A polis is made up of households, called oikoi (singular: oikos), to the point that creating a new polis was called synoikismos (or synocism). The Greek there is συνοικισμóς, συν- (meaning “together”) and οἶκος giving the word a meaning something like “living together in one house” or “putting the houses together as one”. This was the word the Greeks used to describe the process by which a disparate set of tribes, villages and households came together to create a polis; Indeed Aristotle (Arist. Pol. 1253b) is explicit that the oikos is the smallest unit, the “atom” to use M.H. Hansen’s word, of the polis, not the individual.
So what is an oikos? Well that word is about as plastic as polis. Oikos can mean a house (as in a physical building), or it can mean a household (as in the family that dwells in that building) or it can mean all of the property of that household, and indeed Greek writers will use this word to mean all of these things, often in the same context (that is they shift freely between these linked meanings, not seeing them as fully distinct). Now as a “family” we should note that an oikos was rather more extensive than our sense of family (though rather less extensive than the Roman concept of a familia and a lot less extensive than a Roman gens; we’ll come to these in a later series): an oikos consisted of all of the people who lived together in a house, which generally meant the adult citizen male, his wife and dependents and also their enslaved workers. It that family had enslaved workers who did not live with them, they also generally counted as part of the oikos because they were understood as the property of it.
The creation of a polis meant merging all of these things together in a very literal way. In a physical sense the creation of a town core meant literally putting houses together, as a good part of the population might move to live in that town core (with their farms just outside the town in walking distance, remember: most of these poleis are very small). Indeed M.H. Hansen notes in the introductory article on synoikismos in the Inventory that the only “purely political synoecism” – that is, a synoikismos that did not involve actually moving people to form or merge with a new town center but merely politically united existing geographically distinct communities – occurs in myth in Theseus’ supposed creation of the Athenian poleis. That this sort of synoikismos never happens in the historical period (there’s an attempt in Ionia in 547/6 but it never gets off the ground) ought to suggest that it probably didn’t happen with Theseus either.
It is also in a sense the merging of families, as one of the key privileges of citizenship in a polis was the right to marry women of citizen status (that is, the daughters of citizens) and thus have citizen children. And it meant the new citizenry putting their fortunes – in a literal, physical sense of the wealth that enabled them to survive (think farms and farming) – together in common when it came to things like war.
This may all seem fairly straightforward, but I invite you to consider the different implications it has compared to the way we mostly conceive of the population of a country, which we tend to imagine as a collection of individuals; as we’ll see the Greeks did this a bit too, but it wasn’t the first thought they reached for. In the polis, it is the households that have standing, represented by their adult, free citizen male heads, not individuals. The polis protects the households from the world, not the members of the household from each other, with the most obvious and immediate legal implication being the fact that crimes against junior members of the household are often understood as property crimes against the head of the household and actions within the household are simply not the business of the state. Now we shouldn’t over-stretch this: the Greeks were capable of understanding non-free and non-male people as individuals at times, but the political structure of the polis is predicated on units of households.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.
September 24, 2023
QotD: The composition of the polis
September 22, 2023
“The Online News Act … has been an utter disaster”
Michael Geist on the ongoing disaster the federal government created with the Online News Act:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked this week about concerns with the implementation of Bill C-18, to which he responded that other countries are quietly backing Canada in its battle against tech companies. I posted a reality check tweet noting that Meta is not returning to news in Canada, the law’s regulation stipulating a 4% fee on revenues is not found anywhere else, and that Bill C-18 has emerged as a model for what not to do. With the House of Commons back in session, it is worth providing a more fulsome reality check on where things stand with the Online News Act. While the government is still talking tough, the law has been an utter disaster, leading to millions in lost revenues with cancelled deals, reduced traffic for Canadian media sites, declining investment in media in Canada, and few options to salvage this mess.
For those that took the summer off, Bill C-18 received royal assent in late June. Over the past three months:
1. Meta has blocked all news links in Canada and cancelled existing deals with Canadian news outlets. The blocked links covers both Canadian and foreign news in light of the broad scope of the law. While the Australian experience lasted a few days, the blocking in Canada has now gone on for weeks and there is little reason to believe that the company will reverse its position to comply with the law by simply not linking to news.
2. The government responded to the blocked news links by stopping to advertise on Facebook and Instagram and encouraging others to do the same. The boycott has had little effect as the Liberal party is still advertising on the platforms with a new round of ads this week, the Prime Minister is still posting on the platforms, and reports indicate that Facebook has not experienced a reduction in user activity. In fact, reports suggest that the experience on Facebook without news has improved. Further, a Competition Act complaint has not sparked any action.
3. Google responded to Bill C-18 by advising it too would remove news links from its services before the law takes effect in December. That position enabled it to wait for the government to release draft regulations that provide further detail on the application of the law and the standards for obtaining an exemption from the mandatory bargaining process that can lead to final offer arbitration overseen by the CRTC.
Several more items of concern at the link.
September 13, 2023
Michael Geist on the “relentless misinformation campaign that ignores the foundational principles of copyright law”
Michael Geist discusses a recent public statement from the Canadian Federation of Library Associations on how changes to copyright rules in Canada may seriously impact the public:
Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/5JbsPE
Last month, the Canadian Federation of Library Associations released a much-needed statement that sought to counter the ongoing misinformation campaign from copyright lobby groups regarding the state of Canadian copyright and the extensive licensing by libraries and educational institutions. I had no involvement whatsoever with the statement, but was happy to tweet it out and was grateful for the effort to set the record straight on what has been a relentless misinformation campaign that ignores the foundational principles of copyright law. Lobby groups have for years tried to convince the government that 2012 copyright reforms are to blame for the diminished value of the Access Copyright licence that led Canadian educational institutions to seek other alternatives, most notably better licensing options that offer greater flexibility, access to materials, and usage rights. This is false, and when the CFLA dared to call it out, those same groups then expressed their “profound disappointment” in the library association.
Yet what has been disappointing is that despite repeated Supreme Court of Canada decisions that have eviscerated the foundation of those groups’ claims, they insist on running back the same failed strategy again and again. The reality of Canadian copyright isn’t complicated: libraries and the education community spend more than ever before on licences that provide the right to access and use materials for teaching, course materials, text and data mining, and a myriad of other purposes. When combined with the gradual disappearance of course packs, the emergence of open access materials, and a reasonable interpretation of fair dealing consistent with Canadian jurisprudence, education and libraries are fulfilling their mandate by responsibly using public dollars to maximize public access, enable student learning, and ensuring fair compensation for authors.
The lobbying efforts to convince government to restrict fair dealing by requiring unnecessary licences would increase student costs, make education less affordable, and render Canada less competitive. Further, it would mean less access to materials for Canadian students. Universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars on licences that grant both access to materials (purchasing physical books has declined dramatically) and the ability to use them. The outdated Access Copyright licences only grant rights to use already acquired works for a limited series of purposes. Reverting back to the unnecessary Access Copyright licence would mean access to fewer works and reduced investment by the education sector and libraries in new works.
I wrote a six-part series on these issues earlier the year including posts on setting the record straight, the shift to electronic licensing, transactional licences, the disappearance of course packs, the emergence of open text books, and a fair reading of fair dealing. Once you get past the rhetoric, the data leaves little doubt that education and libraries are still actively paying for copyright materials through licensing and the claims of mass illegal copying in education in 2023 is a fabrication unsupported by the evidence.
September 2, 2023
The 4% non-solution
Michael Geist updates us on the Canadian government’s latest blunder in the Online News Act saga:
The government is releasing its draft regulations for Bill C-18 today and the chances that both Google and Meta will stop linking to news in Canada just increased significantly. In fact, with the government setting an astonishing floor of 4% of revenues for linking to news, the global implications could run into the billions for Google alone. No country in the world has come close to setting this standard and the question the Internet companies will face is whether they are comfortable with the global liability that would see many other countries making similar demands. The implications are therefore pretty clear: there is little likelihood that Meta will restore news links in Canada and Google is more likely to follow the same path as the Canadian government establishes what amounts to 4% link tax from Bill C-18 on top of a 3% digital services tax and millions in Bill C-11 payments.
The estimated revenues from Bill C-18 or the Online News Act have always been the subject of some debate. The Parliamentary Budget Officer set the number at $329 million, using a metric of 30% of news costs for all news outlets in Canada. Under that approach, over 75% of the revenues would go to broadcasters such as Bell, Rogers, and the CBC. The Canadian Heritage estimates were considerably lower, with officials telling a House of Commons committee last December that they expected about $150 million in revenue:
I won’t speak to the PBO report which is the source of the numbers that you cited. That was not a department-led initiative. The internal modelling that we did when we tabled the bill and mentioned in our technical briefings was more around $150 million impact. That was based again in terms of how this played out in Australia and making some assumptions about how it might play out here. With respect to the PBO report, any questions about that particular number would have to be directed towards them.
By the time the bill reached the Senate several months after that, the number had grown to $215 million.
With the release of the draft regulations, the government has established a formula with an even bigger estimate. The creation of a formula is presumably designed to provide some cost certainty to the companies and represents a change in approach in Bill C-18, given that the government had previously said it would not get involved private sector deals but it is now setting a minimum value of the agreements. Officials told the media this morning that it believes Google’s contribution would be $172 million and Meta’s would be $62 million, for a total of $234 million. However, that may understate the revenues by focusing on search revenues alone. If based on total revenues, with a 4% minimum floor, the requirement would exceed C$300 million for Google. Either way, the number is more than 50% higher than the $150 million estimate the department gave the Heritage committee just eight months ago.
The draft regulations will also provide some additional clarity on several issues. The standard for a digital news intermediary has been fleshed out to include $1 billion in global revenues and 20 million Canadian users. As for the process, those companies subject to the rules are required to conduct a 60 day open call for negotiations. To meet a fairness standard, the resulting deals must be within 20% of the average and cover a wide range of news outlets. Contributions can include non-monetary items but it seems unlikely the resulting deals would grant links significant value. The CRTC would then pass judgment on the deals and determine whether the companies are exempt from a final offer arbitration process. The timing on this includes a 30 day consultation process on the regulations, before they are finalized prior to the December deadline. But with the CRTC not having established a bargaining framework before 2025, the liability issues start arising well before any deals are concluded or approved.
August 28, 2023
Why Britain Advanced Before Other European Nations | Thomas Sowell
Thomas SowellTV
Published 17 Dec 2021
(more…)
August 22, 2023
With Bill C-18 about to come into effect, there is zero sense for the “tech giants” to start negotiating
Michael Geist explains why there are no incentives for Google and Meta to begin any kind of negotiations with the Canadian government over the ruthlessly self-destructive Online News Act:
The rhetoric around Bill C-18 has escalated in recent days in light of the awful wildfires in NWT and British Columbia. In my view, the issues associated with these tragic events have little to do with Meta blocking news links and the attempt to bring it into the conversation is a transparent attempt to score political points (the connectivity issues with some NWT communities completely taken offline for days is somehow never mentioned). The reality is that Meta was asked about just this scenario at committee and it made it clear that it would not block any non-news outlet links. That is precisely what has been happening and the government’s legislative choices should be the starting point for understanding why compliance with the law involves blocking a very broad range of news links that extend beyond even those sources that are defined as “eligible news outlets”.
The government and supporters of Bill C-18 talking points now emphasize two things in relation to Meta blocking news links: the law has yet to take effect and there is room to address their concerns in the regulation-making process. Both of these claims are incredibly deceptive, relying on the assumption that most won’t bother to read the actual legislation. If they did, they would see that (1) the law has received royal assent and can take effect anytime and (2) the regulation making process addresses only a small subset of Bill C-18 issues with most of the core issues finalized. In other words, the time to shape the law and address many of the key concerns was before the government repeatedly cut off debate in order to ensure it that received royal assent before the summer break.
Start with when the law takes effect. As noted above, the law has been passed and received royal assent. It is the law of the land and there is no scope for changes or amendments without a new bill that must be passed by Parliament. Section 93 establishes when the provisions come into force. The law initially envisioned a staged approach whereby certain sections would be proclaimed in effect by the government in stage one, followed by four additional stages, some of which were contingent on certain regulations coming into force. Yet at the last minute the government approved a Senate amendment that basically discarded the entire approach. Section 93(6) states:
(6) Despite subsections (1) to (5), any provision of this Act that does not come into force by order before the 180th day following the day on which this Act receives royal assent comes into force 180 days after the day on which this Act receives royal assent.
The entire law therefore takes effect no later than 180 days after royal assent, which is December 19, 2023. This change was included at the urging of the Canadian media sector (specifically Quebecor) which lobbied to have it take effect as soon as possible. Under this approach, the law can take effect at any time as the government need only issue the relevant Orders-in-Council. There is now little wiggle room. As of today’s post, the latest the law will take effect is in 120 days but it could happen well before that.
Once the law takes effect, the clock on negotiations and potential mediation and arbitration begins. The timelines are fixed in Section 19(1) of the law: 90 days to negotiate and 120 days for mediation. If there is no agreement and no request to the CRTC to extend the deadlines, the issue can go to final offer arbitration. To be clear, none of these timelines are subject to the regulation making process. They are fixed and they create obvious urgency for anyone facing compliance requirements.
The government threatened Meta and Google with mandated payment to Canadian news sources if their online services merely linked to articles or videos from those news sources. Meta and Google rationally decided that the tiny little Canadian market wasn’t worth the cost of paying CBC and other Canadian news outlets for the privilege of sending them readers and are in the process of obeying the letter of the new law and blocking such links on their respective platforms. They told the Canadian government that this is what they’d do if the law was passed in its current form, yet the government is pretending to be shocked and surprised that Meta and Google are going to obey the law.
After all, there’s no real risk that lives might be endangered because so many Canadians are used to getting their news by way of Facebook or Google, is there?
August 17, 2023
Lawfare as politics by other means
Chris Bray explains why getting rid of the Donald Trump candidacy wouldn’t even begin to solve the real problems in US politics today:
Donald Trump has been charged with crimes, so the Republican Party should drop him as a candidate and move on to someone else who hasn’t been indicted. That’ll solve the problem!
It won’t. The problem is lawfare. The Republican governor of Wisconsin defeated a recall effort, so Democratic district attorneys launched a long series of predawn raids on his supporters — until the courts made them stop. The Republican governor of Texas won four terms, but then was indicted by the office of a Democratic district attorney — for a budget veto, an action within his constitutional authority. Again, the courts intervened, and the legally absurd charges were dismissed.
Today, scumbag California Assemblyman Evan Low, a uniquely craven publicity chaser even by the local standards, proudly announces that he’s just introduced a legislative resolution calling for the federal government to open a criminal investigation into Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
So. Get rid of Trump and nominate DeSan— oh, wait. Okay, name someone, anyone: Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, a utility nominee to be named later in exchange for three rookie infielders. Oh no, it turns out that the new nominee is under criminal investigation for [TBD]! As of, uh, tomorrow.
I have mixed feelings about Donald Trump, who supported pandemic lockdowns and school closures and the rushed development of mRNA injections with limited testing. Dumping him as a candidate because he’s been indicted misses the point. No Republican candidate will run for the presidency without being indicted, unless he’s a court-eunuch Mitt Romney figure, too safe to bother attacking.
August 13, 2023
Don’t worry about losing all your news links, citizen! The Liberal government’s Ministry of Propaganda will tell you everything you need to know!
The federal government still seems shocked and a little bit hurt that the “tech giants” are carefully obeying the letter of their new Online News Act instead of pumping millions of dollars into government-favoured media outlets. How dare Alphabet and Meta obey the law we wrote? We wanted to soak them for bribes subsidies to give to legacy corporations who can be depended upon to cheerlead our agenda!
Blocking of news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada has becomes increasingly widespread in recent days, leading to a growing number of public comments from media outlets and reporters expressing surprise or shock about the scope of the link blocking. Indeed, outlets with blocked links include university student newspapers, radio stations, and foreign news outlets. While there may have been some errors (Facebook has a page to seek review of any blocked link decision), the inclusion of a very wide range of Canadian and foreign news outlets is no accident. Rather, it reflects the government’s Bill C-18 approach, which effectively covers all news outlets worldwide whose links are accessed in Canada. The Canadian government could have adopted a more targeted approach – for example, limiting the scope to news links from those news outlets eligible to negotiate agreements with Internet platforms under the law – but it instead went for the broadest possible approach that includes foreign news outlets with little or no connection to Canada.
Understanding why Bill C-18 covers news links from outlets who are not “eligible news businesses” under the law requires unpacking several provisions. First, start with the definition of a “digital news intermediary”, which states:
digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada. It does not include an online communications platform that is a messaging service the primary purpose of which is to allow persons to communicate with each other privately.
This definition is critical since the only companies that are subject to Bill C-18’s requirement to negotiate agreements with news outlets are (1) those that qualify as DNIs under this definition and (2) meet the requirements found in Section 6 on a significant bargaining power imbalance. The absence of significant bargaining power imbalance is why companies such as Twitter, Microsoft or Apple are not subject to the law. That leaves Google and Meta, provided that they qualify as DNIs. The key phrase in the qualification requirement is that the companies “make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada”. If the companies do not make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada they are not DNIs and are not subject to the law.
[…]
… the government’s choice was to try to bring Meta and Google into the scope of the law by virtue of any news links to any news outlet anywhere in the world, even if those outlets have nothing to do with Canada or with the Bill C-18 system. Given Meta’s stated goal of complying with Bill C-18 by removing links to news content that would render it a DNI, the government’s legislative choice of covering all news links from all news outlets therefore effectively requires it to block all of those news links.
It takes a lot to make Google, of all companies, a sympathetic victim … yet Canada’s awesomely awful Liberal government aced it. Bananada strikes again!
August 3, 2023
“Tech giants” obey the law and block access to Canadian news sites to Canadian users
For some reason — despite a clamour of warnings from sensible observers — the Canadian government still seems shocked and surprised that the much-reviled “tech giants” have chosen to obey the new Online News Act and are actively blocking links to Canadian media outlets just as the law requires:
For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms. However, what has been readily apparent for months became reality yesterday: Meta is now actively blocking news links and sharing on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The announcement does not reference Threads, but it would not surprise if news links are ultimately blocked on that platform as well. The company says that the blocking will take several weeks to fully roll out to all users, suggesting that it has learned from the over-blocking mistakes made in Australia and is proceeding more cautiously in Canada. By the end of the month, the world’s largest social media platform will become a news desert in Canada, with links to all news – both Canadian and foreign – blocked on the platform.
It is worth revisiting that it was only a couple of months ago that some industry leaders, lobbyists, and academics were assuring the Senate that the Meta threat was just a bluff. Kevin Desjardins of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, referenced the Australian experience, and told the Senate committee studying the bill that “when legislated to do so, they will come to the table”. Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down”. Chris Pedigo of the U.S.-based Digital Context Next assured the committee “it’s important to understand what happens when these bills become law. In Australia, they moved quickly to secure deals. They have done similar work in Europe, and I expect it would happen quickly in Canada as well.” And Carleton professor Dwayne Winseck said “I am not worried. The threats they are making, they are doing this all around the world.”
Despite the assurances, the company was true to its word and blocking news links is now here. If this is a negotiation tactic, it’s a pretty strange one given that reports indicate the company is not talking to the government about potential changes to a law that has already received royal assent. Indeed, while the new Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge urged the company to participate in the regulatory process, there is nothing in the regulations that could alter the fundamental principle in the bill of mandated payments for links. At best, the government could toss aside its commitment to stay out of negotiations by using the regulations to dictate to the supposedly independent CRTC how much needs to be spent in order to avoid Bill C-18’s final offer arbitration provisions. Government negotiating total payment value and eviscerating the CRTC’s independence does not inspire confidence and Meta reasonably wants no part of it, since the time to fix Bill C-18 was before it received royal assent, not after.
Bolded section mine: I didn’t realize that it wasn’t just Canadian media links that were being blocked … it’s all news sites in the world being hidden from Canadian users. That’s an escalation from what I’d originally understood. I don’t blame the “tech giants” at all, but it will be tough on older Canadians who’ve been depending on social media to keep them up-to-date on domestic and foreign news.
July 30, 2023
QotD: Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan
One last point before we close: As we’ve noted here probably ad nauseam, modern English is far less Latinate than the idiom of Hobbes’s day. Hobbes translated Leviathan into Latin himself, and while I’m not going to cite it (not least because I myself don’t read Latin), it’s crucial to note that, for the speakers of Hobbes’s brand of English, “right” is a direction – the opposite of left.
I’m oversimplifying for clarity, because it’s crucial that we get this – when the Barons at Runnymede, Thomas Hobbes, hell, even Thomas Jefferson talked about “rights”, they might’ve used the English word, but they were thinking in Latin. They meant ius – as in, ius gentium (the right of peoples, “international law”), ius civile (“civil law”, originally the laws of the City of Rome itself), etc. Thus, if Hobbes had said “might makes right” – which he actually did say, or damn close, Leviathan, passim – he would’ve meant something like “might makes ius“. Might legitimates, in other words – the actually existing power is legitimate, because it exists.
We Postmoderns, who speak only English, get confused by the many contradictory senses of “right”. The phrase “might makes right” horrifies us (at least, when a Republican is president) because we take it to mean “might makes correct” – that any action of the government at all is legally, ethically, morally ok, simply because the government did it. Even Machiavelli, who truly did believe that might makes ius, would laugh at this – or, I should say, especially Machiavelli, as he explicitly urges his Prince, who by definition has ius, to horribly immoral, unethical, “illegal” (in the “law of nations” sense) behavior.
So let’s clarify: Might legitimates. That doesn’t roll off the tongue like the other phrase, but it avoids a lot of confusion.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
July 27, 2023
QotD: The causes of crime in Britain
Theodore Dalrymple, “Pray for Rain”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-07-08.
July 8, 2023
Iowa votes to re-impose child labour in ways that violate federal labour laws
Chris Bray covers the breathless excitement of national media covering recent changes to Iowa labour laws:
Suddenly, though, this message is all over social media:
These messages are not exactly false, and not entirely true. They take note of a real development, but strip away all the limits and caveats to fake up the creation of a 21st-century Upton Sinclair novel. But the effects of this successful legislation — this is where it gets complicated.
Start here (or here) with Iowa Senate File 542: signed into law in May, took effect on July 1. A bunch of the first-glance shocking details are more complicated than the outrage-farming Twitter takes suggest: 16 year-olds can serve alcohol in restaurants, with at least two adults to supervise, but not in bars; 15 year-olds can work on assembly lines in school-based work training programs, with parental permission; teenagers can work until 11 p.m. in the summer, but not during the school year. Allowing a 16 year-old coffee shop waitress to bring you a beer strikes me as … not the end of the world?
But all of those details aside, the new Iowa law expands child labor (while ending some earlier measures allowing even younger workers to do a few jobs like migrant farm labor), and will, in fact, put 14 year-olds to work in what will look a great deal like adult settings. So red state legislatures are expanding child labor at the moment they’re banning gender mutila— uh, gender-affirming medical care for teenagers, and making that latter choice on the highly defensible grounds that teenagers lack the maturity to make decisions like that. So a 15 year-old working in a factory lacks the maturity to make adult decisions, is where we end up when we put all of this together.
July 7, 2023
Justin Trudeau says that Canada is merely defending itself from the “attack” by Facebook
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has never faced a situation he couldn’t get histrionic about:
The government escalated the battle over Bill C-18 yesterday, announcing that it was suspending advertising on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms due the company’s decision to comply with the bill by blocking news sharing and its reluctance to engage in further negotiations on the issue. While the ad ban applies to federal government advertising, Liberal party officials confirmed they plan to continue political advertising on the social networks, suggesting that principled opposition ends when there might be a political cost involved. At issue is roughly $11 million in annual advertising by the federal government, a sum that pales in comparison to the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s estimate of at least $100 million in payments in Canada for news links from Meta alone.
In addition to raising the economic cost to Meta for stopping news sharing, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau increased the rhetoric, describing Canada as having been “attacked” by Meta and likening the government’s fight over the bill to defending democracy in Ukraine or during the Second World War [at 13:30]:
Facebook decided that Canada was a small country, small enough that they could reject our asks. They made the wrong choice by deciding to attack Canada. We want to defend democracy. This is what we’re doing across the world, such as supporting Ukraine. This is what we did during the Second World War. This is what we’re doing every single day in the United Nations.
There are strongly held views on both sides of the Bill C-18 debate, but the suggestion that stopping sharing news links on a social network is in any way comparable to World War 2 is embarrassingly hyperbolic and gives the sense of a government that has lost perspective on the issue. Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has repeatedly described the manner of compliance with Bill C-18 as a business choice for the Internet companies, yet the Prime Minister now calls that choice an attack on the country.
If it were truly comparable to a world war, then surely the Liberal Party (joined by the NDP) would not continue to advertise on the platform. Yet since the 2021 election call, the party alone has run approximately 11,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram. That is separate from individual MPs, who have also run hundreds of ads. The Meta Ad Library provides ample evidence of how reliant the party has been on social media. For example, since the start of the year, Anna Gainey ran over 500 ads as part of her by-election campaign in Quebec. David Hilderley, who was a candidate in the Oxford by-election, ran approximately 180 ads on Facebook during the same timeframe.
June 26, 2023
America can’t build anything these days and “it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault”
One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:
Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America’s inability to build.
Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget — or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.
Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there’s no one simple fix, there’s no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame.
But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, “It’s that guy’s fault!”
There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn’t isn’t a mustache-twirling villain — he’s a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it’s probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is.
That’s right: it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.
How’d he do it? By creating what’s now called the public interest movement: a new form of activism through which citizens force change — or, more often, block change — by suing the government. Though it was begun with the best of intentions and achieved some real good along the way, this political innovation led to the constipated governance we all complain about today.
How did a movement launched by an unassuming 30-year-old lawyer become the dominant form of activism in the country, and completely change the way our government operates?
To find out, we have to go back to a time before Ralph Nader had even hit puberty — the era of the New Deal.
[…]
It is the inherent nature of politics that no reform works forever, because the next generation of political entrepreneurs will inevitably discover new ways to bend the process to their will. Eventually, there will always be another Dick Fosbury revealing a way to work the system that no one saw coming.
Still, I do think some of the blame for the way this all panned out can be laid on Nader’s particular personal idiosyncrasies. His ironclad black-and-white view of the world, combined with his near-pathological aversion to dealmaking and compromise, made him uniquely suited to a form of activism that focused on regulatory and legal action rather than coalition-building and electoral politics. Nader was infamously rigid and inflexible, so it’s no surprise that his movement was too. But a less rules-oriented movement might have created fewer of the bureaucratic barriers that have now become a hindrance to progressive action.
Much like the movement whose story it tells, Public Citizens the book is a worthwhile project that nonetheless suffers from significant flaws. The main problem is that it can’t decide if it’s a historical narrative or a work of political theory. As a work of political theory, it doesn’t take nearly a strong enough stand — I’ve made explicit a lot of claims that are only lightly implied in the book. I think we’re making the same argument, but the book makes its argument with such a delicate touch that it’s hard to be 100% sure.
As a historical narrative, Public Citizens has a much simpler problem: it’s boring. The author writes like an academic (which, to be fair, he is), and the book is quite light on colorful details. The uncreative chapter titles (chapter three is called “Creating Public Interest Firms”) give you a taste of what the writing is like. One particularly egregious issue is how little biographical information is provided about Nader, even though the majority of the book is about him. For someone who apparently subscribes to the Great Man theory of history, the author includes surprisingly little information about the Great Men themselves. Any interesting biographical fact you read in this review — even something as basic as the fact that Nader never married—is almost certainly something I found through other sources.
Paradoxically, this book manages to be simultaneously boring and too concise. It’s over in less than 200 generously-spaced pages, and I frequently had to look stuff up on the internet to get a full understanding of what was going on. I get the sense that the author is trying to give this book mass appeal, but come on: anyone who’s willing to read a nerdy book like this is willing to read an additional hundred pages or so. Besides, Robert Caro and Ron Chernow have proven that people will read thousand-page tomes if the story is compelling and the details are juicy.
Basically, my critique of Public Citizens is like that old Catskills joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible — and the portions are too small.
June 25, 2023
British schoolchildren mock their oh-so-woke teachers
In Christopher Gage’s weekly round-up, I discovered that I shared a trait with Ted Kaczynski (“austere anarchist scholar” as US mainstream media might have described him). Not just any trait, but the one that ended up putting him in prison after nearly twenty years of sending bombs through the mail:
Elliot Rodger, Ed Kemper and Ted Kaczynski.
Photos from Quillette.
… Ted insisted on the proper use of the idiom, “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too”. Ted rejected the common and logically fraught version: “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too”. Indeed, you can. You must have your cake if you are to eat your cake. You cannot have your cake once you’ve eaten your cake.
That turn of phrase helped F.B.I agents snare Ted. His sister-in-law read his essay, recognised the writing style, and the peculiar diction, and then grassed him up to the rozzers.
For the record, this may be the only point of agreement I have with that noted austere scholar, although I’ve never read any of his writings to find out.
Another amusing incident involved children taking the Mickey out of ultra-progressive teachers in British schools:
Last week, schoolchildren in Sussex dropped themselves into the soup after suggesting that their fellow classmate is not actually a cat.
Two thirteen-year-old girls at Rye College were told they “should go to a different school” if they didn’t believe that a girl could identify as a cat.
During a “life education” class, the pair said there was “no such thing as agender” and: “If you have a vagina, you’re a girl, and if you have a penis, you’re a boy — that’s it.”
When they queried how someone could identify as a cat, the pair were blasted for questioning their classmate’s identity.
An investigation found children at schools across the land now identify as dinosaurs and horses. Another often dons a cape and demands to be acknowledged as a moon. Another identifies as Bambi.
After the hysteria simmered, it became obvious what was going on here. And it too became obvious that this is a good thing.
Reader, these children are taking the Mickey.
When confronted with obvious nonsense held by their preachy, supposedly superior teachers, these kids cannot resist mocking them to a nub.
After all, if one can identify as whatever one wants then that includes anything one wants. For teenagers primed with mischief, this is just too good a brew not to sup on a daily basis.
And it is a promising sign. Ridicule, the sharp-elbowed sister of truth, is essential to all progress. Clearly, these kids are unafraid to think for themselves and are determined to see that which is beyond their own nose.
Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of what almost everybody knows to be patent nonsense. As history assures us, once something becomes a laughingstock it soon dies of ridicule.
As James Thurber put it, that which cannot withstand laughter is not a good thing.
