked about the state of the country (more on that later), was LOUSIANA in giant letters over the vice president like the midterms loom over her party.”
In a 2010 article headlined, “Obama’s Hell of a Ride,” John Podhoretz wrote:
Something weird happens when presidencies go wrong — presidents become incompetent at doing the things they were always able to do in their sleep, and their aides follow suit. I noted this when I wrote my first book, Hell of a Ride, about the decline and fall of the first President Bush, back in 1993. When Bush spoke, it rained, and his advancemen weren’t quick-thinking enough to move his events indoors. When he went to Japan on a state visit, he vomited. He was so intent on getting out his message of the day that he referred to it as “Message: I Care.”
But then, this presidency has been going wrong long before it even started.
GREAT MOMENTS IN STOCKHOLM SYNDROME: Mitt Romney: “America Is in Denial. Too many Americans are blithely dismissing threats that could prove cataclysmic…President Joe Biden is a genuinely good man.”
Flashback to 2012: Biden: Romney’s approach to financial regulation will ‘put y’all back in chains.’
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: This is featured on ESPN’s front page for July 4th: “Baseball, barbecue and losing freedom this Fourth of July.”
JIM BENNETT: Ukraine’s future: Finland or Cyprus?
TRAVEL GEAR: Samsonite Classic Multi Gusset Toploader Briefcase. #CommissionEarned
OH, THAT EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: It’s the 10th anniversary of the firework show where San Diego accidentally set off all 7,000 fireworks at once.
Happy 10-year anniversary to the greatest fireworks show in history, when San Diego accidentally shot off 7,000 fireworks at once.
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/qihO4zeXP3
— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) July 4, 2022
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(Bumped).
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: After 30+ Years, NPR Cancels Declaration of Independence Reading. “When will NPR decide to end its broadcasts altogether to make amends for its flawed founding? After all, that’s what NPR’s prescription is when it comes to the Declaration of Independence.”
EMBRACE THE HEALING POWER OF “AND:” Robert Reich either doesn’t know what causes inflation or is counting on the stupidity of the American people.
This year, Americans have found it increasingly difficult to not notice that everything’s a lot more expensive than it was at this same time last year. Those infamous $0.16-off hotdogs now cost more than ever, along with the watermelon and corn and potato salad and ground beef and bread and clothes and gas and cars.
And thanks in no small part to the rising prices and costs for basic goods and services, the Democratic Party is on track to lose pretty big in November and Joe Biden’s poll numbers are on a plummeting downward trajectory. So dear old Robert decided yesterday to try to do the Dems a solid and echo one of Joe Biden’s favorite narratives and blame GrEeDy CoRpOrAtIoNs for all of it:
If questioned, Reich would likely respond, “I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it.”
BAN GAY SEX ORGIES FOR TWO WEEKS TO SLOW THE SPREAD? Advocates warn US at risk of losing control on monkeypox. But they are focusing on the main avenues of contagion: “New York City and Washington, D.C., began offering the vaccines to men who have sex with other men or may have been exposed to the virus. But both cities ran through their supplies less than a day after launching their local immunization initiatives. D.C. Health had to shut access about 10 minutes after making shots available.”
SKYNET FROWNS: The myth of ‘artificial intelligence.’
What AI shares with radical environmentalism is a longing to create an external moral arbiter. With apocalyptic climate change, the planet is judging us because we dared improve our lot. In AI’s Jesuit wing – transhumanism – man hasn’t fallen, we were just awful all along. Among transhumanists, there is a revulsion toward the physical body, which decays and defines a fixed form, and also a revulsion at what is characterised as our hopeless irrationality. We have always been inferior to the machines, they argue, but those machines just hadn’t been invented yet. By submitting to the machines, we become free, as Grimes’ 2018 single, ‘We Appreciate Power’, articulates:
‘People like to say that we’re insane
But AI will reward us when it reigns
Pledge allegiance to the world’s most powerful computer
Simulation: it’s the future.’Here the religious overtones are explicit – immortality is achieved by digitising the physical and uploading it. The deeply misanthropic idea that humans are not unique, and are in fact a bit rubbish, is not a new invention of the AI evangelists, of course. It has become commonplace in fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science to argue that consciousness is a trick of the mind, that the subjective self is an illusion or a trick of the brain circuitry. Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett was making this case three decades ago. A parallel, materialist view is even older: the proposition that we’re just poorly functioning machinery was expressed by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, where he wrote: ‘You, dear human, are simply a gigantic lumbering robot.’
In the early 2000s, computer pioneer and technology critic Jaron Lanier recognised these two beliefs as two cheeks of the same backside – a backside he called ‘cybernetic totalism’. He was dismayed that so many highly intelligent friends of his in science and technology were sympathetic to this collection of prejudices, in part or in whole. Of the six characteristics he identified of this worldview, one was that ‘subjective experience either doesn’t exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect’. Subjectivity has long been unfashionable among the intelligentsia, as James Heartfield identified in The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained in 2002. Twentieth-century literary fashions like structuralism, cognitive science and more recently behavioural science merely added some intellectual respectability to these prejudices.
Two decades ago, Lanier already had an explanation for the supposedly ‘magical’ and ‘emergent’ properties of today’s AI. ‘To make the computers look smart, we have to make ourselves stupid’, he observed. It requires a curious act of self-abasement. Unfortunately, abasing ourselves is a habit to which our elites seem strangely addicted. Hollowing out what it means to be human has cleared the path for both artificial intelligence and apocalyptic environmentalism, two of the most powerful religions of the 21st century.
As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)
MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: Biden’s July Fourth Message from Last Year Has Aged Hilariously Terribly.
Related: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
RE-FUND THE POLICE: Ibram X. Kendi has stated, “When it comes to defunding the police, many Americans have historically supported inflated police budgets on the premise that it’s police who are able to bring down crime levels. But there’s no data that supports that.”
Paul Taylor cites the data that Kendi says doesn’t exist. He also discusses the fact that, back in 1990s, there was considerable support among black leaders (even Eric Holder) for tough on crime policies. At the time, they understood that blacks were both disproportionately the perpetrators and victims of crime. They took seriously their duty to protect those innocent victims instead of mouthing empty platitudes about how “black lives matter.”
These days Kendi’s ill-informed views seems to be typical: You’re a racist if you even mention the possibility that there has been a rise in crime.
(More from Taylor on race and crime here.)