Quotulatiousness

April 10, 2023

The ADL would like to warn you away from that dangerous source of information, Substack

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

Chris Bray doesn’t seem to be taking the ADL’s dire warnings seriously here:

The ADL has written a much-discussed hit piece about Substack …

    Substack, a subscription-based online newsletter platform for independent writers, continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.

… and I’m grateful. It’s gloriously stupid and clumsy, and shows how the braindead disinformation racket works. If you read Jacob Siegel’s important examination of the disinformation hoax in Tablet, and then read the ADL’s laugh-out-loud stupid article about Substack, you’ll be inoculated. You’ll be a dead end for this mind virus. See, this discussion is a vaccine, and that means it’s good and you can’t ever question it.

Start with the headline:

So the opening claim, the frame the headline establishes as you wade into the text, is that this is an exposé of antisemitism, of people — like Nazis! — who hate Jews. Substack is a Nuremberg rally, y’all, and Leni Riefenstahl has the film rights. The topic of the piece is hate and bigotry. And then the text says things like this:

1.) Antisemitism is on Substack!

2.) For example, Steve Kirsch criticizes Covid vaccines.

Pretty sure Steve Kirsch is Jewish, by the way, and listed alongside other monsters who publish on the Jew-hating platform Substack. Also a vicious hater writing on the antisemitic platform, as the ADL warns us: Chaya Raichik (of Libs Of TikTok fame), an orthodox Jew. I’m not a technical expert, but this may be poor form for antisemitic publishing. “Anti-Papist mob to publish G.K. Chesterton box set”.

The lumping in of this thing, this thing, and this entirely other thing is a way to dirty up a bunch of Not X by reference to X, warning about antisemitism at the top and then delivering text about people who criticize pharmaceutical products. This website hosts people who love terrorism, genocide, and baking. For example, cupcakes.

Second, and this amazes me, the ADL piece — in 2023! — runs on the premise that the line between good information and dangerous disinformation is perfectly clear and eternally unchanging. Steve Kirsch writes “anti-vaccine conspiracy theories”. See, and not one of those have ever proved to be true. What we think is true now about mRNA vaccines in the spring of 2023 is exactly what we believed in March of 2020. Truth never changes, and no ambiguity ever exists in any scientific question. No debate is ever real or reasoned. No skeptic has ever turned out to be right about anything, ever, on any topic in any field, like eugenics and phrenology. This narrative approach, the rhetorical equivalent of watching a writer hit himself in his own drooling face with a boot, is why every person of ordinary good sense sighs heavily at the first sign that someone claims status as a disinformation expert.

April 9, 2023

What’s the “exit strategy” from the Trump fiasco in NYC?

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Severian wonders how the deep state’s public muppets will manage now that former President Donald Trump has been brought to court:

Let us ask ourselves, then, what The Left‘s “exit strategy” could possibly be, for any of their outstandingly Juggalicious projects. They of course don’t actually have one — “grokking the skull-fuckingly obvious consequences of their actions” not being the Left’s long suit — but if they did, what would it be?

And I admit, I’m buffaloed. We’ve already talked about the Ukraine thing, so let’s contemplate how the BOM’s “indictment” ends.

One wonders what happens if they throw the book at him. What’s the max sentence? It’s important. Does he face actual jail time? How much? I’m assuming for the purposes of this exercise that the jury will not only convict him, but give him the max, because c’mon man, this is AINO — we live in a Prerogative State now; jaywalking is a federal pound me in the ass prison offense if you can be proven to have voted the wrong way. What can they give him?

[…]

Throw BOM in the slammer, and there you have it. Not even Toby fucking Keith could fail to conclude that we now live in a police state. They’re screwed …

But they’re equally screwed if he gets off, because then their guys will go nuts, and forget passive resistance, the Left gets to riot. And riot they shall, because they’ve got a real taste for it now. Even if everything breaks perfectly for the Juggs for the next few years, Antifa etc. will still be rioting whenever they feel aggrieved — and when do they not? — simply because they like it. And they never face any consequences, so why not flip cars and break shit and light buildings on fire every time Starbucks raises the price of a frappucino?

Same deal if the BOM gets a slap on the wrist. I think that was the original plan, insofar as they’re capable of planning — indict him, slap him on the wrist, and turn him loose. They didn’t think past “getting him off the 2024 ballot”. If they even thought that far … which I doubt, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Even though they must know that 2024 will be Fortified for Democracy™, the BOM’s very existence terrifies them, because he shows that there’s a possible alternative. We see him for the ridiculous CivNat pussy he is, and we know full well we’re not voting ourselves out of what’s coming. But they see him as a real threat.

A Serious version of the BOM would be a very big deal indeed. They can’t allow that to happen. And so long as the BOM stays on this side of the grass, that seems to them to be a live possibility.

So what can they do? Seriously asking. How the hell do they get themselves out of this? If you were the Machiavelli behind Les Juggs, what would you tell them to do? I’m a Historian, so I can envision a lot more “worst case scenario” than most people, and all I can think of is “Roll the fucking tanks”. I don’t think even their total lock on the Media will work this time — you can instruct them to never speak of it again, but they don’t see themselves as your loyal stenographers anymore; they consider themselves news makers, not just news reporters.

Maybe … just maybe … you could sacrifice Alvin Bragg. Throw the case out for the obviously political hitjob it is, then keester Bragg with everything in the arsenal. Disbar him; haul him up on “prosecutorial misconduct” charges, and the throw the book at him. If I were trying to get Les Juggs out of it with the minimum of violence while maintaining the barest fig leaf of legitimacy for The System, that’s what I’d advise.

But they’re simply not psychologically capable of doing that. Admitting it’s a hitjob means admitting that the BOM was right about something, and that cannot stand.

The technocratic elite believe “You cannot be trusted with your own mind”

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

Chris Bray explains why he was struggling to write about the farcical events in New York City and the show trial of Bad Orange Man:

I started to write about the precedents for the Trump indictment and related topics in the recent criminalization of political disagreement, but I couldn’t summon up the energy to keep going. I was boring myself, and I kept stopping. It took a couple of days, but I figured it out: I realized that I was treating a pseudo-event as an event.

The thing that finally got me over the cognitive hump was Jacob Siegel’s massive article on the disinformation hoax, which you have no choice but to read. I printed it out and read it on paper, and I suggest you do the same. He’s describing, in depth and with considerable precision, an information technocracy organized around a principle now taken as a given by the governing class: “You cannot be trusted with your own mind.” There’s much more to say about it, but I’m mostly not going to say it. Siegel said it, and you should go see what he said. It’s important, and will show up in political discussions for a long time.

However. The development of this enormous manipulative apparatus, policing your perceptions and putatively guardrailing where your mind can go, cannot succeed. It treats bytes as trees; it treats information, or pieces of pseudo-information, as reality, and presumes that your perception can be shaped. It presumes that Twitter can become real, that repetition coupled with repression of the counterclaim can make you think X is Not-X. It can’t. The Federal Center for Lake Perception, working in conjunction with an endless variety of lake-centered NGOs and lake-describing academic researchers, tells you your house sits next to a lake. You look outside and don’t see a lake. The end. Hundreds of paid influencers can tell you that a lump of shit is filet mignon, and social media companies can suspend the accounts of users who say that the shit is shit, but then you take a bite.

That which is, is. Its isness is ineradicable. You’re a person in the world; you can see what is and what isn’t, and you mostly can’t not see, even if you try to make your mind comply. Starving person reads wall poster declaring resounding success of annual crops due to Great Leap Forward, dies of hunger.

Alex Berenson said on Twitter that the mRNA injections don’t prevent transmission or infection, so his account was cancelled and he was denounced for disinformation, so now you know that the injections do prevent transmission and infection. Right? Mind control. Very effective. Your brain just slides right in between those guardrails, doesn’t it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

April 8, 2023

Russia’s Last Crusade – The Crimean War 1853-1856

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Media, Middle East, Military, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 7 Apr 2023

The Crimean War between the Ottoman Empire and Russia (and later the UK and France) has been called the last crusade and the first modern war at the same time.
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April 7, 2023

Political demands without proper definitions

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

Chris Bray identifies an all-too-common pattern from the people who demand change, but can’t seem to adequately explain what they’re so all-fired passionate about:

There’s an exchange I’ve seen a dozen times in the last few months, and it’s always more or less the same. The faces and the names change, but the structure of the discussion is consistent. It happened last week between Senator John Kennedy and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (video is time-stamped to 1:55 or so, when the discussion begins, but Substack sometimes eats the timestamp, so fast-forward if necessary):

I won’t quote from it, because it’s so casually bizarre and unsettling you should just watch it to see for yourself, but Kennedy notes that Mayorkas has recently and very publicly demanded a federal ban on assault weapons — and then he asks Mayorkas to define “assault weapons”. You want to ban X, so what is X? What is the thing you intend to ban?

Mayorkas responds with all known forms of rhetorical deflection short of diving under the table: “I defer to the experts,” do it for the children, it is no longer acceptable to do nothing as people die, the children the children the children. But he will not propose a definition for the term. He wants to ban something, but he refuses to say what he wants to ban. Kennedy keeps asking; Mayorkas keeps right on with not ever saying. The closest he ever comes to an answer is that at one point he tentatively upspeaks a firm maybe, saying that possibly assault weapons are kind of … military style? But then he won’t say what that means, either.

Not noticing himself, Mayorkas just comes right out and says one of the things that fatally undermines his own claim that he lacks the expertise to participate in the discussion, noting that he worked as both an assistant U.S. attorney and as the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California while the last federal assault weapons ban was on the books. So he’s been a federal prosecutor, and has led federal prosecutors, during a period when federal prosecutors went to court to enforce an assault weapons ban, but he can’t possibly discuss a legal definition of the term “assault weapon,” because he’s not an expert in a question that was central to his professional identity for years. I don’t know nothin’ about all this giraffe anatomy, says local zoo veterinarian.

So this is the structure of the exchange:

    Very Senior Government Official: I demand that we do X, because X is very important.

    Questioner: Okay, what is X?

    Very Senior Government Official: I have no idea.

[…]

Over and over and over again, prominent members of the political class argue for things by throwing their givens around the room, and that’s all they can do. I feel very strongly that we need common sense solutions, in the sense that the solutions we need are very common sense things that we can all agree are very common sense. If you try to penetrate the half-millimeter of topsoil to find out what’s underneath, you see that there isn’t anything down there. You can ask them to explain their underlying premises, or to explain by logical steps how they reached their policy conclusions, but you’re just being charitable. They don’t have any of that, and wouldn’t admit it if they did. They simply feel, senator, that we must protect the children. With bipartisan solutions. That are common sense.

Yes, this is sometimes a tactic, and they know what they mean. But the brittle crust at the top edge of the discourse increasingly seems to not be characterized by the sneaky maneuver. There’s often nothing to probe for. There’s no debate to be had by opening a space for the discussion. Remarkable numbers of “leaders” read what’s on the index card — and then look up, finished with the statement, waiting for a treat like a golden retriever.

    I am for [symbol]!

    Mister Secretary, what do you mean by [symbol]?

    I am for [symbol], I am for [symbol]! (Long pause.) I am for [symbol!]

So it seems to me that the first fact about our political discourse is that it’s increasingly about nothing, populated by people who don’t mean anything and can’t think about anything. There’s often no possibility of an exchange that leads to a deepened understanding, because there’s nothing in there. We must fight inflation by passing the Inflation Reduction Act! The public sphere has been emptied; its where we go to pass null sets back and forth.

Stormtroopers – The German Elite of WW1 – Sabaton History 119

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 6 Apr 2023

By the middle of the Great War, several nations had begun to experiment with shock troops, and Germany was one of them. The Sturmtruppen were a revolution on the battlefield, for sure, but what did they actually do? What equipment did they carry and use? What were the men actually like? Today we’ll look at all that.
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April 2, 2023

“Digital blackface” (and it’s not Justin Trudeau trying on fresh face paint)

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

Kat Rosenfield on the desperate efforts of the terminally online to make “digital blackface” a cancellable crime for white people:

Five years after Sweet Brown’s original interview, it was given new weight with the coining of a phrase. In a Teen Vogue essay, Lauren Michele Jackson described the act of non-black people using reaction GIFs featuring black Americans as “digital blackface”. And so, a trend was born: The New York Times weighed in, followed by The Guardian, followed by the mommy bloggers and the service journalists. Just when it seemed like the internet had squeezed the concept dry, it returned again, last weekend, in the form of a clickbaity banner on the front page of CNN: “What’s ‘digital blackface’? And why is it wrong when White people use it?”

For those who remember this argument in its original iteration, the immediate reaction is probably best encapsulated by a meme from the pre-social internet — not one of the ones that allegedly constitutes digital blackface, but the one from Mean Girls, in which an enraged Regina George hisses: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” We do not need to do this again. This argument was transparent, racebaiting, outrage fodder even when it was new; now, it is all of that and tired.

If anything, the notion that, as CNN’s John Blake insists, employing reaction GIFs featuring black people represents “one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism” is illustrative of just how badly the discourse is foundering in the wake of the massive racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. All that momentum, all that money, all those marches and protests and pleas for real change end up being squandered again and again on luxury beliefs: galaxy-brained takes that circulate like wildfire among members of the coastal media class while being utterly bewildering to any normal person. The absurdity of Blake’s argument seems obvious even for those who think America is a long way from being a post-racial paradise. This is a country where black citizens remain underrepresented in key positions of power, and disproportionately suffer from poverty and violence. How terminally online must one be to think that the “most insidious” form of racism comes in the form of some 60-year-old Facebook grandma in Des Moines who feels that her emotions are best represented by a GIF of Stanley from The Office rolling his eyes?

But then, one gets the sense that no one does think this. Not even the people who are earning a living — or at least, a few hundred freelance dollars a pop — by arguing as much. Every writer who tackles this topic has dutifully attempted to connect the mimetic phenomenon of reaction GIFs to the atrocious (and happily defunct) practice of minstrel shows featuring performers in actual blackface. But given the integrated state of contemporary society, and the substantive difference between posting a video of a black cultural icon and doing a mocking impression of one yourself, that’s a tough argument to sell.

Often, those recycling it don’t even seem to be trying. Women’s Health claims that using the wrong reaction GIFs isn’t just upstream from minstrelsy, but also from murder: “[As] it has been proven throughout U.S. history, a Black man can be killed for demonstrating aggression, confusion, or even indifference. Popular GIFs of Kanye West looking serious, Nick Young with question marks around his face, and others, show Black men expressing themselves which, while technically be harmless [sic], can oftentimes be fatal.”

This isn’t just unpersuasive; it’s practically incoherent. Does anyone believe this argument? Does anyone even believe that the writer believed it? The whole enterprise feels so convictionless, more like a simulation of an opinion than the real thing.

Ozempic versus the make-believe world of “Healthy at Every Size”

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

Poor Americans are being propagandized that being fat — even to the point of being unable to carry on ordinary tasks — is “perfectly healthy” at the same time that the glitterati, the wealthy, and the mediagenic are getting thinner thanks to diet, exercise, and (it’s an open secret) drugs and cosmetic surgery. Along comes an antidiabetic drug that was found to have an interesting off-schedule property:

If you, a commoner, encountered a feudal lord in the year 1200, the latter would likely be wearing fine armour, carrying a well-polished sword, and riding a horse. Upon seeing these visual cues, you would address him properly, lest he punish you for failing to show proper deference. But as the centuries passed, particularly in the years following the American and French revolutions, this notion of privilege faded; the rich might be a class apart, but at times they might be dressed much like you, even if their apparel was slightly better-made.

Today, however, the rich are separating themselves in perhaps the most obvious way of all: by perfecting their bodies, rather than what they put on them. The rich are fit and the poor are fat: reams of research confirms that the prevalence of obesity decreases as income increases. In the United States, where 41% of the entire population is obese — compared with 25% in the United Kingdom — it is a rare wealthy person who is morbidly overweight (blimp-sized Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and portly former New Jersey governor Chris Christie are outliers). Increasingly, the rich in late middle age have come to resemble Jeff Bezos and Sarah Jessica Parker: ripped to shreds and almost certainly “enhanced” with various anti-ageing drugs and techniques, ranging from steroids and growth hormones to Botox injections and liposuction.

Into this mix comes semaglutide, an antidiabetic medication better known by its trade name Ozempic. Sold by pharmaceutical manufacturer Novo Nordisk, the drug, which reduces food intake by curbing appetite and slowing digestion, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat obesity in 2021. Since then, celebrities and fitness influencers have routinely shared before-and-after pics captioned with details of their courageous weight-loss journeys, which entailed jabbing themselves with a 1.5ml pen that contains a month’s worth of doses and costs roughly $900 without insurance.

Predictably, stories about Ozempic have proliferated in the tabloids and on social media. Some see the drug as a challenge to the celebrity movement that touts “fat acceptance”, and brought us the “slim-thick” era of curvy female superstars. They argue that Ozempic may work hand-in-hand with the return of the “heroin chic” look of the late Nineties. As interesting as it is to consider where these mixed messages might lead us — to a culture in which poor people are told it’s fabulous to be obese, while the rich get ever thinner and fitter — if this is a conspiracy, it’s not a new one. The rich have lusted after youth, beauty and fitness, in others and themselves, since time immemorial, always keeping the poor as downtrodden as possible while pacifying them with bromides about equality, liberty and fraternity. Ozempic, then, is not simply the key to thinness; those who pay for it are buying even more distance between themselves and the hoi polloi.

In short, this appears to be yet another sign that the elite are headed toward some sort of crude transhumanist utopia, complete with gene therapy and designer-baby selection. Some may scoff that this is science fiction, but this future looms: once they’re sufficiently fine-tuned, gene editing tools will likely eradicate heart disease, muscle wasting, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions in embryos that are still in utero — but their price will be nothing short of staggering. Similarly expensive gene therapies will enhance the overall performance of already-healthy humans, raising ethical questions about whether these procedures should “improve” a person or merely “fix” a condition. The rich, of course, will leave those debates to the philosophers and pay upfront for the best bodies that their considerable resources can buy. Already, news stories abound of billionaires pursuing immortality, with a few commentators trying to sanitise the pursuit by arguing that the research will somehow benefit even the least of us.

April 1, 2023

The fastest growing demographic in Canada might be the “Pretendians”

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

In Quillette, George Case outlines the fraught topic of claimed First Nations heritage among Canadians:

“The Pretendians”, a CBC documentary – https://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/the-pretendians

Many North Americans have cited such extraction as a conversation piece, an exotic mark of character, or just an intriguing bit of genealogy: among them are singers Cher and Beyoncé, actor Johnny Depp, rockers Jimi Hendrix and Robbie Robertson, baseball great Johnny Bench, and numerous others.

That such backgrounds are both perfectly plausible and difficult to verify tells us something about the history of the human species since 1492. Consensual or coerced relations between Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous people throughout the Americas — even when socially deplored or officially prohibited—must have happened countless times to generate the populace we are today. Most of us, by some measure, are mini-melting pots. And consider, too, today’s routine unions of partners whose great-grandparents might have been horrified at the prospect of “marrying out”: Protestants with Catholics, Jews with Gentiles, Asians with Anglos, and a rainbow of other combinations. Indeed, to oppose such relationships, and the products thereof, is now usually seen as a small-minded prejudice of the ignorant and intolerant.

Unless the opponent happens to be a Native person. In Canada, over the last few years, a rash of scandals have erupted over prominent figures whose claims of Aboriginal heritage have been heatedly disproved, like novelist Joseph Boyden, actress and filmmaker Michelle Latimer, academic Carrie Bourassa, and former judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. The uproar around “Pretendians” has raised uncomfortable questions around race and politics that the angriest Aboriginals may not have intended in their denunciations. Métis lawyer Jean Teillet has called the phenomenon “the ultimate step in colonialism”, while on The Indigenous Foundation website, Neegahnii Madeline Chakasim has asserted, “To claim Indigenous ancestry and/or claim to be a member of a Nation without any evidence, or claiming Indigeneity for the fun of it, is a complete slap to the face of any existing Indigenous person.” And Ojibwe writer Drew Hayden Taylor explained the message of his 2022 documentary, The Pretendians, by remarking, “In past centuries, the dominant culture has tried to take so many things from us, leaving behind the one thing most important to us: who we are.”

Yet just who are “we”? As with so much else in conventional Canadian wisdom around Native issues, the jealous guarding of authentic Native identity has its logical terminus in a separate-but-equal regime that contradicts the universal impartiality promised to all citizens: sanctioned racial essentialism for Aboriginals, mandatory multiculturalism for everyone else. Never discriminate against, but always discriminate in favor. In principle, all people are to be treated interchangeably, but in practice, one subset of people must be impermeably sealed off from others. At its creepiest, the Pretendian problem has echoes of the one-drop standards that obtained in Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow American South, insofar as sorting the real Natives from the fake ones is determined in part by a biological purity that few other cultures attempt to preserve, much less openly endorse.

It’s also ironic that in many episodes of exposed Pretendians, the purported disadvantage of a Native background — statistically, Canadian Natives are poorer than non-Natives, suffer higher rates of addiction and suicide, and have long been overrepresented in prisons and as victims of crime — is used as a bonus credential in academia or the arts. Schools and other institutions eager to boast of their ameliorative “Indigenization” programs have hired, commissioned works by, or otherwise granted special recognition to applicants based on unchecked claims of Aboriginal ancestry.

Eventually — and inevitably — some of those claims turn out to be flimsy: a vague personal biography here, a tenuous adoption record there, suspicious gaps in government documentation (Canadian Natives are entitled to hold a “Status Indian” card issued by federal or provincial agencies) somewhere else. This has happened across Canada, from Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where faculty member Gina Adams’s Native lineage was called into question in 2021, to Kingston Ontario’s Queen’s University, where no less than six instructors and staff had their Native self-identification doubted in an anonymous report that came out the same year.

Complicating these situations, however, is that few of these cases seem to have been deliberate frauds. Even the famous imposter Archie Belaney (1888–1938), an Englishman whose Scottish-Apache persona of “Grey Owl” was wholly invented, parlayed his imaginary Native status into genuinely progressive campaigns for wilderness conservation in the early 20th century.

March 31, 2023

Bill C-11 should properly be called the “Justin Trudeau Internet Censorship Bill”

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

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains why the federal government’s Bill C-11 is a terrible idea:

Canada’s Liberals insist the point of Bill C-11 is simply to update the 1991 Broadcasting Act, which regulates broadcasting of telecommunications in the country. The goal of the bill, according to a Ministry of Canadian Heritage statement, is to bring “online broadcasters under similar rules and regulations as our traditional broadcasters”.

In other words, streaming services and social media, like traditional television and radio stations, would have to ensure that at least 35 percent of the content they publish is Canadian content — or, in Canadian government speak, “Cancon”.

The bill is inching toward a final vote in the Canadian Senate as soon as next month. It’s expected to pass. If it does, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said in an October blog post, the same creators the government says it wants to help will, in fact, be hurt.

[…]

If you’re confused by all this — if you’re wondering why the Liberal Party and its allies in these quasi-governmental organizations are suddenly so worried about Canada’s national identity — that’s understandable.

In a 2015 interview with The New York Times, Trudeau proudly declared, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Canada, he explained, is “the first postnational state”. The authorized, two-volume biography of Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is called Citizen of the World. Pablo Rodriguez maintains dual citizenship — in Canada and in Argentina, where he was born.

So why is Trudeau, of all people, championing this legislation? There’s an easy explanation — and it has nothing to do with borders or culture.

“Bill C-11 is a government censorship bill masquerading as a Canadian culture bill,” Jay Goldberg, a director at the conservative Canadian Taxpayers Federation, told me. Referring to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Goldberg said, “The government is intending to give the power to the CRTC to be able to filter what we see in our news feeds, what we see in our streaming feeds, what we see on social media.”

Supporters of Bill C-11 emphasize it would affect only YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, TikTok, and other Big Tech platforms; the Heritage Ministry statement notes “the bill does not apply to individual Canadians”. But the language is so vague that it’s unclear how it would actually be implemented.

For example, it would be up to CRTC regulators to decide what constitutes “Canadian” content. The singer The Weeknd was born in Toronto but now mostly lives in Los Angeles. Does he still count as Canadian? What about rock n’ roller Bryan Adams, who was born in Kingston, Ontario, and spends a great deal of time in Europe?

March 29, 2023

The Grauniad something something glass houses something something throwing stones

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

In UnHerd, Ashley Rindsberg recounts the details we know so far about the Guardian‘s embarassing historical project to find out about the newspaper’s links to the slave trade:

The Guardian prides itself on being one of the most Left-leaning and anti-racist news outlets in the English-speaking world. So imagine its embarrassment when, last month, a number of black podcast producers researching the paper’s historic ties to slavery abruptly resigned, alleging they had been victims of “institutional racism”, “editorial whiteness”, “microaggressions, colourism, bullying, passive-aggressive and obstructive management styles”. All of this might smack of progressive excess, but, in reality, it merely reflects an institution incuriously at odds with itself.

Questions about The Guardian‘s ties to slavery have been circulating since 2020, when, amid the media’s collective spasm of racial conscience following the murder of George Floyd, the Scott Trust announced it would launch an investigation into its history. “We in the UK need to begin a national debate on reparations for slavery, a crime which heralded the age of capitalism and provided the basis for racism that continues to endanger black life globally,” journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson wrote in a June 2020 Guardian opinion piece about the toppling of a statue of 17th-century British slaver Edward Colston. A month later, the Scott Trust committed to determining whether the founder of the paper, John Edward Taylor, had profited from slavery. “We have seen no evidence that Taylor was a slave owner, nor involved in any direct way in the slave trade,” the chairman of the Scott Trust, Alex Graham, told Guardian staff by email at the time. “But were such evidence to exist, we would want to be open about it.” (Notably, Graham, in using the terms “slave owner” and “direct way”, set a very specific and very high bar for what would be considered information worthy of disclosure.)

The problem is that the results of the investigation, conducted by historian Sheryllynne Haggerty, an “expert in the history of the transatlantic slave trade”, have never been made public. When contacted with questions about what happened to the promised report, Haggerty referred all inquiries to The Guardian‘s PR, which has remained silent on the matter. (The Guardian was asked for comment and we were given the stock PR response The Guardian gave following the podcaster’s letter.) But what we do know is this: according to Guardian lore, a business tycoon named John Edward Taylor was inspired to agitate for change after witnessing the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when over a dozen people were killed in Manchester by government forces as they protested for parliamentary representation. Two years later, Taylor, a young cotton merchant, with the backing of a group of local reformers known as the Little Circle, founded the paper.

“Since 1821 the mission of The Guardian has been to use clarity and imagination to build hope,” The Guardian‘s current editor, Katharine Viner, proudly proclaims on the “About us” page of the paper’s website. Part of this founding myth concerns one of the defining social and political issues of the day, slavery, which the Little Circle members, including Taylor, vigorously opposed as a moral affront. “The Guardian had always hated slavery,” Martin Kettle, an associate editor, wrote in a 2011 apologia on why during the Civil War the paper had vociferously condemned the North while equivocating on the South.

That may be true, but it also presents an incomplete picture. The Manchester Guardian, as the paper was then known, was founded by cotton merchants, including Taylor, who were able to pool the money needed to launch the paper by drawing on their respective fortunes. While none of these men, many of whom were Unitarian Christians, is likely to have engaged in slavery, they didn’t just benefit from but depended upon the global slave trade that provided virtually all of the cotton that filled their mills. As Sarah Parker Remond, an African American abolitionist, said upon visiting Manchester in 1859: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125 million worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”

March 28, 2023

Computers and music, from 1961 to 2001

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

Ted Gioia explains the deep history behind the scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where H.A.L. sings a song:

Not many people could afford an IBM 7094 computer back in the early 1960s — a typical installation cost $3 million. That’s the equivalent of around $20 million in purchasing power today. Over the course of the decade, fewer than 300 were built.

You didn’t get much computing power for that hefty price tag, at least by current-day standards. But if you wanted a machine that did complex or rapid math, you had few other options. The 7094 could handle 250,000 additions or subtractions in just one second. A whole room of accountants couldn’t keep up with it.

But addition and subtraction aren’t very sexy. So someone got the bright idea of teaching the IBM 7094 to sing. That’s why John L. Kelly Jr., Carol Lockbaum, and Lou Gerstman of Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, began working in 1961 on this pioneering computer music project.

Digital music wasn’t an entirely new development, even in those distant days, but singing presented completely different challenges, requiring breakthroughs in speech synthesis. But Bell Labs — then the in-house research arm of AT&T (it’s now part of Nokia) — had more expertise in that area than any other organization in the world.

The Bell Labs team needed a song for their experiment. They decided on “Daisy Bell” — also known as “Bicycle Built for Two” — composed by British tunesmith Harry Dacre in 1892.

The idea for the song came to Dacre when he visited the US and found, to his surprise, that the customs officials had imposed a tariff on his bicycle. A friend quipped that he was lucky it wasn’t a bicycle with two seats, or the duty might have been double. The end result was Dacre’s most successful song ever.

[…]

Even back in the early 1960s, this tune didn’t have much hipness potential. But at least the melody was simple, well-known, and no longer protected by copyright. (That said, I would love to watch a jury in 1961 debate computer music rights.)

For the instrumental parts of the song, the Bell Labs team relied on contributions from Max Matthews, who had created a breakthrough sound-generating program called MUSIC back in 1957. In those ancient analog days, he had hooked up his violin to an IBM 704, and was thus the first performer in history to transfer live music to a computer for synthesis and playback.

Miles Davis – “Concierto de Aranjuez: Adagio”

Filed under: Europe, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Miles Davis
Published 23 Mar 2021

“Concierto de Aranjuez: Adagio” by Miles Davis
(more…)

March 27, 2023

The vicious – not virtuous – circle of green

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

Elizabeth Nickson thinks that our societal pursuit of green technology will be the undoing of everything we have built:

Some of us have been saying this for a very long time: green will bring down the world. Green creates a vicious circle, a term you may remember from Economics 101. It is when the serpent eats itself, no wealth is created and collapse results. That is what we are doing with ESG, with carbon taxes, with the forced adoption of unreliable vertiginously expensive green energy. It has skewed every single market. No one is investing in sound enterprise, and anything once sound is a Jenga tower, unstable, rotting from within. This. This is what threatens to bring down the world.

Green is built on subsidies. And not just government subsidy. Every mutual fund, every hedge fund, every multinational and every local or national corporation has a green monster within preventing innovative investments, sucking profits and growth. Every local, regional and state government leaks millions to green morons promising to “bring sustainable prosperity”. The only prosperity is theirs. They fiddle around in lakes and watercourses, producing “studies”, all of which are hysterical and exaggerated. They muck around in forests, buying as much as possible, shut them down, never visit again, leaving them to desertify. They buy farms and ranches, leaving them to rot. They are termites, eating us alive.

These outfits have burrowed into every level of government and every ministry. They are purely extractive. They do not produce anything of value. They leech. They move in and out of government. When in government, they identify sources of funds to plunder once out of government. In 2015, I did a cross-ministry analysis of just how much money these folks take from the government annually. It is in the hundreds of billions in the US alone. From private foundations they take more billions. All this money is used to shut down economic activity.

[…]

Here is the nasty little secret that lies at the heart of environmentalism. It has been long captured by plutocrats and WEFers, who use it to take resources once thought to belong to the people, to everyone, to use in order to innovate and develop. This freedom and access, and only this was the source of prosperity in the United States. It powered the entire world. It made America the beacon, the lighthouse of the world. It produced strong healthy brilliant young people who performed one feat of innovation, athleticism, and creation after another. All those kids today are working on ever more vicious ways to surveil, control and supress via AI.

And the interior is being cleared of people, businesses, farms, ranches, working forests, mines, and oil and gas installations.

In pursuit of 2030 goals, Biden’s agents are busily acquiring hundreds of millions of acres from private owners, from state and regional land banks, which they will then lock down. Many ranchers, including the heroic Wayne Hage, believe that government is taking that land to use as collateral for its massive debt to the Bank for International Settlements. The only people who will be able to use those resources are multinationals who pay a fee to government and to the BIS to pay down the loans. No citizens will be able to access those resources to make money for themselves, to build families and businesses and towns and cities. The environmental movement has, within 40 years, returned us to serfdom, where we eat what we are told to eat, go where we are told to go, take whatever medicine they want to give us, and eventually, fight when we are told to fight.

The environmental movement is so evil, it has twisted ethical standards to the point where we are able to kill each other with impunity. Their PR is so strong, so invasive, that every school child now believes there are too many people (this is nonsense), and population must be drastically drawn down (a genocide unrivalled in history). Every adult secretly fears this is true. This appalling lie has created a culture of death. What are the effects of this thinking, that life is no longer sacred, but a threat?

The war against fertility

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

Chris Bray:

The effacement of women’s bodies is changing from a cultural signal to a battlefield maneuver. The acceleration of the presence of men as dominant participants in women’s sports, the growing intensity of casually monstrous blue zone attacks on families and parenting, the emergence of drag queens — men playacting as women, burlesque cartoons about sexual identity — as The Most Important Symbol Ever (and something children should definitely see) …

… and now this:

That’s footage from a Let Women Speak event in Auckland, New Zealand, where women arguing that “women” are “adult human females” were physically attacked by a mob of “transwomen” — by men — and their allies. It’s very progressive when men dressed as women silence women and hurt them. More here, also linked above.

In the opening paragraph of this post, you may have thought that one of the things I mentioned was different than the other things — that the blue state assault on families and parenting isn’t specifically gendered, and is equally an assault on the role of mothers and fathers. And it is. But.

It seems to me that the very very strange thing breaking out all over the world — or all over the Anglosphere, because I don’t see Nigeria and Peru and Singapore going all-in on transgendered everything — is loaded with subtext about a febrile loathing for fertility. In policy, we’re incentivizing childlessness, and disincentivizing childbearing. Birthrates are declining sharply, and were declining even before the mRNA injections, while blue state governments work on laws that tell would-be parents their children can vanish from their custody on political pretexts. Who has the future children while the state says that hey, nice family you have there, be a shame if something were to happen to it?

I suspect the reason so much hate and rage is being directed at women is that their bodies can produce babies, which means that the hate and rage is being directed at the future. Peachy Keenan, who’s all over this stuff in multiple forums, wrote recently about Hicklibs on Parade, describing “how deeply the postmodern, anti-human gender ideology has penetrated into what we used to call ‘middle America'”:

    In Plano, Texas last fall, an “all-ages” drag brunch attracted some unwanted attention from people who thought they lived in a conservative state. At the brunch — which was held at Ebb & Flow, an eatery in an upscale strip mall — a buffoonish man in a dress wearing cat ears sings, “My p*ssy good, p*ssy sweet, p*ssy good enough to eat”, while flashing his underwear.

    In the video from the event, a four-year old girl stares in shock as the “drag” performer twerks and grinds for the ladies in attendance.

    The people in the crowd watching this man systematically strip away a little girl’s innocence look like nice friendly Texans; plump grandmas and families and the types you’d run into at the local Costco. They are not hipsters; they are not edgy. They look normal!

    This is what makes all of this so striking. These slightly downmarket Texan and Midwestern prairie home companion women have, historically, been the only thing holding this rickety old country together.

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