Quotulatiousness

March 19, 2024

Canada’s new international role: the object lesson in failure and tyranny

Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the foreign impressions of Canada’s descent into the west’s object lesson in what not to do in almost every area:

In just the last week, there have been two separate columns in British newspapers framing Canada as a model of what not to do.

Both were inspired by the tabling of Bill 63, the Liberals’ Online Harms Bill. The Spectator said that it effectively engendered the founding of a Canadian “thought police”. The Telegraph cited it as evidence that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete”.

This didn’t used to happen. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian politics were famously inaccessible to the wider world. For Canada’s 2008 federal election, The Spectator covered it with a blog post that mostly mused on how nobody cared. “It’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections,” it read.

But now – on topics ranging from assisted suicide to housing affordability to internet regulation – it’s not infrequent that Canada will be cited in foreign parliaments and in foreign media as the very model of a worst-case scenario.

It was just six months ago that The Telegraph scored a viral hit with a mini-documentary framing the political situation in Canada as a “warning to the West”.

“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has sought to position itself as the global bastion of progressive politics,” reads a synopsis for the film Canada’s Woke Nightmare, which has garnered more than five million views.

The documentary notes that Canada is now at the absolute global vanguard of progressive issues including harm reduction, assisted suicide and gender ideology.

[…]

If the Online Harms Act is suddenly garnering headlines across the rest of the Anglosphere, it’s not because Canadian politics are inherently interesting to the wider world. Rather, it’s because Bill C-63 – just like any number of Trudeau policies before it – is proposing to do things that no other Western democracy has yet proposed.

While plenty of Canada’s peer countries have hate speech controls, Bill C-63 was able to raise even European eyebrows with life sentences for “advocating genocide”, and a provision for police to mandate house arrest merely on suspicion that a Canadian was likely to commit a hate crime.

The Wall Street Journal, for one, profiled the bill as a real-life example of the 2002 film Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian future in which citizens are jailed for “pre-crime”.

Or in the critical words of The Spectator, “this legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime … if that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is”.

March 18, 2024

Slimy “nudgers” want to manipulate the food you buy by “denormalizing” what you enjoy

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowden on the self-imagined elites’ desire for you dirt people to eat a different diet than you would voluntarily choose for yourselves:

On Thursday, Legal & General Investment Management’s senior global environmental, social and governance (ESG) manager told Nestlé to sell less sugar. It’s not for want of trying. In 2018, Nestlé launched Milkybar Wowsomes with 30% less sugar than a Milkybar. The company described it as a “great tasting product” that was the result of “a scientific breakthrough” but when it was discontinued in 2020, Nestlé lamented that demand for it had been “underwhelming”. In 2021, it launched a non-HFSS version of Shreddies called Shreddies The Simple One which contained just four ingredients. The company said:

    We know that consumers are looking to eat more healthily, especially following the pandemic. Shreddies The Simple One is an exciting new addition to the breakfast table that caters to growing demand, with a delicious taste consumers will love.

Consumers did not, in fact, love it and it was withdrawn from sale the following year.

Today, the King’s Fund has added its voice to the call for mandatory reformulation targets enforced with heavy fines. The King’s Fund’s job has traditionally been to get more money for the NHS but it is under new management with Sarah Woolnough, a former trustee of Action on Smoking and Health and former CEO of Cancer Research UK, so it is now involved in lifestyle regulation.

    Compelling food manufacturers to strip out large amounts of fat, salt and sugar would help “denormalise” the routine consumption of unhealthy food, Sarah Woolnough, the chief executive of the King’s Fund, told the Guardian.

The word “denormalise” is taken straight from the anti-tobacco playbook. See how it works yet?

As the Guardian points out, the King’s Fund has done some polling which finds that reformulation is hugely popular in the abstract.

    Overall, 67.3% of Britons agree that the government should require companies to reduce the amount of fat, salt and sugar they put in their products, a survey for the influential health thinktank undertaken by Ipsos Mori found. Only 5% disagreed.

This is a beautiful example of the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences. People love the idea of fat, salt and sugar being removed from food. Who wouldn’t, so long as the food tasted the same? But it doesn’t taste the same. It tastes considerably worse. And when reformulation isn’t physically possible — for example, with nearly all confectionery, biscuits and cakes — the only way to meet the target is by shrinking the product. Some chocolate bars are now so small that a dual pack is the default (and so, as with the sugar tax, big business is doing rather well out of it). And, yes, that is because of the government’s reformulation scheme.

If pollsters asked people if they are in favour of shrinkflation, I doubt many would say yes. As for reformulation, the only way to get an informed opinion would be to do a taste test using the “before” and “after” versions of popular food products and ask people whether the government should mandate the reformulated version and ban the original version. Again, I doubt many people would give unqualified support for reformulation.

Fortunately, we don’t need to carry out such experiments because the public have been offered reformulated products many times in the real world. Sometimes they become popular — in which case there is no need for government coercion — but very often they are a flop, and in many cases they cannot even be attempted.

The British public have put up with a lot from meddlesome puritans in the last 20 years, but I strongly suspect that if the government tried to force us to eat the likes of Milkybar Wowsomes and Shreddies The Simple One, the thin blue line would finally snap.

QotD: Self-hatred (aka “false consciousness”)

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The expectation that a commentator’s views must be in lockstep with his or her ethnic, religious, or sexual identity is always distasteful — particularly when blacks, women, gays, or Jews are labeled “self-hating” when they refuse to toe the perceived party line.

Cathy Young, “When Jews wax anti-Semitic”, Boston Globe, 2005-02-07.

March 17, 2024

Problematic art, again

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Thompson calls to our attention yet another outbreak of problematic racist white supremacy in … landscape paintings?

Hampstead Heath by John Constable, 1820.

Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.

The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour”. And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative”. Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white”, or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.

But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

March 16, 2024

The “TikTok ban” isn’t really about banning TikTok

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Matt Taibbi explains why the movement to ban TikTok is so dangerous to Americans’ civil liberties:

As discussed on the new America This Week, passage of the TikTok ban represents a perfect storm of unpleasant political developments, putting congress back fully in line with the national security establishment on speech. After years of public championing of the First Amendment, congressional Republicans have suddenly and dramatically been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile Democrats, who stand to lose a lot from the bill politically — it’s opposed by 73% of TikTok users, precisely the young voters whose defections since October put Joe Biden’s campaign into a tailspin — are spinning passage of the legislation to its base by suggesting it’s not really happening.

“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok, it’s an attempt to make TikTok better,” is how Nancy Pelosi put it. Congress, the theory goes, will force TikTok to divest, some kindly Wall Street consortium will gobble it up (“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Steve Mnuchin told CNBC), and life will go on. All good, right?

Not exactly. The bill passed in the House that’s likely to win the Senate and be swiftly signed into law by the White House’s dynamic Biden hologram is at best tangentially about TikTok.

You’ll find the real issue in the fine print. There, the “technical assistance” the drafters of the bill reportedly received from the White House shines through, Look particularly at the first highlighted portion, and sections (i) and (ii) of (3)B:

As written, any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States” is covered.

[…]

As Newsweek reported, the bill was fast-tracked after a secret “intelligence community briefing” of Congress led by the FBI, Department of Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The magazine noted that if everything goes as planned, the bill will give Biden the authority to shut down an app used by 150 million Americans just in time for the November elections.

Say you’re a Democrat, however, and that scenario doesn’t worry you. As America This Week co-host Walter Kirn notes, the bill would give a potential future President Donald Trump “unprecedented powers to censor and control the internet“. If that still doesn’t bother you, you’re either not worried about the election, or you’ve been overstating your fear of “dictatorial” Trump.

We have two decades of data showing how national security measures in the 9-11 era evolve. In 2004 the George W. Bush administration defined “enemy combatant” as “an individual who was part of or supporting Taliban or al Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States”. Yet in oral arguments of Rosul et al v Bush later that year, the government conceded an enemy combatant could be a “little old lady in Switzerland” who “wrote a check” to what she thought was an orphanage.

March 15, 2024

Woke Shakespeare?

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Doyle wonders if even the Bard can survive the incessant assaults of the ultra woke, the new Puritans:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

The puritans had it in for Shakespeare. With the exception of the plague, they were perhaps the most persistent threat to his livelihood. As far as these zealots were concerned, the theatre was a realm of “adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons”.

These were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histrio-Mastix (1633). He was eventually to get his way in 1642 when the puritan-led parliament shut the theatres down. When the ban was lifted on the accession of Charles II, older plays had to be dusted off to satisfy the public’s appetite for drama. It was Shakespeare’s work that proved to be the most popular, establishing a trend that has never waned.

Now the bard faces another breed of puritan, more censorial than the last. We are living in conformist times, and inexplicably those in the creative arts have turned out to the be most conformist of all. Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrongthink is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Virtually all productions of Shakespeare’s plays I have seen in recent years have been mangled to promote the regressive fashions of our time. Today’s audiences are seeing a vague shadow of these masterworks through a narrow and uninspiring prism.

Even so, many of us are reluctant to give up on the theatre altogether. We tolerate the gender-neutral toilets that nobody asked for, the rainbow lanyards worn by ushers, and the little sermons in the programmes by directors who think their job is to educate the masses. One friend remarked that so long as the preaching only amounts to 20% of the show’s content, he is willing to accept it. I suppose it’s like going for dinner in an especially pious household, and having to put up with a long-winded prayer before a delicious meal.

Theatregoers might have a better experience if they opt for productions of plays written many years before this new state religion took hold. Shakespeare, as a playwright who has never been bettered, is surely the safest choice. In his work we find ourselves unmolested by ideology. We know nothing of Shakespeare’s opinions on matters of politics or religion, and attempting to glean any suggestions from his works is futile. I think A. L. Rowse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare “saw through everybody equally”. Neither prince nor pauper escapes his sceptical gaze.

Toronto’s blue-uniformed surrender monkeys say … just make it easier for criminals and maybe they won’t hurt you

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Crime has been increasing lately, and Toronto’s boys, girls, and all 57 other genderbeings in blue have their very best advice for you: surrender now.

… Toronto Police have reflected on the problem. They’ve mulled it over. Thought long and hard. And they’re advising people just give up. To stay safe.

This advice came out at a community safety meeting between Toronto Police officials and concerned citizens last month. (The meeting was covered by City News Toronto, but didn’t get widespread coverage until this week, when clips went viral online. Tell me that isn’t a microcosm of the 21 century.) In remarks to the citizens at the meeting, a Toronto police constable said this: “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs by your front door. Because they’re breaking into your homes to steal your car. They don’t want anything else. A lot of them that [the police] are arresting have guns on them. And they’re not toy guns. They’re real guns. They’re loaded.”

Oh. Okay.

Look, it’s not bad advice, in any individual circumstance. There probably are a lot of people out there who’d be relieved if someone kicked in their door, grabbed the fob and took off. And it’s certainly not novel advice from a police service. We’ve all heard variations of this before, right? “Just give up your wallet” when you’re mugged. “Just get out of the car” during a carjacking. You can always replace things. Right?

The problem is that, in the other scenarios above, you’re out and about in public. There’s no guarantee of safety in public, as much as we all wish otherwise. The advice now being given by Toronto police isn’t what to do when someone jabs a gun into your ribs in a seedy back alley, but how to avoid being harmed by bad guys in your own home. And the police advice is “Make it so easy on them that they have no reason to hurt you”.

There’s no charitable read on this, and in this case, truth isn’t a defence. I accept that the police are giving their real, best, true advice. I accept that they are being sincere. That’s the problem: the police are sincerely surrendering. They’ve given up, and they think it would be best if you gave up, too. These violent robberies are just going to continue, and it’s on us — the public — to minimize the bloodshed and risk to ourselves by … submitting.

I try to avoid hyperbole in columns, with the odd exception for comic effect. But this isn’t funny at all, so I won’t make a joke of it. Let’s be extremely serious for a moment. If this is where the Toronto Police Service has landed in terms of their best advice for the public, as a member of that public and Toronto resident, I’d like to ask this: why stop with leaving my fob by the front door? I have a laptop computer. It’s a few years old now, but still in workable condition. It’s worth a few hundred bucks. Maybe I should leave that by the door, too? I don’t keep a lot of cash on hand — who the hell does, in 2024? — but there’s usually a few bucks in my wallet, or my wife’s. Should part of our nightly routine now just be emptying our wallets into a little bowl that we can leave on the radiator by the front door, and come morning, if the door hasn’t been kicked down and the cash grabbed, we can just put the money right back into our wallets as we get the day started? I’m not really a jewelry guy, but my wedding band is worth something, I guess. Pop that into the bowl with the cash?

After all, the bad guys have guns. Real guns. Loaded guns. And there is apparently nothing to be done about this except submit and co-operate. So say the police.

<sarc>No, that can’t be right. Justin Trudeau made guns illegal, so the bad guys just can’t have guns. It would be against the law, and they might get in trouble.</sarc> Oh, and should the propitiatory offerings be placed inside or outside the door? I guess outside, to make it even easier for them, but make sure everything is protected from rain or snow … it’d be risky if they had to pick everything up soaking wet and they might take it out on you and your family.

That’s Matt Gurney from The Line, so you really should read the whole thing.

March 14, 2024

Oddly, Jen Gerson finds her fears about the Online Harms Act unassuaged

There was a point during the last Line podcast where Jen Gerson used the word “assuaged”, and then realized that although she knows what it means and when it’s appropriate to use it, she didn’t know how to say it out loud (a problem I’ve encountered many times in my life, having read widely but not listened to lectures on the various topics I’ve read about). I reference that in the headline, as she recounts going through a belated “technical briefing” on the already tabled bill:

Let’s start by noting that it’s a little bit odd for a government to hold a technical briefing for a bit of legislation more than a week after that legislation has been tabled. Usually presentations of this kind are held for media, MPs, and various stakeholders as or just before a complicated issue or bill is about to be announced to the public.

For the federal government to hold a briefing on the Online Harms Act on March 6 — as it did — raises questions. Questions like “Why?” Questions like “Is this really a ‘technical briefing’ or is this an attempt to assuage concerns about what is actually written in the bill?” And, most importantly, questions like “Am I so assuaged?”

I think, dear readers, that I am not.

Let me explain by appending a caveat about the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, which was tabled about two weeks ago. About 75 per cent of what’s in this bill is either good, or benign but potentially useless, and is genuinely focused on mitigating real online harms like child porn and revenge porn. I might nitpick some of those parts if it weren’t for the rest of it. The rest of it consists of “will result in the most significant expansion of Canada’s hate speech laws and create one of North America’s most rigid regulatory environments for media and social media companies”, as law firm Norton Rose Fulbright put it.

In C-63, and its attempts to explain this bill, this government has consistently muddied the waters that delineate between hate crimes and hate speech, and has demonstrated a deep unwillingness to deal with the philosophical problem of defining hate speech in a way that is clear, consistent, and fairly and evenly applied. More specifically, the bill’s attempts to increase the penalties for “advocating genocide” to life imprisonment; the use of peace bonds for pre-crime hate speech; and the re-introduction of Section 13, to be administered by the already questionable Human Rights Tribunal apparatus. All of these present such punitive measures that they would have a chilling effect on speech that is fundamentally incompatible with the freedoms we expect in a Western liberal democracy.

There’s no nice way to put this. These measures reveal deeply authoritarian instincts toward speech and regulation, all the more pernicious as they’re being introduced by people who are absolutely convinced of their own righteous good intentions.

And that brings us back to the aforementioned technical briefing, which attempted to address each of these concerns in turn. I should note that I don’t believe I was invited directly to this briefing — and as I’m not in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, this is not surprising or unusual. I was, however, provided a copy of the briefing in its entirety, and I was told that I was free to quote from it, provided I did not name the Department of Justice official speaking.

To that end, I’d like to provide some excerpts and paraphrases from this briefing, followed by my own observations on what was being presented to an audience of, broadly speaking, laymen. I’ve also run these observations by criminal lawyers to ensure my understanding of the law is sound. If I am in error in any point, I welcome any correction.

“The dark world of pediatric gender ‘medicine’ in Canada”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The release of internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) revealed just how little science went into many or most juvenile gender transitions and how much the process was being driven politically rather than scientifically. Shannon Douglas Boschy digs into how the WPATH’s methods are implemented in Canada:

An undercover investigation at a Quebec gender clinic recently documented that a fourteen-year-old girl was prescribed testosterone for the purpose of medical gender transition within ten minutes of seeing a doctor. She received no other medical or mental health assessment and no information on side-effects. This is status quo in the dark world of pediatric gender “medicine” in Canada.

On March 5th Michael Shellenberger, one of the journalists who broke the Twitter Files in 2022, along with local Ottawa journalist Mia Hughes, released shocking leaks from inside WPATH, the organization that proclaims itself the global scientific and medical authority on gender affirming care. The World Professional Association of Transgender Health is the same organization that the Quebec gender clinic, and Ottawa’s CHEO, cite as their authority for the provision of sex-change interventions for children.

These leaks expose WPATH as nothing more than a self-appointed activist body overseeing and encouraging experimental and hormonal and surgical sex-change interventions on children and vulnerable adults. Shellenberger and Hughes reveal that members fully understand that children cannot consent to loss of fertility and of sexual function, nor can they understand the lifetime risks that will result from gender-affirming medicalization, and they ignore these breaches of medical ethics.

The report reveals communication from an “Internal messaging forum, as well as a leaked internal panel discussion, demonstrat(ing) that the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care. These internal communications reveal that WPATH advocates for many arbitrary medical practices, including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults. Its approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science.”

These findings have profound implications for medical and public education policies in Canada and raise serious concerns about the practices of secret affirmations and social transitions of children in local schools.

These leaks follow on the recent publication of a British Medical Journal study (BMJ Mental Health), covering 25-years of data, dispelling the myth that without gender-affirmation that children will kill themselves. The study, comparing over 2,000 patients to a control population, found that after factoring for other mental health issues, there was no convincing evidence that children and youth who are not gender-affirmed were at higher risk of suicide than the general population.

In the last week, a second study was released, this one from the American Urology Association, showing that post-surgical transgender-identified men, who underwent vaginoplasty, have twice the rate of suicide attempts as before affirmation surgery, and showing that trans-identified women who underwent phalloplasty, showed no change in pre-operative rates of suicide and post-operative.

These and other studies are now thoroughly debunking the emotional blackmail myths promoted by WPATH, that the absence of sex-change interventions, suggest that gender-distressed children are at high risk of taking their own lives.

March 13, 2024

The true “Online Harms” are coming from inside the bill

Even the state media lapdog CBC admits that the Trudeau government’s proposed Online Harms Act is an incredibly authoritarian piece of legislation:

Justice Minister Arif Virani is defending his government’s Online Harms Bill after celebrated Canadian writer Margaret Atwood shared views comparing the new legislation to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The award-winning author took to social media late last week to share an article from the British magazine The Spectator titled, “Trudeau’s Orwellian online harms bill”.

“If this account of the bill is true, it’s Lettres de Cachet all over again,” Atwood wrote on X, referring to letters once sent out by the King of France authorizing imprisonment without trial.

The federal government introduced late last month its long-awaited Online Harms Bill, which proposes to police seven categories of harmful content online, including content used to bully a child, content that sexualizes children or victims of sexual violence, content that incites violence or terrorism, and hate speech.

As part of proposed amendments, “hate speech” would be defined based on Supreme Court of Canada decisions.

“The possibilities for revenge false accusations + thoughtcrime stuff are sooo inviting!” Atwood wrote.

In Orwell’s cautionary novel about a totalitarian society, thoughtcrime is the illegal act of disagreeing with the government’s political ideology in one’s unspoken thoughts.

Atwood famously tackled authoritarian regimes in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which a religious patriarchal society forces women to bear children and those who speak freely are severely punished.

March 11, 2024

The ever-increasing risk that they’ll destroy the US political system to “save our democracy”

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman outlines not only the threat of a re-elected Donald Trump, but the threat of what his opponents are clearly willing to do to stop him:

    I’ve run into a surprising number of progressives who apparently genuinely believe that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, that will be the last free and fair election that America ever has. These people believe that if Trump wins, then by the 2026 midterms, if not by the 2025 gubernatorial elections, Trump and his acolytes will have figured out a way to rig the elections, or disenfranchise large number of Democrats, or hack the voting machines, or some other nefarious plot that will end self-government. The irony is that these people are the mirror image of the Trump fans who insist that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Democrats (or the Deep State, or whomever) rigged the elections, hacked the voting machines, etc. (Jim Geraghty in National Review, “A Reality Check on the Trump-as-Dictator Prophecies“)

Trump is a competent demagogue but an incompetent administrator. Having won the election and become president, he did very little with his power. The most important thing he accomplished was getting three conservatives onto the Supreme Court, something that a more conventional Republican could probably have done as well.

He did, however, succeed in scaring the center left establishment, parts of the conservative establishment as well. He had no respect for the political, academic, media elite, for Hilary Clinton, Harvard professors, the New York Times or National Review. He was an outsider in a sense in which previous Republican presidents were not, with enough political support to raise the frightening possibility of a government, nation, world no longer going in what they saw as the right direction.

Responses included:

Russiagate, the attempt to claim that Trump was a Russian asset.

The attempt to discredit the information in Hunter Biden’s laptop, which included a bunch of former intelligence leaders implying, on no evidence, that it was a Russian plant, Twitter blocking links to the New York Post‘s article on the laptop.

After the 2020 election, with the federal government back in Democratic hands, attacks have mostly involved weaponizing the legal system to punish Trump and his supporters. The strongest of the cases against him, for deliberately holding classified documents after the end of his term, clearly illegal, looked less unbiased after it became clear that Biden had knowingly retained classified documents from his time as Vice President and knowingly revealed them (although, unlike Trump, he returned the documents once his retention of them became public) and was not being prosecuted. The weakest of the cases was a prosecution for an offense, falsifying business records, on which the statute of limitations had run — on the grounds that the expenditure being concealed had been intended to protect his image and so counted as a falsified campaign expenditure on which the statute had not run. That and prosecuting him for optimistic claims for the value of properties used as collateral for loans — all of which were repaid in full — and finding him liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages were based not on legal necessity but on the predictable bias of a judge or jury in New York City, where the 2020 electorate voted against Trump by more than three to one.

My previous post described a tactic by which, if Trump won the 2024 election, Democrats might have tried to prevent him from taking office. The recent Supreme Court decision makes that particular tactic unworkable but it is clear from the Atlantic article published before that decision that some Democratic politicians were willing to take the idea seriously. Arguable the three liberal justices took it seriously enough to object to the majority preventing it, although there are other possible explanations of their dissent from that part of the decision. The Colorado Supreme Court took seriously, indeed endorsed, the idea of defeating Trump by keeping him off the ballot. It is far from clear that if there is another opportunity to defeat Trump’s campaign in the courts instead of the voting booth it will not be taken. If, after all, the survival of American democracy is at stake …

Trump has been charged with both federal and state offenses. If he wins the election he can use the pardon power to free himself from conviction for a federal offense but not a state offence. James Curley spent five months of his term as mayor of Boston in prison for mail fraud, until President Truman commuted his sentence. Georgia’s Republican governor does not have the power to give pardons even if he wanted to; the State Board of Pardons and Paroles does but only after a convicted felon has served five years of his term. The governor of New York has the pardon power but is a Democrat unlikely to use it on Trump’s behalf. If Trump wins the election but loses at least one of the state criminal cases, does the state get to lock up the President?

Suppose that, despite any legal tactics of the opposition, Trump ends up in the White House, in control of both the federal legal apparatus and, through his supporters, those of multiple states. After the repeated use of lawfare against him by his opponents it is hard to imagine Trump refraining from responding in kind or his supporters expecting him to.

Google’s “wild success and monopolistic position has made it grow fat, lazy, and worst of all, stupid”

Google has long been the 500lb gorilla in the room as far as search engine dominance is concerned, despite a significant and steady drop in the quality of the search results it returns. Niccolo Soldo suggests that Google has gotten fat and lazy in the interval since the release of its last huge success — Gmail — and the utter catastrophe of Gemini:

It’s become passé to complain about Google’s search engine these days, because it’s been horrible for years. We all recall its early era when its minimalist presentation effectively destroyed its competition overnight. Only us olds remember AltaVista‘s search engine, for example. So ubiquitous is its core function that the word “google” entered our lexicon.

Roughly 85-90% of the readers who have subscribed to this Substack have used a gmail address to do so. It’s a great product, although it could be better. Like many of you, I have several gmail addresses, and use email services from other providers like Protonmail. Gmail is incredibly easy to use, and works very well on all the devices that we operate on a daily basis.

Google is a tech behemoth, and is in a monopolistic position when it comes to both of these services. It has used this position to hoover up an insane amount of cash, taking a battering ram to many other businesses in the process, especially news media outlets that rely on advertising revenue. Yet it has not scored any big victories since its rollout of gmail all those years ago. Pirate Wires says that it hasn’t had to for some time … until now. The explosion of AI tech means that its core business is now at threat of extinction unless it can win the AI arms race. Its first foray into this war via its rollout of Gemini has been an absolute disaster. Mike Solana chalks it up to many factors, primarily the “culture of fear” that seems to permeate the tech giant.

The summary:

    Last week, following Google’s Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google’s life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken’s market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

The product rollout was so incredibly botched that mainstream media outlets friendly to Google (and its cash) are doing damage control on its behalf.

Gemini’s ultra-woke responses to requests quickly became a staple of social media postings.

Multiple issues:

    This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator’s Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody’s in charge.

It’s human nature to want to boil issues down to one single cause of factor, when it’s usually several all at once. We humans also have a strong tendency to zoom in on one factor when presented with many, mainly because the one that we focus on is something that we know and/or are passionate about.

Of course, Google’s engineers didn’t do this accidentally. They’ve been very intently observed by the most woke of all, the HR department:

As we all know, HR Departments are the Political Commissars of the Corporate West.

Stupid stuff:

    Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I’ve obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir”, “ey/em”, “xe/xem”, and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There’s no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products.

March 10, 2024

The rapid transition from the amazing smartphone to the “pocket moloch”

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:01

Magdalene J. Taylor follows up her New York Times article from last year with more evidence that so many of the social problems identified today are caused by, or at least made worse, by the almost universal addiction to smartphones:

A year ago, I published an opinion essay for the New York Times that changed the trajectory of my career. It was about how fewer Americans are having sex, across nearly every demographic. For any of the usual caveats — wealth, age, orientation — the data almost always highlighted that previous generations in the same circumstances were having more sex than we are today. My purpose in writing the essay was mainly to try to emphasize the role that sex plays in our cultural wellbeing its connection to the loneliness epidemic. Many of us have developed a blasé attitude toward sex, and I wanted people to care. It wasn’t really about intercourse, and I said as much. It was about wanting to live in an lively, energetic society.

Since writing, I have been continuously asked what I think the cause of all this is. Obviously, there isn’t one universal answer. After publishing, I went on radio shows and podcasts and was asked to share what I thought some of them could be. Economic despair, political unrest, even climate fears were among the reasons I’d heard cited. But all of that, honestly, feels pointlessly abstract. It puts the problem entirely out of our hands, when in fact I believe it may quite literally be in them.

The problem is obviously our phones.

In February, The Atlantic published a feature about the decline of hanging out. Within it was a particularly damning graph sharing the percentage of teens who report hanging out with friends two or more times per week since 1976. Rates were steady around 80 percent up until the mid-90s, when a subtle decrease began to occur. Then, in 2008 — one year after the release of the first iPhone — the decrease became much more dramatic. It has continued falling sharply since, hovering now at just under 60 percent of teens who spend ample time with friends each week.

Some of us really don’t like our screen time habits criticized. Others may think they appear smarter by highlighting other issues, that they can see above the fray and observe the macro trends that are really shaping our lives, not that stupid anti-phone rhetoric we hear from the Boomers. And some of these other trends do indeed apply. Correlation does not equal causation. Lots of things happened in 2008. Namely, a financial crisis the effects of which many argue we are still experiencing. When I shared the graph on Twitter/X saying phones are the obvious cause, this was one of the most common rebuttals. Another was the decline in third spaces. There are indeed few places for teenagers to hang out outside of the home. Skate parks are being turned into pickleball courts with “no loitering” signs, malls are shuttering and you can no longer spend $1 on a McChicken to justify hanging out in the McDonald’s dining area for hours. But as the Atlantic piece explains, the dwindling of places to be and experience community has a problem we’ve been lamenting since the 90s. And it’s not just teens — everyone is spending less time together than they used to. “In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own,” the article states.

March 9, 2024

Titania McGrath – From parody to prophecy

Filed under: Books, Britain, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle‘s imaginary Social Justice Warrior known as Titania McGrath was created as a satire on some of the more extreme goings on among SJWs … today, her work can be seen as amazingly accurate prophecy of how our culture has deteriorated thanks in no small degree to the very, very woke:

“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle

Today is the fifth anniversary of the publication of Titania McGrath’s acclaimed book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice. I created this intersectional activist and slam poet in order to satirise this new intolerant and authoritarian identity-obsessed religion and its stranglehold on society. Having seen so many posh and entitled activists berating working-class straight white people for their privilege, I could think of no more appropriate reaction than mockery. Even Harry Windsor was at it. And he’s an actual prince.

Five years on, and I cannot decide whether I find it funny or depressing that so many of Titania’s ideas in that book ended up becoming reality. Nothing that Titania was ever able to suggest has not eventually been outdone by real-life activists. It is as though they were reading her book for inspiration.

For instance, in a chapter from Woke entitled “Towards an Intersectional Socialist Utopia”, Titania makes the following observation:

    Capitalism, after all, is a singularly male phenomenon. The ultimate symbol of capitalism, the skyscraper, is nothing more than a giant cock on the horizon, fucking the heavens.

Sixteen months after the book was published, this article appeared in the Guardian:

Or what about this passage from a chapter in Woke called “White Death”? Here, Titania calls out Hellen Keller for her white privilege:

    Consider, if you will, the example of white American author Helen Keller (1880–1968). Even though she was left deaf and blind following an illness as a baby, she still managed to study for a degree, write twelve books and travel the world to give lectures. This kind of privilege is staggering.

Compare this with an article that appeared in Time magazine over a year later, in which the author writes:

    However, to some Black disability rights activists, like Anita Cameron, Helen Keller is not radical at all, “just another, despite disabilities, privileged white person”, and yet another example of history telling the story of privileged white Americans.

And how about this tweet from October 2019, in which Titania had some advice for dog owners:

The subsequent outrage ensured that the tweet went viral. And just a couple of months ago, a leading pet talent agency in the UK called Urban Paws was asking owners whether their cats or dogs identified as “gender neutral” or “non-binary”.

After the backlash, the company claimed that it was a mistake. But the specific addition of a “gender identity” category on an application is hardly the equivalent of a typo.

March 8, 2024

A fresh look at the PUA “bible”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In UnHerd, Kat Rosenfield considers the original pick-up artist bible, The Game by Neil Strauss, in light of more than a decade of changes in how moderns approach relationships with the opposite sex:

A decade letter, I’m struck by the astonishing prescriptiveness of this line: the notion that any sexual encounter preceded by flirtation, negotiation, or indeed any assessment of a suitor’s desirability should be understood as “less-than-ideal” — and that any man who seeks to make himself desirable to an as-yet-uncertain woman is doing something inherently sleazy. Granted, the anti-Game backlash began in the form of reasonable scrutiny of controversial seduction techniques like “negging” (a slightly backhanded compliment deployed for the sake of flirtation).

But since then it has morphed into something much stranger: the idea that anything a man does to impress a woman, from basic grooming to speaking in complete sentences, should be viewed with suspicion. Behind this is the same low-trust mindset that leads women to treat every date as a hunt for the red flags that reveal her suitor as a secret monster. If he compliments you? That’s lovebombing, which means he’s an abuser. If he doesn’t compliment you, that’s withholding, which also means he’s an abuser. Other alleged “red flags” include oversharing, undersharing, paying for the date, not paying for the date, being too eager, being five minutes late, and drinking water — or worse, drinking water through a straw.

Today, the turn against pick-up artistry can be understood at least in part as a reaction against some of its more prominent contemporary practitioners, including men such as Andrew Tate, who makes Mystery look like a catch by comparison. But it is also no doubt an outgrowth of a culture in which male sexuality has effectively been characterised as inherently predatory, while female sexuality is seen as virtually non-existent. The question that seduction manuals once aimed to answer — “how do I, a shy young man, successfully and confidently approach women?” — is now, in itself, a red flag, one likely to provoke anything from squawking indignation to abject horror to bystanders wondering if they ought to call the police. That you are even thinking of approaching women just goes to show what a troglodyte you really are. What do women want? The contemporary answer appears to be: to be left alone, forever, until they die — or to meet someone in a safe and sanitised way, via dating app … although even that option is increasingly positioned as inherently dangerous.

Meanwhile, I was surprised upon revisiting The Game to realise that the strategies contained within the book are not just useful but mostly in keeping with more traditional dating and courtship advice, from “peacocking” (wearing something eye-catching or unusual that can act as a conversation starter), to passing “shit tests” (responding with humour and confidence when a woman teases you). Even the much-derided negging wasn’t originally designed with the goal of insulting or belittling women, but rather to teach men how to talk to them without fawning and drooling all over the place. In the end, the message of The Game is more or less identical to the one in popular women’s dating guides, like The Rules or He’s Just Not That Into You: that confidence is sexy, and naked desperation is a turnoff.

And while this may just be a function of one too many viewings of the BBC’s Pride & Prejudice (featuring Mr Darcy, a man in possession of £50,000 a year and an absolutely legendary negging game), I wonder if the aim of seduction guides is, paradoxically, to restore our confidence in the tension, the mystery, and the playfulness of courtship in the age of the casual hookup. Even as we rightly rejoice in the fact that society no longer stigmatises women for desiring and pursuing sex, there is surely still something to be said for subtlety — and just because we aren’t consigned to the role of the passive damsel, dropping a handkerchief on the ground in the hope that the right man will pick it up, that doesn’t mean every woman wants to be horny on main. It’s not just that announcing your desire through a megaphone can seem uncouth; it’s also a lot less exciting than the dance of lingering glances, double entendres, and simmering chemistry that characterises a mutually-desired seduction in the making. Certain people might deride this brand of sexual encounter as “less-than-ideal” for its political incorrectness, but it’s wildly popular — in novels, in films, and in the fantasies of individual women — for a reason.

Meanwhile, the contemporary dating landscape is one in which the sheer fun of dating, courtship, and, yes, falling into bed together has been largely back-burnered in favour of something at once formal and immensely self-serious. In a world of handwringing over sexual consent — in which a man just talking to a woman at a coffeeshop can trigger an emergency response protocol — the stakes of sex itself come to seem unimaginably high, a breakneck gamble where one wrong move will result in a lifetime of trauma (or, if you’re a guy, a lifetime on a list of shitty men). Add to this the proliferation of dating apps, which makes the entire romantic enterprise feel more like a job search than a playground, and the whole thing begins to seem not just fraught but inherently adversarial — a negotiation between two parties whose interests are completely at odds, who cannot trust each other, and where there’s a very real risk of terrible and irreparable harm.

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