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Then there is one other thought. If you are getting praise from the Kremlin, you aren’t on the right side of the argument. Much of what I’ve heard from people with whom I usually align politically has been Kremlin propaganda without a hint of nuance or consideration that invading another country is morally repugnant and indefensible. An internal conflict is not a justification. The popular uprising that overthrew Yanukovych, which some attribute to the CIA—as if they have that level of power (they don’t)—does not justify an invasion. There was never a justification.
The deal on the table is a shitty one for Ukraine and a good one for Russia. I always felt that the least bad outcome would be the one that would have to happen, but sucking up to Putin and pretty much rewarding him for his invasion is going to backfire. The accusations of NATO expanding eastwards begs the question, why do those countries want to join if Russia is such a peaceful neighbour? Zelensky’s point, clumsily and inappropriately made, is that diplomacy hasn’t worked so far and he is right. Moldova, Estonia, Finland and Sweden are getting twitchy and with good reason, they know how this is likely to pan out, hence the point Zelensky was making about security. Without that, no deal is worth signing, for the bloodshed will merely be delayed.
– Longrider
“Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?” asks Jonathan Kay in Quillette.
“I find this story astonishing as an outsider,” a British historian told me on social media last week. “Can I just confirm what I believe to be the case: There is no proof of any burials… just GPR [ground-penetrating radar] ‘anomalies’ [that] haven’t been investigated? The 215 children are, as things stand, entirely notional?”
The answer, in a word, is yes. Of the 215 “unmarked graves” of Indigenous children that were said to have been “discovered” on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia four years ago, not a single one has actually been shown to exist.
The astonishing thing is not that a remote detection system gave a reading that suggested something dramatic which upon further investigation turned out not to be. That happens all the time, in every field from mining to astronomy. Nor was there anything astonishing about the furore or about the swarms of reporters who converged on the site. If the inconsistencies in soil density had turned out to be dead bodies rather than “old pipes, septic lines, irrigation ditches, bedrock cracks, groundwater sources, mineral deposits, buried utility lines, and landfill artefacts” it would have been a knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself.
What is astonishing, what raises the whole Kamloops affair to the level of mass psychosis, is Official Canada’s response. No graves were found, but it decided to have the whole ‘knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself’ jamboree anyway.
… Canadians were given the impression that these radargrams displayed unmistakable images of child graves—perhaps even skeletons of the (claimed) victims.
Reporters accompanied these reports with descriptions of unspeakable crimes, supposedly sourced to the eyewitness memories of Indigenous elders—including children woken up in the middle of the night to dig shallow graves for their murdered friends
Mr Kay charitably says that Canadian journalists did not realise how many of these tales could be traced to “a defrocked priest named Kevin Arnett—a man who’d also claimed he’d witnessed Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip personally kidnap a group of Kamloops students in 1964.” I suspect that quite a few Canadian journalists did realise it. It is not as if the former Reverend Arnett concealed his views. Unlike many of the journalists, Arnett himself was probably sincerely deluded. Like false positive errors from machines, folk who think that they have secret information about a terrible conspiracy involving someone famous are not that rare. Poor old Arnett missed a trick by only witnessing the late Queen and her consort engage in a humdrum spot of kidnapping and murder. If he had just looked a little longer he would have seen them turn into shape-shifting pan-dimensional alien lizards and would have died richer than he did.
So twelve million Canadian dollars and heaven knows how many tons of earth1 later, the story that led Justin Trudeau to fly the flags on federal buildings at half-mast for almost six months and to hundreds of arson attacks on churches has finally been acknowledged to be a false alarm.
Just kidding over the last bit. Official Canada has not acknowledged it. They are in too deep.
As I suggested above, what made this period in Canada’s history unusual is not that the likes of Kevin Arnett – correction, “Eagle Strong Voice”2 as he later preferred to be called – made bizarre claims and that Noam Chomsky believed them. It’s that the likes of the Law Society of British Columbia believed them.
Not just believed them, but made them into an official doctrine that had to be affirmed by anyone wishing to practise law in British Columbia. The second half of Jonathan Kay’s article tells a story that in its implications is at least as frightening as the hysteria and fury described in the first half. Reading it, one keeps expecting to reach the point where one of the eminent lawyers entrusted with maintaining the standards of their profession in Canada’s westernmost province will finally issue a carefully-worded statement about waiting for evidence before making accusations, or about how both sides of any case must be heard, or about any of that old lawyer stuff that they used to believe in. Four years have gone by and that point has not yet come. More to the point, judging from their behaviour none of these eminent lawyers has yet dared to say to their colleagues, “Guys, I hate to be the one to ask, but have we got a watertight case?”
*
Related post: There will be no “truth and reconciliation” if an inconvenient truth is made illegal.
1Exactly how many tons of earth remains unclear. As CayleyGraph2015 commented in response to the earlier post, for all the talk of urgent investigation, less actual digging seems to have been done than one might expect given the severity of the allegations and the millions of Canadian dollars given to the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation to investigate the site.
2The “Eagle Strong Voice” link takes you to an excellent article by Terry Glavin in the independent Canadian news website The Tyee about Arnett and his claims, including one that might have been the model for “Pizzagate”. It was written in 2008, demonstrating that Arnett was well known on the conspiracy circuit even then. Interestingly, an editor’s note was added to Glavin’s article in 2021 apologetically saying that despite Glavin’s scepticism the remains of 215 children had been detected at Kamloops residential school. I await an editor’s note to the editor’s note.
There is a legit argument over what support we should give Ukraine. But I don’t understand how so many conservatives convinced themselves that Ukraine committed an unforgivable offense by getting themselves invaded.
– Megan McArdle
“Many Democrats rolled out of the election acknowledging the urgent need for a change in direction—for moderation, an end to cultural radicalism, a reconnect with working-class Americans. They immediately crashed into the left-wing base, threatening political death to heretics. Even if the party had the spine to push back, who exactly on the Democratic bench even remembers how to be a moderate?”
Writes Kimberley Strassel, in the Wall Street Journal ($). She beats up on the Donkey Party, and with good reason:
What looks like a rapid collapse was years in the making. The left’s takeover of the Democratic Party began with the rise of Barack Obama and it steadily eradicated dissenting voices. Nancy Pelosi’s “majority makers”—the Blue Dogs and moderates who won her the speakership in 2006—were made to support unpopular legislation and paid for it in lost elections. Progressives targeted and polarized other holdouts, picked them off in primaries, or drove them to resignation. It was Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”
The Squad’s wild proposals for the Green New Deal, open borders, Medicare for all—a program of socialism that traditional Democrats initially rejected—is now mainstream thinking, the policy litmus test for party entry.
But…
This could be the MAGA future. The GOP is a party of many factions, and their policy disagreements frequently produce stalemates and governing heartache. Influential Trump supporters are honing their own methods for stamping out even mild disagreement with the president’s approach: rally online supporters to pile on, label the target a member of the “uniparty” or the “establishment,” threaten a primary. This exact playbook was exercised numerous times over the past few weeks of nomination votes. “Rules for Radicals.”
It’s a recipe for intellectual stagnation. It’s a departure from the modern conservative movement, which has been defined by its innovative ideas, from school choice to civil-service reform. It sits unnaturally in a movement that has long prized individualism and entrepreneurship and condemned the left’s collectivism. It mistakes the goal of party unity (the act of members compromising on strongly held positions for a legislative victory) with the tyranny of party conformity (think like we do, or get the boot).
And look how it worked out for Democrats.
I will forever remember that it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that made me realise the political right is as retarded as the political left.
– Tim Newman
“Yes, Mr. Musk and his young team are seeing confidential government data. But he’s also the second most closely observed person on the planet, the exact opposite of the thousands who already have access to government data and stay invisible until they turn out to be Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Charles Edward Littlejohn or Jack Teixeira. Mr. Musk is said to be causing chaos but government programs are born in chaos—with congressional horse trading and payoffs to appease interest groups.”
– Holman Jenkins, Jr. Wall Street Journal
Naturally, the press has echoed the Deep State. “This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by a private citizen of unlimited means with no restrictions and no transparency,” said Kara Swisher of a man presently working for the democratically-elected president of our country, following his orders directly, and who at any moment can be (and ultimately almost certainly will be, let’s be honest) fired. “It’s a coup,” said Lindsay Owens of Groundwork (some kind of tedious, commie, dark money think tank), which was echoed throughout the press. “…what’s going on right now really is a genuine crisis,” said Jesse Singal, “and it should be recognized as such.”
But a crisis for who? I don’t share politics with the Deep State, and am not a huge fan of permanent, unelected, unaccountable power in general, so maybe this is hitting me different. In any case, I’ve been wondering: where is this level of “crisis” reporting on the president’s flurry of trans orders? His dismantling of DEI? The trade war (already mostly over, by the way) or Panama (also basically handled now, but I digress). With the exception of Selena Gomez, I haven’t seen many tears for deported violent criminals, something we heard a lot about back before the election. No, panic is almost entirely focused on saving federal bureaucrats. Why?
– Mike Solana
“Mr. Trump sometimes sounds as if the U.S. shouldn’t import anything at all, that America can be a perfectly closed economy making everything at home. This is called autarky, and it isn’t the world we live in, or one that we should want to live in, as Mr. Trump may soon find out.”
– Wall Street Journal (£)
I think this post is going to annoy Trump defenders, and of course he’s done a few things (shutting DEI down in schools and so on) that I applaud. But this is not the time for whataboutery when considering how terrible Biden was and Harris would have been, as they were and would have been. Those talking points have their place, but now Mr Trump is in office. He’s the President for the next four years.
So there’s no way to finesse this. Tariffs are a form of self-harm, and the reasons given in this particular case shows they are seen as clubs to hit countries with in order to make them change this or that policy. It creates uncertainty, hits inward investment and domestic activity. Domestic and global economic growth will be reduced from where it might have been. Tariffs are taxes, however hard one might try and spin that fact away. Since Adam Smith pointed this all out 250-plus years ago, the damaging impact of tariffs have been widely understood.
Tariffs, particularly given how they been justified and enacted, are a grave mistake by Mr Trump. Trying to claim that the US hit economic heights when tariffs existed in the late 19th century is another case of correlation and causation getting all blurred. The US in the post-Civil War era was a low-tax place: no federal income tax, no Fed, hardly much of a Welfare State as we’d call it, immense inflow of immigrants from places such as Russia, Germany, Italy, Sweden, etc. (Because there was little state welfare, such folk had to work their backsides off, and they did.) Here is an essay that in my view debunks the idea that the post-Civil War tariffs were a good idea.
There are facts that might be a puzzle, but not when you consider that Mr Trump loves tariffs even because they are a weapon. That’s what gets him out of bed in the morning, sometimes for good causes, often not. But the economic rationale is even worse when you consider that American energy costs, thanks to all that fracking he’s in favour of (a plus for him, in my view) means American manufacturing in some ways has a big competitive advantage on Europe, which self-harms because of Net Zero, red tape and high taxation.
Here is an essay I came across via social media and I think it is worth a read:
“I’m going to get a little wonky and write about Donald Trump and negotiations. For those who don’t know, I’m an adjunct professor at Indiana University – Robert H. McKinney School of Law and I teach negotiations. Okay, here goes.
Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of “The Art of the Deal,” a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If you’ve read The Art of the Deal, or if you’ve followed Trump lately, you’ll know, even if you didn’t know the label, that he sees all dealmaking as what we call “distributive bargaining.”
Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you’re fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump’s world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.
The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides don’t have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.
The problem with Trump is that he sees only distributive bargaining in an international world that requires integrative bargaining. He can raise tariffs, but so can other countries. He can’t demand they not respond. There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser. There are always more pies to be baked. Further, negotiations aren’t binary.
China’s choices aren’t (a) buy soybeans from US farmers, or (b) don’t buy soybeans. They can also (c) buy soybeans from Russia, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Canada, etc. That completely strips the distributive bargainer of his power to win or lose, to control the negotiation.
One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you’re going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don’t have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won’t agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you’re going to have to find another cabinet maker.
There isn’t another Canada.
So when you approach international negotiation, in a world as complex as ours, with integrated economies and multiple buyers and sellers, you simply must approach them through integrative bargaining. If you attempt distributive bargaining, success is impossible. And we see that already.
Trump has raised tariffs on China. China responded, in addition to raising tariffs on US goods, by dropping all its soybean orders from the US and buying them from Russia. The effect is not only to cause tremendous harm to US farmers, but also to increase Russian revenue, making Russia less susceptible to sanctions and boycotts, increasing its economic and political power in the world, and reducing ours. Trump saw steel and aluminum and thought it would be an easy win, BECAUSE HE SAW ONLY STEEL AND ALUMINUM – HE SEES EVERY NEGOTIATION AS DISTRIBUTIVE. China saw it as integrative, and integrated Russia and its soybean purchase orders into a far more complex negotiation ecosystem.
Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that’s just not how politics works, not over the long run.
For people who study negotiations, this is incredibly basic stuff, negotiations 101, definitions you learn before you even start talking about styles and tactics. And here’s another huge problem for us.
Trump is utterly convinced that his experience in a closely held real estate company has prepared him to run a nation, and therefore he rejects the advice of people who spent entire careers studying the nuances of international negotiations and diplomacy. But the leaders on the other side of the table have not eschewed expertise, they have embraced it. And that means they look at Trump and, given his very limited tool chest and his blindly distributive understanding of negotiation, they know exactly what he is going to do and exactly how to respond to it.
From a professional negotiation point of view, Trump isn’t even bringing checkers to a chess match. He’s bringing a quarter that he insists of flipping for heads or tails, while everybody else is studying the chess board to decide whether its better to open with Najdorf or Grünfeld.”
— David Honig
So there you have it. A bad idea having a damaging impact. Is Mr Trump playing 4-D chess with us all, as his defenders and explainers (including those who consider themselves pro-capitalism seem to be doing in some places that I see on social media), or is this in fact a big error that will eventually hurt America and the freer bits of the world? My worry is that history tells us that, with exceptions, tariff clashes tend to go wrong, lead to slower growth, and even nastier conflicts. It may be that Mr Trump is cleverer than we can appreciate, but I am sceptical.
Not a good start to his time in office. May wiser heads prevail, as they say.
Update: Here is a good article today (4 January) from Daniel Freeman at CapX on how, in his view, Mr Trump has misread the causes of America’s ascent as a business powerhouse.
- Trade makes everyone richer.
- Tariffs make the country applying them poorer.
- The fact that the US government is doing something stupid does not mean you have to join them.
“We are seeing anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere – how can doctors like me respond?”, writes Dr Mariam Tokhi in the Guardian. She starts with the heartrending story of an eight year old Australian girl called Elizabeth Struhs who died of diabetic ketoacidosis due to the withdrawal of the insulin she needed to live. Her family belong to a religious sect called “the Saints” that believes that medicine should not be used. Her father, mother and brother, alongside several other members of this sect, have been found guilty of her manslaughter. Dr Tokhi then writes,
I am seeing the rise of anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere. A patient in my clinic tells us that she has stopped her HIV antiviral tablets, because her pastor told her she has been healed by prayer. A parent rejects mental health treatment for his impulsive, suicidal teenager, telling me that ADHD and major depression are made-up, modern conditions. A pregnant mother asks me to sign her Advanced Care Directive, saying she declines blood products in the event of a life-threatening bleed during birth, worried that she could receive “vaccine-contaminated” blood. Another tells me she will “free-birth” without midwifery or medical care.
During the Covid pandemic, conspiracy theorists distributed junk maps of Covid-19 cases connecting them to 5G mobile phone towers. As a result, I spent countless hours doing community outreach, health promotion work and endless individual consultations trying to debunk pseudoscience and explaining (often unsuccessfully) the risk-benefit ratios of vaccines. In the last year, we have seen outbreaks of pertussis, measles, chickenpox, hepatitis and influenza, often linked to pockets of vaccine refusal.
Medical doctors and scientists now face a barrage of anti-science, anti-medicine narratives, and it feels like we are losing the battle. We are no longer trusted instinctively. So how do we engage with people who mistrust us?
It is a heartfelt piece. I don’t doubt her sincerity. My answer to her question is also heartfelt and sincere: start by admitting what you, the doctors and the medical profession as a whole, did to lose so much trust.
Remember how so many of you said that complete social isolation was vital for the duration of the pandemic except for those attending Black Lives Matter protests? Remember how distinguished doctors, epidemiologists and virologists were denounced when they said that, for much of the population, the risk of harm from Covid-19 was less than the risk of harm from lockdown? Remember how you declared the theory that the Covid-19 coronavirus strain came from a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a racist conspiracy theory, and cheered when Facebook deleted posts that discussed it? Remember how you self-censored discussion even among yourselves of the side effects that the Covid vaccines, like all vaccines, have – thus degrading the system of reporting adverse reactions that was once universally understood to be a vital tool to improve the safety of medicines?
For the record, I have taken every vaccine offered to me, including the Pfizer and the Astra Zeneca Covid-19 vaccines, and I am happy with that decision. But the unquestioning faith I once had that I would be given all relevant information before I chose to accept any medical procedure has gone. Some of it departed alongside the faith that I would be given a choice at all. Such faith as I now have in the medical profession as a whole is in its residual ethics. Most doctors were trained in better times, and according to better precepts. I trust old doctors more than young doctors. Lest I offend any young doctors reading this, that’s still quite a lot of trust. It’s not that I think any significant number of doctors set out to harm people. It’s that I do think a significant number of doctors refused to consider many serious and well-founded policy and treatment proposals regarding Covid on no better grounds than that they might have helped Donald Trump’s electoral chances, and an even larger number never even got to hear about such proposals in the first place, except at second hand as the ravings of folk in tinfoil hats. These proposals were not necessarily correct. But excluding them from discussion for political reasons gnawed away at the edifice of trust in medicine.
And the gnawing persists. When termites infest a property, they eat the walls from inside, so that if you tap the walls they sound hollow. If all else is quiet you can even hear the rustle of tiny jaws directly. That is a metaphor for how millions of people feel about the house of medicine now: not that it has fallen down with a crash – it is still their shelter – but that the walls have hollow patches and that sometimes one hears a soft scratching noise . . . and if you tell the owners of the house about it, they say you are imagining things or just trying to make trouble.
The Guardian‘s (pre-moderated) comments burn with outrage at the medical misinformation that comes from religious people and right-wingers. At medical misinformation coming from left-wing New Age practitioners, not so much; and at medical misinformation coming from the medical profession itself and enforced by censorship, none at all. Maybe some comments that pointed out that the medical establishment itself had some responsibility for the loss of public trust in medicine were made, but the Guardian censored them so we’ll never know what they said.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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