Baffled European

Tag: racism

  • Beyond Dunning-Kruger

    “Britain has had enough of experts,” said Michael Gove in 2016. As a Brexiter, he was aware that his team were getting trounced on both generalities and details when it came to the EU. None of them knew what they were talking about and this was a way to neutralise knowledge and competence in the campaign.

    Unfortunately for everybody, Brexit won and this clutch of self-proclaimed anti-experts set about implementing a prize they never expected to win. “Britain has had enough of exports” became reality as UK trade suddenly permanently dropped as a result of these useless fools.

    This brings me on to RFK, oh good. “Trusting the experts is not a feature of either science or democracy,” was the outpouring from what is left of his brain. It echoes Gove’s comment, but takes the ignorance and stupidity to new levels. I guess everything is bigger in the land of opportunity.

    It strikes me that this goes beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect, the well-known result describing the fact that incompetent people tend to overestimate their own competence at a given task. It’s not merely that RFK overestimates his own competence, he also underestimates the competence of everybody else.

    I don’t know if this is a real effect or something that can be tested. However, in the interests of science, democracy as well, I think he should urgently undergo some psychological evaluation. Preferably in a padded cell with a big lock on the door.

  • Freedom and liberty

    “What’s your message to communist Zohdan?”

    A question at Tuesday’s press conference.

    How things have changed since January. The new administration banned AP from press conferences because they were insufficiently positive towards the president. They sued against the decision and won. The regime blocked them anyway.

    By now, all recognised press organisations have been banned from official press conferences. What remains are a set of influencers from Twitter and Youtube who agree with the project and will flatter the president appropriately. It’s no wonder he hated the NATO presser so much last week. That was the first time he has faced real questions for ages.

    “We’ll have to arrest him,” came the reply. “We don’t need a communist.” He went on to threaten a number of other political opponents with deportation, some of whom were born in the USA.

    Bondi is on the case, trying to find ways to suppress opposition.

    That’s where we are, less than six months in. The president talks about arresting and deporting his enemies to a tame press and that’s the way things are.

    Then there’s also the reports from Abrego Garcia’s trial, where he describes the harrowing torture the regime put him through. No wonder they tried so hard to stop him coming back. This is another one of the changes we have seen.

    I’m taking a break from this for a week or so. I’ve had enough of these monsters.

  • A white house in a red square

    This might be counted as good news, but for the fact that it is simply undoing an obvious wrong by the government. There was in edict that trans people must have their birth name and gender on their passports. This has been overturned. It is now once again possible for trans people to get a passport with their legal, chosen name, rather than a government mandated name.

    All this name stuff highlights a few inconsistencies. The birth name of the Vice President is “James Donald Bowman”, but he changed this to “James David Vance”. Should he be forced to readopt his birth name? I guess not.

    More concerning is the case of Sergio Gor, the man in charge of appointing and vetting all White House personnel. His birth name is Sergio Gorokhovsky. He claims to be from Malta, but was definitely not born there. His keeps his actual birthplace a secret, but he does confirm it is not Russia. OK. However, being born in 1986, the big happy family that was the USSR still existed. Could that be the “not Russia” that he is talking about?

    At any rate, he has not been vetted for his position and refuses to cooperate with security checks. An imposition, considering all the money he paid over the years to get the job. At the same time, thousands of trans soldiers are being discharged with a black mark on their record, implying they are a security risk.

    There is something very wrong here.

  • The most beautiful word

    Liberation is not quite going as planned. The trade war that was supposed to make the whole world treat the USA “fairly” is starting to make a mark.

    After weeks of trying to get China to start negotiations, the USA finally gave in and announced a great new deal. It was nothing of the sort, merely suspending the absurd 145% tariffs for 90 days and replacing them with an only slightly less absurd 30% rate in the meantime.

    Scott Bessant proudly announced before the talks that they had identified five or six areas of importance to the US economy and they were going to focus on those. I’m no expert, but I would have done this part first, and only then picked a fight with a massive, powerful rival. Alienating the rest of the world does not help. In fairness, it does look like none of this was Bessant’s idea, ace economist Ron Vara being the likely source of the policy.

    Walmart has announced price rises, leading to a wave of orange fury. Apparently, Walmart and China should “eat” the tariffs, although it’s not clear how anybody can absorb a rise of 145% of the purchase price. Even 30% is asking a lot.

    Hard to sympathise. Corporations, big and small, were so afraid of the “socialism” of Harris, they voted for a criminal who has now hit them with effectively a massive rise in corporation tax. Serves them right.

  • It’s just not cricket

    Cricket has “laws” rather than rules, the terminology reflecting the 18th century when the game was codified. In order for a batter to be given “out”, two things must happen: the fielding side must appeal; and the umpire must give the batter out.

    In principle then, a batter can be cleanly bowled, stumps and bails strewn all over the place. But if the fielders simply pick up the wreckage and reassemble the wicket, play continues – whatever the umpire might think. It is also possible that they appeal, but the umpire smiles, hands in pocket. The captain of the fielding team can even be invited to withdraw an appeal.

    We find ourselves in such a position in the USA. The president has accepted a massive bribe from Qatar. A Boeing 747, laden with bling and listening devices, an estimated value of $400m. The constitution is clear on this point – it explicitly mentions bribery (alongside treason) as grounds for impeachment.

    The president himself doesn’t know if he is supposed to uphold the constitution. The Republicans in Congress won’t express an opinion on the matter either – they are too busy inventing pseudo-legalistic sophistry to excuse this blatant corruption. They will do nothing. Should it reach the Supreme Court, they will slice and dice the question, before dismissing it.

    I have criticised the US constitution as being no longer fit for its purpose. However, when all responsible people ignore every rule, law and limitation, no imaginable constitution can compensate. Game Over.

  • Rubber stamp

    Congress doesn’t have much to do these days. Mainly it is a forum for Republicans to coo over their dictator, while Democrats cluck disapprovingly, writing their strongly worded letters.

    It has only passed six laws in the first hundred days. The mob isn’t particularly interested in new laws. There are plenty on the books that they can ignore or abuse. One of these six laws is the Take It Down act. Melania herself wanted this, who could refuse?

    In any normal world, this new law would be a good idea. Designed to take down “deepfake” and revenge porn, it is intended to protect people from onling bullying and persecution. To a tyrant, the law is an effective method of government censorship, a way to clamp down on the free speech of his opponents.

    The key to it all is in the enforcement. Take Twitter, for example, which is owned by Elon Musk. Any violation of the new law will be policed by the FTC, which is currently controlled by Elon Musk.

    Much of the traffic on Facebook nowadays is bots sharing AI pictures with each other. Since Zuck has sworn fealty to the emperor, he has nothing to fear from the law.

    Smaller companies however will be hammered, or merely comply without question. Wikipedia will probably be the prize target.

    Many writers yesterday were complacently assuming the regime is burning out, that it is running into implacable opposition. It’s only just started.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • They really mean it

    Lovely warm spring day today. I put a cat tree out next to my front door. Both of my cats have found it and immediately recognised its strategic advantage. They started fighting over possession of it at any rate.

    This being a laboured link to indicate that my cats display more intelligence than the US government at the moment.

    Thousands of government workers have been sacked by DOGE over the last two months, with the destruction still in full swing. I thought this was all inspired by a love for small government. In fact, it looks as though they want to maintain government capabilities by using AI. This is astonishing. It appears they actually believe their own hype about AI.

    Have they ever used AI for anything? Like a google search? It’s useless. It produces walls of readable text, but it can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth or lies. It gives every appearance of doing the same job as a human, much faster, but the results are worse.

    In one sense, this explains why the rulers of the USA are a bunch of amoral liars. They actually believe the things their computers tell them and they don’t have the critical faculties to evaluate the results. On the other hand, they think they can use this unreliable and immature technology to run the country.

    Maybe it will work.

  • Performative politics

    The USA has a new war on drugs. This time it is not crack cocaine, but the opiate fentanyl. This has been a growing problem in recent years and everybody promised to sort it out as part of their election campaigns.

    So far, the president has cancelled scanning machines to check for smuggled drugs, and pardoned a notorious drug dealer who profited from sales of the drug in its early days. He has hit Canada and Mexico with tariffs – this was the original of many reasons for the tariffs – and is threatening military action against his neighbours if they don’t sort out the US fetanyl problem.

    This seems to fit into a pattern of typical policy making for Maga. First, get rid of any policy that is grounded in reality or might be effective in any way. Second, invent an insane policy that cannot possibly work, but insist it is the only way, or that it will get results fast.

    The point of all of this is not to actually do anything, but to give the appearance of doing something. This policy will never solve the fetanyl problem, because it does nothing to address either the problem or its causes. However, they can say they are doing something to their supporters. When everything gets worse, they can blame Canada, Mexico, Kulaks, leftists, whoever, in order to distract from the fact that they aren’t doing anything.

    I have a feeling this is going to be normal governance.