Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2024

QotD: The ever-growing state

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Inconvenience would seem to be a small price to pay for peace of mind.”

That one phrase sums up all the problems we are having with government in this country. It justifies the humiliating personal searches at airports. It justifies the police state tactics of “sobriety checkpoints” or “identification stops”. It justifies the Patriot Act, and the new Intelligence Reform Act, with all their draconian intrusions on personal privacy, including the repulsive, illegal and un-Constitutional parts, such as no-warrant-required searches, a national ID card, federal snooping into our reading habits at libraries and book stores. It justifies any intrusion into private, personal, or intimate matters. After all, if someone has more than one wife (or husband), doesn’t your peace of mind require that that person be harassed, jailed, or otherwise punished for violation of your religious or moral code? It doesn’t matter that the people involved are adults who freely and willingly consent to live in that situation. For that matter, if two men or women live together, doesn’t your peace of mind require that their “immoral and ungodly” lifestyle be exposed, and the people involved publicly pilloried?

Ron Beatty, “Peace of Mind”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-03-06.

January 3, 2024

They all spy on you, the FBI, RCMP, MI5 … and apparently your Subaru

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

JoNova linked to this disturbing little article explaining what legal rights you give away merely by being a passenger in a modern Subaru vehicle:

Subaru is a Japanese car company started back in the 1950s. Their all-wheel drive, sporty SUVs and cars are popular with outdoor types and the LGBT+ community (and your privacy researcher’s Mom … Mom swears by Subaru and has since the 1980s). Popular models in the Outback, Forester, Crosstrek, Impreza, Legacy, the sporty WRX, and the electric Solterra. The MySubaru app and Subaru’s Starlink connected services offer up all the usual connected car things like remote start/stop, lock/unlock, honk your horn and flash your lights from bedroom, automatic collision notification, multimedia services like navigation and news, trip logs, and a way to manage other people who might drive your Subaru with boundary, speed, and curfew alerts. So, do we love Subaru’s privacy? Not really. But hey, they aren’t the worst car company we reviewed, so there’s that.

Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow them to use — and maybe even sell — your personal information. According to their privacy policy, that means things like your name, location, “Audio recordings of Vehicle Occupants“, and inferences they can draw about things like your “characteristics, predispositions, behavior, or attitudes“. Call us bonkers, but we don’t think that simply sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s Subaru should mean you consent to having any of your personal information use for, well, pretty much anything at all. Let alone potentially sold to data brokers or shared with third party marketers so they can target you with ads about who knows what based on the the inferences they draw about you because you sat in the back seat of a Subaru in the mountains of Colorado. We’re gonna really call out Subaru for this, because they lay it out so clearly in their privacy policy, but please know, Subaru isn’t the only car company doing this sort of icky thing.

If you go read Subaru’s privacy policy (or don’t, we did it for you, you can just read our review here), you’ll see at the very start they say this: “This Privacy Policy applies to each user of the Services, including any ‘Vehicle Occupant’, which includes each driver or passenger in a Subaru vehicle that uses Connected Vehicle Services, such as Subaru Starlink (such vehicle, a ‘Connected Vehicle’), whether or not such driver or passenger is the vehicle owner or a registered user of the Connected Vehicle Services. For the avoidance of doubt, for purposes of this Privacy Policy, ‘using’ the Services includes being a Vehicle Occupant in a Connected Vehicle.” So yeah, they don’t want there to be any doubt that when you sit in a connected Subaru, you’ve entered the world of using their services.

December 31, 2023

QotD: Orwell as a “failed prophet”

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Some critics do not fault [Nineteen Eighty-Four] on artistic grounds, but rather judge its vision of the future as wildly off-base. For them, Orwell is a naïve prophet. Treating Orwell as a failed forecaster of futuristic trends, some professional “futurologists” have catalogued no fewer than 160 “predictions” that they claim are identifiable in Orwell’s allegedly poorly imagined novel, pertaining to the technical gadgetry, the geopolitical alignments, and the historical timetable.

Admittedly, if Orwell was aiming to prophesy, he misfired. Oceania is a world in which the ruling elite espouses no ideology except the brutal insistence that “might makes right”. Tyrannical regimes today still promote ideological orthodoxy — and punish public protest, organized dissidence, and conspicuous deviation. (Just ask broad swaths of the citizenry in places such as North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and mainland China.) Moreover, the Party in Oceania mostly ignores “the proles”. Barely able to subsist, they are regarded by the regime as harmless. The Party does not bother to monitor or indoctrinate them, which is not at all the case with the “Little Brothers” that have succeeded Hitler and Stalin on the world stage.

Rather than promulgate ideological doctrines and dogmas, the Party of Oceania exalts power, promotes leader worship, and builds cults of personality. In Room 101, O’Brien douses Winston’s vestigial hope to resist the brainwashing or at least to leave some scrap of a legacy that might give other rebels hope. “Imagine,” declares O’Brien, “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” That is the future, he says, and nothing else. Hatred in Oceania is fomented by periodic “Hate Week” rallies where the Outer Party members bleat “Two Minutes Hate” chants, threatening death to the ever-changing enemy. (Critics of the Trump rallies during and since the presidential campaign compare the chants of his supporters — such as “Lock Her Up” about “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and her alleged crimes — to the Hate Week rallies in Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

Yet all of these complaints about the purported shortcomings of Nineteen Eighty-Four miss the central point. If Orwell “erred” in his predictions about the future, that was predictable — because he wasn’t aiming to “predict” or “forecast” the future. His book was not a prophecy; it was — and remains — a warning. Furthermore, the warning expressed by Orwell was so potent that this work of fiction helped prevent such a dire future from being realized. So effective were the sirens of the sentinel that the predictions of the “prophet” never were fulfilled.

Nineteen Eighty-Four voices Orwell’s still-relevant warning of what might have happened if certain global trends of the early postwar era had continued. And these trends — privacy invasion, corruption of language, cultural drivel and mental debris (prolefeed), bowdlerization (or “rectification”) of history, vanquishing of objective truth — persist in our own time. Orwell was right to warn his readers in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of Hitler and the still regnant Stalin in 1949. And his alarms still resound in the 21st century. Setting aside arguments about forecasting, it is indisputable that surveillance in certain locales, including in the “free” world of the West, resembles Big Brother’s “telescreens” everywhere in Oceania, which undermine all possibility of personal privacy. For instance, in 2013, it was estimated that England had 5.9 million CCTV cameras in operation. The case is comparable in many European and American places, especially in urban centers. (Ironically, it was revealed not long ago that the George Orwell Square in downtown Barcelona — christened to honor him for his fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War — boasts several hidden security cameras.)

Cameras are just one, almost old-fashioned technology that violates our privacy, and our freedoms of speech and association. The power of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other web systems to track our everyday activities is far beyond anything that Orwell imagined. What would he think of present-day mobile phones?

John Rodden and John Rossi, “George Orwell Warned Us, But Was Anyone Listening?”, The American Conservative, 2019-10-02.

December 1, 2023

“I considered shopping a proposal for an anti-helicopter parenting book called Your Kid Sucks, but for some strange reason my agent dissuaded me”

Filed under: Education, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer on the modern phenomenon of “helicopter parenting”:

Collapse in childhood freedom – Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.

For the New York Times, Jessica Grose details how new online grading systems allow parents to track the progress of their children not from year to year, semester to semester, report card to report card, but week to week or even day by day. The results are depressingly predictable, in today’s parenting environment. There’s stress for students and teachers alike, a collapse in interest in learning in and of itself, an adversarial relationship between parents and teachers, and the rise of “hyperchecking”, where parents complain about each and every single grade that isn’t an A. The piece is about K-12, but Grose notes that parents are increasingly seeking access to college online gradebooks, which seems crazy to me; as someone who’s taught a lot of college classes, the idea of someone constantly monitoring a student’s grade with the mindset of a litigious lawyer sounds awful. But then again, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Here’s a piece about helicopter parenting extending into the college years to the extent that the parents are arranging social calendars. Of their college-age children.

I’ve been thinking about these issues for some time — I considered shopping a proposal for an anti-helicopter parenting book called Your Kid Sucks, but for some strange reason my agent dissuaded me — and what I can’t stop wondering is why parents don’t stop doing this stuff for the good of their kids themselves. There are social and philosophical critiques to be made of helicopter parenting, some very good ones. But we never need to wonder why people choose to pursue selfish interests over social or philosophical ones. What consistently surprises me is that parents keep puttering along in the clouds above their kids, binoculars in hand, when there seem to be really compelling arguments against doing that for reasons that are completely aligned with the selfish interests of the kids. I get ignoring social responsibility for the sake of your kid; it’s hard to understand ignoring what’s best for your kid for the sake of your kid.

There’s the social case to be made against helicopter parenting, of course. If you wanted to define the essential moral project of human beings in the broadest terms possible, you could do worse than “put others before self”. Aggressive parenting allows people to juke this basic logic — parents who act as though their child’s best interest is the only important criterion are, in a literal sense, putting someone else before themselves. “Hey, I may be disadvantaging already-disadvantaged kids with my hyperactive parenting, but I’m doing it for a greater cause than myself.” And the intrinsic (genetic) dedication to the good of one’s child obliterates the broader social concerns once freed from the guilt of traditional for-myself selfishness. But hyper-parenting still reflects selfishness, putting your own kin above the interest of everyone else, especially in cases where the harm done to society is a lot bigger than the benefit to your child. Academic malfeasance like the Varsity Blues scandal has obvious negative social consequences, for example, while those specific kids faced only going to slightly less competitive or desirable schools had there been no fraud in their applications. Less directly illicit behavior, like grade grubbing — which, among other things, inevitably benefits the students with the parents who are the most aggressive and who hold the most social capital — are a greyer area, but ultimately do more to unbalance an already-unbalanced system. If these parents were confronted with the opportunity to do this for themselves, I genuinely think that most of them would decline, out of a sense of social obligation. But once it’s “for my kid”, it’s no holds barred.

I think absolutely all parenting contains a little narcissism, and that’s OK; it’s probably a part of our genetic endowment that helps compel parents to nurture their children, and anyway parenting is a tough job that we shouldn’t expect people to perform with no sense of self-satisfaction. But it is one of those quirks of our social order that the parents who are the most politically progressive, who most ardently advocate for a society that serves all of our people, are often also the most unapologetic about putting their thumb on the scale for their own children. Plus, the sort of second-order selfishness of parenting allows for the sidestepping of more philosophical objections to helicopter parenting. These objections are less about the social good of others and more about the content of our individual characters. These include personal values such as the notion that we just should, as human beings, be able to live with a degree of independence in youth; that we just should experience hardship and the consequences of our actions to better appreciate what it means to be alive; that we just should, as human beings, secure our own interests to whatever degree we’re able, without help from above, including in school; that we just should operate as though we are but one in a broad collection of human beings, all of whom matter as much as we do, for our own spiritual good. The thing about these personal values is that they’re only motivating if they are indeed personal — that is, these might sway an individual, but not even occur to their parents, and in our system parents have remarkable ability to obstruct the agency of their kids. They can do the dirty work the kids might not do for themselves.

November 8, 2023

Details from the day of the Hamas terror attack on Israel

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Matt Gurney in The Line:

On Nov. 6, one-month-less-a-day after the Hamas assault on southern Israel, I was one of a small number of journalists to receive a briefing by a senior Israeli government official at the Israeli consulate in Toronto. Part of the briefing was the showing of a film, approximately 42 minutes long, that contained video and audio records of the attack. The sights and sounds came from many sources, including home security footage, survivor footage, surveillance cameras at private residences, military facilities and in public places, as well as cameras and Go-Pro-style body worn cameras carried by Hamas. Later in the film, we also see footage taken by Israeli first responders — some of it informally, via body worn cameras and smartphones, but some of it also deliberately and meticulously, as part of the documenting of the attack’s aftermath. The video also included audio portions of what the Israeli government claims is intercepted Hamas communications sent during the attack.

I have to preface this near the top: I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the videos, or of the translations. I believe that the videos are authentic and the translations accurate — the latter is easier, since it has by now been shown to enough people that any false translations would have been noted by members of the audience, but I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic, and had to rely on the captions. As for the videos, while some of what I saw on Monday was new to me, other clips have already been shared widely on social media. There’s a decent chance you’ve seen some of them, too. For further disclosure, many of the clips are very short — a few seconds each. The Israelis said that in many cases, they are only choosing to release what the families of victims have agreed to allow to be shown. That’s an editorial decision, and I haven’t seen the unedited videos. I can’t tell you what I wasn’t shown.

So if you’re absolutely determined to find a way to discredit or dismiss everything I’m about to say, I’ll keep it easy for you. I saw what was presented to me, by Israel, and have little ability to independently confirm any of it.

If you’re interested in hearing what I saw, though, here it is.

I should start by telling you I don’t plan to dwell on all the atrocities or try to summarize the whole 42 minutes of carnage I watched in any kind of coherent sequence. It’s not that the atrocities aren’t important — they’re obviously the central point of the briefing for reporters, and what I was asked to bear witness to. My thinking is simply this: much of what I could tell you has been summarized elsewhere. The global media first saw this film, in Israel, two weeks ago; some of my Ottawa-based colleagues saw it last week. If you’re looking for a summary of the contents, those exist already. I don’t think you’d benefit from just another version of that, and I know I wouldn’t enjoy writing one. So in the main, I’ll avoid long, descriptive passages where I tell you what I saw. I’ll try to offer something different.

But first, let’s get this out of the way. I confess that I was afraid when the video started. Simple fear. Fear I’d crack, fear I’d have to look away, fear I’d somehow fail to meet the moment. I don’t know if that was a rational fear — what the hell does meeting the moment even mean? — but I was afraid. I was afraid from the moment I was asked to attend and said yes. As the film began, though, I found many of the videos less graphic than I’d feared, and actually less graphic than some of what I’d already seen and written about. No one should mistake me — the videos are graphic, some of them extremely so. But in many cases, the videos are taken from too far away or from an unsteady camera (particularly the body worn ones) and many of the worst gruesome details are thus obscured or missed.

Not all of them. Lord no, not all. But some. That helped.

September 19, 2023

For some reason, ordinary Londoners don’t seem to appreciate Mayor Khan’s ULEZ initiatives

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s hard to believe that anyone could possibly want to avoid London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) expansion beyond the initial areas of the city, but a quick search of Twit-, er, I mean “X” shows evidence of what Justin Trudeau might characterize as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views”:

Weird, isn’t it. All those “decommissioned” cameras. And people physically blocking access to workers:

London has put up with a lot over the centuries, but Mayor Khan’s ULEZ somehow seems to have awakened the resistance in a major way:

Brian Peckford republished this article from Yudi Sherman on the pushback against London’s ULEZ expansion:

London taxpayers are damaging the city’s surveillance vans in an escalating feud between Mayor Sadiq Khan and the city’s residents.

Last month Khan peppered the city with ultra-low emission zones (ULEZs), areas in London accessible only to low-emission vehicles. Cars that do not meet the city’s environmental standards are charged £12.50 ($16) for entering the ULEZ. Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras positioned around the zones read license plates and check them against the vehicles’ make and model in real time. If a vehicle does not meet the environmental threshold, the fine is levied against the car owner. Failure to pay can lead to fines as high as £258 ($331).

The ULEZ climate mandate has drawn heavy protests from residents, including hunger strikes and refusal to pay fines. Taxpayers have also taken to disabling the ANPR surveillance cameras which Transport for London (TfL), the city’s transportation department, said will be used both for climate and law enforcement.

In response, the city deployed mobile surveillance vans mounted with ANPR cameras across London in the hopes of evading attacks, but the vans are being targeted as well. Some have been spotted covered in graffiti with their tires slashed, while others have been completely covered in tarp, reports the Daily Mail.

The activists are said to belong to a group calling itself the Blade Runners and have promised not to rest until every ULEZ camera is removed or destroyed “no matter what”. The group is being widely cheered by its compatriots, including media personality and political commentator Katie Hopkins. Over 4,000 people have joined a Facebook group to report ULEZ van sightings.

Between April 1st and August 31st, police recorded 351 incidents of destruction to ULEZ cameras and 159 removals, reports Sky News, an average of over 100 a month. Of those incidents, 171 reportedly occurred since August 17th alone, just before the ULEZ mandate officially expanded to include all outer London boroughs. Two individuals have been arrested in connection with the incidents, one of whom was charged.
One reported Blade Runner said, “In terms of damage it’s way more than what [London Mayor Saidq Khan and TfL] have stated.”

August 18, 2023

QotD: Everyone’s a woke cop

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.

I read about the PWR BTTM accusations. They’re disturbing. I take them seriously. But these guys have had their careers erased overnight, and the idea that we have any responsibility to give them the chance to defend themselves is treated like you took part in their alleged crimes. You simply cannot say, in polite society, “basic fairness requires us to avoid a rush to judgment and to give people the right to respond to accusations”. To do so gets you lumped in with the criminals. Like a friend of mine said, “the only acceptable reaction to an accusation is enthusiastic and unqualified acceptance”. I don’t know how people can simultaneously talk about prison abolition and restoring the idea of forgiveness to literal criminal justice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kangaroo court system. Like I wrote once, we can’t simultaneously be a movement based on rehabilitation and restorative justice AND a viciously judgmental moral aristocracy. You know who thinks everybody’s guilty until proven innocent? Cops. You know who thinks people don’t deserve the right to defend themselves? Cops. You know who says those who defend basic fairness and due process are as bad as criminals themselves? Cops.

Freddie deBoer, “Planet of Cops”, reposted by Jesse Singal, originally published 2017-05-17.

February 17, 2023

Spy ballooning has a remarkably long history (that’s clearly still ongoing)

Filed under: Cancon, China, France, History, Japan, Military, Technology, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Scott Van Wynsberghe outlines the history of balloons in wartime and (as many are now aware from recent events) in peacetime:

China’s balloon spying is shocking on so many levels that you can take your pick. There is the ultra-flagrant violation of foreign sovereignty, the stunningly surreal air of denial exhibited by Beijing, and the fearful sense that something in the world order just lurched. There is also puzzlement: what, balloon spying is still a thing? Indeed it is, and its centuries-long history is instructive as to what China is now doing. It also makes clear that the U.S. is no innocent victim here but rather a past offender with a cleaned-up act.

Among the first major studies of aerial reconnaissance was a book brought out by military author Glenn B. Infield way back in 1970. In a way, Infield was charting unknown territory. When he addressed balloons in particular, he traced their use in spying to the many wars associated with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. In 1794, he related, the French military officer Jean-Marie-Joseph Countelle made an ascent at the city of Maubeuge in order to monitor enemy forces in the area. In the process, Countelle became the first balloon spy.

As technology improved, other firsts followed. By the 1850s, cameras were mounted on French military balloons. In the 1860s, during the American Civil War, Union forces battling the Confederacy used balloons trailing telegraphic wires, which transmitted immediate updates from the balloonists. Yet technology cut both ways. By the early 1900s, balloons had a nemesis in sight, in the form of winged and powered aircraft.

The inevitable showdown occurred in the First World War, and it was ugly. Large numbers of observation balloons were used by all sides in the conflict, and WWI historian Denis Winter claims the Germans alone deployed 170 of them in France by 1917. Typically, such balloons were tethered in place near the frontline, floating at several thousand feet, with telephone wires dangling to the ground. Although they seemed vulnerable, they were actually protected from below by anti-aircraft units, which blasted at any enemy plane that got too close. However, the reverse was also true, with balloons themselves being fired at from the ground. By 1915, says aviation writer Ralph Barker, the British were losing at least a dozen balloons a month from all forms of enemy action. Those balloonists who were not shot to pieces often had to bail out, putting their faith in parachutes that did not always work. (Horrified onlookers called them “balloonatics.”) The fighter pilots responsible for much of this mayhem — which they called “balloon-busting” — may not have had an easy time, but some of them scored heavily, with one Frenchman named Coiffard tallying 28 balloons. Although observation balloons managed to make it to the end of the war, it was a near-run thing. According to author Linda Hervieux, nobody after the war was talking about repeating that experience in any future fighting.

[…]

Once the Second World War was underway, some propaganda leafleting did occur, but secret balloon activity seemed to be at a low level. That was very misleading, because one of the tensest moments in ballooning history was playing out in the background, but it occurred amid so much security that the entire tale took years to emerge. In 1944, Japan launched the first of over 9,000 bomb-rigged balloons​ across the Pacific. Robert C. Mikesh, in a comprehensive 1973 monograph issued by the Smithsonian Institution, noted that almost a thousand of the balloons may have reached North America, but the true number is unknowable, because so many came down in remote wilderness. (One was found by forestry workers in British Columbia as late as 2014.) Mikesh tabulated 285 known incidents, ranging from Alaska all the way south to Baja California and as far inland as Manitoba. Both the U.S. and Canada clamped down hard on any news about the balloons, for fear of providing Tokyo valuable feedback about the results of the campaign. (In other words, balloon counterintelligence became a priority.) In general, the balloons did not cause a lot of harm, but one of them slaughtered six people in Oregon in 1945. By a strange fluke, one of the few groups in the U.S. that knew the full story of the balloons was an element of the Black community. The all-Black 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion was sent to the U.S. West to handle emergencies caused by the balloons.

The remains of a Japanese balloon bomb found in the Monashee Mountains near Lumby, BC in 2014. It was detonated on-site by the bomb disposal unit of Maritime Forces Pacific of the Royal Canadian Navy.

There is a strong temptation to blame the Japanese balloon bombs for what happened next, because the U.S. unaccountably entered the Cold War as the most pugnacious exponent of clandestine ballooning up to that time. Whatever the explanation, the epic struggle between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics plunged U.S. ballooning into a tangle of psychological warfare, shadowy science, under-the-table finances, and clandestine belligerence indistinguishable from military attacks. Plus, UFOs and breakfast foods were involved (seriously).

February 14, 2023

Are you not a PATRIOT? Do you hate FREEDOM?

I sometimes wonder if any bill ever gets passed in the United States without a catchy acronym anymore. Rob Henderson notes the anti-patriotic PATRIOT act and the anti-freedom FREEDOM act as examples of bills named in a way to almost exactly invert the true purpose of the legislation:

Many fully-grown adults have never developed the ability to think beyond words. Others are keenly aware of how easily people fall for this language game. And tactically exploit this mental weakness.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. William Shirer, the American journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, described his experiences as a war correspondent in Nazi Germany:

The strangest variant of this way of thinking is the belief that just because a word or a term sounds good, the reality behind it is also unquestionably good.

In October of 2001, the Bush Administration famously decided to expand state surveillance. This allowed federal agencies to monitor domestic telephone conversations, online activity, email, and financial records, among other intrusions, without a court order.

And what did they call this decision? The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.

USA PATRIOT Act.

Better known as the PATRIOT Act. And if you were against it, what did supporters say that your criticisms implied?

In June of 2015, the PATRIOT Act expired. The Obama Administration then restored most of the provisions under the title Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.

USA FREEDOM.

Better known as the FREEDOM Act. And if you were against it, what did supporters say that your criticisms implied?

There’s a country in which the first three names are “Democratic”, “People’s”, and “Republic”. The first and third words essentially mean the same as the middle — this state belongs to the people, and represents them.

In the modern era, government legitimacy is derived from this concept — representation of the people.

So the name of this particular country basically begins: “Legitimate Legitimate Legitimate”. Officially it known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Sounds like a lovely place. It’s more commonly known as North Korea.

The Soviet Union was officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

China today is officially known as the “People’s Republic of China”.

Who could be against entities with names containing words like Republic, Democratic, People’s, and Union? They sound so nice. Even socialist is cleverly named — who could be against anything with the word “social” in it?

There’s a violent organization that calls themselves Antifa. Short for antifascist.

There are people who will say with a straight face that if you criticize Antifa, then you are a fascist. Or they will imply that you harbor fascist sympathies.

Interestingly, as William Shirer notes in the book referenced above, Antifa collaborated with the Nazis to help elect Adolf Hitler. Antifa has its origins in Germany, and, as a communist organization, their primary goal was to accelerate the forces of history. Antifa in the 1930s aimed to bring forth the revolution. They partnered with the Nazis to overthrow the Social Democrats who controlled the Weimar Republic. Antifa supporters believed that a fascist regime was a necessary step to end capitalism and usher in a communist utopia.

During this period, fascist was used as an epithet against capitalist society and anyone opposed to communism. They used this term to describe the center-left party in control of the Weimar Republic. As Stalin put it, “Fascism and social democracy are twin brothers, social democracy is only a wing of fascism.”

February 13, 2023

It’s open season for balloons over North America

Filed under: Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, yet another incursion into NORAD air space, and no, this isn’t a re-post from last week:

Holy jumpin’ Jeepers, folks, we’ve got more balloons!

On Friday, the Americans shot down another unidentified flying object — gulp — off the coast of Alaska. By Saturday, NORAD was reporting yet another one, this time over Canadian territory. NORAD jets scrambled, and an American F-22 destroyed the object over Yukon. Canadian military teams are now en route to recover the wreck and find out what the hell we are shooting at.

This was an exciting enough little pick-me-up on Saturday, but it wasn’t done. Later that night, another air defence emergency was declared over Montana, and American F-15 jets were scrambled out of Oregon to intercept an object that had been detected on radar. They were not able to find anything, and as of press time, NORAD has said only that they will continue to monitor the situation.

A few points we’d make about a truly bizarre series of stories.

The first is that there’s nothing wrong or particularly embarrassing about an American plane defending Canadian air space. NORAD is a joint bi-national command. Missions are tasked to the first available aircraft. That might sometimes mean a Canadian jet defending U.S. territory. It’s happened! On Saturday, the object was closer to American bases in Alaska than the nearest CF-18 base in Alberta. There probably is a conversation worth having about whether Canada should maintain a small alert force of jets further north, better able to respond in the future. That’s expensive and logistically complicated, but may still be worth considering. For now, the system functioned as intended. So we say, quite sincerely, thanks, America. We appreciate the help.

That being said, we do think this is a useful reminder that the long and repeated delays by Canada to both replace the aging CF-18 jets and modernize NORAD with new sensors and capabilities were reckless and dumb. It was obvious that the CF-18s needed replacing when Stephen Harper took office, but we only got that underway in recent months. NORAD, for its part, functions well as an institution but needs upgraded technology. That project also should have begun many years ago. In both cases, we delayed because we didn’t want to spend the money and because defence projects in this country are almost always politically fraught. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the weird series of aerial intruders is a useful reminder that neglecting your own defences is never a good idea. We are realists about Canada’s ability to field a massive military, but our geography, in so many ways a blessing, does impose a few costs back on us. It’s not easy to patrol and police such massive territories, especially with a relatively small and concentrated population. But we have to do it. It’s what being a country means. Too often, we haven’t. We hope that changes. With the NORAD modernization announced and the F-35s ordered, perhaps we’re finally making right some of these failures. We hope so. But we are jaded, friends. We admit that.

Our final point is an appeal to calm. We don’t really know what the hell is happening with all these aerial intruders either, but there could easily be a pretty mundane explanation. Radar sets have programmable software filters that are intended to avoid cluttering up the scopes with too much information. Without these filters, clouds, snow storms and birds can cause returns that may look like planes and missiles. One way of filtering out such clutter is by establishing a minimum speed for flagging an object. Balloons are likely normally below that minimum. Your Line editors suspect that part of what is happening right now is that we’ve adjusted those filters, and are suddenly seeing things that were already there all along.

Is that better, or worse? We don’t know. We can make that argument either way. In any case, that may be what’s happening.

Or hell, maybe it’s aliens, and Canada and the U.S. just declared war on a more sophisticated race that travelled across the vastness of the stars only to end their journey by being murdered by Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. We doubt it, to be honest. But it’s been a weird few years already, no?

December 31, 2022

The Twitter Files – “Let’s at least try to stop lying for a while, see what happens. How bad can it be?”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Taibbi on the continuing revelations about Twitter’s deep entanglements with agencies of the US (and probably many other) government:

In the coming days you’ll find a new thread on Twitter, along with a two-part article here at TK explaining the latest #TwitterFiles findings. Even as someone in the middle of it, naturally jazzed by everything I’m reading, I feel the necessity of explaining why it’s important to keep hammering at this.

Any lawyer who’s ever sifted though a large discovery file will report the task is like archaeology. You dig a little, find a bit of a claw, dust some more and find a tooth, then hours later it’s the outline of a pelvis bone, and so on. After a while you think you’re looking at something that was alive once, but what?

Who knows? At the moment, all we can do is show a few pieces of what we think might be a larger story. I believe the broader picture will eventually describe a company that was directly or indirectly blamed for allowing Donald Trump to get elected, and whose subjugation and takeover by a furious combination of politicians, enforcement officials, and media then became a priority as soon as Trump took office.

These next few pieces are the result of looking at two discrete data sets, one ranging from mid-2017 to early 2018, and the other spanning from roughly March 2020 through the present. In the first piece focused on that late 2017 period, you see how Washington politicians learned that Twitter could be trained quickly to cooperate and cede control over its moderation process through a combination of threatened legislation and bad press.

In the second, you see how the cycle of threats and bad media that first emerged in 2017 became institutionalized, to the point where a long list of government enforcement agencies essentially got to operate Twitter as an involuntary contractor, heading into the 2020 election. Requests for moderation were funneled mainly through the FBI, the self-described “belly button” of the federal government (not a joke, an agent really calls it that).

The company leadership knew as far back as 2017 that giving in to even one request to suspend this or that set of accused “hostile foreign accounts” would lead to an endless cycle of such demands. “Will work to contain that”, offered one comms official, without much enthusiasm, after the company caved for the first time that year. By 2020, Twitter was living the hell its leaders created for themselves.

What does it all mean? I haven’t really had time to think it over. Surely, though, it means something. I’ve been amused by the accusation that these stories are “cherry-picked”. As opposed to what, the perfectly representative sample of the human experience you normally read in news? Former baseball analytics whiz Nate Silver chimed in on this front:

December 28, 2022

The Myth of the Nazi Police State – WW2 Documentary Special

World War Two
Published 27 Dec 2022

The popular image of the Gestapo is as black leather-jacketed fiends whose spies keep the nation under constant surveillance. They are so powerful that the terrified population has no choice but to sell out its family and friends. But how true is this? Are all Germans living in fear of the Gestapo all the time?
(more…)

November 30, 2022

The widespread anti-lockdown protests in China … and how Apple is helping suppress them

N.S. Lyons admires what can only be described as potentially revolutionary protests across many of China’s big cities and resisting further lockdowns by the government:

Something extraordinary happened in China over the weekend. Not long ago I wrote at length, if in a rather different context, about the vital importance of courage in the defense of the true and the human against the cold, mechanistic evil that is nihilistic technocracy, the machine whose Conditioners forever lust after total control – not only over men, but ultimately over reality itself. Well, now we have just seen a stunning example of such courage in the streets of China, where people rose up to reassert their human dignity in the face of the most dehumanizing machine of control in the world today: the Chinese Communist Party’s “zero-Covid” terror-state.

For three years now, the Chinese government has maintained its policy of draconian city-wide lockdowns, endless daily mass testing and biomedical surveillance, digital Covid-passes that arbitrarily govern every aspect of daily life, vast camps to house those dragged into quarantine for weeks (or longer) at a time, and, more recently, such innovations as “closed-loop” factories, where workers are forced to work, sleep, and “live” completely isolated from the outside world so that they can continue to produce your iPhones.

But now over the past several days protests have erupted in at least a dozen cities and 79 universities across the country, with spontaneous demonstrations – often begun by only a handful of people, or even a single individual – quickly drawing crowds of hundreds, even thousands, of people willing to fearlessly demand an end to the zero-Covid nightmare.

In Wuhan, where it all began, swarming crowds smashed down containment barriers and “liberated” locked-down neighborhoods:

[…]

All across the country, many thousands of these protesters spontaneously echoed many of the same lines:

    We don’t want PCR tests. We want to eat.

    We don’t want Cultural Revolution. We want reform.

    We don’t want lockdowns. We want freedom.

    We don’t want a Great Leader. We want the vote.

    We don’t want lies. We want dignity.

    We aren’t slaves. We are citizens.

These are conspicuously the same lines as those of a banner hung from a Beijing bridge by a lone (since disappeared) protester, Peng Lifa, on the 13th of October, just ahead of the CCP’s 20th Party Congress and Xi Jinping’s re-coronation as Chinese leader for life.

Now, as recordings of the anti-lockdown protests are swiftly censored online, Chinese netizens have often simply been replying with “We saw it” – a phrase referring not just to the protests, but to Peng Lifa’s message.

His final and most striking line, on a second banner, happens to have been:

    “Refuse to go to class. Go on strike. Remove the traitor Xi Jinping.”

And indeed in many protests over the last few days the people’s frustration with zero-Covid tyranny translated into something more: an outpouring of raw anger against the CCP and Xi.

Of course, China’s ruling Communist regime isn’t without its loyal supporters and useful idiots like Apple:

Maybe something will come of the COVID lockdown protests in China. Maybe not, if you’re old enough to remember the guy who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, and who was never identified nor ever seen again. More likely, the Chinese Communist Party will crack down again, and the people of China will become compliant again.

And the West will turn a blind eye. Again.

Here’s what was in the latest iPhone update, according to Zachary M. Seward of Quartz:

    Hidden in the update was a change that only applies to iPhones sold in mainland China: AirDrop can only be set to receive messages from everyone for 10 minutes, before switching off. There’s no longer a way to keep the “everyone” setting on permanently on Chinese iPhones. The change, first noticed by Chinese readers of 9to5Mac, doesn’t apply anywhere else.

In other words, Chinese iPhone users can’t do or say anything without the CCP knowing about it. Dissent can be quashed before it even starts. The Chinese people can be kept under the CCP’s thumb. And Apple is helping.

November 17, 2022

TikTok (aka “Digital Fentanyl”)

Filed under: China, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Geoffrey Cain at Common Sense on the malign influence of the massively popular Chinese social media platform on US politics and culture:

The midterm elections of 2022 were many things — a shocker for Republicans, the possible end of Donald Trump, a win for centrist Democrats. Overlooked is the fact that they were also a big turning point for TikTok, the Chinese social-media platform.

TikTok is not only the most trafficked news app for Americans under 30. It was also a major political force this year. Exhibit A: the Senate race in Pennsylvania, in which both Democrat John Fetterman and his Republican rival, Mehmet Oz, deployed TikTok, with Oz railing against the cost of vegetables in one video, and Fetterman slamming Oz for saying “crudité” in a highly effective response. Other candidates who took to TikTok this cycle include Tim Ryan, who ran for Senate in Ohio, and Val Demmings, who ran for Senate in Florida. (Both are Democrats.) The Democratic National Committee, early this year, launched its own TikTok channel.

Now, there are calls to shut it down. Just yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau has “national-security concerns” about TikTok. Last Friday, the top Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, called TikTok “China’s digital fentanyl”. The day before, Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Mike Gallagher, both Republicans, introduced legislation banning the social-media platform, noting that the data of millions of Americans is “effectively controlled” by the Chinese Communist Party. Earlier in the month, Carr also said the U.S. government should ban TikTok.

It’s about time.

Ever since TikTok began expanding into the United States, more than four years ago, we’ve known that it was a disaster waiting to happen. What’s shocking is that it’s taken this long to get serious political attention.

I know all about this. I used to be an investigative reporter in China. In December 2017, I first heard from friends on social media that a Chinese tech unicorn called ByteDance was planning on entering the American market with a new app. It was called TikTok.

Alongside its sibling app, Douyin, which operates only in China, TikTok was poised to sweep up the Gen Z audience in America, with its preference for video snippets of dancing celebrities, DIY projects, cooking demonstrations, skincare routines and other Gen Z’ers singing and dancing in their parents’ kitchens. As the fastest growing social media app ever, it rankled American competitors Facebook and YouTube, which were banned in China.

By October 2018, ByteDance was the world’s most valuable startup, with a valuation of $75 billion.

Four years later, ByteDance is worth $300 billion. TikTok is expected to reach 1.8 billion users globally by the end of the year. And a quarter of American adults under 30 get their news from the social-media app.

There’s a good reason for this success. TikTok has developed one of the most powerful machine-learning algorithms ever — one that is able to reveal people’s unknown desires to themselves.

Every day, every hour, every waking minute, TikTok is hoovering up seemingly infinite bits of information about its users — their tastes, hobbies, political views, sexual preferences, their facial structure, the sound of their voice. Ostensibly, all this is meant to provide a better product. It should also be noted that this information can be used for spying, influencing millions of users — even waging war. Every time we swipe for the next video, every time we post videos of our own, we are helping the world’s most sophisticated police state learn more about us.

May 3, 2022

Is all of social media just a “giant domestic surveillance operation”?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Severian posted this last week, but I’m only just getting caught up now:

I was wrong about Musk buying Twitter. Lot of that going around — the Z Man got a whole podcast on “avoiding error” from his misread of the situation. It’s well worth a listen. I, too, had a “hot take” on Musk’s offer — not that it was particularly hot, as most folks on this side were saying it, but I too thought it was a stunt. After all, Musk, like Bezos and all the other “new commerce” billionaires, don’t exist without massive government support. I figured his “offer” was stoyak — he’s got something in the works in the Imperial Capital and needed to play hardball with somebody.

But I was also working off my longstanding assumption that Twitter, Faceborg, and all the rest are essentially CIA / NSA fronts. When I first heard about Facebook, my first thought was “Wait, don’t we already have Friendster? What does this bring to the table?” My second thought was the first one I’d had about Friendster: “That’s clever, I guess, but how on earth is this going to make money? Even if they saturate it with ads, to the point where it’s unusable — which will happen in about two weeks — they can’t monetize your personal data any farther. People are pretty set in their habits — once the algorithm figures out you’re the kind of guy who likes anime and New Wave music, any further data is useless.”

Being a much more naive, trusting sort back then, I figured it was just stupidity. You know, Pets.com level stupidity. The VC boys were trying to get another dotcom bubble inflated, because if the first one proved anything, it’s that people are dumb and will keep falling for the same obvious scam over and over. I could hear them in the board rooms: “This time, instead of sticking ‘cyber’ in front of everything, we’ll call it ‘Web 2.0.’ Cha-ching!”

Obviously that didn’t happen. So I went with the common explanation that was floating around in those days, that “social media” sites made their money by selling your data to advertisers. But that doesn’t pass the smell test either. For one thing, as I said above, your habits don’t change very much. For another, as anyone who has any experience with them knows, those algorithms really suck. The other day, for instance, I was listening to some old music one of the streaming music sites. And I mean really old. Nothing I’d played the whole morning had been composed after the 17th century, but the service’s algorithm was convinced that what I’d really like to listen to next was some rapper.

Indeed, the whole point of the ads on Pandora, Spotify, whatever seems to be: To annoy you to the point where you pay for their premium service. Pandora, for instance, either really really really believes I want a Surface Pro 8 and some Taco Bell, or they’re just playing those ads every two songs to annoy me into buying the premium service (which is every ad that isn’t Surface Pro or Taco Bell). Which is just bizarre, because I haven’t had Taco Bell since college — which was 30 years ago, and I paid cash — and this essay right here is the first time I have ever even typed the words “Surface Pro 8”, much less looked at the product.

I really wouldn’t be surprised that the “algorithm” is reading itself. Hey, this guy sure has seen a lot of ads for Taco Bell and Surface Pro! He must really want some!

But the algorithm for companies whose entire business model is e-commerce is no better. Amazon seems to have gone to a “push” model — they must be selling their suppliers on the idea that they can push you stuff, which is why they always pimp the same four or five items in the “Amazon’s Choice” recommendations, no matter what you’re searching for. And these again are laughably wrong — the only things I get off Amazon are used history and philosophy books, and stuff for my dog. Based on this, they have concluded that what I’m really looking for are chick lit and beach gear.

Given all that, I came to the conclusion that “social media” (and Amazon too, probably) really only have one customer, who really does have a use for your data, and that customer’s initials are CIA. It’s a giant domestic surveillance operation.

And why wouldn’t it be? The Regime has had a legitimacy problem for a long time, and a “feedback loop” problem for longer than that. Even if we assume no ulterior motives whatsoever — fat chance, but let’s stipulate — the fact remains that public opinion polling, however you want to define it, has a similar problem as psychological studies. Since the vast majority of study participants are college undergrads, what you get is WEIRD — that’s Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, and also in a very narrow age range. Psych studies that purport to be universal are, at their very best, snapshots inside the head of the BCG.

If you haven’t encountered the Basic College Girl, he provided a thumbnail sketch here.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress