Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Jul 2014Sorry it’s been a while. Summer vacation plays merry hell with both my work ethic and my voice. *discreetly hacks up a lung*
King Lear! He’s not a very good king, and he’s not a very good father! Good thing that, by the end, he’s neither of those things.
One of the phrases in the mouth of managers or bureaucrats that indicates almost unfailingly that they are about to commit an act of betrayal is, “We believe passionately in.”
The only thing that most managers or bureaucrats believe in passionately is their career, in the broad sense of that term: for they are quite willing to abandon or sacrifice a career completely in the narrow sense if it is in the interest of their career in a broader sense.
I learned this in the hospitals in which I worked. As soon as a hospital manager said “I believe passionately in the work that Department X has been doing,” I knew that Department X was about to be closed down by that very same manager.
Thus, when I read that a publisher claimed that “We believe passionately in freedom of speech,” I knew at once that the publisher was about to withdraw a book from publication that it had previously advertised for publication.
Theodore Dalrymple, “‘Passionate’ Belief in Freedom of Speech and Multiplying Orthodoxies”, New English Review, 2020-12-22.
One of the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic has been to reveal to a very large percentage of the population the joys of instant expertise. The world now has hundreds of millions, if not several billions, of epidemiologists, virologists, and clinicians, all of whom know best how to deal with the pandemic. The only problem is that their solutions are at variance with one another.
It sometimes seems as if the certainty with which views are held is inversely proportional to the solidity of the factual basis on which they are founded. If commentary on the internet is anything to go by (it might not be, of course, for those who avail themselves of this means of self-expression are a self-selected rather than a representative sample), people often take a religious attitude toward their own doctrine and condemn as heretics all those who express doubts about it. I don’t want to sound like a psychoanalyst, that class of person who believes that he unfailingly knows the real meaning of what is said rather than its merely apparent meaning, but stridency of views is often indicative of unacknowledged uncertainties. Zinc supplementarians and others of the type cling to their beliefs with a fervor that evidence does not merit.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Everyone’s an Expert”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-10-16.
In The Critic, Simon Evans reviews Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle (who is perhaps best known on this side of the pond for his ultrawoke Twitter persona “Titania McGrath”):
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom, because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
Frank Herbert, Children of DuneIt is most peculiar. If the counter-culture had a dominant theme, it was the right to criticise the establishment and to question orthodoxy of all kinds. Back in the Sixties, it was central to its mission to Expand your Consciousness, man. And it worked. Walls came tumbling down. Yet now, everywhere you look, it seems the elements of society — students, academics, comedians — that one would most naturally associate with that freedom of expression, are introducing caveats and qualifiers to that principle faster than you can cry “Stop Little Pol-Pot, Stop!” They are turning, before our very eyes, into actual scolds.
It must be supposed that what was once the siege army, camped outside the moat like Occupy Wall Street, has captured the castle, for they are demanding that the walls be re-erected. That “hate” speech be distinguished from free speech and dealt with accordingly. That freedom of speech need not mean freedom from consequences. And a general suspicion is at large, among the young, that free speech is some sort of artefact of complacent boomer self-indulgence, like Steely Dan and second homes. No longer counter-culture, but decidedly counter-revolutionary.
I’m a comedian, and these have been strange times for our trade. Brexit saw comedians side with the mirthless neo-liberal consensus, against the humorous, sceptical grumble of the common rabble. The same thing happened in America, with bar-room stand-ups horrified by the vulgarity of Trump. And now the latest revision sees many of my fellow jesters and fools unsure whether people can really be trusted with free speech.One might have thought this issue had been settled long ago, in this country, and in liberty’s favour. But no, it seems we need to sharpen our tools once again, and Andrew Doyle’s new book is an excellent place to start.
Making the case for the defence, Doyle’s book is terse, restrained and as carefully argued as a QC’s summing-up in a top-drawer courtroom drama. Whether his command of the material comes from his doctorate in Renaissance literature or his experience of defending the comedy character Titania McGrath from infuriated wokerati, who knows? It is a beautifully balanced and comprehensive overview that will of course be read by no one who needs to hear it.
It is admirably historically literate. Doyle takes a quote from Milton’s Areopagitica as his epigram, with the old poet, declaiming over the din of the Civil War, as defiant as Satan himself, “Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
This sets the tone for the whole book, but Doyle also presents arguments intended to appeal to those who insist that we live in a society. With the compromises that entails. This was most famously recognised by notorious cis-hetero white man and free speech absolutist John Stuart Mill, who was surveying the world from the heights of Victorian Exceptionalism when he published the still unsurpassed On Liberty.
J.J. McCullough
Published 2 Jan 2021The show struggled for five years to figure out what kind of show it wanted to be, and how to treat its characters. It could have been much weirder than it was.
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The first three were essential to plan for victory and peace, though many of their key provisions, especially for the liberation of Eastern Europe, were ignored by Stalin. The first Nixon-Brezhnev meeting was substantive and a couple of the later Reagan-Gorbachev meetings were very productive. These were intense business meetings between people who really were at the summit of world power and influence. The only matter agreed to in meetings between Soviet and American leaders between 1945 and 1972 was in the “kitchen debate” between then vice-president Nixon and Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, when (forgive my coarseness in the interests of historical accuracy), Khrushchev accused Nixon of uttering “Horse shit, no, it is cow shit, and nothing is fouler than that” to which Nixon replied, “You don’t recognize the truth, and incidentally, pig shit is fouler than cow shit.” Khrushchev conceded the second point.
Conrad Black, “Take heed Canada: the U.S. would win a true trade war”, Conrad Black, 2018-06-16.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Liars and Maligners”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-11-13.
One might ask why a social-services functionary in New York City would cite the Bible in defense of public policy — except that the quotation is not even from the Bible. In fact, it is from Finley Peter Dunne, a popular Chicago columnist from the 1890s who invented a humorous character named “Mr. Dooley,” an Irish bartender who delivered his wisdom in dialect.
The original quotation, in which Mr. Dooley described the function of the newspaper: “Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.” Somehow, in a bizarre game of “cultural telephone,” this mock-sonorous fiddle-faddle has gathered the effulgence of holy writ for progressives, who take it as descriptive of their “joyous responsibility.”
On the one hand, it’s comical that this scrap of tabloid wit is taken so gravely by self-righteous officials. Properly speaking, isn’t it their job to make people more comfortable, not to diminish comfort? But on the other hand, it’s frightening to consider that New York is now run by progressive militants who appear to believe that their vocation is to “afflict” their constituents by disrupting their undeserved calm and comfort. Mass immiseration is not a side effect of bad policy; it is the policy.
Seth Barron, “The Politics of Affliction”, City Journal, 2020-12-17.
Algal the Bard
Published 19 Jun 2020Song composed by James Hetfield & Lars Ulrich
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6AU6D…
iTunes: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/alg…
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Twitter: http://twitter.com/Alvariu
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alvariu360
Instruments: Lute-guitar, Irish bouzouki, Low whistle (D), Drums.
In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh outlines some of the historic “diseases escaping from the lab” events that certainly allow us to be … dubious about the WHO maintaining the line that the Wuhan Coronavirus was “unlikely” to have escaped from the biological lab in Wuhan:
The original SARS virus, which terrorized Canada in 2003, has escaped from laboratories and infected humans at least six times since its successful suppression in the wild — once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and four times from one laboratory in Beijing.
And then there’s the great enigma in the history of infectious disease (maybe the second greatest — I for one would still really like to know what the English sweat was). How in blazes did the H1N1 flu virus come back? A strain of H1N1 was responsible for the Spanish flu of 1918-19; it lingered in human populations and continued to evolve until it was seemingly supplanted by a cousin, H2N2, which swept the world during the 1957-58 “Asian flu.”
H1N1 just plain vanished for two decades, then reappeared rather puzzlingly in Russia in 1977, causing a “Russian flu” pandemic and 700,000 deaths. This strain wasn’t especially lethal, but it knocked those too young to have natural immunity to H1N1 flat on their rears. Since then, H1N1 has been endemic in humans — it is incorporated as a matter of course into seasonal flu vaccines — and modern genetic analysis shows that the 1977 strain of H1N1 was, DNA-wise, pretty much a carbon copy of H1N1 strains from before the Asian flu years.
The “Russian flu” therefore almost certainly cannot have reappeared naturally, since it had undergone almost no discernible evolution. It probably crossed into Siberia from (wait for it) mainland China, which was then not yet a WHO member state. Some analysts think this may have happened because of a lab leak. Others think it more likely that it was a botched effort to create an H1N1 vaccine from old samples; H1N1 had crossed over to a small number of humans in the United States in 1976, creating the famous “swine flu” scare.
Still others ask: uh, is the difference between a lab leak and a botched vaccination experiment particularly meaningful? The general public may not know it, but a pandemic originating in a research laboratory isn’t just a hypothetical. It has not only happened, but there’s a decent chance that you, personally, have suffered from the resulting disease.
Alexander Riley looks at a few of those awkward points where actual “scientific” science conficts with the deeply held beliefs of the “I heart SCIENCE!” community:
… human and nature cannot so easily be pried apart. The evidence of the biological reality of the sex difference — not just in gonads and sex cells, but in personality characteristics and behavioral profiles, on average — is overwhelming, and science is daily producing more. Male and female brains are structurally different in ways that map on to the emerging neuroscientific knowledge on how brain structure affects behavior and capabilities. The feminist claim that these differences are wholly a product of socialization becomes more implausible the more we know. In societies where egalitarian gender ideology is arguably most widespread, such as in Northern Europe, there has been no disappearance of traditional sex differences in choices concerning careers. Men are still overrepresented in fields that focus on systems and objects, and women are still the overwhelming majority in fields dedicated to extensive human interaction and social services.
The radical spirit of ’90s feminism represented by [author Judith Butler’s] Gender Trouble did not stop at “deconstructing” gender in the effort to move toward a world in which gender roles are divorced from biological sex. Sex too had to be subjected to such “problematization.” Radicals used the writing of Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist who admitted her work was fundamentally shaped by her “1960s street-activist heart,” to suggest that the sex binary was also an oversimplified social construction. Fausto-Sterling insisted there are at least five sexes: males, females, “true hermaphrodites” with one testis and one ovary, male pseudohermaphrodites with testes and “some aspects of female genitalia” but no ovaries, and female pseudohermaphrodites with ovaries and “some aspects of male genitalia” but no testes. Perhaps, she asserted, several of every hundred people might be in one of the three intersex categories, with — the clincher — an “infinitely malleable continuum” between them.
It was quickly pointed out that Fausto-Sterling had been deceptive in her estimate of the frequency of intersexuality. Leonard Sax, in the Journal of Sex Research, noted that she had counted phenomena such as Klinefelter’s Syndrome (biological males with an extra X chromosome), Turner’s Syndrome (biological females with only one X chromosome), and several other conditions typically not recognized as intersex. One of these alone — late-onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH), which involves the overproduction of adrenal androgens — accounts for 90 percent of Fausto-Sterling’s claimed figure of 1.7 percent of the population that is intersex. But LOCAH is not an intersex phenomenon. Many individuals who have it are never diagnosed because the symptoms are so mild, and all who have it are born with typical male or female genitalia that correspond to the male and female genotypes. Nearly all such individuals go through puberty with the typical sexual development for their genotype, as the condition generally does not manifest in women until the early 20s and in men much later. The true estimate of intersex individuals, Sax argued, is roughly 0.018%, about 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling’s estimate. That is, more than 99.98% of humans are clearly either male or female in terms of biological sex.
But the attack on “standard sex difference science” was undeterred by this decimation of Fausto-Sterling’s case. In Gender Trouble, Butler criticized the work of an MIT group that had just discovered the region on the Y chromosome responsible for sex differentiation, claiming these scientists ultimately had to invoke cultural symbols of patriarchy to legitimate their explanations. In her view, this betrayed the very notion of an objective science of sex difference. We are always trapped in culture, she wrote, which means we are always trapped in patriarchy. A science of sex is impossible. Radical sex/gender ideology attacked science as male knowledge and elevated female knowledge as superior on the basis that women as a class were treated as inferior. Like blacks and other powerless groups, women — at least, women with a feminist outlook — could critically understand the point of view of men and supplement its lacunae with the fuller vision of the female perspective. Marx made similar claims about the superiority of working-class consciousness, though he did not attempt to cast the very notion of science as a tool of oppression.
The MIT group’s finding that what we now know as the SRY gene determines sex is universally accepted science today, and Butler’s ideological criticism has aged poorly in scientifically literate circles. So has her wild overestimation that perhaps one in ten people is outside the normal sex binary.
TimeGhost History
Published 24 Mar 2021The interwar era has seen an explosion of art movements all vying to offer the most revolutionary response to modern society. The competition is intense and, as we shall see, often spills over into open conflict.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Michał Zbojna
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…Sources:
Some images from the Library of CongressSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
“Epic Adventure Theme 3” – Håkan Eriksson
“Crimp” – Hysics
“Substage” – Jay Varton
“Appeased Soundscape 01” – August Wilhelmsson
“Stranger Days” – Alexandra Woodward
“Superior” – Silver Maple
“Rememberance” – Fabien Tell
“Ghost Dungeons” – Ethan Sloan
“Ancient Discoveries” – Gabriel LewisArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
The original idea for this episode came from me (Francis here, hello) stumbling across a passing reference to the 1922 trial of André Breton buried deep in a Wikipedia article. It led me down a huge rabbit hole on the history of the chaotic artists milling around in Paris, New York, Zurich, and beyond.Considering that it also takes place in the same season as the publication of Ulysses, the release of Nosferatu, the birth of Brazillian Modernism, and more, I realized that it was the perfect opportunity to dedicate an entire episode to the weird and wonderful artistic movements of the modern era. If this kind is new to you then consider this episode your introduction to the topic. Indy talks about the Cubist revolution, then Dadaism, Expressionism, and more.
In case all that seems a bit too niche for your liking then look at it this way: if you want to understand how people processed the horrors of the Great War, the rise of mass production, and modern geopolitical machinations, then diving into the art of the time is a great place to start.
Watch the video to find out why.
The weekend round-up at The Line includes a bit more on the ongoing scandal where over a third of the senior military leadership of the Canadian Forces are currently under investigation for sexual impropriety:
Canadian Defence Minister (at least for the moment) Harjit Sajjan in better times.
We noted with interest Steve Saideman, who holds the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton, has called for National Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan’s resignation — and Saideman is no partisan alarmist.
We agree with Saideman. Sajjan should quit or be sacked, frankly, pour encourager les autres. He should be epically sacked for birthing one of the stupidest possible excuses for inaction that we’ve ever heard from a minister of the Crown. Sajjan, under sharp questioning at committee, said — he really said this, we shit you not — that it wasn’t his place to get involved when allegations of sexual misconduct by retired army general Jonathan Vance were brought to his attention because, since Sajjan is an elected official, his involvement would politicize the matter.
Think about that for a minute. The entire goddamned basis of our system of government is ministerial accountability. Once upon a time, before it became awkward and inconvenient for him personally, Prime Minister Trudeau used to even boast about how he was bringing back government by cabinet, in contrast to that nasty, evil, centralizing Harper fellow. But according to Minister Sajjan, ministers are actually the wrong people to get involved in these serious issues … because they’re politicians. This completely inverts the way our government is supposed to work, though it might actually be a depressingly accurate summary of how Trudeau’s cabinet ministers interpret their roles.
But think about the message it sends to to our women (and men!) in uniform who’ve been the victim of abuse and harassment, sexual or otherwise: sorry, guys, I’d love to help and all, but I’m too busy being a fucking Liberal politician to step in as minister of National Defence.
Sajjan’s gotta go. Now. If he doesn’t quit he should be fired. And as we’ve been saying for weeks now, this is only getting worse — the sexual misconduct scandal that was frantically ignored by Canada’s self-styled feminist government has now made The New York Times, which means, if you’re an Ottawa Liberal, this is about as real as it gets. All that media attention was nice when it was fawning, with nice photo spreads, but … this? This isn’t fun for the Liberals at all.
In Quillette, Jonathan Kay looks at the attempt to cancel Jesse Singal who has repeatedly failed to follow the “party line” on Trans issues for several years:
One of the odd-seeming aspects of progressive cancel culture is that many of the figures targeted by mobs aren’t especially conservative in their views. Rather, the victims tend to be heterodox liberals who simply offer a dissenting opinion on one or more compartmentalized issues — since these liberal targets tend to operate in left-leaning professional and social milieus through which a mob can exercise leverage and demand concessions. There are numerous popular writers and broadcasters who promote deeply conservative themes without attracting any notice from cancel mobs — even as lifelong leftists within such niche genres as Young Adult fiction, LGBT theatre, and knitting-trade journalism are excommunicated on the basis of minor verbal infractions.
In some notable mobbings chronicled by Quillette, in fact, the targeted dissenter wasn’t even offering an opinion per se, but merely highlighting facts we’re all expected to ignore. James Damore wasn’t fired by Google because he gratuitously insulted women, but because he pointed out real differences between the sexes. In Canadian literary circles, Margaret Atwood became reviled among a progressive fringe when she argued (correctly, as it turns out) that falsely accused novelist Steven Galloway should have received due process before being tarred as a rapist. If you grovel enough, woke mobs might eventually forgive you for being wrong — but never for being right.
On the issue of gender, a particularly interesting case study centres on Jesse Singal, a mild-mannered and amiable (I’ve met him) New York-based journalist, book author, and podcaster whom Quillette readers may remember from his 2019 appearance on our own show. As early as 2016, well before the culture war over trans rights reached its crescendo, Singal authored a ground-breaking New York magazine exposé on the cynical takedown of eminent Toronto psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker (who was subsequently paid more than half a million dollars by his former employer, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, as part of a legal settlement relating to its part in that smear campaign). Two years later, Singal wrote an impeccably researched cover story for the Atlantic titled “When Children Say They’re Trans” — one of the most widely discussed features in the magazine’s recent history. In these articles, and on social media, Singal has dealt with the issue of gender dysphoria with care and sensitivity, documenting the challenges faced by those experiencing the condition. And while he is the furthest thing from an actual transphobe, he acknowledges the plain fact that some children who present as trans later “desist” to an identity that accords with their biological sex.
As anyone who follows this issue closely can guess, Singal’s measured approach doesn’t always sit well with progressive activist and journalistic subcultures, wherein the approved view is that any child’s expression of trans identity must summarily be “affirmed” by parents, educators, and therapists. Within these circles, Singal himself has written, “desistance isn’t viewed as a phenomenon we’ve yet to fully understand and quantify but rather as a myth to be dispelled. Those who raise the subject of desistance are often believed to have nefarious motives — the liberal outlet ThinkProgress, for example, referred to desistance research as ‘the pernicious junk science stalking trans kids’ … But the evidence that desistance occurs is overwhelming.”
We know from experienced psychotherapists in this area that children can present as trans for all sorts of reasons, sometimes related to trauma, sexual anxieties, or comorbid mental-health conditions. In some cases, the dysphoria is permanent, but in other cases, it isn’t (which is why the analogy with sexual orientation is misleading). Certainly, the idea that desistance is some kind of transphobic “myth” has now itself been shown to be a myth: In late 2020, British jurists upheld desister Keira Bell’s claim that the country’s Gender Identity Development Service had improperly rushed her through a medical reassignment process, at age 16, without proper safeguards. At the age of 23, Bell now is recovering from the after-effects of these treatments — including a needless double mastectomy — and confronts a lifetime of possible medical complications.
As we wrote in a recent Quillette editorial about Bell, it won’t just be doctors and politicians whose actions will be judged in relation to the excesses surrounding the transition of young people, but also those many journalists who’ve chosen to prioritize political fashion over journalistic integrity. Singal stands out as one of the few honourable exceptions. Indeed, Bell’s case is exactly the sort of tragedy that he’s consistently warned about over the past five years. To a certain kind of ideologue, such prescience is unforgiveable.
Sarah Hoyt on the current situation in American politics:
As we sit here, waiting for the other shoe to drop, almost weekly, if not daily, I field the question “Why isn’t anyone doing anything yet?” This is usually followed by wails that we’ll do nothing that we’ll just sit here and take it.
There are two things to take into account. The first is that most people aren’t us. Most people aren’t political junkies who know every stupid, unjust and just plain suicidal executive order coming from on high, from the office of the vice-roi of the middle kingdom installed over us.
The second is the shock part of shocked disbelief. Which tends to delay reactions quite a bit.
On the first one “but how can they not know?” Well, because most of our media is and has been devoted to lying to the people. They are the propaganda arm of international socialism, drumming madly for their billionaire owners, who somehow have failed to read a single word of history and think they’ll end up on top.
No, forgive me. It’s not that. It’s that they don’t think at all. They want to be accepted with the “best” people, who at their level are the old aristocratic families of Europe, who of course are all on the spectrum of socialism/communism.
What our idiot nouveau riche have failed to absorb is that these more inbred and pedigreed mental midgets might not know why they support the bullshit anymore, but it all started in the early 20th century with their being convinced communism was inevitable and putting on wolf suits before they were eaten by the wolves.
So we get back to the idiot millionaires and billionaires (hi Bernie!) are stupid and have never read history. After all they made lots of money in various ways that have nothing to do with learning history, so why should they bother.
And below them are the scrambling multitudes of the upper middle class who ape what they view as the beliefs of their betters and — when they attended college — the “smart people” who in turn were taught by the fossils of the 20th century that communism was inevitable and that all smart people are communist.
All of which amounts to: most of the people have not yet found out what Zhou Bai den has been signing at warp speed, or what it saddles us with. Fear not. These people are very very stupid, bordering on mentally slow, and they will make sure everyone knows, soon enough. Why, they’re proud of it.
People are already finding out retail, anyway. Very retail. As in, they are finding out every price is going up, and what was their very nice lifestyle is now evaporating before their eyes, as is any hope of getting better.
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