West's weekly round-up: July 3

Canada's bizarre witch hunt, America's murder explosion, Britain doomed

Good morning. This week, I wrote about the chilling echoes of history we now see in the Tory government, and how Britain is on the verge of literal fascism. On a related note, I wrote about how the grooming scandal was allowed to happen because of a totally perverse fear of the far-Right. On Friday I looked at the British Council’s memo about Britain being a hotbed of racism and discrimination, and asked whether it would be better to get foreigners to do these sort of jobs.

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Roe v Wade was obviously a big story in Britain, unlike in 1973, when it seemed to be barely noticed here, as Dominic Sandbrook wrote in UnHerd. This inability to distinguish between Britain and America is obviously a bugbear of mine, but partly because I too am so absorbed. I’m like the smartphone-addicted parent telling off their teenagers for always being on their smartphone. Last year I wrote about how British conservatives are increasingly turning against American influence, and it’s hardly surprising with the sort of imperial mindset displayed by the likes of Ben and Jerry.

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After our embattled prime minister claimed that Vladimir Putin’s war was a result of ‘toxic masculinity’, Sam Ashworth-Hayes pointed out in The Critic that, unfortunately, women rulers tend to be more belligerent. It’s strange hearing a Tory PM use the sort of language you associated with Teen Vogue, but I suppose we’re just going to have to get used to that; we’ve already had Labour MPs talk of ‘gaslighting’. My only consolation is that we’re surely only a few years away from a backbench Tories using ‘based’ in the Common chamber. That would be based. (Putin, meanwhile, hit back at the British prime minister, suggesting that seeing him topless would be a ‘disgusting sight’.)

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“Of the 1100 employees of a large ad agency in New York City, 150 have the title of vice president. The same agency has 11 senior vice presidents and 11 executive vice presidents.”

That’s from the latest Rob Henderson piece, on his main topic of interest — status, explaining why most people would happily be palmed off with a fancy title rather than be paid more.

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The United States saw a huge explosion in murder in 2020, which most media outlets attribute to the pandemic, or at least Covid was mentioned in the same breath —even though it was quite obviously related to the George Floyd protests. Here Scott Alexander looks at the data, and concludes that, yes, the homicide rate clearly was linked to the BLM protests. This was all correctly predicted, of course, by a certain California-based blogger who every conservative writer secretly reads.

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The murder rate in America is still some way off its early 1990s peak; drug deaths, however, are running at record levels, as Jacob Siegel writes.

What was already hellish was made even worse in recent years by the rapid spread of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid some 50 times more potent than heroin. Driven largely by fentanyl, which is now used to cut virtually every other drug, overdoses set a new record in the US in 2021, killing nearly 108,000 people. Up roughly 15% over 2020’s record death toll, overdoses killed more people last year than guns and cars combined. In San Francisco, an average of 53 people died every month from overdoses last year, many of them “outdoors and on sidewalks in front of buildings”.

The authorities, in treating this problem, are very keen on ‘harm reduction’, which sounds sophisticated and forward looking.

San Francisco was an early adopter. In 2000, the city’s Health Commission unanimously voted to adopt a harm reduction policy for drug offences. The city effectively decriminalised drug use while at the same time shifting public funding away from enforcement and toward providing clean needles, distributing the drug naloxone, which can reverse opioid overdoses, and offering methadone and other drug treatment plans. In 2020, San Francisco led the country in overdose deaths.

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Some harm reduction programs such as needle exchanges, fentanyl testing strips, and free testing kits for HIV, appear to have been broadly beneficial. But in the absence of a commitment to the full recovery of individuals, harm reduction morphs into a permanent method of managing chronic drug addiction by expanding the nonprofit-bureaucratic sector. Administrators count lives saved and ODs reversed without registering the broader increase in addiction they help to accommodate. Success is measured not by freeing individuals from addiction so they can live full lives, but by the growth of the treatment bureaucracy.

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I found this snippet interesting:

One of the core concepts in cross-cultural studies is “power distance,” which refers to the degree to which a culture values hierarchy. Places such as France and Saudi Arabia and Colombia have high power-distance cultures: authority, in all its manifestations, matters a lot there. Places such as Australia and Israel are low power-distance cultures. A friend of mine, who was the Middle East correspondent for a major newspaper, once told me that he would sometimes call the Israeli Prime Minister’s residence, and the Prime Minister would pick up. That’s low power distance. I guarantee you that the President of France does not answer his own phone.

From Malcolm Gladwell attending a Mennonite wedding; the Mennonites have very low power distance, to the extent that the bride is expected to not make a show of herself on her own wedding day.

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I recommend this very interesting piece on housing. I’m sympathetic because I would regard myself as a Right-YIMBY. I would like to tear up the Town and Country Planning Act and feel we need to expand cities like Oxford, Cambridge,  Brighton and Winchester, where absurdly overpriced homes are the product of artificial constraints,. But unlike most YIMBYs, it seems anyway, I also want far tighter immigration restrictions; we could easily fit far more people into England, it’s true, but would it make us happier? The Government’s latest wheeze to solve the problem? Forever mortgages.

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A bit late to it, but this Palladium article by Brian Balkus on why it’s so hard to get stuff built in America is very interesting.

After four years of congestion and construction, and with the project a year behind schedule, Sepulveda was trying everyone’s patience. One of the people fed up with the project was Elon Musk. His daily commute to and from SpaceX’s headquarters was taking over an hour due to construction delays. He went to Twitter with his frustration and began openly speculating about buying tunnel boring machines (TBMs) to drill under Los Angeles, offering to pay for the cost of adding more workers to the project. When he investigated TBM technology he discovered that it hadn’t improved in decades—a snail moves 14 times faster than the best drill. A year after his initial tweet, Musk launched the Boring Company, a tunneling technology company devoted to building TBM that can “beat the snail.”

What I find fascinating about Musk is that he seems like a character out of the Victorian era, powered by the same sort of determination to push the limits of engineering and discovery, mixed with a fair degree of eccentricity. But then there weren’t anything like as many lawyers then.

Shortly following the passage of NEPA, California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into law, which required additional environmental impact analysis. Unlike NEPA, it requires adopting all feasible measures to mitigate these impacts. Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything. As California Governor Gavin Newsom succinctly put it, “NIMBYism is destroying the state.”

It is also destroying the U.S.’s ability to build nationally. The economist Eli Dourado reported in The New York Times that “per-mile spending on the Interstate System of Highways tripled between the 1960’s and 1980’s.” This directly correlates with the passage of NEPA. If anything, the problem has gotten worse over time. Projects receiving funding through the $837 billion stimulus plan passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crises were subject to over 192,000 NEPA reviews.

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ROBOTS. We all love robots, yet Britain is falling behind China, Japan and pretty much everywhere:

The U.K. has become an exemplar of reverse automation. Automatic car wash sites plummeted up to 2018 as unregulated, untaxed, and often forced labour flooded the hand car wash market. The number of automated car washes halved from 9,000 in 2000 to less than 4,200 in 2015. The number of dedicated handwashing sites expanded to at least 20,000. This was not part of some broader global trend. Automatic car washes remain a growth industry. Rather the U.K.’s habitual solution to aging and tight labour is wage suppression as opposed to capital-intensive investment. The trend was only somewhat halted by belated parliamentary scrutiny and labour shortages caused by the coronavirus. Given the immigration trends of the current government, it is likely reverse automation in this sector will re-emerge.

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This Friday was Canada Day, celebrating the only country that actually claims to be committing genocide. Bless. Canada is an interesting example of Rapid Onset Identity Dysphoria in a country; it has gone through the most crazed of moral panics these past couples of years, a sort of mixture of the satanic abuse panic and the blood libel. Dozens of churches have been attacked. Tom Flanagan explains it all.

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Sam Freedman is one of the best writers on British politics, and this week he looks at the nostalgia problem facing the two parties. I don’t think that nostalgia is necessarily a sign of a tired culture, since it played a big part in ascendent nations like early Rome and 14th-century England. But it’s true to say that the Conservatives really have no real vision of what they believe. They seem achingly progressive in some ways, mixed with spasms of knee-jerk reaction that seems directed at older people. They have no idea of how they wish to reshape the country, so what we get is the same progressivism as we would with Labour, but worse public services.

I can’t wait until Labour are elected; it’s going to be great.

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Thanks for subscribing, and to my American readers, have a happy 4th July tomorrow; and to my fellow Britons on Tuesday, Happy NHS Day.