Canadian Cincinnatus

The importance of Lars von Trier’s pro-Nazi comments at Cannes

Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has been making unwatchable extreme-left films for decades so people were naturally taken aback when he expressed some Nazi sympathies in a rambling Q&A session at the Cannes Film Festival this year. They think: how can somebody this left-wing be for something so right-wing. 

Answer: easy, because Adolph Hitler consciously designed National Socialism as a Hegelian synthesis of the right and the left. From the right he took nationalism, militarism and anti-Semitism. From the left, he took socialism, totalitarianism, class warfare, the concentration camp (invented by Trotsky) and the deliberate mass murder of entire categories of people (also placed in the 20^th century politician’s toolbox by Trotsky). As a result, the left is much closer ideologically to the Nazis than they let on. So for a left-wing extremist like von Trier to be sympathetic to Nazism is not that much of a stretch.

The left likes to emphasize National Socialism’s right wing elements, but the left-wing elements not so much because they are its dirty little secret. There is a reason why we call Nazis, Nazis rather than National Socialists, as Hitler himself referred to his movement. In his meandering soliloquy, von Trier inadvertently let the cat out of the bag.

We should draw attention to this secret whenever we can by always referring to Nazis as National Socialists. By doing so we make the left-wing elements of Nazism explicit, thereby making it harder for the left to tar us with the Nazi brush. Or better yet, if time permits, we should call Nazism by its full name: the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, which makes them sound more like a Teutonic version of the NDP than anything legitimately conservative. 

 

It’s regulations - not labour costs - that are killing the US manufacturing sector

Read this article in the American Spectator, written by an entrepreneur who contrasts the regulatory burden faced by an upstart manufacturer in America and in China. For instance, he says:

“Today the environment for starting and operating a manufacturing plant is not good. Gone are the days of "Great, go to it, do the best you can." Replaced by, "NIMBY" -- Not In My Back Yard. The government has imposed itself as our costly overseer, placing environmental, zoning, and wage/benefit restrictions so burdensome in time and cost that businesses are left barely competitive if not impossible to begin.”

He goes on to describe all the regulatory hurdles, burdens and risks he faced while trying to set up a manufacturing plant in a north-eastern US state. The list is long so I won’t repeat it here. In contrast, this is the regulatory procedure he faced while starting up a manufacturing plant in China:

“Now, consider my experience the last time I visited China. I was escorted by the governor of Tianjin State to one of his new cities and shown the process to open a manufacturing facility. I was led into a room with a series of desks. You start at the first desk where you present your plan. Thereafter you proceed from one to the next obtaining approvals or agree to modifications on the spot until at the last table where you are shown what lots and buildings are available that best suit your needs and the price of each. The total timeline for permits, from beginning to approval, takes about 3 hours.”

“Now, this is China so the government and the state share 30% of your business, but considering the ease of entry, increased in-country sales and helpful attitude, this is a small price to pay, especially considering America's 35% plus corporate tax rates.”

Now I know the demise of the manufacturing sector in the US has been greatly exaggerated by populists like Pat Buchanan. I have argued several times in these pages that much of the drop in manufacturing jobs in the US is due to increased productivity. In other words, the US is making more with less. i.e. this is a Good Thing. But still… the mountain of regulations and the unnecessary risks and arbitrary constraints they impose on manufacturers can’t be good for America’s (and Canada’s) vitality.

The Obamariods like to present the free market GOP with a choice: you can have pro-growth economic policies (i.e. lower taxes), or you can cut the deficit, but you can’t have both. Well, here’s a way you can have your cake and eat it too: cut regulations. Every regulation you eliminate works on both problems: it promotes growth by eliminating an obstacle to entrepreneurs while simultaneously cutting costs because there is incrementally less for the bureaucrats to do.

Of course, eliminating their false choice is why the left doesn’t want to talk about deregulation. Their biggest fear is that it will work too well.

 

A wonderful thing is happening in Eastern Europe

This according to Stratfor:

“At a Thursday meeting, the defense ministers of the Visegrad Four (V4) - a loose regional grouping of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia - decided to create a battle group. The decision is significant but expected. It's significant because it shows that the V4 states are willing to upgrade their loose alliance to the security and military level. It's expected because STRATFOR has long forecast that they would be forced to take security matters into their own hands by NATO's lack of focus on the singular issue that concerns them: Russian resurgence in the post-Soviet sphere.”

This echoes some advice I gave for Eastern Europe last February on these pages:

“What the Eastern European countries need to do is to develop a rapid reaction force –within the context of NATO – for the express purpose of repelling a Russian invasion. Don’t involve the Obama-led US or the effete Western Europeans in this. They are too vacillating. To cut Russian bullying off at the pass, the real purpose of this force should be stated explicitly right away and large-scale joint maneuvers held as soon as possible afterwards. In this way they will tell the Russians by words and actions that they will hang together. The Russians will scream provocation and hurl gigantic threats at them, but let them. The Russians always try to get their way with the West by bluff and bluster.

Could such a force hold off the Russian army? I don’t know if they could win, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that by fighting together as a unified force they would turn any Putinist invasion into a big Charlie Foxtrot.

How do I know this? Simple. Examine the performance of the Russian Army in South Ossettia in the summer of 2008. The invasion of this small, postage stamp sized plot of land containing a mere 50,000 souls, with a pro-Russian puppet government already installed, had a tragicomic air about it reminiscent of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. Shortly afterwards Georgian TV interviewed a Russian soldier who deserted because he hadn’t eaten in 5 days. The interview was conducted at a MacDonald’s. Russian logistics are that bad. Additionally, every single volunteer unit in the Russian Army was required to achieve what little they did. Keep in mind that these are the only units in the Russian Army competent enough to execute complicated maneuvers such as an invasion. The bulk of the Russian Army is conscripted. These troops are almost completely ineffective.”

It’s nice to see events prove me right. Of course, I am not saying these things are happening because of anything I wrote, but rather, the Eastern European governments simply came to the same conclusion that I did: that the Good Lord only helps those who help themselves. It’s best not to rely entirely on the goodwill of the US, as Obama’s election has amply demonstrated.

The DIY spirit in the East also shows that the pundits who denounce NATO as a worn-out organization with no mission are completely off the mark. They make the same mistake many columnists do when comment on events in Europe. They underestimate the increasing importance of Eastern Europe in Europe. Whether they are predicting the dawn of Eurabia, as Mark Steyn does regularly, or just issuing generic criticisms of Euro-weenie-ism, commentators usually fail to draw a distinction between Eastern and Western Europe. Much disapprobation that is valid for Western Europe is completely off the mark for the East. In Eastern Europe, the economies are far more open and dynamic, the local population more self-reliant, political correctness dismissed as Soviet propaganda-lite and the fin de siecle decadence of the EU ruling class is as widely scorned there as it is in a Mark Steyn column.

Eastern Europe is currently discounted because they are still the junior partners in Europe. But as their position relative to the decadent West changes, so will the world’s appraisal of them. 

P.S. To confirm the point I made last year about the decrepit state of Russian army logistics, here is a recent news item about how Russian soldiers are fed dog food.

 

Two Maryland teens get charged with a hate crime, but not the hate crime that they actually committed

According to this Fox News story, the two black teenage girls who viciously beat a white transsexual woman in a Maryland McDonalds last month are being charged with a hate crime in addition to assault. A cell phone video of the protracted beating ended up on the internet, generating widespread revulsion and disgust after Drudge linked to it. One thing is for sure: after viewing it, there is no way you can conclude that the principal alleged attacker is “a very nice young lady” as her lawyer describes her.

The attackers were black and the victim is white. Therefore it is possible that anti-white racism was at least a partial motive. Indeed, the police have charged the two ‘nice young ladies’ with a hate crime, but not for an anti-white hate crime but for an anti-gay hate crime. I have my doubts about the police’s own motive in the decision.

From the video, anti-white racism is strongly suggested. I think this was why people reacted to it the way they did. I think the cops wanted to charge her with an anti-white hate crime but racial politics in Maryland and political correctness in general gave them second thoughts. I think when it came out that the victim was transgendered, everybody seized on that because it is a safe, uncontroversial motive for a hate crime. 

Why do I think this? Partly from the video, where the victim looks like a white woman. I was certainly clued out about the victim’s transgendered status when I first saw it and I think the perpetrators were as well. Consider the fact that just prior to the assault, the ‘nice young lady’ had accused the victim of ‘looking at her man’. This suggests sexual jealously as one motive. Would the lead attacker be as jealous of a transsexual looking at her man as she would of a white woman? I strongly doubt it. If she had been aware of the victim’s sexual status, I think the ‘nice lady’ probably would have just contemptuously laughed at her, secure in the knowledge that ‘her man’ wouldn’t be tempted.

All of which illustrates the folly of hate crime as a legal concept - the reason why I bring the whole incident up in the first place. While I think part of the reason white people reacted to the video as strongly as they did was because they felt personally threatened by what they saw (“Hey! That could happen to me!”), what difference should that make to the court proceedings? The fact is, aggravated assault is an ugly thing - regardless of the motive. Would it have been any less ugly if the victim had the same sex and skin colour as the attackers? Doubtlessly the video would have been less controversial, but the harm inflicted would have been the same.

All the hate crime angle does is inject grievance politics and increasingly convoluted PC metaphysics (‘How many holocaust deniers can dance on the head of a pin?’) into what is really (or what should be) a straightforward criminal matter. The sex and skin of the participants should be irrelevant to the prosecutors - except in determining motive. 

 

People who tell half the story on immigration criticize the Fraser Institute for telling half the story on immigration

The Fraser Institute has just released a report on the state of immigration in Canada that, at first glance, appears to be a much needed real check on the subject. According to the National Post:

“The Fraser Institute report says newcomers pay about half as much in income taxes as other Canadians but absorb nearly the same value of government services, costing taxpayers roughly $6,051 per immigrant and amounting to a total annual cost of somewhere between $16.3-billion and $23.6-billion.”

Of course, their conclusion is getting pushback from the Establishment’s enforcers:

“’I’m sure the data behind the numbers is sound, but I think it only tells half the story,’ said Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the Dominion Institute and author of Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto. ‘The fact is that we’re doing immigration on the cheap … We don’t spend enough money on language services, and we don’t do enough skills accreditation and training.’”

So our problem with immigration is that existing Canadians are not spending enough money on new arrivals? Swell... 

In a sane country, immigration would be like any other issue, with the pros and cons of various legal options debated rationally so that the most appropriate policy for the country could be enacted. But Canada isn’t a sane country, at least with regard to certain subjects. Immigration is one of those issues – like affirmative action – where we are encouraged to have a robust one-sided debate. We cheerlead (“Immigration! Immigration! Yeaah immigration!”) for the Received Opinion and scream racist! in a mandatory ritualistic two-minute hate at anyone who dares criticise it.

The collapse of the housing bubble and the rise of affordable family formation

An interesting angle on America’s housing crisis:

“But housing's troubles may have a silver lining. If you're a homeowner, the steep fall in prices is calamitous. But if you're a future buyer, it's a godsend. What we're seeing is a massive wealth transfer from today's older homeowners to tomorrow's younger homeowners.”

“The National Association of Realtors routinely publishes a housing "affordability" index, which judges the ability of median families to buy the median-price home at prevailing interest rates. By this measure, existing homes are the most affordable since the index started in 1970.

Young buyers "will be able to enter the housing market at bargain prices," argues NAR economist Lawrence Yun. When home prices again rise, increases will parallel income gains, meaning that the relative burden of housing costs will remain roughly stable, Yun says.”

One of the most important but underrated factors of a successful, sustainable society is affordable family formation. It is so underrated that it is actively rooted against. For instance, rising home prices are always hailed as a good thing. Well, who are expensive houses a good thing for? Not young couples starting to build a family. And I say this as an existing homeowner with no mortgage.

The fact remains, a society is sustainable (to borrow the environmentalists’ favourite phrase) only if it provides a friendly environment to young couples who want to have children – i.e. create the next generation. This is why anti-sprawl regulations such as Ontario’s Greenbelt (where much of the land around Toronto has been declared off-limits to development) are so harmful.

This is also why the urban boosters - who think a great city must have a ‘vibrant’ downtown core to attract high-end knowledge workers such as venture capitalists, celebrity chefs and IT gurus – are so off the mark. What a functioning – as opposed to great - city needs is a large, stable, engaged middle class; in other words, men and women with families. And how do you attract them? With affordable houses that have backyards for their children to play in; safe, child-friendly neighbourhoods; good schools; and lots of mid-level jobs.

Those smart and sexy knowledge workers the urban planners are infatuated with are too footloose to be really engaged in any community they live in. It is the middle class families who plant their flag where they live and proclaim, this is my home! It is their bourgeois values that imbibe the city with the kind of civic virtues that make it a great place for ordinary people to live in.

Cities that don’t care for affordable family formation and court high-end yuppies instead, end up with a bifurcated population: the very rich (who can afford the land and the taxes) and the very poor (who don’t have to). Manhattan is the prime example with its juxtaposition of the Upper West Side and Harlem. San Francisco is a classic example of a town that has made the journey from a middle-class-friendly city (which it actually was in the 1950’s) to the overpriced yuppie paradise it is today. As a result, there is a growing dearth of children, much to the consternation of the local teachers’ union. Young families of modest and even not-so-modest means can’t afford to live there, and increasingly don’t.

In a generation, San Francisco will have an entirely different population...and character.

Dick Morris explains why President Obama’s toast in 2012

In a recent blog article, Dick Morris says:

“In our book Revolt!, we warn that inflation may well be the dominant legacy of the Obama presidency. While he had Bush’s help in creating high unemployment, he has driven us into inflation all on his own.”

“Faced with these increases in fixed costs, businesses will have to raise prices. But nobody will be able to pay them because the economy is terrible. That will trigger a loss of customers and ever higher prices to make up the gap. This stagflation cycle is now upon us and will wipe out any gains that the so-called recovery may offer. 

Annual inflation of 6.5% is just the beginning, just like $5 gas is just the beginning. The inflationary forces Obama has unleashed by his record deficits and his virtual tripling of the money supply will batter the economy with a violence that will make his re-election impossible.”

This analysis strikes me about right. What Obama’s poll numbers are right now is irrelevant. Ronald Reagan had much worse numbers at the midpoint of his Presidency. The fact is that, if everything you do as President harms the economy, the economy will likely still be in bad shape when you seek re-eelction.

And this analysis does not even consider the looming debt crisis, whose solution Obama is doing his best to obstruct. When Albert Einstein was once asked what the most powerful force in the universe was, he replied “compound interest”.

Given this, I think that my prediction of several years ago, that Obama’s name will not be on the ballot in 2012, might yet come to pass.

 

Slut walks: demonizing sensible advice

In January, a Toronto police officer inadvertently stepped on a feminist landmine while conducting a crime prevention seminar at York University. What prompted it was a spate of late night attacks against women walking around on campus (which are continuing). Among the preventative measures discussed, Constable Michael Sanguinetti recommended that women not walk around alone at night ‘provocatively dressed’.

Sounds like common sense advice to avoid rape?

Not if you’re a feminist. The usual suspects promptly seized upon that comment as an attack by the police on women’s freedom. To drive the point home, a ‘slut walk’ was promptly organized in Toronto, which was then copied across various American cities, as this MSNBC article recounts.

Confusing practical advice with moral pronouncements is commonplace in the left’s knee-jerk grievance mongering ‘dialogue’.

To see why Constable Sanguinetti was not ‘blaming the victim’, lets reframe his advice in terms of a nonsexual crime. Let’s say I want to drive my Cadillac Escalade into downtown Toronto and park it late at night in Regent Park (a bad neighbourhood). I leave the doors unlocked, the windows rolled down and the keys in the ignition. I can do that. I have a right to do that. As far as I can tell, it’s even guaranteed by the constitution. And furthermore, I vigorously defend my right to do that.

But at the same time, when I report it stolen, the reporting officer has a perfect right to tell me I am an idiot. And if I ask Constable Sanguinetti about the advisability of this course of action at a community safety meeting, I expect him to tell me that it is not a very good idea. This is what the good constable did at York University in January, except the crime was rape not auto theft. But regardless of the crime under discussion, he is no more taking the side of the rapist than he is taking the side of the auto thief. (Psst..this example is adapted from one given by Camille Paglia from an article of her’s on the same subject.)

The police force would be blaming the victim only if they charged victims of sexual assault with lewd conduct - as they do in Saudi Arabia, or as the police in Canada do when they charge gun owners with unsafe storage who report their guns stolen.

All of this would be common sense if it weren’t for the fact that the left aggressively pushes a grievance agenda that is completely divorced from reality. And because their advice (‘go ahead and dress like a slut and walk around at night alone because you have a God given right to do so’) is so dangerous, it is precisely the targets of their compassion who suffer the most.

For if a young woman finds herself alone at night in an underground parking garage with a rapist, her sacred human rights will do her precious little good against the deranged pervert now confronting her. In this case, Constable Sanguinetti could help her a lot more than a community organizer would be able to. Of course, a close second best would be a snub-nosed 38 in her purse, but I suspect that the activists who are so strenuously championing her right to dress provocatively wherever she wants to would be just as adamant that she do so only while in a state of complete helplessness.

US study confirms American independents are not ‘moderate’

Real Clear Politics analyst and all-purpose debunker of conventional wisdom, David Paul Kuhn highlights a Pew Center study on the American electorate:

“The study also underlines a common mistake in political analysis: independent is not a synonym for moderate. The ranks of independents have increased in recent years. Pew notes what's often overlooked. Many non-aligned voters still hold some highly ideological views. "But they combine these views in ways that defy liberal or conservative orthodoxy," Pew reports.”

This echoes what I said in my last post about the Canadian ‘moderate’ voter:

“As I explained in this post, the moderate voter in the middle is not somebody whose philosophical philosophy lies in the statistical midpoint of politics space. Rather, he is simply an apathetic voter who doesn’t care about politics at all. What political scientists like Flanagan see as a preference for moderation is really just a sensible desire to not rock the boat when things are doing OK.”

 

 

Tom Flanagan is wrong about the nature of moderation in Canada

In this analysis, Tom Flanagan - the former advisor to Stephen Harper (and also his former professor) - explains how the preponderance of moderate voters in the political middle ensures that the parties on the left and the right will converge ‘in the middle’ in a two party system. While some of his conclusions are not far off the mark, Flanagan’s analysis itself couldn’t be more wrong, mostly because he has made two serious errors: he completely misunderstands the nature of the moderate voter, and he has too much faith in the one-dimensional model of politics.

Lets look at the second error first. The one-dimensional model states that ‘political space’ can be described with one parameter, usually by a big government index. According to this model, the NDP is on the left, the Bolsheviks are on the far left, small-c conservatives are on the right, and Ann Rand objectivist are on the far right. But if this model describes the key features of politics adequately, how come Hitler’s National Socialists are universally considered to be on the far right? And how come socially conservative, big government populists like Pat Buchanan and libertarians - who believe in small government and personal freedom - are both classed as right-wing parties. If the one-dimensional model is right, shouldn’t Pat Buchanan be a lefty moderate while a gay libertarian is a right-wing extremist!

In reality, one parameter is nowhere near enough to describe important features of the body politic.

In science, there is a saying: all models are wrong but some are useful. What makes the one-dimensional model useful is that the parameter it uses – economic freedom – is usually dominant. But this is not always the case. Take Quebec, where politics is split on federalist-separatist lines. There the conventional left-right split occurs within the parties themselves. In the real world, all political parties are expedient coalitions of diverse interests and how they come together depends on specific circumstances.

Another place where the one-dimensional model doesn’t work is a blue collar riding like Oshawa where voters are socially conservative but economically socialist. Because the main parties are split along conventional left-right lines, there is no party that really services them. They alternate between Conservatives and the NDP, depending on whether social issues (like gun control or family values) or economic issues (like free trade and middle class entitlements) predominate. A conventionally moderate candidate who is socially liberal but economically conservative, like say John Tory or Scott Brison, are poison to them. The one-dimensional model does not explain the Oshawa voter.

Now lets tackle Flanagan’s first error, a misunderstanding of what political moderation is. As I explained in this post, the moderate voter in the middle is not somebody whose political philosophy lies in the statistical midpoint of politics space. Rather, he is simply an apathetic voter who doesn’t care about politics at all. What political scientists like Flanagan see as a preference for moderation is really just a sensible desire to not rock the boat when things are OK. These people believe that there are a lot more ways to break things than there are utopian schemes that will actually make things better.

The flip side of this sentiment is a preference for decisive action when they see the wheels coming off the machine. This is why Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mike Harris and Rob Ford are popular, even though they were decisively to the right of the people who elected them. In serious times, the moderate voter wants – nay, demands - a leader who offers him a credible answer to the problem of the day and then boldly carries it out. A ‘moderate’ split-the-difference solution just repels him. Because Thatcher, Reagan and Harris offered convincing solutions that worked, they succeeded in moving the statistical middle towards them.

So when times are good, splitting the difference Median-Voter-Theorem-style works. But when the seas get choppy, you better have an answer that isn’t a weasely half-measure.