Baffled European

Blog

  • No idea

    International backup day today apparently. Done it, good. Maybe I should do it more than once a year.

    I’ve been trying to understand maga and what they believe, but I don’t get it. It seems to be defined entirely by what they don’t want, rather than any idea of what they do.

    Mainly, it seems to be about exceptionalism, that USAians are somehow intrinsically superior and uniquely suited to running the entire world. Why and how is not clear, it just seems to be an accepted belief.

    Then there’s “owning the libs”. Liberals favour consensus and reality based policies. Climate change, LGBTQ+, public transport, sustainability, this sort of stuff. Maga rejects all of these things. Because the libs are in favour.

    If anything, they genuinely seem to blame these policies for all their perceived problems in the world. They believe that being nasty to the gays will improve the economic performance of the country. Or that shouting aggressively in people’s faces is the best form of diplomacy, it’s just that nobody has tried this before.

    It’s all so incoherent. We get decades of dogma about “free markets”, now it’s overt protectionism and they cheer along without missing a beat. Endless calls for tax cuts, then huge rises, all greeted enthusiastically. The latter is rationalised by the government itself that “tariffs are a tax cut”.

    I find it all so hard to understand because none of it makes sense.

  • Academic freedom

    I saw a scatter graph recently, showing how many Nobel prizes each country had won over the years. Germany was the clear Weltmeister until 1933, when the number of awards suddenly dropped, never to recover. The USA, followed by the UK, have been dominant since 1945.

    There’s a good chance this will change. The USAians are happily destroying their university system. Some reasons are transparently ridiculous, such as withholding $175million from Penn because they had a trans swimmer in their team. Florida has sacked a professor because he is a Chinese refugee. Harvard and Columbia are both knuckling down to suppress unwanted opinions or disband departments that the government doesn’t like.

    These elite universities have collected literally billions in endowments over the years. I get that there might be a tight spot in the short term, but they don’t need government money. Instead of compromising their charter and sacrificing academic freedom, they are genuinely in a position to say no. For whatever reason, they don’t do this.

    The exodus is starting, with academics seeking new positions in Canada and Europe. This is indeed a good opportunity to attract the brightest and best, if the USA doesn’t want talent anymore. Not to mention that many foreign scholars are too scared to enter the country even for conferences, let alone for permanent positions.

    We won’t see the effects of this for a few years, but it’s pre-programmed.

  • Long term planning

    Irene Triplett died 31st May 2020 at the age of 90. Her death was possibly the most significant event of her life: she was the last living dependent of a civil war veteran, 155 years after the war had ended. In a similar vein, there are still many widows and dependents of WWI veterans, even though the last ex-soldier died in 2011.

    Things like this seem incredible, impossible even, but they happen all the time when you deal with big numbers. That’s why outliers appear.

    Whatever the case, it means that if you start a war, the costs and consequences are going to be around for a lot longer than you might imagine. Government is a century-long project.

    Moreover, all of this shows that the government keeps its promise. If you join up to fight in a war, the government says it will look after you and your family. It’s reassuring to see that the government takes this seriously.

    Inevitably, this leads us to DOGE and their new project. They have turned their attention to the social security computer system. It serves tens of millions of people, contains tens of millions of lines of code – mainly COBOL, with some assembler – and has not been significantly updated since the 1980s.

    DOGE plans to rewrite the entire codebase in a few months using AI and a team of script kiddies. No, stop. I’m not writing any more on this. I’ll just get angry.

  • Secret Service

    “Dominos Pizza Service, how can I help?”

    “Yeah, hello, do you have any war plans?”

    “I’m sorry sir, we don’t have any war plans on the menu.”

    “Then they need to be on the menu. You gotta get used to the idea of – yeah, bourbon, please… large, thanks – yeah, the idea of war plans. We’ll get these war plans rolling and then it’ll be margarita time!”

    “One Margherita. Do you want coke with that?”

    “Obviously. I tell you, if you haven’t got your own war plans – another bourbon, yes, that’s lovely – I got some war plans of my own that I made myself. Those Pentagon plans, that’s for those goddamn pathetic Europeans. They just freeload off of us – if it looks like it’s going down, just top it up, cheers – like they’re on vacation in Hawaii.”

    “One Hawaii. With extra pineapples?”

    “As many as possible. Yeah, where are they then? Anybody seen the war plans? Don’t tell me I left them on the S-Bahn, I was sure I had them when I got off. What’s that James? You got a copy on Google Drive? Email it to me, but remember what happened last time – what, empty? there’s a bottle of Drambuie in the cabinet, I think there’s some left in that – got them, great. War plans, now listen. You remember what happened to Hallo Pizza, you don’t want that to happen to you …”

  • Texas sharpshooter fallacy

    Rain here at last. First time this month, we really needed it. It’s not enough, but at least it hasn’t forgotten how to rain.

    Meanwhile, over in the USA, measles is spreading in eighteen states. Doctors are telling people to get vaccinated, but they are shouting into the wind. Decades of undermining medicine and science are paying off.

    RFK is again responsible for this. But good news, he’s found somebody to lead his vanity project which will definitively establish the link between vaccination and autism.

    This man is David Geyer. He has no experience in research, clinical or otherwise. He does however have medical experience, at least he did until they took his licence away. That was for lying about his credentials, and maltreating autistic children.

    The last point is the clue. It’s depressing looking through his record. You can extrapolate the entire anti-vax movement just by looking at his madness. Now RFK has got somebody who knows the conclusion to the study, all they have to do is find the evidence to fit.

    So typical for the new administration. Loyalty and ideological purity are the watchwords here. Here we have them wasting a lot of money and the expertise of what remains of the CDC in order to prove a logical fallacy.

    All of this and then I read that JD Vance is now calling bullets “freedom seeds”. They are insane, the lot of them.

  • The worst idea ever

    Why are they all such massive racists?

    Racism is not a law of nature – it’s a human invention. It has its origins at the start of the 16th century, at a time of the Reformation and the discovery of the New World. People were trying to make sense of a world that had suddenly changed. Racism seemed to offer answers to their questions. Trouble was, all the answers are wrong.

    It has been challenged from time to time by people looking for some sort of evidence or basis to its claims. It always fails these challenges and then mutates into a new form that is immune from the last challenge.

    The most recent setback was the shoah, which most people – though evidently not all – consider a very bad idea. That’s by no means its only crime. Racism has a solid record of persecution, oppression, extortion, torture, rape, murder, war and genocide. It has no predictive power for anything and has zero virtues.

    It’s been a popular mass delusion for centuries and has drenched our culture with its poison. It’s so well established that we grasp for racist tools such as affirmative action as part of our attempts to undo some of the mess. Like everything else racist, these are also useless.

    The entire leadership of the USA believes unquestioningly, reflexively, in this baseless garbage. It dominates their thinking and decisions. And it’s total bullshit.

  • Rewarding the great leader

    I’ve been rather negative in my opinions of the 47th POTUS. However, some people are very happy to see him in power and they are already queuing up to shower him with awards and recognition.

    New York Representative Claudia Tenney has introduced a new bill to declare 14th July – Corleone’s birthday – to be a national holiday. And why not? She is arguably correct to say that “no modern president has been more pivotal for our country”, but even so I think it’s a bit far to describe him as “the founder of America’s Golden Age”.

    They want his image on a new $250 bill as well. Good idea. This will make it easier for the 51st state to accept their new ruler. They already have the King on their banknotes.

    Renaming Dulles airport also makes a lot of sense. The USAians currently have a grievance against Europeans for not doing more to keep the Suez Canal/ Red Sea searoute running. What better than to punish the memory of the man who was responsible for this policy back in 1956?

    The literal crown has to be Mount Rushmore. Congresswoman Luna wants to carve the fifth face as a permanent record to his “bold leadership and steadfast dedication to America’s greatness”. Marvellous.

    There were bootlickers in the East German Volkskammer as well. But even they waited until the boss was dead, or at least out of office, first.

  • Procrastination makes you go blind

    Big protests in Türkiye. Erdogan has imprisoned his main rival. The Türks have clearly had enough of their dictator and are trying to get rid of him. I wish them all the best.

    Reading through news feeds and the stories of protests, authoritarianism and government violence, I have to check carefully if it is about Türkiye or the USA. Judging by responses on social media, I’m not the only one to be confused.

    The US media is not so confused. They know how to deal with stories like this. It’s some unstable foreign country, where they don’t value freedom anyway because they are not white and what else do you expect. The complacency of the media can be explained to a large extent by their oligarch owners.

    And the opposition? AOC is making an effort, but the Democrats are relying on procedure and precedent to solve the problem. They have set their red line for when the government defies the Supreme Court. Then they will spring into action.

    Two problems with this. First is that the bad guys already routinely ignore other courts already, no need to wait. Second, it presumes that there will be a clash between the Executive and Supreme Court.

    The mob is running rampant. Their mates in the Supreme Court will just nod approvingly. The Democrat strategy is to pray to their constitution to save them, until such time as they are told to shut up.

  • Please update your mythology

    “If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” – George Washington

    “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

    “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” – John F. Kennedy

    “The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The greatness of America is grounded in principles and not on any single personality.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

    “In the real world, as lived and experienced by real people, the demand for human rights and dignity, the longing for liberty and justice and opportunity, the hatred of oppression and corruption and cruelty is reality.” – John McCain

    “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” – Ronald Reagan

    “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

    “Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.” – John Adams

    “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” – James Madison

    “When the dictatorship came, we just gave in straightaway. It was easier that way for us.” – Columbia University, probably, and many others.

  • Pump and drumpf

    It appears official US government policy is to keep the share price of Tesla above $200. The full force of the government is being deployed to achieve this. The idiot-in-chief has literally performed a sales pitch to sell the cars, and is now designating Tesla protests as “domestic terrorism”.

    Howard Lutnick, SoS for commerce, tells the public to buy Tesla stock, great buy. He must know, having made a big investment himself, which he has not yet divested as required by anti-corruption regulations.

    Elon Musk is doing his part to pump the share price by making absurd promises again. This time, he wants to build 5000 useless robots. He has also told Tesla employees that they shouldn’t sell their shares. That’s reassuring. He really ought to tell Tesla directors and executives, who have been selling millions of shares in the last couple of weeks.

    Still, there is something that he doesn’t quite understand. Why don’t “liberals” just passively accept what is happening? Libs are soft, touchy-feely beta cucks who are incapable of direct action. That means somebody must be directing them. Elon knows who this is. It’s George Soros.

    You have to feel sorry for these people. They are the rulers of the most powerful nation in the world and they are being thwarted by a Jewish conspiracy. Why is it always the Jews? And why am I not surprised?