Quotulatiousness

March 24, 2024

“[A] term was coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public: ‘sodcasting’ – after ‘sod’ for ‘sodomite’, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do”

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

We’ve all been there at some point, especially in waiting rooms or on public transit: someone is either accidentally or deliberately subjecting everyone else in the vicinity to their personal soundtrack:

The modern world is noisy, I get that. I’m fine dealing with busy, urban places. But that surely makes those other places where you can escape the noise all the more vital in the constant struggle for sanity in this century. This is perhaps the one issue on which uber-leftist Elie Mystal and I agree. He found himself this week in a waiting room, full of peeps “listening to content on their devices with no headphones … LOUDLY. What the SHIT is this?? Is this normal?” His peroration: “I’M DEAD. I CAN FOR REAL FEEL THE VEINS IN MY HEAD THROBBING. THIS IS HOW I DIED.” #MeToo, my old lefty comrade.

The degradation of public space in America isn’t entirely new, of course. As soon as transistor radios became portable, people would carry them around — for music or sports scores on construction sites or wherever. But the smartphone era — thanks once again, Steve Jobs, you were so awesome! — gave us an exponential jump in the number of people with highly portable sound-broadcasting machines in every public space imaginable. In other words: Hell on toast.

At the beginning of this phone surge, a term was even coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public: “sodcasting” — after “sod” for “sodomite”, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do. Sodcasting was just an amuse bouche, though, compared with our current Bluetooth era, where amplifiers the size of golf-balls have dialed it all up to 11, and the age of full-spectrum public cacophony — including that thump-thump-thump of the bass that carries much farther than the sodcasting treble — has truly begun.

National parks? They are now often intermittent raves, where younger peeps play loud, amplified dance music as they walk their trails. On trains? There is now a single “quiet car” when once they all were, because we were a civilized culture. Walk down a street and you’ll catch a cyclist with a speaker attached to the handlebars, broadcasting at incredible volume for 50 feet ahead and behind him, obliterating every stranger’s conversation in his path.

On a bus? Expect the person sitting right behind you with her mouth four inches from your ears to have a very loud phone conversation, with the speaker turned up, and the phone held in front of her like a waiter holding a platter. The things she’ll tell you! Go to a beach and have your neighbors play volleyball — but with a loud speaker playing Kylie Minogue remixes to generate “atmosphere”.

When did we decide we didn’t give a fuck about anyone else in public anymore?

It’s not as if there isn’t an obvious win-win solution for both those who want to listen to music and those who don’t. Let me explain something that seems completely unimaginable to the Bluetoothers: If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford AirPods, or a headset, or the like. Put them in your ears, and you will hear music of far, far higher quality than from a distant Bluetooth, and no one else will be forced to hear anything at all! What’s not to like? It follows, it seems to me, that those who continue to refuse to do so, who insist that they are still going to make you listen as well, just because fuck-you they can, are waging a meretricious assault on their fellow humans.

What could be the defense? The Guardian — who else? — had a go at it:

    the ghetto blaster reminds us that defiantly and ostentatiously broadcasting one’s music in public is part of a history of sonically contesting spaces and drawing the lines of community, especially through what gets coded as “noise” … it represents a liberation of music from the private sphere in the west, as well as an egalitarian spreading of music in the developing world.

The first point is not, it seems to me, exculpatory. It’s describing an act of territorial aggression through sound. The second point may have some truth to it — but it hardly explains the super-privileged NYC homos on the beach or the white twenty-something NGO employees in the park. But would I enjoy living in Santo Domingo where not an inch — so far as I could see and hear when I was there — was uncontaminated by overheard fluorescent lights and loud, bad club music? Nope.

Whenever I’ve asked the sonic sadists whether they actually understand that they are hurting others, they blink a few times, their mouths begin to form sentences, and then they look away. Or they’ll tell me to go fuck myself, or say I’m the only one who has complained, which is probably true because most people don’t want public confrontation, and have simply given up and moved on. Then there is often the implication that I’m the one being the asshole. On no occasion has anyone ever turned their music off after being asked to. Too damaging to their pride.

One reddit forum-member had this excuse: “It’s because earbuds hurt my ears and headphones don’t stay on.” Another got closer: “A lot of people that play their music out loud think that others won’t mind it.” Self-absorption. One other factor is simply showing off: at Herring Cove, rich douchefags bring their expensive boats a little off-shore so they can broadcast with their massive sound systems. It strengthens my support for the Second Amendment every summer.

March 21, 2024

Banksy is “a jester to the woke court, the cheeky clown of received opinion”

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

As a certified curmudgeon, I’ve never seen the attraction of Banksy’s various bits of artistic … whatever it is properly called. At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill helps put Banksy into proper perspective:

I guess it wasn’t enough that us polluting plebs are chided for our transgressions against Mother Nature every time we watch a BBC nature documentary. And by politicians of all persuasions. And by columnists who summer in Tuscany. And by aristocratic arseholes called Edred and Poppy who won’t even let us enjoy the football or the snooker without cutting through the fun with their cut-glass tones to remind us we’re hazardous to Gaia. No, we also have to be walloped with an eco-sermon as we cycle to work down the Hornsey Road.

Unsurprisingly, the elites are lapping up Banksy’s latest missive in spray paint. A Radio 4 expert on Banksy – I’m dying – raved to the BBC that his message is “clear” and it “really resonates”: “Nature’s struggling and it is up to us to help it grow back.” The founder of Haringey Tree Protectors – I’m not making this up – gushed in the Guardian about how Banksy’s “stark image” reminds us that “in the climate crisis we just can’t continue treating our tree canopy with such savagery”. Pruning leaves is barbarism now. You just know that when green-fingered Charles III saw the Banksy pic during his morning peruse of the papers he gave it a kingly nod of approval.

That’s what Banksy is, isn’t it – a jester to the woke court, the cheeky clown of received opinion? He larps as rebellious, sneaking about in the dead of night to put up his technically illegal “art”, but in truth he has not once voiced an opinion that wouldn’t win noisy murmurs of approval at a soirée in Daunt Books. Brexit is bad, Israel is insane, the paparazzi are scum, don’t vote Tory, capitalism is a rat race, Save the Planet – honestly, browsing Banksy’s back catalogue of stencilled eyesores is like being stuck in a lift with one of those craft-beer centrists who says cockwomble a lot.

His Finsbury Park fake tree captures the conformist thinking that hides in his guerrilla-art performance. It’s a public-information campaign masquerading as graffiti. “Save the trees” – Rishi Sunak could say that. He has, in fact. He recently announced a ban on felling trees without “proper consultation”. Banksy’s tree also has that whiff of hysteria that always attends dinner-party efforts to alter the behaviour of the lower orders. The idea that we’re obliterating trees with “savagery” is bullshit. London’s a forest. Literally. The UN defines a forest as anywhere that is at least 20 per cent trees – London is 21 per cent trees. The “world’s largest urban forest”, as Time Out puts it.

So relax, Banksy. Chill in the no doubt cushy pad you bought from selling your graffiti to philistine luvvies. London’s fine. If anything were to make me leave this great city, it wouldn’t be a want of trees but the oversupply of your sixth-former propaganda. Only a few months ago he put up a “STOP” sign in Peckham decorated with three drones to signal his desire for a ceasefire in Gaza. Radical.

Look, it can be irritating when artists decide to épater la bourgeoisie. That slogan, dreamt up by the decadent poets of late 19th-century France, means to take glee in scandalising the middle classes. But surely Banksy’s style of pandering to the middle classes – let’s call it servir la bourgeoisie – is worse? He is simply smuggling the received wisdom of society’s self-styled betters under the cover of edgy graffiti. From his anti-Brexit mural showing a workman sadly chipping one of the yellow stars from the EU flag to his image of Brits pledging their allegiance to the flag of Tesco – consumerism is slavery, y’all – his every utterance is chattering class to the core.

“That is a catastrophic miscalculation for the NDP, and it’s the single best thing that happened to Poilievre”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney reflects on what he got wrong about Pierre Poilievre and why he misread the situation leading up to Poilievre becoming Conservative leader:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

“Think of Trudeau in late 2019,” he told me from the bar. “India trip. SNC-Lavalin. ‘Thank you for your donation.’ Black and brown face. Canadians were souring on him. They were starting to think he was a fake, and maybe a bit of an asshole. His disapproval ratings were soaring. Then COVID hits, and he’s doing his smiling, reassuring press conferences every day outside his house. His disapprovals tank. Canadians are reminded of 2015 Trudeau. But then pandemic ends, and we’ve got some Trudeau missteps. ‘Unacceptable people’, COVID-era wedges. He’s going back to his 2019 position: people don’t like him.”

“And then,” he told me, “just as Canadians are starting to think the PM is an asshole again, the NDP decides to sign an agreement with him. [NDP leader] Jagmeet [Singh] could not have screwed up more. This is a historical, books-to-be-written-about-it screw up. Because just as Canadians are remembering that they don’t like the PM, Singh is giving those voters no reason to go to the NDP.”

Normally when the Liberal vote collapses, he continued, those voters disperse across all the parties. But CASA, my source told me, was like a funnel, forcing all the voters the Liberals were losing to go to the Conservatives instead of going everywhere. “If you’re angry at Trudeau, if you don’t like him, if you’re sick of him, you can only go Conservative this time. Singh did that. That is a catastrophic miscalculation for the NDP, and it’s the single best thing that happened to Poilievre. None of us saw that coming.”

He had other thoughts, as did others I spoke to. The People’s Party having been neutered as a threat was something I heard repeatedly, which matters, but not in the way that you think. “The PPC wasn’t a huge draw on our voters,” a senior Tory told me. “People still think the PPC was just our most-right-wing fringe. Wrong. It was drawing voters from everywhere, including typical non-voters. So the problem wasn’t that we were losing votes. The problem was that the fear of the PPC gave too many of our western MPs licence to get away with anything or oppose anything. ‘If we do/don’t do this, Maxime Bernier is going to kill us!’ Guess what? Portage-Lisgar was Bernier’s best possible shot and we annihilated him. No one is afraid of the PPC anymore. No one can use the PPC as leverage against the leader.”

I asked about that — Poilievre’s hold over his own party. In my 2021 column, I had noted that O’Toole never really had full control. Every Conservative I spoke to agreed: Poilievre has the most control over his caucus of any CPC leader they can remember. Better than O’Toole, better than Andrew Scheer, and as good, at least, as Stephen Harper. Not all the MPs were thrilled when O’Toole was replaced, but the smell of impending victory has a way of winning over new friends.

I talked with the source at the bar for a long time, and we covered a lot of ground. A lot has gone right for Poilievre, he said. Some of it is luck, some of it is timing, but some of it is entirely to Poilievre’s credit. My source isn’t one of Poilievre’s guys, so to speak. He’s just long-time CPCer, who served all four leaders of the modern era. He has never hesitated to critique the current leader in our chats, but he gave credit where he felt it due. “Poilievre was talking cost of living and inflation back when the PM was taking time at press conferences to tell everyone he doesn’t care about monetary policy, and when the finance minister and the governor of the Bank of Canada were telling everyone there was nothing to worry about, and when all the economists on Twitter were saying that deflation was the worry. Poilievre was right. In public, loudly, right. About the issue that was about to completely take over Canadian political conversation. He called it. Trudeau, Macklem and Freeland were wrong. People may not remember the details, but they remember that.”

March 20, 2024

Google’s unmissable leftward biases

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

Tom Knighton on a recent New York Post article calling out Google for their strong political biases and how they inform everything that Google and its subsidiaries and affiliates do:

Once, the company was well-known for having the phrase “Don’t be evil” painted on a wall in their headquarters. It’s a noble sentiment, but apparently, it’s now more like “Don’t be evil.”

That’s pretty clear after what we learned from the New York Post:

    Google has been putting its thumb on the scale to help Democratic candidates win the presidency in the last four election cycles during which it censored Republicans, according to a right-leaning media watchdog.

    The Media Research Center published a report alleging 41 instances of “election interference” by the search engine since 2008.

    The MRC published a report accusing Google of having “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship.”

    The report comes weeks after AllSides conducted an analysis which found that news aggregator Google News skewed even more off the charts in 2023.

    Google has also come under fire after its Gemini AI image generator produced “woke”-inspired and historically inaccurate images such as black Vikings, female pope and Native Americans among the Founding Fathers.

Now, Google denies the claims and someone close to the company took issue with the methodology used to detect this supposed interference.

But the truth of the matter is that there’s absolutely no reason to believe Google on this because we’ve seen enough of it previously to know better.

For example, YouTube has a profoundly leftward bias. The site is notorious for silencing right-wing voices while allowing leftists to get away with trampling community standards willy-nilly. YouTube is owned by Google, which means they’re at least tacitly endorsing the strategy.

From there, it’s not difficult to see the mothership taking on a similar role, if not originating it. They’re just able to hide it easier.

But even there, we can see it.

I use Google’s news feed regularly, particularly for my work at Bearing Arms. It’s common for me to look up “gun rights” and the first article that shows up, unless I set it for the most recent stories, be one treating them as a negative thing.

So yeah, I have no doubt that Google is playing favorites.

The worst part is that there isn’t anything that can be done through the legal system as far as I’m aware. But that doesn’t mean someone there didn’t realize what they are doing is wrong.

Most probably didn’t, though. They believe the Holy Progressive Cause is so vital, so unerringly good, that they can and should do anything to serve it. That includes displaying a staggering degree of bias in the service of what you believe to be the greater good, your business be damned.

But they knew it would be considered wrong by a great many people, which is why they’re hiding it.

This “should be a reality check for the technocracy”

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

Ted Gioia on the SXSW audience reaction to being presented with full-quill AI enthusiasm that didn’t match the presenters’ expectations at all:

Tech leaders gathered in Austin for the South-by-Southwest conference a few days ago. There they showed a video boasting about the wonders of new AI technology.

And the audience started booing.

At first, just a few people booed. But then more and more — and louder and louder. The more the experts on screen praised the benefits of artificial intelligence, the more hostile the crowd got.

The booing started in response to the comment that “AI is a culture.” And the audience booed louder when the word disrupted was used as a term of praise (as is often the case in the tech world nowadays).

Ah, but the audience booed the loudest at this statement:

    I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.

The event was a debacle — the exact opposite of what the promoters anticipated.

And it should be a reality check for the technocracy.

If they were paying attention, they might already have a hunch how much people hate this stuff — not just farmers in Kansas or your granny in Altoona, but hip, progressive attendees at SXSW.

These people literally come to the event to learn about new things, and even they are gagging on this stuff.

It’s more than just fears about runaway AI. Prevailing attitudes about digital tech and innovation are changing rapidly in real time — and not for the better. The users feel used.

Meanwhile the tech leaders caught in some time warp. They think they are like Steve Jobs launching a new Apple product in front of an adoring crowd.

Those days are gone.

Not even Apple is like Apple anymore. A similar backlash happened a few weeks ago, when Apple launched its super-high-tech virtual reality headset. The early response on social media was mockery and ridicule — something Steve Jobs never experienced.

This is the new normal. Not long ago we looked to Silicon Valley as the place where dreams came from, but now it feels more like ground zero for the next dystopian nightmare.

He’s not just a curmudgeonly nay-sayer (that’s more me than him), and has some specific things that are clearly turning a majority of technology users against the very technology that they once eagerly adopted:

They’re doing so many things wrong, I can’t even begin to scratch the surface here. But I’ll list a few warning signs.

You must be suspicious of tech leaders when …

  1. Their products and services keep getting worse over time.
  2. Their obvious goal is to manipulate and monetize the users of their tech, instead of serving and empowering them.
  3. The heaviest users of their tech suffer from depression, anxiety, suicidal impulses, and other negative effects as a result.
  4. They stop talking about quality, and instead boast incessantly about scalability, disruption, and destruction.
  5. They hide what their technology really does — resisting all requests for transparency and disclosure.
  6. They lock you into platforms, forcing you to use new “features” and related apps if you want to access the old ones.
  7. They force upgrades you don’t like, and downloads you don’t want.
  8. Their terms of use are filled with outrageous demands and sweeping disclaimers.
  9. They destroy entire industries not because they offer superior products, but only because as web gatekeepers they have a chokehold on information and customer flow — which they use ruthlessly to kill businesses and siphon off revenues.

Every one of those things is happening right here, right now.

We’re doing the technocracy a favor by calling it to their attention. If they get the message, they can avoid the coming train wreck. They can return to real innovation, with a focus on helping the users they now so ruthlessly exploit.

March 19, 2024

Canada’s new international role: the object lesson in failure and tyranny

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

Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the foreign impressions of Canada’s descent into the west’s object lesson in what not to do in almost every area:

In just the last week, there have been two separate columns in British newspapers framing Canada as a model of what not to do.

Both were inspired by the tabling of Bill 63, the Liberals’ Online Harms Bill. The Spectator said that it effectively engendered the founding of a Canadian “thought police”. The Telegraph cited it as evidence that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete”.

This didn’t used to happen. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian politics were famously inaccessible to the wider world. For Canada’s 2008 federal election, The Spectator covered it with a blog post that mostly mused on how nobody cared. “It’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections,” it read.

But now – on topics ranging from assisted suicide to housing affordability to internet regulation – it’s not infrequent that Canada will be cited in foreign parliaments and in foreign media as the very model of a worst-case scenario.

It was just six months ago that The Telegraph scored a viral hit with a mini-documentary framing the political situation in Canada as a “warning to the West”.

“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has sought to position itself as the global bastion of progressive politics,” reads a synopsis for the film Canada’s Woke Nightmare, which has garnered more than five million views.

The documentary notes that Canada is now at the absolute global vanguard of progressive issues including harm reduction, assisted suicide and gender ideology.

[…]

If the Online Harms Act is suddenly garnering headlines across the rest of the Anglosphere, it’s not because Canadian politics are inherently interesting to the wider world. Rather, it’s because Bill C-63 – just like any number of Trudeau policies before it – is proposing to do things that no other Western democracy has yet proposed.

While plenty of Canada’s peer countries have hate speech controls, Bill C-63 was able to raise even European eyebrows with life sentences for “advocating genocide”, and a provision for police to mandate house arrest merely on suspicion that a Canadian was likely to commit a hate crime.

The Wall Street Journal, for one, profiled the bill as a real-life example of the 2002 film Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian future in which citizens are jailed for “pre-crime”.

Or in the critical words of The Spectator, “this legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime … if that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is”.

March 18, 2024

Slimy “nudgers” want to manipulate the food you buy by “denormalizing” what you enjoy

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

Christopher Snowden on the self-imagined elites’ desire for you dirt people to eat a different diet than you would voluntarily choose for yourselves:

On Thursday, Legal & General Investment Management’s senior global environmental, social and governance (ESG) manager told Nestlé to sell less sugar. It’s not for want of trying. In 2018, Nestlé launched Milkybar Wowsomes with 30% less sugar than a Milkybar. The company described it as a “great tasting product” that was the result of “a scientific breakthrough” but when it was discontinued in 2020, Nestlé lamented that demand for it had been “underwhelming”. In 2021, it launched a non-HFSS version of Shreddies called Shreddies The Simple One which contained just four ingredients. The company said:

    We know that consumers are looking to eat more healthily, especially following the pandemic. Shreddies The Simple One is an exciting new addition to the breakfast table that caters to growing demand, with a delicious taste consumers will love.

Consumers did not, in fact, love it and it was withdrawn from sale the following year.

Today, the King’s Fund has added its voice to the call for mandatory reformulation targets enforced with heavy fines. The King’s Fund’s job has traditionally been to get more money for the NHS but it is under new management with Sarah Woolnough, a former trustee of Action on Smoking and Health and former CEO of Cancer Research UK, so it is now involved in lifestyle regulation.

    Compelling food manufacturers to strip out large amounts of fat, salt and sugar would help “denormalise” the routine consumption of unhealthy food, Sarah Woolnough, the chief executive of the King’s Fund, told the Guardian.

The word “denormalise” is taken straight from the anti-tobacco playbook. See how it works yet?

As the Guardian points out, the King’s Fund has done some polling which finds that reformulation is hugely popular in the abstract.

    Overall, 67.3% of Britons agree that the government should require companies to reduce the amount of fat, salt and sugar they put in their products, a survey for the influential health thinktank undertaken by Ipsos Mori found. Only 5% disagreed.

This is a beautiful example of the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences. People love the idea of fat, salt and sugar being removed from food. Who wouldn’t, so long as the food tasted the same? But it doesn’t taste the same. It tastes considerably worse. And when reformulation isn’t physically possible — for example, with nearly all confectionery, biscuits and cakes — the only way to meet the target is by shrinking the product. Some chocolate bars are now so small that a dual pack is the default (and so, as with the sugar tax, big business is doing rather well out of it). And, yes, that is because of the government’s reformulation scheme.

If pollsters asked people if they are in favour of shrinkflation, I doubt many would say yes. As for reformulation, the only way to get an informed opinion would be to do a taste test using the “before” and “after” versions of popular food products and ask people whether the government should mandate the reformulated version and ban the original version. Again, I doubt many people would give unqualified support for reformulation.

Fortunately, we don’t need to carry out such experiments because the public have been offered reformulated products many times in the real world. Sometimes they become popular — in which case there is no need for government coercion — but very often they are a flop, and in many cases they cannot even be attempted.

The British public have put up with a lot from meddlesome puritans in the last 20 years, but I strongly suspect that if the government tried to force us to eat the likes of Milkybar Wowsomes and Shreddies The Simple One, the thin blue line would finally snap.

QotD: Self-hatred (aka “false consciousness”)

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

The expectation that a commentator’s views must be in lockstep with his or her ethnic, religious, or sexual identity is always distasteful — particularly when blacks, women, gays, or Jews are labeled “self-hating” when they refuse to toe the perceived party line.

Cathy Young, “When Jews wax anti-Semitic”, Boston Globe, 2005-02-07.

March 17, 2024

Problematic art, again

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

David Thompson calls to our attention yet another outbreak of problematic racist white supremacy in … landscape paintings?

Hampstead Heath by John Constable, 1820.

Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.

The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour”. And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative”. Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white”, or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.

But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

March 16, 2024

The “TikTok ban” isn’t really about banning TikTok

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Matt Taibbi explains why the movement to ban TikTok is so dangerous to Americans’ civil liberties:

As discussed on the new America This Week, passage of the TikTok ban represents a perfect storm of unpleasant political developments, putting congress back fully in line with the national security establishment on speech. After years of public championing of the First Amendment, congressional Republicans have suddenly and dramatically been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile Democrats, who stand to lose a lot from the bill politically — it’s opposed by 73% of TikTok users, precisely the young voters whose defections since October put Joe Biden’s campaign into a tailspin — are spinning passage of the legislation to its base by suggesting it’s not really happening.

“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok, it’s an attempt to make TikTok better,” is how Nancy Pelosi put it. Congress, the theory goes, will force TikTok to divest, some kindly Wall Street consortium will gobble it up (“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Steve Mnuchin told CNBC), and life will go on. All good, right?

Not exactly. The bill passed in the House that’s likely to win the Senate and be swiftly signed into law by the White House’s dynamic Biden hologram is at best tangentially about TikTok.

You’ll find the real issue in the fine print. There, the “technical assistance” the drafters of the bill reportedly received from the White House shines through, Look particularly at the first highlighted portion, and sections (i) and (ii) of (3)B:

As written, any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States” is covered.

[…]

As Newsweek reported, the bill was fast-tracked after a secret “intelligence community briefing” of Congress led by the FBI, Department of Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The magazine noted that if everything goes as planned, the bill will give Biden the authority to shut down an app used by 150 million Americans just in time for the November elections.

Say you’re a Democrat, however, and that scenario doesn’t worry you. As America This Week co-host Walter Kirn notes, the bill would give a potential future President Donald Trump “unprecedented powers to censor and control the internet“. If that still doesn’t bother you, you’re either not worried about the election, or you’ve been overstating your fear of “dictatorial” Trump.

We have two decades of data showing how national security measures in the 9-11 era evolve. In 2004 the George W. Bush administration defined “enemy combatant” as “an individual who was part of or supporting Taliban or al Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States”. Yet in oral arguments of Rosul et al v Bush later that year, the government conceded an enemy combatant could be a “little old lady in Switzerland” who “wrote a check” to what she thought was an orphanage.

March 15, 2024

Woke Shakespeare?

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

Andrew Doyle wonders if even the Bard can survive the incessant assaults of the ultra woke, the new Puritans:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

The puritans had it in for Shakespeare. With the exception of the plague, they were perhaps the most persistent threat to his livelihood. As far as these zealots were concerned, the theatre was a realm of “adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons”.

These were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histrio-Mastix (1633). He was eventually to get his way in 1642 when the puritan-led parliament shut the theatres down. When the ban was lifted on the accession of Charles II, older plays had to be dusted off to satisfy the public’s appetite for drama. It was Shakespeare’s work that proved to be the most popular, establishing a trend that has never waned.

Now the bard faces another breed of puritan, more censorial than the last. We are living in conformist times, and inexplicably those in the creative arts have turned out to the be most conformist of all. Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrongthink is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Virtually all productions of Shakespeare’s plays I have seen in recent years have been mangled to promote the regressive fashions of our time. Today’s audiences are seeing a vague shadow of these masterworks through a narrow and uninspiring prism.

Even so, many of us are reluctant to give up on the theatre altogether. We tolerate the gender-neutral toilets that nobody asked for, the rainbow lanyards worn by ushers, and the little sermons in the programmes by directors who think their job is to educate the masses. One friend remarked that so long as the preaching only amounts to 20% of the show’s content, he is willing to accept it. I suppose it’s like going for dinner in an especially pious household, and having to put up with a long-winded prayer before a delicious meal.

Theatregoers might have a better experience if they opt for productions of plays written many years before this new state religion took hold. Shakespeare, as a playwright who has never been bettered, is surely the safest choice. In his work we find ourselves unmolested by ideology. We know nothing of Shakespeare’s opinions on matters of politics or religion, and attempting to glean any suggestions from his works is futile. I think A. L. Rowse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare “saw through everybody equally”. Neither prince nor pauper escapes his sceptical gaze.

Toronto’s blue-uniformed surrender monkeys say … just make it easier for criminals and maybe they won’t hurt you

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

Crime has been increasing lately, and Toronto’s boys, girls, and all 57 other genderbeings in blue have their very best advice for you: surrender now.

… Toronto Police have reflected on the problem. They’ve mulled it over. Thought long and hard. And they’re advising people just give up. To stay safe.

This advice came out at a community safety meeting between Toronto Police officials and concerned citizens last month. (The meeting was covered by City News Toronto, but didn’t get widespread coverage until this week, when clips went viral online. Tell me that isn’t a microcosm of the 21 century.) In remarks to the citizens at the meeting, a Toronto police constable said this: “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs by your front door. Because they’re breaking into your homes to steal your car. They don’t want anything else. A lot of them that [the police] are arresting have guns on them. And they’re not toy guns. They’re real guns. They’re loaded.”

Oh. Okay.

Look, it’s not bad advice, in any individual circumstance. There probably are a lot of people out there who’d be relieved if someone kicked in their door, grabbed the fob and took off. And it’s certainly not novel advice from a police service. We’ve all heard variations of this before, right? “Just give up your wallet” when you’re mugged. “Just get out of the car” during a carjacking. You can always replace things. Right?

The problem is that, in the other scenarios above, you’re out and about in public. There’s no guarantee of safety in public, as much as we all wish otherwise. The advice now being given by Toronto police isn’t what to do when someone jabs a gun into your ribs in a seedy back alley, but how to avoid being harmed by bad guys in your own home. And the police advice is “Make it so easy on them that they have no reason to hurt you”.

There’s no charitable read on this, and in this case, truth isn’t a defence. I accept that the police are giving their real, best, true advice. I accept that they are being sincere. That’s the problem: the police are sincerely surrendering. They’ve given up, and they think it would be best if you gave up, too. These violent robberies are just going to continue, and it’s on us — the public — to minimize the bloodshed and risk to ourselves by … submitting.

I try to avoid hyperbole in columns, with the odd exception for comic effect. But this isn’t funny at all, so I won’t make a joke of it. Let’s be extremely serious for a moment. If this is where the Toronto Police Service has landed in terms of their best advice for the public, as a member of that public and Toronto resident, I’d like to ask this: why stop with leaving my fob by the front door? I have a laptop computer. It’s a few years old now, but still in workable condition. It’s worth a few hundred bucks. Maybe I should leave that by the door, too? I don’t keep a lot of cash on hand — who the hell does, in 2024? — but there’s usually a few bucks in my wallet, or my wife’s. Should part of our nightly routine now just be emptying our wallets into a little bowl that we can leave on the radiator by the front door, and come morning, if the door hasn’t been kicked down and the cash grabbed, we can just put the money right back into our wallets as we get the day started? I’m not really a jewelry guy, but my wedding band is worth something, I guess. Pop that into the bowl with the cash?

After all, the bad guys have guns. Real guns. Loaded guns. And there is apparently nothing to be done about this except submit and co-operate. So say the police.

<sarc>No, that can’t be right. Justin Trudeau made guns illegal, so the bad guys just can’t have guns. It would be against the law, and they might get in trouble.</sarc> Oh, and should the propitiatory offerings be placed inside or outside the door? I guess outside, to make it even easier for them, but make sure everything is protected from rain or snow … it’d be risky if they had to pick everything up soaking wet and they might take it out on you and your family.

That’s Matt Gurney from The Line, so you really should read the whole thing.

March 14, 2024

Oddly, Jen Gerson finds her fears about the Online Harms Act unassuaged

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

There was a point during the last Line podcast where Jen Gerson used the word “assuaged”, and then realized that although she knows what it means and when it’s appropriate to use it, she didn’t know how to say it out loud (a problem I’ve encountered many times in my life, having read widely but not listened to lectures on the various topics I’ve read about). I reference that in the headline, as she recounts going through a belated “technical briefing” on the already tabled bill:

Let’s start by noting that it’s a little bit odd for a government to hold a technical briefing for a bit of legislation more than a week after that legislation has been tabled. Usually presentations of this kind are held for media, MPs, and various stakeholders as or just before a complicated issue or bill is about to be announced to the public.

For the federal government to hold a briefing on the Online Harms Act on March 6 — as it did — raises questions. Questions like “Why?” Questions like “Is this really a ‘technical briefing’ or is this an attempt to assuage concerns about what is actually written in the bill?” And, most importantly, questions like “Am I so assuaged?”

I think, dear readers, that I am not.

Let me explain by appending a caveat about the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, which was tabled about two weeks ago. About 75 per cent of what’s in this bill is either good, or benign but potentially useless, and is genuinely focused on mitigating real online harms like child porn and revenge porn. I might nitpick some of those parts if it weren’t for the rest of it. The rest of it consists of “will result in the most significant expansion of Canada’s hate speech laws and create one of North America’s most rigid regulatory environments for media and social media companies”, as law firm Norton Rose Fulbright put it.

In C-63, and its attempts to explain this bill, this government has consistently muddied the waters that delineate between hate crimes and hate speech, and has demonstrated a deep unwillingness to deal with the philosophical problem of defining hate speech in a way that is clear, consistent, and fairly and evenly applied. More specifically, the bill’s attempts to increase the penalties for “advocating genocide” to life imprisonment; the use of peace bonds for pre-crime hate speech; and the re-introduction of Section 13, to be administered by the already questionable Human Rights Tribunal apparatus. All of these present such punitive measures that they would have a chilling effect on speech that is fundamentally incompatible with the freedoms we expect in a Western liberal democracy.

There’s no nice way to put this. These measures reveal deeply authoritarian instincts toward speech and regulation, all the more pernicious as they’re being introduced by people who are absolutely convinced of their own righteous good intentions.

And that brings us back to the aforementioned technical briefing, which attempted to address each of these concerns in turn. I should note that I don’t believe I was invited directly to this briefing — and as I’m not in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, this is not surprising or unusual. I was, however, provided a copy of the briefing in its entirety, and I was told that I was free to quote from it, provided I did not name the Department of Justice official speaking.

To that end, I’d like to provide some excerpts and paraphrases from this briefing, followed by my own observations on what was being presented to an audience of, broadly speaking, laymen. I’ve also run these observations by criminal lawyers to ensure my understanding of the law is sound. If I am in error in any point, I welcome any correction.

“The dark world of pediatric gender ‘medicine’ in Canada”

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

The release of internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) revealed just how little science went into many or most juvenile gender transitions and how much the process was being driven politically rather than scientifically. Shannon Douglas Boschy digs into how the WPATH’s methods are implemented in Canada:

An undercover investigation at a Quebec gender clinic recently documented that a fourteen-year-old girl was prescribed testosterone for the purpose of medical gender transition within ten minutes of seeing a doctor. She received no other medical or mental health assessment and no information on side-effects. This is status quo in the dark world of pediatric gender “medicine” in Canada.

On March 5th Michael Shellenberger, one of the journalists who broke the Twitter Files in 2022, along with local Ottawa journalist Mia Hughes, released shocking leaks from inside WPATH, the organization that proclaims itself the global scientific and medical authority on gender affirming care. The World Professional Association of Transgender Health is the same organization that the Quebec gender clinic, and Ottawa’s CHEO, cite as their authority for the provision of sex-change interventions for children.

These leaks expose WPATH as nothing more than a self-appointed activist body overseeing and encouraging experimental and hormonal and surgical sex-change interventions on children and vulnerable adults. Shellenberger and Hughes reveal that members fully understand that children cannot consent to loss of fertility and of sexual function, nor can they understand the lifetime risks that will result from gender-affirming medicalization, and they ignore these breaches of medical ethics.

The report reveals communication from an “Internal messaging forum, as well as a leaked internal panel discussion, demonstrat(ing) that the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care. These internal communications reveal that WPATH advocates for many arbitrary medical practices, including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults. Its approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science.”

These findings have profound implications for medical and public education policies in Canada and raise serious concerns about the practices of secret affirmations and social transitions of children in local schools.

These leaks follow on the recent publication of a British Medical Journal study (BMJ Mental Health), covering 25-years of data, dispelling the myth that without gender-affirmation that children will kill themselves. The study, comparing over 2,000 patients to a control population, found that after factoring for other mental health issues, there was no convincing evidence that children and youth who are not gender-affirmed were at higher risk of suicide than the general population.

In the last week, a second study was released, this one from the American Urology Association, showing that post-surgical transgender-identified men, who underwent vaginoplasty, have twice the rate of suicide attempts as before affirmation surgery, and showing that trans-identified women who underwent phalloplasty, showed no change in pre-operative rates of suicide and post-operative.

These and other studies are now thoroughly debunking the emotional blackmail myths promoted by WPATH, that the absence of sex-change interventions, suggest that gender-distressed children are at high risk of taking their own lives.

March 13, 2024

The true “Online Harms” are coming from inside the bill

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

Even the state media lapdog CBC admits that the Trudeau government’s proposed Online Harms Act is an incredibly authoritarian piece of legislation:

Justice Minister Arif Virani is defending his government’s Online Harms Bill after celebrated Canadian writer Margaret Atwood shared views comparing the new legislation to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The award-winning author took to social media late last week to share an article from the British magazine The Spectator titled, “Trudeau’s Orwellian online harms bill”.

“If this account of the bill is true, it’s Lettres de Cachet all over again,” Atwood wrote on X, referring to letters once sent out by the King of France authorizing imprisonment without trial.

The federal government introduced late last month its long-awaited Online Harms Bill, which proposes to police seven categories of harmful content online, including content used to bully a child, content that sexualizes children or victims of sexual violence, content that incites violence or terrorism, and hate speech.

As part of proposed amendments, “hate speech” would be defined based on Supreme Court of Canada decisions.

“The possibilities for revenge false accusations + thoughtcrime stuff are sooo inviting!” Atwood wrote.

In Orwell’s cautionary novel about a totalitarian society, thoughtcrime is the illegal act of disagreeing with the government’s political ideology in one’s unspoken thoughts.

Atwood famously tackled authoritarian regimes in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which a religious patriarchal society forces women to bear children and those who speak freely are severely punished.

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