Quotulatiousness

June 23, 2022

The government believes that anyone opposed to Bill C-11 is “spreading misinformation”

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

Happily for the Canadian government (if not for Canadian internet users), if Bill C-11 gets passed, they can sic the CRTC on those critics … isn’t that convenient?

Last week, shortly after midnight in Ottawa, the House of Commons Heritage Committee concluded its deliberations on the Online Streaming Act, which will grant a federal regulator authority over the global Internet.

You may think putting the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and its nine government-appointed commissioners in charge of the entire online world is a good thing. Or you may think it’s a bad thing. But I’m guessing we can all agree that Bill C-11, the world’s most extensive internet regulation legislation so far, is a Thing.

And you’d think a thing that big would be deserving of respectful, honest debate and thoughtful review. If there’s something in the legislation that is bad in a way that isn’t intended, you’d want it caught and fixed, right? We are, after all, about to grant authority over 21st-century communications to people in charge of something called The Broadcasting Act. An act that was passed in 1993 to make sure nothing terrible — like people preferring NFL over CFL football or the Oscars over the Genies — results from watching too much American TV. Given that thousands of successful Canadian free enterprise Tik-Tokers and YouTubers fear new rules will disadvantage them in favour of the CRTC’s certified cultural broccoli, you’d think that’d be worth a think.

But you’d be wrong.

[…]

But then Liberal MP Tim Louis of Kitchener took this government’s truth-torquing communications strategy to a breathtaking level of self-righteous fantasy — one that dripped with contempt for all but he and his clan.

He calmly rose in the House of Commons and quietly accused C-11’s critics of deliberately spreading “misinformation” — a chilling threat given the government’s plans to deal with he same in “Online Harms” legislation later this year.

Louis did not even try to say, as did Mendicino’s deputy minister, that there was a misunderstanding of some kind. He did not attempt to make it clear that there are people who — as reasonable people often will — disagree. He did not dismiss the bill’s critics as being overwrought, incorrect and yet honourable. He stood up in the House of Commons and, barefaced, declared that views, lived experiences and legal analyses — including the testimony of CRTC Chair Ian Scott — are “simply untrue”. In other words, it’s all #fakenews.

And we are all liars.

June 22, 2022

Puberty, “white guilt”, and social contagion helps drive huge numbers of teen girls to think they are transgender

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

Until a few years ago — a blink of the eye in social terms — most individuals who wanted to transition to the other gender were born male. That is no longer the situation in North America, as vast numbers of young teens have been hammered with accusations of “privilege” for being white, while already undergoing the stresses and social disruption of puberty, seem to be deciding in groups that they must have been “assigned the wrong gender” at birth. In City Journal, Leor Sapir tells some of their stories:

Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) — that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.

I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege”, how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color”. Plagued by guilt, the children — almost all of them girls — rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.

The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.

The wages of whiteness for teenagers are, however, only half of the story. Decades of gay rights activism have taught us that being gay or lesbian is not something one chooses. The mainstream narrative of transgenderism — promoted aggressively in the context of civil rights policymaking — holds that even being transgender is something people have little control over. Gender identity, experts have argued in Title IX lawsuits, is innate, immutable, and “primarily dictated by messages from the brain”. Thus, membership in the “LGBTQ+ community” would seem to be nonvoluntary. One is either “born that way” or not.

[…]

Several of the parents I spoke to told me that their daughters’ friends all identify as non-heterosexual, despite none having ever kissed another teenager or been in a romantic relationship. LGBT identity is, for them, not related to sexual attraction or behavior. As Kate Julian has written in The Atlantic, America is going through a “sex recession”. Whereas in 1991, most teenagers would have had at least one sexual encounter by the time they graduated high school, by 2017 most had had none. The vacuum left by the hollowing out of courting and relationships has been filled, so it would seem, by a new, inward form of “sexuality” in which the sexual side of our nature is purely a private experience. The 1960s sexual-liberation movement has somehow bred asexual atomism.

Riding the tiger almost always ends badly for the rider

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

Christian Watson considers the plight of so many consciously progressive organizations as they discover that there are no limits to wokeness:

Leftists created wokeism. They claimed it was about justice, inclusion for all, diversity, equity and more, much much more. However, this ill-defined “theology” has become a self-destructive nihilism.

Now, leftist organizations are being eaten from within over the no-bounds, no-rules wokeism.

Wokeism essentially empowers any person – except straight white males – to claim grievances. There are no limits as to what can be called a “microaggression” or upon which one can claim to be harmed. With wokeism, “my truth” matters — even if it is not at all based in reality.

A recent report from The Intercept outlined the many ways leftist organizations are imploding due to this open-ended invitation for people to claim grievances. Leftist organizations found themselves mired in “Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.”

Some executives claim they spend “90 to 95 percent” of their time addressing office drama. They’re being forced to address issues that have nothing to do with the organization’s mission or the donors’ wishes.

Executives at the Guttmacher Institute, the American Civil Liberties Union, Sierra Club, and elsewhere are now the targets of their own employees for failing to meet their woke expectations.

Many executives have quit, leaving behind prominent positions because they simply cannot stand their employees. As one executive put it, “This is out of control. No one can be a leader in this culture. It’s not sustainable. We’re constantly being called out from the bottom.”

“I also see a pattern of … people who are not competent in their orgs getting ahead of the game by declaring that others have engaged in some kind of -ism, thereby triggering a process that protects them in that job while there’s an investigation or turmoil over it,” a separate executive stated.

That process leads to internal divisions as employees take sides. And when the woke rules are violated, no apology is ever good enough.

June 21, 2022

“Schlimmbesserung is a lovely German word which means making something worse by trying to improve it”

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

In the New English Review, Armando Simón considers some of the oddities of American worldview that seem so often to make worse the very things they try to “fix”:

Americans’ ignorance of other countries, their cultures, their history and their geography is legendary and world renowned and the subject of countless anecdotes and jokes by foreigners. This ignorance is inexplicable, as it is not found in America’s northern or the southern neighbors, so it cannot be due to geographical isolation. It is also a fact that foreigners know more about America than Americans know of their countries. Or even their own.

It is also a paradox. One would expect logically that a country that is principally composed of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants would have an encyclopedic knowledge of other countries, as is the case with Britain, which had a world-wide empire. Not so.

And this may explain America’s unintentional policy of schlimbesserung, the worsening of something that it is trying to improve, or as Greene described it so aptly of an American character in one of his novels, “armored in his ignorance and good intentions”.

As an aside, let me also say that this naïve optimism — to put it charitably — has enabled foreign governments to easily steal diplomatic and military secrets with little trouble, according to Gordievsky’s KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. John Walker, an American traitor who spied for the Russians for 17 years once said in a public interview that Walmart guards a tube of toothpaste better than the Navy guards its secrets. He should know.

Many individual American philanthropists and government bureaucrats go energetically out in the world upon hearing of some terrible condition in some part of the world through the television, convinced that they, yes they, can personally correct the situation when in reality they have no idea of what the hell they’re doing, who they are dealing with, or what is really going on in that part of the world, nor of the cultural, historical, and geographical circumstances. Nor can they even speak the local language! They are simply confident that they will solve the problem. And so they will feel good about themselves (for example, there is no question in my mind that some dirt-poor African doctors, upon learning that some idiot Americans, obsessed with AIDS, were going to send millions upon millions of dollars in their countries “to combat AIDS”, and having very few actual cases of infected patients, simply falsified the statistics. Or worse.). It is as if they were hopscotching across a cultural minefield with an idiotic grin.

The cultural values that one takes so much for granted that one is not conscious of may not be present elsewhere. For example, Americans do not understand that many countries e.g., Greece, Ireland, tend to explain their present problems by blaming other countries (Turkey, Germany, England) over what happened centuries ago instead of actually solving the problems. People in other countries are backward looking in that their sights are rigidly focused on their past, whereas Americans’ eyes are always on the future (and which might explain why Americans are addicted to science-fiction) while being generally ignorant about their past.

Also, it is a general truism that the majority of persons who run for office in North America and various European countries do so because they sincerely want to help and improve their communities/countries. However, in all of Africa and most of Asia, persons who seek public office do so for one purpose, and one purpose only: to steal everything that they can get away with. So when some ignorant, naïve, American shows up with buckets full of money, oblivious of the culture and the longstanding, entrenched, corruption, and with an announced intention to make the local community more like an American community, they are welcomed with open arms while suppressing their snickering. This also explains something where Americans exhibit willful blindness: other cultures don’t play fair. Honesty is seen as the trait of fools. Fools are to be taken advantage of. Especially in trade and diplomacy. Just look at China.

“Maybe black people generally prefer black music because it’s far superior to the standard ‘landfill indie’ that ‘Glasto’ is mired in?”

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

At Spiked, Julie Burchill wonders what happened to Lenny Henry:

“Sign of the times @ Glastonbury Festival” by timparkinson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Spare a thought for Sir Lenworth George Henry, Commander of the Order of the British Empire and knight of the realm. He works without interruption or unemployment at a job he loves (and in his spare time makes television commercials for Premier Inn hotels – megabucks payday ahoy!) and has done so from the age of 16. He is now 63 and, unusually, is becoming more attractive as he ages. He has sailed a trimaran from Plymouth to Antigua, performed on a record alongside Kate Bush and Prince, and escaped from marriage to Dawn French. Whereas some comedians become sad shadows of themselves – capering clowns who are laughed at, not with – in middle age he became a serious actor. His radio documentary, Lenny and Will, sent him “in search of the magic of Shakespeare”, whose plays he has since performed in to great acclaim. Not only is he very rich, he has also helped raise millions of pounds for charity as co-founder of Comic Relief.

But despite all of this wonderful success, Henry has in recent years taken to griping about things which really aren’t worth bothering about. Sir Len, where did it all go wrong? Well, I’d wager that it went wrong when Henry realised that if he identified as happy people might start thinking that he chose showbiz as a way to show off and get handsomely rewarded for it. And where would that leave him in the Victimhood Olympics? Nowhere near the podium.

His latest gripe is about Glastonbury. “It’s interesting to watch Glastonbury and look at the audience and not see any black people there. I’m always surprised by the lack of black and brown faces at festivals. I think, ‘Wow, that’s still very much a dominant culture thing'”, he told the Radio Times this week.

Here’s a thought. Maybe black people generally prefer black music because it’s far superior to the standard “landfill indie” that “Glasto” is mired in? And maybe they’re keener on personal hygiene than a bunch of scruffy, middle-class students roughing it on their gap year before going home to a cushy billet arranged by a friend of their father? You won’t find many white working-class people at festivals, either, for the same reasons.

I speak from personal experience. As a teenage reporter at the New Musical Express I got sent to a festival – Reading – as punishment for one of my many juvenile misdemeanours. The moment my stilettos sunk into the mud, I turned back to the station, thus facing a further trouncing from the editor. Every night, after an evening watching some rubbish punk band, I would go home and dance around the room to the sweet soul licks of the Isley Brothers until the awful white racket was forgotten.

I prefer more foreign things than I do indigenous things – from curry to gospel music – but I’m not some self-loathing idiot who believes that this country was worthless when it was white; if diversity is so great, does that mean that India and China and Africa were uninteresting before the West barged in? And don’t bother trying to make the countryside “more accessible” – I’ve never wanted to go on a ramble in my life. Why should I and my fellow mud-dodging citizens of various ethnic heritage be bussed into the racist countryside from the cities we built and love?

QotD: The modern age of ad hominem

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

Ad Hominem has become not only the prime argument of the scalawag, but, in the current intellectual climate, the only argument. It is the only arrow in the quiver and the only dart they have.

Hence, I myself have developed a particular enmity and impatience with the art of merely labeling opposing viewpoints as anathema, and dismissing them, sight unseen, with no further investigation.

These are not cases where a particular person known to have an ulterior motive or suffering a well earned reputation for dishonesty find his remarks being regarded with judicious skepticism. These are cases where to disagree with the party line or popular gossip provokes the accusation of being such a person.

While not all scalawags are Morlocks, all Morlocks are scalawags. Scalawaggery is the core of their philosophy. Morlock borrowed from the generous genius of HG Wells, for anyone who imagines himself to be evolved beyond human norms and into the realm of moral inversion, so that all rules of right and wrong, only for oneself, are flipped downside up.

In Wells, the Morlock is a cannibal troglodyte who treats other human descendants as cattle. In my wry jest, a Morlock is an intellectual trapped in a structure of reasoning he erected, at first, to justify his inhumanity toward his fellow human beings. That structure has since become for his his thought-prison. The bars and chains are mental and spiritual. Impalpable, they are unbreakable.

Their inhumanity include treating the children of other men as lab experiments and a mass attempt at sexual social engineering, namely, the elimination of the two sexes. Inhumanity also includes treating individuals as fungible and interchangeable nonentities in the great game of identity politics, so that simplistic and bigoted generalizations about minorities or majorities become not merely permitted, but mandatory. Inhumanity includes treating the prosperity and freedom of other men as optional, or even as hindrances, in the headlong panics and stampedes inspired by orchestrated ecological scaremongering and virtue-signaling.

Inhumanity includes regarding other men as meat-robots, or hairless apes, or helpless cells of blind historical forces, and hence as nothing more than the raw materials to be bred like livestock or organized like chain gangs or stacked like cordwood or slaughtered like scapegoats to create the foundations of the towers of Utopia.

The inhumanity, sadly, also and finally includes an inhumanity toward themselves, whenever a godless and soulless mind turns inward, and develops terminal narcissism. All men beyond the narrow orbit of self-absorbed self-regard are reduced to flitting shadows, and seem to Narcissus to be merely echoes, not real.

John C. Wright, “Ad Hominem and Illusion”, John C. Wright, 2022-03-18.

June 20, 2022

The blight of the 21st century – the dictatorship of the experts

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

Oliver Traldi considers the role of experts in the modern world:

Click to see full-size image at The New Yorker.

A few weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration as President, the New Yorker published a cartoon depicting a mustached, mostly bald man, hand raised high, mouth open in a sort of improbable rhombus, tongue flapping wildly within, saying: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” The tableau surely elicited many a self-satisfied chuckle from readers disgusted by the populist energy and establishment distrust that they perceived in Trump’s supporters.

But what exactly is the joke here? Citizens in a democracy are not akin to airline passengers, buckled quietly into their seats and powerless to affect change, their destinations and very lives placed in the hands of professionals guarded by a reinforced door up front. Even brief reflection reveals the cartoonist’s analogy to be comparing like to unlike.

That none of us thinks we know better than a plane’s captain, yet we often think we know better than experts in matters of politics, suggests differences between those domains. And it highlights a vexing problem for modern political discourse and deliberation: We need and value expertise, yet we have no foolproof means for qualifying it. To the contrary, our public square tends to amplify precisely those least worthy of our trust. How should we decide who counts an expert, what topics their expertise properly addresses, and which claims deserve deference?

* * *

We all rely upon experts. When something hurts, we consult a doctor, unless it’s a toothache, in which case we go to a dentist. We trust plumbers, electricians, and roofers to build and repair our homes, and we prefer that our lawyers and accountants be properly accredited. Some people attain expertise through training, others through experience or talent. I defer to someone who’s lived in a city to tell me what to do when I visit, and to a colleague who’s studied a particular topic at length even though we have the same mastery of our field overall. A friend with good fashion sense is an invaluable aid in times of sartorial crisis.

In all these cases, our reliance on expertise means suspending our own judgment and placing our trust in another — that is, giving deference. But we defer in different ways and for different reasons. The pilot we choose not to vote out of the cockpit has skill, what philosophers sometimes call “knowledge how”. We need the pilot to do something for us, but if all goes well we need not alter our own beliefs or behaviors on his say so. At the other extreme, a history teacher might do nothing but express claims, the philosopher’s “knowledge that”, which students are meant to adopt as their own beliefs. Within the medical profession, performing surgery is knowledge-how while diagnosing a headache and recommending two aspirin as the treatment is closer to knowledge-that.

But how are those without expertise to determine who has it? Generally, we leave that determination to each individual. A free society and the free market allow for widely differing judgments about who to trust about what, with credentialing mechanisms in place to facilitate signaling and legal consequences for outright fraud. Speculative bubbles notwithstanding, the market also helps to aggregate countless individual judgments in ways that yield socially valuable outcomes. Two New York City diners may have signs promising the “World’s Best Cup of Coffee”, but the one that actually has good coffee is more likely to be bustling on any given day and to thrive in the long run.

H/T to Ed West’s weekly round-up post for the link.

Criminal justice reform

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

At Time Well Spent, an interview with Charles Fain Lehman that considers the divergence between “what everyone knows” (based on how or if the media reports on an issue) and reality in the criminal justice system:

“Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park” by August Rode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I want to really dive into your work at City Journal and elsewhere because you’ve produced some of the most informative and sensible material on crime and crime policy I’ve found online, but before that I’m wondering: where does your interest in crime reporting come from, and what inspires you to keep going in the wake of what seems like a pro-crime movement capturing our newsrooms, elite colleges, and preeminent government institutions? You were the first person to support my interest in converting to Judaism as a black dude (as I mentioned in our dms), and so I have to ask also if Jewish culture centralizes the importance of issues of public safety in some way? Let’s get into it.

In some senses, my interest in crime is just a product of my natural contrarianism — I am rarely satisfied with the popular explanation. When I first started out as a reporter (at the Washington Free Beacon), I focused on domestic policy broadly, which I still do to some extent. I have a fluency with numbers, and so my first intuition was to dig into publicly available data. What I regularly found was that data about the criminal justice system simply did not align with the account of reality pushed by the criminal justice reform movement. Books like The New Jim Crow and documentaries like Thirteen give the impression that most people are in prison for marijuana possession on trumped up mandatory minima, all at the behest of the private prison-industrial complex. In reality, the majority of offenders are in prison for murder, marijuana possession is barely an asterisk in prison populations, mandatory minima explain little of the growth in prison populations, and few prisoners are held in private prisons at all. So I began to develop the sense that perhaps the story popular with people, even conservatives, my age was not precisely up to snuff.

The other issue that I think started me down the road to my “tough on crime” stances today was learning about death penalty abolitionism. I wrote a long essay (unfortunately never published) about the death of Clayton Lockett, who was executed in Oklahoma with a drug called midazolam, which lead to a fairly horrible death. What became apparent to me in researching the piece is that Oklahoma only used midazolam because anti-death-penalty activists had lobbied pharmaceutical firms to stop selling more reliable drugs, namely pentobarbital and thiopental, to states, forcing them to switch to less reliable methods. This sort of unintended consequence is actually a common theme across abolitionist activism. For example, in 2019 the Supreme Court blocked the execution of Vernon Madison, a 68-year-old man whose lawyers argued that dementia rendered him incompetent for execution. But of course, Madison only developed dementia because he’d been awaiting execution for literal decades, since he murdered a police officer in 1985.

These may seem like fairly specific issues, but I think they can allow us to identify a common theme with the progressive current in criminal justice reform, namely a belief that “justice” is primarily a concern of the accused — protecting his rights, defending him against the state, etc. Values like due process are, of course, important. But our discourse obfuscates entirely the basic fact that most criminals have committed heinous acts, and that the first responsibility of justice is to redress those harms through punishment. I am motivated, in other words, by a basic belief that justice matters, and that many reformers, in their zeal for fairness or equity or whatever, actively undermine the pursuit thereof.

I don’t think this is consciously a Jewish attitude, which is to say I don’t think I came to this sentiment because I was taught at some point that this is what Jews believed. That said, I tend to think the view that one of the ways that Judaism is distinguished from Christianity is the primacy of justice in the former, compared to the primacy of mercy in the latter. To the Christian, everyone is a sinner, and so the differences between me and the death row prisoner are ontologically trivial. (A view like this I think motivates someone like the Atlantic‘s Liz Bruenig, whom I credit as one of the few honest death penalty opponents, even as I disagree with her.) Judaism, by contrast, is fundamentally a religion of law: God says that these things ought to be done, and to live well is to do them. Of course, Judaism thinks a great deal about the balance of justice and mercy — the Talmud blunts the Torah‘s death penalties, for example. But Judaism always proceeds from the view that there are laws which should be respected, and that violating those laws requires consequences. So in that regard, I suspect that my views are inflected by Judaism. And indeed, coming around to those views I think helped me to think more about Judaism, too.

June 19, 2022

Has anyone checked the “Best Before” date on the federal government lately?

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

In the free-to-cheapskates abridged edition of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors wonder if the Trudeau government may have inadvertently entered the end-game phase of its life:

Your Line editors have grown wary of making firm predictions. We’ve been burned a few times before, plus, the last two years have been so wild it’s almost impossible to take seriously any prediction with a time horizon longer than a week or two. All that being said, one of your Line editors did have something of a prediction this week. Honestly maybe something more akin to an intuition or a Spidey sense tingling. But as he watched the news over the last 10 days or so, he found himself wondering: is this it for the Liberals? Is this the start of a death spiral? Is this what we will look back to in years to come as the moment they crossed the point of no return?

The Liberals started to look and feel really burnt out and exhausted this week. Of course they’re burnt out and exhausted. It’s been a hellish two years for everyone, and they were dealing with the Trump circus for years before that. They haven’t usually looked exhausted, though. Even when they have no doubt been running on adrenaline, existential terror, caffeine and digestive bile, they kept running. That’s not sustainable forever, though, and sooner or later, a government slips into the terminal phase of democratic politics. We’ve all seen that before, and we recognize the signs when we see it.

Just think about the stories over the last few days. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino has come in for widespread criticism, and not just from here at The Line, for his handling of the gun control and Emergencies Act files. Chrystia Freeland, for her part, made a wholly uninspiring appearance before the committee investigating the Emergencies Act, and followed that up with a speech to a Toronto business crowd where she rolled out the Liberal plan to help Canadians cope with inflation. It was nothing but a repackaging of previously announced initiatives, some of which are fine on their merits, but none of which, even in total, will make a dent against inflation. Mélanie Joly’s office, as noted in greater detail in the full, subscribers-only version of the dispatch, has become a complete clown show of absurdity this week. Karina Gould, normally one of Trudeau’s less trouble-making ministers, had to issue a mea culpa over a minor ethics breach. The Liberals rammed Bill C-11, which would regulate internet content, through the House with unseemly speed, and the Senate is pledging to do the thorough review that the House Liberals clearly wished to avoid.

And then there was the sudden evolution of Liberals’ stand on vaccine mandates, and the pandemic more generally. Facing enormous public pressure over delays at the airports, the Liberals first agreed to “suspend” random COVID-19 testing of passengers landing in Canadian airports from international arrivals. This week, they followed that by suspending the vaccine mandate for air and rail travel. In both cases, the government had been overtly defending both of those measures as absolute necessities just hours or days before scrapping — sorry, “suspending” — them. We won’t even try to summarize this better than the National Post‘s Chris Selley did in a recent column, because we won’t do better than his absolute perfection: “By now, the Liberal playbook on untenable pandemic-related policies is clear: They defend each square inch of policy territory like Tony Montana at the top of the staircase until ordered to retreat, at which point they drop their weapons, flee into the night and claim science made them do it.”

Yuuuup.

In a political sense, none of these would amount to all that much in isolation. (Some of them should amount to a whole lot, because they’re legitimate issues, but we know how politics works in this country.) When viewed in their totality, though, all these (and more) stories over the last week or two start to look and feel like a government that has basically exhausted itself and run out of gas. When you consider the fact that, if anything, the situation facing the country is getting worse on many fronts — hello, inflation! — not better, it’s not at all difficult to imagine them struggling to ever really recover from this.

June 18, 2022

Do you remember Julia from 2012?

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

If you don’t remember the amazing life story of Julia Faceless, here’s Chris Bray to refresh your memory:

In 2012, the Obama campaign released a cartoon depiction of the choice America was facing, boiled down to a single figure: The Life of Julia.

Julia was actually, literally faceless, and entirely alone, traveling through life without family, friends, or colleagues. But ahh, like the story about the guy who asks God about the two sets of footprints, Julia wasn’t alone alone: She was supported, at all times, by the endless beneficence of the centralized state, our one true parent and deity, the very lifesource. She was able to begin learning as a child because Barack Obama gave her a HeadStart program; she was able to start a business as an adult because Barack Obama gave her an SBA loan. The God-Patriarch Barack walked with her always, enabling her to live, giving her the substance of her life.

That’s how it works, of course: You need programs so you can do stuff. How can a human being possibly reproduce without government programs to support and subsidize reproduction? It’s a biological impossibility — as is well known, the uterus isn’t even activated until the first government check arrives. You can’t do things on your own, and you certainly can’t do things with the informal support of family, friends, or community. Life requires the empowerment that comes with formalized systems of dependency.

Chris then follows up an earlier post on the administration’s muscular deconstruction of student-led activities and organizations at Stanford with some further evidence that even at the college campus level, deliberate infantilization of adults continues at an ever-increasing pace. Adulting is hard, man!

That’s way beyond you, poor debilitated child. Why don’t you try something that’s within your range of ability, like going for a walk around campus? You know, we have a formal organization that can support you in the attempt. To take a walk. Here. On campus.

The message of stories like this, and the message of the administrative actions they describe, is a message of weakness, fearfulness, debilitation, and dependency: You can’t. Imagine telling a healthy twenty year-old that he shouldn’t try to go camping in the mountains, ’cause it’s probably just way too hard for him. See, Stanford’s student life administrators are helping.

What you’re doing in your late teens and early twenties, whether you go to college or not, is learning adulthood — acquiring habits of independence and resourcefulness that you’ll carry for the rest of your life. (Ideally your parents will already deliver you to legal adulthood with a big part of this training already in place.) The message, don’t try to take a trip to the mountains, it’s too hard for you, is a knife in the heart of that journey. It’s a disgusting and shameful thing to communicate to young adults.

QotD: Celebrities “came up out of the lagoon and helped themselves to all the culture they could find. They just ate everything.”

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

SO YOU’RE SAYING CELEBRITIES ARE A CULTURE PROBLEM?

Well, actually, I’m asking.

Are celebrities one of the reasons our culture is now so chaotic and unstable?

There is a strong case for “yes”.

For starters, celebrities have many flaws.

They can be self centered, as when Madonna was asked to celebrate Aretha Franklin. She referenced herself more than 50 times, and Ms. Franklin 4 times.

They can be naive, as when Gal Gadot lead a sing-along with fellow celebrities from the comfort and protection of their beautiful homes. She now agrees this was “in poor taste”.

Celebrities are not durable. That’s our our fault. We raise them up and we strike them down. And because we have the attention span of a French monarch, their moment in the spot light is fleeting. But it means our relationship with them is often fleeting.

Celebrities are vulnerable. Being a celebrity is incredibly perilous. Living in the very thin air up there, no mortal should wish for this. So celebrities suffer. They have break downs. They slide into drug dependency and bad relationships. At this point it is hard for them to be exemplars. Unless of course we are struggling too.

But here’s the key reason to treat celebrities as a culture problem.

In the course of the 20th century, celebrities ate their way through Western society, consuming or discrediting any and every elite that dared compete with them.

In this period, people still cared about scientists and other experts. They saw editors, publishers, judges, and professors as figures of authority. They admired and sought to emulate people of exalted social standing. They looked to religious leaders to address the big issues of the day. Artists, a few of them, were consulted. Designers, some of them, were gods.

This is mostly gone. Celebrities brought them low. It’s not clear that they meant to. It’s more likely that the simply won the popularity contest of contemporary culture.

We could choose between (nearly) dead white males, cranky, pipe smoking, vest wearing, utterly pompous creatures who would occasionally stoop to correct us. Or we could go with the effortlessly charismatic, blindingly beautiful, funny, endearing, eager-to-please people. I mean just look at the people in the “selfie” above. You can’t help but be wowed. Game, set and match to the movie star.

Celebrities remind me of the Rem Koolhaas library in Seattle.

This never fails to make me think of a mechanical monster that’s just crawled out of Seattle’s Elliot Bay and climbed the hill looking for lunch.

That’s what celebrities did. They came up out of the lagoon and helped themselves to all the culture they could find. They just ate everything.

It started with children’s books. They had to write em. Then it was lines of perfume and clothing. They had to design em. Then of course it was politics. How could we possibly do without em? Most of the people running for office in the US are now strikingly attractive. Some of them could actually be part-time models. This is the celebrity effect.

But here’s the other reason that the celebrity influence might be a cause of our instability. It is that they have colonized our young. There are lots of ways of making this argument, but I think “exhibit A” is probably TikTok. This platform matters because it mints celebrity. And that matters because a fifteen year old typically believes he or she matters in exact proportion to his or her fame.

Grant McCracken, “Culture Problem: celebrities”, Future Watch: an anthropological pov, 2022-03-17.

June 17, 2022

Oikophobia run rampant

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

In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers the prevalence of oikophobia in western culture:

In an article for the American Mind, Daniel Mahoney draws our attention to a recent book on the phenomenon of oikophobia, the dislike or even hatred of one’s own country or culture, which now seems so prevalent in western academic and intellectual circles as to be almost an orthodoxy or requirement for acceptance into the intellectual class. Of course, no social trend or phenomenon is entirely new or has an indisputable starting point: for example, George Orwell drew attention to English self-hatred many years ago. But the spread of oikophobia has been of epidemic proportion in late years.

It seems to me that Mr. Mahoney’s analysis can be extended. The first question to ask is why oikophobia should now be so prevalent. To this, I should tentatively reply that it is because of the mass intellectualization of society consequent upon the spread of tertiary education. Intellectuals have an inherent tendency to be oppositional to all received opinion or feeling, for there is no point in going to the trouble of being an intellectual if one ends up thinking and feeling what the great mass of the people around one think and feel. Love of country and inherited custom is so commonplace as to appear almost normal or natural, and much of it, of course, is unreflecting.

But intellectuals are supposed to reflect. That is their function, and they are inclined to reject received opinion, not because it is wrong but because it is received. It goes without saying that received opinion can be wrong and even wicked or evil, in which case the strictures of intellectuals are necessary and salutary; but intellectuals themselves may promote wrong or even wicked opinions, partly from the a priori need to distinguish themselves from the run of mankind.

The phobia in oikophobia is the fear of being taken for one of the common run of mankind.

The second question about oikophobia is the old one of cui bono? Again, one must not confuse the psychological or social origin or function of an opinion with its justification or correctness in the abstract, but once one has decided that an opinion is mistaken or deleterious in its effect, it is natural to ask where it comes from and what interests it serves.

In my opinion, oikophobia is generally bogus, that is to say insincere, as is its cognate, multiculturalism. The oikophobe and the multiculturalist are not really interested in other cultures, except as instruments with which to beat their fellow citizens. The reason for their lack of real interest in other countries is not difficult to find and is of very common application. The fact is that it is very difficult genuinely to enter into a culture, or subculture, other than one’s own, even when that culture or subculture is close to or adjacent to one’s own.

The dark side of Tim Berners-Lee’s statement “When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination”

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

In The Critic, Tom Farr wonders about the wider meaning of the Eugenia Cooney story:

Eugenia Cooney in 2016.
Photo by Lilg54g – CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Journalist and author Mandy Stadtmiller shared a new article last week on her excellent Substack series Rabbitholed entitled: “Why is Jeff Bezos Allowing Millions of Teenage Girls to Watch the Severely Anorexic Influencer Eugenia Cooney Slowly Kill Herself On Stream?”

The article itself received widespread attention for its harrowing coverage of the story of Eugenia Cooney, a 20-something Twitch streamer and YouTuber, who has built a global fanbase off vlogs featuring her cosplaying, and giving makeup and beauty tips amongst other things, as well as her distinctive early 2000s emo aesthetic.

Cooney is also severely anorexic. As Stadtmiller’s article succinctly explains:

    Cooney’s horrific skeletal appearance is documented lavishly by her sick and enabling mother, Debra Cooney, who is seemingly keeping her daughter trapped and isolated at home with almost no contact with the outside world outside of the online predatory men who pay her daughter tips to spin around, crawl around on the floor, act like a cat and show how weak she is when trying to lift things.

Whilst Cooney’s story warrants attention, that isn’t the purpose of this article. In order to understand fully the social apparatus that allows and encourages Cooney’s mother to disturbingly parade her young daughter around for tens of thousands of digital voyeurs, no better explanation can be found than the one that actually answers Stadtmiller’s original question: Just why is Jeff Bezos allowing millions of teenage girls to watch Eugenia Cooney slowly kill herself on stream?

Whilst Jeff Bezos could and should be skewered for his role in amassing grotesque, Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth at the expense of anyone with the temerity to want to use the toilet during their working hours, in this instance he is merely a symptom of a deeper rot that has taken hold of our society, aided in part by the explosion of the internet in the late 90s.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, once said: “When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.” Berners-Lee was not wrong, but it would be unfair to stick him with the responsibility for what the depraved depths of some individuals’ “imagination” have conjured up in the subsequent decades since the web’s mass adoption.

Those of us who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s — ostensibly the first generation to be exposed from an early age to the internet in its more rudimentary form – will surely remember the sporadic emergence of individual “shock videos”: from the fairly benign (“Meatspin”, anyone?) to videos of murder (“Three Guys One Hammer”), the internet was a developing digital territory that its early adopters were still testing the limits of. These videos were occasionally linked to entire websites that would host videos depicting varying degrees of degeneracy, but they operated mainly in the darker corners of the web, reliant on people sending links to each other on MSN with a description that would lull the recipient into a false sense of security in order to get them to click on it.

Such content ran, if not explicitly then certainly conceptually, parallel to another early-2000s meme: Rule 34. In short, Rule 34 stated: “Rule #34 There is porn of it. No exceptions.” It doesn’t really require Einstein’s intellect to parse what was meant by this aphorism: as the porn industry was finding its footing in the new digital age, the type of pornographic content that was readily available was also breaking new ground. Initially, those shock videos existed in a slightly separate orbit to that of more mainstream pornography, but their intersection was by no means a rarity, even in those early days. This somewhat grimly operates as the perfect example of Berners-Lee’s observation that the creativity fostered by the internet is only constrained by our collective imaginations.

June 16, 2022

Paul Wells takes in a current movie … and likes it

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

I’ve never been much of a movie-goer, even before the neverending pandemic lockdown theatre landed on us in 2020, so the chances of me going to see something like Top Gun: Maverick were pretty low (especially as I never bothered to watch the original, back in the day). Paul Wells is in the middle of a European trip, so he did what every travelling North American would do somewhere on the continent of history and culture: he watched a current-release American movie:

The mystery of Maverick is why, by next weekend, it will pass Doctor Strange in the Convolution of Fan Service as the year’s biggest movie, why it is the biggest film of Tom Cruise’s charmed life — why it strikes such a chord in this moment, even though its premises, visual vocabulary and soundtrack are 36 years old. In terms of chronological distance from the original Top Gun, it’s as though the top-grossing movie of 1986 had been a sequel to 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun. (“And there has never been a star as sensational as Betty Hutton!” Annie‘s trailer proclaims. Switch Tom Cruise in for poor Betty and suddenly the claim may actually be true.)

The simplest hypothesis is that Maverick is just big and loud, so you can leave your brain at home and enjoy the spectacle. But lots of lousy movies nobody watched were big and loud, including Matrix: Resolutions and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, so there must be some fuller explanation.

This being a Substack newsletter, I suspect I’m contractually encouraged to argue that Maverick wins because it isn’t woke. I’m afraid I can’t oblige. I mean, the movie definitely makes only the barest acknowledgment of taking place in the 21st century. None of the hotshot young recruits pauses from the action to specify their pronouns. None decorates their flight helmets with empty square brackets to acknowledge their privilege. The film’s few concessions to cultural change since the MTV era have the effect, not of engaging today’s fights on provocatively old-fashioned terms, but of declining to engage. Joseph Kosinski, the journeyman special-effects technician brought in to direct this film in note-perfect homage to the style of the original Top Gun director Tony Scott, doesn’t even bother to make the film’s racial politics as minimally complex as Scott did in 1995’s Crimson Tide. Maverick‘s young recruits, diverse in gender and ethnicity, are awesomely interchangeable in every other way. One smirks, one has a moustache; the others have no identifying characteristics. (When half the recruits get cut from the big mission at the 90-minute mark, there is no dramatic payoff because it’s impossible to tell these people apart. “Sorry, Component A, I’ve decided to go with Component B.”) Nobody under 30 in this film has sex for either pleasure or procreation. Yearning for intimate touch is plainly something only old people do, like writing in cursive script or owning books.

As a cultural argument, Maverick is so close to being tabula rasa that there’s no real point interrogating it. But on another front, it succeeds resoundingly in popular art’s primary function of tantalizing simplification. It started to make sense when I realized that Cruise’s character, despite the denial inherent in his call sign, is a career civil servant.

This is a movie about the action of a large modern state. It’s a film about public policy. Its central claim is a cathartic feat of Avengers-level denial. Just as the superhero movies offer us a made-up universe in which we have any hope of telling the good characters and the evil characters apart, Maverick posits a world in which modern governments can get anything done at all.

I may be influenced in this reading by the fact that I work in contemporary Ottawa. I’ve been writing variations on a simple question — Can Justin Trudeau get big things built? — since 2017. I’m hardly alone. And it’s hardly just a question about Trudeau, Ottawa or Canada. It’s been fun reading about chaos at Toronto’s Pearson airport, but last week the Financial Times ran a “big read” feature story about global airport chaos that didn’t even mention Pearson, Toronto or Canada. Joe Biden promised to Build Back Better. It’s not going great. Here in France, Emmanuel Macron is the first president to be re-elected in 20 years, a genuine feat, but it’s not going great. Brexit? Don’t ask.

A generic term for the ability of governments to do stuff is “state capacity”, and there’s a vague sense in the quasi-academic literature that it’s in decline, although, the real world being the real world, every element of this claim — that state capacity is declining, that it can be measured, that it even exists in any measurable form — is open to dispute. Still, it feels true, don’t it? The world was never great. In important ways it was worse than today. But it used to feel like it was possible to improve the thing, and now it just feels like everyone’s just firing blind and hoping for the best. COVID is a dynamite demonstration of this. Three successive Canadian federal health ministers were told, by a prime minister who prides himself on his ability to read the room, to get cracking on plain-paper packaging for tobacco products. And then the biggest public-health disaster of our lifetimes opened up its jumbo can of whup-ass, and it wasn’t even in the mandate letters. And it’s hard to blame anyone involved. All the chaos that has ensued had its roots in the original chaos. Real life doesn’t have a plot. As Homer Simpson said, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens.

QotD: The Guardian and “capitalism”

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

The displacement of responsibility is a Guardian staple, with society or capitalism (or “late capitalism”, or “neoliberalism” or whatever) being blamed for the columnist’s own hang-ups and incontinence. Tanya Gold did it two or three times during her time at the paper, as did Madeleine Bunting, Oliver James, VJD Smith and God knows how many others. Diane Abbott once claimed that capitalism is the reason she got fat, and still is.

It’s practically a rule. If a Guardian contributor drinks too much, eats too much, buys too many shoes … well, obviously, they’re the victim because consumerist peer pressure somehow made them do it against their will, such as it is. The premise is generally “capitalism made me fat”, followed by “capitalism made me anxious about being fat”, followed by “tax such-and-such to buggery, or ban it altogether, and then I’ll be thin”.

David Thompson, from the comments to “Reheated (55)”, DavidThompson.com, 2019-04-01.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress