Sobering Thoughts |
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Comments on politics, the culture, economics and religion by Paul Tuns -- in short, everything about the human endeavour from a non-hyphenated conservative perspective.
I am Toronto-based writer and editor, whose articles, columns and reviews have appeared in more than 35 publications. I am editor-in-chief of The Interim, Canada's life and family newspaper, author of Jean Chretien: A Legacy of Scandal and a regular contributor to the book pages of the Halifax Herald.
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Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Against grievance mongering Nothing quite offends me as much as how easily people become offended. Theodore Dalrymple recently addressed this phenomenon in City Journal: Unfortunately, sensitivity to slurs can become hypersensitivity to them, which in its own way can be as pathological as the insensitivity of those who utter them. A man who disregards others’ feelings becomes brutish by habit; a man who focuses too closely on his own feelings falls in love with grievance and constantly seeks a cause for it, becoming fragile in a way that lacks good faith. This insincere, self-aggravating fragility tends to confer great power on authority—which gladly assumes the duty to protect the feelings of the fragile, for then it will have the locus standi for almost infinite meddling. Whatever happened the schoolyard wisdom of "sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me"? Sadly, people's precious feelings are hurt not only by names or even genuine criticism but the slight of disagreeing. I recently offended an acquaintance by not agreeing that a certain movie was great -- and this is not the first time that has happened. It's like you are judging their intelligence and taste by having a different opinion. People should grow up and they could do that by remembering the schoolyard wisdom of sticks and stones. From police force to police service A move, not in the right direction. Five Feet of Fury illustrates why. End the debt-ceiling debates I'm lining up with the liberal economists (Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers at Bloomberg and Matthew Yglesias at Slate) on this one: the debt-ceiling debate is harmful. But it isn't just liberal economists; last Summer Thomas Sowell pointed out that the debt ceiling was an ineffective restraint on government spending. I have two concerns with the debt ceiling: 1) the political problems noted by Sowell and 2) the economic problems noted by Stevenson/Wolfers and Yglesias. But the combination of the two makes the debt-ceiling kabuki dance particularly pernicious: government continues to grow (and both parties are to blame, although one side usually gets "credit" for avoiding an economic crisis) while stocks take a huge hit and the economy stalls (hurting retirees' investments and worsening unemployment). There are real-life consequences to the phony political maneuvering of the debt-ceiling debate. There are two solutions: find serious politicians who are willing to tackle government spending so that the federal government is not constantly bumping up against the debt-ceiling necessitating an economically ruinous political debate or scrap the debt ceiling. I don't think there are serious politicians -- certainly not enough of them -- so that means scrapping the debt ceiling. The problem, of course, is that plagued as we are by non-serious politicians, the political class does not understand or care about the real-life ramifications of their political actions. Toronto's 'Canadian-Chinese' food BlogTo has the list of the six best Canadian-Chinese food restaurants in the city. Canadian-Chinese is an apt description of what most North Americans think of when they hear the term Chinese food. I get it's not authentic, but as Darren "DKLo" Susilo says, it is "a legitimate type of cuisine" and while I'm not quite Cliff Barnes from Dallas, I'm a fan of Chinese. I like Chinese, including the round battered meat with orange gloop, but I especially like the half-decent establishments where you can eat for under $6, although I'm not opposed to spending more for better quality. Sadly, over the past 15 years the overall quality and availability of Canadian-Chinese in Toronto has declined, mostly because the growing immigrant population has replaced the fake Chinese with more authentic ethnic foods and the growth of Asian fusion to satisfy the demand of faux sophisticates. Our family's four favourite Chinese-Canadian restaurants in North York and Thornhill have all closed in the last three to five years (Lichee Garden Thornhill was the best). Susilo admits his list is not comprehensive but I don't understand how he doesn't mention Spadina Garden which has the city's best lemon chicken, General Tso Chicken, crispy chilli chicken, Hunan beef, and crispy ginger beef. Most Toronto Chinese restaurants make sub-standard ginger beef. Interestingly, Owen Sound, located about three hours northwest of Toronto and which has a population of about 30,000, has more than a half-dozen Chinese food restaurants with several of a quality that matches most Toronto offerings (although not as good as Spadina Garden or the late Lichee Garden). Of course, the fact that a smaller community has so many of the same kind of restaurant suggests they should be good because the competition should force the poor ones out of business. That said, the quality of the sweet and sour chicken balls is significantly lower, but their fried rices are pretty good. Perhaps relevant to this discussion is the fact I don't like onions and won't eat fish or seafood, both severely limiting qualities when evaluating restaurants in general and Chinese in particular. Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Interesting presidential contest fact John Nagl pointed out in the WaPo on the weekend that, "For the first time in modern American history, neither major candidate for the presidency has any military experience." Severed human foot sent to Conservative Party HQ This is the big story in Canada right now. How long 'til the Harper government gets blamed by the opposition parties or some CBC journalist for leading the perpetrator to take such an extreme action? Elite denigrate real work Thomas Sowell has a column on how certain people -- let's call them snots -- push "meaningful work" at the expense of "menial" work. Sowell says: In the real world, many things are done simply because they have to be done, not because doing them brings immediate pleasure to those who do them. Some people take justifiable pride in working to take care of their families, whether or not the work itself is great. Sowell says this denigration of menial jobs de-legitimizes hard if unpleasant work and the lack of respect shown to these jobs might be a disincentive to people working because when the elite look down on the work, some people will feel that there is little dignity in doing them. Furthermore, Sowell says that the elite snots denigrate so-called menial work because they have contempt for the exchange system of the marketplace and prefer to impose their wishes on society. Does Wal-Mart lower housing prices? Critics of Wal-Mart claim that building a Wal-Mart lowers nearby property values. Tyler Cowen points to a study that suggests otherwise. Looking at 159 Wal-Marts built between 2000 and 2006 Devin G. Pope and Jaren C. Pope found: Using a difference-in-differences specification, our estimates suggest that a new Walmart store actually increases housing prices by between 2 and 3 percent for houses located within 0.5 miles of the store and by 1 to 2 percent for houses located between 0.5 and 1 mile. I've known a few American locations where Wal-Marts have been built and in every case they seem to have been at the front end of a revitalization of the community and in one case, the creation of a community that previously had not existed just outside the city (Winter Haven, Florida). The same is true in three locations in Ontario. The UN sucks Via David Akin: Zimbabwe will co-host (with Zambia) the 2013 United Nations World Tourism Organisation. It is hilarious how government officials from tinpot dictatorships talk. Zimbabwe's Tourism and Hospitality minister Walter Mzembi told NewsDay: WM: We have to put Zimbabwe in the right frame of mind, of a tourism host country, the entirety of it. We want to host the world. Therefore all our actions and speech should converge on this. Monday, May 28, 2012
'5 Classic Teen Sex-and-Drug Freakouts' Reason's Nick Gillespie on scares that didn't warrant the hype from "the choking game" to "butt-chugging" to "rainbow parties." These are all hoaxes, but unlike Gillespie, I don't think they're written about to sell newspapers or magazines. Indeed, it's hard to link particular features to sales and even if you could, these stories ran during the continuous slide in print sales. Instead, I think that these hoax stories result from cruddy journalism -- some are created in the imaginations of reporters or they are cases of taking a single incident and turning it into a phenomenon. Also, teenagers lie to reporters. This is about more than disenfranchisement According to Kady O'Malley, Ted Opitz, whose victory in the 2012 federal election in Etobicoke Centre was nullified by an Ontario court earlier this month, says in announcing that he will appeal the deicision: "it is in the public interest that election results be respected... and that voters not be disenfranchised." Yes, but it is also in the public interest to have fair and credible elections -- elections in which there is no doubt that the voters were qualified to cast a ballot. Sunday, May 27, 2012
Sure the Tories aren't the only ones to do this The Ottawa Citizen reports that "Nearly one in four defeated Conservative candidates in the 2011 election received a taxpayer-funded federal job within the last year." The rate for defeated candidates in Quebec is 40%. The Prime Minister's Office, of course, defends those who were appointed as qualified but that is beside the point; this kind of stuff feeds voter cynicism. Good science-based pro-GMO website In recent weeks I've had numerous discussions about genetically modified organisms (GMOs). I wish I had been familiar with Biofortified, if only to direct others to the website. Tyler Cowen, a GMO defender, describes it as a "Good website about GMOs." It's post "An inconvenient truth being ignored by GM wheat protesters Take the Flour Back," is a typically good post. 'The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness' That's the opening sentence in Robert J. Samuelson's WaPo column. Samuelson explains: College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all of K-12 education. If you didn’t go to college, you’d failed. Improving “access” — having more students go to college — drove public policy. We overdid it. The obsessive faith in college has backfired. For starters, we’ve dumbed down college. The easiest way to enroll and retain more students is to lower requirements. Even so, dropout rates are high; at four-year schools, fewer than 60 percent of freshmen graduate within six years. Many others aren’t learning much... The fixation on college-going, justified in the early postwar decades, stigmatizes those who don’t go to college and minimizes their needs for more vocational skills. It cheapens the value of a college degree and spawns the delusion that only the degree — not the skills and knowledge behind it — matters. I fully endorse Samuelson's suggestion that more be done to provide vocational training. '10 Favorite Hate-Crime Hoaxes' Gavin McInnes’s "10 Favorite Hate-Crime Hoaxes" notes that a good fake hate crime trumps a real crime in which the perps are a PC-protected ethnic group and/or the victims are whites. Anyway, people need to be reminded of these hoaxes so that they will learn to be sceptical when the media hypes crime nonsense in the future. The list begins but certainly doesn't end with Tawana Brawley. (HT: Five Feet of Fury) Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Amnesty International almost as big a joke as the UN Canadian Press reports: "Canada's failure to arrest former U.S. president George W. Bush during a visit to B.C. is cited by Amnesty International in its annual report on human rights atrocities around the globe." Remember when AI was not as political and did good things like highlight political prisoners and organized letter-writing campaigns to free them? Follow me on Twitter @ptuns is my Twitter handle. I try to keep snark to a minimum and generally link to stories & studies that do not require comment. People generally like my avatar even if it makes them hungry. Heh, Democrats are unexcited about their candidate, too The Washington Post reports that for the third time in three weeks, Barack Obama won a primary with only six in ten Democratic primary voters. In West Virginia and Arkansas, Obama's opponent won about 40% of the vote and in Kentucky, "uncommitted" had about 58% of the vote. Of course, these are small sample sizes -- practically no one shows up for the primaries when an incumbent president is facing what is effectively a paper candidate. It is possible that in yesterday's near-south primaries (Kentucky and Arkansas), Obama was facing a backlash from voters within his party over his newly announced pro-same-sex marriage stance. Tuesday, May 22, 2012
What's wrong with fluff? And is The Avengers fluff? Writing about The Avengers, Eric Mataxas of Breakpoint.org offers one of those humourless commentaries about television and movies for which religious conservatives are known that makes all social conservatives look like boring and self-righteous assholes. (For a great critique of why Christians should be in but not of the film and television culture, read this Rick McGinnis column from the February 2012 The Interim.) Mataxas complains of The Avengers: In fact, there were no ideas at all — the phrase that comes to mind is “mindless spectacle.” I am not saying that it wasn’t entertaining. It was, in a “popcorn movie” sort of way. But just while there are times when munching on popcorn is okay, no one puts popcorn at the base of their food pyramid. Likewise, while the occasional “popcorn movie” is okay as an occasional diversion, a steady diet of nothing but mindless entertainment is not good for us. Yet, when it comes to popular culture, “mindless” is increasingly the least-worst option. All I hear is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It isn't that Mataxas is incorrect -- of course popcorn cannot be the basis of a nutritious diet, but why pick on The Avengers. I would argue that a generous dose of popcorn movies is fine -- we need escape or diversion or whatever one wants to call it. As long as we aren't living for entertainment, there is nothing wrong with living with a fairly sizeable amount of it. And there is certainly nothing wrong with enjoying movies for their art. As Tom Hiddleston, a star of the movie, wrote in The Guardian, "Superhero movies also represent the pinnacle of cinema as 'motion picture'." We can enjoy movie-making as a form of art and appreciate when it is well done. Enjoying the non-serious in a serious or non-serious way is certainly defensible as long as it doesn't replace or crowd out what is serious and important. But is The Avengers really a fluff movie, as Mataxas says? Kelly Reed at Christian Post would disagree, saying that Captain America, for example, provides "an excellent opportunity to connect younger Americans with the values that have made this country great while at the same time giving warning of the path we are on." (Warning there are spoilers in Reed's post.) Pastor Dave Online explores the issue of submission and (Christian) freedom in The Avengers. Perhaps Mataxas didn't notice the themes of freedom in The Avengers, but if he admits them he can't rail against mindless entertainment. In this video Alex Merced offers thoughtful comments on libertarian themes in The Avengers (good and bad in human nature and how that is regulated through self-control and self-government, unrestrained use of liberty, order and justice not being intrinsically tied to the state, and other issues). Rebecca Cusey gets the political messaging wrong, but at least she sees that there is something in the movie to discuss, to think about. Not all movies need to be "burdened with glorious purpose" as The Avengers villain Loki claims to be. I'll leave the last word to Mr. Mataxas to Heath Ledger's Joker: "why so serious?" Three and out 3. This past weekend marked the beginning of interleague play for the 2012 season. Baseball Prospectus has provided free access to Joe Sheehan's anti-interleague article from 2008. Three key points: A) interleague play necessitates unequal scheduling and therefore helps and hurts different teams in the playoff hunt, B) there is no reason to ruin all of baseball for the sake of a handful of desired match-ups (Mets vs Yankees, Angels vs Dodgers and White Sox vs Cubs), and C) if interleague games were such a draw, they'd be scheduled during the week and in April and September when fans are less likely to come to the ballpark than the beautiful June and July weekends on which interleague contests are presently scheduled. 2. Al Yellon at SB Nation makes the case for the National League adopting the designated hitter. The DH has been around for 40 years so that is enough of a reason to justify keeping it. I'm a fan of the DH in the American League but oppose it becoming part of the NL. With interleague play, enough damage to the distinctiveness of each league has been done and getting rid of this most visible difference would essentially make the two leagues mere conferences in MLB and probably be the next step to having more games played between the NL and AL (as will the move of the Houston Astros to the AL next year, creating two leagues with an odd number of teams). Organized Baseball should be careful how much they tinker with a sport steeped in tradition. 1. Aroldis Chapman has been named the closer in Cincinnati -- long after he actually earned it. But as Paul Swydon at Fangraphs says, if he has finally learned to control his stuff, as Reds skipper Dusty Baker says to justify the new responsibilities, that only begs the question of why not insert Chapman into the rotation? And as Jonah Keri notes, if Chapman is as dominant in the closer role as he was in setup, he may never get the chance to start. Pitchers are more valuable as good starters than dominant closers because a quality start has more value than pitching with a three-run lead in the ninth. And then Chapman gets arrested for doing 93 mph -- with a suspended license. Monday, May 21, 2012
Thousands of Ontario college students require remedial math The Toronto Star reported on Sunday on the findings of the College Mathematics Project: Thousands of first-year students at Ontario community colleges are taking catch-up courses in basic math skills — fractions, decimals, percentages — that they should have learned in grades 6, 7 and 8, according to an alarming new study... "We’re expressing concern that 8,300 students are taking preparatory and foundational math in first-year college, but the vast majority cover concepts introduced in grades 6, 7 and 8," said co-author Graham Orpwood... A growing number of community colleges — including most in the GTA — offer catch-up courses for first-year students who are weak in math but need it for their field. Others offer broad first-year “foundation” programs such as pre-business and pre-technology that include math review. When researchers looked to see which elements of grades 11 and 12 math these courses covered, they were startled to find concepts from back in grade school. Yet these college students have graduated from high school with at least three math credits... Still, when the college study examined 19 pre-technology foundation programs and 11 in pre-business, it found every one reviewed the “order of operations” for algebra first taught in Grade 6 (the memory trick is BEDMAS; do what’s in brackets first, then exponents, then division, multiplication, addition and subtraction). Moreover, all pre-business courses reviewed fractions, 91 per cent covered decimals and 82 per cent covered percentages. Star education reporter Louise Brown asks: "Why are math skills so weak?" The answer, according to the study's authors, is that we undervalue math skills. That's probably true, but the more obvious answer is that the education system is failing students. The reason we have college students who need to review grade school mathematics is that our teachers, schools, education system, and government have failed the students they are supposed to teach. I'd like to see the past decade's worth of graduates launch a class action suit against teachers, teachers' unions, school administrators, and the Ministry of Education and sue their asses off. Was Hayek against all welfare? Kevin Vallier at Bleeding Heart Libertarians has a thoughtful post on whether all welfare states inevitably lead to serfdom. He says: Hayek's critique of the welfare state simply falls out of his broader conception of the legal order of a free people. If you have a patterned principle of distributive justice, one that would license a welfare state of tinkering, then you’re going to have to constantly interfere with liberty in increasingly objectionable ways to get the distribution right... But contrast this with being forced to pay a modest share of your income to provide a universal basic income, with clear, simple tax rates and clear, simple funds provided to those who fall below, again, a clear, simple, public threshold. That sort of welfare state does not seem to make us serfs or lead to worse forms of serfdom. So the simple answer is no, Hayek was not opposed to all welfare. The difference between a Hayekian libertarian and the leftist welfare state liberal is that the libertarian actually means modest (low) level of taxation with a minimal administrative interference to carry out the redistribution of income. It has been said that the difference between conservatives and libertarians are that the former want a limited government (limited in power by constitution and tradition) and the latter minimal government (as small as possible with few laws). The obvious best course is a combination of the two. Politicians will scold lobbyists with one wagging finger while glad-handing them with another five The Washington Post reports: The visitor logs for Jan. 17 – one of the most recent days available – show that the lobbying industry Obama has vowed to constrain is a regular presence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The records also suggest that lobbyists with personal connections to the White House enjoy the easiest access. More than any president before him, Obama pledged to change the political culture that has fueled the influence of lobbyists. As Don Boudreaux says, "Mr. Obama’s pledge to exclude lobbyists from the White House was, from the start, about as believable as a madam’s pledge to exclude men willing to pay for sex from the whore house." I'm not against lobbying, but I am against the hypocrisy, moralizing, and political posturing practised by most politicians. The Post has collected the information and posted it on a searchable database, "The White House Visitor Database." |