And there was me thinking it was a tennis stick.

Whether this public hostility (even among the young and unversity educated – who have been subjected to P.C. brainwashing all their lives) will have a real effect I do not know.

I like to think it will.

If you’re looking for grass courts, the Club at Harrow-on-Hill in London has both grass and clay–or at least it did when I played there in the 70s. They used to allow we USAF types to hold the 3rd AF UK tennis tournament there. I well remember my first Wimbledon (either 70 or 71IIRC) I attended was thanks to a club member there whom I chanced by in the changing room who graciously gave me his tickets as he was unable to go for some reason or another. They were centre court. 2nd row off court just to right of umpire’s chair. Watched Newcombe-Rosewall singles match and doubles of Tiriac-”Nastase” v. Bob Hewitt-Fred McMillian, last was a 5-setter that carried over to next day.

In a way, I admire the perverse collective genius that engineered this sheer perfection of party line enforcement.

Well, it was the Americans that figured it out, but then America is the keystone of the whole progressive arch (as I’ve suggested elsewhere, what we’re suffering is a specifically anglospheric form of statism/socialism, and the USA is the centre of the anglosphere). They figured it out because they’re a land of lawyers.

Rather than the inefficiency and lack of coverage of a secret police system, or of having citizens report their fellows to said secret police, you turn every citizen into a potential enforcer by use of the court system. They are incentivised by the potential rewards, which can be enormous. Progressivist legal firms, acting in the pseudo-market, are the “community organisers” of the system- again motivated by profit as well as zeal. The state only has to pass a few laws about discrimination, then you leave it to the legal system to do the rest. Very clever system, really. You get a tyranny actively maintained and extended by the citizens themselves.

You play at this club? On grass? I’ve never even seen a grass court in person, let alone played on one. Damn, I’m jealous!

I just remembered something I noticed the other day that is one of the zillion examples of how deeply rooted the whole progressivist system is now throughout our society. I was looking at the website of my local tennis club. Here’s their “Equity Policy Statement”.

Recently I had a similarly depressing episode when I was helping a less computer-savvy friend write his CV and cover letters for a few job applications. I noticed that on each corporate website on which he was applying, by the time you manage to click through to the job applications page, you’re deluged with a slew of messages about “social responsibility,” “environmental consciousness,” “diversity,” “equity,” and all other imaginable PC cliches. On some of them, you’d have to struggle to find your way through this bullshit to even find out what the business of the company is supposed to be in the first place.

This might look like just a minor silly irritation, but it seems to me like it’s a manifestation of a much more sinister phenomenon. In the USSR, all institutions had to have political commissars attached to ensure ideological compliance with the party line. The modern progressives, however, have managed to implement a far more effective mechanism of ideological self-policing by imposing a system of impossibly complicated, incoherent, and contradictory laws and regulations on every private institution, where whatever you do, you can be prosecuted or sued for violating some environmental, safety, anti-trust, anti-discrimination, or God knows what other regulation. It’s literally impossible to do anything that couldn’t provide a pro forma pretext for such punishment and/or a media lynching for violating the enlightened norms and sensibilities. So, we see every private institution humbly pleading “Please don’t punish us, you see that we’re bending over backwards to follow the party line!”

In a way, I admire the perverse collective genius that engineered this sheer perfection of party line enforcement. What makes the whole thing bitterly ironic is when I see the hordes of young activists joining various progressive causes, believing that they are fighting a cool rebellious crusade against entrenched injustice, unaware that in fact they’re serving as loyal soldiers of an ideological control system that makes Stasi look entirely inefficient and backward, like an abacus compared to a modern laptop.

I just remembered something I noticed the other day that is one of the zillion examples of how deeply rooted the whole progressivist system is now throughout our society. I was looking at the website of my local tennis club. Here’s their “Equity Policy Statement”.

What CDS’s do is simply dissociate the the default risk from an underlying debt security. That does not make that risk vanish, and yes, it can concentrate it in the portfolio of someone who wants it. The fact that some dumb folks estimated that risk poorly does not make the instrument evil – if you fail to do your due diligence, you can lose money with pretty much any financial instrument, and with quite a few non-financial ones.

Blaming CDS’s for the current crisis is the financial equivalent of blaming guns for murder rates. Those who want to murder someone can do it with a brick no less successfully than with a gun – and actually more easily so if assured the victim does not have a gun. Those who want to lever up can do it without CDS’s; however, those who want to invest in bonds, but do not care for the default risk, can do so with CDS’s.

If you like eponymous laws… these are gloriously at work here:

1) Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
2) Amara’s Law: “”We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. (CDS’s are just another “technology’)
3) Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.
4) Murphy’s version of Murphy’s Law: “If there’s more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way.”

I often find IanB to be overly pessimestic, but in this case I am in full agreement.

The proponents of this pernicious movement are entrenched throughout all levels of government, organised labour and charity, both fake and real. Removing them will be the work of a generation of determined activists, and I see no sign of thse activists arising.