Quotulatiousness

April 21, 2023

The bigger the government, the worse it does everything

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

Sarah Hoyt wants you to see the illusions that the government and the legacy media have invested so much time and effort to make you believe:

The last century hasn’t actually brought about great “scientific” improvements in governance or the condition of man. It has brought about better production and better commerce, which was enough to stop the periodic famines which plagued our ancestors.

Famines and scarcity subsist only where pernicious central governments stomp on human liberty and individual freedom. And they need to stomp pretty hard. We haven’t managed it. But there are rumors out of China and Venezuela. And of course Russia managed it, just as they did the near-starvation of “never quite enough.”
However, all those advances in material culture didn’t bring about similar advances in centralizing government and “sculpting” the new man.

Humans remain human. And the more centralized, over a larger area, that government is, the more inefficient it is. Even — fortunately — at creating misery. Government that requires certain results gets certain results reported. Even if they have nothing to do with reality.

Sure, the Soviets didn’t have nearly our nuclear arsenal. But the people at the top there MIGHT very well have thought they did, at least after a while. Because the underlings had to report it was done. or else.
All of you repeating the nonsense about boiled frogs, and how their sloooooowwww plan has worked perfectly are just buying into the same juvenile, retarded lie. NONE of their plans ever worked perfectly. Their history is littered with five year plans that worked only in someone’s imagination.

So why would their plans work better in a far away place they never fully understood? With a people who are notoriously averse to obeying?

Of course they didn’t. They don’t. You can convince yourself they have, particularly if you listen to the left and ignore all the times they got stomped on, got smacked, got their cookies taken away.

Look, their plans at changing THE PEOPLE and the people’s beliefs worked so well that despite their total control of federal democracy, two presidents that broke the script, almost 40 years apart, were enough to wreck all their illusions and control. Reagan and Trump, amid a train of uniparty parrots were enough to destroy the left’s certainties and “control”.

This is because their control was always — and still is — largely not real. It’s an illusion created by the mass-industrial communications complex. Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative. The narrative is how they keep telling you to give it all up, because, look, their plan worked perfectly, and now your children are theirs and mwahahahaha.

In true fact, they’ve broken their teeth on America. They’ve managed — with propaganda — to take over the sectors that are less in contact with reality: academia, the arts, the rarefied heights of corporations. (Those aren’t really business. They’re to business what MBAs are to running a lemonade stand. Having worked for corporations, the large ones have more in common with massive, inefficient states than with commerce of any kind.)

The rest of us? We have not surrendered our guns or our minds. Yes, the propaganda machine keeps pushing those who have, but that’s the only thing the centralized state was ever good at: propaganda.

But if their plans were working perfectly, “Let’s go Brandon” would not have gone viral. That one proved not only that the majority of people aren’t with the left, but also that the majority of people see the media manipulation. More importantly, do you remember what the “Let’s go Brandon” was all about? Right. There were spontaneous flash mobs forming everywhere screaming “F*ck Joe Biden.” I’d known about them for months. They were forming everywhere, including in New York City. That one was just one that was caught on camera. (Because of course, the media never showed those.)

The Neo-Prohibitionists have taken over the World Health Organization

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Media, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Christopher Snowden illustrates some of the deliberate lies promulgated by the World Health Organization’s anti-alcohol activists:

The incompetent and corrupt World Health Organisation has produced a “guide for journalists” to help hacks report on issues related to alcohol accurately. Not entirely unpredictably, it is a catalogue of anti-drinking tropes, half-truths and brazen lies. The very first words are “No amount of alcohol is safe to drink” and it doesn’t get any better thereafter.

The health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption really stick in the craw of the neo-temperance lobby and so that is where the WHO starts:

    Isn’t drinking some alcohol good for your health?

    No, there is no evidence for the common belief that drinking alcohol in moderate amounts can help people live longer by decreasing their risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke or other conditions.

No evidence?! Even a casual follower of the science knows that there is at least some evidence. Those who are more familiar with the literature know that there is a huge amount of evidence built up over decades, tested and re-examined from every angle precisely because so many people in ‘public health’ don’t want to believe it.

    It is inaccurate to say that “experts are divided” on whether there is no amount of healthy alcohol drinking. The scientific consensus is that any level of alcohol consumption, regardless of the amount, increases risks to health.

This is just a lie. That is not the consensus, and the only reason there isn’t unanimous agreement that moderate drinking is beneficial to health is that anti-alcohol academics such as Tim Stockwell have made it their life’s work to cast doubt on the evidence.

    While several past studies did suggest that moderate consumption could, on average, promote health benefits …

Note that this immediately contradicts the claim that there is no evidence.

    … newer research (1) shows that those studies used limited methodologies and that many of them were funded by the alcohol industry (2).

The first reference is a short commentary by some WHO staffers which doesn’t discuss methodologies at all. The second reference is a study which found that only 5.4 per cent of research papers in this area were funded by the alcohol industry and concluded that “the association between moderate alcohol consumption and different health outcomes does not seem to be related to funding source.”

The WHO must hold journalists in low esteem if it thinks they won’t check up the citations like this.

    The dicussion [sic] about possible so-called protective effects of alcohol diverts attention from the bigger picture of alcohol harm; for example, even though it is well established that alcohol can cause cancer, this fact is still not widely known to the public in most countries (3).

The “bigger picture” is overall mortality. When all the risks are taken into account, including the small risks from a few rare cancers, do moderate drinkers live longer than teetotallers? Yes. Yes, they do.

April 20, 2023

It’s not your imagination, you really did just hear that song again … and again … and again

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

Ted Gioia on some sort of scam-like activity going down on Spotify and other large web platforms:

Adam Faze kept hearing the same song on Spotify over and over again.

Such things aren’t unusual. Hit songs get played repeatedly—although this one seemed more annoying than most.

But in this case, something even more bizarre was happening.

When Adam looked to see the name of the song, it was always different. The titles were a wild assortment—almost as if a random word generator had been used to pick them:

  • “Trumpet Bublefig”
  • “The Proud Dewdrop Amulet”
  • “Thorncutter”
  • “Viper Beelzebub”
  • “Whomping Clover”
  • Etc. etc.

But the music was always the same.

Even stranger, the artist was also different in each instance. And if you clicked on the writer credits, those were all different too.

How could the same track be attributed to dozens of different musicians? How could the same song be written by dozens of different composers?

Adam started compiling a playlist, and adding each new iteration of this song when he found it. When he got to 49 versions, he shared the playlist on social media. “I’ve officially stumbled upon the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen”, he announced.

A Twitter user, alerted by this, quickly discovered another 10 iterations of the same song. This banal tune was everywhere. The use of multiple aliases made it difficult to gauge the full extent of the deception, but Spotify was pushing this track so aggressively that it was impossible to hide the charade they were playing.

When asked how it was possible to find so many examples, Adam replied: I’m completely serious when I say it was starting to be every other song after a while.”

The song itself is just 53 seconds. And you’re glad when it’s over, because this tune is a loser — almost a Frank-Ocean-at-Coachella level of bad. Even call centers have better taste in their on-hold music.

QotD: Food fascism

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

I think the liberal elite – which you don’t see bellying up to a creepy-crawly buffet – just likes the idea of not only nagging us but seeing how much they can make us humiliate ourselves by bending to their will. I can see a bunch of kale grazers in Brooklyn sitting around giggling about how they convinced those stupid rubes in gun/Jesusland to start chewing cicadas.

But the diet dictatorship craze is a real thing. You’ve seen the war on beef by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Genius, who runs her oversized novelty mouth about how we have to stop cooking cows because doing so displeases the great and terrible climate goddess Gaia. See, cows may contribute to the world being slightly warmer in a century, so stop doing something you enjoy. Consider not eating beef as a sacrifice made on behalf of the weird weather cult.

Here’s a locust. Now, don’t you feel better about your slightly reduced carbon footprint?

What do you think the chances are that the di Caprios and the Gores and the rest of the climate hucksters won’t be dining on filet mignon in their private jets flying from their mansions to Davos to save the planet from your carbon crimes, while you pedal your bike in the rain back to your unheated 500 square foot apartment to gnaw on a dinner of arugula and raw moths?

Remember, food fascism is for your own good, since you are evidently unable to make decisions about what you put in your mouth for yourself. You see, if you are allowed to make your own choices about your body you might make the wrong ones – with “wrong” being defined as choices Michael Bloomberg or the other members of Team Helper would not make.

Kurt Schlicter, “Tell The Nags To Go Pound Sand”, Townhall.com, 2019-11-19.

April 19, 2023

QotD: Transsexuals before Trans* politicization

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

In a not terribly long life, I have known well three transsexuals (as we used to say), and another three not so well. Not because I especially sought out their company, but just because I’ve spent a lot of my time around theatre and music and areas that attract those who feel “different”. Two of those three friends I didn’t know were transsexual until they were “outed”, one very publicly — although with hindsight certain curious aspects of both their physiognomy and behavior suddenly made a lot more sense.

But that’s the point: Even those far closer to them than I was weren’t aware — because back then the object of having a “sex change” (also as we used to say) was to change from being a man to being a woman. There were still only two teams and you were simply crossing over to bat for the other side. The trans-life had little in common with “gay pride” — because the object wasn’t to come out of the closet, but to blend into it so smoothly no one would know you hadn’t always been there. Before their outing, the two ladies in question were more lady-ier than thou: both used to show up once a month with a box of Tampax “discreetly” poking out from the top of their handbags — even though, as we all understood in retrospect, they had no need of it. But they had chosen to live as women, and so they wished to be as other women. And they were mortified when they were exposed.

This was the conventional view as late as the Nineties, when Armistead Maupin’s celebration of the gay life, Tales Of The City, became must-see TV for sophisticated liberals on Britain’s Channel 4 and America’s PBS. The big plot point was the matriarch Mrs Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis) “revealing” her “secret” — that she was not born a woman.

To be sure, as the chromosomocentrists argue, one cannot, biologically, “change sex”. But I’ll skip that argument, because, as usual, conservatives are fighting over ground the left has already scorched and moved on from for new conquests. I have no great objection to a grown man who “identifies” as a woman and wishes to live as one. Guys have been doing that, to one degree or another, throughout history, and all that’s happened is that cosmetic surgery has caught up with their desires. If half the women in California can walk around with breast implants, I don’t see why the chaps can’t.

But the chromosomocentrists are missing the point. The left’s saying, “Yeah, XY chromosomes, big deal. You’re right, but so what? No one’s saying she’s a woman. We’re saying she’s a transwoman — a new, separate and way more glamorous category that’s taking its seat at the American table and demanding public affirmation. This isn’t your father’s sex change. Changing from man to woman is so last century.”

Mark Steyn, “Birth of the New”, Steyn Online, 2015-06-05.

April 18, 2023

“People who pivot this quickly need to make sure their pants are securely buckled”

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

We’ve apparently reached the “Republicans Pounce” stage of yet another progressive crusade:

The memo has gone out, and the pivot has arrived.

Ten days ago, you may remember, the suddenly high-profile Nebraska Senator Machaela Cavanaugh went on NPR to play make-believe, expressing consternation over this weird new focus on transgender issues over on the political right: “I don’t know why, as a nation, as policymakers, there is this newfound focus on trans children… And all of the sudden, there is a decision by policymakers that we need to do something about them. It doesn’t make any sense to me.” It’s the why are you guys so obsessed with this DARVO maneuver, spun with bald-faced shamelessness by people who’ve been talking for years about the thing that they suddenly want you to know it’s creepy to talk about.

Now the New York Times explains the same thing in a similar way, writing that transgender issues have suddenly become a big deal in America because scheming right-wingers decided to cook it up as a fake wedge issue:

“The religious right went searching for an issue.” To get donors to write some checks, see. They just made it up, in a cynical act of invention. A bunch of social conservatives were sitting around the office, lamenting how no one gives them money anymore because everybody stopped hating the gays, so they decided, tactically, to pretend that transgender rights was a thing, now, so that they could trick people into giving them money again. Completely out of left field! Trans rights was just sitting there watching some Netflix with a tub of Cherry Garcia when suddenly the doorbell rang.

There’s no pouncing, but you’ve heard this descriptive maneuver before:

    Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, a group that fights discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people, said there was a direct line from the right’s focus on transgender children to other issues it has seized on in the name of “parents’ rights” — such as banning books and curriculums that teach about racism.

“Seized on”. The story also says that the issue of men participating in women’s sports “was accelerated by a few influential Republican governors who seized on the issue early”. There’s a lot of seizing on, and it’s all mysterious. Why did the seizers seize the seized thing? Dunno. They just suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, seized on the issue of women’s sports. Weird. Similarly, that paragraph about “banning books” and forbidding “curriculums that teach about racism” is presented as a given, not as a thing that requires explanation or illustration. It’s tactical murk: half-accusations as smoke and chaff, designed to leave you with the general outlines of a thing that it’s convenient to have you believe. The right-wingers are something something something, and it’s scary.

Canada Council for the (decolonized) Arts

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte follows up on an earlier report on the mission of the Canada Council for the Arts, as outlined by Simon Brault:

… the founders of the Canada Council felt so strongly about the dangers of bureaucratic and political impositions on the arts — officials using federal money to force artistic and cultural activities in one direction or another — that they built checks and balances into its founding legislation.

The checks and balances haven’t checked or balanced. The Canada Council is now fully dedicated to teaching, censoring, and directing artistic endeavour.

The occasion for last year’s piece was a decision by Simon Brault, chief executive of the Canada Council, to halt funding for any “activity involving the participation of Russian or Belarusian artists or arts organizations … This includes partnerships, direct and indirect financing of tours, co-productions, participation in festivals or other events held in Russia.”

The outcome of Brault’s edict was that Canadians last summer weren’t able to enjoy a variety of planned tours by performers who had the misfortune to be born in Moscow, even if they loathed Putin like the rest of us.

It wasn’t the extremity of Brault’s position that set me off — he reserved to himself the right to ban artistic interaction with artists from any country whose government was involved in a conflict he considered unjust — so much as his implication that the arts community was too stupid to have noticed what was happening in Ukraine or to have known how to respond without his guidance.

A few months ago, Brault upped the ante, speaking at the council’s annual general meeting of his “vision for a decolonized future of the arts”.

    To actualize this vision, we must also decolonize the Council itself by questioning our own assumptions and convictions.

    It is important to acknowledge that decolonization is a complex, evolving, and open concept and journey.

    There’s no definitive guide on how to undertake this work.

    And it has different implications for different organizations and sectors in our society.

    So far, our understanding is that to decolonize the Council, we must agree to reframe our understanding of what constitutes art, which is a big thing for an arts council.

    We need also to question the notion of professionalism and artistic disciplines, which are deeply rooted in a very specific time in history, mostly Eurocentric, and often from a very colonialist perspective.

    So, we need to challenge the notion of “artistic excellence”, again a concept that upholds hierarchies of good taste and values that confirm and perpetuate the status of the dominant culture.

    We also need to move beyond limited notions of artistic expertise because those notions are often the direct product of an education system built to reproduce power relations and safeguard the privilege of a dominant colonial discourse on arts and culture.

There you have it. Brault committed the leading funding agency for the arts in Canada to “challenging” the prevailing understandings of art, artistic professionalism, artistic disciplines, artistic excellence, good taste, artistic values, and artistic expertise.

He’s not quite clear on what he’s going to replace it all with — he’s just sure that the way you think about art is wrong and that Keynes statement that the work of the artist is by nature individual and free, undisciplined, unregimented, uncontrolled, etc., is colonialist claptrap.

Let the regimentation and control begin.

QotD: The worldview of the fanatic

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

More importantly, though, this is the logical endpoint of “democracy”, and now everyone gets to see it firsthand. In theory, democracy works by channeling competing vices. If men were angels, no government would be necessary, James Madison said, but since they’re not the best we can do is incentivize bad people to do good things in pursuit of their own selfish interest. It’s a nice thought, but it can only work (if, indeed, it can work) in a culture like Madison’s, in which public men are concerned about their dignity, honor, and posthumous reputation.

Obviously none of those hold in Current Year America, since they were all invented by the Pale Penis People, and even if they weren’t, they can’t matter to atheists anyway — one only defends one’s dignity and honor if one believes he’ll be called to account for them, and who’s going to do the accounting? There is no God, and as for the bar of History, what could that possibly matter to a cultural marxist? To them, as to their Puritan forbears, “history” is really soteriology. The past is nothing but a catalog of freely chosen error. For the fanatic, “history” begins anew each dawn, because why study endless iterations of Error when you already have the Truth?

Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.

April 17, 2023

The lingering pandemic of fear

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

Liz Hodgkinson on the pattern of fear that the state, media, and public health messaging instilled into so many people during the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The Stoics of ancient times believed that in many cases it was possible to control pain by thought alone. To achieve this, they stoically, as it were, accepted painful or unpleasant sensations, viewing them with studied indifference. As such, the pain often went away of its own accord, although to be fair they did use a painkiller known as theriac, which contained opium.

The opposite is also true, in that you can induce pain or disease by thought alone, causing acute and sometimes lasting physical symptoms. Although ancient and tribal societies understood that the power of suggestion can be so strong that it may make people well or ill, this seems to have been forgotten in modern, mechanistic medicine with its insistence on tests, scans, screens and so on.

Because of this, I am now wondering whether as many people would have gone down with Covid (or what passed for it) if, instead of a flu-like illness being ramped up as the worst and most dangerous disease ever to affect humankind, it had been ignored.

As it was, around 80 per cent – and it may have been more – of the world’s population were gripped by such a fear of the bug that they actually thought themselves into illness. Once the PCR test was introduced, people began testing themselves, sometimes hourly, and if the test showed positive they waited for symptoms to appear. More often than not, they obliged.

Then people became terrified to step out of the house without wearing a mask, even though all the evidence showed that these muzzles were more or less ineffective and that even the surgical-quality ones lasted only a couple of hours, at most. People were also nervous of getting close to anybody else, edging away if somebody came within a few feet of them. Only the other day, as I was in a queue waiting to pay for an item, a masked woman in front of me turned round and said crossly: “Do you mind not standing so close to me?” I wondered about making a quick riposte but decided that there was no way I could penetrate this kind of stupidity.

There was also the handwashing ritual where shops, doctors’ surgeries, solicitors’ and estate agents’ offices, for instance, forced hand sanitiser on to you, and sometimes took your temperature as you walked in.

The cleaning nonsense went even further, with hotels, gyms and other places where people gathered announcing “enhanced cleaning”. This may or may not have halted the virus in its tracks but it certainly increased fear. I still see people in the gym furiously scrubbing down bikes, treadmills and other equipment in case a germ from a previous user has had the audacity to linger on the machine.

April 16, 2023

Do Foucault and Derrida deserve the blame for PoMo excesses?

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

In Spiked, Patrick West says that it’s a misunderstanding of Foucault and Derrida to blame them for the rise of wokeness:

Michel Foucault speaking at the Hospital das Clínicas of the State University of Guanabara in Brazil, 1974.
Public domain image from the Arquivo Nacional Collection via Wikimedia Commons.

It has become common to blame wokeness on its supposed philosophical parent: postmodernism. As the standard narrative goes, postmodernism is the ideology that entrenched itself in Anglophone universities in the 1980s and 1990s. It talked of relativism, of the absence of objective truth, of the spectre of a pervasive, invisible power, and it was generally anti-Western. A whole generation of professors, writers, journalists and a fair few activists have subsequently been raised on this diet of postmodern thinking. And the result is a cultural elite that is wedded to wokeness.

[…]

For these critics of woke, Foucault’s influence, in particular, is seemingly everywhere. According to [Douglas] Murray [in The War on The West], it’s through the “anti-colonial” philosophy popularised by the Foucault-inspired scholar, Edward Said, that Foucault and therefore postmodernism have filtered down into woke philosophy, which holds that Western society is uniquely racist and to blame for all of today’s ills. Equally, right-wing critics of wokeness will claim that the trans movement has sprung from the postmodern contention that sexuality and gender are entirely socially constructed and therefore plastic and malleable.

If Foucault is regarded as the father of wokeness then 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche tends to be regarded as the grandfather. After all, Foucault was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche and even proudly declared himself to be “Nietzchean”. Nietzsche, like Foucault, also saw all human behaviour stemming from the desire for power. And he conceived of morality – good and evil, right and wrong – as the mere manifestation of the will to power. As he wrote of the “origin of knowledge”, in The Joyous Science (1883): “Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgements and convictions, and a ferment, a struggle, and lust for power developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about ‘truths’.” One can see this Nietzschean sentiment at work in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975): “Power produces knowledge … power and knowledge directly imply one another.”

So, according to this largely right-wing narrative, wokeness is the product of a 20th-century philosophical assault on truth, objectivity and the West. And it was inspired by Nietzsche and led by several “cultural Marxist” thinkers.

There are several problems with this rather neat story. The first error is to use the phrase “cultural Marxism” to talk of postmodernism or wokeness. This term doesn’t really make sense. Marx himself conceived of his work as a historical materialism. It was focussed on class and the means of production, not on culture. Yes, in the 1940s and 1950s, some Frankfurt School thinkers, who sometimes presented themselves as Marxist, did focus on culture rather than class. But as Joanna Williams writes in How Woke Won (2022), their thinking “represented less a continuation of Marxism and more a break with Marx”.

Moreover, postmodern thinkers were broadly opposed to Marxism. Many may have been signed-up Communists in their youth (the French Communist Party dominated left-wing politics at the time), but by the 1960s they had become highly critical of Marxist politics. They rejected the idea that history was progressing “dialectically” towards a communist future, or “telos”. And they were often hostile to the scientific objectivity and “Enlightenment” values so central to Marxism. Foucault wrote that history was not the story of progress; it was but a series of non-linear discontinuities and contingencies. And Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), in his highly-influential The Postmodern Condition (1979), announced and celebrated the end of “grand narratives”, and with it the end of the Marxist “grand narrative” of progress. Lyotard’s writings from the 1970s onwards were violently antithetical to Marxism, especially its claims to objective truth.

As for wokeness itself, it has nothing to do with Marxism. With their myopic focus on race and gender, woke activists are utterly blind to the material, class-structure of society. Today, bizarrely, it’s often conservatives who are more attuned to the plight of the working class than woke “radicals”. As Williams writes, “critics who insist that woke is simply Marxism in disguise are wide of the mark”.

April 15, 2023

QotD: When the pick-up artist became “coded right”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When did pickup artistry become criminal? Relying on online sex gurus for advice on persuading women into bed used to be seen as a fallback for introverted, physically unprepossessing “beta males”. And for this reason, in the 2000s, the discipline was promoted by the mainstream media as a way of instilling confidence in sexually-frustrated nerds. MTV’s The Pickup Artist shamelessly broadcast its tactics, with dating coaches encouraging young men to prey upon reluctant women, hoping to “neg” and “kino escalate” them into “number closes“. Contestants advanced through women of increasing difficulty (picking-up a stripper was regarded as “the ultimate challenge”) with the most-skilled “winning” the show.

Today, the global face of pickup artistry is Andrew Tate: sculpted former kickboxing champion, self-described “misogynist”, and, now, alleged human trafficker. Whatever results from the current allegations, his fall is a defining moment in the cultural history of the now inseparable worlds of the political manosphere and pickup artistry, and provides an opportunity to reflect upon their entangled history.

Pickup artistry burst onto the scene in the 2000s, propelled by the success of Neil Strauss’s best-selling book The Game. More a page-turning potboiler cataloguing the mostly empty lives of pickup artists (PUAs) than a how-to guide (though Strauss wrote one of those too), the methods in the book had been developed through years of research shared on internet forums. The “seduction underground”, as the large online community of people doing this research was called, then became the subject of widespread media attention. Through pickup artistry, the aggressive, formulaic predation of women was normalised as esteem boosting, and men such as those described in Strauss’s The Game could be viewed in a positive light: they had transformed from zero to hero and taken what was rightfully theirs.

The emergence of PUAs generated a swift backlash. The feminist blogs of the mid-to-late 2000s internet, of which publications like Jezebel still survive as living fossils, rushed to pillory them. The attacks weren’t without justification, but the world of PUAs during this period, much like the similarly wild-and-woolly bodybuilding forums, had no obvious political dimension beyond some sort of generic libertarianism. It was only after these initial critiques that it began to be coded as Right-wing by those on the Left. Duly labelled, PUAs and other associated manosphere figures drifted in that direction. MTV’s dating coaches were not part of the political landscape, merely feckless goofballs and low-level conmen capable of entertaining the masses. But their successors would be overtly political actors.

Oliver Bateman, “Why pick-up artists joined the Online Right”, UnHerd, 2023-01-08.

April 14, 2023

The trust deficit is getting worse every day

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

Ted Gioia provides more evidence that the scarcest thing in the world today is getting ever more scarce:

Here are some news stories from recent days. Can you tell me what they have in common?

  • Scammers clone a teenage girl’s voice with AI — then use it to call her mother and demand a $1 million ransom.
  • Millions of people see a photo of Pope Francis wearing a goofy white Balenciaga puffer jacket, and think it’s real. But after the image goes viral, news media report that it was created by a construction worker in Chicago with deepfake technology.
  • Twitter changes requirements for verification checks. What was once a sign that you could trust somebody’s identity gets turned into a status symbol, sold to anybody willing to pay for it. Within hours, the platform is flooded with bogus checked accounts.
  • Officials go on TV and tell people they can trust the banking system—but depositors don’t believe them. High profile bank failures from Silicon Valley to Switzerland have them spooked. Over the course of just a few days, depositors move $100 billion from their accounts.
  • ChatGPT falsely accuses a professor of sexual harassment — and cites an article that doesn’t exist as its source. Adding to the fiasco, AI claims the abuse happened on a trip to Alaska, but the professor has never traveled to that state with students.
  • The Department of Justice launches an investigation into China’s use of TikTok to spy on users. Another popular Chinese app allegedly can bypass users’ security to “monitor activities on other apps, check notifications, read private messages and change settings.”
  • The FBI tells travelers to avoid public phone charging stations at airports, hotels and other locations. “Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices,” they warn.

The missing ingredient in each of these stories is trust.

Everybody is trying to kill it — criminals, technocrats, politicians, you name it. Not long ago, Disney was the only company selling a Fantasyland, but now that’s the ambition of every tech empire.

The trust crisis could hardly be more intense.

But it’s hidden from view because there’s so much information out there. We are living in a culture of abundance, especially in the digital world. So it’s hard to believe than anything in the information economy is scarce.

Whatever you want, you can get — and usually for free. You can have free news, free music, free videos, free everything. But you get what you pay for, as the saying goes. And it was never truer than right now — when all this free stuff is starting to collapse in a fog of fakery and phoniness.

    Tell me what source you trust, and I’ll tell you why you’re a fool. As B.B. King once said: “Nobody loves me but my mother — and she could be jivin’ too.”

Years ago, technology made things more trustworthy. You could believe something because it was validated by photos, videos, recordings, databases and other trusted sources of information.

Seeing was believing — but not anymore. Until very recently, if you doubted something, you could look it up in an encyclopedia or other book. But even these get changed retroactively nowadays.

For example, people who consult Wikipedia to understand the economy might be surprised to learn that the platform’s write-up on “recession” kept changing in recent months — as political operatives and spinmeisters fought over the very meaning of the word. It got so bad that the site was forced to block edits on the entry.

There’s an ominous recurring theme here: The very technologies we use to determine what’s trustworthy are the ones most under attack.

Trust used to be a given in most western countries … it was a key part of what made us all WEIRD. Mass immigration from non-WEIRD countries dented it, but conscious perversion of trust relationships by government, media, public health, and education authorities has caused far more — and longer lasting — damage to our culture. Trust used to be given freely, but now must be earned. And that’s difficult for organizations that have proven repeatedly that they can’t be trusted.

From “cash for access” it’s a very short step to “cash for influence”

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

Ted Campbell shut down his blog some time ago — unfortunately for those of us interested in Canadian military affairs — but he’s still active on Twitter. Here he responds to a tweet from Sam Cooper of Global News:

Andrew Coyne highlights some of the boggling details in this thread:

Twists and turns in the “Twitter Files” narrative

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

Matt Taibbi recounts how he got involved in the “Twitter Files” in the first place through the hysterical and hypocritical responses of so many mainstream media outlets up to the most recent twist as Twitter owner Elon Musk burns off so much of the credit he got for exposing the information in the first place:

I was amazed at this story’s coverage. From the Guardian last November: “Elon Musk’s Twitter is fast proving that free speech at all costs is a dangerous fantasy.” From the Washington Post: “Musk’s ‘free speech’ agenda dismantles safety work at Twitter, insiders say.” The Post story was about the “troubling” decision to re-instate the Babylon Bee, and numerous stories like it implied the world would end if this “‘free speech’ agenda” was imposed.

I didn’t have to know any of the particulars of the intramural Twitter dispute to think anyone who wanted to censor the Babylon Bee was crazy. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, going to war against a satire site was like dressing up in a suit of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae. This was an obvious moral panic and the very real consternation at papers like the Washington Post and sites like Slate over these issues seemed to offer the new owners of Twitter a huge opening. With critics this obnoxious, even a step in the direction of free speech values would likely win back audiences that saw the platform as a humorless garrison of authoritarian attitudes.

This was the context under which I met Musk and the circle of adjutants who would become the go-betweens delivering the material that came to be known as the Twitter Files. I would have accepted such an invitation from Hannibal Lecter, but I actually liked Musk. His distaste for the blue-check thought police who’d spent more than a half-year working themselves into hysterics at the thought of him buying Twitter — which had become the private playground of entitled mainstream journalists — appeared rooted in more than just personal animus. He talked about wanting to restore transparency, but also seemed to think his purchase was funny, which I also did (spending $44 billion with a laugh as even a partial motive was hard not to admire).

Moreover the decision to release the company’s dirty laundry for the world to see was a potentially historic act. To this day I think he did something incredibly important by opening up these communications for the public.

Taibbi and the other Twitter File journalists were, of course, damned by the majority of the establishment media outlets and accused of every variant of mopery, dopery, and gross malfeasance by the blue check myrmidons. Some of that must have been anticipated, but a lot of it seems to have surprised even Taibbi and company for its blatant hypocrisy and incandescent rage.

But all was not well between the Twitter Files team and the new owner of Twitter:

We were never on the same side as Musk exactly, but there was a clear confluence of interests rooted in the fact that the same institutional villains who wanted to suppress the info in the Files also wanted to bankrupt Musk. That’s what makes the developments of the last week so disappointing. There was a natural opening to push back on the worst actors with significant public support if Musk could hold it together and at least look like he was delivering on the implied promise to return Twitter to its “free speech wing of the free speech party” roots. Instead, he stepped into another optics Punji Trap, censoring the same Twitter Files reports that initially made him a transparency folk hero.

Even more bizarre, the triggering incident revolved around Substack, a relatively small company that’s nonetheless one of the few oases of independent media and free speech left in America. In my wildest imagination I couldn’t have scripted these developments, especially my own very involuntary role.

I first found out there was a problem between Twitter and Substack early last Friday, in the morning hours just after imploding under Mehdi Hasan’s Andrey Vyshinsky Jr. act on MSNBC. As that joyous experience included scenes of me refusing on camera to perform on-demand ritual criticism of Elon Musk, I first thought I was being pranked by news of Substack URLs being suppressed by him. “No way,” I thought, but other Substack writers insisted it was true: their articles were indeed being labeled, and likes and retweets of Substack pages were being prohibited.

April 13, 2023

Old and tired – “Conspiracy Theories”. The new hotness – “Coming Features”

Kim du Toit rounds up some not-at-all random bits of current events:

So Government — our own and furriners’ both — have all sorts of rules they wish to impose on us (and from here on I’m going to use “they” to describe them, just for reasons of brevity and laziness — but we all know who “they” are). Let’s start with one, pretty much picked at random.

They want to end sales of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, and make us all switch to electric-powered ones. Leaving aside the fact that as far as the trucking industry is concerned, this can never happen no matter how massive the regulation, we all know that this is not going to happen (explanation, as if any were needed, is here). But to add to the idiocy, they have imposed all sorts of unrealistic, nonsensical and impossible deadline to all of this, because:

There isn’t enough electricity — and won’t be enough electricity, ever — to power their future of universal electric car usage. Why is that? Well, for one thing, they hate nuclear power (based on outdated 1970s-era fears), are closing existing ones and will not allow new ones to be built by dint of strangling environmental regulation (passed because of said 1970s-era fears). Then, to add to that, they have forced the existing electricity supply to become unstable by insisting on unreliable and variable generation sources such as solar and wind power. Of course, existing fuel sources such as oil. coal and natural gas are also being phased out because they are “dirty” (they aren’t, in the case of natgas, and as far as oil and coal are concerned, much much less so than in decades past) — but as with nuclear power, the rules are being drawn up as though old technologies are still being used (they aren’t, except in the Third World / China — which is another whole essay in itself). And if people want to generate their own electricity? Silly rabbits: US Agency Advances New Rule Targeting Portable Gas-Powered Generators. (It’s a poxy paywall, but the headline says it all, really.)

So how is this pixie dust “new” electricity to be stored? Why, in batteries, of course — to be specific, in lithium batteries which are so far the most efficient storage medium. The only problem, of course, is that lithium needs to be mined (a really dirty industry) and even assuming there are vast reserves of lithium, the number of batteries needed to power a universe of cars is exponentially larger than the small number of batteries available — but that means MOAR MINING which means MOAR DIRTY. And given how dirty mining is, that would be a problem, yes?

No. Because — wait for it — they will limit lithium mining, also by regulation, by enforcing recycling (where have we heard this before?) and by reducing battery size.

Now take all the above into consideration, and see where this is going. Reduced power supply, reduced power consumption, reduced fuel supply: a tightening spiral, which leads to my final question:

JUST HOW DO THEY THINK THIS IS ALL GOING TO END?

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that increased pressure without escape mechanisms will eventually cause explosion. It’s true in physics, it’s true in nature and it’s true, lest we forget, in humanity.

Of course, as friend-of-the-blog Severian often points out, these people think Twitter is real life. Of course there’ll be enough pixie dust to sprinkle over all their preferred solutions to make them come true. Reality is just a social construct — they learned that in college, and believe it wholeheartedly.

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