Quotulatiousness

May 30, 2024

As everyone knows, it takes at least three years to find a shovel in Canada …

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay notes the third anniversary of the “mass graves” moral panic here in the utterly dysfunctional Dominion:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

This week marked the third anniversary of Canada’s strange “unmarked graves” scandal — a morbid social panic that took hold of my country in late May 2021, following unverified claims that the corpses of 215 (presumably murdered) Indigenous children had been located at the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

As I’ve already described this saga in several Quillette articles, I will not belabour the specifics (which, by now, have also been covered in the international press, as well as Canada’s National Post and Dorchester Review). Instead, this update will focus on the manner by which Canadian public figures (journalists, in particular) have tried to evade accountability for their original gullibility, as it presents an interesting case study in social psychology on a national scale.

The background here, as anyone who’s followed the story closely will know, is a genuinely shameful aspect of Canadian history — the federally funded, church-run system of residential schools established in the nineteenth century as a means to assimilate the country’s Indigenous population. In many cases, children were forced to attend boarding schools located hundreds of miles from their home reserves. Mortality rates from infectious diseases (especially tuberculosis) were tragically high, and the whole issue was properly referred to an authoritative body known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which concluded that at least 3,200 children died after enrolling in residential schools. The real number might well be considerably higher.

All of this had been common knowledge in Canada for years by the time Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in Kamloops claimed to have discovered the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

In fact, she’d discovered nothing of the kind. But the Canadian media ran with the claim as if it were the proven truth. A typical headline: “Tk’emlups confirms bodies of 215 children buried at former Kamloops Indian Residential School site“.

If you don’t live in Canada, it will be hard to appreciate the national hysteria that resulted. In the press, Canada was officially anointed a nation of baby killers. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lowered the flag on public buildings for five months. Dozens of churches were burned by arsonists in apparent acts of retribution. The word “genocide” was thrown around in casual parlance as if we were Nazi Germany or Rwanda in 1994. The Canadian Press called the discovery of these ostensible unmarked graves the 2021 “Story of the Year.”

Then the days passed, the national festival of self-laceration abated somewhat, and it began dawning on some of us that — um, wait a minute — no evidence of graves had actually been presented yet. That evidence was on its way, right?

May 29, 2024

“The more they rant, scream and lecture, the more cool singing ‘Ausländer raus‘ and ‘Deutschland den Deutschen‘ will become”

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

Our deep undercover secret informant in Deutschland, eugyppius, recounts the latest scary outbreak of deadly neofascist singing in the beleaguered country:

The latest threat to German democracy including “one of the men in the video can be seen offering a slack, distinctly metrosexual Roman salute and giving himself a two-fingered Hitler moustache”

“Fascism”, as popularly understood, is both very bad and also very ill-defined, being a negative political vice characterised primarily in opposition to that equally ill-defined political virtue known as “democracy”. This “democracy”, whatever it may be, is distinguished above all by its fuzzy associations with a wide array of other virtues, like diversity, inclusiveness, equity and transsexuality. Fascism is mostly the opposite of all of these things, which sounds bad enough, but it gets much worse: Because democracy is a very fragile virtue, forever requiring vigilant defence and social fertiliser, fascism has become the most ineradicable and indestructible of weeds.

Or perhaps it is better, in our post-pandemic era, to say that fascism is like a virus. It is always spreading, despite (or because of?) our best efforts to kill it off. We vaccinate children against the fascist virus with years of indoctrination about the evils of National Socialism in school, but to judge from the present state of our political discourse, this programme has worked about as well as the mRNA jabs worked against Covid. Never have we preached so stridently against fascism, and never has it been so omnipresent.

Another curious property of fascism, is that it does not merely infect human brains. It can also taint cultural artefacts, like phrases. All of the very best people can use a specific phrase, but that does not matter at all should the fascists get ahold of it. Once they have run the benign words through their evil fascist mouths, anyone who utters them afterwards – whatever his intentions – may well be guilty of fascism. If only democracy were that effective and powerful.

As we’ve learned from the events of the past week, the Germ Theory of Fascism applies also to songs, even vacuous pop music. All of the most democratic people in Germany have worked themselves up into a collective outrage against an unremarkable 1999 Italodance tune called “L’amour toujours” (“Love always”) by Gigi D’Agostino, because some very bad fascists have been caught singing some very naughty lyrics to its indifferent melody. The fascists themselves have been cancelled of course, and the song is on its way to its own separate cancellation as well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

[…]

The SPD only deepened their performative self-parody by posting this graphic to Instagram:

The Sylt revellers had chanted “Germany for the Germans”, but in this image the SPD proposed an improvement: “Germany for those Germans who defend our democracy”. Checkmate fascists! Except, “Germany for the Germans” is a slogan most closely identified with Der Heimat (formerly the NPD), an “ultranationalist” and “neo-Nazi” party. Realising that they had unwittingly reproduced the forbidden Nazi incantation, and were therefore guilty of spreading this horror virus, our crack SPD social media team swiftly deleted their post and threw up a hasty apology:

    We just published a post condemning in the strongest possible terms what we all saw in a video from Sylt. We did not manage to strike a tone that would resonate with everyone. We would like to sincerely apologise for this. Our aim is to make it clear that we do not want to leave this country to the far right and hate preachers. We want to defend our democracy and our freedom. Let’s continue this fight together in solidarity!

This is one of those missteps that really leaves you scratching your head. After hours of foaming at the mouth about “neo-Nazi slogans”, our virtue-mongering social democrats posted their own version of those very same tainted words to Instagram, in apparent ignorance of their origins and deeper significance. We are left to ask what they imagined they were angry about in the first place.

It’s hard not to agree with eugyppius’ conclusion:

I have my own theory about all of this.

Once upon a time, teenagers sustained a vibrant countercultural leftism, which was all about telling the establishment to go fuck itself, ingesting inadvisable quantities of drugs and engaging in a lot of inadvisable sex. All of that was very transgressive and exciting, directed as it was against a much more conservative and straight-laced German society. They shocked people, and that was the point. In the decades since, all of those hippies have grown old, and the most ideologically committed of them have become that which they used to hate, namely a lot of insufferable shrivelled scolds. As is the way with scolds everywhere, they’ve unwittingly inspired a new countercultural movement on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The more they rant, scream and lecture, the more cool singing “Ausländer raus” and “Deutschland den Deutschen” will become. Maybe, if they don’t like these words, they should try chilling out and finally shutting the fuck up about fascism. God knows there are more important things to screech about.

In the meantime, our new fascist anthem L’amour toujours has hit the top of the German charts.

May 28, 2024

Rishi Sunak’s big-brained election-winning strategy: bring back the draft

Filed under: Britain, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Embattled British Conservative leader Rishi Sunak has had another of his patented brainstorms for a policy that will absolutely win his party huge numbers of “gammon” votes in the July 4th general election:

I thought the misty nostalgia for postwar “National Service” had died out long ago …

Here we go: straight off, let’s get the youth to do some indentured servitude, sorry, National Service.

The Sunday Times reports:

    Every 18-year-old will be required by law to sign up for a year of National Service under plans unveiled by the Conservatives this weekend.

    Rishi Sunak’s first manifesto commitment would see youngsters given the choice between a full-time course (for 12 months) or spending one weekend a month volunteering in their community. There will be sanctions for teenagers who do not take part. Up to 30,000 full-time positions will be created either in the armed forces or in cybersecurity training. The weekend placements could be with the fire or police service, the NHS or charities tackling loneliness and supporting older, isolated people.

    The Tories have pledged to set up a royal commission to design the £2.5billion programme and establish details such as how the cybertraining would be delivered. A pilot will start next year and by the end of the parliament legislation will be passed making it mandatory for all 18-year-olds.

[…]

The Prime Minister says: “This new, mandatory National Service will provide life-changing opportunities for our young people, offering them the chance to learn real-world skills, do new things and contribute to their community and our country.” I doubt very much it will do this. The youth could learn real world skills in a weekend job that they’d actually get paid for but under Tory Rule they must become an indentured servant of the State instead.

It was floated that “the weekend placements could be with the fire or police service, the NHS or charities tackling loneliness and supporting older, isolated people”. Really? The fire and police service having to babysit some surly 17-year-old teenager glued to a mobile phone? Is this really what a police officer wants?

No doubt the vast majority of the youth will be dumped in some NHS hospital to do goodness knows what, or indeed a nursing home. And what about all the people who are currently off work and on anti-depressants “because of mental health”. Will they be forced to volunteer, or let off the requirement?

Trudeau is at his very best in tackling imaginary problems

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

Tristin Hopper calls attention to just how much of the federal government’s attention is focused on problems that don’t actually exist, except in the Prime Minister’s vivid imagination, like the notorious “hidden agenda” of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives to turn Canada into the world of The Handmaid’s Tale by banning abortion (and undoubtedly forcing women to wear the distinctive red-dress-and-bonnet uniforms, too):

In Trudeau’s fevered imagination, this is what the Tories want Canadian women to be wearing in future.

The Trudeau government has initiated another round of warning that Canadian abortion access is at risk.

“Women’s rights, reproductive rights, and equality are non-negotiable,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared at a recent speech, as Liberal Party social media accounts broadcast accusations that their opponents endanger a “woman’s right to choose”.

This would all make perfect sense in the United States, which has indeed seen a wave of new state-level laws effectively banning abortion outright.

But the Liberals are talking about Canada, a country that has no abortion laws whatsoever, and no political inclination to create any.

Polls show an incredible 80 per cent of Canadians supporting a “woman’s right to an abortion”. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t once touch abortion during his nine-year tenure.

As noted, Canada literally has no legal language dealing with the whole abortion issue … and therefore any Conservative government would have to create a new law to even begin to address an issue that a super-majority of Canadians are already against “fixing”. Conservatives can be incredibly dumb at times, but that would be stupidity of a very high order indeed.

Then, there’s Trudeau’s determination to link Poilievre with Diagonal, er, Dialagon, er, Dialysis, I mean “Diagolon”, which is apparently some super-powerful secretive extreme right-wing conspiracy to … do something diagonal-ish? I dunno. I’d never heard of ’em until Trudeau started trying to tie Poilievre to them:

Earlier this month, the Liberal’s main attack against the Conservatives was that they were in thrall to Diagolon, a supposed white supremacist militia with designs on destroying Canada from within.

“What has not been answered by the leader of the Opposition is why he chooses to continue to court extreme right nationalist groups like Diagolon,” said Trudeau in the House of Commons on April 30, one of several times he would slap down a question from the Conservatives by bringing up Dialogon.

Poilievre’s alleged ties to Diagolon are pretty tenuous. At a Nova Scotia fundraiser, among the attendees who queued up to shake Poilievre’s hand was Diagolon founder Jeremy MacKenzie, who claimed he did it just to get Poilievre in trouble. More recently, Poilievre visited an anti-carbon tax encampment where one of the RVs had a small Diagolon logo scrawled on its front door in permanent marker.

What’s more, multiple police investigations have concluded that Diagolon isn’t even a group, much less an organized anti-government militia.

It’s basically three guys on a podcast and their followers — whom they’ve occasionally met for BBQs. According to an RCMP profile of Diagolon put together at the height of Freedom Convoy, it was “exceedingly difficult” to nail down Diagolon as “a distinct group, with common ideology, a political agenda, and the cohesion necessary to advance such an agenda.”

The bought-and-paid-for Canadian media, of course, haven’t done much to point out just how ludicrous these accusations are, because even if they’re not, y’know, true, they are “truthy”. It’s not likely to change, as the legacy media still hate and fear anyone who might threaten their cosy subsidy deal with the Liberals.

And then there’s the Liberals’ fixed belief that Canada is the most racist country to ever have existed and that our entire culture is based on white supremacy and oppressing the “global majority” at all times:

Derived from the U.S. academic dogma of critical race theory, anti-racism holds that Canada’s basic structures — from its police forces to its justice system to its parliaments — are all fundamentally white supremacist. As such, they can only be remedied by “deliberate systems and supports” favouring “equity-seeking groups”, according to official Government of Canada literature.

The Trudeau government has established an Anti-Racism Secretariat, they’ve poured tens of millions of dollars into race-specific grants and they’ve subjected every arm of the federal government to anti-racism mandates and training.

Agencies such as the Canada Research Chairs program now openly screen for candidates based on ethnicity and other immutable characteristics. And perhaps most infamously, it was a federal anti-racism program that paid more than $500,000 to Laith Marouf, a virulent antisemite who has repeatedly referred to his benefactor as “Apartheid KKKanada”.

All of this has proceeded on the core assumption that Canada is — and always has been — a country defined by “systemic racism”. This was stated most plainly in an internal Canadian Armed Forces report which declared “racism in Canada is not a glitch in the system; it is the system”.

There’s a lot of (imported) fretting and huffing and puffing about this “issue”, yet there is almost no evidence for any of it being true in Canada. It would be statistically more likely to be true that much of our government and business organizations are actively over-hiring and over-promoting people on the basis of them not being white or male or heterosexual than the reverse.

QotD: Women’s voting interests

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

… I was young, then. Imbecilic stupidity is common in the young, who are subject to fashionable excitations. My mother, on the other hand, was older. As a Tory, she of course doubted whether women should vote at all; but as my father was of old Ontario Methodist farmboy stock, his congenital propensity to vote Liberal had to be acknowledged.

“I have to vote Conservative, for his sake,” she reasonably explained.

She had compounded his characteristic error in 1968, however, and felt she owed an explanation to her son. This began by reminding me of her fragile, female sex.

“One thinks of the party leader on the analogy of going for a date.”

And true enough, the Tory leader, Mr Robert Stanfield, was the sort of man you could present to your father. He could be relied on, to get you home safely, and on time.

“But there are times when a woman does not want to get home on time,” mama added.

She, a registered nurse acquainted with the eccentricities of mental patients, called my attention to a phenomenon I had not previously noticed. Whenever a truly monstrous (male) psychopath is strapped away in gaol, the prison receives adoring letters for him, from women. These correspondents have never met him, and know him only from accounts in the yellow press. He may have been found guilty of heinously murdering a succession of wives and lovers. But they promise to be waiting for him on the steps of the penitentiary; and as the police will confirm, they are still there.

My mother had never comprehended how a woman could be so crazy. But when she realized that she had herself just voted for “Pierre” [that’s Trudeau the elder, to clarify], she suddenly understood.

David Warren, “The women’s vote”, Essays in Idleness, 2024-02-22.

May 27, 2024

“Product recommendations broke Google, and ate the Internet in the process”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia says the algorithms are broken and we need a way to get out of the online hellscape our techbro overlords have created for us:

Have you tried to get information on a product or service from Google recently? Good luck with that.

“Product recommendations broke Google,” declares tech journalist John Herrman, “and ate the Internet in the process.”

That sounds like an extreme claim. But it’s painfully true. If you doubt it, just try finding something — anything! — on the dominant search engine.

No matter what you search for, you end up in a polluted swamp of misleading links. The more you scroll, the more garbage you see:

  • Bogus product reviews
  • Fake articles that are really advertisements
  • Consumer guides that are just infomercials in disguise
  • Hucksters pretending to be experts
  • And every scam you can imagine (and some that never existed before) empowered by deepfakes or AI or some other innovative new tech

The Google algorithm deliberately makes it difficult to find reliable information. That’s because there’s more money made from promoting garbage, and forcing users to scroll through oceans of crap.

So why should Google offer a quick, easy answer to anything?

Everybody is now playing the same dirty game.

Even (previously) respected media outlets have launched their own recommendation programs as a way to monetize captured clients (= you and me). Everybody from Associated Press to Rolling Stone is doing it, and who can blame them?

Silicon Valley sets the dirty rules and everybody else just plays the game.

Welcome to the exciting world of algorithms. They were supposed to serve us, but now they control us—for the benefit of companies who impose them on every sphere of our lives.

And you can’t opt out.

For example, when I listen to music on a streaming platform, the algorithm takes over as soon as I stop intervening—insisting I listen to what it imposes on me. Where’s the switch to turn it off?

I can’t find it.

That option should be required by law. At a minimum, I should be allowed to opt out of the algorithm. Even better, they shouldn’t force the algorithm on me unless I opt in to begin with.

If this tech really aimed to serve me, opting in and opting out would be an obvious part of the system. The fact that I don’t get to choose tells you the real situation: These algorithms are not for our benefit.

Do you expect the coming wave of AI to be any different?

[…]

The shills who want us to lick the (virtual) boots of the algorithms keep using the word progress. That’s another warning sign.

I don’t think that word progress means what they think it means.

If it makes our lives worse, it isn’t progress. If it forces me into servitude, it isn’t progress. If it gets worse over time — much worse! — it isn’t progress.

All the spin and lobbying dollars in the world can’t change that.

So that’s why I became a conscientious objector in the world of algorithms. They give more unwanted advice than any person in history, even your mom.

At least mom has your best interests at heart. Can we say the same for Silicon Valley?

Visual metaphors in the British general election

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

When British PM Rishi Sunak decided to drop the writ for a general election, he must have thought he was boldly seizing the initiative but his timing was characteristically bad:

If your pitch to voters is that Britain needs protection in dangerous and uncertain times, it’s probably best to first show the voters that you can protect yourself.

For example, if it’s raining, you might want to consider demonstrating the good sense to wear a raincoat. Or carry an umbrella. Or if, say, you are the prime minister of an entire country, with an events team at your disposal, you might want to consider erecting a tent of some sort, something that can keep you dry without ruining your visuals.

Or you can be Rishi Sunak, the beleaguered British prime minister, and stand out in the pouring rain, unprotected, and get drenched as you state your case for more time to be the country’s leader, evading the storm only when re-entering the house you will surely be vacating after voters have their say on July the 4th.

To be fair to Sunak, it’s not easy to predict the weather in London. Nor can you always control the timing of events. But when it rains all of the time where you live and you do absolutely control the timing of events, as a British prime minister does when calling an election, it’s unforgivable to be unprepared. There’s a reason most Brits keep an umbrella nailed to their hips, and it’s not style.

And if you think this is to make a mountain out of a molehill, you should check out the front pages of the U.K. papers on the morning after the election call. “Drown & out”, blared The Mirror. “Drowning Street”, chortled another broadsheet. “How long will (Sunak) rain over us,” chirped in a key regional title. Each headline was accompanied by a grim looking Sunak soaked to his whippet-like core. The presentational details matter, especially when you’re putting yourself in the shop window.

Then again, to expect anything more from a Conservative movement that is running on fumes after 14 turbulent years in power is to put hope over experience. It’s been a draining (nearly) decade and a half. There was the austerity and economic uncertainty of the coalition years. The referenda — Scottish and EU — that choked off most debate on other issues in the middle part of the last decade. And then came the double act of COVID and Ukraine, a compounding whammy that hammered supply chains and put up energy and other prices, prompting the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations. It would have been enough to test any leader’s mettle, which is probably why the Conservatives have had five prime ministers during their stretch in government, including three in 2022 alone.

May 26, 2024

Will Rishi Sunak be the British Kim Campbell?

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

The British election is now underway and if the polls are accurate, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are in for one heck of a thrashing. If he’s particularly unlucky, he could come close to former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell’s electoral shipwreck in 1993 (losing a Parliamentary majority and being reduced to two seats in the Commons), but perhaps Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer isn’t quite the <sarc>charismatic juggernaut</sarc> that Canada’s Jean Chrétien was:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

I’m old enough to remember the sense of optimism, hope and promise felt when Tony Blair was elected back in 1997; not by me, obviously, but I could at least appreciate that other people felt that ‘things can only get better’.

Whether you think they did or not, Blair transformed the country in his own image, just as his predecessor Margaret Thatcher had done during her similarly long reign. No one could say the same of the recent fourteen years of Tory-led governments, a period that has been marked by a continual drift away from conservatism both within civil society and in many ways driven by the administration itself.

As I have said one or two times before, you could have woken up from a long coma and had no idea who had been in charge the whole time. It’s an indication of how far the Overton Window has shifted that proposals to limit student-led immigration are considered way out there despite being mainstream only a decade ago – proposals which the Prime Minister backed out of. One of the benefits of being in government should be the ability to shift the terms of debate, but whereas the rest of Europe is mostly turning Right, Britain under the Tories has gone the other way.

In retrospect, and I have definitely said this more than once or twice, the post-Brexit immigration policy was their biggest mistake. It meant the worst of both worlds for the country and for Tory coalition building, alienating both a large section of cautious voters over leaving the EU, and the many cultural conservatives they picked up in 2019 who saw the referendum as a vote on immigration.

In a parallel universe where the government reduced net migration to five figures, there may well have been immediate pain: struggles to fill vacancies, inflationary pressure caused by rising wages, and universities which now cannot survive without using the immigration system as a funding mechanism. But the Tories would have been on 30% rather than 20%; that they aren’t aware enough to understand this is strange, but then they aren’t an ideological party.

Rishi Sunak’s decision to hold the election early is very curious. Perhaps he was worried that enough letters would be handed in triggering a leadership contest; perhaps he feared that Nigel Farage would reappear and make the Reform Party even more of a problem. Perhaps he’s just impetuous and has had enough, but the announcement itself, in pouring rain and drowned out by a New Labour anthem played by a public nuisance, was fitting.

The prime minister is very unpopular, and the Tories are currently polling at catastrophic levels, but there is little enthusiasm for Labour and more people think the country will get worse than better after they are elected.

“Naked ‘gobbledygook sandwiches’ got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink”

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

Jo Nova on the state of play in the (scientifically disastrous) replication crisis and the ethics-free “churnals” that publish junk science:

Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.

Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.

Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on “breast cancer” becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a “naïve Bayes” classifier became a “gullible Bayes”. An ant colony was labeled an “underground creepy crawly state”.

And what do we make of the flag to clamor ratio? Well, old fashioned scientists might call it “signal to noise”. The nonsense never ends.

A “random forest” is not always the same thing as an “irregular backwoods” or an “arbitrary timberland” — especially if you’re writing a paper on machine learning and decision trees.

The most shocking thing is that no human brain even ran a late-night Friday-eye over the words before they passed the hallowed peer review and entered the sacred halls of scientific literature. Even a wine-soaked third year undergrad on work experience would surely have raised an eyebrow when local average energy became “territorial normal vitality”. And when a random value became an “irregular esteem”. Let me just generate some irregular esteem for you in Python?

If there was such a thing as scientific stand-up comedy, we could get plenty of material, not by asking ChatGPT to be funny, but by asking it to cheat. Where else could you talk about a mean square mistake?

Wiley — a mega publisher of science articles has admitted that 19 journals are so worthless, thanks to potential fraud, that they have to close them down. And the industry is now developing AI tools to catch the AI fakes (makes you feel all warm inside?)

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.

In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

May 25, 2024

Another thing for progressives to obsess about – “horticultural appropriation”

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

In Spiked, Lauren Smith wonders if your garden — yes, your garden — is a nest of racist appropriation:

Is your garden a bed of racist colonialism?

Is your garden racist? As incredible as this may seem, it’s a question many gardeners are being forced to ask themselves. The innocent act of planting a few flowers can now get you branded with the r-word.

A piece in the June issue of the BBC’s Gardeners’ World magazine claims that the weeds of racism have sprung up in some unlikely places. Landscape designer Jackie Herald argues that choosing to plant non-native species in British gardens can constitute “horticultural appropriation”, because they were originally brought to the UK as a result of colonialism.

Herald writes: “Embedded within cross-cultural borrowing is horticultural appropriation, something that’s all too easy for our nation of gardeners to carry on regardless. In many cases, the abundant plant selections that we now take for granted did come via free-willing exchanges, but were sourced by plant hunters during years of colonialism and power-grabbing global trade.”

So, instead of picking out plants willy-nilly, Herald tries to choose plants that “connect to my client’s cultural heritage”. That means you had better check your 23&Me results before filling your flowerbeds, otherwise you could be horticulturally appropriating plants that don’t align with your racial heritage.

Uprooting racism from your garden might be more tricky than you’d think. Not least as some of the UK’s best-loved flowers are products of “colonialism”. Magnolias, for example, came from colonial Virginia and camellias from China.

Apparently, the most problematic perennial of all is wisteria, that inoffensive purple plant you often see hanging around the doors of posh houses. In 2022, Transport for London published a sightseeing guide called Art on the Underground, which claimed that wisteria has “colonial roots” (presumably no pun intended). This is because it was brought to England in the early 19th century from China. The guide also highlighted the supposedly racist nature of using words like “exotic”, “native” or “invasive” to describe plants. According to TfL, these can cultivate painful memories of “histories of conquest” and are best avoided.

Fathers of Light and Darkness – Rockets and Explosives – Sabaton History 126 [Official]

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Media, Military, Science, Space, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Sabaton History
Published Feb 7, 2024

There are many inventors whose creations have been turned into weapons of war. A couple that really stand out are Alfred Nobel and Wernher von Braun. Today we’ll take a deep dive into their stories and the paradox of using destructive weapons for good, or creative weapons for destruction.
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QotD: “Dirt Theory”

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

Moving is racist, when white people do it. When a white person chooses to relocate, the consequences are racism. To understand this, you have to understand what Steve Sailer dubs “Dirt Theory”: Any geographical location where black or brown people live is “Tragic Dirt”, afflicted by poverty and violence, and the only solution to their problem is to move them to white-occupied “Magic Dirt”, where everybody is rich and all the kids have high test scores. At least, this is how liberals seem to believe the world works, and have made “Dirt Theory” the basis of their attitude on such issues as immigration. In their disordered minds, people like Harvard Professor Raj Chetty believe that analysis of geographic data about poverty, crime, etc., will yield insights about the causes of these phenomena — places matter more than people.

Robert Stacey McCain, “New Form of Racism Has Been Discovered”, The Other McCain, 2024-02-04.

May 24, 2024

“Great Britain is not yet a basket case. But we do a rather good impression of a failing state.”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Gage considers the plight of modern day Britain in the context of Rishi Sunak’s political suicide note election call:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

The ambition for things to get better is a bar so low it’s a carpet. A favoured genre of meme here centres on the dysfunction and general farce of a country with “Great” in its name. That lofty adjective edges perilously close to hilarity, akin to those countries prefixed by “People’s Democratic Republic”. The excitable kind with an AK-47 printed on its flag.

Call the doctor’s surgery at 8 a.m. An automated voice will reveal you are number 49 in the queue. When you eventually wade through, a soft-centred receptionist assures you in therapeutic tones that there’re no appointments left today. Sorry.

Book a same-day train ticket from London to Newcastle. Without a hint of contrition, the train company demands £786.80. That’s a week or two in warmer, healthier, saner Sevilla or three hours and eleven minutes on a train in Great Britain.

House prices and rents are akin to the board game Monopoly, in which your coked-up crypto-addled mate has lined up hotels on Mayfair.

Go to the supermarket. Olive oil, a civilising elixir which once threatened to heave the primitive British palate out of the Mesolithic era, is prohibitively expensive. If modern Britain were a film scene, it would be that of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas: Fuck you. Pay me.

This all-encompassing one-footed waltz feels like the finale of a political satire. Since the 1980s, we’ve parodied America. We’ve nailed the social pathology but not the prosperity. Essentially, Great Britain is an advertising agency with a nuclear submarine.

This election pits two tribes against each other. One tribe pines for 1997. The other yearns for 1979.

For a sizeable swathe of the population, everything is awful, and nothing will ever change. And thank God for that.

Here, a natural law dictates that anyone under 45 who dares suggest things could be better is to be consumed by a radioactive flood of sadistic nostalgia. The mere whiff of dissent conjures through the pavement a battalion of nostalgians who lament the end of Polio.

“You don’t remember the Seventies!” warn those who yearn for the Seventies. ‘Bodies uncollected! Rubbish piled up in the streets!’. In that fateful decade, striking union workers allowed garbage to pile up in the streets. To this hazy memory, the rest of us are serfs to economic juju.

Whenever I point out that a first-time buyer in London must save for 31 years just for a house deposit, a familiar chorus of denial debunks the theory of free will. “You waste your money on flat whites and trips to Rome!” goes the wearisome riposte.

During the 1970s, that prelapsarian idyll when rubbish piled in the streets, when adults caned children at random, and when Bullseye was on the telly, the average house cost four times the average wage. Today, it’s twelve to one.

To point out mathematical reality invokes spasms of uniquely British nostalgia. It’s a negative nostalgia which glories in just how bad everything was.

Churchill was right. The British people are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst. Memory-mongers paint postcards of perfect penury. Back then, children didn’t talk back. There were no phones or elbows on the table. Back then, that famed sense of community slapped any ribbon of dissent out of those who dared dream bigger than the suffocating confines of community life. The past is a foreign country in which children could count their ribs but they was happy.

Such nostalgia serves two purposes. The first indulges one’s triumph over wistfully disfigured adversity. The other bleaches the parlous state of modern Britain with a mop soaked in a very British version of nostalgie de la boue. Nostalgia, truth be told, is a polite form of dementia.

“[I]t is offensive to say that women should help men reach their potential; but … men must help women reach theirs“

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

There has been a lot of online outrage after Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker spoke at the graduation ceremonies at his alma mater:

“Stop giving men microphones,” wrote one of the signers of the petition to have NFL kicker Harrison Butker fired.

“As a woman living in post-Roe America,” declared another, “I’m exhausted from men telling women what to do with their lives.”

“How offensive to imply women are put here on this planet to help a man reach his full potential,” fumed a third. “We should be empowering women to achieve greatness however that looks for them. Having children or being a mother isn’t the currency we must pay to be treated as equal members of this society.”

And on and on they go in predictable, and predictably incoherent, statements. Apparently, it is offensive to say that women should help men reach their potential; but, in the next breath, men must help women reach theirs.

At a time when women encourage one another in “rage rituals” and feminists like Mona Eltahawy call for perpetual anger as the route to liberation, few can be surprised by the hysteria that followed National Football League kicker Harrison Butker’s speech to the graduating students of Benedictine College in Kansas. It is a rage that has led well over 200,000 of the furious, mostly women, to sign a petition demanding he be fired by the Kansas City Chiefs.

Manufacturing outrage is what feminist journalism does best, and its audience is eager for cosplay rebellion and narcissistic posturing even when, as in the case of the speech, the hyperventilating is far in excess of the fact. That even Benedictine nuns have joined the chorus shows how many women in all walks of life find such posturing near-irresistible.

Of course, if Butker had addressed the Benedictine College graduates to say that Catholicism was riddled with misogyny and homophobia, no popular petitions would have been launched. If he had said that abortion was a gift to humanity and that female priests would lead the church to glory, his words would have sparked dissent only in the most marginal of venues.

Let a man praise his wife for her devotion to family, and we witness a stampede of foul-mouthed nasties to their bullhorns.

May 23, 2024

Where does a former general go to get his reputation back?

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The National Post reports on a former Canadian senior officer launching a lawsuit in an attempt to clear his reputation after an abortive court martial brought his career to an end:

Lt.-Gen. Steven Whelan, a three-star general who was accused of sexual misconduct in what he claims was a politically motivated prosecution that was then abandoned before he was able to defend himself, is looking for his day in court.

“I didn’t get a chance to tell my side of the story,” he told me.

Whelan’s lawyer, Phillip Millar of Millars Lawyers, has just filed a bruising statement of claim with the Federal Court in Ottawa, naming a who’s who of Canada’s military establishment as defendants; a litany that makes allegations of abuse of office, negligent investigation, malicious prosecution and involvement in media leaks that destroyed Whelan’s reputation and career.

Defendants named in the lawsuit include His Majesty the King in Right of Canada (the Crown) and top brass in the Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF): Jody Thomas, former deputy minister of National Defence and former national security advisor to the Prime Minister; General Wayne Eyre, chief of the defence staff; Lt.-Gen. Frances Allen, vice chief of the defence staff; and Lt.-Gen. Jennie Carignan, CAF’s chief of professional conduct and culture.

The allegations stretch all the way to the Prime Minister’s Office.

Last September, Whelan faced a court martial, accused of sexual misconduct purported to have taken place more than a decade ago.

At the trial’s outset, military prosecutors dropped the more serious allegation of improperly communicating with a female subordinate (flirting, in colloquial terms). A week later — following the testimony of the complainant and minutes before Whelan’s lawyers could cross-examine her or hear from other witnesses — prosecutors dropped the remaining charge accusing Whelan of doctoring the same subordinate’s performance evaluation in 2011, allegedly fearing she would disclose their friendly but not physical relationship to others. The court martial came to an abrupt end. Notwithstanding the technical win for Whelan, the allegations effectively sidelined the three-star general.

Casual observers, seeing just how many Canadian generals’ and admirals’ careers have run aground in scandal of one sort or another, might draw conclusions about the quality of the leadership and the deep culture of the Canadian Armed Forces at both military and political levels.

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