Quotulatiousness

March 2, 2024

Get your new election narratives! Hot off the press!

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

Chris Bray isn’t impressed with two new political books hitting the bookstores at the moment:

It’s an election year, so get ready. Two astonishingly dullwitted books arrived in bookstores this week, on the same day, as their dreadful authors hit the airwaves to promote them. One was White Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, about the breathtaking stupidity and backwardness of rural whites, who are destroying America. Taking care to be subtle, the publisher gave the book a cover that features a pick-up truck with an American flag and a Trump sign, leaving out only the weird kid with the banjo and the dude who shouts, “Squeal, boy! Squeal like a pig!”

And then there’s the wonderfully nuanced title Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, by Obama-era US Attorney Barbara McQuade, who is now a law school professor after being asked to resign by Orange Hitler — though apparently a law school professor who is unfamiliar with the text of the 6th Amendment, thinking it exists to confer a right upon the public to have people put on trial right away.

[…]

The cover of McQuade’s book is somehow more obnoxious than the cover of White Rage:

See, it’s a giant clenched fist rising out of Middle America. Get it? Get it? It may take a moment.

These books: If, one day, by some bizarre chain of weird accidents, these are the only remnants of our civilization, no one will have the slightest idea what actually happened while we were alive. They’re miscategorized fiction. Every paragraph is full of obtuse faked reality; if you hold it up to the real world, it doesn’t even sort of match. Go click on the Amazon preview for McQuade’s book, if you’d like to see this for yourself […]

Onward: “Much of the American right glamorizes assault weapons, based on the absurd claim that the Second Amendment protects not only the right to bear arms but also the right to overthrow our government.”

My goodness, where would anyone get the claim that a founding-era American document meant to describe citizens as having a right to overthrow their government?

The Declaration of Independence, the literal founding statement of the nation that gave McQuade a government job:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Thomas Jefferson thought Americans had a right to “throw off” their government; Barbara McQuade finds it an “absurd claim”. Which one do you think understood the topic?

March 1, 2024

Online “harmful content” is in the eye of the beholder

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

It’s almost refreshing to find so many people realizing just how dystopian the Trudeau government’s proposed Online Harms Act could be if implemented in its current form. Ezra Levant on Twit-, er, I mean “X” points out to Jordan Peterson just how the system would be set up to suppress and punish online speech the complainant didn’t like:

For years the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) has banned discrimination against people based on “gender identity or expression”. You of course have never discriminated against anyone.

But this new bill adds s. 13 to the CHRA, which now says that mere speech is considered discrimination if it is “likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group”.

So now, if someone watches one of your YouTube videos or reads on of your tweets about, say, transgender athletes changing in the girls change room, and as a result is “likely” to have hard feelings towards trans people, that’s hate speech.

That’s step 1. Here’s step 2.

Any member of the public (including non-citizens) can lodge a complaint against you to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal — an activist quasi-judicial tribunal run by non-judges, appointed by Trudeau.

They can get up to $20,000 per complaint from you — and they don’t have to be the “victim”. (There doesn’t have to be a victim at all — remember it’s a future crime. They only have to show that your tweet or video is “likely to” (i.e might) cause one person to have hard feelings about another person. $20,000 that you’d pay the complainant — plus $50,000 in fines to the government.

Per complaint.

So there could be a new complaint for every tweet you make. Every video. And the complainants can be professional busybodies and activists — they don’t have to be a “victim”.

Why wouldn’t woke activists literally file a CHRA complaint after every single thing you do or say on social media? It’s free. There’s no limit. Even if you “win”, you lose — the process is the punishment. And of course, they’re going to win. This will become an industry — to enrich woke grifters and destroy you financially.

But here’s the truly amazing part: the complainants can keep their identity a secret from you. Secret testimony from secret witnesses — who get paid up to $20,000 to take a run at you.

That’s how they’re going to come for you — and for us at @RebelNewsOnline

In the National Post, Jamie Sarkonak considers how the “digital safety” provisions of the Online Harms Act might be implemented:

The law would put “harmful content” in scope of government regulation by way of “arm’s-length” agencies. Targeted content would include media depicting sexual abuse (and understandably so), as well as any content that “expresses detestation or vilification” of any group considered by human rights legislation to be vulnerable and is likely to foment such feelings given the context of the communication (less understandably so). Identity-based protections are inherently more subjective, and they aren’t afforded equally to everyone: human rights law tends not to protect white people, for example.

The bill states that expressing disdain and dislike — or discrediting, humiliating, hurting or offending — is not necessarily hateful for the purposes of online regulation. Critically, it’s silent on what does make speech cross over into unacceptable territory. There’s no hard threshold.

At what point does discussion of the fact that most gender-diverse sex offenders in federal prison are transwomen (male) cross over into “harmful content” territory? Or the fact that Black people make up only three per cent of the population, but represent six per cent of all accused in criminal courts? Or the fact Eritreans in Canada, half of whom arrived after 2016, and who come from a country known for not cooperating with the deportation process, are increasingly rioting in response to politics back home?

Regardless, the promotion of actual hate propaganda, and the incitement of genocide, are already crimes in Canada, so the very worst speech was already covered by the current law and enforceable by the police. If the Liberals wanted better work done on these fronts, they could have simply raised police funding and staffed the courts with judges, as manpower is a primary constraint in dealing justice.

Instead of maintaining the systems that exist, the online harms law would add proactive measures in the form of a new bureaucracy to ensure that everything from genocide advocacy to the insulting recitation of upsetting facts don’t get out of hand. These will work in tandem with reactive measures: the crime of “hate crime” will be enforceable at criminal law, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission will be empowered to adjudicate cases of rights-violating content online.

Women behaving badly on [police bodycam] video

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

Janice Fiamengo suggests that demands to the use of police bodycam footage involving young women being arrested for criminal behaviour is a weird bit of official white-knighting on the part of the authorities:

Moments of public outrage can be opportunities to consider deep-rooted cultural assumptions.

There’s been moral outrage lately over a popular YouTube channel called Drive Thru Tours. Launched in 2020, the channel started out by posting videos of tours through parts of New Jersey and New York. It hit paydirt last year when it began showing videos of police arrests, with titles such as “Rude 19-year-old Girl Arrested for DUI in Pullman, WA” (recommended if you want to get a flavor of the site) and “Belligerent Woman Arrested for DWI after Police Pursuit and Taken to Jail” (not recommended — very disturbing). The channel owner obtained the content — which until recently has focused exclusively on female offenders — from police bodycam recordings, now publicly available through freedom of information requests.

Bodycam footage was originally made accessible to the public so that American citizens can hold police accountable for their actions. Scrutiny of police behavior is widely considered a public good. Scrutiny of female behavior, however, is quite a different story — as responses to the channel demonstrate.

According to a small flurry of recent news reports, New Jersey police are warning that Drive Thru Tours is harming “vulnerable” young women by posting the evidence of their arrests. The bodycam footage was never intended, they protest, for such a purpose. In consequence, the Association of Chiefs of Police of New Jersey is calling for legislation against what they are describing as “online sexual predators“, and lawmakers in that state are considering a bill that would prohibit publishing the footage except within narrow parameters, including with the written consent of the subject.

Quite apart from whether such a bill is a good idea or not (I favor public access but have not given the matter serious thought), the language used in the articles is remarkable for its gynocentric sentimentality and misplaced sympathy.

One of the most vocal on the subject is Montville, New Jersey Police Chief Andrew Caggiano, who is quoted as stating that “It was never the intent of OPRA [the Open Public Records Act] to create such a platform that preys on young women and takes advantage of them at a time when they are vulnerable”. He also expressed a personal repugnance: “As a law enforcement professional and the father of three daughters, I am sickened by the fact that people are abusing OPRA to post these types of videos on social media sites”.

Given that it is not (yet) illegal to use bodycam material in the manner described, Chief Caggiano’s dramatic reaction seems overstated. One wonders in what sense the reckless and self-absorbed young people shown in these videos are “vulnerable”. Wouldn’t such language be better suited to their victims? Perhaps Caggiano knows something about his daughters that we don’t know (there is a video in which a “Cop’s Daughter Gets Arrested for DWI after Fleeing Accident Scene”): one would not normally expect a chief of police to so quickly substitute in imagination his own daughters for the inebriated and flagrantly dishonest women shown on Drive Thru Tours.

Caggiano’s bluster is, of course, all too familiar in a culture that cannot bear to hold women fully responsible for their bad actions — no matter how anti-social or potentially lethal — and must habitually frame them as innocent victims. It’s impossible to imagine such outraged sympathy being expressed for any male offenders in similar situations.

Understanding the modern media

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

It’s hard for Baby Boomers and even some older Gen X folks to grasp just how much the mainstream media has changed since the 1960s and 70s. Helpfully, Severian provides the context to properly understand what drives them and why they do the things they do:

Proposed coat of arms for Founding Questions by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.

There is no local news, because all “news” is Apparat audition tape. Back when — back when they were called “reporters” — news people had a clear career progression within a specific industry. A hungry young reporter for the Toad Suck, Nebraska, Times-Picayune might end his days as a reporter for the New York Times or Washington Post, but that was as high as he could reasonably expect to go. Same with the television division — the bobblehead at WSUX in Toad Suck might end up, at most, on CNN or Fox.

These days, though, they call themselves “journalists”, and “journalist” is just an entry-level Apparat post. They’re not just auditioning for the NYT or CNN, of course. A hungry young “journalist” might end xzhyr career at either, of course, but also as a corporate communications director, a political campaign consultant, a professor of “journalism”, a Diversity Outreach Coordinator, any one of a million “Media strategies” and “Media consulting” gigs … or, of course, as an outright lobbyist, because all of those are just euphemisms for “lobbying” anyway.

And that’s before you consider that all the “independent” papers and stations have been bought up by huge conglomerates, and depend on advertising revenue. Noam Chomsky was right — the Media does dance to the tune its corporate paymasters’ call. He was just wrong on those paymasters’ political orientation. Combine all that, and even the most straight-up, just-the-facts-ma’am local “news” story will find some way to insert The Sermon. If you don’t see The Sermon, you’ve either found an incompetent journalist (which happens) … or you might be looking at something subtle.

[…]

The Media, like Skynet, is self-aware. This significantly complicates the stoyachnik‘s task, as The Media understands its own power, and it increasingly wants to drive Narratives itself, especially as its power is on the verge of… well, not collapse exactly, but certainly a sea change. Because The Media is not monolithic, and that’s part of its self-awareness. So many “journalists” do nothing but hit refresh on Twitter all day, and Twitter knows this — that makes Twitter the real power broker. Google, too, obviously is more self-aware than traditional Media. That ludicrous AI image generator represents years of effort; they expended enormous resources to get precisely that result. They understand how utterly dependent the lower layers of The Media are on them; they are more self-aware.

Let us […] use Google’s own AI “summarizer” to refamiliarize ourselves with the tale of Comrade Ogilvy:

    Comrade Ogilvy is an imaginary character in the novel 1984, created by Winston Smith to replace Comrade Withers, an Inner Party member who has fallen into disgrace and been vaporized. Comrade Ogilvy supposedly lived a patriotic and virtuous life, supported the party as a child, designed a highly effective hand grenade as an adult, and died in action at the age of 23 while protecting important dispatches for his country. He did not drink or smoke, was celibate, and only conversed about Party philosophy, Ingsoc. Comrade Ogilvy displays how easy it is for a member of The Party to be pulled from thin air, and how determined The Party is to keep unpersons from the media.

The Apparatchiks at Google are more self-aware than the Apparatchiks at, say, the New York Times. That is, they understand their place in the Apparat better, and see the networks more clearly. They know how mal-educated “journalists” are, far better than the “journalists” themselves do. Google, like Winston Smith, knows full well that there’s no Comrade Ogilvy. But the “journalists” at the New York Times who are utterly reliant on Google for their “facts” do NOT know this. How could they?

And thus, the only White people in all of human history were Nazis. At least according to Google’s AI image generator, and therefore — soon enough — it’s what “everybody knows”. (And it’s necessarily recursive. The second generation of Google engineers will not know there’s no Comrade Ogilvy, any more than the current generation of “journalists” does).

QotD: Canadian neuroticism

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

Canada remains unmatched in its ability to turn somebody else’s tragedy into a debate about our own neuroses.

Paul Wells, quoted by Mark Steyn, Western Standard 2005-01-31.

February 29, 2024

The incredibly harmful Online Harms Act

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

Michael Geist thinks a substantial part of the Online Harms Act should be removed:

Having a spent virtually the entire day yesterday talking with media and colleagues about Bill C-63, one thing has become increasingly clear: the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions found in the Online Harms Act should be removed. In my initial post on the bill, I identified the provisions as one of three red flags, warning that they “feature penalties that go as high as life in prison and open the door to a tidal wave of hate speech related complaints”. There is no obvious need or rationale for penalties of life in prison for offences motivated by hatred, nor the need to weaponize human rights complaints by reviving Human Rights Act provisions on communication of hate speech. As more Canadians review the bill, there is a real risk that these provisions will overwhelm the Online Harms Act and become a primary area of focus despite not being central to the law’s core objective of mitigating harms on Internet platforms.

Indeed, these concerns are already attracting media coverage and were raised yesterday in columns and commentary from Andrew Coyne and Professor Richard Moon, who I think rightly describes the core provisions of the Online Harms Act as “sensible and workable” but notes that these other provisions are troubling. Bill C-63 is effectively four bills in one: (1) the Online Harms Act, which forms the bulk of the bill and is focused on the duties of Internet platforms as they respond to seven identified harms, (2) the expansion of mandatory child pornography reporting requirements to include those platforms, (3) the Criminal Code provisions, which opens the door to life in prison for committing offences that are motivated by hatred of certain groups, and (4) the changes to the Canadian Human Rights Act, which restores Section 13 involving communicating hate speech through the Internet as a discriminatory practice. The difference between the first two and the latter two is obvious: the first two are focused on the obligations of Internet platforms in addressing online harms, while the latter two have nothing directly to do with Internet platforms at all.

The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act changes originate in Bill C-36, which was introduced in 2021 on the very last sitting day of the Parliamentary session. The bill died on the order paper with an election call several weeks later and did not form a core part of either the online harms consultation or the 2022 expert panel on online harms. These provisions simply don’t fit within a legislative initiative that is premised on promoting online safety by ensuring that social media services are transparent and accountable with respect to online harms. Further, both raise legitimate concerns regarding criminal penalties and misuse of the human rights complaint system.

At the National Post, Carson Jerema points out that under the Online Harms Act, the truth is no defence:

As much as the Liberals want everyone to believe that their proposed online harms act is focused almost exclusively on protecting children from predators, and that, as Justice Minister Arif Virani said, “It does not undermine freedom of speech,” that simply isn’t true. While the legislation, tabled Monday, could have been much worse — it mercifully avoids regulating “misinformation” — it opens up new avenues to censor political speech.

Under the bill, condemning the Hamas massacre of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, could, under some circumstances, be considered “hate speech”, and therefore subject to a human rights complaint with up to $50,000 in penalties. As part of the new rules designed to protect Canadians from “online harms”, the bill would reinstate Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the hate speech provision repealed under the Harper government.

The new version is more tightly defined than the original, but contains the same fatal flaws, specifically that truth is no defence and that what counts as hate speech remains highly subjective.

Under the new Section 13: “it is a discriminatory practice to communicate or cause to be communicated hate speech by means of the Internet or any other means of telecommunication in a context in which the hate speech is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination”.

It is distressingly easy to imagine scenarios where everyday political speech finds itself under the purview of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Criticizing Hamas and the murderous ideology that motivates it could, to some, be seen as “likely to foment detestation or vilification” against a group, especially if the condemnation of Hamas notes that Palestinians generally support the terrorist group or that Hamas is driven by religious fanaticism.

Dan Knight calls it “the sequel no one asked for”:

Morning my fellow Canadians and lets break into the liberals latest sequel with Bill C-63 the its failed predecessor, Bill C-36, which is a sequel nobody asked for in the saga of online hate speech legislation. We’re witnessing a government’s second attempt to police what you can say online.

Now, the Liberal government in Canada initially put forward Bill C-36. This bill aimed to tackle extreme forms of hate speech online. It sought to bring back a version of a section that was repealed from the Canadian Human Rights Act in 2013. Why was it repealed, you might ask? Because critics argued it violated free speech rights. But here we are, years later, with the Liberals trying to reintroduce similar measures under the guise of combating hate speech. Under the proposed changes, folks could be fined up to $20,000 if found guilty of hate speech that identifies a victim. But here’s the kicker: the operators of social media platforms, the big tech giants, are initially left out of the equation. Instead, the focus is on individuals and website operators. Now, the government says it plans to hold consultations over how to make these social media platforms more accountable. But the details are hazy, and the timeline is, well, as clear as mud.

The justice minister of Canada has framed these amendments as a way to protect the vulnerable and hold individuals accountable for spreading hatred online. But let’s be clear: there’s a thin line between protecting individuals and infringing upon free speech. And that line is looking blurrier by the day in Canada. Critics, including the Opposition Conservatives, have voiced concerns that these measures could curb freedom of speech and be difficult to enforce. They argue that the government’s efforts might not just be about protecting citizens but could veer into controlling what can and cannot be said online. And when the government starts deciding what constitutes “hate speech”, you have to start wondering: Who gets to draw that line? And based on what standards?

And, just when you thought it couldn’t get any more Orwellian, enter the pièce de résistance: the Digital Safety Commission of Canada. Because, clearly, what’s missing in the fight against “hate speech” is another layer of bureaucracy, right? Another set of initials to add to the alphabet soup of governmental oversight. So, here’s the deal: this newly minted commission, with its CEO and officers — oh, you better believe there will be officers — is tasked with overseeing the online speech of millions. And let me tell you, nothing says “independent” like a government-appointed body policing what you can and cannot say on the internet. I can just imagine the job postings: Now Hiring: Online Expression Regulators, proficiency in silencing dissent highly valued.

Arizona GOP pushes to legalize hunting down suspected illegal immigrants with deadly force! Film at 11!

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

Chris Bray reports on this utterly abhorrent piece of proposed legislation that will literally condemn any brown person in the state of Arizona to be murdered out of hand by evil red-hatted Trump supporters … or will it?

Republicans in the Arizona legislature have advanced a bill that would allow anyone in the state to just casually gun down any migrant anytime they feel like that filthy brown person might be trespassing. You can trust that this is really happening, because it’s in the news.

Delightfully, Axios reporter April Rubin trained at the New York Times. Here’s how she starts this story:

    Arizona Republicans are advancing a bill that would allow people to legally kill someone accused of attempting to trespass or actively trespassing on their property.

    The big picture: The legislation, which is expected to be vetoed if it reaches the state’s Democratic governor, would legalize the murder of undocumented immigrants, who often have to cross ranches that sit on the state’s border with Mexico.

These monsters, they’re legalizing the murder of undocumented migrants.

So, as always, let’s read the actual bill:

A person in lawful possession of property can threaten deadly force, or potentially use deadly force, in response to an act of criminal trespassing: You can go out on your property with a gun and tell a trespasser to get lost.

But Subsection B is the key to the actual use of deadly force, and journalists aren’t saying anything about it (emphasis added): “A person may use deadly physical force under subsection A only in the defense of himself or third persons as described in sections 13-405 and 13-406,” existing sections of Arizona state law. The bill explicitly references an existing legal standard for the use of deadly force.

February 28, 2024

The rise of the “Pretendian” is an inevitable consequence of academia’s ultra-woke culture

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

Freddie deBoer summarizes why we’ve seen a vast increase in the number of Pretendians in western academia, but especially in Canada and the United States (and we can be almost certain that there are a lot more who haven’t yet been revealed, because the incentives to pretend are so enticing):

“The Pretendians”, a CBC documentary – https://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/the-pretendians

  1. Certain jobs in academia are highly prized
  2. There are far more applicants than openings for those jobs and so competition for them is incredibly fierce
  3. Representing yourself as a member of an underrepresented minority significantly improves your odds of getting such a job, and in certain fields representing yourself as a person of indigenous descent improves those odds dramatically
  4. Indigenous identity is easy to fake and difficult to disprove, and the cost of accusing someone else of faking it, in academia, can be very high indeed
  5. Most crucially of all, the social culture of academia strongly prohibits speaking frankly about these facts

Jay Caspian Kang’s new piece on the “Pretendian” crisis in academia is deeply researched and compulsively readable, and read it you should. But fundamentally everything you need to know about the problem is in the numbered list above. You’ve created a fiercely competitive process in which a segment of people are given a very large advantage, there are few if any objective markers that can disprove that someone is a member of that segment, and you’ve declared it offensive to question whether someone really is a member of that segment, outside of very specific scenarios. (When I was in academia people spoke very darkly about the concept of ever questioning someone’s indigenous identity, called it the act of a colonizer, etc etc.) The obvious question is … what did you think was going to happen? Humanities and social sciences departments have, through the conditions described above, rung the dinner bell for people pretending to have indigenous heritage. They now act shocked when such people show up. I find it disingenuous and untoward. This behavior is the product of the incentives that you yourself built. Of course it’s a stain on the integrity of the fakes. But you made it inevitable that this would happen. Reap what you sow.

Accusations aplenty, but still no clear evidence

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

Michelle Stirling outlines the establishment of the North West Mounted Police (today’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and their role in driving out American whiskey traders and criminal gangs who had invaded the Canadian west, and the initial role of Sir John A. Macdonald in setting up the first residential schools for First Nations children:

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

It is clear that the claim of “mass graves” of children allegedly found by Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School is false. The main reason is that there is no list of names of missing persons — over the course of 113 years of Indian Residential Schools, which saw 150,000 students go through the system, some staying for a year, most for an average of 4.5 years, some staying for a decade or more and graduating, and some orphans being taken in to the school as children, then remaining to work as Indigenous staff — these many thousands of children passed through Indian Residential Schools, their parents enrolling and re-enrolling them year after year.

And there is no list of names of missing persons.

There are many claims of missing persons.

Some of these claims are quite fatuous — with one person claiming that in their Band, every family had four or five children who went missing at that school. Another person claimed that their grandfather had ten siblings disappear in that school.

If that were true, the Band would have ceased to exist.

Despite these claims, there are no missing persons records.

And every student who went to that school is documented on the Band’s Treaty rolls, in documents of the Indian Agent, in the enrollment forms at the Department of Indian Affairs, along with the student’s medical certificate for entry, and in the quarterly reports of the department.

In fact, the Indigenous population of Canada grew from about 102,358 in 1871 to now 1.8 million.

It seems that the claim of a “mass grave” on the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site was timed to “nudge” the approval of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People through parliament — which it did! The bill had been “stuck” as six provinces had requested delay and clarity on key issues. Once the claim of “mass graves” surfaced — boom!

Less than a month after the “mass graves” news shot round the world, shocking the global community that Canadians — once known as international peacemakers, were actually hideous murderers of Indigenous children — UNDRIP swept through the Canadian Parliament with no objection.

A day later, China accused Canada of genocide, citing the Kamloops “mass graves” find as proof. For those of you following the concerns about China’s alleged interference in elections in Canada, this rather convenient timing might set off some alarm bells.

If anything, the RCMP should be investigating this matter on grounds of false pretences or fraud. But the RCMP appear to have transferred the investigation of the Kamloops “mass grave” to the people who claimed to have found them! Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) can only identify “disturbances” under ground, not bodies or coffins. In fact, based on previous land use records, most likely the GPR found 215 clay tiles of an old septic trench.

QotD: When the rules in the dating market all changed

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

So far we’ve only been talking about guys, but the gals went through their own version of the same process way back in the days. Indeed, it’s because the girls changed that the guys got into PUA in the first place.

Under the old dispensation, back before the Clinton Era (1988-2001), everyone acknowledged that there were a lot of users and abusers, douchebags and parasites and losers, out there in the world. That being the case, simply being an all-around ok guy with a steady job — what the PUAs came to term “beta providers” — was, in itself, a pretty solid resume in the dating market. “Just be yourself” was every guy’s dad’s advice when it came to dating, and back then it was pretty solid, since it was assumed that the decent job etc. flowed from being a decent human being. And since every girl’s mom was telling her complementary things, the system worked … until it didn’t, and you can date the change precisely: June 6, 1998, the premiere of the HBO series Sex and the City.

[…] Everyone has met one of those “one of the guys”-type girls. They’re great fun, and while you know what I mean when I say they’re not necessarily marriage material as-is, you therefore also know what I mean when I say they really are what feminists all claim to be: Strong, confident women. They are what they are, and they know it, take it or leave it.

The problem is, most women — and, it goes without saying, all feminists — aren’t “strong, confident women”, in the same way the vast majority of guys aren’t naturally “alpha males”. That’s the dialectic I’ve been trying to get at in this series of posts. Sex and the City, as much as every episode needs to be burned and the ashes shot into deep space, was just the manifestation of a long-developing process. Thanks to all that “self-esteem” shit that started in the Seventies, sometime in the Clinton Era a critical mass of young women decided that what they needed was to be “strong” and “self-confident”. But they didn’t know how to do that, because the people telling them this were fat lesbian college professors. Then HBO, sensing a valuable market niche, got into the act …

Sex and the City […] is the gayest show in the history of television. Carrie and the Gals don’t act like women; they act the way women think men act — which is to say, they act like gay men. Recall that the late 1990s also saw an explosion of female “comedians”, whose one “joke” was some version of “I got my period today, but damn, I still crave dick.” (Sex and the City, you’ll recall, was pitched as a comedy). And that’s a serious problem, because as every straight guy has said at least once in his life, being gay would be fabulous if not for the “sex with guys” part. I mean, how awesome would it be (every young man thinks), if you could reorient your whole life around your crotch?

Severian, “Mental Middlemen III: SATC”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.

February 27, 2024

Thank goodness we don’t get all the CBC we pay for!

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

In the dim, dark recesses of history … say twenty-five years ago … the CBC was what the government still seems to believe it is: a credible, trusted source of news and entertainment. In truth, it was never as loved as some might claim, as it had a deep bias in favour of Quebec and Ontario issues and tended to only occasionally remember the rest of the country. The federal government has been subsidizing the CBC, yet the network’s audience has shrunk to the point that it’s rare to encounter anyone who consumes very much of the programming on offer. Part of that is just the sheer variety of other options available to Canadians and part of it is the CBC’s sour, toxic, hectoring tone when lecturing about “the current thing”. Far from being a major player in upholding Canadian culture, the CBC is clearly one of the major factors that are destroying it:

… looking at the viewer and listener stats for the CBC, our national behemoth, which eats up $1.5 billion annually, and which amounts to 50% of the media dollars spent, is equally disheartening. The state spends another $600 million supporting once-successful media because “internet”. CBC television is watched by 3.9% of Canadians and only 0.8% watch CBC News. Again, half of all media dollars, half. Half is spent engaging less than 4% of Canadians. CBC radio is considered reasonably good, and is listened to by 10%, despite its vindictive calling out of anyone who disagrees with their hard socialist stance. As to other mainstream media, propped up by government via hundred of millions, it is still shedding staff and readers in double digits.

Despite every conceivable advantage, advertising on the CBC dropped 20% during the pandemic. In fact, they are so disliked that CBC is hiring “close protection security” for the next two years. They are so disliked, they have turned off commenting on their various programs. They are so disliked that there is a brand of coffee called “Defund the CBC”. This isn’t passive ignoring, this is active dislike to the point of needing bodyguards.

Why? Because our media show us to ourselves as racist, stupid, sexist, stupid, stupid and more stupid. And while they are at it, shallow and violent. That is the real reason, and the only reason CanCon is dying. They hate us. Why? The only people who have thrived during the past twenty years in Canada when private and public wealth doubled then doubled again, are the ones who live off the government, whether through mandated consulting in the enviro and other business, or direct granting or though quasi-private-sector jobs that are heavily subsidized. Public Private Partnerships have to be the most fiendish way to flat out loot the public ever been invented. Or straight up public sector jobs which are among the most lushly funded and unionized in the known universe, the number of which have grown 400% in the last ten years. Do or did you get six weeks of paid holiday a year?

And do they hate us, in fact correcting us is how they get the grants, the jobs, the subsidy. Everything they do is meant to fix us deplorable Canadians.

Sit at a downtown Toronto dinner party as I have, with say, the head of CBC drama, as I have and listen to just how much they hate the rest of Canada. Why? They hate the rest of Canada because they feel guilty. They know they are cheating and they know they are stealing. I tell ya, I needed close protection security — this woman was terrifying. “Sit Down While I’m Talking to You“, she roared at me.

Javier Milei gets ghosted by US media after posting rare budget surplus in Argentina

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jon Miltimore on Argentine President Javier Milei’s good economic news that the legacy US media are resolutely ignoring:

Argentine President Javier Milei speaking at the World Economic Forum gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, January 2024.
Photo by Flickr – World Economic Forum | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Argentines witnessed something amazing last week: the government’s first budget surplus in nearly a dozen years.

The Economy Ministry announced the figures Friday, and the government was $589 million in the black.

Argentina’s surplus comes on the heels of ambitious cuts in federal spending pushed by newly-elected President Javier Milei that included slashing bureaucracy, eliminating government publicity campaigns, reducing transportation subsidies, pausing all monetary transfers to local governments, and devaluing the peso.

Milei’s policies, which he has himself described as a kind of “shock therapy,” come as Argentina faces a historic economic crisis fueled by decades of government spending, money printing, and Peronism (a blend of national socialism and fascism).

These policies have pushed the inflation rate in Argentina, once one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America, above 200 percent. Today nearly 58 percent of the Argentine population lives in poverty, according to a recent study.

And Milei rightfully blames Argentina’s backward economic policies for its plight — policies that, he points out, are spreading across the world.

“The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism,” Milei said in a recent speech in Davos. “We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world — rather they are the root cause.”

The revelation that Argentina has done something the US government hasn’t done in more than two decades — run a budget surplus — seems like a newsworthy event.

Yet to my surprise, I couldn’t find a word about it in major US media — not in the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, or Reuters. (The New York Sun seems to be the only exception.)

I had to find the story in Australian media! (To be fair, the Agence France Presse also reported the story.)

One could argue that these outlets just aren’t very interested in Argentina’s politics and economics, but that’s not exactly true.

The Associated Press has covered Argentinian politics and Milei extensively, including a recent piece that reported how the new president’s policies were inducing “anxiety and resignation” in the populace. The same goes for Reuters and the other newspapers.

A cynic might suspect these media outlets simply don’t wish to report good news out of Argentina, now that Milei is president.

QotD: The role of the scholar

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

The first Great Commandment of scholarship is be honest; everything else is commentary. All the standards and methods that scholars have developed over the ages can be reduced to “be honest”.

Of course, fraudulent scholars have always existed, but it seems to me — not that I’ve conducted a study of the matter — that clear dishonesty by leading scholars no longer elicits widespread condemnation and no longer discredits the guilty parties to the extent that it used to. The Nancy MacLean affair [her book Democracy in Chains (2017) was an extended character assassination of Nobel Prize winning economist James M. Buchanan] is clear-cut. Thomas Piketty’s work is either blatantly dishonest or spectacularly incompetent. And many other examples might be adduced. Ideology, it seems, has overwhelmed scholars in the humanities and social sciences to an unprecedented degree.

Scholars should be seeking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, however much they appreciate that this objective can never be attained fully. They are obliged to strive. If they clearly are not trying, indeed, are twisting and turning in the ideological wind above all, real scholars should drum them out of their professions as unworthy of recognition by genuine scholars.

Bob Higgs, Facebook, 2019-08-28.

February 26, 2024

Time to pry the smartphones from the clutches of our dopamine-addicted youngsters?

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

A couple of articles this weekend deal with the already acknowledged problem of dopamine addiction especially among the young whose brains and personalities are still in the formative stages. First, here’s Christopher Gage reporting with some delight that British schoolchildren are going to have to learn how to cope with a full school day without the electronic binkies they’ve grown so dependent on:

Detail of an article at bankmycell.com

I long for the day when gawking at one’s phone like a lobotomy patient invokes derision. Don’t you know your filthy addiction pollutes every atom of our society? You selfish bastard. You perverts should be ashamed of yourselves, etc. That day is on the horizon.

This week, British lawmakers banned smartphones in schools. Those pocket perils are lobotomising those whom sentimentalists call “the nation’s future”. Denied their devil devices, schoolchildren will endure hours of reading, thinking, and writing. Heaven forbid, they’ll talk to their friends and teachers in flesh and blood.

In these matters, I am militant. Children are not vessels of wisdom and wonder corrupted by a cruel world. They’re ignorant. By teaching them how to think and live, adults civilise children. That bleeping burping buzzing beehive in their pockets renders that civilising mission impossible.

Many disagree. But their knee-jerk reaction to this “knee-jerk reaction” crashes against concrete evidence. Smartphones erode concentration, dull critical thinking, blunt memory, and shred retention. The monstrous equation: Smartphones plus face-hugger apps equals ignorant, depressed, anxious youths.

Yes, technology invites moral panic. Plato worried that the written word would mulch minds into mush. But this is serious.

Last year, Dr Vivek Murthy, the United States surgeon general, issued a rare public health advisory. Across 19 pages, Dr Murthy warned that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were “not fully understood”.

“There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents,” he said.

And what did we say? Not much. We had more important matters to attend. If I remember correctly, on that very day, Kim Kardashian revealed on Instagram her latest arse or her newest boyfriend.

However, serious people think this is a serious problem. Dr Benjamin Maxwell, a director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, said he is “immensely concerned” by a study linking social media and poor mental health. That “highly stimulating environment” may corrode “cognitive ability, attention span and memory during a time when their brains are still developing,” Maxwell said. “What are the long-term consequences? I don’t think we know.”

The UN’s education, science, and culture agency says the more young Jack scrolls through TikTok and the like, the lower his grades sink.

Countless studies show smartphones and their face-hugger apps — designed by behavioural psychologists to addict and milk the user — worsen anxiety, depression, and self-esteem. Not to mention lining up children for the predation of bullies 24/7.

Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge are the canaries in the cultural coalmine. They say HMS Progress is crashing toward the icebergs — rising rates of suicide, depression, and anxiety. To them, the evidence is almost irrefutable. Turn back now, they say, or the ship sinks.

The second item is a follow-up by Ted Gioia to his post on dopamine culture last week:

My article on “dopamine culture” has stirred up interest and (even more) raised concerns among readers who recognize the symptoms I described.

One of the illustration went viral in a big way. And I’ve gotten requests from all over the world for permission to translate and share the material. (Yes, you can all quote generously from the article, and reprint my charts with attribution.)

This image was shared widely online

But many have asked for more specific guidance.

What can we do in a culture dominated by huge corporations that want us to spend hours every day swiping and scrolling?

I find it revealing and disturbing that readers who work on the front lines (in education, therapy, or tech itself) expressed the highest degree of alarm. They know better than anybody where we’re heading, and want to find an escape path.

Here’s a typical comment from teacher Adam Whybray:

    I see it massively as a teacher. Kids desperately pleading for toilet breaks, claiming their human rights are being infringed, so they can check TikTok, treating lessons as though they’re in a Youtube reaction video, needing to react with a meme or a take — saying that silence in lessons scares them or freaks them out.

    One notable difference from when I was at school was that I remember a lesson in which we got to watch a film was a relief or even pleasurable (depending on the film). My students today often say they are unable to watch films because they can’t focus. I had one boy getting quite emotional, begging to be allowed to look at his phone instead.

Another teacher asked if the proper response is to unplug regularly? Others have already embraced digital detox techniques of various sorts (see here and here).

I hope to write more about this in the future.

In particular, I want to focus on the many positive ways people create a healthy, integrated life that minimizes scrolling and swiping and mindless digital distractions. Many of you have found joy and solace — and an escape from app dependence — in artmaking or nature walks or other real world activities. There are countless ways of being-in-the-world with contentment and mindfulness.

Today I want to discuss just one bedrock of real world life that is often neglected — or frequently even mocked: Ritual.

I know how much I rely on my daily rituals as a way of creating wholeness and balance. I spend every morning in an elaborate ritual involving breakfast, reading books (physical copies, not on a screen), listening to music, and enjoying home life.

Even my morning coffee preparation is ritualistic. (However, I’m not as extreme as this person — who rivals the Japanese tea ceremony in attention to detail.)

I try to avoid plugging into the digital world until after noon.

I look forward to this daily time away from screens. But my personal rituals are just one tiny example. There are many larger ways that rituals provide an antidote to the more toxic aspects of tech-dominated society.

Below I share 13 observations on ritual.

The Freedom Convoy’s European echoes

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo on the widespread protests against the EU and various national governments’ intrusive and anti-human attempts to restrict or destroy European farmers in pursuit of their climate change agenda:

I wish there was a way to measure the gulf between ruling elites and the people that they lord over. Don’t Political Scientists have such a methodology already on hand? I don’t know.

What I do know is that this gulf is very palpable on both sides of The Pond, and that this gulf shows no signs of narrowing any time soon. Whether the issue is migration, crime, COVID-19, etc., it seems that the views of the people are simply ignored by those who can and do ignore them, and proceed to make policy that suits their own interests and the interests of their allies and class.

Judging by American media reporting, you would most likely not be aware that massive farmers’ protests are rocking the European continent as we speak. From Portugal to Poland, farmers are protesting the EU’s drive to push policies like “Net Zero” in order to “combat Climate Change” … policies that would severely impact the livelihoods of our food producers. These proposed changes are entirely top-down, indicative of just how divorced the Brussels elites are from the daily lives of the people whose lives they wish to upend with a stroke the pen. “Oppose us? You must be far right … probably a Nazi too.”

    The “far-right” political libel against hard-pressed farmers is really a sign of how far the EU elites have lost touch with the reality of life for the peoples of Europe. We should ignore the slurs, and get behind the fighting farmers.

    The protests by angry farmers have spread across the European Union, with mighty convoys of tractors blockading roads and cities from Romania to Rome, from Portugal to Poland, from Bulgaria to Brussels and beyond.

    There might be some national variations in the farmers’ specific demands. But what unites them all is opposition to the way that the EU elites are subordinating agricultural policy to their Green agenda and Net Zero obsession, leading to more hardship for farmers and higher food prices for other Europeans.

    As tractor convoys blockaded German cities in January, farmers’ association president Joachim Rukwied spelt out that they were protesting not just against the government’s proposed cuts in fuel subsidies, but against an EU-wide system where “agricultural policy is being made from an unworldly, urban bubble and against farming families and rural areas”.

    This week in Poland, 62-year-old protesting farmer Janusz Bialoskorski told the media that, “They’re talking about climate protection. But why should it be done at farmers’ expense?” Farmers, he pointed out, are not responsible for industrial pollution, and “nor do we fly to Davos on our jets”.

Pitchfork Populism. The fact that the elites in Brussels have invited this in a year when elections for the EU’s Parliament are scheduled to occur indicates just how out of touch they really are.

    These farmers are now in the front line of a wider populist revolt, against those elitists who DO fly in their private jets to the World Economic Forum in luxurious Davos, Switzerland, where they lecture the rest of us about how to save the planet by sacrificing our living standards.

    Their protests expose the yawning gap between the high-minded talk of the Brussels Green oligarchy, and the grim reality of what those Net Zero policies mean for normal people in the muddy fields of Flanders or on the supermarket shelves of Florence.

If you can’t shut them up, call them “far right”:

    Last weekend, UK Observer newspaper (Sunday sister of the liberal Guardian), the most pro-EU voice in the British media, worried aloud about how the European farmers’ cause “has been enthusiastically adopted by a resurgent populist far-right”.

    Similar fears have repeatedly been expressed in the Brussels-backing news media this year: “Brussels struggles to placate farmers as far-right stokes protests,” and “EU farmers egged on by the far-right” (Financial Times); “How the far-right aims to ride farmers’ outrage to power in Europe” (Politico); “Far-right harvests farmers’ anger across Europe” (France 24) etc., etc.

    The EU establishment and its media pals are so out of touch with the reality of people’s lives that they apparently imagine Europe’s naïve farmers are protesting only because they have been “egged on” or “stoked up” by “far-right” agitators. The idea that these farmers might be entirely reasonable, hard-working people who are simply at the end of their collective tether with EU bureaucracy seems beyond the comprehension of those bureaucrats and their media mouthpieces.

“A Silent War on Farming”:

    As the title of a recent report by the think-tank MCC Brussels puts it, Europe’s agricultural communities are facing nothing less than a “Silent War on Farming,” waged from Brussels.

    For decades, EU agricultural policy was about the efficient, cheap, and safe production of food to feed the peoples of Europe and ensure that the continent never suffered famine again. Now, that policy has instead been captured by Green ideology, which demands that farmers use less land and less intensive methods to produce lower emissions. In sum, that must mean less farming—and less food being produced.

    Farmers are bearing the brunt of the ideologically-driven regulations imposed by the EU, with falling incomes and the closure of family farms. The rest of Europe faces a scarcity-driven surge in prices—with shortages being met by food imports from countries with far higher emissions than the EU’s hi-tech farming sector.

    For many Europeans now supporting the farmers, however, this is about even more than the price of food on their table. Farming and rural communities are at the heart of traditional European ideas of community and self-image. People who live far from the countryside can now identify with farmers who are resisting the same sort of threat to their way of life that they see posed by, for example, EU policies on mass migration.

All Brussels seems to be able to do these days is pass laws to micromanage the lives of Europeans, while increasing the contempt that these same people have for them.

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