Quotulatiousness

November 29, 2022

In a dangerous and insecure world, the EU appears to feel that the greatest enemy is on the other side of the Atlantic

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

CDR Salamander on how the EU’s movers and shakers (i.e., mostly not democratically elected leaders) seem to have decided that their one true enemy is the United States:

If you are an American who lived on the European Continent, specifically Western Europe, you’re very familiar with an exceptionally sharp strain of anti-Americanism that resides in a significant percentage of their ruling elite – an adult version of the middle school mean girls. Though present in all nations to one degree to another, it is especially acute in Germany and France for slightly different reasons but are all working towards the same goal; degrade American influence in Europe.

The best way for this political and corporate anti-Americanism to find a lever of power is through the the trans-national and anti-democratic modern iteration of the European Union – made even more problematic with the departure of Great Britain who once played a balancing role between the Continental powers as she has for centuries.

Why primarily France and Germany? To start with, this is part of the sibling rivalry between the children of Charlemagne for primacy in Europe that has churned Europe over the last thousand years. The Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic kept getting in the way of their return to the struggle.

Their armies under various blood-soaked leaders moved across Iberia to Moscow and back for centuries in order to be THE driver of power in influence on the continent. The European Union, once the “trade association” nose was in the tent, is now seen – fairly – as a mechanism to centralize power so The Smartest People in the Room™ no longer have pesky minor powers and – Buddha forgive – voters getting in their way. Without checks, power only seeks more power for itself. The morphing of the EU is just the latest example.

Not unlike their American counterparts who would like the USA to extract itself from foreign entanglements (NB: as I have written through the years, I am sympathetic/supportive of these efforts), many of the strongest proponents of the EU just want the USA to go home.

The Europeans, while benefiting from the WWII/Cold War leftover presence of the USA, want it to end and the influence that comes with it. If any opportunity to push back against the USA appears, they have their talking points ready to dirty up the reputation and standing of the USA. If that can be done while blaming Eurocrat failures on the USA as well, even better.

You know the Americans, citizens of that mongrel nation whose gene pool is full of religious zealots, failed revolutionaries, slaves, economic refugees, grasping second sons, criminals, and their descendants – spoiled with a continent overflowing with food, water, minerals, forests and open land they don’t even appreciate.

Loud. Fat. Pushy. Americans.

The usual snarled insults cobbled together by smug people who get much of their opinions of the USA by reading The Washington Post or The New York Times. “I know America, I read your newspapers.” That is right after, “I’ve been to America. I spent a week in DC/NYC/Boston/Chicago. I studied a semester at Brown.”

[…]

The smaller European nations don’t trust France and Germany all that much, for good historical reasons. Most of the Europeans in the “new territories” in the east like the USA. They see the Americans as a more reliable guarantee of safety from hostile powers in the East, having a few centuries of experience of the Western European Frankish tribes carving them up for fun and profit – irrespective of local desires. Collectively these nations are not that large in GDP or population – not much more than Italy (for now), but that’s OK. They have the correct geography.

If we shape this relationship correctly, we don’t have to permanently garrison this part of Europe. Poland is already establishing a new paradigm of proper levels of security investment. Once NATO’s eastern front calms down a bit, we can rotate through forces for exercises and training. Perhaps even create some combined training and logistics bases ready to scale up in case of trouble in Mordor. A template we should have put in place in Western Europe decades ago.

Reward positive behavior and let the French and Germans continue their millennium-length struggle – peaceful this time – in the west; keep them frothing in Brussels and Strasbourg while the forward-looking nations try to set up the next thousand years of Western progress in a positive direction.

Perhaps.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, expert projectionist

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

Donna Laframboise on part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s performance last Friday at the Public Order Emergency Commission’s hearings in Ottawa:

There’s a concept in psychology known as projection – accusing others of your own shortcomings. Last week Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, told an Emergencies Act hearing that Freedom Convoy protesters didn’t just want to talk. They wanted, he said, to be obeyed.

That was a strange word for him to use. About people he’d never spoken to. Yet it sums up his own posture rather nicely: Don’t bother trying to change my mind. I’m in charge, you must obey. Conversation over. Case closed.

According to Mr. Trudeau, the Freedom Convoy didn’t deserve a face-to-face meeting with his government because it wanted to change public policy. How terrible that free people, in a free country might want some influence over the increasingly draconian COVID rules they were required to follow. How unreasonable for them to come to Ottawa in an attempt to communicate the depths of their desperation.

A Prime Minister who received less than 33% of the votes cast during the federal election a mere four months earlier chose to thumb his nose at these protesters. Get lost, peasants. You will not be changing public policy.

[…]

We need to recognize what has happened here. The same federal officials who meet with corporate lobbyists by the thousands refused to have a single meeting with the truckers.

This, ladies and gentleman, is the state of Canada’s democracy.

QotD: People have always lied about sex, but GenZ’ers lie even more than you’d expect

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

I’ve been out of academia for a few years, but this bespoke sexuality nonsense was already exploding by the time I got out. I saw two big shifts in the studentry during my academic career. The first was the catastrophic drop in academic readiness, thanks mostly to No Child Left Behind (et al. Lots of trends contributed, especially Participation Trophy culture, but NCLB is a good synecdoche). The second was the end of all-out college kid hedonism.

By the end of my last tour of duty, most college kids were dour puritans. I know, I know, but hear me out. This is the thing people keep forgetting about the Internet: People lie. I know we all know that consciously, but we seem hardwired to believe confessions. In the same way that we might not consciously watch TV — might go some distance out of our way to avoid it — but find ourselves staring mindlessly at the blinking screen when we’re in a bar or a waiting room or something. It seems to be hardwired. So when these folks start writing about all the bizarre sexual shit they’re into, we just … believe them. Sight unseen.

But y’all, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I want to state, unequivocally and for the record, that my entire knowledge of undergrads’ sex lives is secondhand. I have zero personal experience in this area. But it’s a close secondhand. For one thing, there’s not much to do in College Town that doesn’t involve undergrads, so I ended up drinking at a lot of the same bars, and in vino veritas. Second, kids these days have no filter. None whatsoever. Finally, social media — my last tour was at a SPLAC, where they strongly encouraged the faculty to be “friends” with the student body on their campus social media apps.

And yeah, they SAY a lot of things … but I highly, highly doubt they actually DO much of anything at all.

For one thing, those “student” bars were lucky I and a few other semi-normal profs were still in our “drink away the pain” phase, because otherwise they would’ve gone out of business. Friday and Saturday nights during football season were still pretty lively, but the rest of the week the “downtown” bars had all the crackling energy of singles’ night down at the mortuary.

Kids just don’t socialize much IRL, and when they do, they don’t hook up. In my not-inconsiderable experience, college drinking these days is like college anything — a grim, pinch-faced, assembly-line business. They intend to get blackout hammered, and they get after it like Heroes of Socialist Labor. Pausing for a quickie in the bathroom would mean skipping a turn in the drinking game — and they all play drinking games; it’s bizarre — so no thanks.

And y’all, those are the outgoing ones. The ones who still have some slight urge to see and be seen out in physical space. The rest of ’em never leave their rooms except at gunpoint, and when you force them to, their eyes never leave their phones.

That’s why I’d bet many crisp stacks of Crispus Attucks that all the “kink” in their social media profiles — even their personal ads — are just for show. They’re not listing all that stuff in order to find someone to have sex with. They’re using it as an excuse not to have sex with anybody, because “having sex with” entails personal interaction and they’re terrified of that. If they ever perfect those VR sex helmets like they had in Demolition Man, watch out, but as of now the whole idea is to seem weird and daring and liberated and kinky, but with no possibility of a follow-up. Oh, you’re into aardvarks and dental tools too? Um … yay? Oh, wait, you dress up as O. a. erikssoni, and I’m only into O. a. leptodon. Sorry!

Severian, “Saturday Miscellania”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-13.

November 28, 2022

It’s not a “conspiracy theory” if you’re just repeating the words they say themselves

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

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann on the clear declarations of climate activists that abolishing capitalism is part of their overall goal:

For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life’s purpose was to save the world from climate change. Now she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow “the whole capitalist system”, which she says is responsible for “imperialism, oppression, genocide … racist, oppressive extractionism”. The “activists” of the doomsday cult “Last Generation” say quite openly that their goal is the abolition of capitalism.

Examine the standard work of anti-capitalist climate change activists, and you will quickly see what I mean. Naomi Klein, the popular critic of capitalism and globalization, admits she initially had no particular interest in the issues surrounding and related to climate change. Then, in 2014, she wrote a hefty 500-page tome called This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.

Why did she suddenly become so interested in climate change? Well, prior to writing this 2014 book, Klein’s main interest was the fight against free trade and globalization.

She admits in her writing: “I was propelled into a deeper engagement with [the topic of climate change] partly because I realized it could be a catalyst for forms of social and economic justice in which I already believed.” And she hopes for “a new kind of climate movement to take up the fight against so-called free trade”. She strictly rejects highly efficient solutions, such as climate-friendly nuclear energy, because she is not at all interested in solutions within the framework of capitalism.

Klein writes that she recognizes that climate change presents a chance to “collectively use the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now” and “that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change … it could be the best argument progressives have ever had … to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals … to open borders to migrants.” The climate crisis could “form the basis of a powerful mass movement”, and this movement should set itself the following objectives:

  • to “radically expand the commons” (i.e., state-owned property and resources)
  • to introduce a “carefully planned economy”
  • to “change pretty much everything about our economy”
  • to introduce “new taxes, new public works programs”
  • “reversals of privatizations”
  • “extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known — the oil and gas industry”
  • government guidelines on “how often we drive, how often we fly, whether our food has to be flown to get to us, whether the goods we buy are built to last … how large our homes are”
  • “a fundamental reordering of the component parts of Gross Domestic Product”
  • “less private investment in producing for excessive consumption”
  • “increased government spending”
  • “a great deal more redistribution”

Klein embraces a suggestion that the well-off 20 percent in a population take the largest cuts in order to create a fairer society. She argues that “our economic system and our planetary system are now at war”, and the only suitable response is “revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony”.

November 26, 2022

Britain’s experiment with mass immigration since 2014

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West considers the legacy media’s quick dismissal of conservative concerns about rising immigration from poorer European countries in 2014 with the reality only eight years later:

“Xenophobia” by malias is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It was a sort of mini-publicity stunt by Vaz, but all for a good cause: a response to fear mongering by the Right-wing press who warned that we’d be “flooded” by Romanians, and predictions by MigrationWatch that’d we have 50,000 new arrivals a year from the A2 countries (as Romania and Bulgaria were called).

Twitter that day was full of journalists and other public intellectuals laughing about how we were going to be “swamped”. Why would Romanians, after all, want to come here, to this miserable rainy island?

“We’ve seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it’s the 1st of January,” Vaz concluded.

Various publications, with the ill-founded confidence so often found in the journalist trade, soon declared that the Romanian influx was a conservative fantasy.

“Eastern European invasion comes to nothing”, the Independent declared on the day, just a tad prematurely you might say.

A Guardian commentator suggested the year before that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians arriving might actually fall following accession, and that “all the ‘invasion’ predictions … have more in common with astrology than demography.”
[…]

As it turned out, in the year to September 2015, 206,000 Romanians and Bulgarians took out a National Insurance number, meaning they were registering to work here. By late 2017, there were 413,000 Romanian and Bulgarians living in Britain, suggesting 90,000 had arrived each year since January 2014, while just 6,200 Britons had made the opposite journey.

By mid-2018, there were more than 400,000 Romanians in Britain, making them one of the largest national minorities in England. The real figure is hard to tell, because the British state has lost the capacity or will to count the number of foreign residents, and it may be higher.

[…]

The scale of immigration in the 2000s and 2010s led to the rise of Ukip, the referendum and the political chaos that followed; what follows now we can’t yet say, but no one has seemed to have learned the lesson: that in the 21s century, because of easier travel, smartphones, smuggling networks and establishment communities in the West, the sheer scale of potential migration is astronomical. Yet people often have a very 20th or even 19th century understanding of how much people are able and willing to move, which makes them vastly underestimate the potential numbers arriving.

The Turkish Cypriots of north London are a case in point, the example Paul Collier used in Exodus to show the huge extent of potential migration between countries with different levels of wealth. 

Because of colonial links, North Cyprus had free movement with Britain and so provided a test case: as a result, there are now more Turkish Cypriots in Britain than in Cyprus. In fact, not only did the majority of Turkish Cypriots move, but back in their homeland they become outnumbered by arrivals from a third, even poorer country, mainland Turkey, who are permitted to settle there.

In a theoretical world of open borders, Britons would be outnumbered very quickly; infrastructure would start to buckle under the strain, and governments would find it difficult to increase the necessary number of houses, schools, hospitals and other services for this expanded population, because society would now lack the social capital and cohesion to make the personal sacrifices. People would begin to lose faith in the police, a difficult role in such a transient and diverse society, and politics would become increasingly unstable and aligned along ethnic lines.

November 25, 2022

“… no Canadian should trust any government enough to settle for a ‘trust me’ on matters this serious”

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

Matt Gurney at TVO Today on the likely outcome of the Public Order Emergency Commission’s deliberations after testimony ends on Friday with whatever Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is planning to say:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

We can’t simply outsource decision-making to federal agencies, particularly intelligence services! The federal cabinet has the right to disagree with CSIS’s conclusions, especially as it may consider a broader range of information. That’s why we elect leaders. That’s democracy.

But a democracy is supposed to empower the people. We are citizens, not subjects. And there is something very worrisome in Vigneault’s comments. He noted that he had information that informed his decisions — information that cannot be publicly disclosed. This apparently includes legal opinions that the federal government has not disclosed (citing attorney-client privilege) and also, reportedly, classified information.

Attorney-client privilege is important. So is secrecy on matters of national security. Both of these things are essential for a society to function. But, in this case, they are corrosive to democracy and public faith in the federal government.

The Trudeau government’s case for invoking the Emergencies Act isn’t a slam dunk. It’s not bulletproof. I’ve been swayed by some of its arguments and some of the testimony and documents that have been produced. But it hasn’t sealed the deal. And if its final argument hinges on legal advice and classified information, that’s … awful. That’s just a terrible situation. That would amount, in effect, to Trudeau saying, “We can’t tell you why we did this incredibly rare and controversial thing, but trust us.”

No.

That’s it. Just no.

I don’t trust this government. That’s partially, I grant, a criticism of this particular government, which I am not a fan of. It is often high-handed, arrogant, and incompetent, and I do not trust it won’t try to duck criticism by hiding dirty laundry behind privilege and secrecy. Its conduct over the past seven years in office simply has not earned it any benefit of the doubt.

But there’s a deeper truth here: no Canadian should trust any government enough to settle for a “trust me” on matters this serious. That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work. Bluntly, if that’s how your democracy is working, it isn’t working or a democracy.

QotD: Cults, conspiracy theories, progressives, and “the death wish”

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

The more refined the man — crusty old badthinkers like E.B. Tylor and Lucien Levy-Bruhl would say “civilized”, and of course you shouldn’t look those names up, much less read their works, they are very very bad — the greater his sense of time … and the greater his death wish. In fact, at some point in the “civilization” process, Whitey gets so “over-civilized” that he reverts to what is effectively bicamerality (if Jaynes does it for you) or to the primitive sense of the endless now …

… but alas, he does NOT lose his neuroses, his death wish. That becomes all-consuming.

When the very smart boys in the sociology departments first started studying cults, they assumed — being very smart boys — that cult members would all be dumb, mal-educated yokels. After all, those are the only kind who believe in Magic Sky Fairies, no? But because the urge to suppress or falsify research findings that don’t fit their pre-chosen Narrative hadn’t entirely permeated the academy yet, they actually published their “counterintuitive” findings — the average cult member is smarter, and much better educated, than the hoi polloi.

Which should’ve been obvious by the fact that cults as a general rule don’t bother trying to recruit in slums, or out in the sticks, but DO focus almost their entire recruiting effort near college campuses. They could’ve skipped the fieldwork entirely, and just looked around at the very obvious cult of “Leftism” that they and all their colleagues were already in, but self-awareness has never been a thing on the Left, and that goes triple for the egghead set.

The other thing that becomes immediately obvious in the academic study of cults is that the phrase “suicide cult” is redundant. They’re all suicide cults. Lots of them do us the great favor of admitting it, one way or the other, but THE cult belief is in the imminent immanentizing of the eschaton. The world’s gonna end, and they’re going to be the Big Guy’s right-hand persyns in the new dispensation. The Big Guy could be God, Jesus, the saucer people, Cthulhu, Satan, the Proletariat, whatever — they have a bewildering variety of mythologies, but the underlying belief is exactly the same, every time, and there’s only that ONE belief:

    The world is gonna end in their lifetimes, and they themselves are helping to make it happen sooner.

Thus to pscircle back to [the] question: “has there been a historical situation where there is a generalised cult mentality which is attached and detached to a serial cult sequence (coof, ukraine, trump, etc).”

The way I’m interpreting this (please correct me if I’m wrong) is that the Juggalo Cult, unlike all the other known cults throughout history, seems to be able to change its mythology on a dime. We’re all familiar with Festinger, yeah? If not, go read When Prophecy Fails at the nearest opportunity — it’s short, and surprisingly readable for academic sociology. The UFO cult Festinger studied predicted the end of the world. When it didn’t happen, lots of members left the cult … but lots didn’t, and in fact they doubled down — it was only their constant vigilance, they said, that kept the saucer people from destroying the earth as originally planned.

(This is where the phrase “cognitive dissonance” comes from, by the way. Festinger coined it).

Note that the UFO cultists didn’t suddenly flip mythologies as a way to deal with their cogdis — oh, we were wrong, it wasn’t the saucer people, it was the Illuminati. And that seems to apply to any “disconfirmation” of any cult belief. Everything that happens, or doesn’t happen, gets folded in. In the same way, there’s only ever one Devil. See e.g. every conspiracy theory on the Internet, ever. When ___ happens, the guys who think the Freemasons control the world blame the Freemasons, the guys who think it’s the saucer people blame it on the saucer people, etc., same as it ever was.

But if the Freemasons step up and take credit for it, the guys who think it’s the saucer people don’t shrug and say ooops. Rather, they build it in — ok, ok, yeah, technically it was the Freemasons, but we all know who really controls the Freemasons! (It’s the saucer people and the RAND Corporation, in conjunction with the reverse vampires. We’re through the looking glass here, people).

In a sense, of course, the Juggalo Cult does do that — Whitey is always the Devil (do a find-and-replace, swapping in “White supremacy” for “capitalism”, and you could republish the entire Collected Works of V.I. Lenin, verbatim, as your dissertation and no one would be the wiser). But the Juggalos also seem to be unique in that the Apocalypse changes on a dime, too. Festinger’s cult all agreed that the saucer people were still going to destroy the world; they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet, because reasons.

The Juggalo Cult, by contrast, lurches from apocalypse to apocalypse. Global Cooling! Global Warming! Global Climate Change! Reagan! Boooosh! Drumpf! Covid! Ukraine! The Supreme Court! THE CURRENT THING!!!!

This, I think, is the reversion to bicamerality — the “digital clock effect” […] The Juggalo Cultists are still oppressed by their two-millennia-old sense of the passage of linear time — it’s baked into their DNA at this point — but they’ve been acculturated to the Endless Now of social media. There is no past on Twitter, nor any future — there’s just retweets and upvotes and replies, and what’s at the top of the news feed is all that is or could ever be, world without end amen.

They’re trapped in an endless loop — everything they do immanentizes the eschaton, because immanentizing the eschaton is simply a matter of tweeting it. And yet, the eschaton never comes. The tweet is merely replaced by another tweet, which is the only thing in the universe. It’s like what some old “paranormal researchers” said ghosts are — little loops of “film”, endlessly replaying the same thing forever. Time passes — the haunted house is bought and sold, remodeled, added to, stripped to the bricks and rebuilt, bought and sold again — but the ghost is still there, endlessly replaying the same scene, because it’s just static, just energy discharge from some kind of psychic dry-cell battery.

The difference being, of course, that these ghosts can actually pull the nuclear trigger … and they won’t even know they’re doing it, in the same way that the ghosts don’t realize they’re scaring the “occupants” of the “haunted house”, because there ARE no occupants, no house. It’s just the flickering, endlessly repeating NOW.

Severian, “The Ghosts”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-17.

November 24, 2022

Viewing the Public Order Emergency Commission spectacle from abroad

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

Chris Bray on how the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry in Ottawa has utterly failed to show up on the radar of the US legacy media:

I conducted a dignified survey of a number of politically savvy people this evening, by which I mean I staggered around a bar and slurred questions at friends, and I was surprised to discover that no one has noticed the POEC. At all. Similarly, the US news media appears to have taken a nearly complete pass on covering the thing. The New York Times offered a single story, more than a month ago, describing the fact that it would be happening, and then lapsed into silence. I left some blank space at the bottom of this image so you can see all the nothing down there:

But the spectacle has been extraordinary, and it opens the curtains on the world of high-status malevolence, elite mediocrity, and news media cravenness. For background, remember that the Canadian government led by Prime Minister Derek Zoolander responded to the peaceful truckers’ “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa and anti-Covid-measure blockades at several border crossing areas this February — the infamous bouncy castle protests — by invoking Canada’s Emergencies Act, for the first time since that law was created in 1988. That declaration of a national emergency allowed the government to exercise extraordinary power, most infamously in the form of an order to Canadian banks to completely freeze the bank accounts of protest participants. Zoolander lost his state of emergency as the Canadian Senate signaled its growing alarm at the decision, after a shameful vote in the House of Commons to affirm the declaration. The state of emergency was declared on February 14, and revoked on February 23.

Now comes the second act. The invocation of the Emergencies Act triggers a legal duty to review that decision after the fact. Here’s the directive calling the Public Order Emergency Commission into being.

So the commission is meeting, with testimony from government officials, and — this is the important part — with cross-examination from lawyers representing the targets of the declaration of emergency. In effect, the truckers are in the room; their representatives can ask questions of the government officials who did things like ordering banks to take their money because they disagreed with the government.

If you read the mainstream Canadian press, which pisses me off every time I try to do it, this means that the moronic lawyers for a bunch of idiotic terrorists are being pointlessly mean to senior government officials. Conspiracy theories! Debunked claims! I mean, truck drivers versus respectable figures, amirite? All the usual deployment of marking language is in effect, telling readers what to think about what’s happening while carefully limiting their description of what’s actually happening.

[…]

And finally, most remarkably, if you followed the Emergencies Act debate in the House of Commons back in February, you’ll recall that Prime Minister Zoolander and his ministers responded to every criticism and question regarding their handling of the convoy by saying that Canadians won’t stand with people who carry Confederate flags, and with “those who fly swastikas”.

That’s how they framed the entire event, full stop: the truckers, the swastika people. The anti-vaccine-mandate Nazis!

The news media picked up that framing and ran with it, non-stop, pounding the message that the truckers were flying Nazi symbols and Confederate flags:

Now: Miller said, before the commission, that he knows the identity of the people who carried those Nazi and Confederate flags in Ottawa — and that they’re employees of a public relations firm that was working on behalf of officials in the Canadian government.

November 23, 2022

The potential mass-casualty event of Trump being re-instated on Twitter

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

You can almost hear Tom Knighton‘s eyes rolling here:

I’m not the biggest fan of Donald Trump. Most of his policies — the things he enacted quietly as he went — were pretty decent, including criminal justice reform and reducing federal regulations.

He just couldn’t stop tweeting.

I joked more than once that I wish someone would lock his phone so he couldn’t get on the app. However, I never once thought he should be banned from the platform.

But he was.

Now, he’s back.

Sort of.

His account isn’t banned anymore, though as of this writing, he doesn’t appear to be using it.

Yet this is, apparently, something just short of genocide if you listen to some journalists.

No, seriously.

I hoped this was a troll, but it’s not.

He apparently actually believes this is a thing, too, because it’s not the only time he claimed Trump being on Twitter will result in people’s deaths.

Again, there’s no word whether Trump will return to use the platform. As of this writing, his last tweet is from January 8th, 2021, so even if Trump’s tweets somehow could result in people’s death, it doesn’t seem like it matters since he’s not back on the platform.

But this unhinged individual has the old-school blue checkmark, the one given because an individual is “notable”.

Yet he also has his cover photo set to a screenshot of him being blocked by Trump. In other words, it looks like the boy is a might obsessed with the Orange One.

And this is the problem.

It’s not about Trump, but the media. This is a guy with mainstream media bylines aplenty. He’s got the old Twitter mark of approval, and he’s literally arguing that a former president having the ability to voice his thoughts on a social media platform will result in people’s deaths.

Does he think Elon Musk has weaponized tweeting and only given the launch codes to Trump?

The Babylon Bee (or as Instapundit says, “America’s Newspaper of Record”) is already on this hot new calamity:

November 22, 2022

“Andrew Doyle is a dangerous man, and this is a dangerous book”

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

I missed this review when it first got posted at The Critic, which is why I’m only linking to it now. Stephen Daisley reviews The New Puritans: how the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World:

Andrew Doyle is a dangerous man, and this is a dangerous book. Don’t take my word for it: the bloke’s own mates think he’s one for the watching. Like the pal he tells us about who pegged him as “a fucking Nazi cunt”. Admittedly, vodka martinis had been taken and the friend’s evidence of fascist proclivities was Doyle’s vote to leave the EU and his satires of progressivism, but you can never be too careful.

So it was with some trepidation that I opened my copy of The New Puritans during a recent stay in hospital. I had lost patience with a John Grisham grabbed from the shop, which was largely concerned with how racist and stupid everyone is south of the Mason-Dixon Line. When did the gutsy master of Southern populist pulp turn into a sneering liberal bigot? A shift to the right was in order, so Doyle’s book it was.

As Nazi polemics go, The New Puritans is something of a disappointment. It’s a better read than Mein Kampf and less esoteric than The Myth of the Twentieth Century, but it’s pretty light on the old blood and soil. It turns out Doyle isn’t a Nazi at all, just a bog-standard, run-of-the-John-Stuart-Mill liberal. The New Puritans, far from a tract on Aryan racial purity, is an admonition against authoritarian trends in identity politics. Boy, are there going to be some red faces at the next Britain First reading group.

A broadcaster and stand-up comedian, Doyle is also a recovering academic with a PhD in “Renaissance discourses of gender and sexuality”, which takes some recovering from. It has, however, gifted him an intimate insight into a political insurgency that, in just a few years, has seized the commanding heights of government, law, medicine, education, journalism, the arts and private enterprise.

The architects of this movement are “the new puritans” and their religion is critical social justice, Doyle’s term for what is more commonly known as wokeism. They are “a prohibitionist and precisionist tendency who seek to refashion society in accordance with their own ideological fervour”. Their zealotry, philistinism and spiteful exercise of power over others reminds Doyle of the Salem Witch Trials and the vicious little girls whose “lived experience” sent 19 innocent women to the gallows.

Where Abigail Williams and her finger-pointing acolytes saw witches, their ideological descendants see racists and transphobes. They do so by applying a doctrine called intersectionality, which asserts interlocking systems of oppression as the basis of Western societies. They harness the power of social opprobrium to punish transgressors and sceptics. This is cancel culture — “retributive and performative mass denunciation in order to destroy lives and enforce conformity” — and today it rages on Twitter rather than a colonial settlement in Massachusetts.

In addition to punishment, the new puritans exercise prior restraint by banishing speech they disapprove of as harmful, a practice known as safetyism. Doyle notes how routinely this involves the privileged imposing their preferences on the lower orders. “Imagine,” he ventures, “Debrett’s guide to etiquette having been rewritten by someone with a histrionic personality disorder.”

QotD: The obligatory orgy scene

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

I went last week to a production of Rigoletto, the revival of a production first staged in 2001. A criticism that I read in advance informed me that the initial orgy scene had been toned down somewhat by comparison with what had gone seventeen years before. Was this progress or regression? The critic did not venture an opinion on this vital question; he merely recorded the change as a fact.

It seems that all opera productions these days need an orgy scene, just as doctoral theses in the Soviet Union used to need at least one quotation from Lenin. There was a time when an orgy would have been censored, but now it is obligatory — no opera without one. There was a brief orgy scene in the last Flying Dutchman that I saw, and it was a bit of a relief when they got it over with because I knew that it must be coming and tension mounted until it did. It was a bit like childhood diseases in the old days: The sooner you had them, the quicker you got over them.

The problem with orgies is that once you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all, and these days they are staged literally rather than suggestively, as if the aging audience has to be reminded of what sex actually is. Moreover, they are staged like a tableau of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the fin de siècle compendium of what used to be called, in those far-off judgmental days, perversions. The implicit, however, is more powerful than the explicit, or it used to be. The explicit, in fact, is the enemy of the voluptuous.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Adding Injury to Insult”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-01-20

November 19, 2022

American political parties from 1865 down to the Crazy Years we’re living through now

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

Severian responds to a comment about the Democrats and Republicans and how they have morphed over the years to the point neither party would recognize itself:

“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.

A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.

I find this extremely useful. I’d add that the postbellum parties do shift ideologies fairly regularly, as PR notes, such that even though they’re still called by the same names, they’re nowhere near the same parties, 1865-present.
I’d add some distinguishing tags for ease of reference, like so:

DEMOCRATS:

The Redeemers of the “Solid South”, 1865-1882, when their main issue was ending Reconstruction and establishing Jim Crow.

The Grover Cleveland years, 1882-1896: Still primarily an opposition party, their main goal was reining in the ridiculous excesses of the Gilded Age Republicans. As one of about 100 people worldwide who have strong opinions on Grover Cleveland, I should probably recuse myself here, so let me just say this: Union Army veterans were to the Gilded Age GOP what the Ukraine is to the Uniparty now. They simply couldn’t shovel money at them fast enough, and the guys who orchestrate those ridiculous flag-sucking “thank you for your service” celebrations before pro sporting events would tell them to tone it way, way down. Cleveland spent most of his presidency slapping the worst of this down.

[How bad was it? So bad that not only did they pass ridiculous giveaways like the Arrears of Pension Act and the Dependent Pension Act — think “Build Back Brandon” on steroids, times two, plus a bunch of lesser boondoggles — but they got together every Friday night when Congress was in session to pass “private” pension bills. These are exactly what they sound like: Federal pensions to one specific individual, put up by his Congressman. Grover Cleveland used to burn the midnight oil vetoing these ridiculous fucking things, which makes him a true American hero as far as I’m concerned].

The Populist Party years, 1896-1912: They were more or less absorbed by the Populist Party — William Jennings Bryan ran as a “Democrat” in 1896, but he was really a Populist; that election hinged entirely on economic issues. They still had the “Solid South”, but the Democrats of those years were basically Grangers.

The Progressive Years, 1912-1968: They picked up all the disaffected “Bull Moose” Republicans who split the ticket and handed the Presidency to Woodrow Wilson in 1912, becoming the pretty much openly Fascist entity they’d remain until 1968.

The Radical Party, 1968-1992: The fight between the Old and New Left, or Marxism vs. Maoism.

The Boomer Triumphalist Party, 1992-2000. It’s an Alanis-level irony that Bill Clinton was the most “conservative” president in my lifetime, if the metric for “conservatism” is “what self-proclaimed conservatives say they want”. This was our Holiday From History, in which “wonks” reigned supreme, tweaking the commas in the tax code while occasionally making some noises about silly lifestyle shit.

The Batshit Insane Party, 2000-Present. The years of the Great Inversion. Today’s Democrats only know one thing: Whatever is, is wrong.

REPUBLICANS:

The Radical Party, 1864-1876: Determined to impose utopia at bayonet point in the conquered South, they started asking themselves why they couldn’t simply impose utopia at bayonet point everywhere. They never did figure it out, and we owe those awful, awful racists in the Democratic Party our undying thanks for that. This is the closest America ever came to a theocracy until The Current Year. Morphed into

The party of flabbergastingly ludicrous robber baron excess, 1876-1896. In these years, J.P. Morgan personally bailed out the United States Treasury. Think about that. FTX, meet Credit Mobilier. You guys are pikers, and note that was 1872. William McKinley deserves a lot more credit than he gets in pretty much everything, but he might’ve been the most fiscally sane American president. Only Calvin Coolidge is even in the ballpark.

The Progressive Party, 1900-1912. For all the Left loves to call Republicans “fascists”, for a time they were … or close enough, Fascism not being invented quite yet. But the Democrats coopted it under Wilson, leading to

The Party of (Relative) Sanity, 1912-1968. Before Warren G. and Nate Dogg, there were Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the only two contestants in the “American politicians with their heads screwed on straight” competition, 20th century division. Alas, superseded by the

Anti-Left Party, 1968-2000. Want to punch a hippie? Vote for Richard Nixon. Or Gerald Ford. Or, yes, the Gipper.

The Invade-the-World, Invite-the-World Branch of the Uniparty, 2000-Present. Wouldn’t it be nice if Bill Clinton could keep it in his pants, and wasn’t a walking toothache like Al Gore? That was the essence of W’s pitch in 2000. Our Holiday From History was supposed to continue, but alas, 9/11. Some very special people at the State Department got their chance to finally settle their centuries-long grudge with the Cossacks, and, well … here we are.

By my count, the longest periods of ideological consistency ran about 50 years … and I’m not sure if that really tells us much, because it makes sense to view 1914-1945, if not 1914-1991, as THE World War, which put some serious constraints on the ideology of both sides.

Trend-wise, what I see is one side going nuts with some huge moral crusade, while the other side frantically tries to slam on the brakes (while getting their beaks good and wet, of course). Antebellum, it was the proslavery side leading the charge, but if they’d been slightly less excitable in the late 1840s, the abolitionist lunatics would’ve done the job for them by the late 1860s. If you know anything about the Gilded Age, you know that they somehow presented the truly ridiculous excesses of the Robber Barons as some kind of moral triumph; this was, after all, Horatio Alger‘s America. Progressivism, of either the Marxist or the John Dewey variety, is just moralizing gussied with The Science™, and so forth.

The big difference between then and now, of course, is that the grand moral crusade of The Current Year is open, shit-flinging nihilism. The “opposition”, such as it is, is also full of shit-flinging nihilists; they just don’t want to go before they’ve squeezed every possible penny out of the Suicide of the West. So … yeah. We’re overdue for a big ideological change. And we shall get it, never fear; we can only hope that we won’t have to see it by the light of radioactive fires.

November 18, 2022

“WOLLT IHR DEN TOTALEN TWEET?“

Filed under: Germany, History, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

When German public TV is willing to invoke literal Nazi imagery, you know the Twitter situation has gotten out of hand:

After Germany’s “first” public television network, ARD, compared Elon Musk reducing Twitter censorship to “letting rats out of their holes”, Germany’s “second” public television network, ZDF, has now compared Musk to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels! (The network’s name Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen literally means “Second German Television”.)

Thus, last Friday, ZDF’s would-be comedy program, the “Heute Show”, posted the below tweet and photoshop.

The Tweet reads: “Thanks to Elon Musk, you’re allowed to say anything again on Twitter! Total freedom of speech! #heuteshow.” The caption, whose color scheme and font invoke Nazi-era propaganda, reads “Do you want total tweet?” It is an allusion to Goebbels’s 1943 speech at the Berlin Sportspalast, in which the Nazi Minister of Propaganda famously shouted, “Do you want total war?” – in response to which audience members leapt to their feet shouting “Yes!” and raising their arms in the Hitler-salute.

The background image appears to show a Nazi Party rally with the swastikas replaced by the Twitter bird logo. Two smaller swastikas are still visible in the lower left-hand corner of the full-size image.

Leaving aside the extreme mental contortionism required to associate freedom of speech with Nazi Germany, if ever there was a don’t-throw-stones-in-glass-houses moment, this was it. For, as so happens, during the Second World War, the founding director of ZDF, Karl Holzamer, himself served in one of the propaganda units that none other than Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda embedded with the different divisions of the Germany military.

Holzamer served in a propaganda unit of the Luftwaffe or German air force. As noted in a 2012 article titled “Goebbels’s Soldiers” in the German daily Die Frankfurter Rundschau, Holzamer was embedded with the Luftwaffe during its April 1941 bombing of Belgrade and was “the first” to report on the German subjugation of the Yugoslav capital.

QotD: Therapism

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

Therapism has caused a decline in the quality of our culture. People are now engaged in a kind of arms race, feeling obliged to express their emotions ever more extravagantly to prove to themselves and other just how much and how deeply they feel. This leads to the peculiar shrillness, shallowness, and lack of subtlety of so much of our culture.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Bad counsel”, The New Criterion, 2005-06-23.

November 17, 2022

TikTok (aka “Digital Fentanyl”)

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

Geoffrey Cain at Common Sense on the malign influence of the massively popular Chinese social media platform on US politics and culture:

The midterm elections of 2022 were many things — a shocker for Republicans, the possible end of Donald Trump, a win for centrist Democrats. Overlooked is the fact that they were also a big turning point for TikTok, the Chinese social-media platform.

TikTok is not only the most trafficked news app for Americans under 30. It was also a major political force this year. Exhibit A: the Senate race in Pennsylvania, in which both Democrat John Fetterman and his Republican rival, Mehmet Oz, deployed TikTok, with Oz railing against the cost of vegetables in one video, and Fetterman slamming Oz for saying “crudité” in a highly effective response. Other candidates who took to TikTok this cycle include Tim Ryan, who ran for Senate in Ohio, and Val Demmings, who ran for Senate in Florida. (Both are Democrats.) The Democratic National Committee, early this year, launched its own TikTok channel.

Now, there are calls to shut it down. Just yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau has “national-security concerns” about TikTok. Last Friday, the top Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, called TikTok “China’s digital fentanyl”. The day before, Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Mike Gallagher, both Republicans, introduced legislation banning the social-media platform, noting that the data of millions of Americans is “effectively controlled” by the Chinese Communist Party. Earlier in the month, Carr also said the U.S. government should ban TikTok.

It’s about time.

Ever since TikTok began expanding into the United States, more than four years ago, we’ve known that it was a disaster waiting to happen. What’s shocking is that it’s taken this long to get serious political attention.

I know all about this. I used to be an investigative reporter in China. In December 2017, I first heard from friends on social media that a Chinese tech unicorn called ByteDance was planning on entering the American market with a new app. It was called TikTok.

Alongside its sibling app, Douyin, which operates only in China, TikTok was poised to sweep up the Gen Z audience in America, with its preference for video snippets of dancing celebrities, DIY projects, cooking demonstrations, skincare routines and other Gen Z’ers singing and dancing in their parents’ kitchens. As the fastest growing social media app ever, it rankled American competitors Facebook and YouTube, which were banned in China.

By October 2018, ByteDance was the world’s most valuable startup, with a valuation of $75 billion.

Four years later, ByteDance is worth $300 billion. TikTok is expected to reach 1.8 billion users globally by the end of the year. And a quarter of American adults under 30 get their news from the social-media app.

There’s a good reason for this success. TikTok has developed one of the most powerful machine-learning algorithms ever — one that is able to reveal people’s unknown desires to themselves.

Every day, every hour, every waking minute, TikTok is hoovering up seemingly infinite bits of information about its users — their tastes, hobbies, political views, sexual preferences, their facial structure, the sound of their voice. Ostensibly, all this is meant to provide a better product. It should also be noted that this information can be used for spying, influencing millions of users — even waging war. Every time we swipe for the next video, every time we post videos of our own, we are helping the world’s most sophisticated police state learn more about us.

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