Quotulatiousness

August 1, 2023

Evil climate heretics deny the revealed holy truth of global BOILING!

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Notorious heretic Brendan O’Neill preaches climate denial! Where are the Green Gestapo when you need them?

And just like that we’ve entered a new epoch. “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived”, decreed UN chief António Guterres last week. It’s hard to know what’s worse: the hubris and arrogance of this globalist official who imagines he has the right to declare the start of an entire new age, or the servile compliance of the media elites who lapped up his deranged edict about the coming heat death of Earth. “Era of global boiling has arrived and it is terrifying”, said the front page of the Guardian, as if Guterres’s word was gospel, his every utterance a divine truth. We urgently need to throw the waters of reason on this delirious talk of a “boiling” planet.

Guterres issued his neo-papal bull about the boiling of our world in response to the heatwaves that have hit some countries over the past two weeks. “Climate change is here [and] it is terrifying”, he said. We see “families running from the flames [and] workers collapsing in scorching heat” and “it is just the beginning”, he said, doing his best impersonation of a 1st-century millenarian crackpot. In fact, forget “climate change”, he said. Forget “global warming”, too. What we’re witnessing is a boiling. It all brings to mind the Book of Job which warned that the serpent Leviathan would cause the seas to “boil like a cauldron”. Leviathan’s back, only we call him climate change now.

The obsequious speed with which the media turned Guterres’s commandment into frontpage news was extraordinary. They behaved less like reporters than like the slavish scribes of this secular god and his delusional visions. “World entering ‘era of global boiling'”, cried the Independent, and we “know who is responsible”. No prizes for guessing who that is. It’s you, me and the rest of our pesky species. It always is. “Planet is boiling”, one headline breezily declared, confirming that Guterres’s fearful phrase, his propagandistic line no doubt drawn up with the aid of spin doctors in some UN backroom, is already being christened as fact.

Almost instantly, media outlets started lecturing readers on how they might help to put a halt to the coming evaporation of our planet. SBS in Australia advised us to “Reduce meat intake”, “Stop driving cars” and “Cut down on flights”. In short, stop all the fun stuff; make sacrifices to appease nature’s angry gods. Even self-styled radicals made themselves mouthpieces of the UN’s medieval sermonising. Novara Media instantly embraced “global boiling” as an apt metaphor for the arsonist impact humanity has had on Earth. Scratch a Marxist these days, find a Malthusian.

“Tonight in the news: the moon is made of green chees- wait, patch downloading … not made of green cheese, and anyone who says it is is a MAGA conspiracist h8er.”

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

Sarah Hoyt on the amazing co-ordination of messaging from so many legacy media and their social media collaborators:

Many of us are amused with how fast the left acquires a sudden mission to propagate the one holy acceptable opinion. How it changes overnight, and how it comes from all of them at once, in almost the same words. And how it gets repeated ad-nauseam, in defiance of all sense, until the message changes.
This has led the least kind among us (eh. Myself, sometimes) to refer to our leftist brethren as “NPC”s who do whatever the programmers put in their heads.

The sad truth, though, is they’re not NPCs. They’re humans, like the rest of us, just — a lot of them — through cowardice or a more conformist temperament, humans who want to be “right” with the “majority” as they perceive it. They, like most primitives the world over, have no moral center, and want to back the winner and the strong horse.

Add in a dose of truly bad education, and their self-conceit as smart, and what you have is someone who reads all the accepted publications, catches on to what they’re saying, and runs to get ahead of what they think will be (and to be fair is, of their kind only) a parade.

The sequence goes something like this: Leftists, for nefarious, stupid, or money reasons (and often all three) declare that they want something utterly, inconceivably stupid to happen: ban something, force some tech, whatever.

Immediately, on command, some “scientist” (usually of the softer side) who smells grant money does studies showing this idea is brilliant and will bring about utopia. The stupid is flawed and irreproducible, but the journalists are all leftists who want to “support the current thing” and jump on it. Suddenly every possible and some imaginary publications tell us how the Current Thing is the most important thing ever, and it must be done nowwwww.

Take Joe Biden’s idea of cooling the Earth by covering the sunlight. — Okay, not his idea. Or maybe it is. Who knows how much meth they’re putting in his ice-cream? — But the idea of the group of people who form “Joe Biden.” Or the idea of those jokers at the WEF that the planet is BOILING and the only solution if for us peasants to surrender to their wisdom and eat the bugs, and give up private transportation.

Dire Straits – Tunnel Of Love (Rockpop In Concert, 19th Dec 1980)

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

Dire Straits
Published 28 Apr 2023

Dire Straits performing ‘Tunnel Of Love’ at Rockpop in Concert on December 19th 1980.
Footage licensed from ZDF Enterprises. All rights reserved.
(more…)

July 30, 2023

Letting a UN agency police “disinformation” online? What a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?

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

Savroula Pabst outlines the United Nations Development Program’s new online anti-disinformation tool, iVerify:

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has quietly announced the rollout of an automated anti-disinformation tool, iVerify, this spring. The instrument, initially created to support election integrity, centers a multi-stakeholder approach spanning the public and private sectors to “provide national actors with a support package to enhance identification, monitoring and response capacity to threats to information integrity”.

The UNDP demonstrates how iVerify works in a short video, where anyone can send articles to iVerify’s team of local “highly-trained” fact-checkers to determine if “an article is true or not”. The tool also uses machine learning to prevent duplicate article checks, and monitors social media for “toxic” content which can then be sent to “verification” teams of fact-checkers to evaluate, making it a tool with both automated- and human-facilitated elements.

On its website, the UNDP makes a blunt case for iVerify as an instrument against “information pollution“, which they describe as an “overabundance” of harmful, useless or otherwise misleading information that blunts “citizens’ capacity to make informed decisions”. Identifying information pollution as an issue of urgency, the UNDP claims that “misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech threaten peace and security, disproportionately affecting those who are already vulnerable”.

But, behind this rhetoric of fact-checking expertise and protecting society’s most marginalized, iVerify, as a tool functionally claiming an ability to separate the true from the false, actually provides governments, adjacent institutions, and the global elite an opportunity for unprecedented dismissal, and perhaps thus subsequent censorship, of dissenting perspectives and inconvenient information and reporting, all behind the pedigree of a UN institution with international reach.

July 28, 2023

Progressive objections to Oppenheimer

Filed under: History, Japan, Media, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the movie, and have no immediate plans to do so. That said, there’s a lot of discussion about the movie, its successes and its failures and how it relates to today’s issues. Over at Founding Questions, Severian felt the need to do a proper fisking of one particularly irritating take:

This is one of two Oppenheimer stories that popped up this morning. I don’t watch tv and haven’t seen a movie in the theater in decades; I doubt I’ve seen more than a handful of “new” movies in the last ten years. So I really am not the target audience for this kind of thing, but … I don’t get it. Why is this movie such a big deal? Have they decided to simply create The One Pop Culture Thing out of whole cloth?

Anyway, let’s see what they have to say:

    There’s a cabal online, and even in some professional circles, arguing that Nolan has made the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a sideshow: that Oppenheimer looks away from the devastating effects of what happened on August 6 and 9 1945.

I guess this is where the Historian in me will forever override the pop culture critic. Obviously Robert Oppenheimer knew he was developing a weapon. The difference between a nuclear bomb and a regular bomb is one of degree, not kind. American firebombing had already done to dozens of Japanese cities what Oppenheimer’s nuke did to Hiroshima. Curtis LeMay knew it, too — after the war, he said that he’d have been rightfully tried for war crimes had the outcome gone the other way. I simply cannot see how this man is uniquely culpable for anything … or if he is, then Rosie the Riveter should be held accountable for every bomber that rolled off the assembly line.

    Anti-nuclear groups have been similarly disappointed, with Carol Turner from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament telling The Guardian that “the effect of the [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] blasts was to remove the skin in a much more gory and horrible way – in [Oppenheimer] it was tastefully, artfully presented.”

That‘s your objection? That people weren’t shown getting killed in a realistic-enough manner? Jesus Christ, do you people ever listen to yourselves? That’s fucking sick. You are a loathsome excuse for a human being, Carol Turner.

    Although it says much about the morals and mechanics of war, Oppenheimer isn’t a war film: it’s ultimately about the internal conflict and persecution of one individual. To painstakingly focus on the Japanese victims would have made it an entirely different film, and one at odds with the rest of Nolan’s vision. (His fellow director James Cameron, meanwhile, is said to be planning a film on the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

“Victims”. You keep using that word.

    There is currently a trend for great cultural works, such as Oppenheimer, to be denigrated if they don’t tick certain boxes, and such complaints often come from the Left. A lack of focus on victims has been a frequent criticism: it’s an argument that gets wheeled out, for example, whenever a drama is being made about serial killers. Yet I don’t think artists are obliged to do this if it doesn’t fit into their own authorial vision.

I have to admit, I’m getting that old College Town feeling right now. The one where it feels like someone dropped some low-grade acid in my coffee, and I’m hallucinating. I know what all those words mean, but put together like that they don’t make any sense at all. On the most basic level, the objection here seems to be that movies require plots. A “drama about a serial killer”, for example (“drama” … what an odd word choice), requires murders. You know, mechanically speaking. But what does “focusing” on them add? Is it any more or less awful, learning that the dead guy killed at random by a lunatic was really into soccer and had a dog and liked classic rock?

And all this is before you consider that the most vocal critics of Oppenheimer are Leftists … the very same Leftists who are determined to fight to the very last drop of Ukrainian blood, and who seem to think that giving Zelensky tactical nukes is a super idea. Reading the Left’s pronouncements on Vladimir Putin, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’d like to nuke him twice, just to be sure.

Your concern for the “victims” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rings a little hollow, gang, when you’ve been howling for blood 24/7 on Twitter for a year and a half.

July 27, 2023

Instead of a malignant conspiracy, consider the possibility it’s really a society-wide dearth of competence

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

Sarah Hoyt on a topic I’ve been pushing for years in casual conversation:

Recently, in a conversation between friends, the hypothesis was floated: what if all the burning farms, derailed trains, crop failures, etc. etc. etc. etc. ad scary nauseam aren’t really enemy action, but more a competency crisis.

As in these things happen not because big-bad is plotting against us, but because no one knows how to do the things they purportedly do anymore. Some kind of know, but they are hampered, slow, and sometimes hemmed in by counterproductive regulation or the result of previous “strokes of genius” decisions that broke the system.

I’m not going to bore anyone with what I know to be a massive crisis of competency plus inherited factors breaking ability to function in the field. I already did that at Mad Genius Club this morning, and am not unpacking the whole thing again.

But here’s the thing: All of us can live without a functioning fiction writing/selling market. Maybe not as pleasantly/happily, at least for those of us addicted to reading, but we can survive. We have old books to re-read, and if we get really desperate we can write our own fanfic.

It’s another thing when you talk of transportation or medicine, or farming, or – Well, everything else.

I have friends and fans in a lot of places. And almost everyone’s story is of being caught in the middle of a system where nobody knows or can do much of anything. It’s all the way the cogs and bureaucracy move. And the way they move is completely divorced from what needs done, or what anyone knows how to do.

To give an example: Suppose you were hired to haul buckets from a well. But when you actually get the job, you find out, no. Because of inherited systems, and what your superiors expect, you’re supposed to climb down the wall, hand over hand, and bring up water by the cupfull. And there are regulations in the works to make that by the spoonfull. However, you’ll be fully held to account if you can’t provide the amount of water the company is contracted for. You. Personally.

So, you do what you can. You fudge the books. On paper, you’re getting all this water up. Where the water goes no one knows, every one down stream (pardon the pun) from you does the same.

If this sounds like the soviet system? It is. It’s just that the directives don’t come directly and traceably from the government. (Though under the infestation of Bidentia they increasingly do.) Instead, they come from “experts” “scientists” “Studies” “marketing gurus.” And sometimes they are curtailed or made worse by agencies and regulations.

Yes, the managerial or worse “expert” class is the same that furnishes government. These are not your friends, are not meant to be your friends, and are convinced they know much more than you do.

What they know in fact is “how to manage.” But it’s not how to manage anything. They know theory of management (or whatever) derived from no reality (mostly from the writings of Marx, if you dig a little) and pushed ALL THE WAY DOWN.

It’s like — exactly like — being run by “experts” who memorized the Little Red Book. It might please those in power, but it has nothing to do with accomplishing the actual job in front of you.

Part of this has to do with colleges. Remember all those student demonstrations of the 60s? If you’re like me, and didn’t hit college till the eighties or younger, you might think these are, as the movies show, all anti-war and for civil rights, and all that jazz.

Unspoken to any of us is the fact that half of these demonstrations were to DUMB DOWN THE CURRICULUM. To demand easier grading. And social factors taken into account. And to “update” to “relevant things.”

The idea being that we were in a sort of an year zero and anything else, in the long storied glories of Western civ no longer counted, except for us to declare ourselves superior to it.

July 26, 2023

Justin Trudeau’s odd choice to agitate Muslim Canadians over his LGBT beliefs

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

In the weekend’s roundup post from the editors of The Line, one of the topics discussed was Prime Minister Trudeau’s attempt to blow smoke up the collective butts of deeply religious Canadian Muslims that the only reason they were upset about his blatant dedication to LGBT issues was due to brainwashing by extreme right-wing Americans:

this week offered us a video clip of Trudeau that was just too interesting for us to pass up. Readers may recall a story from a few weeks ago in which several Muslim students in Edmonton absented themselves from Pride events and were lambasted by their teacher, who told them that they had to support this event or they “can’t be Canadians.” We didn’t make much note of it at the time because our colleague and friend at the National Post Colby Cosh had the definitive and winning take: that is, the teacher is a fucknut. These kids didn’t protest or object to pride or make their peers feel uncomfortable in any way. They just declined to participate. And in a pluralistic society, politely absenting oneself from ideological events with which one disagrees and instead hanging out at the Orange Julius or wherever the hell kids spend time these days is about the most perfect and Canadian response.

Perhaps not coincidentally, upon receiving such clear signals about the conduct that is now expected of a Canadian, Muslim parents are organizing ever louder protests against what they deem to be LGBTQ “indoctrination” in schools. And if you’ve been paying any attention to the logic pretzels that have been spun about intersectionality, lived experiences, the importance of listening to minority voices in majority cultures and so on, this is about the point at which you’re going to grab the popcorn, because what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a bona fide clash of values between competing minority interest groups.

So we give the prime minister a lot of credit for meeting with Muslim parents in a Calgary-area mosque last week to discuss the issue. And we mean that! Genuinely! Heading face-first into a mob of angry parents is a really difficult thing for anybody to do. He deserves credit for doing this.

However, the response that was recorded by attendees was also very, very interesting. The furore over LGBTQ issues in schools is much ado about nothing, he insisted; the result of right-wing extremists spreading “a lot of untruths about what’s actually in provincial curriculums”.

Trudeau continued: “They are weaponizing the issue of LGBT, which is something that, yes, Islam has strong opinions on …. That is something that is being weaponized by people who are not doing it because of their interest in supporting the Muslim community.”

A few notes about this response: The first is that it is undeniably true. There are anti-LGBTQ activists who are trying to mobilize the Muslim community because this minority population has greater moral suasion among the intersectionality set than socially conservative white Christians. There are right-wing commentators out there who focus on cases, videos, examples and books that they claim demonstrates a pervasive trend of “indoctrination” on LGBTQ issues in school environments. The examples are out there, and some are age-inappropriate. However, we have no sense that those examples are representative of what’s happening in most classrooms. Are there a lot more non-binary 12-year-olds in middle school nowadays? Sure. Is that a problem? We don’t know. Maybe? But we’ve yet to walk into an elementary school hosting a 24/7 Pride Parade with naked men and women throwing rainbow glitter and condoms to the kiddies. We are savvy enough media consumers to know that in a social-media age, edge cases have a habit of being falsely portrayed as routine.

Our snark aside, Trudeau’s response is interesting because it is also a dodge. Trudeau doesn’t actually want to deal with the hard problem of how to accommodate competing minority rights. So instead he pretends there is no problem. He blames the perception of a problem on disinformation agents. Marvellous — right up until the moment we see some video from a Toronto school of a teacher screaming at eight-year-olds that there is no such thing as boys and girls and that the whole concept of biological sex is an expression of imperialism and white supremacy. (Ed note: pin this graf for future victory lap.)

Or, just as an example of the sort of thing that just maybe could happen, when an ostensibly trans shop teacher shows up to class in a wig and Size-Z prosthetic breasts with armour-piercing nipples and the school board responds by saying “This is not a problem, you bigot,” and then it turns out that the teacher in question hasn’t been entirely upfront about their life! Or until, well, some teacher tells a bunch of Edmonton kids that skipping pride to head to the mall makes them un-Canadian. Oops! Wait, so who’s lying now?

The second reason we found this response interesting is that it’s become this government’s go-to deflection. All criticism is just disinformation. Anybody who disagrees with the Liberals is a baddie because can’t you see how awesome and empathetic and genuinely well intentioned they are? Throw in a little threadbare virtue, a touch of white saviour: “you, poor, deluded, Muslims, are just being manipulated by malign forces and can’t possibly understand what you’re saying or what you really believe,” and you’ve got a pitch-perfect urban progressive Canadian non-comment. It’s a mask slip moment, when we see exactly how Trudeau seems himself, and how he sees the people he’s talking to. Oh wait: actual Muslims find this statement condescending and insulting? Don’t they know whose side they’re supposed to be on? Maybe they’re just watching too much Matt Walsh. Why does anybody need to define what a woman is anyway? Maybe we need a new law for that so the plebes stop getting so confused …

You see where this logic takes us. We may wade into this one a bit more at The Line in coming days and weeks, so enough said for now. But for now, it’s enough to note that this is not how a mature, pluralistic society handles irreconcilable differences in values and beliefs. Generally speaking, everyone is pretty content to let adults live and let live, but when you bring kids into any ideological agenda, expect matters to get ugly quickly. And you’re going to need a better response to legitimate concerns about how an emerging secular ideological consensus around gender and ideology crashes against deeply held religious values than: “YouTube lies”.

July 25, 2023

Chris Rufo, enemy of the [legacy media] people

Filed under: Books, Education, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Richard Hanania posted this review of Chris Rufo’s new book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything:

Some facts are so shocking that you don’t want to believe them. And if you do believe them, there’s a tendency to forget, downgrade their importance, and often have to be reminded of them again. Here’s one fact that falls into this category: The American education system, or at least the field of education itself, was taken over by literal communists. Those entrusted to teach children and young adults have as their greatest intellectual inspirations lunatics who would clearly have massacred their fellow Americans if they had the chance.

We know this because during the Cold War, some of the leading lights of modern academia were openly in favor of distant regimes that were engaging in mass killings in the name of equality. Some of them, like members of the Weather Underground and Angela Davis, personally participated in violent acts themselves. Instead of locking these people up and throwing away the key, we made them into tenured professors, and some of the most highly cited scholars in the world. They now are major intellectual figures in education schools, which train future teachers and administrators and ultimately control what kids learn, along with the DEI bureaucracies that exert so much control from within our most powerful institutions.

What does one do with these facts? Chris Rufo’s work over the last several years has been about taking them seriously. Tomorrow, he is publishing his first book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, which explains the history behind and intellectual foundations of modern wokeness. It serves as a wakeup call as to how bad things are. Many of the facts presented may be familiar to the reader, but taken together, they tell a story that serves as a searing indictment of the American establishment.

Rufo’s book is built around intellectual biographies of four activist-scholars: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. He traces their influence through political organizing and propaganda efforts. Marcuse was the intellectual godfather of the New Left. Davis’ Black Panther movement can be considered the precursor to BLM. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed “became the bible of teachers colleges throughout the United States and created a cottage industry in academic publishing,” with the author’s research having garnered about half a million citations. Finally, Derrick Bell was the force behind Critical Race Theory, a movement that seems to have been resisted and laughed at by most of the academic legal establishment before it wore its opponents down and gained a foothold in top law schools.

I can’t help but feeling a certain parallelism between Rufo’s work and my own. We both started becoming well known for writing about wokeness in the last few years. We both make extensive use of Twitter and longform writing to communicate to the world, and we both have books coming out two months apart with the same publisher trying to explain the origins of the radical ideas and concepts that have taken over American institutions. He’s exactly one year and two days older than me, so we’ve lived through the same formative political and cultural experiences, watching “white” become an epithet and homosexuals go from being a leper class when we were in high school to individuals having a preference that seems almost quaint in the era of public celebration of trans and the alphabet people.

Of course, an important difference is that Rufo has maintained a laser-like focus on wokeness and avoided alienating natural allies as he’s built a broad coalition within the conservative movement to take on the enemy. And his accomplishments have been quite impressive. Rufo was almost single-handedly responsible for Trump banning Critical Race Theory in the federal government, as he’s also developed close working relationships with Ron DeSantis and other politicians. Today, when Republican-controlled states ban gender transitions for minors, forbid the discussion of Critical Race Theory in schools, or abolish DEI offices in public universities, Rufo is serving as an intellectual inspiration to decision makers when he’s not directly involved in the policy process himself. If wokeness is ever defeated, one can imagine a leftist in thirty years writing a book on the career and activities of Rufo the way he writes about Marcuse and others today.

July 24, 2023

Revolutionary boredom

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

Chris Bray rises to passionately denounce [Comrade to be named later] as a traitor to the revolution who must be purged from the movement instantly!

Well-written histories of the Great Terror or the Cultural Revolution — or of the final years of the Roman republic, say for example — have the strange effect of becoming incredibly boring. The 94th bonfire of humanity, appearing on page 678, resembles the previous 93 bonfires. The grim machine of political purges makes brutal depravity tedious. Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z run the Committee to Kill Wrongthinkers; then, and you always see this coming, Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z are declared to be wrongthinkers, and are tossed on their own bonfire. The managerial tier is always consumed by its own instrument. Purge culture is the center of a politics of repression, the inevitable dynamic of a system that has degenerated to the stage of an unprincipled grasping for status and position. Someone was denounced yesterday; someone is being denounced today; someone will be denounced tomorrow.

The “Gang of Four” on trial in 1981.

In two instances, now — the frenzied shark attack on Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, and the obviously insane response to RFK Jr. this week — prominent House Democrats have mimicked a cultural style that should be extremely familiar to anyone who has read some history. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is so fascinatingly horrible a figure that she echoes, a bug-eyed ranting halfwitted sociopath with a hollow core like a long historical line of hollow bug-eyed sociopaths. These are the people who are drawn to destructive political stages. Repellent and ascendant, they call to others of the type. Destroyers flock.

I assume you’ve seen some footage from yesterday’s hearing, which was widely covered and widely discussed, so I’m not going to rehash that nasty piece of Theatre of Cruelty. If you missed it, just know that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is OBSOLETE OBSOLETE OBSOLETE.

But I want to point at the water underneath the waves we can see in national media, because the presumptions of the Central Commissariat go all the way down.

The week that led to the ritual denunciation of RFK Jr. started with a fascinatingly naked declaration in a Pasadena courthouse. Two California physicians, Mark McDonald and Jeff Barke, are suing the California Medical Board to block enforcement of AB 2098, the new law that threatens the medical license of any doctor in the state who expresses consensus-deviating crimethink about the darkly sacred Covid-19, a High Enemy of the Glorious Motherland. McDonald and Barke are relying on the First Amendment and its protection of the so-called “free speech” trope, a well-known tool of dangerous far-right extremists.

Courts have split on AB 2098, and so far some have declined the premise that this regulation of physicians’ speech is unconstitutional, so the case is now before the 9th Circuit on appeal. A three-judge panel heard oral argument in the case this week, in an architecturally pleasant forum that used to be a luxury hotel. And this is where Deputy Attorney General Kristin Liska said this to the court: “In order to effectively regulate the practice of medicine, the state needs to be able to reach the aspects of speech that are used to care for patients.”

If you take a professional license from the state, the regulatory power of the state reaches your speech acts; you can lose your license not only for harming patients or providing poor quality care, but for saying things that the state disagrees with. Your conversations belong to the government.

July 22, 2023

“… no-one has a ‘right’ to a bank account …”

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

Unlike in Canada, where the extra-legal debanking of an unknown number of what Justin Trudeau described as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views” had all the bien-pensants in and out of the legacy media nodding along, British opinion is not so friendly toward the extra-legal debanking of Nigel Farage and his family and friends:

An acquaintance of mine on Facebook, a hardline capitalist (so he says) made a comment that no-one has a “right” to a bank account, as they don’t have “rights” (those inverted commas are doing a lot of work here) to healthcare, education, paid-for holidays, etc. He was, of course, writing about the Nigel Farage/Coutts saga that has seen the CEO of NatWest, Coutts’ parent firm (39% owned by the taxpayer) issue a sort-of apology to the former UKIP leader.

[…]

When a person is “debanked” today, they can have a problem opening an account anywhere else if the bank asks them why they left a bank in the past. As a result, we have almost a sort of “cartel” system operating.

In time, hopefully, competition will swing back, and some of the nonsense going on will disappear. In the meantime, while I agree with you that the idea of having a “right” to a bank account is as bogus as many of the other “rights” that people talk about today, the fact that banking is such an embedded form of life in a modern economy means this issue hits hard in a way that, say, isn’t the case if you are banned from a pizza restaurant or candy store for holding the “wrong” views. Of course, it may be that the Farage case might encourage a firm to go out of its way to court business from those who have been targeted. Let’s hope so. For example, a bank could, without incurring wrath from the “woke” or regulators, say something like “Banking is all we do. No politics. No agendas. Just finance.”

And as I have said before, the outrageous Nigel Farage case, and that of others, surely demonstrates that a central bank digital currency idea must be resisted. This would be the end of any financial autonomy at all.

As you’d expect, Brendan O’Neill isn’t a fan of this latest attempt to make certain political viewpoints effectively illegal:

So there you have it. Nigel Farage really was given the boot from the prestigious private bank Coutts because of his political views. Because he is very pro-Brexit, is fond of Donald Trump and has been critical of Black Lives Matter. Because, in the words of an extraordinary internal dossier compiled by Coutts, his views “do not align’ with the bank’s values”. For the past fortnight the chattering classes have been chortling over Farage’s claim that Coutts was persecuting him for his political beliefs. How dumb – worse, how complacent in the face of corporate tyranny – those people look now.

Last month, Farage went public about the closure of his Coutts account. I’ve been given the heave-ho for political reasons, he said. He also said that nine other banks have since rejected his custom. Now he has published a dossier that was distributed at a meeting of Coutts’ “reputational risk committee” on 17 November 2022. It is a truly chilling read. It runs to 36 pages. There is a strong case for “exiting” Farage from the bank, it says, because his publicly stated views are “at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The Stasi once compiled dossiers on dissident activists and artists whose views ran counter to those of the GDR regime. Now Coutts seems to be doing similar on customers who dare to bristle against the regime of woke.

The dossier basically finds Farage guilty of wrongthink. It highlights his renegade views not only on Brexit and Trump but also on Net Zero and even on King Charles – he has had the audacity to criticise His Majesty. Like dissidents in East Germany, his friendships are held against him, too. His links with Trump and tennis champ Novak Djokovic make him suspect, apparently. The dossier quotes the Independent‘s description of Farage’s visit to Djokovic’s trophy room in Belgrade, during which he criticised Australia’s expulsion of Djokovic for failing to get vaccinated against Covid, as “the spineless, chaotic behaviour of a chancer”.

[…]

The Farage / Coutts story is important because it highlights what a huge threat woke capitalism poses to freedom and fairness. Let’s be clear about what has happened here: a man has been economically unpersoned for having the supposedly wrong views. He’s been blacklisted for being a little too dissenting on the big issues of the day. And it’s happening to others, too – including people who do not have access to the same media platforms as Farage and thus have little leeway to protest against their expulsion from economic life by unelected, unaccountable banks and businesses. We acquiesce to this capitalist policing of thought at our peril. It is surely time for the government to act and clip the wings of banks and companies that believe they have the right to penalise citizens for the contents of their conscience. It might be Farage today, it could be you tomorrow.

Theodore Dalrymple sees it as a sign of the rise of woke totalitarianism:

It isn’t a question of whether Mr. Farage is always right or sometimes horribly wrong; when the bank says that it “uncovered” something that he said, as if he had recorded saying it by secret microphones, it makes itself ridiculous. Not even his worst enemies, or perhaps his best friends, would accuse him of hiding his light under a bushel.

The question is whether it’s the role of a bank to examine its clients’ views and deny them service if those views don’t accord with those of the chief executive, as if the latter were indisputably true and from which it were heresy to dissent. Is a bank an inquisition?

The chief executive of the parent bank, Alison Rose, said soon after her appointment that “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her work, and on the occasion of the so-called Pride month last year said that “our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is integral to our purpose of championing the potential of people, families, and businesses”. This year, the company headquarters were covered in the rainbow colors of the LGBT flag, with lettering the height of humans declaring the “Championing the power of Pride”. Under her leadership, staff may “identify” as women and men on alternate days, should they so wish.

Of course, when she said that “diversity” and “inclusion” was “integral to our purpose”, she was using these terms in a strictly technical sense to mean “everyone who thinks as I do and has a fair bit of money”. The diversity “integral” to the “purpose” of Coutts doesn’t include those persons with less than $1 million to deposit, who even in these days of currency depreciation remain a small minority. People bank with Coutts because it’s exclusive, not inclusive.

The chief executive, however, is safely within what we might call the Coutts Community, because she was paid about $5.2 million last year. The prospect of being barred from the bank will no doubt inhibit anyone who banks with her banks from suggesting in public that she’s paid too much.

In European politics, “far right” doesn’t mean what Americans think it means

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Italy, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The European Conservative, Rod Dreher tries to put the various “far right” European political parties into context for North American readers:

If you are an American who depends on the U.S. and other English-language media for news about continental European politics — and most Americans obviously do — then you might well be afraid that a wave of fascism is poised to sweep Europe.

The European Conservative, obviously, is a great source of news and information about Europe for our American readers — and I hope with this column to help American conservatives better understand what’s going on with the European Right — because there are very few venues for them to do so.

American and British news agencies are reporting that the “far-right” party VOX is likely to do well in this weekend’s Spanish elections. The “far-right” Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is surging in German opinion polls. It seems like just yesterday that the “far-right” party of Giorgia Meloni topped Italian elections. “Far-right” parties are key to governing coalitions in Finland and Sweden.

And, of course, the BBC website informs its readers to mind “the ultra-conservative, authoritarian-leaning governments in Poland and in Hungary”. Far-rightists to the fingertips, the lot, right?

Well, no. Not even close. American conservatives should understand that by U.S. standards, the “far-right” parties are basically center-right contemporary Republicans. The declining establishment conservative parties of the European continent are more or less Clinton-style Democrats. There do exist genuinely far-right parties in Europe, but they aren’t anywhere near government.

(Though in this spring’s Hungarian elections, the actually far-right party Jobbik, which considers Viktor Orban to be a squish, went into coalition with the left-wing parties. This caused the coalition prime ministerial candidate to boast moronically that his side was truly diverse, because it spanned the ideological spectrum from communist to fascist.)

When U.S. journalists describe these nationalist and populist parties as “far-right”, they intend to call up images of burly fascists marching down cobblestone streets in hobnail boots, shouting abuse at Jews and minorities. I can’t decide if they do this deliberately to mislead American readers into thinking Europe is two tics away from a gran mal Nazi seizure, or if the reporters themselves are so absorbed in the ideology of their class that they honestly cannot discern gradations of right-wing politics.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

July 21, 2023

Country music world (and legacy media) convulsed by country song that isn’t woke

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

There’s been a lot of wailing by the usual suspects about a recent video released by Jason Aldean for his song “Try That in a Small Town”, alleging all sorts of horrible things including promotion of lynching, outright racism, and inciting violence:

… writer Zachary Faria notes that the left is rabidly protective of Black Lives Matter. In fact, they’re so protective of it that they’ll take issue with criticism of literally anything that ever even happened at a Black Lives Matter protest.

Entire neighborhoods were burned to the ground? A small price to pay for social justice, at least in their minds.

So the idea of people standing up to them — warning them to try that in a small town — is despicable.

Remember that these are the same people who continue to accuse Kyle Rittenhouse of murder despite having been acquitted of the crime. These are the same people who call the kid a racist despite him having shot three white dudes. They say he acted unprovoked despite one trying to take his gun from him, another hitting him in the head with a blunt object, and a third literally pointing a gun at him.

Through it all, they act like Rittenhouse should have just rolled over and allowed his murder to happen, all because the cause of Black Lives Matter cannot be criticized.

Where Aldean sinned is because he, too, thinks ill of the riots that engulfed every major city in this nation.

He’s harkening back to a time when communities were full of people protecting one another. That’s a very good thing, and I’m someone who would love to see that happen again.

Instead, the people claiming that Aldean’s song is about lynching are telling on themselves.

There doesn’t seem to be any part of the song that says a thing about black people or anything like that. In fact, most of the people involved in the riots, at least as I saw them, seemed to be white. But the fact that this is where the leftists went tells us plenty. It tells us they think the only kind of person who would cross that line is a black person.

July 20, 2023

Three phases of a cultural cycle

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

Chris Bray visits an art museum and shares some thoughts provoked by his experiences:

There’s a moment, in a museum supported by a deep permanent collection, when you transition from glowing oil paint depictions of Lord Major Fluffington P. Farnsworth-Hadenwallace, Seventh Earl of Wherever, Ninth Duke of Someotherplace, posing in his lordly estate with a bowl of fruit and his array of status decorations, to the shocking emergence of late-19th century innovations in painting, and you find yourself thinking that huh, this Renoir dude really knew his stuff, like you’re the first person to ever notice.

Good eye, Sterling

These explosive moments of creativity were usually social: artists gathering, talking, seeing the work of other artists and thinking about new ways of seeing and showing. Individual acts of artistic liberation appeared in the context of an emerging cultural freedom. Renoir and Monet hung out together.

You can see the tide coming in and going out. You can watch enormous waves of joyful innovation, or — respectful nod to the German Expressionists — anxious and anguished innovation. It’s on the wall: here’s the moment when people experienced unusual freedom of vision. You can see artists pursuing beauty with disciplined attention, in a cultural atmosphere that allows the pursuit.

And it’s just so abundantly clear that something opened in the world, somewhere between 1870 and … 1950? Or so? And then it began to close, and the closure recently began picking up force. There are periods of general creativity and periods of general stultification and retrenchment; there was one Italian Renaissance, one Scottish Enlightenment, and so on. Weimar Germany, sick as it was, fired more brilliant art into the world in twenty years than many cultures produce in a period of centuries, though a certain teenager who lives in my house would like you to know that Fritz Lang sucks and please stop with those boring movies and I’ll be in my room.

So it seems to me that the first part of the cultural cycle is the making phase, the period of astonishing innovation; then comes the consolidation and appreciation, the moment the heirs to sewing machine fortunes show up and notice how good everything is; then comes the phase when a few monk-equivalents try to keep the record of accomplishment alive in the context of a hostile or indifferent culture, while most institutions reject innovation and turn to scolding, wrecking, and cannibalization. The fifth Indiana Jones movie. She-Hulk. Like that. I just spent twenty minutes in a Barnes and Noble, and the “new fiction” section may still be making me feel tired next week.

We’re living through a decline in fertility — in literal fertility, in rates of people being married and making babies and hanging around to raise children — at the moment when cultural fertility also seems to be going into freefall. Your results may vary, but I’m finding the moment manageable, largely with piles of earlier books and the occasional sprint to a place like the Clark. Fecundity and sterility appear in cycles, but you can time travel. You can reach back. Mary McCarthy got me through June, and Willa Cather is helping with July. Evelyn Waugh covered roughly February through May.

If you’re near the Berkshires, a worthwhile Edvard Munch exhibit is around until mid-October.

It’s very strange to be in the river and then to suddenly notice that it isn’t running — you’ve hit a long stretch of dead water, so still it starts to stink. I assume it will pass. But until then …

July 19, 2023

Infohazards on the internet of lies lead us into the clutches of “egregores”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The latest review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf from John Psmith, is on the 1872 novel Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky”. I didn’t read the post immediately, as Russian literature and I aren’t even nodding acquaintances. I should have remembered that both of the Psmiths have an amazing ability to tell you a lot more than a “review” would normally contain, and this one certainly lived up to expectations, including a brief discussion of philosopher Charles Taylor’s ideas about pre-modern versus modern concepts of the self. Most pre-modern cultures believed in external influences having disproportional impact on the person, while most modern cultures believe the influences arise internally within the mind. Most pre-modern cultures also feared the self could be taken over, or possessed, by malevolent external entities, ideas, or thoughts:

Dostoevsky obligingly gives us a character who’s clearly possessed in exactly this sense — a dissolute nobleman around whom the various radical conspiracies swirl. He is, simultaneously, a subversion of the brooding Byronic hero archetype that was so popular in 19th century European literature, and an eerie anticipation of the modern concept of the serial killer. How did he get this way? Remember the modern view of our desires is that they come from within us, and indulging them leads to inner harmony. But the older and truer view is that they can come from outside, force their way into our skulls through an opening, set their hooks in our brains, lay their eggs. These fledgling desires start out small and weak, but to indulge them is to feed them, grow them, until they take over their host and move its mouth and limbs around like a puppet. In this sense the porn addict, the drug addict, and the rage addict are all alike: sensual dissipation gets boring eventually, and you need harder and harder stuff to feel the same thrill, until one day you reach for something so hard you lose yourself forever.

The Dostoevskian twist to all this is that the proto-serial killer is far more sympathetic, and ultimately more redeemable, than the revolutionaries. The radicals’ motivations spring from the same emotional source as his, theirs are just sublimated into politics, which is why the form of the dystopia doesn’t really matter to them, all that matters is that there be a boot stomping on a human face. The sexual sadism of the serial killer is unflinchingly portrayed as less disordered and less socially destructive than its political equivalent and, ultimately, as rather basic. It’s actually quite easy to miss all of this because it’s so deeply at odds with modern sensibilities. Not just “serial killers are better than communists actually,” but also “serial killers are really pretty boring actually,” and all from the guy who just invented serial killers.1

But what if the radicals aren’t sublimating anything at all? What if there’s another kind of demon, another kind of infohazard, another kind of meme, which rather than infecting or possessing individuals, instead tries to do that to entire societies? Such a being might still work through individuals, the way a Haitian voodoo spirit speaks through a chwal, but here the individual puppet is not a target, but rather an instrument or a transmission vector. The internet jargon for such a being is an “egregore,” and you’ve encountered them before: the bizarre fad that sweeps through a middle school class like a wildfire, the war fever that grips a nation and turns it overnight into a basket of bloodthirsty lunatics. Dance crazes, viral TikTok challenges, internet-mediated mental illnesses. There’s a classic Futurama gag involving the Brain Slug Party, but the real joke is that every party is the Brain Slug Party, they’re all egregores. Have you ever spoken with somebody who had hashtags in their Twitter bio? If you looked carefully, you may have seen the slender, silvery proboscis emerging from the back of their neck and vanishing into the ether. If you listened carefully, you may have heard the alien metallic clacking of the egregore’s mandibles, as it sent messages down that tube for the meat puppet to vocalize.

Sometime in the mid-19th century, an egregore was born in the Russian Empire. It went by a thousand different names — among them: anarchism, communism, nihilism, democracy. What’s that? Those four ideologies are completely opposed to one another? That’s the entire point! It wasn’t actually any of those things, it was an egregore, its true name was something like Melkhorbalai or Uztaa-Binoreth. It wore those other names like skins when it was convenient to do so, which is why in the real life history of 19th century Russia we see countless examples of individuals switching between communism, anarchism, and democracy like they were flavors of ice cream.

The egregore wanted none of these things: it wanted to grow, to spread, to manifest itself into this reality. Madly, it willed destruction, and the more destruction it caused the stronger it got, and the easier further destruction became, a runaway exothermic reaction endlessly feeding on itself. So the reformist zeal of the 1840s became Nechayev’s insane nihilism of the 1870s, then the even more insane terrorism of 1900-1917 with which I opened this review, until finally, strengthened by half a century of blood sacrifice, that rough beast slouched towards St. Petersburg to be born. The trauma of that birth ripped apart first Russia, then Europe, then it almost ate the rest of the world too.

Could anything have stopped it sooner? In Dostoevsky’s story there’s one character who tries lamely to stand in the way of the swirling, coalescing, immaterial malevolence. He is a reactionary, a newly-freed former serf,3 and (like Dostoevsky himself) a repentant former revolutionary. He’s young and hip, but has old and edgy views, a perfect stand-in for online “trads”. Given Dostoevsky’s own views it would be easy to make him the hero of the story, but Dostoevsky is too great a writer for that, and instead makes him a pathetic LARPer:

    “I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself?”

    “I believe in Russia … I believe in her orthodoxy … I believe in the body of Christ … I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia … I believe …” Shatov muttered frantically.

    “And in God? In God?”

    “I … I will believe in God.”

How great a description is that of all the crusader-avatar twitter accounts named “DeusVult1571”? Imagine one of them blubbering: “I believe in based aesthetics … I believe in Western civilization … I believe in the Hajnal line … I believe …” Ah, but do you believe in God? Probably some of them do, but for many others it’s a pose, or a meme, or a philosophical premise that they must accept in order to turn the rest of the brand they’ve assumed into a self-consistent whole.2 For these, the god they worship is just another egregore — one small and weak for now, less threatening perhaps than some others, but feed it, let it grow, and see how fast it turns on you.

The other force that could have resisted the growing darkness is the parents’ generation, the liberals of 1848, Turgenev’s boomers. We already know how that turned out in real life, but while Dostoevsky didn’t live to see it happen, he had these peoples’ number. Once so bold in condemning their government and sneering at their civilization, they are suddenly timid in the face of their children, terrified of being seen as uncool or conservative or just not with it. That’s a good way to raise a psycho, and Dostoevsky more than hints that everything which follows is ultimately their fault. And it’s a bad way to face down an egregore. Doing that requires boldness and … well:

    “But this is premature among us, premature,” he pronounced almost imploringly, pointing to the manifestoes.

    “No, it’s not premature; you see you’re afraid, so it’s not premature.”

    “But here, for instance, is an incitement to destroy churches.”

    “And why not? You’re a sensible man, and of course you don’t believe in it yourself, but you know perfectly well that you need religion to brutalise the people. Truth is honester than falsehood …”

    “I agree, I agree, I quite agree with you, but it is premature, premature in this country…” said Von Lembke, frowning.

    “And how can you be an official of the government after that, when you agree to demolishing churches, and marching on Petersburg armed with staves, and make it all simply a question of date?”

“Premature, premature”, is what the useless normies will bleat when our own radicals are blowing up Mt. Rushmore and pulling down statues of George Washington. Who are these radicals? I have no idea what the egregore will call itself this time. It doesn’t matter. Its true name sounds to human ears like a high-pitched mechanical screeching and clicking, a sound calculated to drive men mad, and to drive madmen into making it real.

    1. I’m told that the internet jargon for this is an “unbuilt trope.”

    2. Dostoevsky positions a former serf as the defender of “Holy Russia,” Orwell suggests that if there is hope it lies in the proles, Bismarck believed the poor would serve as a reactionary bulwark against liberalism, and MAGA believes that various dispossessed and subaltern groups will keep America great. Are they all correct? No. They’re all wrong. The lower classes have no special compass for political or religious truth, they’re just almost definitionally slightly behind the times. When an egregore is rapidly accumulating strength, they’re likely to oppose it out of inertia, but they’re as vulnerable as anyone to its blandishments, and will just as vigorously defend the new thing once it has taken over.

    3. Look, I have a lot of sympathy for these guys. Like the Russian radicals of the 1870s, they correctly observe that there’s something insane and rotten about our society, but unlike those radicals they’re attracted to something that’s really out there and really true and good. “Fake it til you make it” is not the worst strategy ever invented for securing a mature and authentic faith in a supreme being. But once you’re in that state, there’s a clock running, your time is limited, there are other things out there in the night, attracted by the smell of lost and receptive souls.

Ever wonder where the term “two-spirit” came from?

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Malcolm Clark explains the origin of the now commonly used term as a portmanteau for many different words — with significant variation in meaning — in indiginous languages:

Typical media presentation of Two-spirit individuals

The term two-spirit was first formally endorsed at a conference of Native American gay activists in 1990 in Winnipeg in Canada. It is a catch-all term to cover over 150 different words used by the various Indian tribes to describe what we think of today as gay, trans or various forms of gender-bending, such as cross-dressing. Two-spirit people, the conference declared, combine the masculine and the feminine spirits in one.

From the start, the whole exercise reeked of mystical hooey. Myra Laramee, the woman who proposed the term in 1990, said it had been given to her by ancestor spirits who appeared to her in a dream. The spirits, she said, had both male and female faces.

Incredibly, three decades on, there are now celebrities and politicians who endorse the concept or even identify as two-spirit. The term has found its way into one of Joe Biden’s presidential proclamations and is a constant feature of Canadian premier Justin Trudeau’s doe-eyed bleating about “2SLGBTQQIA+ rights”.

The term’s success is no doubt due in part to white guilt. There is a tendency to associate anything Native American with a lost wisdom that is beyond whitey’s comprehension. Ever since Marlon Brando sent “Apache” activist Sacheen Littlefeather to collect his Oscar in 1973, nothing has signalled ethical superiority as much as someone wearing a feather headdress.

The problem is that too many will believe almost any old guff they are told about Native Americans. This is an open invitation to fakery. Ms Littlefeather, for example, may have built a career as a symbol of Native American womanhood. But after her death last year, she was exposed as a member of one of the fastest growing tribes in North America: the Pretendians. Her real name was Marie Louise Cruz. She was born to a white mother and a Mexican father, and her supposed Indian heritage had just been made up.

Much of the fashionable two-spirit shtick is just as fake. For one thing, it’s presented as an acknowledgment of the respect Indian tribes allegedly showed individuals who were gender non-conforming. Yet many of the words that two-spirit effectively replaces are derogatory terms.

In truth, there was a startling range of attitudes to the “two-spirited” among the more than 500 separate indigenous Native American tribes. Certain tribes may have been relaxed about, say, effeminate men. Others were not. In his history of homosexuality, The Construction of Homosexuality (1998), David Greenberg points out that those who are now being called “two spirit” were ridiculed by the Papago, held in contempt by the Choctaws, disliked by the Cocopa, treated by the Seven Nations with “the most sovereign contempt” and “derided” by the Sioux. In the case of the Yuma, who lived in what is now Colorado, the two-spirited were sometimes treated as rape objects for the young men of the tribe.

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