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).

 
NYT: the future of bookstore is Indigo. The market: wait a minute

On May 1, the New York Times ran a story, "How a Canadian Chain Is Reinventing Book Selling: Indigo is expanding to the United States with its new model for how a big bookstore chain can thrive in the era of online retail." Replicating the fawning style of Canada's media when covering Heather Reisman and her "book" chain, the Times reports on a conversation between Reisman and Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood that led to the development of "reading socks," which opened the door to more non-book products for the bookstore chain to sell:

Over the last few years, Indigo has designed dozens of other products, including beach mats, scented candles, inspirational wall art, Mason jars, crystal pillars, bento lunchboxes, herb growing kits, copper cheese knife sets, stemless champagne flutes, throw pillows and scarves.

Indigo is positioning itself as a “cultural department store” where customers who wander in to browse through books can make impulse purchases of cashmere slippers or crystal facial rollers.

It may seem strange for a bookstore chain to be developing and selling artisanal soup bowls and organic cotton baby onesies. But Indigo’s approach seems not only novel but crucial to its success and longevity. The superstore concept, with hulking retail spaces stocking 100,000 titles, has become increasingly hard to sustain in the era of online retail, when it’s impossible to match Amazon’s vast selection.

Indigo is experimenting with a new model, positioning itself as a “cultural department store” where customers who wander in to browse through books often end up lingering as they impulsively shop for cashmere slippers and crystal facial rollers, or a knife set to go with a new Paleo cookbook.

Today the Canadian Press reports: "After general merchandise sales 'hit a wall,' Indigo decides to change its creative direction." CP reports on the conference call Reisman had with reporters and analysts following the companies annual financial report:

Partly due to the lack of recent growth, Indigo decided to change its creative direction and take a fresh look at how it approaches the category, she said.

“There’s a real need for newness on a continuing basis and that’s our job,” she said, adding the company wants to put its efforts this financial year into the overall evolution of its general merchandise and lifestyle products ...

She noted the future of the business does not lie in returning to books, which remain the base, but in making sure the general merchandise category is strong and growing. Once that’s established, she said, the company will return to look at its U.S. strategy.

Indigo opened its first American store this past financial year in New Jersey.

“It’s going to do okay,” she said. “It’s not knocking it out of the park.”

Reading socks aren't going to save the bricks and mortar bookstore. The Times got duped by Indigo's optimistic press releases about how wonderful they are doing and strong they are positioned for the future, ignoring the harsh, cold financial reports.

 
The creepy spectacle of government's anti-Big Tech crusade

Terrence Corcoran in the Financial Post on the granstanding committee of parliamentarians haranguing Big Tech:

Rapid technological change and the rise of the Internet have created scores of serious and unresolved legal and political issues. There are matters of privacy, freedom of expression, terror risks, national and international governance, corporate and government conflicts, and copyright issues, to name a few.

Into this complex world comes something called the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy, a band of pompous Canadian and international politicians who, in Ottawa Tuesday, delivered absurd demagogic harangues as they bullied and insulted junior executives of the main players in the tech revolution, namely Facebook, Google and Twitter.

The “grand” in the committee’s overblown title apparently stands for grandstanding. Through most of the hearings, the politicians who are members of the committee — culled from more than a dozen countries from Singapore to the United Kingdom to Mexico — ritually engaged in self-aggrandizing and condescending putdowns of the unfortunates who appeared before them.

The most obnoxious performers were the Canadians.

No wonder Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg declined their invitations to show up. The only reason they were invited was to subject them to verbal abuse and cheap political interrogations aimed at their humiliation. The lower-level executives who did show up — particularly Facebook’s directors of public policy Neil Potts and Kevin Chan — acquitted themselves admirably through the constant sneers, putdowns and interruptions.

At the end of the afternoon session, the chair of the hearing, Conservative MP Bob Zimmer from B.C., called out “shame” over Zuckerberg’s failure to appear. One politician (it was unclear who) called it “abhorrent.” Zimmer, apparently doing a Trump imitation, said that “As soon as they step foot — either Mr. Zuckerberg or Ms. Sandberg — into our country, they will be served (with a summons) and expected to appear before our committee.”

Former Stephen Harper policy adviser Rachel Curran is right in her tweet-sized take:

This might be the most ignorant take yet. Social media is no threat to democracy, but it is a threat to elite control of channels of communication and organization. These "experts" are actually objecting to the results of the exercise of democratic rights. https://t.co/5PdVb2LaX1

— Rachel Curran (@reicurran) May 28, 2019

Social media is a threat to elite rule and opinion is more on the mark than social media is a threat to democracy. The clerisy is upset it is being challenged.

What I found so disturbing was Big Tech's willingness to cooperate (Zuckerberg and Sandberg's no-show notwithstanding) with government in suppressing online content. Efforts to prevent foreign agents from influencing domestic elections are welcome, but parody and mocking stories and memes should be beyond what politicians try to censure. Politicians don't like being made fun of, but too bad. Having private corporations work with governments to determine what should and not be shown and shared is creepy, collusion, and dystopian.

posted by Paul Tuns at 1:22 PM

 
Rick McGinnis on the end of The Game of Thrones

Rick McGinnis in the forthcoming (June) edition of The Interim on the end of The Game of Thrones series and about Daenerys:

The councilor recalls how the heroine had been cheered when she had slaughtered people considered evil – slavers and slave owners, the leaders and soldiers of the armies that opposed her. “Everywhere she goes, evil men die and we cheer her for it,” he says. Sure he’s talking about the heroine’s allies in the show, but also about the audience that had, for seven and a half seasons, longed for the heroine to triumph over her enemies in just this way.

The most depressing thing I read in the final weeks of Game of Thrones was how parents had named their daughters after the character, and were suddenly defensive about that choice when the heroine turned tyrant. Even U.S. senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren was forced to publicly backtrack on her public expression of fandom for the character: “Oh, I am so blue about Daenerys,” said Warren at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. “You know, what can I say?”

“She grows more powerful and more sure that she is good and right,” the councilor tells the hero. “She believes her destiny is to build a better world – for everyone. If you believed that, if you truly believed that, wouldn’t you kill whoever stood between you and paradise?”

The article is worth reading even if, like myself, you did not watch the series.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:14 AM

 
India's election: the decline of the House of Gandhi and the Congress Party

Just a few months ago, Indian businessmen were telling me that Congress was likely to win. It wasn't even close. The Guardian: "Rahul Gandhi loses his seat in Congress party landslide defeat." Three different members of Gandhi's family have represented Amethi, although the Congress leader won in Wayanad in Kerala (because party leaders do in India what Canadian party leaders did in the 19th century, namely run in more than one riding to ensure they would be elected), so he will be returning to the Lok Sabha. While Congress marginally improved upon its 2014 showing -- gaining eight seats, for a total of 52 compared to 303 for the ruling BJP -- Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata made breakthroughs in numerous regions across the country and has, as The Guardian notes, "superseded [Congress] as India’s only national political force."

posted by Paul Tuns at 1:01 AM

 
Every new detail makes this story better

The New York Post reports:

A bungling felon from Washington state made a series of blunders when he shot himself in the testicles and tried to hide the weapon — all while storing drugs in his anus, a report said Wednesday.

Click on the story and read. It gets progressively better.

posted by Paul Tuns at 9:36 PM

 
More 'too white.' And 'too male' (of course)

The Guardian: "Museum art collections are very male and very white." By "very" the headline-writer means "too." The subhead basically explains the article: "A large-scale study found just 12% of the artists in US museums were women – and figures from the UK tell a similar tale." Permanent collections should reflect the best artistic endeavours in history, which until recently was a field dominated by men. It also reflects what was collected, and in the West that was the work of white men. (It should also be noted that Europeans and east Asians collected in a way that most of the rest of the world did not, at least until recently.) This will change over time as more women enter the field and their artistic contributions are appreciated. Even though more women and blacks have been making great art in the last (say) century, it will take time to overcome the disadvantage of the head-start men had, which the author (grudgingly) admits:

Just 15% of the artists in the Tate’s permanent collection were women when they shared this data in 2014. To be generous to the Tate, things have improved. Looking at the year of the artist’s birth, a slow change appears in the collection.

There's a nifty chart to show the growth of women artists curated at the Tate. It definitely shows a move toward greater equality (with women representing the majority of new artists added).

The great museums are not snapshots in time but the accretion of the best a culture has to offer. It will take time to make their collections more representative, although one can question whether it need be. Great art should not speak to black women or Japanese men or whatever. It should speak to humanity. Presumably, men and women of any colour are capable of creating such pieces. But it is the beauty and profoundness of any work, not the biological details of the creator, that should matter.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:38 AM

 
'Too white'

Steve Sailer notes that the BBC asks, "Are Our Weddings Too White?" and observes:

You could write a computer program to generate these headlines: just take a noun that has positive connotations and then add “too white?” at the end.

Is recycling too white?

Is being concerned about climate change too white?

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:12 AM

 
The revolt against liberalism

Three from the New York Times, although the reporters at the paper spin it as a rise of worrying far-right politics rather than the revolt against global liberalism:

"Prime Minister Scott Morrison Seizes a Stunning Win."

"European Elections Will Gauge the Power of Populism."

"India’s Narendra Modi Appears Headed for Re-election, Exit Polls Show."

That's news stories from one day from Australia, Europe, and India.

And let's add one from CNN for good measure:

"The rising wave of abortion restrictions in America."

posted by Paul Tuns at 8:03 AM

 
The market is lovely and loving

Jeffrey Tucker writes about his new book The Market Loves You; Why You Should Love It Back. Tucker is essentially making the argument that I do about free market economics: it is another name for cooperation. Tucker writes at American Institute for Economic Research:

Every unforced decision to trade represents a spark of insight, a hope for a better future, and the instantiation of a human relationship that affirms the dignity of everyone involved. Sometimes that relationship is personal; it is even more awesome to consider the enormously complex impersonal relationships that make up the vast global networks of exchange that make our lives wonderful.

We take the results for granted because they are so much part of our daily experience. If they suddenly went missing, any aspect of what we depend on to live a better life, we would experience demoralization and even devastation. The lights go out. The gas stations close. The shelves are empty. The doctors run out of medicine. There is no one to fix the plumbing, no one to repair the heater, no one to do the surgery on my heart. This is a world that is less lovely than the world of plenty we’ve come to expect ...

Economics is about human life. Exchange is about forming human relationships and connections, so that everyone benefits. Social order is an extension of these relationships.

The more complex these connections are, the greater the chance for wealth creation, reparation of social and personal problems, and the realization of the good life. To love and feel loved – there are so many layers to what that means, so much more than the common use of the term denotes – is at the foundation of what we call the good life.

The institutional setting in which human relationships become real in our lives is the market. This does not entail reducing human life to dollars and cents. It is about the recognition that our value as human beings is bound up with our associations with others, our trading relationships, and the opportunities we have to value and be valued by others.

Looked at this way, the moral aesthetic of the market is lovely. It fosters love. It needs love.

The free market is cooperative and beautiful and lovely. And loving.

posted by Paul Tuns at 9:16 PM

 
Front-runner Boris Johnson faces uphill battle for Conservative leadershp

The Sunday Times reports that Boris Johnson is the "clear favourite" of more than 850 party members* YouGov surveyed for the paper, being the first choice of 39%, followed by Dominic Raab who has 13%. Johnson is the second choice of 15%, Raab the second choice of 21%. Michael Gove and Sajid Javid are both at 9% and Jeremy Hunt has 8%. Gove is the third most popular second choice with 14%. The newly appointed Defense Minister Penny Mordaunt, the most recent media darling, is the first choice of 5% and second choice of 7%. In head-to-head competition between Johnson and Raab, BoJo leads 59%-41%. BoJo probably would not unite the party. About one in six respondents placed Johnson last among the nine (potential) candidates polled and The Times reports that he is the first choice of half of Leave supporters within the party but only one in ten Tory Remainers. But Johnson is also given the highest ratings in all five leadership qualities polled (likeable personality, win an election, up to the job, strong leader, and competent). Javid, Raab, and Gove are together in the next tier for all five qualities. Boris Johnson is easily the best candidate to lead the Conservative Party.

It's a little odd that Amber Rudd, Damian Green, and Nicky Morgan, leaders of the 60 MP-strong Remainer One Nation Caucus, were not included among the nine candidates in the Times poll. It should also be remembered that the leadership field will be narrowed to two candidates by the Conservative caucus before the membership gets its say. Johnson might face an uphill battle winning the support of his colleagues. The Daily Telegraph reports that the One Nation Caucus is trying to prevent a hard-line Brexiteer like Johnson, Raab, or Jacob Rees-Mogg (also not included amongst the nine) from winning the leadership by drawing moderate, liberal, and Remain Tories behind a declaration of values that includes prioritizing climate change and rejecting a "Nigel Farage no-deal Brexit." If the 60-member caucus, that includes eight former cabinet ministers, stays united, it makes it a little more difficult for Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab from being one of the finalists.

It's way to early to make predictions. The European Parliament elections (in which the Conservatives are polling fifth right now, although the EP elections are a good way for voters to express dissatisfaction with the Tories) will change the political landscape, as will dozens of other events between now and Theresa May's exit. But Johnson is both a strong candidate and someone who faces an uphill battle.

* There are between 100,000 and 150,000 party members. The Times poll tacks pretty closely to the most recent ConservativeHome "panel" of 1700 party members.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:24 PM

 
Cowen on Ronald Sullivan firing

You are probably aware of the story of Ronald Sullivan, the Harvard lawyer and faculty dean at the school's Winthrop House that was was dropped from the latter position following protests that he is part of Hollywood sexual predator Harvey Weinstein’s legal team. As Vox noted, "A college dorm getting a new top administrator managed to touch on practically every hot-button issue in the world." Seldom do administrative decisions at universities make much news, although admittedly Harvard is different. Riffing off the Vox piece, Tyler Cowen has some tempered comments on the controversy:

Let’s say I hired a TA for my Econ 101 class, and then I learned that TA would be defending Edward Snowden in his or her spare time. Probably I would ask for another TA! And that has nothing to do with my view of Snowden, one way or the other, or whether my students have rational views of Snowden or not (I genuinely do not know if they do).

With the Sullivan/Weinstein episode, it is not difficult to imagine the media becoming “too interested” in Winthrop House and Sullivan’s role, for media-prurient reasons, and to the detriment of student focus. It is not crazy for Harvard to choke this off before it gets started, with no animus required toward Sullivan or any particular defendant ...

Overall, I don’t think this is the right cause for free speech advocates, opponents of PC in universities, etc. It seems to me like a private institution making an entirely defensible governance decision, on a matter which does quite genuinely fall under its governance purview.

Cowen also says the college snowflakes might be complainers but that does not mean that all his complaints are wrong. It might feel wrong (to some) to cave into the demands of the perpetually aggrieved but that doesn't mean all their grievances are wrong or that there might not be other reasons (see Cowen's comments above) that make accommodating the complaints reasonable. I can't say I'm happy about Harvard's decision, but it might not be as cowardly as it seems at first glance.

posted by Paul Tuns at 9:41 AM

 
Brilliant

Babylon Bee, which some call the Christian Onion: "Man Identifies As Woman Just Long Enough To Voice Valid Opinion On Abortion." I wonder if it would work in real life.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:08 PM

 
Gender ideology and life and death -- but not in the way the ideologues would have you believe

PJ Media's Tyler O'Neil: "Baby Died Because the Mother's Medical Records Listed Her as Male." O'Neil reports:

This week, The New England Journal of Medicine published a bizarre story. A "transgender man" entered a hospital with severe abdominal pains. Because she was identified as a man, the doctors naturally did not think to treat her for labor and delivery, so she tragically lost the baby. Rather than emphasizing the danger of placing gender identity over biological sex, both the journal and The Washington Post made the absurd claim that the hospital should not have ruled out pregnancy for a man.

There are more details and links in O'Neil's article, including the case against recognizing transgender self-identity. The article also critiques the ideologically tainted coverage in the Post and NEJM, concluding:

The tragedy in this case is not "those bigoted doctors and nurses" but the prevailing fiction that this woman is "really a man." Had the medical records not listed her as male, her baby might be alive today.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:55 PM

 
Liberals and the right of women to make their own health decisions

The Liberal Party of Canada sent a fundraising email out today that focuses on abortion and it implies there is a scary faction of pro-life politicians noting that 12 Tory MPs attended last week's National March for Life in Ottawa. A dozen MPs who provided some encouraging word to a few thousand pro-lifers on The Hill. Frightening indeed.

The Liberal email includes this line: "Liberals know that women in Canada have the right to make their own health decisions." I guess that means the Liberals will begin fighting for the right for Canadian women to purchase their private health care. I look forward to it. There is, of course, a certain irony to my sardonic observation. Abortion is one of the few procedures that Canadian women have been able to purchase out-of-pocket (in some provinces). I can only hope that the Justin Trudeau government would amend the Canada Health Act to make it easier for Canadian women to access health care in the free market and direct its Ministry of Health to get out of the way of provinces that permit one of half of the population to exercise their right to make their own health decisions outside the taxpayer-funded public system.

I also assume this means Liberals are open to women assessing their own risk levels when deciding whether or not they should wear a seat belt or light up a cigarette. After all, these are health decisions, too.

posted by Paul Tuns at 2:00 PM

 
Trickle-down socialism

The Daily Mail: "Cuban government announces it will ration food and everyday goods amid 'grave economic crisis'after Venezuela was forced to cut its aid to the communist-run island." Although Havana blames Washington's sanctions against the island prison state, Commerce Minister Betsy Díaz Velázquez announced that lower-than-expected production of eggs and pork is part of the reason there are food shortages. Typically, Caracas makes up for the predictable Cuban shortfalls, but the petro-state's petro isn't selling and Venezuela has its own problems right now.

posted by Paul Tuns at 1:37 AM

 
The separation of school and home

Bethany Mandel writes in the New York Post:

This is why, ever since winter break, [the author's friend] Mary has decided to ignore the school notifications about upcoming bake sales or gifts she’s supposed to have her kids make for their teachers. She deletes the multiple emails sent to parents about “volunteering” to staff and cater the spring social. She will now do two things during the day with her kids: drop them off at school in the morning and either pick them up or arrange for someone else to do it.

It’s not that she doesn’t care about her kids or their education, but she has reevaluated how she spends her time. Where once she would multi-task during dinner fashioning a costume, making crafts or baking for a sale, she now simply spends that time focused on herself and her kids. She realized that all the expectations set by her kids’ school weren’t actually part of her kids’ education but just busy work given to parents by teachers and administrators.

“I’m an involved parent who would like to give my kid a sphere of independence from me,” Mary said. “School would be an ideal place for that, but the school sets the expectation that parents should be buzzing around doing things there far too often.”

Of course, it's not possible to completely separate school and home, but there must be limits. Homework should not intrude unnecessarily on family time and non-school activities. It is imperious of school to assign homework and make demands of parents. Other than studying, projects and unfinished class work, assigned homework represents the teacher's assault on the family saying that his or her work takes precedence over what parents think children should be doing. If the time outside school is fair game for teachers to encroach upon families, families should have the home number and address of teachers to reciprocate the blurring of the distinction between school and home. Parents should be able to drop kids off for dinner at teachers while the parents complete the various assignments the teachers have given to mothers and fathers (many of which have nothing to do with schoolwork). I think the proper reaction to schools that make these impositions on parents to tell teachers and administrators to go away. Or give us home numbers and addresses so we can invade your time, too.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:22 PM

 
Doesn't fit the narrative

The New York Post reported that women make up nearly half of Donald Trump's individual contributors:

More than 45 percent of the itemized individual contributions to Trump’s campaign for the first three months of the year came from women, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks money in US contests.

Woman accounted for nearly $1.5 million in Trump contributions. The president collected almost $1.8 million from male donors, bringing the total to more than $3.2 million.

posted by Paul Tuns at 10:12 AM

 
Sluggish demand for non-subsidized electric cars

The (London) Times reports:

Sales of cars powered solely by battery were more than twice as high in France and Germany, adding to concerns over “sluggish” demand in the UK and questions over how the government will reach its targets for phasing out new petrol and diesel cars.

Norway sold three times as many electric cars as Britain while the Netherlands had sales that were 70 per cent higher, even though both countries have much smaller populations.

A report by the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (EAMA) also showed that the rise in sales recorded in the UK last year was smaller than for any European country apart from Switzerland. The increase — 13.8 per cent year on year — was about a quarter of the European average.

Last autumn the government made the controversial decision to cut the grant for buyers of new ecofriendly cars, making them more expensive. The grant for pure electric cars was reduced from £4,500 to £3,500 and incentives for plug-in hybrids, which run on a combination of battery power and combustion engines, were abolished.

Electric cars cost up to £10,000 more than their petrol or diesel equivalents and the government has acknowledged that the gulf in price is unlikely to close until the mid-2020s at the earliest.

This apparently follows a familiar pattern. Last summer, after the Ford government nixed the generous $14,000 subsidy for EVs, the CBC reported:

David Adams, president of the Global Automakers of Canada industry association, said Friday that experience elsewhere shows that sales of electric vehicles take a hit when subsidies are removed, such as when British Columbia stopped and then restarted its program.

"When they cancelled it, sales went down dramatically, and then when they reinstated it sales went back up again. That is the same pattern that we've seen in other jurisdictions internationally," he said.

Customers generally look for some kind of assistance in overcoming the extra cost of electric vehicles, Adams said.

And EVs are not a particularly efficient way of reducing greenhouse gasses. As the Fraser Institute's Kenneth Green recently wrote:

But a study for the Montreal Economic Institute pegged the cost of emission reductions from electric vehicles at an estimated $523 per tonne of averted GHGs in Toronto and $288 per tonne in Quebec — an absurdly large number, when carbon offsets in North America were selling for about $18 per tonne.

Here's the MEI study Green references.

Bribing consumers to buy a car they will not buy without the government subsidy is a bad idea. A correctly priced carbon tax would lead consumers to make these decisions without the "rebate" governments give typically high-income customers to buy electric vehicles. If gas prices were high enough, the calculus would be in favour of spurring EV purchases. But no government wants to tax carbon at the level that would actually significantly change behaviour. The fact that EVs are not a cost-effective way to reduce GHGs makes EV subsidies pure policy madness. But most importantly, the fact that virtue-signally "green" car buyers are not really interested in purchasing such cars without a government handout betrays their rhetoric about the need for everyone to make sacrifices to save the planet.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:57 PM

 
Tariffs are self-destructive

Pierre Lemieux at EconLog:

For more than two centuries, economists have shown that protectionism hurts most of the residents of the country that is supposedly “protected,” irrespective of whether the governments of other countries do the same to their subjects or not. Joan Robinson, the famous Cambridge economist, suggested that retaliation is as sensible as it would be “to dump rocks into our harbors because other nations have rocky coasts.”

In the short-term, trade wars produce only losers. There is little evidence it produces the desired results over time. Regardless, President Donald Trump cannot declare any sort of victory at this point, and promises only to produce more American losers (consumers) with his chest-beating.

George Will's most recent column is also about the Trump administration's protectionist fetishes. Will points out the costs of the benefits of the trade war fought with tariffs:

A report from the Trade Partnership, a free-trade advocacy group, estimates that tariffs would increase jobs in the U.S. vehicle and parts sectors by 92,000 — but that for each of those jobs, three jobs would be lost elsewhere in the economy. And about $6,400 would be added to the price of an inexpensive ($30,000) car.

The economy does not exist to make entrepreneurs rich or to give people work. These are nice benefits of the economy, but not the reason it exists. An economy exists to meet the needs and wants of people by offering goods and services at the best prices. Not only do tariffs seldom work efficiently in achieving the usual stated goal of protecting jobs, they always -- always -- add to the price that domestic consumers pay for foreign goods and services. The Chinese don't pay tariffs; American consumers pay them on Chinese products. That's dumb. As dumb as dumping rocks into our harbours because other nations have rocky coasts.

posted by Paul Tuns at 7:24 PM

 
'Lesser of two evils' looks a lot like just supporting your (winning) team

Nancy French, wife of David French, writes about The Religious Right in the public square in the Age of Trump in the Washington Post:

Although Christians claimed that voting for Trump did not entail endorsing his panoply of bad character traits, that’s exactly what happened. Turns out, people don’t want to support the “lesser of two evils.” Instead, they want to support a winner. Consequently, evangelicals began to rationalize behavior that they would have vociferously condemned in a Democratic president.

I'm not entirely sure this is just about supporting a winner, as much as it is tribal loyalty.

posted by Paul Tuns at 11:24 PM

 
Vox imitates Salon

Vox: "Ranking celebrity chef cookbooks ... by how many animals their recipes kill." I found this helpful, but probably not for the reasons the author thinks so.

posted by Paul Tuns at 9:43 PM

 
Canada's pot experiment: legalize it, more people will use it

CBC: "First-time cannabis use up after legalization, StatsCan reports." The CBC reports on the StatsCan report on marijuana:

About 18 per cent of Canadians aged 15 and older, or about 5.3 million people, reported pot use in the last three months, the federal agency said in its quarterly report on Thursday.

Early indications point to more use right after it was legalized last October, when the reported use stood at 14 per cent.

"One of the things … unique with this survey is the number of respondents who said they're using for the first time. So they started, in this case, in the post-legalization period," said Michelle Rotermann, a senior analyst in Statistics Canada's health analysis division.

In the first three months of 2018, about 330,000 Canadians said they'd tried cannabis for the first time. A year later, it was up to 650,000, she said.

If you decrease the cost of something -- and cost can include the social costs of stigma or criminal sanction -- you usually find a greater demand. Advocates of legalizing pot argue their position is just a matter of ensuring users do not have a criminal record. But making it easier to consume weed will inevitably lead to more people using the stuff. Is that okay? Perhaps that's a tradeoff worth making: fewer people having criminal records so they can travel freely or get a job easier, but also more people using a drug, that as J.J. McCullough has pointed out, "is a personal health hazard, a public nuisance and a habit-forming depressant that routinely hurts families, friendships, careers and other important relationships." And, to make it crystal clear, there are now more people susceptible to these harms because marijuana is legal. Maybe we as a country are okay with that. But we should be honest about it.

posted by Paul Tuns at 12:10 PM

 
"50 years of abortion in Canada"

That's the headline on my cover story for the May edition of The Interim, and the subhead is: "The Day of Infamy and Canada’s enduring shame." The first half looks at how the abortion law was liberalized under Lester Pearson/Pierre Trudeau and concludes with Justin Trudeau's celebration of abortion as a great Canadian accomplishment. The excerpt below focuses on the enduring shame: the social, political, and economic costs of abortion:

In the 50 years since abortion was decriminalized, approximately four million preborn babies have been killed by abortion, a number equivalent to the population of the fourth most populous province, Alberta. About 100,000 preborn children are killed annually by surgical and chemical abortions. That’s equivalent to the loss of a city the size of Moncton, Milton, or Red Deer each and every year.

The pro-life movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s said that if children could be killed by abortion at the beginning of life’s journey, it would not be long until euthanasia became legal as a solution to problems at the other end of life. Euthanasia became legal in Canada in 2016. Meanwhile, schools are being shuttered in parts of the country, especially Atlantic Canada and in rural communities, where depopulation has begun. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, an average of 24 Ontario schools closed each year, but by the early 2000s that number grew to 52 schools annually. Considering abortion was legalized in 1969 and came to be used as a form of backup birth control by the 1980s, it is not difficult to link cause and effect with the accelerating school closures.

There is a growing literature that women’s physical and psychological health are negatively affected by abortion, a phenomenon given living witness to in the personal stories of the mothers who are Silent No More. Getting figures for the financial cost of abortion is difficult – in 1995, the Library of Parliament Research Branch said determining the cost of abortion is a “complex and inexact process” – but pro-abortion and pro-life groups seem to agree that procuring an abortion costs the system about $1,000 a piece. At 100,000 abortions annually, we’re talking about an approximately $100 million annual price tag for abortions before taking into account dealing with immediate side-effects such as infections or long-term consequences such as fertility problems or mental health issues.

Abortion is also impacting public finance. With declining birth rates (which are also affected by birth control and other lifestyle choices), there are fewer workers per retiree and fewer taxpayers to cover the costs of Canada’s socialized health care system. In recent years, Canada has more people joining the ranks of seniors over 65 than are being born, creating a population pattern that most demographers do not consider sustainable.

For five decades abortion has seemed to corrupt our politics and our culture. Often the pro-life view is censored, from universities disallowing pro-life student groups or speakers, to provincially enacted bubble zone laws. Abortion often seems the third rail of politics, with media gatekeepers, party leaders, and senior staff colluding to prevent discussion of pro-life and even punishing those few politicians willing to raise the issue. It is generally assumed that no pro-life politician can be elected party leader or premier/prime minister even while socially conservative candidates continue to win leadership races.

Please do read the full article.

posted by Paul Tuns at 1:26 AM