Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.
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I was in Rome earlier this week for a few days, and is my wont, I will strike up conversations with random people who I sense are willing to participate in them with me. I tend to ask simple and open-ended questions that work as a sort of verbal Rorshach Test, and gauge the general sentiment of the locals by compiling, sorting, and averaging out the answers that I get from them.
Having been to Italy five times this year alone, I can conclude with some confidence that the median Italian is the most antagonistic toward Brussels of all the major EU countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and maybe Holland). There is a fury towards Brussels that is consistently found across party and ideological lines from non-politicians, notable in that the capital of the EU receives much more ire than Rome itself, or any party in or out of Italian government.
Italy has not fared particularly well in the EU when compared to other large EU states, and has performed very poorly when compared to other large EU states that have adopted the Euro. Italy has for some time now been economically stagnant, with a bloated national debt, and no relief in sight.
Poland, on the other hand, has undergone an economic miracle these past two decades, and its future looks very bright, to the point where it is expected to leapfrog the UK in GDP per capita:
Both Poland and Italy are large players within the EU. Where Italy has been the recipient of economic discipline courtesy of Brussels, Poland has been the victim of political punishment for now toeing the liberal democratic line that is entrenched in EU HQ. Where the Italians are increasingly anti-EU, the Poles are still generally positive about it for obvious reasons, even if Brussels has been openly playing political favourites in their country.
This favouritism has been on full display since the Poland’s centrist-liberal Civic Platform managed to cobble a governing coalition together after the national conservative PiS was unable to do so due to underperforming in the recent Polish parliamentary elections. PiS, despite leading Poland’s enormous effort to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invasion of its territory (going as far as to house and settle millions of Ukrainians on its own soil), has long been targeted for issues pertaining to “rule of law” by both Brussels and the US State Department. Brussels went as far as to withhold COVID relief funds from Warsaw until they fell into line.
Where PiS went wrong was in pursuing a social conservative domestic policy that included the forcible retirement of older, ex-communist judges, the precise type of apparatchik that easily segued from holding the Comintern line to becoming Brussels-like liberal democrats overnight. The judiciary is the weak link in western liberal democracies, particularly when it comes to national sovereignty. PiS identified this weak link and sought to reform it, upsetting both Brussels and Washington DC, even as it bent over backwards to assist Ukraine.
‘Miraculously’, the EU unblocked those billions of Euros in COVID relief funds the moment that Civic Platform formed a governing coalition, even though none of the changes sought by Brussels regarding the “rule of law” have yet to take place:
The European Commission has thawed billions in funding for the so-called recovery plan (KPO) following the formation of an anti-PiS government in Poland. This development, unfortunately, tells us, in black and white, a few unpleasant truths about the realities of European Union politics.
……..
However, one does not need to be a PiS supporter to see that this “miraculous thawing of euros” is quite ambiguous. It takes a lot of ill will and a very closed mind not to notice — or pretend not to see — that something quite alarming has happened here, and for several reasons.
Firstly, we have a clear indication that the accusation of a lack of rule of law in Poland, which has been hammered at us for the last few years, was baseless. It was not founded on any solid evidence, which we can agree is necessary to call such a serious decision “fair” or even “lawful.” Now, it’s obvious that we are dealing with a purely political sanction based on an abstract assessment of the situation in Poland. In terms of actual legal framework (laws, statutes), nothing has changed in Poland. Except, of course, that new members have indeed joined the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS), chosen from the politicians of the current majority.
It is clear to everyone that the money is flowing because the elections in Poland were won by those who, in the opinion of the European Commission, should have won. The EU Commission, particularly its president, trusts and backs this new government. It was obvious from the beginning. We knew that the liberal euro-establishment, by “arresting” the KPO funds, wanted to influence the democratic electoral process in Poland. In other words, they were heavily interfering with Polish sovereignty, trying to blackmail Polish voters into behaving in a manner “appropriate” in their opinion.
It’s one thing to suspect such actions, even with near certainty. It is quite another to know, see, and have tangible proof that this is how the European Commission operates — using the abstract accusation of a lack of “rule of law” to impose its will on a sovereign state is disgraceful.
Civic Platform is the darling of the Brussels and Washington DC set, with Mr. Anne Applebaum (aka Radek Sikorski), having been a big name in the party, and who continues to be the USA’s point man in the country. They promise to transform Poland into Ireland East, jettisoning all the traditional and conservative elements of Polish politics, culture, and society, in favour of a liberal secularist one.
Worse yet, the new Polish government is actively purging national media of those who do not reflect their political opinions:
The new Polish PM Donald Tusk and his hitman culture minister, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, have trampled on the constitution and the rule of law, flushing them down the toilet.
Sienkiewicz, who was an officer in the intelligence services, has misled the public by saying that the commercial code was enough for him to dismiss the CEOs of public media, whereas public media actually operate on the basis of special legislation, and their managing bodies are chosen by the National Media Council.
The law in Poland stipulates clearly how public media is managed and does not allow governments to arbitrarily dismiss the management of public media.
I experienced a lot of things at TVP. I saw many CEOs being replaced. I also remember various more or less turbulent changes among directors.
But I had never seen such jostling and pushing, with some outside people coming to forcibly lead people out of their offices, slamming and locking doors, jumping over people, pushing MPs. Frankly, I had never seen such a use of force there.
I started working at TVP in 1994. We were a new team and we were not welcome there either. The post-communist establishment, to which the television personnel mostly belonged back then, treated us as a foreign body. But even those communists behaved much more decently towards us than what we see today on those cell phone video recordings in Warsaw.
Illegal seizure of media (from the previous link):
The forceful takeover of public television is an admission on the part of the new Culture Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz and his bosses, i.e. Donald Tusk or someone even higher, that they know they are not following the law. If, in terms of formal procedures, there had been a legitimate change of the management at TVP, the Polish Press Agency, and Polish Radio, then the previous team would have left just as the politicians from the Law and Justice coalition had left their offices.
After all, ministries and the parliament building did not have to be taken over by force with the help of some thugs — those weird big men in hoods. The Morawiecki government’s ministers just left their offices and moved out. They handed over drawers, desks, and documents to their successors because these successors had been chosen in a democratic election procedure by the people.
Similarly, there are legal regulations provided for how the changes in public media management staff take place. There is the National Media Council, there is the National Broadcasting Council, there are the boards of directors of these media, and they appoint the CEOs of the public media companies. This is stipulated by law, and we have regulations for this, which allow for a smooth transfer of power and make it possible to replace the persons concerned.
On national media and objectivity:
In this regard, complaining that there is no objectivity on television in Poland is nothing original, as I have seen programs on the BBC about Polish anti-Semites, about the Black Sotnia, about the 70,000 fascists who walk the streets of Warsaw and want to murder Jews and homosexuals. Such things were aired on the supposedly objective BBC with complete disregard for reality.
Looking for objectivity in the media is like looking for virginity in a brothel. In contrast, during the eight years of PiS rule, at least we had two different voices in the Polish media. This situation was far from perfect, one could sometimes disagree with both sides, but at least we were learning about some of the things that the European Commission was preparing, for example.
The former PM (from PiS) is also highlighting these illegal actions:
Morawiecki specifically pointed to the new Justice Minister Adam Bodnar’s questioning of the status of judges who were legally sworn in by the president.
“We are facing a potential anarchy in our courts and a lack of protection for civil rights,” Morawiecki stated.
He also criticized the new minister of culture for illegally altering the composition of public media, accusing the government of disregarding the law and cutting off the public television signal, thereby depriving people of access to information.
The politician from the Law and Justice Party (PiS) party added that such unprecedented events have not occurred in Poland since the fall of communism, with the last similar instance happening during the martial law introduced by the communist regime in 1981.
A big hint as to why the new Polish Government is behaving in this manner:
Morawiecki also suggested that the turmoil surrounding public broadcaster TVP is a smokescreen by Donald Tusk to conceal the issue of agreeing to the EU migration pact. He warned that Poland might be forced to accept thousands of illegal immigrants or face hefty fines.
“Nearly 11 million Poles voted against illegal immigration in a referendum, many of whom are unaware that it has been accepted by the EU with the consent of the Polish government,” he said.
He further added that the previous PiS government opposed such measures for eight years, while Tusk’s government took just eight days to agree to them.
…and this is why you are not hearing about this anywhere nor reading about it on any sites…….this behaviour is approved by Brussels to pursue its greater agenda.
The actions of the Polish government towards its national media would be scandalous if done by other governments, or other states outside of the EU.
The Irelandization of Poland is underway.
You want a long weekend read? OK, I’ve found a good one for you. Strap in.
James Bennett, now a Senior Editor for The Economist, was the the editorial page editor at the New York Times from 2016 until he was forced out in 2020 after the newsroom backlash against the outlet publishing an op-ed from Tom Cotton regarding the George Floyd Riots that engulfed the country in which the GOP politician called for the US military to restore calm.
Last week, The Economist published a massive 17,000 word essay by Bennett in which he attacks the New York Times for its slide into “illberalism” due to its inherent liberal bias. “Advocacy Journalism” is par for the course in mainstream western media these days, and it tilts toward elite consensus politics, while being a bit to the left on social issues in the main. None of this is new to any of you, but this very long essay is an important shot across the bow, especially due to the fact that Donald Trump is now in pole position for re-election, unless he is stopped from running.
Bennett argues that trust in mainstream media has been lost especially due to the advocacy journalism on display at outlets like the New York Times. I’ll share some interesting excerpts and allow you to read the rest at your leisure:
Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief. There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.
I hope those historians will also be able to tell the story of how journalism found its footing again – how editors, reporters and readers, too, came to recognise that journalism needed to change to fulfil its potential in restoring the health of American politics. As Trump’s nomination and possible re-election loom, that work could not be more urgent.
The New York Times has been far from perfect in the past. One need only go back to 2003 and see how it played a key role in selling the Iraq WMD story that turned out to be false. Bennett does concede that mainstream media’s overt partisanship helped elect Trump, and he fears that 2024 will see a replay of this.
From “liberal bias” to “illiberal bias”:
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.
Don’t get me wrong. Most journalism obviously doesn’t require anything like the bravery expected of a soldier, police officer or protester. But far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage: not just the devil-may-care courage to choose a profession on the brink of the abyss; not just the bulldog courage to endlessly pick yourself up and embrace the ever-evolving technology; but also, in an era when polarisation and social media viciously enforce rigid orthodoxies, the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.
One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down. In the face of this, leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.
Forgive Bennett his own biases, we all have them.
Recognizing reality:
As preoccupied as it is with the question of why so many Americans have lost trust in it, the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.
For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.
The proverbial echo chamber.
2016:
The Opinion department mocked the paper’s claim to value diversity. It did not have a single black editor. The large staff of op-ed editors contained only a couple of women. Although the 11 columnists were individually admirable, only two of them were women and only one was a person of colour. (The Times had not appointed a black columnist until the 1990s, and had only employed two in total.) Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative.
This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing. “Too many liberals,” read my notes about the Opinion line-up from a meeting I had with him and Mark Thompson, then the chief executive, as I was preparing to rejoin the paper. “Even conservatives are liberals’ idea of a conservative.” The last note I took from that meeting was: “Can’t ignore 150m conservative Americans.”
Note that David French plays this role now.
Creeping ideology:
In that same statement in 1896, after committing the Times to pursue the news without fear or favour, Ochs promised to “invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion”. So adding new voices, some more progressive and others more conservative, and more journalists of diverse identities and backgrounds, fulfilled the paper’s historic purpose. If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom. On the right and left, America’s elites now talk within their tribes, and get angry or contemptuous on those occasions when they happen to overhear the other conclave. If they could be coaxed to agree what they were arguing about, and the rules by which they would argue about it, opinion journalism could serve a foundational need of the democracy by fostering diverse and inclusive debate. Who could be against that?
Out of naivety or arrogance, I was slow to recognise that at the Times, unlike at the Atlantic, these values were no longer universally accepted, let alone esteemed. When I first took the job, I felt some days as if I’d parachuted onto one of those Pacific islands still held by Japanese soldiers who didn’t know that the world beyond the waves had changed. Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters. New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them. (President Trump himself submitted one op-ed during my time, but we could not raise it to our standards – his people would not agree to the edits we asked for.)
Bennett represents the old school liberals of the centre who have been pushed aside by the newer, progressive youth who view objectivity in journalism as either impossible, or worse yet, wrong.
Back around 2007, I predicted that the USA would at some point go to war in the name of “gay rights”, in which those “rights” would serve as part of a larger bundle of arguments in which to use against a government targeted for regime change. My fellow forum posters laughed at this notion, telling me that I was being ridiculous.
My argument was that gay rights would be equated to human rights, and human rights is the preferred cudgel to use against targeted regimes. If ethno-confessional minority rights were perceived to be infringed on, why not add another category of rights to the mix to overwhelm the target?
The USA has not yet used gay rights as the main issue in which to target a regime for regime change, whether through military action or subterfuge, but it has been consistently used against all of its present and past targets since the Obama era in order to destabilize or overthrow those regimes. Gay rights are a proprietary foreign policy tool of the USA, leased out to its allies, but thoroughly American as its core.
Almost three years ago, I wrote the following essay:
In it, I argued that the USA is undergoing a fundamental change that many interpret as decline, but which I saw (and see) as a shift to overt ideological rule, both at home and abroad. One of the elements of this ideology (which many refer to as “Wokeness”) is the very American concept of gay rights. The essay argued that this Ideological America would seek to transform the world into copies of the USA along economic, social, cultural, and political lines. US race politics, sexual politics, gender politics….all of it would be exported to the provinces and satrapies of the American Empire.
Helen Andrews of The American Conservative has written an essay on how LGBT rights have become a core part of US foreign policy, something that is quite odd in human history:
In August 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky pledged that his government would introduce legislation to create civil partnerships for gay couples. The bill was approved by the Ministry of Justice in October 2023. Instituting gay marriage will require a constitutional amendment, which Zelensky has said will have to wait until after the war ends. In the meantime, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in June 2023 that two Ukrainian men seeking a marriage license had been illegally discriminated against and, as a signatory to the European human rights convention, Ukraine must pass a law that grants them equal treatment.
In theory, it ought to be possible to be part of the democratic world and not buy in to America’s particular version of non-traditional sexual morals. In practice, apparently, it is not.
The American conception of “gay rights” are the price of doing business with the USA, whether willingly or unwillingly. Outside of the professional NGO class, no one in Ukraine is interested in gay rights….but if you want the support of the USA, you have to play ball, no matter how offensive you may personally find it.
The official kickoff:
The founding charter of American gay rights diplomacy was a speech given by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Geneva in December 2011. In the speech, Clinton modified a line from the famous speech she gave in Beijing as first lady about women’s rights: “Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” She told gay and transgender people around the world, “You have an ally in the United States, and you have millions of friends among the American people.” She also promised to “use all the tools of American diplomacy, including the potent enticement of foreign aid, to promote gay rights around the world.”
This was a sweeping new agenda backed by a formidable threat. The caution lay in the narrow definition of gay rights that the State Department would promote. Embassy personnel abroad would not advocate for gay marriage, gay adoption, or even civil unions. They would simply condemn acts of violence against gays, laws criminalizing gay sex, and disparate treatment of gays under the law, such as unequal ages of consent. The idea was to make gay rights seem to be something everyone could get behind. No American evangelical, however conservative, would endorse the South African practice of “corrective rape” for lesbians, one of the examples Clinton cited in her speech.
All gay people across the world are de facto Americans, whether they realize it or not. All are potential agents of US subterfuge.
Throwing the rules out almost immediately:
Alas, the rule that American diplomats would not promote gay rights beyond protection from violent hate crimes was rather like Obama saying in 2008 that he only supported civil unions. Everyone understood that he was just waiting for the right time to declare his real position. In practice, it was difficult to restrict the purposes to which our gay rights funding was put. We gave grants to local LGBTQ organizations around the world, nominally for legal aid and other approved projects, but once organizations are created and activists are trained, the laws of political momentum begin to operate on their own.
A list of examples of grants quickly gets rococo. American taxpayers sent $19,808 to an NGO called Queer Montenegro to introduce Gay Straight Alliance clubs in Montenegrin schools; $24,000 to stage a gay film festival in South Korea; $32,000 to produce a comic “featuring an LGBTQ+ hero” in Peru; $42,000 for the gay classical group the Well-Strung Quartet to perform in Kazakhstan. An NGO in Ecuador received $20,600 to “host 3 workshops, 12 drag theater performances, and produce a 2 minute documentary.” When Fox News ran a story about it, a State Department spokesperson replied that the purpose of the grant was to “promote tolerance” and “provide new opportunities for LGBTQI+ Ecuadorians to express themselves.”
Even the Trump Administration took part in the fun:
The official position of the U.S. State Department, even today, is that it does not attempt to impose gay marriage on unwilling nations. But sometimes its representatives get carried away. U.S. ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher—a Trump appointee—said in an interview with a Polish news outlet in 2020, “I fully respect that Poland is a Catholic country, but you need to know that, regarding LGBT, you’re on the wrong side of history.” As ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel put his political weight behind a national anti-discrimination bill and called on Japan to implement gay marriage, which annoyed many Japanese who felt he had overstepped his bounds.
Longtime readers of this Substack will recognize that quote from Mosbacher, as I have shared it on here several times through the years.
More on continuity through the Trump era:
Yet throughout Trump’s term, the programs Obama and Clinton had launched were left in place. The leading scholar on this topic, Cynthia Burack of Ohio State University, wrote in her 2022 book How Trump and the Christian Right Saved LGBTI Human Rights: A Religious Freedom Mystery, “I assumed that if the Christian right were in the position to extirpate SOGI [sexual orientation and gender identity] human rights support and assistance from US foreign policy, they would do so. I was wrong.”
Why did this happen? One answer is personnel. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was, in a previous life, the president of the Boy Scouts who pushed the organization to change its policy on gay scoutmasters. Ric Grenell became the highest ranking gay federal official in American history when Trump made him director of national intelligence in 2020. He had spent the previous year leading a campaign to decriminalize homosexuality in the 70 countries where it remains, to one extent or another, illegal.
Oddly, Grenell’s campaign did not cooperate at all with existing efforts within the State Department. When the umbrella body for international gay rights diplomacy, the Global Equality Fund, had a big confab in Berlin in 2018, Grenell declined to attend, even though he was ambassador to Germany at the time.
Which gets to the other reason for inaction on this issue under Trump: the usual deep state insubordination. Trump’s political appointees and the entrenched federal bureaucracy did not always cooperate with each other. On the issue of gay rights, the true believers in the State Department will only put a brake on their advocacy if forced to do so. Professor Burack, in her book, lists the actions she expected the Trump administration to take, which conveniently doubles as a list of action items for Trump II. In addition to obvious steps like pulling out of the GEF, she floats the idea of a gay rights equivalent of the “Mexico City policy” on abortion (which Trump did reinstate). It’s a blunt instrument, but that’s what it would take.
Being a gay activist on behalf of the USA in your country pays dividends:
When Hillary Clinton gave that speech in Geneva, she was joined by a beautifully diverse bunch of gay activists from all around the world—Malawi, Lithuania, the Philippines, Moldova, Jamaica. One of them was Ukrainian. That man, Zoryan Kis, now works for the Foreign Ministry in Kiev, after stints at the National Democratic Institute, Amnesty International, and Freedom House.
Being a gay rights advocate in Eastern Europe seems to be a good way to attract favorable attention from big Western institutions. Bart Staszewski organized a pride parade in the Polish city of Lublin and for this achievement was selected to receive fellowships by the Obama Foundation and the Atlantic Council. Maksym Eristavi, a gay activist in Lvov, was a Poynter fellow at Yale in 2015 and more recently had fellowships at the Atlantic Council, the Millennium Leadership Program, and the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.
It makes sense. These fellowships are about picking individuals and investing in them, tying them to your networks and boosting their careers. If you pick a homosexual, you can be certain his loyalty to the American empire will remain absolute. As long as America stands for giving gay people special legal protections and high social status, self-interest will urge him to maximize its influence.
The above-mentioned Maksym Eristavi contributed a chapter to an edited volume titled Untapped Power: Leveraging Diversity and Inclusion for Conflict and Development (2022). The subtitle practically gives the game away. The book is about how “leveraging diversity and fostering inclusion” have led to “a more effective approach to international affairs.” Eristavi’s chapter, on gay rights, describes how, in countries from Vietnam to his native Ukraine, American diplomats used the power of their office on behalf of gay rights and had their influence enhanced in return by this exercise of sway. Being the gay empire alienates some people, but it inspires others to rally to America’s cause, and perhaps the latter make up in usefulness for what they lack in numbers.
It’s funny to me that people are arguing for decorum in the US Senate building after those two gay men filmed themselves having sex in it recently. What they were doing is what their country is doing to large parts of the world already, and many people have to smile and pretend to accept it as if it’s perfectly fine behaviour.
It’s good to be The King.
(I just learned that Northern Ireland no longer has any official flag whatsoever. The flag above is for the pre-1972 government of Northern Ireland, which no longer exists as an entity as per the footnotes in the following article)
I cannot find the stat right now, but I recall reading some years ago that around 70% of Northern Ireland’s economy was publicly funded(!). In 2008, the public sector accounted for 30.8% of the overall workforce. These are brutal, brutal numbers. Northern Ireland has only had self-rule for 13 of the past 50 years, the rest of the time being spent under what is known as “Direct Rule” from Westminster.
Northern Ireland has the ability to govern its own affairs in a range of areas: education, health, policing, and more. The UK government in London retains power over foreign policy, taxes, and much of the ‘big boy’ stuff.1
But Northern Ireland has only exercised this ability for a total of thirteen of the past fifty years. The rest of the time, the UK government has been in charge, an arrangement known as ‘direct rule’. The devolved government most recently collapsed2 in February 2022, and, despite an election later that year, its political parties have been unable to form a new one since.3 In software terms, Northern Ireland’s political institutions have very low uptime; they rarely work.
Meanwhile, public services and infrastructure are crumbling – from healthcare and policing to roads and the electrical grid. Journalist Sam McBride writes: ‘A sort of half-hearted anarchy pervades. There are still laws, police and regulatory bodies. The streets aren’t filled with looters. But so much of what an advanced democratic society takes for granted is crumbling.’
What’s going on?
Besides issues with policing and energy, its healthcare sector seems to be in disarray:
To this list, we could add poor healthcare: NHS waiting lists in Northern Ireland are the worst in the UK. There are regular news stories of people waiting for years for treatment.
Everyone wants power-sharing between Catholics and Protestants to work, which is why the UK is hesitant to officially impose direct rule as it would signal a failure of this respectable goal:
The UK government has been unwilling to step in and impose direct rule officially, as this would be seen as an admission that power sharing across the sectarian divide – a key goal of the Good Friday Agreement – has failed. This has left civil servants effectively in charge of running the country (rather than the UK government’s Northern Ireland Office). However, limited budget-setting powers mean that those officials are unable to offer pay increases to public sector employees. There are budget shortfalls across thedepartments.
The author argues that many of these issues stem from the peace deal between Protestant and Catholic militants and their political groupings. It’s very interesting reading.
Should I go on? I think I will. It’s important to get to the thoughtful, speculative part, where I ask what it means when the objects in our lives demoralize us in a blizzard of malfunctions, but it’s also important – to me, emotionally -- to bury the reader in details of the unceasing material disappointments I’ve faced The cute yellow mittens my wife picked up at Target which unraveled the second time she wore them. The new suitcase which won’t stand upright when it’s full. The laptop computers that have turned to bricks within months of their warranties expiring. And the hybrid sedan with fifty thousand miles on it that also turned into a brick while going eighty down the freeway, losing its power steering, its power brakes, its power everything. I survived, by some miracle, issued legal threats, and the car’s manufacturer repaired it, free. Then it bricked again a few weeks later.
It’s the little things too, of course, because they’re constant. The staples that won’t pierce five stacked sheets of paper. The matches that sizzle and smoke but don’t catch fire. The grocery bags split by the corners of the milk cartons whose inadequately seals leak drops of milk. The strangely short power cords on electronics. The two or three new pens I use each week that, because no ink comes out of them (at least not continually, in lines) aren’t really pens at all, in fact, but tributes to pens, Potemkin pens, mere props.
Baffled by how to measure this decline in the quality of common wares – a decline whose significance I promise to cover once I’ve further gratified my rage -- I opened the matter to my Twitter audience and quickly garnered two thousand replies, by far the longest thread I’ve ever triggered. The complaints were specific and formed patterns. One was a loathing for newer washers and dryers, because they don’t wash or dry well, and then they break. The clothes that go inside them were disliked too. (A former top executive of Levi’s chimed in to confirm that jeans aren’t what they used to be.) My favorite replies were the picky ones. One person noted that the “juice content” of juice is going down. Another observed that the “foaming liquid hand soap” which suddenly is dominating store shelves is just normal liquid soap, diluted.
The last bit is funny, because only half an hour ago I was criticizing the hand soap in the main floor bathroom here at my parents’ house (I’m here for Christmas).
For those who missed it, we’ve started the latest entry in the FbF Book Club. In this iteration, we are looking at the history of Alcohol Prohibition in the USA, with a focus on the actual period itself that lasted from 1920 until 1933. The book is Daniel Okrent’s “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” (1920). A bestsellter, it’s written in a popular style.
Come join us in the FbF Book Club by subscribing here:
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I will be in NYC later next week where I will be filmed by a team surrounding a very well-known and public figure in these circles. I think it will be part-interview, part Anthony Bourdain walk around and see what happens. I’m looking forward to this, but not as much as many of you are looking forward to seeing how I actually look in real life.
For those already subscribed, I will do my best to put out the next entry of the FbF Book Club tomorrow. For those on the free plan, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and if you do celebrate, try and forget all the stuff that we talk about and read about here, and spread some joy with your loved ones.
I will also ask the latter group to kindly please consider subscribing to my Substack as I do put a lot of work into producing the content that you already enjoy here. By doing so, you will get access to all the rest that is currently hidden behind the paywall.
Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already.
Click the like button at the top or the bottom of the page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
News:
I will be in NYC later next week where I will be filmed by a team surrounding a very well-known and public figure in these circles. I think it will be part-interview, part Anthony Bourdain walk around and see what happens. I’m looking forward to this, but not as much as many of you are looking forward to seeing how I actually look in real life.
FbF Book Club:
For those who missed it, we’ve started the latest entry in the FbF Book Club. In this iteration, we are looking at the history of Alcohol Prohibition in the USA, with a focus on the actual period itself that lasted from 1920 until 1933. The book is Daniel Okrent’s “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” (1920). A bestsellter, it’s written in a popular style.
For those already subscribed, I will do my best to put out the next entry of the FbF Book Club tomorrow. For those on the free plan, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and if you do celebrate, try and forget all the stuff that we talk about and read about here, and spread some joy with your loved ones.
I will also ask the latter group to kindly please consider subscribing to my Substack as I do put a lot of work into producing the content that you already enjoy here. By doing so, you will get access to all the rest that is currently hidden behind the paywall.
The liberalization of Poland and Ireland is going hand in hand with the collapse of Christianity in those countries, particularly among young people. So I need an explanation for why all Christian countries when they become remotely wealthy, completely abandon their millenia long ideology in favor of the liberal secular one.
You look at the Gulf Arabs, they are fabulously wealthy but they remain Muslim. Sure they might not always act according to Islamic law, but they all still identify as Muslim, something you cannot say about the Christian West. You look at Thailand, they all remain Buddhist. Again I am not concerned if they follow Buddhist theology perfectly, just if the population identifies itself as "Buddhist".
Every other religion in the world manages to hold on to their percentage shares except for Christians. Even the poorer Latin Americans are rapidly de-Christianizing. I don't think the beliefs or institutions of Christians are more outlandish or corrupt than any other religion, so don't understand why Christianity is the only religion that is taking the hit.
Click the like button at the top or the bottom of the page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
News:
I will be in NYC later next week where I will be filmed by a team surrounding a very well-known and public figure in these circles. I think it will be part-interview, part Anthony Bourdain walk around and see what happens. I’m looking forward to this, but not as much as many of you are looking forward to seeing how I actually look in real life.
FbF Book Club:
For those who missed it, we’ve started the latest entry in the FbF Book Club. In this iteration, we are looking at the history of Alcohol Prohibition in the USA, with a focus on the actual period itself that lasted from 1920 until 1933. The book is Daniel Okrent’s “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” (1920). A bestsellter, it’s written in a popular style.
Link - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/prologue-and-chapter-1-thunderous
Christmas:
For those already subscribed, I will do my best to put out the next entry of the FbF Book Club tomorrow. For those on the free plan, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and if you do celebrate, try and forget all the stuff that we talk about and read about here, and spread some joy with your loved ones.
I will also ask the latter group to kindly please consider subscribing to my Substack as I do put a lot of work into producing the content that you already enjoy here. By doing so, you will get access to all the rest that is currently hidden behind the paywall.
The liberalization of Poland and Ireland is going hand in hand with the collapse of Christianity in those countries, particularly among young people. So I need an explanation for why all Christian countries when they become remotely wealthy, completely abandon their millenia long ideology in favor of the liberal secular one.
You look at the Gulf Arabs, they are fabulously wealthy but they remain Muslim. Sure they might not always act according to Islamic law, but they all still identify as Muslim, something you cannot say about the Christian West. You look at Thailand, they all remain Buddhist. Again I am not concerned if they follow Buddhist theology perfectly, just if the population identifies itself as "Buddhist".
Every other religion in the world manages to hold on to their percentage shares except for Christians. Even the poorer Latin Americans are rapidly de-Christianizing. I don't think the beliefs or institutions of Christians are more outlandish or corrupt than any other religion, so don't understand why Christianity is the only religion that is taking the hit.