Category: authoritarian

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Electoral Dictatorships

I read this in the French magazine le Point. It bemoans the existence of “electoral dictatorships”. or electoral autocracies.  Like Hungary, Thailand and Turkey.

 

Autocraties électorales 

Le vent a tourné, et même des démocraties qui semblèrent prometteuses au tournant du siècle comme l’Inde, la Thaïlande, la Turquie ou la Hongrie sont retombées dans des ornières autoritaires. Ces pays illustrent le phénomène des « autocraties électorales », aussi appelées « démocratures », qui constituent un trait marquant de notre époque. Selon V-Dem, ces régimes sont devenus des plus courants, avec quelque 44 % de la population mondiale. Leurs dirigeants, arrivés au pouvoir par la voie électorale, subvertissent la démocratie en détruisant les contre-pouvoirs et restreignent les libertés. L’indépendance de la justice et la liberté d’expression disparaissent peu à peu, l’opposition démocratique et la société civile sont marginalisées, mais les apparences électorales restent plus ou moins maintenues, ce qui permet de sauvegarder l’illusion d’une démocratie. La Turquie ou la Hongrie sont des cas d’école. 

 

 

 

I cannot speak for Thailand or for Turkey. By contrast, I have been in Hungary several times in the past decade. The place is safe. I have seen with my own eyes women in full hijab walking around as tourists unmolested and visibly free. I have heard reported by observant Jews that they are able to go to synagogue on Friday night in yarmulke in complete ease, unlike almost every other place on Europe.

I have heard reports of retirees deciding to live in Hungary  because it is safe – crime-free, rather than in Germany, where doors are barred, not just locked.

Obviously none of such reports will satisfy the haters of Orban.

If you don’t have safety, you don’t have anything. Is Orban’s Hungary worse than a New York city controlled by the Democratic party, where you cant use the subway safely? Where crime forces you indoors? Where garbage pile up in the streets, and drug addicts shit where they want, as in San Francisco and Los Angeles?

What are these places, if not electoral dictatorships of the Democratic Party, where irremovable party apparatuses worsen the tolerance of crime, filth, plague, chaos, and decline.

Obviously the appearance of political choice matters little if you cant leave your house in safety, and this critique applies with great force to places where crime and decay are rampant, as in many US cities controlled by the Democrats, or European cities where Muslim immigrants terrorize the civic spaces, encouraged by equally left wing policies of European governments.

So spare us the false mourning for “democracy,  where the so-called democracy fails to address basic problems of personal liberty: freedom from crime, freedom from assaults by the homeless, freedom from drug dependence, freedom from Muslim anti-female violence, freedom from politically-imposed squalor and decadence.

Dictatorships come in many forms, and some of them may be elected. I suppose this is possible. But if some dictatorships are elected, and if they provide better outcomes for personal liberty of every kind, then does the term “electoral dictatorship” have any meaning whatever? And by contrast, if some regimes provide more personal security, and are led by men who keep being elected, then from what point of view are such societies and regimes failing? The freedom to criticize the regime is important, but is it more or less important than the freedom to shop, walk, gather in public and go to religious services in manifest peace and ease?

Defenders of democracy need to consider the basic facts of physical existence – felt sense of security – when they rank which countries are freer than others, which are dictatorships and which are not.

Are people actually freer in France or Germany than in Hungary? Or Japan for that matter?

 

 

 

 

Why do I agree with this left wing faggot?

The question is posed as obnoxiously as I can. Sorry. The real point is that the left/right political divide is increasingly irrelevant. I don’t care  very much  about disagreements I may have with Glenn Greenwald. I find myself agreeing with him about far more than I disagree, and that the agreements in our analysis matter far more. The issues have changed.   The previous left/right divisions in society are largely irrelevant. Who cares about how much of our money the state should absorb, when the issues seems to centre around malignant authoritarian governments that hate us and seek to lower our living standards through energy and food starvation? (Nitrogen fertilizer restrictions, pipeline shutdowns, carbon taxes).

Greenwald asks the right questions. How can you vote for Obama and then for Trump and feel no contradiction? It is because previous left/right policy differences are no longer pertinent. People are voting for outsiders who appear to share their contempt for the new governing classes. The globalistic, de-industrializing elites are the common enemy of left and right. Or people vote left and right at various times to express their contempt for the governing classes for how they are being treated.

In whose interests is society being divided by race, sexual orientation, and ethnicity? Two completely different realities are characterizing US politics: one the one side, white people are threatening to impose white supremacist government; on the other, Latino and other non-white voters are flocking to the Republicans. You know who threatens the Establishment by who is demonized.

Hence Tucker Carlson is now enemy #1.

A fascinating discussion ensues between Nick Gillespie and Glenn Greenwald, which worth your attention. Lots of forbidden topics are discussed.

At minute 57 they turn to the subject of control of speech on the Internet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill C10 – Internet censorship coming to a site you read

For some time now I have been tweeting and organizing resistance to Bill C-10. This has kept me busy in my personal capacity, as it were, and Dalwhinnie has had to take back seat to my public-facing self.

I have learned or been reminded of several truths in the course of the past few weeks, but first let me tell you about the bill.

There are two modes of communications, legally speaking. On the one hand, there are speech and writing, film production, and others which occur without prior permission from the state. You write what you want and assume responsibility after publication for slander, criminal conspiracy, obscenity, and other legal liabilities. Then there is that creature of the twentieth century, called broadcasting, which requires a licence from the state. You broadcast under conditions established for a particular class of speaker, one who is assumed to be few in number talking to hundreds of thousands who are limited in their choice of “stations”. This was the original rationale for broadcasting regulation,  few-to-many, one way and which used airwaves that interfered with one another unless carefully assigned by central authority.

It will be readily understood that every advance of electronic communications has served to increase the number of stations, from three to seven to thirty to fifty, to the Internet. The internet has exploded the number of speakers into the millions, or tens of millions. With new forms of addressing, such as IPv6, the number of “stations” will be in the trillions.

Despite this, Canadian law still treats the Internet as a form of “broadcasting”, a licensable activity that for thirty years the government had the wisdom not to touch. Previous CRTC decisions had said that regulating the Internet as broadcasting was superfluous and unneeded. These decisions of the CRTC claimed jurisdiction over the Internet but did not exercise it.

Now that restraint has been overthrown. In a search for revenue from web giants, and egged on by the Canadian cultural organizations – the ones who feed on television productions subsidies – the government, led by the Minister of Canadian Heritage Steven Guilbault, has plunged recklessly into a gigantic extension of federal authority over communications.

Bill C10, which is a series of amendments to the Broadcasting Act, would treat

  • all websites
  • all user-generated uploads to social media sites

as “broadcasting”, that is, occasions where you could be regulated by the CRTC. The difference is that, in the case of user generated content uploaded to platforms, you would not be the broadcaster, the platform would be the broadcaster. This would outsource government control and censorship to the large platforms, who would act under CRTC or other government regulations.

This website, and all others, commercial, artistic, political, would be treated as broadcasting if they were “predominantly” -word undefined – audio-visual rather than printed in nature. It is not difficult to imagine that by bit count alone, and by inclusion of a few video inserts, a newspaper would become a “broadcaster”, in the same way that a podcaster is now, according to this Bill, a radio station.

It reaches the absurdity of a zoom call among church attendees being considered broadcasting, and subject to federal regulation. Will “balance” in religious programming be imposed on church services? Will the imam share time in the pulpit? If you think this is absurd, you don’t know the CRTC.

 

The authors of C10 are seeking to jam the internet into the form of broadcasting, rather than make  broadcasting conform to the Internet.

It is readily evident that a large number of issues will remain undecided by the bill itself and that years of hearings and lawsuits will ensue, including challenges to the constitutionality of the bill, on several grounds.

But back to the tweetstorm.

The public debate on this bill took a while to get started, for several reasons. The first is that members of Parliament are not clever lawyers on the whole, and it took them a while to scope out the extent of the government’s ambitions. Both the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP favour large public subsidies to their unionized buddies in the TV production industry. The Liberals favour their own guy and they are not averse to totalitarian controls on the Internet, it seems. That left the Conservatives to slowly appreciate that the Liberals had handed them a major electoral campaign issue if they wanted it. They finally realized what the bill meant to ordinary Canadians. And ordinary Canadians are waking up.

This state of affairs was changed only by professors of communications, like Michael Geist, members of the Internet Society of canada, and former CRTC commissioners such as Peter Menzies, Konrad von Finckensten and Timothy Denton to write op-eds in papers until the latter woke up to the notion that they would become “broadcasters” if this bill passed. Open Media got involed and that meant that the political left started to agitate against it. As one wit said of the left-right alliance on C10: “we want to be able to shout at each other without the state refereeing.”

The ignorance of the press on this issue has been astounding, if you were not already cynical about their capacity to understand issues. They had to be told in black and white what the Act said, and even then they still hesitated to get it.

The opinion battle among the elites has taken place principally on Twitter. Throughout, the motives of those opposed to the Bill have been questioned. Vast conspiracies have been imagined by the proponents of the bill, sponsored by the likes of Google and Facebook. It has not occured to them that people could actually freely spend time opposing the bill because of principled concerns for freedom of speech. If you speak only for money, it comes as a shock that people will speak and write for no money at all.

Not once have the arguments of the opponents of the bill ever been frontally addressed. Not once. The Minister has been reduced to blithering incoherence on several occasions by being asked factual questions about what the Bill plainly says. It is as if he had not read his own bill, or did not understand it. A reasoned defence of the Bill has been missing. It might have been attempted, but was not, largely because to address the issues would be to deal with some real concerns that the bill’s proponents would rather not discuss.

The TV production and other recipients of cultural largesse in Canada have only tweeted their unanimous support for C10. (Canada spens about as much money on cultural subsidies overall as we spend on the Candain navy). The French Canadians, it would appear, have no concerns for freedom of speech, and seem not to understand what English Canadians are going on about. Their confidence in a federal institution, the CRTC, to decide matters of cultural concern to them, appears to be unbounded. We are confidently told by those who feel they understand Quebec that even to raise these concerns with them is a provocation.

Normally a story has a two or three day run. The C10 issue has occupied weeks of media attention, and won’t go away because it constitutes an immense assault upon historic rights of free speech won by revolutions and bloodshed in the 17th and 18th centuries, revolutions that passed French Canada by. It remains to be seen whether the Liberals have handed the Conservatives a winning election issue or not. But if enough people say they will die on this hill, not even the federal Liberals can overcome the resolve of the nation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trumpophobia 3

3. Differentism versus inclusivism

By far the most interesting cause of people voting for Trump is explained by reference to one of the enduring divisions of the human species, writes Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic Monthly.

Of the several views of why people choose Trump over his opponents, one is the important discovery that some people do not like or react well to differences. As Friedersdorf explains the research, this has less to do with racism as such than with ‘differentism‘, of which race-ism, tribal-ism, national-ism are examples, but which do not exhaust the categories of differences.

In one sense this is a big obvi-ism. As Jonathan Haidt explained better and more generously in The Righteous Mind, people differ along several axes. Psychological research has identified six such axes, of which procedural fairness and equality of outcome are the two that most engage the ‘liberal’ mind. Group cohesion/treason and the sacred versus the profane are two other such differences, and naturally conservatives score higher in concern for the sacred and for group cohesion.

The author on whom Friedersdorf relies is Karen Stenner, who wrote “The Authoritarian Dynamic“. The treatment accorded the more conservative personality type by Stenner is far less generous that Haidt’s. Stenner seeks to pathologize the syndromes. From the Amazon book blurb:

” This book addresses that question by developing a universal theory of what determines intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance, moral intolerance and punitiveness. It demonstrates that all these seemingly disparate attitudes are principally caused by just two factors: individuals’ innate psychological predispositions to intolerance (“authoritarianism”) interacting with changing conditions of societal threat. The threatening conditions, particularly resonant in the present political climate, that exacerbate authoritarian attitudes include, most critically, great dissension in public opinion and general loss of confidence in political leaders.”

Friedersdorf describes Stenner’s methodology as follows:

” Stenner began her research with a questionnaire that probed the attitudes of her subjects toward child-rearing. Their answers indicated the extent to which they think that it’s more important for kids to obey their parents, have good manners, be neat and clean, and follow the rules—or alternatively, that it’s more important that they are responsible for their own actions, and creative, curious, independent thinkers who follow their own conscience and show good judgment. Designed to provide an unobtrusive, bare-bones measure of each subject’s fundamental stances toward conformity and difference, the child-rearing questionnaires were scored and the subjects arrayed from most libertarian to most authoritarian.”

It is entirely natural that child-rearing has a huge impact on how personalities develop. It is also evident that there is continuum between rule obeying behaviour and independence, and moreover, that there is no inherent superiority whereby the curious and independent minded are to be placed above the obedient and conformist, though liberals might like to think so. Or do they confess to believing in a cognitive and moral superiority to people like themselves? Of course they do.

Stenner observed that “fears regarding immorality and crime, claims about the critical need to reestablish some normative order, and elaboration of plans for accomplishing this” occupied the bulk of “their psychic space,” consuming a hugely disproportionate share of their time and energy.”

Who defines hugely disproportionate?

“Ultimately,” Stenner contended, “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”

Both Stenner and the coverage of her book by Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic Monthly constantly insinuate that concern for a normative order is, in some real fashion, an aberration, a morally inferior position, and that it connotes political “authoritarianism”, a political doctrine, rather than “communitarianism”, which has a much more agreeable sound. If you read a conservative thinker like Thomas Sowell or the British philosopher Roger Scruton, you would gain an entirely more generous perspective on concern for a normative order. Concern for the general state of society, for community and for public and private order is not the exclusive concern of the anxious, the ill-educated, or the authoritarian. People who raise their children to analyze and make intelligent choices are not simultaneously without concern for the state of society.

Indeed, I call the current obsession with diversity and inclusion “inclusivism”. It is a doctrine that holds, for instance, that the student body of a cognitively elite institution should be constituted by racial or ethnic groups in proportion to their presence in the general population; that differences in incarceration rates or rates of being shot by police cannot justifiably be different according to race or ethnicity, but must be uniform across society as a whole. The failure or inability to make relevant and justifiable discriminations is the bane of modern society.

Stenner describes the phenomenon as “innate psychological dispensations to intolerance” and calls it “authoritarianism“. This is a dreadful failure to analyze properly and a gross insult to some of the attitudes that have elevated us from living in caves. Some people are intolerant of dirt and disorder, of rodents in the basement, of shit in drinking water. What is tolerated or not tolerated lies on a spectrum. Some people think there needs to be a decision in any given society to drive either on the right or the left, but not both. Some people are rule enforcers, some rule breakers. When to obey and what rules not to obey is a matter of the most careful judgment. Personalities differ in their propensities to conform or break rules, and these propensities are to some extent capable of being different according to political or religious regimes.

The pathologization of political difference begins in Stenner’s characterization of those who want a rules-based order as “authoritarian”. Her analysis, and that of Friedersdorf reporting on it are no more than another form of snobbish condescension towards those whose anxieties for a sense of community are greater than their own.

At the root of all such characterizations of Trump supporters lies the firm belief that those who do not like him are cognitively and morally superior.