Quotulatiousness

September 29, 2023

Canada is back on the world stage … the world comedy stage

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

Tristin Hopper lauds Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s most unmistakable success in raising Canada’s profile among comedians, satirists, and parodists:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

For most of Canadian history, it was a given that the identity and reputation of the country’s prime minister was unknown to the world’s non-Canadian satirists. There are no Mort Sahl routines about John Diefenbaker or Peter Sellers impersonations of Lester Pearson — and the one time Saturday Night Live parodied a Canadian prime minister, it was Canadian cast member Mike Myers doing Jean Chrétien.

But that’s all changed under the incumbent Trudeau government. Foreign comedians (even those addressing mostly foreign audiences) are routinely getting laughs out of jokes about Canadian politics.

At the beginning of Justin Trudeau’s premiership in 2015, his high international profile spurred the occasional foreign joke about his unusually good looks or perceived arrogance.

At the 2016 White House Press Correspondent’s Dinner, U.S. President Barack Obama cracked a joke about being told that the new Canadian prime minister had replaced him as the world’s progressive darling. “I said Justin, just give it a rest,” he said.

[…]

South African-born Daily Show host Trevor Noah has done Trudeau-specific segments on the show about half-a-dozen times, and even included an entire Trudeau monologue in his 2022 comedy special I Wish You Would.

“My favourite Trudeau scandal by far is where he went on a trip to India and then became Indian,” Noah said.

In a 2019 Daily Show segment about Trudeau’s blackface scandals, Noah noted the “commitment” of Trudeau having applied black makeup to his face, legs and even arms in one instance. “The whole day were you leaving makeup on doorknobs? … If he touched (other white people) he’d leave a black handprint on them?”

[…]

Just last year, another New York-based Comedy Cellar regular, Andrew Schulz, devoted an entire five minutes to roasting the Canadian prime minister at a show in Canada — yielding a video that’s now pushing two million views on YouTube.

“Yo Punjabis, be honest; when Trudeau did the Punjabi-face, what was more offensive? That he put on the turban or that he made y’all dark skinned?” said Schulz, before launching into a string of jokes about Trudeau’s recent put-down of the Freedom Convoy protests — and the popular rumour that he’s the secret love child of a certain Caribbean dictator.

“His dad would be so embarrassed … because Fidel Castro was all about protest.”

Bored? Lonely? No girlfriend? Mister, you want an AI Girlfriend!

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As discussed earlier, GenZ men live in a sexual hellscape unless they meet statistically unlikely criteria. Many of them turn to alternatives like online gaming and porn … but some are apparently paying for AI Girlfriends:

Apparently ads for AI girlfriends have been all over TikTok, Instagram and Facebook lately. Replika, an AI chatbot originally offering mental health help and emotional support, now runs ads for spicy selfies and hot role play. Eva AI invites users to create their dream companion, while Dream Girlfriend promises a girl that exceeds your wildest desires. The app Intimate even offers hyper-realistic voice calls with your virtual partner.

This might seem niche and weird but it’s a fast growing market. All kinds of startups are releasing romantic chatbots capable of having explicit conversations and sending sexual photos. Meanwhile, Replika alone has already been downloaded more than 20 million times. And even just one Snapchat influencer, Caryn Marjorie, makes $100,000 a week by charging users $1 a minute to chat with the AI version of herself.

Of course most people are talking about what this means for men, given they make up the vast majority of users. Many worry about a worsening loneliness crisis, a further decline in sex rates, and ultimately the emergence of “a new generation of incels” who depend on and even verbally abuse their virtual girlfriends. Which is all very concerning. But I wonder, if AI girlfriends really do become as pervasive as online porn, what this will mean for girls and young women? Who feel they need to compete with this?

Most obvious to me is the ramping up of already unrealistic beauty standards. I know conservatives often get frustrated with feminists calling everything unattainable, and I agree they can go too far — but still, it’s hard to deny that the pressure to look perfect today is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. And I don’t think that’s necessarily pressure from men but I do very much think it’s pressure from a network of profit-driven industries that take what men like and mangle it into an impossible ideal. Until the pressure isn’t just to be pretty but filtered, edited and surgically enhanced to perfection. Until the most lusted after women in our culture look like virtual avatars. And until even the most beautiful among us start to be seen as average.

QotD: Collecting jazz

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

So how do you build a collection? What do you do once you’ve wandered off into the jazz section. What do you buy? Not only is there just so much … stuff, but it’s an ever-expanding world. I mean, even if you knew everything there was to know about jazz, how could you possibly own it all? There are nearly as many jazz albums as there are women in the world and how could you sleep with all of them? As with any other type of music, there are some classic records you’d be mad to ignore, but with jazz you really have to plough your own furrow. The jazz police are a proscriptive lot – look to them for recommendations and they’ll tell you that Norah Jones and Stan Getz aren’t jazz, that Blue Note shouldn’t have signed St Germain and that Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is only ever good for paint commercials. However, these are probably the same people who, 40 years ago, would have told you that Abba don’t make good pop music or that punk was a flash in the pan.

And there were some things I just didn’t get. Ornette Coleman was one. At the same time Miles Davis was breaking through with modal jazz forms, Coleman invented free jazz with The Shape Of Jazz To Come. Over half a century after the event it is difficult to recapture the shock that greeted the arrival of this record, but it just gave me a headache. Coleman played a white plastic saxophone that looked like a toy, he dressed like a spiv and was a master of the one-liner, the “Zen Zinger” (stuff like, “When the band is playing with the drummer, it’s rock’n’roll, but when the drummer is playing with the band, it’s jazz”), so I really wanted to like his music. But I couldn’t. No matter how much I tried. As far as I was concerned he was improvising up his own sphincter.

Dylan Jones, “The 100 best jazz albums you need in your collection”, GQ, 2019-08-25.

September 26, 2023

Matt Taibbi – “Canada’s Prime Minister solidifies his status as the world’s most nauseating pseudo-intellectual”

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

It’s hard to come up with ways to justify Canada’s PM and Parliament for giving a standing ovation for a fucking Waffen SS veteran, and Matt Taibbi doesn’t even try:

Let me get this straight:

A year and a half ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced a Jewish member of parliament named Melissa Lantsman for standing with “people who wave swastikas“. Lantsman had criticized Trudeau for fanning “the flames of an unjustified national emergency” in response to the “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests. The “swastikas” Trudeau referenced were, as even Snopes conceded, virtually all “pictured on signs as a way of mocking and protesting government restrictions”, comme ça:

By saying Lantsman stood with “people who wave swastikas”, in other words, Trudeau really meant she was standing with “people who called me a Nazi”. He declined to apologize, which of course is his prerogative.

This week, both Trudeau and House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota are under fire after Rota invited, and Trudeau applauded, a 98-year-old former soldier from the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division named Yaroslav Hunka to attend an address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Rota praised Hunka as a “Canadian hero” from his time fighting the Soviets in World War II when, not that it matters, they were allies to the United States and Canada. Leaving the elderly Hunka out of this for the moment, these politicians could easily have turned up the man’s blogs about joining Hitler’s army, making the applause scene at least approach the max on the cringe scale:

Amid the subsequent outcry, Trudeau squeaked out a handful of sentences that collectively gave off least a faint aroma of apology, though he personally didn’t apologize for anything, and invoked “mistakes were made” phrasing …

“Passport Bros”

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

Few online people are less tuned-in to the mainsteam zeitgeist than me, so perhaps I’m once again one of the last people to be clued-in about “passport bros”. Here’s Janice Fiamengo‘s post on the “bros” and the women who apparently spend a lot of time criticizing them:

Female commentary on so-called Passport Bros is not hard to find on the internet: women are angry, contemptuous, and incredulous that men are looking for women overseas and encouraging other men to do the same — not for sex tourism (which feminists loved to criticize until they discovered that women are doing it too, in which case it is acceptable), but for a long-term relationship, including, in many cases, marriage and children. These men will partially or entirely relocate to the women’s home country in order to start a new, non-western (and non-feminist) life. The angry internet women claim not to care personally: let the losers go is their expressed attitude. Yet the sheer number and vehemence of their responses suggests they do care.

The angry commentary follows a standard pattern in which the women claim to know why a significant minority of men are giving up on western women as mates. The reason never has anything to do, of course, with faults in western women or their unrealistic expectations […]

Likewise, the reason never has anything to do with western divorce laws — in which a man can be ejected from his home, imprisoned, forced to undergo a psychiatric exam, fleeced, and deprived of his children by a grasping ex-wife — or with the fact that women are the ones who initiate divorce in upwards of 70% of cases (and are often applauded for doing so).

The reason has nothing to do with women’s openly expressed attitudes of superiority, resentment, and anti-male bigotry, which are rampant in western cultures, especially Anglophone ones. It has nothing to do with the #MeToo/Believe Women climate of baseless accusation that regularly sees men accused and disgraced purely on a woman’s say-so. It has nothing to do with the institutionalized discrimination of “equity” hiring that makes it difficult for men to find and advance in careers in order to be acceptably successful to the kind of women who now deride them for their failure.

According to the angry women online, men are leaving the west (particularly North America) to find partners because they aren’t good enough for western women. The men are allegedly “terrible, and don’t want to stop being terrible”, according to one gleefully irate commentator. Their only chance is with women so poor as to be grateful for a “terrible” man; in return, such women will have to “subject themselves to [his] advances”, according to another critic’s Victorian-style phrasing.

[…]

Many such women — protected by our pro-woman culture and deferred to by men terrified of female wrath — reach adulthood without ever having received any serious criticism. If and when they are criticized, their response is a howl of outrage and wounded self-regard. This is precisely what is happening in reaction to the Passport Bros.

Underneath the anger, there is perhaps a hint of fear. It’s not fear that men will leave the west in droves (they don’t see that happening yet, and neither do I), but it’s fear that men are not, after all, entirely under female control. Not yet, and maybe never. Some men are sick of the anti-male abuse and starting to do something about it. They are critically examining women’s characters and attitude; they’re drawing back from the acquiescence they’ve always been expected (and been willing) to give. Some are walking away and telling other men to do the same.

These women are used to dishing out the denunciation, reveling in justified grievance; they are infuriated to find that now they are the ones being judged and found wanting.

Don’t be that girl.

“Brothers in Arms” | The Bands of HM Royal Marines

Filed under: Britain, Media, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Bands of HM Royal Marines
Published 23 May 2022

“Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits, arranged by Capt Phil Trudgeon RM, and performed at the Mountbatten Festival of Music 2022 in the Royal Albert Hall, London.
(more…)

September 25, 2023

Something, something “sins of the fathers”, something, something Elon Musk

Filed under: Africa, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray provides an example of how “mainstream psychosis” has become the new normal, at least among academics and our so-called “elites”:

My argument is not “the news media lies”, or “there’s a lot of misleading discourse”. My argument is that whole overlapping layers of high-status America — in academia, in media, and in politics — are psychotic, fully detached from reality and living in their own bizarre mental construction of a fake world. I don’t mean this figuratively, or as colorful hyperbole. I mean that the top layers of our most important institutions are actually, literally populated by people who are insane, who have cultivated a complete mental descent through the looking glass.

So: Jill Lepore.

Lepore is as high-status as it’s possible to be. She holds an endowed chair at Harvard, she has a Bancroft, and she’s been on the masthead at the New Yorker for almost two decades. She has about as much institutional validation as an academic historian can get. And she just published an essay that wouldn’t be out of place in foot-high crayon letters on the wall of a mental institution.

“What happened to antisemitic rants before social media”, is the actual subhed. You see, before Twitter, people who said that Jews were bad were very marginal, and no one ever listened to them. At the risk of giving away too much personal information, I’m writing this in a bar, and the bartender is giving me some fairly aggressive side-eye over the burst of nervous laughter that I just dropped. Musk’s grandfather was named J.N. Haldeman, and he wrote a lot about how much he didn’t like Jews, and here’s what Lepore has to say about that:

    But Haldeman’s legacy casts light on what social media does: the reason that most people don’t know about Musk’s grandfather’s political writings is that in his lifetime social media did not exist, and the writings of people like him were not, therefore, amplified by it. Indeed, they were very unlikely to circulate widely, and are now quite rare.

Jill Lepore has a PhD in history, and she thinks that antisemitic speech was quite rare before social media. Here’s a link to a non-paywalled version of the essay, and I encourage you to go read it. Otherwise you’re going to struggle to believe me. See for yourself, and then come back and I’ll talk about it.

How, if you want to argue that negative statements about Jews had little reach before social media, do you explain … Jewish history? Why didn’t they have time for the bread to rise, Jill? Before Twitter, screeds against Jews “were very unlikely to circulate widely,” except for, I don’t know, Mein Kampf? We dip the parsley in the salt water to remember the bitter tears of our ancestors, who never faced any antisemitism because it was very marginal and never allowed to circulate widely.

It gets better, though, because Haldeman was born in Minnesota, then raised in Canada, and then moved to South Africa two years after the formal implementation of apartheid. He wrote white supremacist tracts in apartheid South Africa, and Lepore maintains that the reach of his racist literature was sharply limited by the absence of social media. See, it was very rare to be able to read racist views in apartheid South Africa.

Ted Gioia explains why he loves writing for Substack

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s much easier to reach the audience he wants to share with using his Substack than either Twit-er, er, I mean “X”, or Facebook:

Below I look at some surprising ways Substack has changed the media (and social media) landscape.

This gives me a good excuse to recommend the new Substack app. It’s now my go-to source for informed writing — providing access to a smarter and more diverse group of authors, thinkers, and creators than I’ve found anywhere else.

I’ve now been on Substack for 30 months, and the improvements in the platform during that time have far exceeded my expectations. I didn’t know any music writers on Substack back when I launched, but it now boasts a better roster of critics than any newspaper or magazine. By the way, I’m also subscribing to writers in a dozen or so other fields (culinary arts, economics, literature, finance, technology, psychology, etc.).

I’m a heavy user. I must have signed up for almost a hundred Substacks.

Substack has also added a lot of new features during those 30 months. I especially like Notes, which is similar to Twitter but with extra IQ points. And I’ve also benefited from cross-posting, recommendations, and many other new features. I also applaud options I don’t currently use (like chat and podcasts), because they empower writers and readers.

The reality is that Substack is innovating faster than I can keep up with. But I like it that way. It’s creating an interconnected and independent media ecosystem here.

Best of all are the core values behind all this:

  • Substack supports writers — who receive almost 90% of subscription revenues. This is the exact opposite of the traditional publishing model, where royalty rates of around 10% are typical.
  • I don’t need to attract advertisers, and this frees me from the conflicts-of-interest advertising brings to other platforms.
  • There’s no surveillance or selling of users’ private information here.
  • I share my articles directly with readers, and no algorithm or gatekeeper intervenes to prevent our direct connection.

For these and other reasons, I’ve been an advocate for the platform. And that’s a good introduction to my subject today.

September 23, 2023

“Canada is, as a whole, a naive, spoiled country that stands a pretty good chance of getting punched in the face by reality”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney praises both the delivery and the content of a recent report by the Business Council of Canada urging Canadian governments to pay a lot more attention to economic security issues that seem to be almost universally neglected in favour of mediagenic gestures and battlespace prep for the next election.

But as I was reading the report, there was this nagging thought in the back of my mind. Why is the Business Council of Canada trying to impress upon the government (and the country at large) the importance of economic security? Why do we need a report from top business leaders to remind our political leadership that poor countries aren’t generally safe and peaceful ones, and that there are countries out there that would wish us harm and that we need to be on guard against? Like, shouldn’t we know that already? Because none of this stuff is revolutionary. It’s all extremely basic stuff that any mature country should just sort of intuitively grasp. Right?

And that’s when the shoulder-slumping realization lands on you like a ton of bricks. We should, but in this country, we don’t. We just don’t. Because, well ….

Uh oh.

It seems to me that a country shouldn’t need a report to impress upon key civilian leadership that economic prosperity is the cornerstone of all security, or that, on the flip side, security is a prerequisite for prosperity. Toronto is a fair bit rougher than it used to be these days — join us at our event next month! — but when I leave the house to run an errand, I’m reasonably confident I’m not going to be abducted by a band of roving pirates prowling the leafy streets of Leaside. When I head up north for the weekend, it doesn’t occur to me that there’ll be a checkpoint along the route, looking to shake me down or carry off my children into slavery. In the mornings, when I lurch out of bed with a groan that gets louder with each passing year, I expect that the light switch will indeed result in light and that the faucet in the bathroom will provide clean water. I don’t have to worry about whether the water treatment plant has been bombed or the power lines shelled.

Many of my Canadian readers may find the above absurd or, at least, a bit of hyperbole. But that’s the point. As I have written many times before, almost everything we do in this country, and almost our entire self-identity as Canadians, accepts internal security and safety from military attack as an ironclad given, just by default. That makes sense: that has been the norm for us, for a long time. It seems absurd precisely because how distant it seems from our normal.

But it isn’t the norm in any historical sense much beyond a human lifetime or two or three, even in Canada. And more to the point, as the voice-over guys in the commercials say, past performance may not be indicative of future results.

We are not owed prosperity in perpetuity. We are not guaranteed security by virtue of our niceness. These are precious things that require more than just good luck — and good luck, thank God, is something Canada still does seem to have. In addition to luck, though, we need realistic understandings of our strengths, weaknesses and the threats we face. We need political leadership that is mature and aware enough to understand the difference between political interest and national interest, and that is seized enough with these issues to devote the necessary resources to building up and preserving our security, from all reasonably foreseeable threats. That includes not just investments of money and people, but also simply intellectual bandwidth and emotional toil. We have to think, hard, about things that aren’t nice to think about, and have robust, effective institutions and a critical mass of people with the necessary combination of mindset, academic and professional training and lived experience to be effective at foreseeing, heading off and, when necessary, managing crises that threaten our safety and prosperity. We need a supportive bureaucracy that is efficient and task-focused and doesn’t get in the way of all this vital work.

Does any of this sound like Canada to you?!

Does it sound like the leader of any of our governments, or any of the people who’ll replace those leaders? Does it sound like any of our institutions except the ones specifically tasked with security and defence? You know, the ones we habitually starve so we can spend a few extra bucks and a bit more political capital on something a bit more pleasing to the average voter? Does it sound like the sort of thing smart, well-read and educated Canadians spare a single solitary moment thinking about as they go about their day to day lives?

Of course not. No one does, and our politics reflect this. These just aren’t issues of concern in Canada outside of the military, the intelligence agencies and a few fellow journalists and academics I could probably recount here in their totality by their first names.

“Even before it began, the protest was denounced as a hatefest”

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

Tasha Kheiriddin on the parents’ 1 Million March 4 Children protest against teaching LGBT issues to school children and the counter-protest by teachers, unions, and a disturbing number of sitting politicians:

Fractal Pride flags

On Wednesday, thousands of parents and supporters took to the streets across Canada for the 1 Million March 4 Children protest, chanting “leave the kids alone.” They were protesting the teaching of “gender ideology” in schools, including lessons about gender identity, transgenderism and schools’ refusal to inform parents of their children’s use of preferred pronouns.

Even before it began, the protest was denounced as a hatefest. School boards sent letters to parents decrying the event. The Ontario Federation of Labour organized counter-protests with the slogan “Trans rights are workers’ rights.” NDP leader Jagmeet Singh stood on Parliament Hill, chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, transphobia has got to go!” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted, “We strongly condemn this hate and its manifestations.”

Here’s something we can all agree on: there is no room for hate in schools. If a kid bullies another kid for any reason, including gender identity, they should be disciplined. But the counter-protestors go further: in their view, unless you actively instruct children about gender, sexuality and inclusiveness at an early age, it is you who is being hateful. There are no shades of grey: you are either a full-on supporter of drag story time or a transphobic bigot.

When it comes to gender identity, it is wrong for educators to dismiss all parental concerns as homophobia. Yes, there are some bigoted parents who teach their kids that being gay or trans is a sin. Some of them were in the crowd Wednesday.

But there are also many parents who are legitimately concerned that encouraging children to question their sexual identity at a very young age is confusing and inappropriate. We label movies PG-13 or higher when they contain sexuality and nudity. Why then introduce sexual identities such as aromantic (absence of romantic attraction) asexual (absence of sexual attraction), pansexual (attraction to any gender) or demisexual (attraction that requires an emotional bond) to grade school kids? And more importantly, why is this the purview of the school system at all?

On Twit-, er, I mean “X”, Jason James responded to a Justin Trudeau Xpost with this counterfactual:

September 22, 2023

Political psychosis and the never-ending “narrative”

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

Chris Bray points out several instances of the legacy media continuing to push “the narrative” despite any inconvenient facts that cast doubt on the official story:

Every day is opposite day. Every day is a bucket of fake. The narrative is the narrative; once it’s established, nothing penetrates it. It rattles on down the road, impervious to inputs, convinced of its own truth without regard to events outside the shell. Psychologists have a term for this.

So Politico warns this week that faith in vaccines is falling, and anti-vaxxer narratives are “on the rise.” Sample paragraph, this one describing Health Secretary Xavier Becerra:

The summer of 2023, a claim made in June and credulously repeated in the bottom half of September: If you take Covid vaccines, you can’t get sick, but if you don’t take Covid vaccines, you die. Government leaders who don’t push the 7th and 8th doses of the mRNA injections “choose not to take care of their people”.

[…]

But the narrative rolls on, unperturbed. If you’re dying of Covid, it’s because you hesitated to get your 7,369th dose, anti-vaxxer! Maybe you should have stopped being such a Nazi! In the news media, it’s 2021 forever, and the virtuous science-lovers are rolling up their sleeves to rebuke the science-hating morons, who will not survive the … okay, well, who will not survive the next … okay, well, YOU’LL PROBABLY DIE AT SOME POINT because you didn’t get it. You’re facing a winter of severe illness and death by 2054, at the latest. No amount of evidence will force the storytellers to stop telling this story. It’s the story, so they tell it. The Politico thing ends by quoting Peter Hotez, by the way, as you knew it would.

Similarly, The Atlantic warns now that Donald Trump was a time bomb who kept nearly going off for four years, and only the courage of General Mark Milley kept him under control. Look at the premise at the top of the piece: Disobeying, resisting, and undermining the President of the United States, a military officer protected the Constitution.

How well does the story parse the constitutional issues at stake? This well:

The military decided to have an abortion travel policy, and to fund it. A senator is now interfering in military policy and the unilateral executive appropriations of the Department of Defense, a sign of the ongoing constitutional crisis that began with Trump. Typically, you see, in our constitutional order, the military does whatever it wants, and spends money on its own authority however it feels like spending it, but Tuberville is engaging in the “unprecedented” act of suggesting that Congress should decide how to appropriate federal funds and regulate the armed forces, which means that he hates the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 would like a word, in this obviously extremist description of the authority of Congress:

    To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

    To provide and maintain a Navy;

    To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

And so on. Why is Tommy Tuberville being such a Nazi?

“The Online News Act … has been an utter disaster”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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.

QotD: Progressive hollow men

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

Ever feel like you’re living in a bad movie? I’ve recently found there’s a worse sensation: Feeling like you’re living in a good movie. There’s a scene in Apocalypse Now where Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz recites the opening stanzas of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men:”

    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

The poem was written in 1925, but that’s why Eliot was a great artist — he anticipated the soyboi, the soulless urban bugman, by almost 100 years. The Left is nothing but “Hollow Men”-style contrasts. They’re religious fanatics without a religion. They Fucking Love Science™, but think gravity is a social construction. They insist that Blacks are literally being lynched in Current Year America, and yet hardly a day goes by without news that yet another professional race hustler is really White. Their political campaigns, it goes without saying, are Cults of Personality without the personality. Above all, they are moralizers without morality – the things they scold us about are so self-contradictory, or so absurd on their face, that one is forced to conclude that this by design.

Severian, “The Hollow Men”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-19.

September 20, 2023

“Future Edward Gibbons’ [will] have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet”

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

In The Line, Andrew MacDougall finds something good to say about social media:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Say what you will about social media, but one unalloyed good is the future Edward Gibbons’ of this parish are going to have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet.

Future historians will not only know what happened as we cratered, but, thanks to our ubiquitous digital sketch pads, they will have all of the horrific micro detail. They will know how many times we circled the bowl, what we were saying about circling the bowl as we were circling it and which streaks we were or weren’t arguing about as we went down. Social media is an infinite canvas home to a limitless number of voices and — while we might not be richer for it in the present — our future societal homicide detectives will be forever grateful that we left so many stains to analyze.

For example, when historians consider — as they surely will — whether the moment Canada truly began to crumble was when a WestJet cabin crew allowed Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to grab the conch and address a planeload of (mostly) Conservative Party of Canada delegates on his way back from a successful party convention, we will have a panoply of voices to consult. From all walks of life and social stations, too. What, for example, did a famous singer like Jann Arden have to say about the whole episode?

Well, thanks to our good friend ex-Twitter we don’t have to guess; we know. And what Arden said was: “Hey @WestJet you and I will not be doing business ever again. This is so ridiculously disappointing.”

In life, I try my best not to be insensitive, but imagine having so little going on that this is considered a good use of your time? Imagine possessing such a delicate constitution that you would rather chain yourself [to] the be-vomited reclining seats of Air Canada than ever fly WestJet again. When you live in Calgary. And what has to be going on to then quote-tweet a bunch of nasty replies and joust with a network of digital cretins, as Arden went on to do. Dozens of them. Who stirs the sewage and then pins the best turds to their page?

As someone who has spent (far) too much time wasting time on platforms like ex-Twitter, I feel I speak from experience. I’ve picked a fair few fights I didn’t need to pick. Both with randoms, and rock stars. I have fed the trolls and I have done performative tweeting. And you know what I’ve learned? The only people who win are our algorithmic overlords. People like Arden are the modern-day Olds-and-Milner lab mice hammering the dopamine reward button — look at me get likes and retweets! — until they (metaphorically) die.

September 18, 2023

It turns out that buying up the rights to old rock songs wasn’t a good investment after all

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

Ted Gioia enjoys a little bit of schadenfreude here because he was highly skeptical of the investments in the first place, although the geriatric rockers who “sold out” seem to have generally made out like bandits this time around:

Back in 2021, investors spent more than $5 billion buying the rights to old songs. Never before in history had musicians over the age of 75 received such big paydays.

I watched in amazement as artists who would never sell out actually sold out. And they made this the sale of a lifetime, like a WalMart in El Paso on Black Friday.

Bob Dylan sold out his entire song catalog ($400 million — ka-ching!). Paul Simon sold out ($250 million). Neil Young sold out ($150 million). Stevie Nicks sold out ($100 million). Dozens of others sold out.

As a result, rock songs have now entered their Madison Avenue stage of life.

Twisted Sister once sang “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. But even they took it — a very large payout, to be specific. A few months ago, the song showed up in a commercial for Discover Card.

Bob Dylan’s song “Shelter from the Storm” got turned into a theme for Airbnb. Neil Young’s “Old Man” was rejuvenated as a marketing jingle for the NFL (touting old man quarterback Tom Brady).

Fans mocked this move. Even Neil Young, now officially a grumpy old man himself, expressed irritation at the move. After all, the head of the Hipgnosis, the leading song investment fund, had promised that the rock star’s “Heart of Gold” would never get turned into “Burger of Gold”.

That hasn’t happened (yet). But where do you draw the line?

I was skeptical of these song buyouts from the start — but not just as a curmudgeonly purist. My view was much simpler. I didn’t think old songs were a good investment. […] But even I didn’t anticipate how badly these deals would turn out.

The more songs Hipgnosis bought, the more its share price dropped. The stock is currently down almost 40% from where it was at the start of 2021.

Things have gotten so bad, that the company is now selling songs.

On Thursday, Hipgnosis announced a plan to sell almost a half billion dollars of its song portfolio. They need to do this to pay down debt. That’s an ominous sign, because the songs Hipgnosis bought were supposed to generate lots of cash. Why can’t they handle their debt load with that cash flow?

But there was even worse news. Hipgnosis admitted that they sold these songs at 17.5% below their estimated “fair market value”. This added to the already widespread suspicion that current claims of song value are inflated.

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