Quotulatiousness

April 21, 2022

EU accuses Le Pen of financial skulduggery, in what I’m sure must be purely co-incidental timing

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

Theodore Dalrymple on the surprisingly frequent “charges made against anti-EU politician late in election campaign” phenomenon that seems to have become standard practice in France:

Marine Le Pen speaking in Lille during the 2017 French presidential election
Photo by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick via Wikimedia Commons

A disturbing pattern has emerged in French presidential elections: A credible candidate is found almost at the last minute to have committed an illegal act, the revelation of which is intended to spoil or destroy altogether the candidate’s electoral chances.

The latest “victim” of this pattern is Marine Le Pen, who is facing the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, in the forthcoming second round of the French presidential election, a repeat of the contest of 2017. The main difference between the two contests is that, this time round, the polls give Le Pen at least some slight chance of victory, while last time Macron gained not only an overwhelming victory, but from the first had also appeared likely to do so. The outcome was never in any kind of doubt, as it is now.

Le Pen is usually described as being of the far right, though in fact her economic ideas are in some respects not very different from those of the candidate of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélanchon, who came not very far behind her in the first round of the election, in which the two candidates who receive the most votes go forward to the second, and decisive, round.

Perhaps economic affinity helps to explain why almost as many voters for the far-left candidate say they will vote for the candidate of the far right as say they will vote for the centrist candidate, Macron. Mélanchon himself has expressed the wish that not a single one of his voters should vote for Le Pen, without, however, having asked them to vote for Macron. He seems, then, to be hoping for a high rate of abstention, which would strengthen his argument that the current French political system is undemocratic and illegitimate, and that the country needs yet another new constitution.

Le Pen has just been accused by the European Union’s antifraud office of malversation of funds, 136,993.99 euros (about $148,000) of the Union’s money to be precise, while she was a member of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2017. For example, she is accused of having claimed 23,100 euros (about $25,000) for the purchase of little objects such as pens and bags to be given out at her political party’s annual conference in 2014, which is not allowed under the rules.

It might be a coincidence that the accusation of something that was allegedly done eight years ago has emerged in the week before the election, but I do not think many people will be found to believe it. After all, Le Pen is decidedly hostile to the European Union, while Macron is almost a religious devotee of it. There are no prizes for guessing, then, which of the two candidates the Union would prefer to win.

The fight for freedom of speech must continue

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

Chris Bray on the foundation of the US Republican Party (aka the “GOP”) and the fight for freedom of speech then and now:

In 1854, Whig Party members disgusted by their party’s weak opposition to the westward expansion of slavery founded the Republican Party. Two years later, the new party ran its first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, behind the slogan that appears at the bottom of these campaign rally-song lyrics:

Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men, Fremont!

The reason free speech and a free press were in there as political premises in 1856, as contested values a new political party was fighting for …

Okay, hold on a minute. In 2022, we’re a little baffled that we’re fighting for free speech. An army of sniveling shitweasels insists that we need guardrails around our discourse to prevent extremism, and Twitter employees gasp and sob as some horrible monster threatens to use their platform to let people just say stuff.

Stop trying to let people speak freely, you Nazis!

The whole thing is so baffling because we feel like the other side is trying to win the game as we amble out of the locker room and get on the team bus to head back to the hotel, like, game’s over, folks, we won an hour ago. Aren’t these long-settled questions? How is it that people are trying to drive us back against the powerful course of the American free speech tradition?

And one argument I’d like to offer, if Robert Reich will allow me to make it HITLER HITLER HITLER this content should me moderated out of existence to protect democracy, is that the argument we’re hearing right now is very much one of the American traditions regarding political speech. We buried it for a long time, but it’s real, it has been quite powerful, and it’s back.

Max Fucking Boot, my God.

April 16, 2022

How much of teenagers identifying as transgender is “social contagion and the development of a new youth subculture”?

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

The sheer number of children and teens who are deciding that they are “trans” is far in excess of previous generations. How much of this phenomena may be accounted for by social contagion?

My teenage daughter has decided that she is “trans”. So have all her friends. Not some of them. Not most of them. Every. Single. One.

She had never heard of trans, and had no signs of gender dysphoria, until she was moved to a new, cool trans-friendly school by her unsuspecting, politically liberal parents. There she met a group of geeky (or dare I say nerdy?), smart, slightly (but not very) gender nonconforming, artsy kids. As I understand it, they all discovered “trans” together. The old “cis” friends were swiftly discarded in favour of this exciting new peer group.

Exploring “trans stuff” online with friends is a source of great interest and excitement — a real social event. What’s not to love about 245 gender identities, complete with their own unique flags? Then there are those cool neo-pronouns. Forcing your out-of-touch old parents to refer to you as “ze” or “ey” (how do you pronounce that again??) in the name of “inclusivity” is just too delicious to resist. The manga, the cute avatars in computer games, the blue or pink hair — all part of the fun as well. Mocking the outgroup (in this case so-called “cis” people in general and the dreaded TERFs in particular) is also good for a laugh — especially if they happen to be your parents as well.

There is even a special vocabulary with lots of new terms — deadnaming, misgendering, sex assigned at birth, and much more. If these concepts need to be explained to your uncool parents (accompanied by eye rolls of course), so much the better.

Bonding with friends, searching for their identity and place in life, working out their sexuality, separating from family — these are all normal developmental tasks for teens. For many, youth subcultures can be a natural part of that. Some are harmless. Some, like drug use and extreme dieting, not so much. But in the case of the latter, sensible adults usually intervene to help steer the young people in the right direction. Not in the case of trans. Here we have adults steering kids down a dangerous path, which involves permanent, life altering drugs and surgeries for which there is no good evidence base.

For many of these kids, LGBTQ+ is a youth subculture. It really is as simple as that. Recent surveys have been identifying skyrocketing rates of “trans” or “queer” identification in young people. One found that an astonishing 39% of young adults in the US aged between 18-24 identified with the label LGBT — the figure for teens <18 may well be even higher. Of course this figure includes gay and lesbian people as well as those identifying as trans. Another poll, which looked only at gender, found that nearly 10% of US high schoolers identified as “gender diverse”. Yet another survey gives a lower figure of 1.8%. Whichever figure is correct, this is a huge explosion in numbers over a very short period of time. As endocrinologist Dr Will Malone asks; “How do we reconcile these numbers with 2013 data reporting the prevalence of adult gender dysphoria to be a rare 2-14 in 100,000?”

Social contagion and the development of a new youth subculture, that’s how.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

April 15, 2022

Volodymyr Zelensky has become a “pop cultural admixture of Churchill and an ’80s action hero”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter explains how Ukrainian President Zelensky has shamed all the western leaders — like Trudeau — who have been long on rhetoric and short on action to support their claimed values:

“Volodymyr Zelensky Official portrait” by http://www.president.gov.ua/ is licensed under CC BY 4.0

When asked by journalists to explain his refusal to head for safety, Zelensky has made it clear that he has no wish to die, and that he fears for the lives of his loved ones (his wife and kids have since been moved to relative safety.) But, he added: “As for my life: I am the president of the country, and I simply do not have the right to it.” Sure, he could flee to preserve his own life. But, he has said, how would he explain his actions to his kids? As Zelensky sees it, he has no choice in the matter. His duty requires that he remain and lead his country in the fight; to do anything less would be dishonourable.

But while his Last Action Hero schtick has proven enormously popular with European and North American audiences, Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv, and Ukraine’s insistence on fighting off the Russians instead of capitulation, has put our so-called leaders in a bit of a bind.

To begin with, Ukraine’s refusal to capitulate to Russian aggression has forced many governments into taking steps they almost certainly would have preferred to avoid — economic and political sanctions against Russia, costly shipments of arms and other aid, diplomatic side-choosing, rethinking of trade agreements, and so on. Ukraine’s defence is coming at a pretty high cost, and the final bill is far from being tallied.

But beyond the economic and political price that is being paid to support Ukraine, there is the extraordinary amount of cognitive dissonance Zelensky’s behaviour has generated amongst the leadership of the West. Honour? Duty? Sacrifice? What century does he think he’s living in?

For centuries, honour reflected the sorts of qualities that gentlemen were expected to possess: dignity, integrity, courage. But it is hard to even talk about honour now with a straight face. It brings to mind 19th-century aristocrats in wigs and hose, demanding satisfaction and challenging one another to a meeting over some best-forgotten offence. The old honour codes couldn’t survive the triumph of the values of liberal democracy and the arrival of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the End of History, where the willingness to risk one’s life for abstract ideas or principles has been replaced by voting and economic calculation in the public sphere and “the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” in the private.

Today, the old notion of honour survives only in small and isolated precincts of (mostly) male society, places like the military and some sports, places where how you behave in front of your peers matters more than comfort, more than money, more than health, maybe even more than life itself. The rest of us have become versions of what Nietszche derided as “the last man” — creatures of liberalism who have no pride, take no risks, and desire only comfort and security.

April 14, 2022

Chris Bray contra Jonathan Haidt’s belief in a former, more unified body politic

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

Jonathan Haidt wrote at some length about what Chris Bray contends was an imaginary period of American history when people were less divided:

First, I think that this maneuver is the political strategy of a mediocre elite, with varying degrees of consciousness. The limit to which this may be true has to do with the spectacular loss of historical knowledge, which leaves a big part of the population feeling pretty sure that they’re the first people in the history of the universe who have ever encountered meanness. But the constant recourse to the language of “bullying” in the face of ordinary disagreement is a tell:

If you disagree with someone and only get the response that you’re vicious and a bully, you’re talking to an asshole; currently, it’s close to being the whole argument of the American governing class. The point of this kind of rhetoric is to win an argument by not allowing the other side to have it, and this seems like not really a mystery. See Jonathan Haidt’s reference to the high levels of trust in countries run by a “stable, competent autocracy”. Political elites all over the free world keep panting and sighing about how much they admire China’s dictatorship, and get a room, man.

A related diversionary strategy is the constant recourse to the argument that people who disagree are victims of disinformation, the pivot in which “I disagree with this policy” is met with horror that the peasants have been tricked by the Internet. For example, did you know that some people have fallen for the lie, spread by Russian bots, that the Covid-19 vaccines aren’t as safe and effective as Pfizer and Dr. Fauci said? It’s hard to believe how far we’ve fallen.

But the biggest problem in Haidt’s essay is a giant omission: While Haidt writes at length about what the psychology of social media has done to the public — how it’s eroded our trust, how it’s fomented tribalism and point-scoring behavior, how it’s trapped us in the pattern of confirmation bias, “making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories,” and so on — he never mentions the possibility that the psychology of social media has had the same effect on our institutions and the people who run them.

April 12, 2022

Mark Steyn on the first round of the French Presidential election

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

It must seem uncanny to Americans that the French can hold a vote, count all the votes, and announce the results all within the same 24-hour window …

Say what you will about la République française but, unlike America, its election operations are not a rusted malodorous sewer of brazenly corrupt practices. So the election was held, the votes were counted in hours, and the official result was known by 1am Paris time. There are no unmarked vans motoring the Dordogne or the Pas de Calais in the dead of night bearing additional votes sufficient to the need.

That speaks well for any nation. Alas, not much else about yesterday does. The Top Three is as follows:

    Emmanuel Macron 27.6 per cent; Marine Le Pen 23.41 per cent;
    Jean-Luc Mélenchon 21.95 per cent.

Mme Le Pen is designated by the BBC “far right” and M Mélenchon “hard left”. I am unclear whether, in Beeb parlance, it is worse to be “hard” than “far. But, be that as it may, they could at least cease applying the label “mainstream” to candidates who can’t crack five per cent, which is the threshold below which your election expenses are not covered by the French state.

On Friday’s Clubland Q&A I mentioned en passant that I’m all about the urgency: The west will die unless we change what we’re doing very fast. Yesterday was yet another of those election nights when the people turn but passing slow. Especially after the buzz about a Le Pen surge and a looming Macron humiliation, last night she didn’t have a spectacular breakthrough and he survived.

There will now be a fortnight to the run-off in which the forty per cent of French voters who cast their ballots for “hard left”, soft left, Green left and nutso left will be told that a vote for other than Macron is a vote against democracy itself. Mme Le Pen ran the blandest, most inoffensive campaign she has ever run, leaving it to the “even farther right” Éric Zemmour to do all the heavy lifting on la fenêtre d’Overton. And in the end all that got her was a couple of extra points in the first round.

We will see how well that approach withstands the onslaught already under way. The one man who could make a difference is the soi-disant “hard leftie”, M Mélenchon. His own surge attracted less attention in the last week or two, but it’s likely that, had not M Zemmour bungled his response to the war, the even-more-far rightist would have drawn enough votes from Mme Le Pen to enable Mélenchon to come through the middle and give France a run-off between a bloodless globalist and a full-bore Marxist.

In pocketbook terms, the gap between “hard left” and “far right” is now barely detectable: Mme Le Pen is pledging that no one under thirty will pay tax. There is surely plenty of overlap between the Mélenchon and Le Pen voters. Yet his priority was plain at last night’s speech, because he said it four times:

    Il ne faut pas donner une seule voix à Mme Le Pen.

Not a single vote for Marine!

So even the hardcore class-warrior shrugs: Better the globalist you know …

April 11, 2022

Ours is a fundamentally unserious culture, two examples

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

Chris Bray provides some examples of just how decayed western culture has become in our headlong flight toward total unseriousness:

In Europe this month to lead the diplomatic response to a war, the Vice-President of the United States responded to a question about refugees by giggling and cackling and babbling in typical form:

And then the “fact-checkers” at Reuters explained that she actually didn’t giggle and cackle and babble, because, okay, she did cackle and giggle and babble, but she didn’t cackle and giggle and babble specifically about the refugees, so it doesn’t count: “It is clear from viewing the longer video in context that Harris and Duda laughed at the awkwardness of not knowing who should speak first. There is no evidence that Harris was laughing at the refugees or the crisis in Ukraine.” The question was about refugees, and she laughed — she laughed a lot — right after the question, but Reuters apparently called no tagbacks before the play, so no points accrue.

So we have an awkward and ineffective playactor who occupies the position of a political leader, but lacks the stature or ability to go along with it, and we have journalists who labor to protect people in powerful political positions from the possibility that people will notice who they really are and what they really do. We have political leaders who aren’t political leaders, and journalists who aren’t journalists: the form without the substance.

Meanwhile, a recent debate on the topic of free speech at Yale Law School — the nation’s top-ranked law school, which produces presidents and Supreme Court justices — began with law students screaming abuse (“I’ll fight you, bitch”) at one of the panelists, before walking out as a group and continuing to shout and pound on the walls of the adjacent hallway.

Now: The students were angry at the panelist, the bitch they wanted to fight, because she’s an anti-trans social conservative, and couldn’t you just die? But the thing that law students are learning to do is be lawyers — advocates for a position in a formalized exchange of competing views, in controversies that play out in open court. They’re training at the profession of making an argument. The point of sitting through an argument made by a person whose views you despise is that you can learn about something you want to fight against; you can see what the enemy says, and how she says it, and so do a part of the work of preparing yourself to advance a different position. So we have law students, people training for a debate-and-exchange-centered profession, who don’t want to hear things they don’t agree with. It’s like a minor league baseball player saying he refuses to touch a baseball, because baseballs offend him, but anyway, when are you assholes sending me up to the major leagues? We have people who want to occupy the profession of the law without preparing for the substance of professional engagement with competing positions: the form without the substance.

(Doing what journalists do, now, the fact-checkers explain that none of this puts points on the anti-free-speech scoreboard: “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began.” It is precisely the point that 1.) law students 2.) walked out before the conversation began. In ten years, oral argument before the Supreme Court will be that Woke lawyers stand up and scream I’M NOT GONNA LISTEN TO THIS SHIT, YOU ASSHOLES at the justices, then storm out and descend into a long round of day-drinking while waiting for the court to rule in their favor, because oh my god they CAN’T EVEN.)

April 10, 2022

“Canadian media, ‘independent’ or otherwise, is about as sparkly as dry toast”

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

It’s impossible to disagree with the editors at The Line about the negative impact of government involvement, oversight and subsidization of the media, and the ensuing neutralization (or even Pablumization) of the news presented to Canadians:

“Newspaper Boxes” by Randy Landicho is licensed under CC BY 2.0

There is no way to create such a system without an inherently political process to answer philosophically fraught questions like “what is news?” and “what is a journalist?” And that takes us ever closer to the perilous path of state credentialization of a profession that only operates properly when it is free of both undue government interference and of government assistance. State meddling is bad for journalism whether the intent be good, bad or indifferent.

Every outlet is beholden to the people who cut the cheque, and if your business model relies on impressing government grant gifters or corporate social responsibility committees, then your content is going to reflect the milquetoast sensibilities of your true audience.

Which, bluntly, is why so much Canadian media, “independent” or otherwise, is about as sparkly as dry toast. Whole grain. To rely on government money is not only philosophically untenable, it is almost inherently corrupting. There are public journalism enterprises in Canada, including, for instance, the CBC and TVO, and your Line editors contribute to both. You can trust us when we tell you that the people in charge of those organizations work very, very hard to avoid the impossible conflicts public funding of journalism cannot help but produce. The readers can judge the results, but no one in either outlets pretends it’s easy. It’s not.

And in case it needs to be noted here again, The Line accepts no public cash. Not a dime. We rely entirely on paid subscriptions from our reader base, and we like it that way. Our relationship with you, the reader, is what allows us to be risky, innovative, and occasionally belligerent. You’re here because you like us — you really like us! — and as a result, we serve only you. That doesn’t mean that you’re always going to agree with us, of course, but rather that you can trust us to tell you what we really think.

We looked into the QCJO program and although we believe we would qualify for the program, we are simply too horrified by its mere existence to consider applying. This puts us at a severe competitive disadvantage, and one that can only be overcome by outperforming everyone else.

April 9, 2022

“Woke Disney” is far from a new thing

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

Geoff Shullenberger points out that Disney’s reputation for family-friendly media rests rather uneasily on the corporation’s actual products:

“Disney is the worst enemy of family harmony.” You’d be forgiven for thinking those words were uttered yesterday, given the number of conservative politicians and pundits castigating Disney for “grooming children” following its criticism of the “Don’t say gay” bill.

In fact, the statement appeared just over 50 years ago, in a polemical analysis of Disney cartoons written by two Marxist militants, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was published in Chile during the brief rule of Salvador Allende as part of an attempt by Allende’s leftist allies to push back against American cultural influence. The book became a bestseller, but after Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, it was banned and publicly burned.

The Right’s current lament for the betrayal of “traditional families who want to hold onto innocent entertainment for their kids” proceeds from the premise that this “woke Disney” is a deviation from the company’s benevolent past. But Dorfman and Mattelart, all the way back in 1971, contested this assumption of innocence. Although their methodology is Marxian and their aims overtly anti-capitalist, their allegations foreshadow the American Right’s current concerns in surprising ways.

[…]

How to Read Donald Duck contains many of the expected Left-wing criticisms of patriarchy and gender roles, but it also includes observations that might be surprising to ideologues today. Notably, as one illustration of the propaganda functions taken on by Disney in the Global South, the authors remark that the US Agency for International Development has circulated films featuring Disney characters promoting contraception. They reinforce this association with the title of their chapter on Disney family dynamics: “Uncle, buy me a contraceptive …”

Like many radicals at the time, Dorfman and Mattelart saw the US state’s growing interest in controlling fertility in the developing world as consistent with a broader campaign to suppress the value placed on family in the subject nations of its economic empire; this was deemed to be in tension with values such as efficiency, productivity, individualism, and competition. Disney’s exclusion of references to reproductive sexuality, in this light, looks less like an attempt to protect childhood innocence, than part and parcel of the larger modern decoupling of sex from reproduction.

It all suggests that the supposed sexual innocence of Disney’s dreamscapes was never aligned with “family values” in the first place and the Right’s current war on Disney isn’t about family — it is simply the latest phase of its realisation that corporate America has now largely aligned itself with the values of the cultural Left.

For, in fact, Disney’s vast influence on the imaginations of children has been enabled by market society’s weakening of the authority of the family. With parents overburdened by the demands of work, important aspects of child-rearing are entrusted to the entertainment industry. Disney has capitalised on this exploding demand more than any other company. If we take “grooming” to simply mean instilling values alien to the family into children, Dorfman and Mattelart would suggest that Disney has never been innocent of this charge.

It wasn’t the Wuhan Coronavirus that crippled the world economy — it was government reaction to the pandemic

Filed under: Cancon, China, Europe, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dan Sanchez points out the undeniable truth that most of the economic damage we’ve sustained over the last two years wasn’t due to the pandemic itself, but to the incredibly disruptive public health measures almost every western government implemented in response (with huge connivance on the part of the legacy media and the social media companies):

… it will not be the coronavirus making us poorer, but the fallacy, embraced by officials from Beijing to DC, that central planners can manage society-wide problems, like “healing” a global pandemic or “fixing” a global supply chain.

As the great economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek explained, societies and economies are inconceivably complex, and it is literally impossible for anyone to centrally plan something so far beyond their comprehension. To think otherwise is, as Hayek called it, a “fatal conceit”.

The fatal conceit of central planners is manifest in the very term “global supply chain”. The metaphor of a “chain” portrays the economy as something static and linear: something simple enough for a single mind to “fix”.

But, as Leonard Read vividly showed in his classic essay “I, Pencil”, even a seemingly simple good like a pencil is not the product of a single supply chain. Every good in the economy is descended from a vast “family tree” of innumerable factors of production. And all the family trees of all goods are intricately interconnected, making the economy, not a “chain”, but as economist Murray Rothbard depicted it, “a highly complex, interacting latticework of exchanges”.

This vast, dynamic latticework is self-healing and self-fixing: through the actions and interactions of its constituent individuals. Blundering, arrogant central planners only get in the way and make things worse.

That has been the lesson of free-market economists and social theorists going back to Adam Smith. The western world partly embraced that lesson, and it flourished as a result, becoming a beacon to the world. Starting in the 1970s, even Communist China emulated its example, opening up its markets. This was a humanitarian miracle for the Chinese people and a boon for us all. If not for Chinese manufacturing being integrated into the global division of labor, it is hard to imagine the west having the modern high-tech living standards and super-comfortable working conditions we enjoy (however precariously) today.

Whereas once China liberalized in emulation of the west, now the leaders of the “free world” are emulating (and, in the case of Canada’s prime minister, openly admiring) the authoritarianism of the CCP. As crises continue to mount, it is clear that this turn toward tyranny is putting our future at risk.

April 7, 2022

QotD: The KonMari message without Marie Kondo

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

My cynical concerns, to be sure, are not about Kondo herself. I assume that she is sincere in what she offers, and indeed I expect some might find her counsel truly useful. It is the nature of her attraction to Westerners that gives me pause. This registers most powerfully for me when I re-imagine what she offers in a distinctly American guise. Before I became a professor, I sometimes earned my keep as a maid. And this class-conscious part of me is more oppositional still where the fascinations of “tidying” are concerned.

In more fanciful moments, I think about decluttering the KonMari method itself, stripping it of the middle-class respectability its exoticism confers. In place of Kondo herself, I imagine a tired maid (maids are always tired) using her years of “tidying” to counsel a family on managing their too-abundant stuff. She appeals to her experience both in cleaning and in life – invoking, say, that time she had to downsize from a double-wide trailer to a single-wide. (Long before the “tiny house movement” – another pop-culture fascination for those suffocated by their own stuff – many people already lived in tiny homes, and these are called trailers.) My sage maid uses her organisational competency, hard-earned from years of picking up after others, and her long practice in the art of making do without the new or the shiny. Most of all, she is full of plain good sense. But what she will not promise, cannot promise, is that cleaning house will bring you contentment. Nor will she suggest that you discard belongings that don’t “spark joy”. And that really is the rub.

My wise maid will forgo soft talk of joy, and use instead a harder, plain-speaking language to assess all that stuff: does it still have use in it? Most of it probably does, and what does not was probably pretty useless to begin with. After all, usefulness is not the prime criterion for many people’s buying habits. But finding that you have a house overstuffed with things useful but never used would promise its own kind of wisdom. It won’t spark joy to see it, but then the quest to find joy in all that stuff was never a good strategy to begin with. This, too, is about everything all at once.

Amy Olberding, “Tidying up is not joyful but another misuse of Eastern ideas”, Aeon, 2019-02-18.

April 6, 2022

Proposed new Canadian censorship rules will ███████ the ████████ unless we ████ ██

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

In The Line, Josh Dehaas waves off accusations against Trudeau while also highlighting just how censorious his governments proposed internet bill can be to freedom of expression online:

Comparisons of our prime minister to a dictator are self-evidently ridiculous. But the Russian example is still a case study in the harms of governments having too much power over the flow of information and ideas in a society. Trudeau is no dictator but he does helm a government in which overreach is becoming a frequent and habitual complaint. And one such area in which this government’s more illiberal tendencies are beginning to show is in the realm of media regulation. Despite pushback from groups like the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Trudeau government seems determined to press ahead with laws to control what you read, write, watch and hear online.

The Liberals have long promised three bills aimed at countering three ostensible problems with online speech. The first bill aims to correct the problem of too few people choosing CanCon, by manipulating what you watch and listen to on platforms like Netflix and Spotify. The second bill would address the problem of advertisers ditching legacy newspapers for Facebook and Google. (Apparently the $600 million bailout was not enough.) The third bill, aimed at so-called “online harms”, would try to prevent people from saying hateful things to each other on social media.

This “online harms” bill is the scariest. Recently rebranded as the “online safety” bill, it’s apparently getting an overhaul from an expert panel and will be re-tabled in a few months. Let’s hope it never comes back. A version tabled last year, Bill C-36, would have created a tribunal wherein people found guilty of “online hate speech” could have been forced to pay up to $20,000 to their accusers, plus up to $50,000 in fines. In some cases, the accusers would be allowed to remain anonymous. Unlike the rarely used hate speech provisions in the Criminal Code, the tribunal would have only needed to find that the speech was hateful on a balance of probabilities, as opposed to the higher standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.

Even more ominously, C-36 would have allowed judges presented with “reasonable grounds” that a person might commit “an offence motivated by bias, prejudice or hate” in the future to threaten the would-be hater with up to 12 months in prison.

I don’t deny that hate speech can lead to harm. But do we really want government and judges deciding what crosses the line? One person’s hateful tweet is another person’s harsh but valuable contribution. Think J.K. Rowling. Think Dave Chapelle. Or think of the University of Toronto student who wrote recently that it was hateful for a professor to show an unflattering cartoon about Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a man whose theocracy executes people for being gay.

Proponents of the bill will tell you that it only applies to the most extreme forms of vilification, but at the end of the day it means government-appointees deciding who gets to say what in an environment that financially incentivizes the aggrieved. People will self-censor even more than they already do.

April 5, 2022

QotD: The “rules” of bad writing

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

Another common habit of the bad writer is to use five paragraphs when one paragraph will do the trick. One of the first rules they used to teach children about writing is the rule of women’s swimsuits. Good writing is like a woman’s swimsuit, in that it is big enough to cover the important parts, but small enough to make things interesting. This is a rule that applies to all writing and one bad writers tend to violate. They will belabor a point with unnecessary examples or unnecessary explication.

Bad writers are also prone to logical fallacies and misnomers. There’s really no excuse for this, as there are lists of common logical fallacies and, of course, searchable on-line dictionaries in every language. In casual writing, like blogging or internet commentary, this is tolerable. When it shows up in a professional publication, it suggest the writer and the editor are not good at their jobs. A brilliantly worded comparison between two unrelated things is still a false comparison. It suggests dishonesty on the part of the writer.

Certain words seem to be popular with bad writers. The word “dialectic” has become an acid test for sloppy reasoning and bad writing. The word “elide” is another one that is popular with bad writers for some reason. “Epistemology” is another example, popular with the legacy conservative writers. Bad writers seem to think cool sounding words or complex grammar will make their ideas cleverer. Orwell’s second rule is “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” It’s commonly abused by bad writers.

Finally, another common feature of bad writing is the disconnect between the seriousness of subject and how the writer approaches the subject. Bad writers, like Jonah Goldberg, write about serious topics, using pop culture references and vaudeville jokes. On the other hand, feminists write about petty nonsense as if the fate of the world hinges on their opinion. The tone should always match the subject. Bad writers never respect the subject they are addressing or their reader’s interest in the subject.

The Z Man, “How To Be A Bad Writer”, The Z Blog, 2019-03-03.

April 4, 2022

The Falklands War — the first postmodern war or the last colonial war?

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dominic Sandbrook in UnHerd says Britain “needed the Falklands War”:

On the morning of Monday, 5 April 1982, the aircraft carrier Invincible slipped its moorings and eased into Portsmouth Harbour, bound for the South Atlantic. It was barely ten o’clock, yet the shoreline was packed with tens of thousands of flag-waving onlookers, singing and cheering for all they were worth, many of them in tears. From every building in sight flew the Union Jack, while well-wishers brandished dozens of homemade banners: “God Bless, Britannia Rules”, “Don’t Cry for Us, Argentina”. In the harbour, a flotilla of little boats, crammed with spectators, bobbed with patriotic enthusiasm. And as the band played and the ship’s horn sounded, red flares burst into the sky.

It is 40 years now since the outbreak of the Falklands War, one of the strangest, most colourful and most popular conflicts in British military history. Today this ten-week campaign to free the South Atlantic islands from Argentine occupation seems like a moment from a vanished age. But that was how it felt at the time, too: a scene from history, a colossal costume drama, a self-conscious re-enactment of triumphs past.

On the day the Invincible sailed, Margaret Thatcher quoted Queen Victoria: “Failure? The possibilities do not exist.” In the Sun, executives put up Winston Churchill’s portrait. And as the travel writer Jonathan Raban watched the departure of the Task Force on television, he thought it was like a historical pageant, complete with “pipe bands, bunting, flags, kisses, tears, waved handkerchiefs”. He regarded the whole exercise with deep derision, until the picture blurred and he realised that, despite himself, he was crying.

For many people the Falklands War was only too real. There were serious issues and genuine lives at stake, not just for the 1,813 islanders who had woken to find military vehicles roaring down their little streets, but for the tens of thousands of Argentine conscripts and British servicemen who were soon to be plunged into the nightmare of combat. And although polls suggest that about eight out of ten Britons strongly supported it, there were always those who considered it a mistake, a tragedy, even a crime. A certain Jeremy Corbyn thought it a “Tory plot to keep their money-making friends in business”. The novelist Margaret Drabble considered it a “frenzied outburst of dying power”. A far better writer, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, famously called it “two bald men arguing over a comb”. That seems an odd analogy, though, for almost 2,000 blameless sheep farmers, who had no desire to be ruled by a junta that threw dissenters out of helicopters.

One common view of the Falklands campaign is that it was Britain’s last colonial war. But this strikes me as very unpersuasive. When we think of colonial wars, we think of wars of conquest by white men in pith helmets against brown-skinned underdogs. We think of embattled imperialists struggling to stave off a nationalist uprising, or fighting in defence of white settlers against a native majority. But the Falklands War was none of those things. There was no oppressed indigenous majority — except perhaps for the islanders themselves, some of whom had been there since the 1830s. As for the Argentines, their Spanish and Italian surnames were a dead giveaway. Indeed, few countries in the Americas had done a more thorough job of eliminating their original inhabitants.

Reconsidering the legacy of conservative activist Mary Whitehouse

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

Mary Whitehouse was a figure of mockery and abuse for much of her time on the public stage, a one-woman British equivalent to the American “Moral Majority” in the 1980s, without the performative religious connections. Even those who agreed with her concerns were careful to distance themselves from her, yet Alexander Larman wonders if she wasn’t more right than wrong after all:

I was surprised to find few public domain images of Mary Whitehouse available, so here is a selection of thumbnails (hopefully this won’t violate any copyright restrictions)

“The Queen of Clean”. “The Archangel of Anti-Smut”. Whatever you thought of the campaigner and activist Mary Whitehouse, she was hard to ignore. From her heyday in the 60s until her gradual decline in both relevance and physical faculties in the late 80s, she became the physical embodiment of social conservatism, loudly demanding that “family values” be placed at the heart of the national conversation, and that national evils (including pornography, abortion, swearing, homosexuality and the BBC in general) should be either tamed or dispensed with altogether.

Whitehouse died in 2001, and the obituaries trod a fine line between acknowledging her impact — even, at times, her importance — and denigrating her as someone who was almost driven insane by her campaign to clean up Britain’s screens. The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that one might have assumed was a natural ally, sighed “[she was] seemingly as concerned to eliminate the occasional ‘damn’ or ‘bloody’ as to prevent the worst excesses of pornography or violence” and the Guardian, a long-standing and probably inevitable bête noire, marked her passing by calling her “a self-appointed and much-derided guardian of public morals”, sneered at her “simplistic and nannyish” views and approvingly cited Ned Sherrin’s comment that “If she had been ignored for the last 30 years the world would have been a better place”.

It also, with some reluctance, admitted that “it was possible for many middle-of-the-roaders to think she was just possibly right”. The debate continues as to whether Whitehouse was an oddly prurient figure, whose apparently endless campaigning was dictated by some sort of strange mental imbalance (she boasted about her “direct line to God”, as if the Almighty were responsible for guiding her attempts to rail against the likes of Dennis Potter) or an ahead-of-her-time master of both media relations and social understanding. And now, for some reason, Whitehouse has once again returned to our screens and airwaves, two decades after her death.

The journalist Samira Ahmed recently presented a Radio 4 documentary, Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, that attempted to ask whether Whitehouse had somehow anticipated the rise of the internet, social media and society’s concomitant, and doomed, attempts to preserve the nation’s innocence amidst the ready availability of virtually every human depravity imaginable at the jab of an eager finger. This was followed by another two-part documentary on television, Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story, in which various luminaries debated whether Whitehouse was simply a bigot who should best be forgotten about, or if she had a salient point that has, if anything, become more relevant since her death.

On the one hand, there is little doubt that Whitehouse was a proudly ignorant and even destructive figure when it came to arts and culture. She refused to watch most of the programmes that she organised campaigns against, announcing, “I have too much respect for my mind,” and declined to consider such things as artistic merit, creative intentions or context. For her, nudity, violence and sex were things that had no place in British public life, and she was happy to roll up her sleeves and lead well-organised campaigns against things that she disapproved of. It was partly because of her that Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from exhibition in Britain for two decades, and her private prosecutions of Gay News and the director Michael Bogdanov for, respectively, blasphemous libel and staging a homosexual rape scene in The Romans in Britain, were vindictive and viciously closed-minded. The first was successful, the second was not, and its failure in 1983 saw the beginning of her decline from public relevance.

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