We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Well, he went ahead and did it. In a ceremony outside the White House, Donald Trump unveiled a list of tariffs on countries, on “friend and foe”, starting with a minimum of 10% (the UK, which is now outside the European Union, was hit with the 10% rate, while the EU was hit with double that amount). In general I see this as a bad day for the US and world economy for all the sort of reasons I have laid out.
This will not adjust the worldview of the red hat wearers, but I wonder has it ever occurred to Mr Trump’s fans that his arguments, when adjusted for a bit of rhetoric, are more or less leftist stuff from the 1990s?
I know he trash-talks. I know that much of what he says is aimed at his base, so it should be taken with a pinch of salt, but this is bizarre. Greenland is not part of the United States and has no desire to be. If the USA wants to enter into trade talks that give them mineral rights or even defensive bases, then fine. But talk of taking it is no different to what is going on in Ukraine – a bigger, hostile neighbour taking by force. In reality, they could do it. Greenland could not withstand an invasion, and despite its tough talk, Denmark would be unable to offer much assistance. Denmark, like the rest of Europe, is weak defensively, and the US administration knows it. Despite the trash-talking, I really don’t think he would go that far.
Would he?
As I say, what the Hell is going on here?
– Longrider
Robbie Collin in the Telegraph actually gave it three stars:
Disney’s Snow White: Not too woke – and better than Wicked
“And they all lived adequately ever after” is not the fairy-tale ending Disney was presumably originally gunning for. But at this point, the studio will surely take what it can get.
[…]
…I’ll say this for the result: it’s better than Wicked. The opening act sets out just how existentially tearing our heroine’s existence is under Queen Gal. (With apologies to Milan Kundera, call it The Unbearable Snow-Whiteness of Being.) And for the most part, this section is fairly beige and dull. But once Zegler scuttles off to the forest, where she teams up with two chirpy septets – the digitised dwarfs and a zany gaggle of bandits, who may have been dwarf replacements in an early draft – it really picks up.
The new versions of two classic numbers, Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work, are stylishly choreographed and rousingly performed, while a handful of the new songs, from The Greatest Showman’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, just about keep pace. (I loved Princess Problems, a teasing ode to Gen-Z prissiness which delivers about all the culture-war the film is prepared to wage.)
In contrast, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gives it one star, and I get the feeling that if he had free rein he’d have given it one asteroid:
Snow White review – Disney’s exhaustingly awful reboot axes the prince and makes the dwarves mo-cap
That title [Snow White] is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders.
[…]
There are some changes: the hero is no longer a prince, but a more democratic citizen who leads a Robin Hood type insurgency from the forest against the witch’s tyranny with SW joining in on a Maid Marian basis. But he still gets to do the controversial non-consent kiss once our heroine has gone into her picturesque coma. But the dwarves? Will this film make them look sort of like everyone else, like the Munchkins in Wicked? No. This Snow White feebly makes them mo-cap (motion-capture) animated figures, but it also – heartsinkingly – duplicates their presence by giving the prince his own gang of seven live-action bandits, in which people with dwarfism are represented. This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.
Has anybody reading this actually done that thing we used to do with films before the internet?
“UK hoping to work with China to counteract Trump’s climate-hostile policies”, writes Fiona Harvey in the Guardian.
The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and a host of developing countries, to offset the impact of Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies and his sharp veer towards climate-hostile countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
A “new global axis” with the People’s Republic of China. Who could possibly object to that?
The article continues,
Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, arrived in Beijing on Friday for three days of talks with top Chinese officials, including discussions on green technology supply chains, coal and the critical minerals needed for clean energy. The UK’s green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, but access to components and materials will be crucial for that to continue.
What they mean by this is that the number of people paid to make government regulations, interpret government regulations, comply with government regulations, check that others are complying with government regulations, and punish those who do not comply with government regulations is increasing three times faster than the rest of the economy, which for some mysterious reason is growing more slowly than expected at the moment.
“They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.”
– Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr., regarding the case of Michael E. Mann, Ph.D., v. National Review, Inc., et al in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia Civil Division 2012 CA 008263 B.
Hat tips to John in the comments to yesterday’s post and to John Hinderaker of Powerline via Instapundit.
As Mr Hinderaker says, the facts of this case are rather complicated but the judge’s conclusions are unequivocal – and the conclusion of the court that Dr Michael E Mann, maker of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph”, knowingly participated in a falsehood has a certain… resonance.
Related post: “Samizdata quote of the day – unfortunately the high-status fraudster won.” I am happy to say that the injustice done a year ago has been partially undone by this latest ruling.
The notion that Russia is inherently stronger than Europe is false, of course — Europe has a lot more people and a lot more heavy industry. All the pushups in the world haven’t prevented the vaunted Russian military from turning in a decidedly lackluster performance in Ukraine. But to the American right, perceptions and posturing and vibes are often more important than numbers and statistics. Russia gives off strength, so it must be strong.
And to the American right, strength is everything in international affairs. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and concepts like the rules-based international order or international law are laughable. If Russia and Europe are to fight, Trump and company want to bet on the side with the shirtless pushups.
– Noah Smith
“I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America…As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!”
– William Pitt the Elder, speaking in the House of Lords on 18th November 1777 in opposition to the war against the rebellious American colonists.
There are some things about the views of supporters of President Trump, and of Americans in general, about the situation in Ukraine that I understand very well. Consider this Bloomberg clip from the President’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 25th September 2018. The caption to the video says gleefully, “Watch the German delegation’s response at UNGA when Trump says “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” The German delegation had a good laugh at the American rube and his silly ideas about not being dependent on Vladimir Putin, and all the sophisticated people on both sides of the Atlantic laughed with them.
They are not laughing now. They are still asking for money, though. In the face of such arrogance, it is no surprise that President Trump and a great many of his countrymen are saying, “We tried to warn you about Russia but you laughed. It’s nice that you ‘stand with Ukraine’ now, but you can do it with your own money. Bye.”
That, I get. I don’t agree with the view that the conquest of a country in Europe by Russia can safely be ignored by the US, but I can understand it.
What I do not get is how many Americans whose views I normally admire have moved from saying, “This war is sad, but it’s none of our business” to speaking as if Ukraine were morally in the wrong for continuing to fight. To take one example, here is a recent tweet from Elon Musk:
What I am sickened by is years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose.
Anyone who really cares, really thinks and really understands wants the meat grinder to stop.
PEACE NOW!!
Similar impassioned pleas for “peace” are being made by many accounts that I follow on X that belong to Americans who are proud supporters of the right to bear arms, people who would until recently have considered themselves spiritual descendants of those unconquerable Americans praised by Pitt. It seems to me that the position of the Ukrainians now is very like that of the Americans then, right down to the invaders of their country being reinforced by wretched hirelings from far away who have been sold by their leaders and sent to die in a the shambles of a foreign war of which they know nothing.
Were the Americans of December 1776 culpable for not laying down their arms when all seemed lost? Should the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware be covered up in shame?
Washington not caring about the meat-grinder
Carney is living, breathing proof that expert credentials are no substitute for sound judgement or political acumen. He has embraced just about every naff and dangerous political trend of our times, never deviating from the Davos script.
Most notoriously, as governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, Carney became the high priest of Project Fear ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote. He warned before the referendum that a Leave vote would spark an instant recession. It didn’t. He claimed Brexit would make investment in British assets so risky that it could ‘test the kindness of strangers’ should the UK take the leap. Needless to say, this was politically motivated hysteria, not a sober assessment of Britain’s economic prospects outside the EU.
More recently, his endorsement of Labour’s Rachel Reeves as chancellor ahead of the UK General Election also smacked of both dubious judgement and needless political interference. Carney said in autumn 2023 that it was ‘beyond time’ her plans were put into action. Yet since Reeves’s plans were actually put into action, in her first budget in October last year, the UK economy has teetered on the brink of recession, unemployment has risen and government borrowing costs have shot up. Call it the Carney kiss of death.
– Fraser Myers
Wittingly or otherwise, the MAGA online right started to absorb Russia’s narrative on Ukraine: that it isn’t a real country, that the Ukrainians aren’t a real people, that if they are a real people then they are uniquely corrupt. On and on it went: that Ukrainian soldiers are ‘literal’ Nazis, that Zelensky is constantly buying villas and yachts in the south of France, that the whole war is one big money-laundering operation, that Ukraine’s war to push the Russians back is unwinnable because of the great might of the Russian army – and that the whole thing is a giant waste of US taxpayers’ money.
– Douglas Murray (£)
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
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