[The near-perfect formulaic general’s speech before battle] has a few basic parts: I) an opening that focuses on the valor of the men rather than the impact of the speech (the common trope here is to note how “brave men require few words”) II) a description of the dangers arrayed against them, III) the profits to be gained by victory and the dire consequences of defeat IV) the basis on which the general pins his hope of success and finally V) a moving peroration; the big emotional conclusion of the speech. You can read through Catiline’s speech yourself; it’s not long and it follows the formula precisely. That order of elements is not rigid; they can be moved around and emphasis shifted. But I don’t just want to show that this trope existed in the ancient past, I want to show that it is projected through military tradition to the present. So let’s look at another very standard and somewhat more recent example, appropriate for June:
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-1. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 6th, 1944
I’ve highlighted an image of the signed document itself to show the various components of the ancient battle speech (following my numbering above): [https://acoupdotblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/breaking-down-the-speech.png?w=689]
Apart from a slight alteration of the order, it is not hard to assign this speech to the same genre as Sallust’s Catiline speech or even Thucydides’ speeches at Delium (Thuc. 4.92-95). As we’ll see, it is certainly not the case that there is no other way to structure a pre-battle exhortation (although, I should note that the standard text of the other famous pre-D-Day General’s speech, Patton’s speech to the Third Army, hits the same notes, but with more words – mostly profanity). But this is the standard structure of a battle speech in the Western literary canon, and speeches with this standard structure, or variations of it, appear frequently.
I think a reader might particularly be caught by the emphasis on a section stressing how formidable the enemy is and how great the danger is (“He will fight savagely”). That seems an odd thing to stress! But it is an important part of the structure of these speeches; it is almost never left out. When paired with the general’s own cause for hope, acknowledging the fearsome nature of the enemy and the general terror of battle is a way to inoculate the soldiers against the seizing fear of battle. The Greeks saw the fear of battle as two distinct elements, deimos (δεῖμος) – the creeping dread before a battle, and phobos (φόβος) – the sudden paralyzing panic in combat, the sharp fear that causes men to flee. If the encouragement of the speech (and the general’s presence) is meant to defuse deimos, openly discussing the fearfulness of the enemy (but couching it in terms of how it may be overcome) is meant to rob phobos of his sting. You do your soldiers no favors by concealing from them the terror they will experience regardless.
Now the bulk of Eisenhower’s D-Day order is dedicated to the fourth part, stating the ground for encouragement, generally framed by the reasons the general is confident despite how fearsome the enemy is. One form of encouragement is a recounting of the noble deeds of the soldiers themselves. One of the marks of good generalship for the Romans was if a general could go up and down the line, calling out individual soldiers and reminding them of great deeds they had performed (Caesar does this, for instance; note Catiline’s opponent, Marcus Petreius encourages his soldiers this way, calling out each one – his is an army of veterans – by name, 59.4). Alternately – especially for a fairly green army where no one has done any great deeds yet – the general might stress the great valor of their forefathers, or the honor of their city or state. The emotion being touched here is pretty clearly pride, tapping into a desire not to let one’s self, one’s community or one’s comrades down. That’s an effective rhetorical tactic; as we’ve discussed, the fear of shame is an effective combat motivator (where so many other motivations fail). Appealing to pride is a good way to arouse that fear of shame, as the two emotions are deeply connected. Alternately, a general may not a superiority in numbers, materiel, tactical position; he may discuss his battle-plan and how it is likely to bring victory. For forces defending on their own ground, the home-field advantage may be stressed.
You want to understand the “fearsome enemy” motif and the “grounds for encouragement” motif working best as a pair.
Consider it this way: you are about to take a very important test. If I, having already taken the test, tell you “oh, don’t worry, the test is easy,” that will help dispel your dread (deimos) before it, but when you sit down with the test paper and read the (quite difficult) questions, the seizing fear (phobos) hits you, and your overall performance is reduced. That seizing panic clouds your thoughts and costs you vital time; in a battle, it might cause you to flee or get you killed. But if I tell you “the test is hard, but (you’ve studied effectively/you can pick up points on XYZ section/etc.)” it not only diminishes the dread before the test, but serves to mentally prepare you for the shock of seeing the real thing. Indeed, I turn your fearful mind into my friend – when the real thing fails to live up to your worst nightmares, you’ll draw confidence from that. When the test turns out to be exactly like I said, the encouragement carries more weight because of the reliability of the warning. I am not dispelling your fear – because this is battle and everyone is afraid and no words can take that away – I am mentally preparing you for your fear. There’s an element of CBT in this: validate the emotion, suggest more helpful ways to think about it, and direct the mind towards behavioral solutions.
Finally, I think it is worth noting what is not generally here. While the speaker is likely to reflect on glorious deeds of the soldiers, or other soldiers like them, or their ancestors, there is generally not a focus on how fearsome or scary or strong they are because no one feels scary or strong when they are terrified. “You’ve done this before” is a good line (so is “our people have always beaten their people”) but “Remember, we are lions” is not. No one feels like a lion when they are receiving indirect fire and cannot fire back; no one feels like a lion when their buddy just went down next to them and there’s nothing they can do about it. Remember: the purpose of the speech isn’t to pump someone up before the charge, it is to emotionally prepare them for the moment when the emotional momentum of the charge is spent and the fear of death comes crashing in to replace it.
Likewise, while “the cause” often figures into such speeches, it does so as a subordinate element; some kind of group membership – the nation, the polis, the legion, comrades-in-arms – is often more prominent (note how Eisenhower’s speech crafts concentric circles of groups that the listener belongs to, watching and depending on the listener; “liberty-loving people everywhere” -> “the United Nations” and “our Allies” -> “our homefront” -> finally “us” and “we”). While it took until the late 1940s for group-cohesion-theory to really emerge on its own, these sorts of speeches show an awareness of what seems to be a timeless truth: the cause may get you to the battle, but only comrades will hold you in it when the dying starts (on this, note especially J. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VII: Hanging by a Thread”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-12.
June 6, 2022
QotD: Eisenhower’s D-Day speech to the troops
June 5, 2022
Privatize the libraries?
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte discovers — perhaps to his surprise — he’s not actually the most visible crank on public library issues:
I’m no longer the world’s biggest crank on public libraries. My argument, you’ll recall, is that public libraries are a good thing, but that North Americans borrowing rather than buying three out of every four books they read is a bad thing for the incomes of authors, the economics of publishers, and the welfare of just about everyone else involved in the book industry. That’s fainthearted stuff compared to this week’s tweet from Chris Freiman, a philosophy professor at William & Mary:
As you can guess from the 4,152 comments he’d generated by last night, Freiman’s was an unpopular take. Summing up the responses:
No one has been in a mood to ask if Freiman has a point, or where he’s coming from. For what it’s worth, he has a track record of criticism of government welfare spending. His usual schtick is to ask why so many Americans are poor when the poverty line for a family of three is $18,530 (annually) and welfare spending on a family of three from all three levels of government amounts to $61,830 (annually). It’s not the worst question.
His answer appears to be that directly transferring funds to the poor would be a more effective and efficient way of alleviating poverty than allowing governments to keep running expensive programs that are failing to achieve the same end. That’s not the worst answer.
But does he have a point regarding libraries?
I give him half a point. Public libraries are overwhelmingly used by people who can afford to buy books, and those people are reading primarily for pleasure. I’m all for lending books to people who can’t afford them, who have trouble accessing them, or who want to improve their minds by reading important or serious stuff. But to the extent that libraries are giving middle-class patrons free entertainment—sure, privatize them. There are better uses of public money. Apply the funds to reduce tax burdens on low-income families or improve conditions in government-run nursing homes.
Where the privatization argument fails is that libraries do a lot more than provide middle-class patrons with entertainment. They are important community hubs and for a minority of users they continue to fulfill their original purpose, which, says historian Ed D’Angelo, was to “promote and sustain the knowledge and values necessary for a democratic civilization”. Privatization would likely destroy the valuable public service aspects of public libraries.
In fact, the real problem with public libraries today is that they’re already half privatized. Starting in the middle of the last century, they stopped believing in their role as the community’s edifier-in-chief. They adopted the mindset of the marketplace, giving people what they wanted, filling their shelves with multiple copies of the hottest bestsellers, however vacuous, and measuring their success by counting foot traffic at their branches. They now manage those branches like Walmart supercentres, maximizing transactions per square foot of space. Who cares what patrons are reading, or why, so long as the turnstiles are spinning.
I’d prefer they leave private-sector thinking to the private sector, and let public libraries rebuild their lending practices around their original mission of elevating the minds of citizens. Surely we can’t yet afford to abandon the latter objective.
My solutions to the public library problem, in order of preference, are a much more robust public lending right, an exclusive new release window for the retail trade, and user fees for patrons who can afford them. More discussion here.
In any event, thanks to Professor Freiman for revealing me as a moderate.
Banzai Charges in Alaska – WW2 – 197 – June 4, 1943
World War Two
Published 4 Jun 2022The Chinese defeat the Japanese at Shipai Fortress and the Americans maul the Japanese in the Aleutians. The Japanese are also worried about the possibility of the USSR joining the war against them. Meanwhile the Allies still plan to invade Sicily, but have no idea what they’ll do after that.
(more…)
Odessa Madre, the female Al Capone of Washington DC
In his latest excerpt from the full Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan reviews a new book from James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, including a fascinating character I’d never heard of until now, a woman who ranked with Al Capone as an underworld boss during Prohibition:
Odessa Madre
Queen of Washington’s Underworld
Odessa Madre grew up in a section of Washington DC called Cowtown, because farm animals would occasionally wander its streets. Born in 1907 in abject poverty, she nonetheless lived and thrived in a deeply segregated city as a dark-skinned African-American woman. “There was only three Blacks at Dunbar (High School) back then — I mean Black like me,” she later recalled. “I had good diction, I knew the gestures, but they still made fun of me.” Dess, as many called her, was also a lesbian, and not too shy about it. “I just couldn’t keep no watchamacallit — a man. I guess I was just born to give orders not take them. What kind of man wants a woman like that?”
She went on to become one of the wealthiest African Americans in an overwhelmingly black city — hauling in over $100,000 a year at her peak — by becoming “the female Al Capone”. She ran brothels, pimped women, owned speakeasies, as well as owning a legit and legendary institution on 14th Street, Club Madre. Jamie Kirchick conjures up a scene from the 1940s:
The crowd roared its approval whenever Madre, covered in mink furs and diamonds and trailed by a multiracial retinue of women for sale, entered the premises and sauntered over to the central table, denoted as hers by an ever-present vase holding a dozen long-stemmed roses.
Among the performers at the club: Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Madre kept all her illicit businesses alive by the old-fashioned method of bribing the fathomlessly corrupt DC police — “You know I practically ran that damn police department,” she later quipped — and became a renowned mediator of mob disputes across the country.
She also reflects a pattern that occurs throughout Kirchick’s new book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. She is within a core group of lesbians and gay men somehow living their best lives in the mid-20th Century, simultaneously at the center and the periphery of power. They were capable, whip-smart and hard-working, resilient beyond measure, yet never free from the threat of being taken down by the criminal law, exposure, blackmail, violence, public shaming and utter ostracism. Madre was convicted in 1949 on various drug offenses, spent over 13 years in prison on one charge or other, and died in 1990, without a penny to her name. Her corpse stayed in the morgue for a week until someone claimed it.
The same terrible story could be told of countless others. They were powerful until they were powerless. They lived on probation their entire lives.
One of several wonderful things about Kirchick’s book is that it doesn’t condescend to these people, but seeks to understand them on their own terms. It shows the tenacity, nerve, and brilliance of a woman like Madre — as well as her immiseration. It brings to crackling life the many gay men and lesbians who were under persecution so brutal and terrifying it is hard for anyone today to appreciate — and yet they lived, worked, loved and often succeeded. Some details (from the magazine, Washington Confidential) leap out:
Today one can only marvel at the courage demonstrated by the “1700 Negro men, all dressed as women, who held a party on a Potomac River cruise incongruously named the Robert E Lee until it was rudely interrupted ben one hundred police officers.
It’s a rare book about gay people that isn’t burdened by the constrictive dogma of “queer theory” and “intersectionality”, free of the nonsense that the gay rights movement began in 1969. The book treats gay people as complex human beings, not socially constructed victims; and it is unafraid to note how gay men were for long by far the principal targets of American persecution.
Winchester G30M
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Jul 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
With the death of Jonathan “Ed” Browning in 1939, development of the Winchester G30 rifle was passed into the hands of a new employee at Winchester by the name of David Marshall Williams. Williams would become widely known as “Carbine” Williams in later years thanks to Jimmy Stewart and Hollywood, but we will get to that part of the story later.
What Williams did to the G30 was to replace Browning’s annular gas piston with his own short stroke tappet system (this being the first rifle to use that system of Williams’). This substantially improved the gun’s reliability, and Winchester was able to submit it to Marine Corps trials in 1940 alongside the Garand and Pedersen rifles under the designation G30M. The Marine Corps was legitimately interested in the G30M, as it was expected to be both faster and cheaper to manufacture than the Garand.
Ultimately the trials were won by the Garand, with the G30M placing third in total malfunctions and broken parts. This had involved 37 different tests and more than 12,000 rounds through each rifle. The Garand had 1,480 total malfunctions and 49 parts broken, replaced, or repaired. The Johnson had 1,547 and 72 respectively, and the G30M 2,864 and 97 (roughly double the number of problems as the Garand).
Despite this failure, Winchester was encouraged to continue working on the rifle, if for no other reason than the possibility of foreign purchasers. Williams’ next step would be to replace the Browning tilting bolt with a Garand-type rotating bolt, which would result in a rifle Winchester would call the M2, or “the seven and a half pound rifle”. We will examine that rifle in the next video …
QotD: The Matrix
The point is Andy and Larry Wachowski figured they’d hit on the perfect wrinkle for a classic postmodern nerd franchise — the Star Wars of our generation. And if you say, “Hang on, old boy, surely Star Wars is the Star Wars of our generation?”, I’d say, nah, it’s too 1930s radio serial, and its grandiosity is plonkingly earnest and squaresville instead of as coolly meta as Keanu Reeves’ too-bored-to-act acting style. The Matrix was quickly followed by The Matrix Revisited, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Recycled, and Neo got paleo pretty quick. None of the sequels could quite match the initial red-pilling of surface reality, and so they simply dug the rabbit hole deeper. Zion is the last outpost of humanity — but maybe it’s merely a Matrix-within-the-Matrix? Ever consider that, huh? And what if Neo himself is a Matrix-within-the-Matrix-within-the-Matrix? He was supposed to be “The One” — but maybe one of the others is The One. Maybe The One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
By the sequel, the Wachowskis’ “innovative visual style” (a Cecil B De Mille-scale computer game peopled by sullen pouters) was looking a lot less innovative: they did all the same things they did in the first film all over again, just more expensively and even more arbitrarily — the scene in which Keanu/Neo is fighting a hundred guys in black and doesn’t win, doesn’t lose, but just finds himself fighting vainly the old ennui and so buggers off after 15 minutes pretty much sums it up. By the second movie, Keanu had perfected his morose blank look, and fine actors like Laurence Fishburne were turning in performances so clunkily solemn you’d think they were auditioning for George Lucas. As usual, the subterranean city of Zion proved to be just another generic dystopian underground parking garage; and the orgiastic dance party looked like a weekend rave in Huddersfield.
Mark Steyn, “The Matrix”, Steyn Online, 2019-04-06.
June 4, 2022
Ontario’s election – “This was a weird campaign during a weird moment in history. Adjust your hot-takes accordingly, friends.”
From the Ontario election wrap-up post from the editors of The Line:
Newly re-elected Ontario Premier Doug Ford, seen here at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.
Photo via Wikimedia.
Doug Ford and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives obviously feel pretty good this Friday. They really did about as well as they could possibly have hoped to do. Still, we urge our readers and all the analysts and pundits out there not to overreact to Ford’s victory. He’s not a political genius, he’s not some sort of colossus standing astride our politics, and he is not the man who must be immediately beamed into the federal Conservative leadership so that he can slay Trudeau’s government and win 200 seats.
Doug? He’s just a guy who got lucky last night. (Politically, we mean. Get your minds out of the gutter.)
We’re not taking anything away from Ford, or his campaign leadership, or all the people who worked hard for the PCs over the last month. They did a lot of smart things, they did them well, and they are reaping the benefits. It was an effective campaign. It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but your Line editors suspect it rubbed people the wrong way precisely because it was an effective campaign. Keeping Ford out of sight, avoiding a lot of questions, keeping things low-key … these weren’t accidents. These were deliberate decisions. You have to start any analysis of the PC campaign by granting that. Yeah, it was well conceived and well executed. A hat tip to the people behind it.
But the point that we want to make, and it shouldn’t take away from anything said above, is that the Progressive Conservatives maxed out the luck-o-meter. If this election had been a year ago, coming off the government’s catastrophic handling of Ontario’s third wave, it probably would have been Doug Ford resigning last night. The government caught an enormous break because factors well beyond its control shifted the public’s focus off its greatest vulnerability, the management of the pandemic, and put it solidly on economic and cost-of-living issues that the PCs are much, much more comfortable talking about.
So yeah, the PCs had a good campaign, but you couldn’t buy that kind of luck. None of it happened in Ontario or even Canada. This was a global trend. After two years of pandemic, people are tired and they’re getting worried about other things. The timing for Ford could not have been better. So we absolutely give full credit to his campaign for a good job, but we also insist on acknowledging the huge role of luck and timing. We don’t know if it’s better to be lucky than good. But we certainly know it’s nice to be both at once.
We raise this as a note of caution before the punditry gets too carried away. This election is undoubtedly a huge victory for the Tories. But it is also a really, really weird election. The circumstances of it are very unique. The combination of low turnout, pandemic fatigue, Ford’s personal political brand in Ontario, bizarrely lacklustre campaigns by the opposition, and a confluence of global trends that all netted out in Ford’s favour don’t tell us anything about the state of the conservative coalition in Canada, who would make a good federal leader, or what’s going to happen at the next federal election. This was a weird campaign during a weird moment in history. Adjust your hot-takes accordingly, friends.
Campaigning from your basement worked very well for Joe Biden, and now it’s done the job for Doug Ford. It probably wouldn’t work for Justin Trudeau — if he’s not performing for the camera, it’s not clear whether he actually exists. Ford certainly benefitted from the small attention his opponents on the right — the New Blue and Ontario parties — although minor parties have pretty much always been a non-factor in Ontario politics. They were summoned into existance by the way Ford and the Progressive Conservatives governed during the pandemic … almost indistinguishable from the federal Liberals under Justin Trudeau. The PCs seemed to rely on their “progressive” urges at the expense of anything remotely “conservative”.
Moving on to the other two major parties … it’s not pretty:
Preliminary riding-by-riding results from the 2022 Ontario election.
Blue – Progressive Conservative, Orange – New Democratic Party, Red – Liberal Party, Green – Green Party
Okay, let’s do the NDP first. The NDP is probably feeling pretty good today. We get it. Even a week or two ago polls were suggesting they were about to lose their hold on official opposition to the Liberals. That would’ve been a disaster for the party. There’s no way around that. They’ve avoided that fate. The NDP has remained in second, although they lost a bunch of seats to the PCs (see above). In the days to come, the party is going to have to take a few cold showers, give their heads a vigorous shake, and realize that warm feeling they’re enjoying right now isn’t the afterglow of victory, it’s the fading adrenaline rush of a near-death experience. Avoiding annihilation shouldn’t be good enough. But that’s all they did.
Andrea Horwath, long-time leader of the party, has already announced that she is stepping down. And rightly so. The Line has some fondness for Andrea. God knows we’ve had the opportunity to get to know her during her tenure as provincial NDP leader, which basically overlaps entirely with our entire careers in journalism. She is a decent person with a better sense of humour than often comes across in public, and she has nothing to be ashamed about. She has taken the party as far as she can, and it’s time for someone else to take over and deal with what might be a changing environment — one that is not obviously changing in the NDP’s favour (again, see above).
[…]
Writing critically about the Liberal campaign today feels a little bit like flogging a dead horse, and then shooting it a bunch of times, and then setting it on fire, and then hunting down all of its little horsey relatives and shooting all of them too. And then peeing on them. But still. It was a really bad campaign by the Liberals. The leader was bad. We’re sorry, but he was. If Steven Del Duca ever encountered charisma we suspect his body would reject it like a donated kidney. The party’s campaign platform was a weird mishmash of stuff that sounded vaguely on point for 2022, but also often read like something copied and pasted directly out of Ontario Liberal campaign platforms going back as far as the 1990s.
Some of the problems the campaign experienced had easy explanations. The party’s 2018 performance was so terrible they lost official party status, and the access to budgets and staff in the legislature that goes along with that status. The party has been trying to rebuild with at least one hand tied behind its back ever since. The campaign team was quite lean, and as a series of ejected candidates show, it was not able to properly vet the full slate of candidates it ran. You can understand how the lack of personnel and money contributed to those problems. But what we can’t understand is why the campaign insisted on making so many weird decisions. Handguns and abortion as campaign issues? In a provincial campaign? Talking up free transit rides, which will only appeal in the deepest downtown cores, where all they could do was hurt the NDP? A mid-campaign pledge to make COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory for school children, which was then never really mentioned again?
The NDP ran a bad campaign, but the Liberals just seemed to be totally disjointed, as if there wasn’t any agreement among the party leadership on what the platform should be so random unrelated items got floated as trial balloons on almost a daily basis, with no follow-up on most of them. Perhaps the party couldn’t afford the cost of proper in-depth pre-election polling or perhaps this was the party leadership’s belated buyer’s remorse over the leader they’d elected.
Falklands Conflict Aftermath | The global impact of a 74-day conflict
Imperial War Museums
Published 1 Jun 2022The Falklands Conflict of 1982 only lasted for 74 days, but it had lasting consequences which continue to be felt today. Prior to 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s government was planning major defence cuts including withdrawing the military from the South Atlantic. Instead, they spent nearly £3 billion defending British sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, and to this day maintain a garrison there. What was the effect of this short conflict for Argentina, Britain and the Falkland Islands, and what impact did it have around the world?
Correction: The video states that Port Stanley was granted city status in 2002, this should be 2022.
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CREDITS
Mount Pleasant images, Crown copyright, April 2022
Margaret Thatcher images © University of Salford Press Office
Landmine clearance photos via Safe Lane Global
Sound effects via ZapSplat
Bill C-18 might as well be called the “Keep legacy media alive at all costs, even if nobody wants it anymore” act
The Line‘s Jen Gerson lays out the case against the federal government’s plans for permanent corporate welfare for the big Canadian legacy media organizations:
How Jen Gerson might visualize Torstar and Postmedia during the lobbying effort for Bill C-18.
“Zombie nuns” by Michael Cavén is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 
This week, The Line signed on to a campaign put together by a coalition of independent media publishers calling for amendments to the panda trash fodder piece of legislation known as C-18. To be fair, I mostly signed on; my co-founder Matt Gurney had some reservations, and I figured it would be best to hash them out in full here.
The bill is a hot mess created by a clearly well-intentioned government that appears to have been bamboozled by a group of media industry lobbyists helmed by organizations like Postmedia and Torstar — companies that despite extraordinary history and resources have largely failed to sustainably transition to a digital media environment. These large outlets are now using the last of their dying power and influence to champion legislation that will force big technology companies like Facebook and Google to compensate them for linking to their content.
This is a straightforward case of regulatory capture, the very thing we would condemn in any other industry; big media companies are using their credibility and political power to pressure the government into forcing “Big Tech” to sustain their dying business models — the very “Big Tech” that they’ve spent years deriding and defaming in their very own newspapers and outlets.
This whole process is corrupt. I don’t say that lightly. Perhaps inevitably, I’ve grown totally disillusioned with the industry to which I have devoted all of my adult life. We used to consider journalism a calling or a vocation — manipulative terms that justified the low pay, harassment, and sometimes abusive management. How can the church of journalism and its holy mandate to preserve democracy continue to take itself seriously when the very catechism of the craft are nowhere present in its own self-created lobbying arm, New Media Canada?
I think the leaders of this initiative have convinced themselves that the business model they enjoyed in the ’80s and ’90s is so totally central to the survival of democracy and liberal values that they’ve committed to keeping it afloat by any means necessary regardless of the ethical and philosophical cost. In doing so, I believe that they’re only ensuring their own failure.
By driving legislation in this way, they are not proving their worth to the broader public. Rather, they are conceding that what they produce has so little value that they need to evolve into parasites of the state. It demonstrates that commitment to democracy and accountability is secondary to their primary functions; running a business. They have stockholders to please and interest on loans to pay. Big loans.
Meanwhile, the legacy media they have managed is little more than a zombie in nun’s drag. It is in a state of terminal decline, and keeping it alive poisons the earth for the generations to come after.
Cheese propaganda, 1940 | Archive Film Favourites
Imperial War Museums
Published 14 May 2022With rationing introduced early in 1940 in Britain, this public information film was created to advocate the advantages of eating cheese over meat. The film explains not only the health benefits of cheese with some (unverified) experiments, but also its versatility in cooking, from grilled cheese to califlower cheese, “a meal in itself.” Film curator Matt Lee introduces us to this brilliant cheese propaganda.
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QotD: A smidgen of forgiveness for the Boomers
That has to mess with your head a bit.
In the same way, no previous generation had ever seen their youth commercialized and sold back to them in middle age, and that’s what messed with our heads. The passing fancies of those ordinary suburban kids in 1963 all involved sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. We — Gen X — wanted those things too, but since by definition nothing is lamer than your parents, we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it.
If you can grok the concept of a 45 year old telling you — with complete, almost heartbreaking sincerity — not to trust anyone over 30, you can grok the 1990s.
If you can’t, I don’t recommend trying. It’s like an anti-koan — if you solve it, you’ll achieve a lower consciousness. But if you’re determined to experience it, get really, really, really drunk and watch Forrest Gump a few times back to back. Really experience it as a work of art … because it is. It’s meticulously constructed. Forrest Gump is a mildly retarded man who stumbles, through dumb fucking luck, into fame and fortune through every significant event of the last half century. (He even has a huge dick, although that’s a detail from the source novel that got left on the cutting room floor).
Is there any more perfect metaphor for My G-G-Generation than that?
That’s what we grew up with. That whole generation was what some wag said about George Bush the First: Born on third base, thinking he hit a triple. And, of course, by merciless application of cold logic: that was also us. The only difference was that while the Boomers were congenitally incapable of seeing it, we were congenitally incapable of getting over it. So, you know, like, whatever.
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
June 3, 2022
Proof of how far public trust in legacy media has fallen
At The Last Ditch, Tom finds the social media coverage of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial unimpressive, but notes that many people are consciously choosing to get their “news” this way rather than depend on the offerings of the legacy media:
Celebrity gossip is not my thing. This case has been particularly unedifying. In a rational world, people would now pay less attention to the opinions of play actors, having seen what shallow, narcissistic souls (and I speak as a devoted theatre person who admires their professional skills) they often are.
What has been interesting about the trial is the MSM vs Social Media aspect of it. Wounded journos bemoan the fact that people have followed the trial – not through the lens of their analysis and opinion – but via such odd channels as TikTok. I understand their point of view. They are professionals and would like people to trust them. However, they just don’t seem to understand the role they played in losing that trust. They would do better to work hard to win it back, rather than insult the customers they’ve so clearly lost. The intense social media interest in a defamation trial shows the demand for coverage is there. Perhaps they should begin to think about how best to meet it? No-one (as the Remain campaign has still not learned) was ever insulted or abused into agreement. It’s just bad advocacy.
I have watched a couple of the videos of which they complain out of curiosity. They consisted of people I had never heard of pointing fingers and raising eyebrows in the corner of a screen showing video from the court. Every so often they’d point downwards to a “subscribe” button. Having practised law myself, I was just as unimpressed as the journalists with this approach to court reporting. Unlike the journalists, I recognised that their customers’ preference for it is a profound critique of the MSM. Just how much trust have you lost, dear journalists, that people trust these clowns more?
The Crusades: Part 10 – The End of the Crusader Kingdoms
seangabb
Published 27 Mar 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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Why the people who don’t freak out politically are the ones politicians pay the least attention to
In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this Paul Wells essay, he shows why it’s the weirdos, the whackos, and the cheerleaders who get political parties to pander to them and the hair-not-on-fire, steady-as-they-go, non-freaking-out normies who get ignored:
This graph is the best illustration of Canadian politics I’ve seen this year. It comes from Greg Lyle, the pollster who runs Innovative Research Group. He published it in February when downtown Ottawa was full of trucks. It takes some explaining, but we have time today.
On the left are results from a poll Lyle did in 2020. Rail blockades and protests had flared up across Canada, in support of Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who opposed the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. One of the questions Lyle asked in 2020 was, Do you agree or disagree that “If the government agrees to meet with the protestors, they are signaling that anyone can block railways to get what they want”?
On the right are results from a poll Lyle did two years later, in March of this year. Agree/disagree, “If the government agrees to meet with the protestors, they are signaling that anyone can block downtown spaces to get what they want”?
[…]
In addition to NDP, Liberal and Conservative supporters, Lyle tracked opinions of people who support other parties. That’s the yellow line above. It’s nearly useless, a jumble of Green, People’s Party, Bloc Québécois and who knows what else.
But he also tracked responses of people who didn’t express support for any political party. That group’s responses didn’t swing at all between 2020 and 2022. That’s the black line above. Does meeting protesters encourage protests? Sure, on balance, a bit, these non-aligned voters said in 2020 (net +7%). People like them said the same thing in 2022 (net +8). Call this group the people who don’t freak out.
Now. Who gets heard in our politics? It goes without saying that the people in political parties, including the people in governments formed by political parties, are partisan. Liberals will tend to be on that upward-sloping red line in our graph. But what’s more important is that these days, only the people on the steeply-sloping partisan lines pay for our politics.
Since 2011, individual donors are the only source of funds for Canadian federal political parties. Corporate and union donations were eliminated in 2006. Public per-vote subsidies were eliminated in 2011. Today the only way I can pay my political party’s bills is if I can persuade lots of people like you to give me many small sums of money. And the people on that nice, even-keel, non-sloping black line in our graph? The people who don’t view every sparrow that falls as a little morality play about their heroes and the villains they face? Those people will never give anyone a dime. It’s the people who mood-swing wildly — who think our gang is great and their gang is the demon — who can be provoked into donating, again and again, until they max out for the year, and then again starting in January.
Irving Gerstein, the Conservative Party’s chief fundraiser under Stephen Harper, explained all of this in a 2013 column by Ken Whyte that stands as one of the most important documents for understanding our times: “Message creates momentum creates money.” Parties that reside permanently on the sloping lines of a Greg Lyle poll — that think, talk and act like their most fervent supporters — are able to separate those people from their money. Parties that exit the slope for the level meadows of moderation go nowhere.
Chat Tanks #148 M548 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
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