Politics – Page 4 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Another carnival of the animals posting

Starting with a new recording of Carnival of the Animals. Saint-Saëns at his harmonious and melodious best. It’s the Kanneh-Mason clan, with additions. Sheku, as of now the most celebrated of this much celebrated classical family, has his big cello moment with the Swan.

Relatedly, “i” reports that the way animals communicate is evolving so that it remains audible above the din made by humans.

This Is Why I’m Broke tells of a squirrel proof bird feeder, with explanatory video.

And then there’s this: Canada battles Norway for tallest moose statue.

More seriously, it is being said the Brexit has enabled Boris Johnson to unveil a ban on live animal exports.

Most significantly of all, when it comes to the ever changing relationship between animals and humans, Singapore becomes the first country to approve the sale of lab-grown meat. See also this earlier posting here, about steps in that same direction in Israel.

LATER: No official ephemera this Friday at David Thompsons, but via the a comment on the latest posting there, here’s a competitive canine in action. The enjoyment is palpable. I love how the dogs in the audience join in with their encouraging barks.

OOPS: There are some David Thompson ephemera today, starting with a couple of cats.

Carrie-Anne Brownian: Having to pretend to be a man is not the same as actually being a man

Carrie-Anne Brownian:

For much of recorded human history, even into the twentieth century, women who wanted to serve in combat, travel or live alone, work in most professions, get published, compete in sports, or conduct research felt compelled to disguise themselves as men. That didn’t make them transmen; it made them girls and women with no other options in a patriarchal, androcentric world. No one would have, for example, published George Eliot, or taken her seriously as a writer, had she used her birth name of Mary Ann Evans, just as Kathrine Switzer had to sign up for the Boston Marathon as K.V. Switzer as recently as 1967 because women weren’t allowed to compete.

This may be hard for liberal Westerners under the age of twenty-five to comprehend, but women have historically been denied access to positions of power, most careers, education, legal protections, politics, combat roles, club memberships, athletic competitions, and so forth, solely on the basis of being female. Women even had to fight for the right to use their own names on legal documents, instead of being forced to sign as Mrs. Husband’s Full Name, or to do anything of importance without a husband or father’s co-signature or permission. By anachronistically pretending all these brave, trailblazing women were truly men, the historical realities of institutionalized sexism and male privilege are written out of existence, and impressionable young people will be led to believe women haven’t played any kind of important role in history.

Quoted by and linked to by favourite-blogger-of-mine Mick Hartley.

My piece on Democrat electoral cheating gets Quotulated

It always cheers me up when something I write gets Quotulated. So I am very happy to discover that the piece I did here entitled Why Democrat electoral cheating is no longer okay was thus recognised. This certainly did seem to get an above averagely healthy trickle of readers, and that would presumably be why. That one intelligent human being, not a robot at all, thought that something I wrote was worth going to that bit of trouble for is very good for the morale. Thank you Mr Quotulator. And sorry it took me so long to notice.

How construction work suits the archaeologists

They’ve just given the go-ahead for the tunnel “under” Stonehenge that they’ve been arguing about for the last few decades. My ignorant and uninvolved take is that “under” is in inverted commas, because actually, it won’t be. But, tell me I’m wrong and you might very well persuade me.

So, not being that involved, I rather liked this:

They should never have built Stonehenge so close to the A303 in the first place.

To which another tweeter attached this:

Would have thought the builders of Windsor Castle would have learned and not built near Heathrow.

Other tweeters pointed out that having the road near Stonehenge must have made it a lot easier to get those big stones there. And, Heathrow is convenient for visits by foreign heads of state to see the Queen.

More seriously, I think I see something else happening, based on a cursory and univolved scan of this archaeologist lady’s twitter feed. A few years back, I found myself exploring London Gateway and surrounding parts. (Although I promise nothing, there’s more postings at the old blog that need transferring.) And that part of the world is also where a great big sewage pipe that they’ve recently built spews its contents. It also spewed a vast amount of earth that they dug out out of it while making it, and with that vast amount of earth, they constructed … a wildlife park! This park is run by and patronised by the local Greenies, and this surely got the local Greenies onside with the big sewer, and with all the Gateway cranes, on a “look on the bright side” basis. Opposition to the Big Scheme is fatally divided, and ahead it duly goes.

Something similar seems to be happening at Stonehenge, and indeed at several of these big and seemingly environmentally-hostile construction projects, only this time it’s not exactly Greenies, it’s their (I assume) ideological confreres the Archaeologists. The Archies don’t like it when you dig up their precious archaeological sites and build horrid motorways and tunnels and such all over them. But then again, they do rather like it, because before construction proceeds, they get to rootle around in all the earth that’s been dug up, a process they couldn’t normally come near to affording, but which the developers now bestow upon them for free. Again, the opposition is divided. Whenever ancient soil is dug up, the archaeologists have first dibs on it. If they find anything seriously significant, the plan that got the digging started will have to be changed.

No more construction work, and the archaeologists would be in quite severe trouble.

It looks and tastes like conventionally-produced chicken

A new restaurant is opening up in Tel Aviv:

At a new restaurant in Tel Aviv called The Chicken, the chicken on the menu is grown from cells in a bioreactor in an adjacent pilot plant visible through a glass window. Diners don’t pay for their meals; instead, SuperMeat, the startup making the “cultured chicken” meat, is asking for feedback on its products, as it prepares for large-scale production of food that it thinks can transform the industry.

The main item on the menu, the Chicken Burger – a crispy cultured chicken fillet served on a brioche bun with toppings – looks and tastes like conventionally-produced chicken. “The burger has a juicy chicken flavor, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside,” says Ido Savir, CEO of the startup. “Feedback from multiple tasting panels was consistent that it was indistinguishable from conventionally manufactured chicken, and simply a great-tasting chicken burger.”

So not really a restaurant as such, more an exercise in handing out free samples. But still very interesting. Although “feedback”, in this context, sounds like someone’s been sick.

Human guilt about the way we treat animals has been building for quite some time. Which means that as soon as we can stop maltreating animals so that we can then eat them cheaply, we will. In the same sort of way that we largely did away with slavery as soon as some of us felt that we could.

I learned of this story from the endlessly informative Steve Stewart-Williams, my favourite tweeter by a considerable margin. He has supplied me with many a story for my Fridays here, when I like to reflect upon and giggle at and about animals and their complex relationships with each other and with humans, from mutually supportive to horribly cruel. And there could not be a more important animals/humans story than this one, because it will surely utterly transform how animals are treated by humans. (Next up, animals won’t be allowed to eat each other either. They too will only eat “cultured” meat. Think about it.)

Sadly for many animals, the choice they have is between being reared by humans, maybe cruelly or maybe not, and then being eaten by humans, or not being reared at all. Life as food, or not life at all.

On a cheerier note, watch the heads of veggies explode when they realise that the fastest food is now also the most veggie food.

And yes, if you’re thinking I must have prepared this earlier, as they say, you are quite right. I wrote this, apart from this, last Monday.

Why Democrat electoral cheating is no longer okay

To start with, a pre-emptive grovel. I am not a fully fit person just now. I can just about manage photoing photos and posting photos. I can even manage stating my opinions. What I shrink from doing, in my present state of seemingly permanent lethargy, coughing-ness and achiness, is embarking on any sort of argument to the effect that my opinions are correct, with someone who does not share them. You’ll either take these opinions of mine, or leave them. I am now only up to stating what they are.

And when it comes to the rows and ruckuses now happening in the USA about how Donald Trump should turn over a new leaf, become “presidential”, and now let Joe Biden become the next president, I have two opinions, which I will now state.

First, it is my understanding that the scale of cheating by the Democrats this time around was something else again. I won’t persuade you if you don’t agree, and I think I am open to the idea that the gap between where Biden is said to stand now and where Trump has to stand to remain President is just too great for a few legal judgements to make any difference. I just watched Megyn Kelly, whose attitude on things generally seems to resemble mine, say exactly this, and I didn’t blow any gaskets. But for whatever it may be worth, I found this, and this from the BBC, rather persuasive, and in the case of the BBC piece, highly relevant.

The Democrats hate Trump, but last time around they were caught by surprise. This jerk? He’s won this? They just were not prepared for that outcome. That’s why they didn’t cheat much last time around. They hadn’t thought they’d need to.

This time they were ready. They hate Trump just as much as ever, but this time around they grasped that, hateful down-market nincompoop embarrassment though Trump definitely is, he is also, for whatever clutch of mysterious and deplorable reasons, a formidable foe. And they were ready. But they weren’t quite ready enough. The scale of Trump’s achievement shocked them again, and this time around their cheating is, as Americans like to say, off the scale.

My opinion. You have a different opinion? Fine by me. I get it. If you do not share my admiration for Trump, fine by me again.

But here’s another opinion, which it seems to me is a bit less generic, a bit less predictably Trumpist. Because something else has changed.

Democrat electoral cheating is not a new story. I’ve been reading stuff about America and American politics all my life, off and on and mostly off, and like a thread through it all is the fact that in big cities that they run and are determined to go on running, Democrats cheat in elections. So Democrats cheating in elections this time around is not the big change.

The big change is a Republican refusing to retreat in the face of it. Why? Why is Trump being so unpresidential, so undignified, so … just so ghastly? The answer is that the big political picture has been transformed, partly by him, but partly by him responding to the fact that it has already changed so much.

Time was when Republicans were the party of the Lucky Winners. Country clubbers, corporate executives, yacht owners, owners of houses with several garages, presided over by perfectly manicured wives, in charge of several well behaved children and subservient servants. The Democrats, meanwhile, were the party of the workers, of people struggling to do work or even to get work. Any plutocrats who were attached to the Democrats, like the Kennedys or (FD) Roosevelt, were numerically insignificant oddities. (Whether that was true, I don’t know. But this was the dominant narrative, as people say now.)

But that’s all changed. The Democrats are now the party of the Lucky Winners, and also of the unlucky losers at the very bottom of the heap who can only now depend on the crumbs of comfort bestowed upon them by the Lucky Winner class. The Republicans have become the party of the workers in the middle, the middle class, as Americans accurately describe them. The Republicans are the party of the people who still struggle to work and to stay working, and who hate the whole idea of giving up and becoming dependant upon the Lucky Winners.

Not all “workers” voted for Trump. A lot of workers, especially in things like IT, are still solidly Democrat. But the heart of the Trump vote was workers of a certain sort. The heart of the Trump vote was no longer the Lucky Winners class. They have migrated over to the Democrats.

Okay, now for the key bit of what I’m saying.

In olden times, if you were a member of the Lucky Winners class, and your guy lost an election, complaining about cheating was frankly a bit, well, undignified. You and your pals controlled almost all the leavers of power in society. You owned the big corporations. Your children were creaming off most of the expensive education. The world was yours. Were you going to bitch about electoral corner-cutting by a few machine politician Democrats in big cities who had enough clout to say boo to you, every once in a while? This was not a good look. And on the whole, Republicans took their defeats, and if Democrat cheating cost them a win or two, well, that was how it crumbled, cookie-wise. Legally, that may not have been the rule, but actually, that was the rule. Noblesse oblige. Let the people picked by the struggling class have their turn. Suck it up. Go play golf.

But now? Now, what is happening is that the Lucky Winners class is telling the class definitely below it in the pecking order that this subordinate class now has to just lie back and let it happen, when the electoral cheating happens all over them.

This is not a good look either, but it’s what the Lucky Winner class now think they can do, and get away with. Maybe they can, in the sense that they may well get their guy over the line this time around. But if they do, but if it then becomes clear that they did this by cheating on a large scale in this election, then the words “reap” and “whirlwind” spring to mind.

Meanwhile, Trumpists do not now give a fuck about Trump being “dignified” or “presidential”. They voted for him because he was none of those things. Yes, he was born into the Lucky Winners class, but now he’s their Lucky Winner. And they now want him to insist on the principle that cheating in political elections is wrong, dammit! And it is especially wrong when it’s done by the very class of people that has spent the last four years declaring itself to be in every way superior to them – richer, better, better looking, cleverer, wiser, more tasteful, more cultured, more intellectually nuanced, less racist, less “deplorable”, you name it. And if those smarmy bastard liars on the television don’t like this, they can just shove it up their Lucky Winner arses.

I trust that the undignified nature of my language in the previous paragraph is getting my point across. Which is that the argument that those now on the receiving end of Democrat cheating should just roll over in the face of it is now out of date, big time.

Cheating is okay – not good, not completely okay, not dignified – when it is done by life’s strugglers to life’s Lucky Winners. But when the Lucky Winners do it to the strugglers, that’s a whole different ball game, and a game that the Lucky Winners will and will thoroughly deserve to lose. And whether you personally agree with that or not, the particular strugglers on the receiving end of this particular bit of cheating damn well do agree.

That’s what’s changed, and it’s a very big change indeed.

Like I say. My opinions. Take them. Or leave them. And comment all you like. Just don’t assume I’ll have the energy to respond to any responses that this gets.

Reflections on how an abundance of news every day has transformed American politics

This abundance, brought into being by the internet, means that you don’t have to read or listen to anything you don’t want to read or listen to. Whatever view you have of the world and what is happening in it, you can spend whatever time you have each day for such matters to confirm what you already see and think. I now think that the Democrats can only win the Presidency if they get away with their cheating. Meanwhile, Democrats think Trump is just a sore loser and a conspiracy theorist.

And I think the latest Lockdown here is a great folly.

The big change in America, brought by the Internet, is that the “mainstream media” used to be just that, but are that no longer. Before the internet, the “mainstream media” (basically the big television news shows) spoke to almost everyone but a few truly contrarian oddballs and freaks. Now, if you don’t entirely care for the point of view they give you, you can go elsewhere.

This had a knock-on effect on the mainstream media themselves. They started to acquire those inverted commas. They began not to be so mainstream. Their centre-left, what-the-government-is-doing-is-what-matters, if-you-want-something-sorted-get-the-government-to-sort-it attitude mutated towards an extreme left, put-the-government-in-charge-of-everything, capitalism-is-evil agenda. Why? Because if you thought the problem with government was that there was too much of it, you could now go elsewhere for your daily news, and commentary. You could choose, and daily have reinforced for you, any “extreme” agenda that suited you, in a way that only freaks like Marxists and libertarians of my sort used, before the Internet, to do (by writing our own news for ourselves). Now, if the “mainstream media” tried to appeal to everyone, they’d end up appealing to no-one. The smart thing for them to do was to choose the most popular “extreme” agenda and run with that. Which is what they have done, and which is why calling them “mainstream” no longer makes nearly as much sense. (It sill makes some sense, because they have gone with the most popular extreme agenda. Which is still a bit mainstream, hence the survival of the expression.)

All that was needed to turn America into a profoundly different place was for a rival “extreme” agenda to arise, comparable in volume and force to the dominant extreme agenda, and, with Donald Trump arriving on the scene and proclaiming such an agenda, there you have it, America now.

And each tribe spends its entire day that it can spare telling itself how right it is about everything, and what evil nincompoops the other fellows are.

I’m part of this. I’m a Trumpist now. A Trumpist with libertarian trimmings and libertarian reservations, but a Trumpist. And I duly think that the Democrats are, on the whole and with various polite exceptions and reservations, evil nincompoops.

All of which explains why my posting here yesterday evening, about literal reflections, although it began as an attempt to change the subject away from mere politics, actually didn’t really do that. What that ended up being about was the human inclination to see what we’re looking for, rather than what merely “is” there.

I’m now watching the election coverage by Newsmax TV

It’s 3 am on Wednesday morning, and yes, I am up again. Truth is, I did sleep a bit, but my actual night’s sleep has been slipping forwards, and it hasn’t actually begun yet.

Originally I was tracking this election by following the PJ Media live blog, but one of the people there said they were following Newsmax TV, and I gave that a try. I’m liking it a lot. No jokes, and constant explanations, for viewers whom they assume to be smart, but ignorant. No prior knowledge assumed. No doubt many Americans would find this insufferable. I am finding it very sufferable indeed.

The only slightly annoying thing is that there are four of them, and often they all seem to be talking at once. They need a chairman, to say: You, shut up. You: talk. Okay thanks, stop, now you. But otherwise, when they can agree who has the floor, it’s very informative.

Took me a while to work out that they are very pro-Trump. Which is exactly what I want. Pro-Trump, but not relentlessly and boringly so.

Is Newsmax TV “television”? Or is it merely stuff that’s live on YouTube? Until now, I had never heard of these people.

LATER: Well, their pro-Trumpery is actually pretty strong and obvious. And, as I’ve not yet mentioned: Trump is winning.