Comments on politics, the culture, economics, and sports by Paul Tuns. I am editor-in-chief of "The Interim," Canada's life and family newspaper, and author of "Jean Chretien: A Legacy of Scandal" (2004) and "The Dauphin: The Truth about Justin Trudeau" (2015). I am some combination of conservative/libertarian, standing athwart history yelling "bullshit!" You can follow me on Twitter (@ptuns).

 
The challenge for the pro-life movement

Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has a thought-provoking article: "A Post-Roe World Would Pave the Way for a New Black Market in Abortion Pill." In light of Anthony Kennedy's retirement and the possibility that Roe could be overturned, Nolan Brown says that chemical or medical abortions might make any legal changes irrelevant:

But in a modern world where abortion is outlawed, the coat hanger is probably an ill-fitting and anachronistic symbol. The availability of easy-to-administer abortion-inducing pills and the impossibility of stopping their flow from foreign pharmacies would create a situation unlike in previous eras when it was difficult or illegal to terminate pregnancies.

Just because some people will break the law does not mean that states should not pass laws protecting preborn life, any more than the breaking of laws against murder, theft and fraud, for example, suggest that they should be ignored or scrapped. But it does mean that passing laws are insufficient. In order to actually save the lives of the preborn, the pro-life movement must do more to help women facing crisis pregnancies, and uphold the dignity of every human being from the moment of conception/fertilization. It would also help to address the root causes of abortion, including sexual promiscuity. (Now there's a popular political cause.) Furthermore, the importation of (illegal) abortifacients would call out for the government to uphold its laws and vigilantly control the border.

It has long been understood by the pro-life movement that overturning Roe was not the end of the political/legal battle, but the precursor to a new set of them, mostly at the state level (unless there is any inclination to fight for a federal Human Life Amendment). But the reality of chemical abortions, means the job of protecting the most innocent and vulnerable human beings requires so much more than political lobbying, electoral wins, and court victories. It means total engagement in the culture.

posted by Paul Tuns at 11:15 PM

 
Neil Gorsuch is not the new Anthony Kennedy

Reason's Damon Root says that in the latest Supreme Court term, Donald Trump's judicial appointment, Justice Neil Gorsuch, was more liberal than traditional swing-vote Anthony Kennedy. Root explains:

Gorsuch's views look even more "liberal" than Kennedy's when you consider their respective approaches in the blockbuster case of Carpenter v. United States. In that ruling, the Supreme Court held that a warrantless government search of cellphone location data violated the Fourth Amendment. "We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier's database of physical location information," the Court said.

Technically, Kennedy and Gorsuch both dissented from the Court's 5–4 judgment in Carpenter. But the content of their respective dissents was entirely different. Kennedy dissented because he thought the Court should have let the warrantless searches stand. "Individuals have no Fourth Amendment interests in business records which are possessed, owned, and controlled by a third party," Kennedy wrote. Cellphone records "are no different from the many other kinds of business records the Government has a lawful right to obtain by compulsory process."

Gorsuch, by contrast, dissented because he favors "a more traditional Fourth Amendment approach" that asks "if a house, paper or effect was yours under law." Cellphone records, Gorsuch observed, "could qualify as [your] papers" for Fourth Amendment purposes.

But because that approach was not raised by the litigants in the case, Gorsuch felt he had no choice but to frame his pro-Fourth Amendment position in the form of a dissent. Gorsuch then used that dissent as an opportunity to invite future litigants to make future arguments grounded in the "original understanding" of the Fourth Amendment.

Put differently, the whole point of Gorsuch's dissent was to nudge the Court in a direction that could prove very favorable to Fourth Amendment protections and very unfavorable to the desires of law enforcement. It was the opposite of the pro-government approach favored by Kennedy.

The terms conservative/liberal don't always fit very nicely when used to describe Supreme Court justices and decisions. Some justices generally support positions associated with one party or another, but this is often coincidental. More often, justices practice originalist versus activist judicial philosophies, or deference to government in some cases but not others. (It can appear politically aligned because like political parties and voters, there are -- or at least seems to be -- inconsistencies in their positions. In Carpenter, Gorsuch tacked pretty closely to an originalist understanding of the constitution. Politically, this is more limited government than "liberal," and while left-wing politicians generally side with the rights of the accused, the conservative movement, if not Republican politicians, is increasingly influenced by libertarian legal scholars who are skeptical of deferring to police in their investigative powers, and (the conservative movement) is therefore much more divided on these legal issues. Root could just as easily referred to Gorsuch as more libertarian than Kennedy in the latest term, than demeaning him as calling him more liberal.

posted by Paul Tuns at 11:02 PM

 
The Brexit crunch that never comes

Charlie Cooper at Politico.EU on the latest deadline or doomsday:

This week’s European Council summit, like many before it and several parliamentary showdowns that failed to deliver much-anticipated fireworks, was supposed to be a big moment in the U.K.’s journey to the EU exit door.

European leaders, most prominently Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney had billed it as the deadline for “definitive progress” on the vexed question of the Irish border which, if missed, could jeopardize the entire negotiation.

Not so.

The U.K. has still only half-proposed its alternative “backstop” for avoiding a hard border. Prime Minister Theresa May’s top team are yet to agree the second half (the Cabinet will come together for another crunch meeting at May’s country residence Chequers toward the end of next week.)

British government officials expect some “finger wagging” from EU leaders and draft summit conclusions obtained by POLITICO note “concern” at the lack of “substantial progress” on Ireland. That’s the stick. The carrot, in the same draft, is a reminder from the EU that if the U.K.’s red lines were to “evolve,” the EU would reconsider its trade offer.

The sky continues to not fall.

posted by Paul Tuns at 11:53 AM

 
Partisans tweet Harper or Trudeau vs. Trump on NAFTA

Two tweets, the first from the current Prime Minister's principal secretary, the second from the former prime minister's speechwriter:

If the Conservatives were still in power, the government of Canada would have folded like a cheap tent to Trump by now. Remember this next year. #NAFTA #TeamTrudeau https://t.co/SJZVIWs7Qb

— Gerald Butts 🇨🇦 (@gmbutts) June 27, 2018

That's one view. Here's mine: If the Conservatives were still in power, NAFTA would have been properly renegotiated, there wouldn't be an ongoing trade war with the US, and the Canadian economy would be far more secure today. Remember this next year. https://t.co/YwhqXPs9Gv

— Michael Taube (@michaeltaube) June 27, 2018

Let's first understand what Butts is doing. He's laying the groundwork for political fallout of the end of NAFTA by suggesting that somehow the continuation of the trade agreement with the (imaginary and unstated) concessions his boss' predecessor would have been worse for Canada than the trade war (at worst) and NAFTA-less trade (at best) we are headed for under Trudeau. It is not conspiratorial to suggest the PMO sees Trump ripping up NAFTA as the likely outcome of whats going on and is preparing their electoral footing for this failure.

And yet, is it fair to call it a failure. Taube definitely thinks so, as does former Harper policy adviser Rachel Curran. There have certainly been missteps, most notably aggressively promoting social goals, including the environment, as part of NAFTA renegotiations, especially when they were at odds with the Trump administration's goals. Unless the green and gender agendas were part of a negotiating tactic to be quickly jettisoned in order to keep something else, this position was not merely stupid, but indefensibly so. But I'm not sure if Taube is correct to say Harper would have made that much of a difference because these NAFTA negotiations are entirely about Trump's prejudices and politics -- and probably more of the former than latter. I just don't see Harper, as bright as he is, changing Trump's mind about how the economy and world works. I don't think the G7 Twitter spat makes a big difference in NAFTA renegotiations, although -- to state the obvious -- we will never really know. If it wasn't for the (alleged) hypocrisy of Trudeau saying one thing privately and another publicly, it would likely have been something else.

There are two ways in which Harper might have made a difference. The first is with regards to Mexico. Harper might have agreed to a new bilateral trade deal. We don't know for sure, and we don't know if that would have been enough. But at least it is possible. The other difference is in regards to how the President views the person who is prime minister. I've talked to a few Republicans in Washington and the word is that Trump administration officials don't like or respect Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, and the words that get thrown around are "weak" and "unserious." If Trump's negotiating strategy is largely influenced by his lack of respect for the Canadian government's top officials and his view that they are easily beaten, perhaps Stephen Harper would have made a difference by appearing to be a formidable adversary. I think it is an open question whether Trump would have viewed Harper as formidable enough. That said, I think ideology -- to the degree that the President has one -- matters more than personalities. Which brings me to a related, last point: would Harper have been a tough negotiator on behalf of Canada (contrary to what Butts says) and would that have helped? Pushing back against Trump works sometimes, but not always; sometimes it only entrenches the President in his position.

When dealing with what is presumed to be a famously unpredictable President, I'm not sure how easy it is to predict some alternative scenario. I don't think Trump is that unpredictable: he fights to win based on what he thinks is right, and Canada is a bit player in this drama. And being a bit player, it probably didn't matter who plays the part of prime minister.

All that said, it is becoming obvious, despite the assertion of Principal Secretary Butts, that Harper could not have done any worse at maintaining some semblance of US-Canada free trade.

posted by Paul Tuns at 11:38 AM

 
Should the Foreign Minister being used to solicit funds for Liberal Party?

A Liberal fundraising email says it is from Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, in which she says:

As we begin to see a rise of anti-democratic forces and authoritarian regimes in many parts of the world, it's up to us as Canadians to show that the forces that unite us will prevail. It's up to us to ensure that the middle class, and people working hard to join it, have the security that comes from education for our youth, healthcare for our family, good jobs for our children, and dignity in our retirement.

Now, I don't for a minute believe the Foreign Minister wrote this. Someone at Liberal Party HQ wrote this and slapped her name on it (presumably giving the Minister a heads-up that it was happening). But let's pretend Freeland did write it. Which countries, precisely, does she believe are experiencing "a rise of anti-democratic forces and authoritarian regimes"? Does she have in mind admittedly illiberal governments that are allies, like Poland and Hungary? Is she implying the rise of populist parties in our closest trading partners and NATO allies (France, Netherlands) is a problem, sticking her nose in the domestic politics of western democracies. Could she possibly be talking about the US President, considering many on the Left view his presidency as an existential threat to liberal democracy?

Even if Freeland does not mean to imply criticism of our allies, might foreign governments understandably view he statement as a commentary on what is happening in their countries?

This email isn't just a pitch for donor dollars to promote Trudeau's political agenda at home; Freeland has commented on what is happening in the world, a world in which she is intimately engaged as Canada's Foreign Minister. The coy references cast aspersions on the democratic choices made by voters around the world and could alienate allies who might see Canada's Foreign Minister joining the chorus of critics of governments that are taking a step back from democratic norms. Is helping her party raise a couple of bucks worth pissing off foreign governments?

posted by Paul Tuns at 3:21 AM

 
Former PM Harper on the political moment in the West

From International Democrat Union chairman Stephen Harper's remarks to open the 35th anniversary meeting of the IDU earlier this week:

In developed countries, corporatist distortions of market economics have led to the global financial crisis, rising income inequality and non-inclusive growth, while international elites have mutated globalization into an attack on the nation-state and national communities. New socialist movements and populist uprisings are the result.

Sounds about right, although I would say that some of traditional European socialism has taken on a populist flavour itself.

I'm not sure that mainstream conservative, centrist, or progressive governments have an answer to these challenges.

posted by Paul Tuns at 3:21 PM

 
The right of businesses to discriminate

My inclination is for a broad tolerance for businesses discriminating, but I am also sympathetic to the position put forth by Oliver Kamm in the (London) Times:

Institutions whose business is to serve food and drink aren’t private citizens issuing invitations to their friends and relations. They operate under the social contract of a liberal society. People can have multiple allegiances of politics, religion, national origin or anything else that matters to them, but all these affiliations are superseded by common citizenship under the rule of law. It wasn’t just boorish behaviour by the proprietor of the Red Hen; it was a breach of the principle that everyone is entitled to a private life. That includes even members of the Trump administration.

If I went with my head rather than my heart -- and the former should not always or automatically win over the latter -- I'd probably have to go with Kamm's argument. But property rights and the liberty of business owners are powerful values, too.

One of the most amazing things I ever saw in a commercial establishment was at my favourite used-bookstore, in Winter Haven, Florida, back in the '90s. The proprietor refused service to a customer wearing a New York Giants jersey saying he doesn't want Giants fans as customers. This is obviously a foolish decision from the point of view of a profit-making entrepreneur. But as a fan of whatever team, or perhaps just as a hater of New York, I found his commitment to principle charming.

posted by Paul Tuns at 1:20 PM

 
How do you 'dialogue' with people who talk like this?

Andray Domise writes at The Walrus:

In our polarized times, speaking openly about our own lived realities often triggers a backlash from those who would rather shout us into silence than listen. And in the face of white people’s profound desire not to be seen as they are, there is no future for a truly collective “dialogue on race.” We have the dialogue within Black communities, and we often do with other communities of colour as well. But when it comes to white folks, the dialogue is reaching a dead end.

A few observations.

1. Most whites don't "dialogue," we talk. In fact, most people just talk, have conversations -- or as Michelle Obama says, conversate. Dialogue comes with certain (perhaps unconscious presumptions), including pre-ordained reconciliation to placate race-huckster activists. There's a certain kind of self-flagellating white liberal who goes for that sort of thing, but not most normal people.

2. WTF is a "collective" dialogue? That sounds both dumb and impossible. No one represents whites, blacks, or other "people of colour," so there can only be individual conversations.

3. Most people who want to "dialogue" actually mean they want to talk and they want others to listen. Eff that.

4. Perhaps whites don't want to "dialogue" with people whose starting point is that they (white folks) "desire not to be seen as they are," which sounds a tad accusatory. Can't figure why people who are implicitly accused of being thoroughly racist would eschew "dialogue."

Official dialogue among representations is over-rated. Conversations among individuals is under-rated.

I didn't read past Domise's fourth or fifth paragraph.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:02 PM

 
Why do Republicans support Donald Trump?

The New York Times reports that Donald Trump's popularity is 90% among GOP voters. Working class Republicans say the country has gotten better under his presidency and that they feel the need to rally around him when he is unfairly maligned (in their eyes) by partisan opponents and the media. A snippet:

Many of these voters say their lives and the country are improving under his presidency, and the endless stream of tough cable news coverage and bad headlines about Mr. Trump only galvanizes them further — even though some displayed discomfort on their faces when asked about the child separation policy, and expressed misgivings about the president’s character.

My thesis is that many Republicans (and independents, especially those recently disengaged from politics) supported Donald Trump in 2016 less out of support for him, than the fact Trump was the enemy of their enemies: intolerant liberals, crony capitalists, and dangerous foreign threats (Iran, Red China). The fact that their (domestic) enemies are vociferously attacking Trump two years later necessitates their rallying around his presidency, even when they disagree with him on any particular issue or two. Remember: the root cause of populism is liberalism.

Anyway, the NYT article is worth reading in its entirety.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:08 AM

 
Arvind Subramanian returns to private life

Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser to the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi resigned, "for personal reasons," yesterday, depending on the source you believe either four or 11 months short of the length of the appointment (some reports say October 2018, others say his appointment had been extended to May 2019). The move was announced on Twitter and Facebook. Subramanian, who has worked at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development, will return to the United States, presumably to a combination of academic and think tank appointments. Modi has had excellent economic advice, even if he hasn't always followed it; as Quartz reported, "Some of Subramanian’s key recommendations to the government as the CEA often fell on deaf ears." Politicians prioritize politics over economics, which is endlessly frustrating to academic economists who work in government. But politics doesn't always win; Subramanian successfully argued for a consumption tax to help fund the perpetually underfunded governments of India that was in turn used to fund basic services. The Business Standard -- basically India's Financial Times -- editorialized that he was a voice of reasonable reform and he pushed the Modi government to better economic positions. The CEA in India is an unusual position in that it advises the Prime Minister and Finance Minister but the office is also responsible for carrying out economic policies; in most countries, advisers advise and are not bureaucrats or technocrats tasked with carrying out their own advice or, more awkwardly, the policies they sometimes advised against. Most notably, Subramanian opposed Modi's disastrous demonetization policy, yet was responsible for implementing it.

Bloomberg Quint looks at Subramanian's legacy. Overall, his legacy is very good, but his most enduring legacy could be the development of an annual economic survey so Indian policy can be based on evidence:

But for economists and policy geeks, Arvind’s most dramatic impact has been in the production of the annual Economic Survey of the Government of India. He transformed it from being a dour document with inane numbers to one that explored a variety of themes in a bold and rigorous manner with very rich and new datasets. Be it using train travel data to show labour mobility in India or using satellite data of rooftops in India’s big cities to show how we do not collect as much property taxes as we should, Arvind’s economic surveys have been such a delight to read and a treasure trove to mine for data and new concepts. Arvind certainly dictated India’s economic discourse through his Economic Surveys and by exploring new ideas and themes such as Universal Basic Income to Direct Benefits Transfer to the impact of cow slaughter ban on leather exports and jobs, the shelf life of these Economic Surveys has been increased hugely.

Not surprisingly, Modi's political opponents suggest Subramanian's exit is a sign of a sinking ship.

posted by Paul Tuns at 3:27 PM

 
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Dale Smith, for one. Smith's Routine Proceedings is a very good daily round-up of federal political news and news coverage. (His book, The Unbroken Machine, is a must-read for anyone who follows Canadian politics, especially those who think the system is broken and needs fixing. I reviewed the book, among others, last summer.) Today, Smith examines the problems with the Toronto Star's in-depth look at the how Question Period has become theatre. Smith notes:

The Toronto Star released a package of stories yesterday on Question Period, and because this is the way we do journalism these days, it was full of data analysis that looks shiny, and hey, they got some investigative reporters to count questions and responses. Absent from that? A hell of a lot of context. So while you got some backbenchers who don’t participate to gripe about it being scripted (which it is), and some counting up of the talking points (without any context as to why these developed), or a surface-level look at the political theatre of it all (again, absent a lot of context or history, or bigger-picture look at the ways in which the messaging has changed and how it is currently being used to gather social media clips). It’s inch-deep stuff that, for someone who covers QP every single day, is mighty disappointing. (Additional point – most of the writers of these pieces have not attended QP, which is a problem because watching it from your desk in Toronto is not the same thing as being there in person. At all).

Smith makes an important point about data-based journalism: it often lacks context and context matters. Numbers don't speak for themselves and journalists do not always do a good job explaining what they mean.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:34 PM

 
Unilateral free trade if necessary, but not necessarily unilateral free trade

Writing in the New York Times, Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, makes the case for unilateral free trade (if necessary):

The fact is, free trade is a robustly good policy — which doesn’t mean that it affects all Americans in the same way or at the same time. Not only is it the best policy when other governments practice free trade; but it’s also the best policy even when other governments are wildly protectionist. By lowering its trade barriers, a government enriches its citizens regardless of the policies implemented by foreign governments. This idea runs counter to the public’s assumption that we benefit from lowering our trade barriers only if other governments lower theirs.

Yes, the world would be a better place if there were no trade barriers at all. But the United States should abolish its barriers even if China, Canada or others do not abolish theirs. As the economist and Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman explained in an academic journal, “The economist’s case for free trade is essentially a unilateral case: A country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do.”

Mr. Krugman also lamented that economists “must deal with a world that does not understand or accept that case” for unilateral free trade. That becomes clearer by the day: Now so-called free traders seem to believe that the president’s $50 billion of tariffs on imports from China is part of a brilliant strategy to get the Chinese to open their markets to American exports. Similarly, they applaud Mr. Trump for starting a trade war with G-7 countries toward the goal of a tariff-free G-7.

Even if Canada never removes its 270 percent tariffs on our dairy products, Americans would gain if Uncle Sam, regardless of Ottawa’s trade policies, unilaterally removed not only the steel and aluminum tariffs it just slapped on Americans who buy Canadian metal but also ended all tariffs on imports from Canada.

Don’t forget that Canada’s dairy tariffs are paid by Canadian consumers. It defies logic for an American president to punish American consumers in order to prompt Justin Trudeau to be kinder to Canadians. We also know that an increase in imports from Canada will expand our exports to our northern neighbor. By contrast, protectionist policies like those supported by the Trump administration may lead to more, not fewer, protectionist policies abroad — tariff hikes that have been historically ineffective.

Finally, the case for low trade barriers is not simply theoretical. It’s currently on display in several places in the world, including Singapore, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Hong Kong is a case worth highlighting. Thanks to its history of free trade under British rule and current special status in China, it’s widely regarded as one of the least restrictive economies in the world. Among the policies that have fueled its growth is unilateral free trade.

Far from suffering from its free-trade stance, Hong Kong’s economy has experienced multiple periods of rapid growth. In 1950 its average per capita income was about one-third the average United States income, but by 2017 it was slightly higher. In 1960 life expectancy in Hong Kong was three years lower than in the United States, whereas by 2017 it was five years longer. Sure, other free-market policies contributed to this economic success story, but at the very least unilateral free trade hasn’t stopped Hong Kong’s transformation into one of the richest economies in the world.

Trade, whether it is international or any market transaction, is about consumers, about the buying of goods and services, not about jobs.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:17 PM

 
What Paul Wells noticed about Jagmeet Singh and Quebec

Paul Wells spends half of his Maclean's column on the NDP and the Chicoutimi-Le Fjord by-election examining how tough NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has had it in Quebec since becoming leader and how tough the scrum with journalists was today. But then halfway through, Wells writes:

This is the real worry in the NDP these days, I think. Not so much that the province is turning with specific and personal fury against Jagmeet Singh, but that it is simply slipping into the perfectly vague apathy with which it regarded any New Democrat before Jack Layton and his walking stick made history in 2011.

This is clever, and not in the Wells-prefers-to-be-cute-than-correct clever style the columnist usually employs. It is a recognition that while often pundits and strategists look at recent results, consider trajectories, and look for new trends or realignments, often election results will return to historical patterns. The 2011 Orange Wave might have been a lasting political phenomenon, or perhaps it was just a reflection of a political moment (aided by the Liberals being led by the atrocious Michael Ignatieff and Quebec giving the supposedly charismatic Jack Layton one chance). Or perhaps it was a real thing, but it ran into the reality of Justin Trudeau, a favourite son in the province. My point is simply that Wells should be congratulated for recognizing a fact staring most pundits in the face: the NDP's showing in Quebec is returning to something closer to pre-2011 norms than the (perhaps) exceptional Orange Wave. Sometimes the best commentary is simply stating the obvious.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:17 PM

 
Trump's endgame

There is plenty of sensationalism in this Global News report on the network's interviews about the Canada-US trade tiff with a Liberal cabinet minister and a former Liberal cabinet minister who heads up a business group. What is important is buried. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale says he doesn't know what President Donald Trump's endgame is. My theory is that Trump's trade musings aren't entirely about trade. Too many pundits think the President is a blowhard and an idiot and leave it at that. But what if he knows what he's doing. Most of the trade comments focus on jobs and investing in America. I think that's a mistake, but there could be a method to the supposed madness. More about this in a moment.

I think Trump is doing two things. The first is challenging the post-WWII global order, or at least, western order. The Establishment certainly thinks that order should continue (forever) except for the changes at the margins that it engineers. But there is no reason that liberal democracy, multilateralism, and globalization should continue as it has progresses over the last 70 years. They are policy choices, even if it is just a matter of most countries choosing to accept the inertia of the status quo. Trump seems willing to challenge the status quo (as did Brexit and the rise of populist parties on the Right and Left in Europe). The Establishment is not countering Trump, Brexit, and the populist parties, it is just freaking out about these threats to existing order. This might increase the chances of a successful challenge to the status quo. It's too early to tell. Likewise, it's too early to know whether Trump can be successful in upending the established order or whether it is just bluster.

Secondly, Trump might be encouraging investment in America and thus jobs, by fomenting instability. Historically, when there is economic and political instability, investors park their money in the United States (so-called flight to safety). By creating uncertainty not just about the Canada-US trade relationship or the ease with which goods and raw resources can be sold to the US from the EU or China, but the existing international economic order, Trump might be incentivizing a new (and grander) flight to safety. It's too early to tell if this investment happens. Maybe it no longer makes sense for the flight to safety to be the United States. Maybe Trump makes the US a less safe destination for investment, at least in the short-term. But he won't view himself as an impediment to investment, so he might very well be actively encouraging the flight to safety for investors.

I'm not offering these theories to defend the US President or to suggest they are good ideas. But they suggest that the US President is not entirely mad.

posted by Paul Tuns at 2:28 PM

 
Downsizing Oxfam

The Guardian reports:

Oxfam has warned staff it needs to urgently find £16m of savings and radically reduce the number of its poverty-relieving programmes as the charity copes with the ongoing fallout from the Haiti sex scandal, the Guardian can reveal.

An internal document circulated last week by Oxfam’s chief executive, Mark Goldring, says the charity will “have to save substantial amounts of money to put [us] on a more stable and sustainable footing”.

The seven-page document, which is marked confidential, states: “It is clear ... that the size of our programmes will be substantially reduced for this year and next ... this means making tough choices.”

It says job losses are “inevitable”. Selling off high-street shops and reducing the number of countries in which Oxfam operates are both proposals under consideration.

I assume this document was leaked in order to get a little sympathetic coverage: pay up Brits or we'll stop helping the poor. That would be shameful and shameless. This is essentially blackmail. In light of exploiting vulnerable women and adolescents in poverty-wracked Haiti, it appears the aid agency is exploiting feelings of white guilt to maintain their status quo. I hope Brits don't fall for it.

Instead of scaling back help for the poor, as Oxfam is threatening to do, perhaps they should cease with the political campaigns they undertake, including their egregious annual report on inequality, reports that have been regularly debunked (see for example the Adam Smith Institute or the Institute of Economics Affairs). These reports garner annual media coverage but do little to help the plight of the impoverished.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:44 PM

 
Brooks on the new politics

David Brooks had a very good column in the New York Times yesterday on the "steady collapse of the postwar order and the way power structures are being reorganized and renegotiated across societies and across the world." This is the new politics, what populism is about. I highly recommend reading it for yourself, but two points are worth highlighting.

Brooks says there is plenty of blame to go around for the fall of the established order:

European elites were so afraid of nationalism that they fell for the illusory dream of convergence — the dream that nations could effortlessly merge into a cosmopolitan Pan-European community. Conservatives across the Western world became so besotted with the power of the market that they forgot what capitalism is like when it’s not balanced by strong communities.

Progressives were so besotted with their own educated-class expertise that they concentrated power upward and away from the people at the same time that technology was pushing power downward and toward the people. Elites of all stripes were so detached they didn’t see how untrammeled meritocracy divides societies between the “fittest” and the rest.

And this is the template for challenges to the status quo:

It begins with 1, some monumental sense of historic betrayal. This leads to 2, a general outlook that says the world is a nasty place, and 3, a scarcity mind-set that says politics is a zero-sum game in which groups must viciously scramble to survive. This causes 4, a pervasive sense of distrust and suspicion, and 5, the rupture of any relationship built on friendship or affection, and finally 6, the loss of any sense that there is such a thing as the common good.

Brooks says that the low-trust, wolf-mentality politics is not good for society or the polity. The challenge is to restore trust in our institutions. Channeling Jonathan Sacks, Brooks says that we need to build things together. We need to focus on what we have in common and understand there is such a thing as the common good. There can be win-win scenarios, not (only) win and punish-the-other-side moves. The problem is that the the cycle Brooks describes above is very powerful and becomes self-sustaining. Restoring trust in institutions is no easy task because reaching out to others is difficult.

posted by Paul Tuns at 2:46 AM

 
Trump-Kim

Tyler Cowen can be ... eccentric on international issues. His take on Donald Trump's meeting with the NORKs is charitable and insightful. (It could be argued that it is insightful because it is charitable to the administration, whereas most "analysis" is merely tribal reaction.) There are a number of points, but this is an important observation:

I am reading so much yelping about how Trump “legitimized” Kim. The status quo ex ante simply was terrible, and there is no reason to think this change is for the worse. Trump’s great “virtue” in this regard was simply to be some mix of ignorant/disrespectful of the prior “expert consensus” and approach the problem afresh with a rather direct transactional and person-centered, personality-centered mentality ...

The goal is to show the North Korean leadership there is a better way than playing the Nuclear Hermit Kingdom game. We won’t know for some time whether this has succeeded.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:18 AM

 
June Interim

A couple of the articles from the June edition of The Interim worth highlighting.

Me on Phillip Roth:

Like Roth’s other literary offerings, the protagonist was a Jew (Alexander Portnoy) and it is essentially the story of how the middle aged man tells tales of sexual woe to his psychiatrist, Dr. Spielvogel. In brief, it’s the story of a man who was a chronic masturbator in his adolescence and early adulthood and who – I would argue consequently – could never find a satisfactory relationship with a woman later in life despite numerous attempts to find the right person with which to settle down.

There are endless stories, relayed in famously graphic detail, of Portnoy’s masturbation: into a bottle, onto a sock, with a piece of liver (that the protagonist returns to the refrigerator). Indeed, there is no more famous book about masturbation. And yet, I’m not convinced that the lesson Roth provides is the one he intended.

I’m convinced that the facts of life are conservative, as the saying goes, and it is difficult to get away from the truth in true art (as opposed to propaganda). It was certainly never Roth’s intention to suggest masturbation was self-destructive, to tease out the consequences of obsessive sexual self-pleasuring. Like most of of his other stories, Roth wants Portnoy’s Complaintto expose the stultifying effects of family, religion, and tradition. Roth obviously views society’s hang-ups about men being sexual omnivores as the root of Portnoy’s lack of satisfaction in life, particularly in the romantic encounters he attempts as an adult desperately looking for companionship (albeit to merely satisfy his voracious sexual appetite). Guilt imposed by his Jewish mother – there’s that triumvirate of family, religion, and tradition wrapped in the personification of this woman he despises – is the culprit in Portnoy’s unhappiness.

Rick McGinnis on Tom Wolfe:

Status, ultimately, was the subject Wolfe understood better than anyone else, and he arrived on the scene just when the markers of status had broken free from the old benchmarks dictated by birth and class and began roaming freely all over the cultural, political and social maps. He began his career when the sober “facts only, sir” period of journalism (a remarkably short period, on the whole) began giving way to a more expressive, literary, subjective mode that was called “new journalism” and found a home in magazines like Esquire, Rolling Stone and New York magazine.

No, The Interim has not become a literary magazine.

posted by Paul Tuns at 2:45 PM

 
Twitter boss in trouble for eat Chick-Fil-A in month of June

Everything from the fact Jack Dorsey publicized his Boost savings at a fast food restaurant to "former CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien" responding to it, from members of the public weighing in on the "controversy" to the media reporting on it all rather fatuous. Sometimes a chicken sandwich is just a chicken sandwich.

posted by Paul Tuns at 2:43 PM

 
Chrystia Freeland in the New York Times

Chrystia Freeland is the subject of a blow jobby piece in the New York Times, where her husband works as a culture reporter. I want to highlight two points.

First, it should be pointed out that Canada's Foreign Minister implicitly compared the United States President to Adolf Hitler:

The optimism Freeland displayed only weeks earlier was now mostly gone. With the United States imposing tariffs and threatening the legally binding Nafta treaty, Freeland believed much larger and more troubling issues had been raised. She was worried that Western nations were forgetting the lessons of history from the 20th century and taking for granted the institutions of a rules-based global order constructed over decades under the leadership of the United States. America’s closest friend and ally and a country that might see America more clearly than it sees itself now offered a dire warning about the perils to liberal democracy in this “fraught” era. Freeland said she had recently come across a “terrifying” quote from Adolf Hitler, explaining his rise to power in Germany in a time of economic uncertainty and grievance. “I will tell you what has carried me to the position I have reached,” Hitler had said. “Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them. ... I, on the other hand ... reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realized this and followed me.”

She leaned forward, a look of concern in her eyes. “How do you attract voters and public support compared with the flashiness of exciting, chaotic, fact-ignoring populism?” she asked. “The reason Hitler won was because all of the other politicians were giving complicated and difficult explanations about difficult things. Hitler just told people simple things that they wanted to hear.”

FFS.

The Times "reports":

Freeland was uniquely qualified to take the lead in Canada’s attempt to sway the president and the United States to respect its longstanding alliance with Canada. Trump was busily selecting plutocrats to populate his cabinet, and Freeland had written a best-selling nonfiction book titled “Plutocrats,” a close study of the excesses of the superrich in the age of growing inequality. As trade minister, she successfully concluded a new free-trade pact with the European Union in 2016, a rare instance of openness prevailing in recent times. From her time as a highly connected expat business journalist in New York City, Freeland was at home in the wealthy real estate and media circles of Manhattan. (Freeland’s husband is a reporter for The Times.) She brought a level of sophistication and familiarity with the American elite at the absolute highest level that was unparalleled in the Canadian government. And so, suddenly, the political neophyte was a geopolitical asset.

FFS, again. This is the conventional wisdom, but the few people I've talked to in the U.S. administration laugh at the suggestion that Freeland has any credibility. Chrystia Freeland has the sort of resume that impresses many pundits, but it is not taken seriously by those Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was trying to win over when he picked her to replace Stephane Dion in the foreign affairs portfolio.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:40 AM

 
Dog parks and rape culture

Helen Wilson of the Portland Ungendering Research Initiative -- what a ridiculous group -- has released a paper, "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon," examines the "emerging themes in human and canine interactive behavioral patterns in urban dog parks" to better understand "emergent assumptions around gender, race, and sexuality." Wilson writes:

They offer a very public view into the ways human companions foster and perpetuate masculinist systems of communal oppression across species and in public spaces. The cultural norms operating within and upon these spaces form microcultures where acceptable and unacceptable behavior in human communities may be reflected in the way human companions construct their interactions with dogs, particularly in regard to rape culture and queering, and a-/moral interpretations of such behaviors and their human analogues under the assumptions of rape culture ...

The College Fix notes Wilson found:

What is particularly interesting is that on Taylor’s definition, raped female dogs were not oppressed because rape was normative at dog parks. This raises interesting and highly problematic issues as to the agency of female dogs in particular spaces as well as with intrinsic victim blaming in female dogs which obviously extends into the analogous circumstance under (human) rape cultures within rape-condoning spaces.

Never mind that dogs don't have agency.

Thank God for PhDs in feminist studies.

posted by Paul Tuns at 8:02 AM

 
The Ontario election campaign: what happened and didn't

There has been a lot of conventional wisdom peddled this election. I'm not saying it's all untrue, but I do wonder it if is all correct. Chances are, it ain't. A few housekeeping items: I have seen a lot of polls, including private and internal party polls, and that data has informed a lot of what is written below. Also, I didn't double-check my writing because of time constraints. I apologize for any errors or confusion. I posted my prediction earlier today, but I'm convinced by the late polls that suggest a slight uptick for the Tories so it wouldn't surprise me if they knock on the door of 80 seats.

A common bit of conventional wisdom is that the Tories almost blew a lead. In many polls, they were nearly 20 points ahead when Patrick Brown was leader and Doug Ford came in and nearly lost. But this story is an over-simplification and not-quite factual. First, according to some polls, Brown had a 20-point lead, but in the aggregate, it was a only healthy double-digit lead. 20 points sound huge. Sounds insurmountable -- or unloseable. But there the PCs never had a sustained 20-point lead. Ford continued to hold this 12-16 point lead from the time he won the leadership until the beginning of the election campaign. That lead in the polls shrunk and briefly disappeared once the campaign started. It's still not great to lose a double-digit lead, but I'm not sure it was ever that meaningful, ever that real. It is possible that the PCs were capturing the change vote, the anti-Wynne/anti-Liberal animus out there. Most of the time, most Ontario voters consider provincial elections a two-horse race between the Tories and Liberals. So if you don't like the Liberals, you vote PC, and vice versa. If you don't like the Liberals, you signal your disgust with them by registering your support with the PCs (and vice versa). The change vote was strong. It is often around 50% -- about the number of partisans in the other two parties who want to see the government change. Polls showed that "time for a change" was registering in the high 60s and lows 70s before the campaign started. That's a lot of potential voters. A lot of potential new voters. If the PC base is in the low 30s, it would be easy to scoop up a large number of disaffected Liberals and coast to victory. The problem for the Tories is that the "time for change" response rose to the high 70s and in a few polls, even 80%. When eight in ten voters want change, it creates opportunities for other parties, too. There was never any way the Tories could win the approximately 30% of people who wanted change that were not PC or NDP partisans. That was up for grabs. The NDP began to grab the lion's share of it when the campaign began. Pollsters that ask if the campaign is a two-horse race found that fewer people considered it so than usual. For whatever reason, the NDP were a legitimate consideration. Some of that is progressive voters abandoning the Liberals for the superficially similar NDP. According to the demographics of some polling, it would also seem to be a migration of some typical Tories moving to the other change party (some older white non-Evangelical Protestants who might have liked elder care or pharmacare, married women with children in their 30s who want childcare or hate Doug Ford). My thesis is that for more than a year, the anti-Liberal vote was parked with the PCs, but once the campaign started and more people began to think about their choices, the NDP were noticed and PC support fell. This is only marginally a story about people not liking Doug Ford and abandoning the PCs, and mostly a story about how little many voters think about politics until they are forced to.

A quick word about the Tory vote and Ford nation. It looks like there is moderate growth for the PCs from the low 30s to the high 30s. Pundits and pollsters may not understand what is happening here. I don’t think this is just a matter of Doug Ford brining in Ford Nation and some disaffected voters backing the Tories. A look at the demographics finds that some traditional PC voters have abandoned the party. If one in ten traditional supporters left the Tories (about 3% of the electorate), it means the gains of Ford Nation and others wanting change is larger than the ostensible five-point bump the party has received. It’s closer to 8%. This could mask a long-term problem for the PCs if the migration represents more a segment of their base being turned off of the leader. We don’t have great data here in Canada, but this seems to be the continuation of a trend some of the smarter strategists understand is occurring across Canada (and indeed, the western world): the shifting nature of the political coalitions that had existed. If married women and older Protestants are leaving the Tories for good, the party will need to find new voters just to hold onto their percentage of the votes. That’s something to consider another time, but it is hardly unique to the Tories in Ontario or Canada.

Another bit of conventional wisdom from this campaign is the death of the political center as the Doug Ford Progressive Conservatives moved right from Patrick Brown's People's Guarantee and the lurch to the left by Kathleen Wynne's Liberal government with their cynical, last-minute, vote-buying caring agenda -- child care, more pharmacare, new elder care – outlined in their 2018 budget. Superficially, Doug Ford is a significantly more conservative leader than Patrick Brown. But he seems extreme because of his intemperate tone, his bold statements, and the media’s lazy but inaccurate comparisons to Donald Trump. However, Doug Ford is an advocate of public housing and has repeatedly vowed to do better for those living in such arrangements. He has also promised PC versions of almost everything the NDP and Liberals have offered, although sometimes not with a program (childcare) but rather a tax cut to help families pay for their own childcare arrangements. I'm not sure the far right position on childcare is indirectly subsidizing daycare. Ford's promiscuous promising of new programs, funding announcements, and tax cuts and tax breaks, would blow a giant hole in the budget, producing deficits larger than those outlined in the NDP and Liberal platforms. Ford promised to find efficiencies but also vowed not to cut public sector jobs. Is that far right? He seems enthusiastic for public transit spending. Is that extreme right? Ford's right-wing agenda is limited to scuttling the tax-grab cap-and-trade system and repealing Kathleen Wynne's sex-ed curriculum. There are large, non-extreme constituencies for these policies, and he has been mostly silent about the latter after the election writ was drawn. It is more accurate to say that the political center has moved leftward, and while Ford offers a more pro-private enterprise, lower-tax vision for Ontario, he is hardly a hard right-wing alternative to the NDP and Liberals, and that if movement conservatives were honest, they wouldn’t be pleased with how much the Tories are vowing to spend and its effect on the deficit. Wynne began the campaign on the far-left alongside the NDP, but as their socialist brethren zoomed ahead in the polls and the Liberals looked like they were fighting for survival, Wynne discovered the historic moderate tone, middle-of-the-road appeal of the Liberal Party as she attacked the NDP’s ideological commitment to unionized labour and even mounted a stirring defense of privately provided daycare during one of the debates. This tone and talking points reinforce the story Liberals like to tell of themselves that they are moderates, eschewing the extremes of the NDP and PCs. Policy-wise, the Liberals are very close to the NDP, but Wynne may have helped save her party from obliteration with her last minute tactical Hail Marys and, probably more importantly, her change of tone. The election post-mortems will focus on her debate sorry/not sorry and her pre-election day concession, but her change of tone might be more consequential. Rhetorically, it restored some semblance of the so-called loss of the political center – a story which was already exaggerated. I thought Wynne’s sorry/not sorry speech at the final debate and her concession the weekend before the election were brilliant. Saying sorry acknowledged the obvious: people were upset with the Liberals. The not-sorry portion was her fighting for the policies she believed in, trying to make the election about those ideas rather than the discredited brand or her own popularity. It is hard to tell if it arrested the freefall the Liberals were in or the party experienced the inevitable dead cat bounce. As for the concession, at that point they certainly knew how many of their identified supporters had participated in early voting and I assume turnout wasn’t good. The Liberals were fighting for party status – or perhaps even a seat – and they needed another Hail Mary. I don’t think it hurt morale, because morale was already low. I don’t know what a winning strategy would have been, and they pulled one of the few remaining tricks in the hat: give the people what they want, which was a future without Kathleen Wynne. I think it helped, but we won’t know until the ballots are counted. My guess if the Liberals win official party status (eight seats), Wynne will be credited with saving them with her bold concession. If the Liberals win 0-4 seats, the concession will get some of the blame, never mind that is what most projections had them getting anyway. If the Liberals win 5-7 seats, I’m not sure what the conventional wisdom will become, but I’d credit Wynne’s desperate move.

I’ve had enough with complaints that the Tories don’t have a fully costed platform because they are misleading. The Liberals and NDP have platforms with estimated costs attached. The PCs have announcements with estimated costs attached. The Liberals and NDP seem more credible because they are in a formal document. Journalists complain the PC platform, as it is, doesn’t state how the party’s promises will be paid for. It is implied: the same way as the NDP and Liberals, through deficit financing. Doug Ford says he’ll balance the budget, but it’s pretty clear he can’t. He has promised a lot of new costs for the government in the forms of programs and tax breaks, and finding efficiencies of 4% without laying off employees on the public payroll will be hard. It’s not four cents of every dollar that needs to be saved, but four cents out of every 88 cents because interest payments can’t be on the table for efficiencies. Good luck with that. When people hear fully costed platform, I think they hear “it’s balanced” or “paid for.” They are not. A fully costed platform that runs massive deficits is every bit as fiscally irresponsible as an insufficiently costed series of campaign promises. That, after all, is what a fully costed platform is: a campaign promise. And we all know what happens with campaign promises: they get broken. Does having a fully costed platform matter? It probably helps. It’s not that voters read them, but they want to know you have one. It doesn’t help to grant the media this talking point against a party. It does seem that the PCs were sliding a bit and NDP getting a boost when the chatter about the Tories lacking one was at its loudest. If you didn’t think Doug Ford was up to the job, his not having a credible plan in PDF form on a website probably reinforced that. It hurts at the margins, and in a close election that might count for something.

That’s about it. I’m sure I’m missing something. The point of this post is to counter several popular narratives which are by definition simplifications. But elections are complex. They are the result of millions of people making millions of independent decisions for all kinds of reasons. No poll and no story can account for all that complexity. I think pollsters and pundits and strategists need to do a better job understanding what is really happening. Journalism is about telling the story in a manageable fashion, but in doing so they obstruct the truth, and at times even ignore it (not usually deliberately). That process will continue tonight as the results come in. I’m hoping that this post goes some way in countering the incorrect and incomplete stories the punditocracy will peddle as the first draft of this portion of Ontario’s political history.

posted by Paul Tuns at 2:53 PM

 
Ontario election prediction

On Monday, I predicted today's Ontario election would result in 74 PCs, 50 NDP, 1 Liberal. I want to move the NDP down a tick or two, the Liberals up a few seats, but I'll stick with Monday's prediction. I will predict the PCs win the popular vote by at least a full percentage point.

I hope to write something before noon about what the pundits/conventional wisdom got wrong about the Ontario election campaign, if I get some time.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:19 AM

 
On why people matter

In his interview with Tyler Cowen, David Brooks, a self-described religious bisexual, talks about souls:

The central claim of religion is that, as a friend of mine, Jerry Root, puts it, is that reality is iconoclastic. There’s something weird extra there. The way I would say it is that we all have souls. There’s all a piece of each of us, which has no weight and has no color and has no size and shape, but is in us, and it gives us infinite dignity, and it causes us to want to lead good lives. And that slavery is wrong because each person has a soul, and slavery is an obliteration of a soul. And that rape is wrong because rape is not just an assault on a bunch of physical molecules, but it’s an obliteration of another human being’s soul.

If I don’t have that concept of soul, it’s very hard for me to do reporting. It’s very hard for me to understand how human beings are and why atrocity is wrong. So I’d say that’s a very empirical . . . I would find it very hard if I’m out covering a story — something that outrages me or something that delights me — if I didn’t see the people I was covering as essentially spiritually driven natures, I just think the whole story would fall to pieces. I find it, not empirically in a statistical way, but empirically helpful, as a way to see reality.

Brooks is a tad too cute and ignores the idea that human beings are made in the Image of God, but this is a decent secular description of a soul-infused mankind.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:14 AM

 
Cowen interview with Brooks

Of course I would like the Tyler Cowen interview with David Brooks. It is typically wide-ranging and interesting and self-recommending. Four snippets:

I would say that one of the things that’s noticeable about affluent people — and this has happened to me — is, as soon as people make money, they seem to purchase loneliness. I grew up in the city, super crowded. When I had a book sitting over there, I had a best seller, which allowed me to buy a house. And I bought it out in Bethesda with a big yard because I thought that was cool. I remember the moment I put the garage door thing on the visor of my car. That was one of the biggest moments of my life.

And this:

Steven Pinker wrote this book on how we’re all doing better. His data was primarily about individuals. If you try to collect data on the quality of relationships, it’s really hard to find data that’s anything but bad. And so people, societies fall into patterns that are pretty self-destructive. And I’d say we’ve fallen into the pattern.

And:

Everything by [Bruce] Springsteen is rated extremely highly, and everything by Springsteen is underrated.

And:

I’m an idealist in foreign policy, but Wilson is too idealistic for me.

Listen to or read it in full here.

Also, Brooks talks about a rediscovery of the Whig Party which could serve the function of Henry Olsen's National Party (see below).

posted by Paul Tuns at 11:56 PM

 
Olsen's National Party

Henry Olsen, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of The Working Class Republican, proposes a new political party for the United States, the National Party. Olsen proposes:

It would sit between the present Democratic and Republican parties on many issues. On economics, it would share the Republican emphasis on the importance of the private sector, while recognising that the state does have a crucial role to play in ensuring all citizens have a genuine opportunity to live decent, dignified lives of their own choosing.

On social issues, it would protect the rights of the unborn, women, and gays and lesbians equally. On cultural issues, it would emphasise shared American values such as freedom, natural rights, and the rule of law, while dispensing with identity politics from the Left (such as those based on gender and race) and the Right (such as those based on religious belief or ethnic heritage).

On foreign policy, it would seek to redefine America’s global role so that it empowers its allies to solve local problems on their own while maintaining America’s ability to defend its direct interests anywhere, any time.

National would not be a party of the mushy middle. Centre parties often have a difficult time finding an identity because they define themselves by what they are not rather than by what they are ... National would instead robustly defining by its positive values.

Four observations.

First, new parties are extremely difficult to get off the ground, and Olsen admits it. Inertia prevents donors, journalists, and, most importantly, voters, from giving serious consideration to anything beyond the choice beyond Democrat and Republican (although journalists love floating the idea of third parties, they do little to expand political debate beyond the tired two-party system). It is easier to co-opt the existing two parties than it is to start something new; witness that the Socialist Bernie Sanders ran and almost won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 while a non-Republican, Donald Trump, ran and did win the Republican presidential nomination. Talk of new parties is overly fanciful. Olsen says one way to create this new National Party is "an expanded and redefined Republican Party, bringing into that party’s embrace the disaffected moderates who currently find both parties offputting." That is what Trump did; someone else could do it again. This would be easier than going the route of Emmanuel Macron in France and creating a new party.

Second, it is good to see Olsen come up with a new party that isn't every pundits favourite, the fiscally conservative, socially liberal canard. There are elements of free markets and government intervention, social conservatism and respect for diversity in Olsen's vision for a new party. There is probably room for a fiscally left-of-center, socially right-of-center (notably pro-life and tolerant of homosexuals but not at the expense of religious freedom) in most western democracies to speak for a forgotten centrist, mostly Catholic voter. This wouldn't necessarily be my first choice, but it would represent an under-served part of the electorate that often has to make a choice between the cultural war right and some basic upholding of the welfare state left. These, I hypothesize are the true swing voters that generally vote for conservative parties when given a clear reason (Mike Harris and quotas in Ontario in 1995, Stephen Harper's Conservatives over gay marriage in 2006, and American Republicans in the 2004 and 2016 presidential elections). When there is no culture war reason to vote conservative, these voters will return to liberal/progressive parties because they care about some modicum of health care coverage and have doubts about trade agreements. Olsen's National Party could radically alter politics even if it didn't win elections, but removing most of these swing voters from the political calculation.

Third, we desperately need a party that is explicitly guided by the principle of upholding human dignity. Olsen's vision for the National Party borrows heavily from Catholic social teaching, or in more secular terms, former British prime minister David Cameron's Steve Hilton's excellent 2016 book, More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First. Without endorsing all of Hilton's ideas, our politics would be better if a party, new or existing, meaningfully embraced his thesis. Of course, I would have no problem with party explicitly or implicitly aligned with the historic teachings of the Catholic Church, especially Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum and Pope John Paul II's Redemptor hominis (1979) and Centesimus annus (1991).

Fourth, even if such a party is unlikely to come into being, discussing it's necessity could lead one of the other major parties to a saner set of policies and principles. That is worth hoping and praying for.

posted by Paul Tuns at 1:34 AM

 
Sexbots and (social) health

The Washington Post: "New report finds no evidence that having sex with robots is healthy." A group of researchers "scoured the medical literature" and found that there is no evidence that sexbots are a healthy option for people. However, neither is there any evidence that they are unhealthy. There is, at this time, a complete lack of empirical data to back up claims that sexbots are beneficial for users. As most studies conclude, there is a need for more research. Actually, for doctors -- or companies peddling sexbots -- there should be the starting point of obtaining some research. Or maybe not. Maybe we have enough data, or more accurately, enough philosophy and theology.

Most people skimming the Washington Post headline would read it to mean that having sex with a machine is unhealthy. Read closely and one understands there is simply no evidence to say one way or another. Read further down and one will realize that by "healthy" the authors mean social health -- an ability to connect to others. What some people might quaintly call "relationships." My guess is that most sexbots are going to be used by those who already have sexually adventurous lives, although part of the market -- and the way robotics companies will sell their wares -- will be the involuntarily celibate and other socially awkward individuals. I can't imagine that connecting (ahem) with a machine will help these people form meaningful relationships with others. It could very well harm an individual's ability to connect with others. Indeed, Catholic teaching on sexuality, most notably Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae vitae (released 50 years ago this July) and Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body, affirm that form follows function and the sexual complementarity of man and woman; Popes Paul VI and John Paul II argue that sex acts completely divorced from procreation are sterile and (ultimately) useless, while the utilitarian nature of satisfying lust impairs the ability to bond with others. Sexbots by definition are incapable of building these essential connections, while reinforcing that sex acts are primarily for selfish pleasure.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:37 PM

 
Schools are not safe for children

Hot Air: "Chicago Public Schools: Over 500 Reports Of Sexual Misconduct, Over 100 Involving Adults." Teachers, coaches, deans, and cafeteria staff are among the 72 school employees in the 102 cases involving adults. Not surprisingly, "By law, school officials are required to pick up the phone and call the Department of Children and Family Services, but in practice some schools spend time interviewing the students and teachers involved before calling anyone." Bureaucracies protect themselves and schools are bureaucracies.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:48 AM

 
My tentative Ontario election prediction

Advanced Symbolics Inc., is monitoring several hundred thousand Ontario voters online. Their tracking predicts on a riding-by-riding basis. As of June 3, they are predicting PCs 73, NDP 50, Liberals 1. This seems about right.

I'm going through my numbers one last time (looking at riding-by-riding polls and making some adjustments for my assumptions about turnout and shifts in voting among some demographics). My preliminary analysis shows that the PCs lead with 46 "safe" seats compared to the NDP with 44 and the Liberals with two. There are 32 ridings that are too close to call. That is, there are 32 ridings that have two or more parties within 5 percentage points. Generally, one party sees a 1.5% - 4% bump in final days as undecided voters make up their minds. Historically, about 80% of undecideds go the same way. Sometimes it breaks toward parties that are already ahead to produce larger election victories (Mike Harris PCs in 1995, Jean Chretien in 2000, Stephen Harper Conservatives in 2014). Other times, it shifts and changes outcomes in unexpected ways (Bob Rae's NDP in Ontario in 1990 to surprise the Liberals, Alison Redford's PC in Alberta in 2012 to overtake the Wildrose, Kathleen Wynne's majority Liberals in 2014, and Rachel Notley's NDP in Alberta in 2015 who clearly jumped ahead of two parties when it looked like a three-way race). In all likelihood, the vast majority of these 32 up-for-grab ridings go one way or another. And they will decide the winner.

If 25 of 32 seats go one way or another, then whichever party wins them gets a majority. It could happen for either the NDP or Tories but I'm predicting the PCs get the province-wide bump. And if it does break 25 seats to the Tories, my numbers get close to Advanced Symbolics: PCs 71, NDP 51, Liberals 2. That is my tentative prediction.

But if the Liberals and Greens combine to win five close seats (Guelph is a three-way race with the Green leader in second right now) and the NDP win ten close seats, the PCs just eke out a majority (before picking a Speaker): 63 seats. If the progressive Left wins a combined half of the 32 too-close-to-calls seats, there will be a minority government. This is possible, but considering the historical record of undecided voters breaking one way or another, I’d say there is as much of a chance of the NDP getting a majority (they only need 19 of 32 close seats) as the combined chances of an NDP minority or PC minority result.

posted by Paul Tuns at 2:29 PM

 
Signs of the times

Jihad Watch reports on a development from Bergkamen, Germany: "Corpus Christi procession canceled due to inability to provide safeguards against jihad attacks." The Catholic parish decided it could not implement the security plan demanded by the city in time for the procession to proceed. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban needles the German chancellor for allowing the Islamization of Europe. Can't imagine why.

posted by Paul Tuns at 5:10 PM

 
Politics trumps economics even when a 'businessman' is in the White House

Bloomberg reporter Jennifer A. Dlouhy:

Breaking: Trump administration officials are making plans to order grid operators to buy electricity from struggling coal and nuclear plants in an effort to extend their life, a move that would represent an unprecedented intervention into U.S. energy markets.

— Jennifer A. Dlouhy (@jendlouhyhc) June 1, 2018

posted by Paul Tuns at 1:17 AM

 
Trump to ban German luxury cars?

The Hill reports:

President Trump wants to impose a total ban on the imports of German luxury cars, according to a new report from CNBC and German magazine WirtschaftsWoche.

Several U.S. and European diplomats told the news outlets that Trump told French President Emmanuel Macron about his plans last month during a state visit.

Trump reportedly told Macron that he would maintain the ban until no Mercedes-Benz cars are seen on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Shares of Daimler, Porsche and Volkswagen were lower on Thursday, shortly after the weekly German business magazine published the report.

This is dumb. Car imports are not a national security issue. Also, such a move would hurt American workers because Mercedes-Benz has a plant in Vance, Alabama and BMW one in Spartanburg, South Carolina. There is a chance this story is not true, but assuming it is, the President Donald Trump was talking shit about German cars with the French President. Assuming it's true, the best case scenario seems to be the American President mentioned an unrealistic fantasy to a foreign leader to ... what? ... curry favour? To brag? To set the stage for his fight with the EU over steel tariffs with the implicit threat against German manufacturing? The worst case scenario is that Trump means it.

posted by Paul Tuns at 1:12 AM