Quotulatiousness

May 29, 2025

“Kollidge Inglish Majors kan so reed gud!”

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

On Substack, Kitten provides a sample of the many, many, many, many reactions to an earlier viral piece called College English majors can’t read:

I think it’s safe to say that “lack of funding” isn’t the problem

Well, that was a wild ride. As of the time of this writing, College English majors can’t read has 120,000 views and 535 comments. Comments and restacks are still rolling in but not at the furious pace they were in the few days after publication. It went viral on twitter, with my tweet announcing the article getting 768 retweets and 1.5M views, with thousands of comments spread across various quote tweets. It was shared to Reddit in several different threads, many of which themselves spawned hundreds of comments. It went viral on Hacker News. It was shared on Vox Day. It was published on Revolver News. Hundreds of people linked it in their Instagram and Facebook posts. A bunch of people shared it on Slack or Microsoft Teams. And most endearing of all, thousands of people forwarded the newsletter around by email like an AOL chain letter from your grandma (Fwd:Fwd:Re:Fwd: You won’t BELIEVE what they are teaching in college now!!!!)

[…]

The people have spoken, and they speak in a single clear voice: they want to hear about how dumb college kids are. They want to bathe in delicious schadenfreude. They want all the embarrassing and gory details about how Suzie in Kansas couldn’t figure out what a megalosaurus is, how heavily she breathed during the 16 seconds she tapped Google searches into her phone before giving up. And their bloodlust will be slaked one way or another.

[…]

The title is inaccurate, college kids can read fine

I got this comment a bunch of different times, and I think that one particular guy made the same comment at least four different times that I saw, in different places. Basically, this nitpicking goes: these kids can read just fine, they just have trouble understanding and interpreting hard texts, and this means the title is sensational and not literally true. This is a fair point, and I deeply treasure our nation’s strategic reserve of turbospergs ready to call out technical inaccuracies wherever they rear their ugly heads. I should note for the turbospergs reading this that “rearing their ugly heads” is figurative language, article titles do not have bodies and do not move, you have me dead to rights on that one.

But most readers were quick to chide the spergs that this is an article about different levels of functional literacy, and that “read” can have different connotations depending on the context. Obviously we’re talking about more than just sounding out the words on the page in this case. And also, College English majors can’t read is just a much better title than the long but more technically accurate one you would have me write instead.

The study is bad and you can’t believe its results

A lot of people made this comment in one form or another, for a variety of reasons. If you want to read a detailed takedown, I suggest this long post by Holly MathNerd. She has a lot of different objections about the methodology and how the results generalize to the population of college kids. It’s worth reading and taking seriously if you’re the scientific minded type, she knows what she’s talking about.

One very large objection that should give you pause: there are multiple layers of potential selection bias taking place. We’re looking at just a couple schools in Kansas at a single point in time, not a nationally representative sample of students. These aren’t exactly top-tier schools, of course they don’t have the best kids! And worse, they recruited study participants the way they always recruit undergrads for this kind of study, by asking for volunteers in class or even by hand-selecting students and encouraging them to join up. This means the researchers weren’t getting a random sample of their students, they were getting the kids who were dumb enough to waste their time on a silly research task. Or even worse: they picked problematic kids on purpose to prove a point.

This is a fair criticism, and I don’t want to minimize it, but I don’t think it ultimately matters much. The reason is that we know how these kids tested on the ACT Reading subtest and how that compares to the national standard.

    The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4

The national average for college students on the ACT Reading subtest is 21.2, so these kids are a bit above average nationally. (20 to 23 is considered a competitive score for admission to most schools, with 24 to 28 being the standard for more selective schools). This is reasonably strong evidence that they are not significantly dumber than typical college students nationwide. Maybe not representative, sure, but certainly not dumber than average.

And despite being competitive for admission according to Educational Testing Service, 22.4 is not a good score!

    According to Educational Testing Service, [students with a score of 22.4] read on a “low-intermediate level”, able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives”, “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages”

So maybe these results don’t actually generalize to students nationwide, maybe this wasn’t a fair sample. But if you’re skeptical on the question of generalization, another way to view this study is as an ethnography rather than a quantitative result — the researchers discovered and documented a group of college English majors with truly terrible reading comprehension. Whether or not this result generalizes to college kids everywhere, these particular kids exist. And they can’t read. Personally I think the ethnographic details are what make this study so evocative, and I wish more research took this form. My hunch is nobody would be talking about this at all without these details — distilled down to a raw quantitative result (half of kids score below median on test, news at 11), nobody would care.

May 28, 2025

The Throne Speech

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

On his Substack, Paul Wells reports on the first Throne Speech delivered by the reigning monarch since the 1970s:

Mark Carney joins our visiting King in the traditional Making of the Small Talk.
Photo by Paul Wells from his Substack

We’re like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, or I guess, since the new PM is said to prefer British spellings, Charlye Brownne with Lewsey’s Foote Ball. Each generation of Canadian leadership tries to find a new way to make throne speeches exciting. These attempts are forever doomed, because no generation of Canadian leadership is exciting and because the format — a statement of intent from a dignitary who is forbidden to harbour autonomous intent — tends to short-circuit the delivery.

This time the delivery mechanism was the King of Canada, Charles Philip Arthur George, popping over from his secondary residence at Buckingham. His French tops Mary Simon’s, though his Inuktitut is shaky. He did his best to sound excited, or resolute, about the CBSA’s “new powers to examine goods”.

A quarter-century ago the reliably impish John Fraser told me he was preparing a book called Eminent Canadians that would survey recent developments in four Canadian institutions. The institutions he’d selected were the office of the Prime Minister; the Globe and Mail; the Anglican Church; — and here Fraser urged me to guess the fourth. Canadian institution? I dunno, the armed forces? The NHL? “The Crown”, Fraser said with a twinkle. Thus was I prepped for this week’s extended round of you-know-he’s-really-the-king-of-Canada browbeating.

This throne speech was like many before it, though out of deference for the deliverer it was on the short side, 21 pages tucked inside wide margins. In substance it was a paraphrase of Mark Carney’s already-semi-legendary Single Mandate Letter for cabinet ministers. There were sections on redefining Canada’s relationship with the United States; on internal trade; on crimefighting and national defence; and on “spending less and investing more”, which, I mean, we’ll see.

The mandate letter seems to have supplanted the Liberal election platform as the main blueprint for Carney’s action. The two aren’t wildly incompatible, but the mandate letter/throne speech is streamlined and puts stuff in different order.

I saw two surprises big enough to make me write today, but first I want to point to a few elements that are worth noting in the less-surprising stuff. That’s right, I’m trying to be useful, not just smart-assed, so here’s a way to thank me. […]

First, Carney (through His Majesty) makes claims for the “new economic and security relationship with the United States” that seem unrealistic. He expects “transformational benefits for both sovereign nations”. But surely any cross-border negotiation can only be, at best, an exercise in damage control? Any security costs that would be newly borne by Canada would represent a net cost. Trade arrangements short of the substantially free trade we’ve enjoyed for 40 years will also represent a net cost. The point of seeking “one Canadian economy” and taking relations with third countries more seriously is to offset the cost of a degraded Canada-US relationship, no?

Under “more affordable”, the throne speech repeats campaign promises for income-tax cuts and cuts to GST on new homes. The list of tangible financial benefits to individuals doesn’t go much past that. “The Government will protect the programs that are already saving families thousands of dollars every year. These include child care and pharmacare.” “Protect” is an old Ottawa word meaning “not extend”.

The goals for the “one Canadian economy” now include “free trade across the nation”, at both federal and provincial levels of government, “by Canada Day”. Which is 34 days away. The staffing and mandate of another new entity, a single-wicket “Major Federal Project Office”, may end up mattering more to this government’s success and Canada’s prosperity than the name of the PM’s next chief of staff, so put an asterisk next to that.

The government repeats a mysterious claim I’ve found shaky since Carney became a Liberal leadership candidate. It “will take a series of measures to catalyse new investment to create better jobs and higher incomes for Canadians. The scale of the Government’s initiative will match the challenges of our times and the ambitions of Canadians.” The challenges of our times, at least, are large.

So again: if the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the Canada Growth Fund and the Freeland-Sabia investment tax credits are sufficient to catalyse (British spelling) new investment, why duplicate them?

And if they haven’t worked, why keep them?

May 27, 2025

Four years on, and the media still haven’t been honest about the Residential Schools claims

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

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies looks back to the bombshell claims that horrified the nation, yet went unquestioned by pretty much all of the mainstream media:

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

This week marks the fourth anniversary of the day Canada’s media broke faith with the public that funds it.

May 27, 2021, was when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” discovered at the former Kamloops Residential School site. Most, if not all, media reported this statement, which was based on anomalies shown on ground penetrating radar, without challenging its veracity.

Not long after, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced that ground penetrating radar had located 751 unmarked graves in a community cemetery adjacent to the former location of a residential school.

Talk of “mass graves” ricocheted across the country and the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Saskatchewan in a flash on bended knee with teddy bears. It didn’t matter that the markers in the cemetery had been removed decades ago by a rogue priest; Anderson Cooper and a 60 Minutes crew were already flying in to Regina. The impression left by the coverage was that children had been murdered en masse. Statues were toppled or put in storage and close to 200 churches were burned — many to the ground — or vandalized in the months and years that followed. Pope Francis visited Canada in 2022 to atone once again for the Roman Catholic church’s role in operating many of the schools.

All because no one had the courage to ask: “This is a very serious allegation – how can you be certain?” and then, in the immortal words of the City News Bureau of Chicago, check it out.

The coverage at the time showed little evidence journalists looked for proof beyond the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc allegation or gave sufficient play to Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme’s efforts to establish context.

Since then, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc have revised their confirmation of bodies so that they now maintain the radar showed anomalies that possibly could be graves. No bodies have been found or, for that matter, searched for. The band has received millions of dollars to assist it with its investigation and the school is now a national historic site.

The original stories remain online and, in many cases, uncorrected, leaving the public’s understanding of the matter unchanged. Here’s one example from CTV/Canadian Press. The headline — “Remains of 215 children found buried at former B.C. residential school” — is still there. CBC has made an effort to update its stories, but its original headlines remain and recent incidents suggest staff still believe the initial version.

As Marco Navarro-Genie of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently wrote, media may even have been enlisted as allies to ensure the allegations went unchallenged:

    “According to The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, “select journalists” were given embargoed details to ensure “sensitive and impactful” coverage. CBC journalist Angela Sterritt admitted she was in contact with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc the day before the announcement and was one of only a few journalists granted access to the June 4, 2021, video conference, where live-streaming was prohibited. This raises serious questions about whether the CBC acted as a passive reporter or an active participant in promoting an unverified claim.”

Shamed domestically and internationally, the nation’s flags went to half mast for months before being raised only in deference to Remembrance Day. A new holiday was declared for federal employees and the Prime Minister took advantage of the first one to go surfing.

There is no question that children died at residential schools. I have stood by and honoured the once unmarked graves — including those belonging to children of the school’s principal — at the reclaimed site of the Indian Industrial School outside Regina. Nor is there doubt that many students suffered from cultural dislocation, shaming and abuse. But that is no excuse for media not reporting the original Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc claim and the Cowessess news professionally and instead wildly and widely misinforming the public, raising the spectre of mass murders and traumatizing many. It’s one thing to make a mistake, quite another to leave it uncorrected because you prefer the impression it made.

May 26, 2025

QotD: A Slop manifesto

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

Long live Slop!

Slop is a creative style that emerged around 2023 with the rise of generative AI. Slop art is flat, awkward, stale, listless, and often ridiculous. Slop works are celebrated for their stupidity and clumsiness — which are often amplified by strange juxtapositions of culture memes.

These Slop works are widely mocked by the audience — and even by the people who create and curate them. Yet they are the results of hundreds of billions of dollars in tech investment.

Slop is all about wastefulness!

Let’s put this in context: In the current moment, there’s no money for serious artists — in filmmaking, fiction, painting, music, whatever. But there’s an endless supply of dollars to create Slop technology.

In fact, no artistic movement in human history has soaked up more cash than Slop.

This seems like a paradox. Why is so much money devoted to churning out crap?

Ah, that’s part of the appeal of Slop. The audience’s gleeful mockery is actually enhanced by the fact that a huge fortune has been wasted in creating pointless and bizarre works.

In other words, this mismatch between means and ends is a key part of our aesthetic movement. Hence a certain degree of cynicism is embedded in both the production and consumption of Slop.

So it’s stupid. It’s wasteful. It’s tasteless. It’s cynical.

And that’s all part of the plan.

Long live Slop!

Ted Gioia, “The New Aesthetics of Slop”, The Honest Broker, 2025-02-25.

May 25, 2025

Comparing Japan’s supply management system to the Canadian version

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

Colby Cosh considers the fate of a Japanese government minister who accidentally told the truth about a subject near and dear to Japanese consumers’ hearts (well, stomachs, actually):

“Japanese Girls at Work in the Rice Fields – Grand Old Fuji-Yama in the Distance, Japan” by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

I’m sure some of you saw Wednesday’s NP headline for an Associated Press wire story: “Japan’s agriculture minister resigns after saying he ‘never had to buy rice’” AP’s Mari Yamaguchi explained this international-news nugget. A cabinet minister in a shaky minority government made a flippant comment indicating that he was light-years out of touch with ordinary people facing high grocery costs in a developed country.

Taku Eto’s political survival thus became impossible within a matter of hours, and his prime minister hastily swapped a congenial young star into the agriculture portfolio. Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a system of parliamentary government more or less like ours, so there’s nothing incomprehensible about any of this to a Canadian …

… but, of course, one almost couldn’t help flashing back to our recent election campaign, wherein the prime minister had half-boasted to a Radio-Canada reporter that he doesn’t buy his own groceries and has no earthly idea how the stuff in his fridge gets there. It struck me at the time that this was a classic mistake for an electoral neophyte like Mark Carney. Fans of the legendary American columnist Michael Kinsley will surely think of it as a “Kinsley gaffe”, i.e., an obviously true statement that is nevertheless bound to get a politician in trouble.

[…]

Eto was talking about rice because the prices for it in Japan have gone through the roof, the clouds and the stratosphere. And rice plays a role in the Japanese culture and diet for which there is no analogue in omnivorous Canada. For precisely that reason, rice is supply-managed there in much the same way our dairy, eggs and poultry are — i.e., through confiscatory tariffs on foreign products, along with a mafia of politically powerful producer cooperatives who operate under supply quotas.

If you read Canadian news, you can recite the effects of this, whether or not you’re capable of finding Japan on a map of Japan. Their supply-management system is, like ours, a major headache for counterparties in trade negotiations. Their farmers, like Canada’s, are dwindling in number and aging out of the business. They are sometimes paid to destroy crops. Farm costs for machinery and supplies are subject to inflation. And sometimes the system for domestic demand forecasting blows a tire.

It’s a constant high-wire act for Japanese governments, who still have official responsibility for the national rice supply under wartime statute. If store-shelf prices get too high, and consumers start to make trouble, the cabinet must consider loosening tariff barriers and releasing rice from the national strategic reserve. The LDP ministry has done both these things in the face of hallucinatory prices, and so the farmers are now just as ticked off as the buying public.

May 24, 2025

German democracy trembles as the extremely extreme extreme right AfD aren’t going to be banned

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

eugyppius updates us on the continued shaky state of German democracy, as the scary extremely extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party seems to have somehow escaped being banned from participation in politics due to some ridiculous “lack of substantive evidence” excuse:

Last week, a supersecret assessment of Alternative für Deutschland by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) leaked to the press. This document was supposed to prove, in excruciating detail, why the AfD are so evil and so fascist and so Nazi and so Hitler, and in this way make a preliminary case for banning the party. In fact its contents turned out to be such an arrant joke that it sapped all remaining momentum within the German political class to prohibit the AfD. I suspect even the “right-wing extremist” classification of the AfD is now in jeopardy and may well be thrown out by the courts, that is how bad this much-heralded supersecret assessment turned out to be.

It took a few days for the full impact of the report’s idiocy to really sink in. That’s how it is with really stupid things – the incredulity they inspire must first dissipate. Finally, though, on Tuesday of this week, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt announced that the dubious evidence marshaled by the BfV was “not sufficient” to support ban proceedings. Dobrindt also said that the whole debate had become “counterproductive” and that it was time to begin finding ways to “end social polarisation”, whatever that means. Hours later, it emerged that Chancellor Friedrich Merz had ordered the entire CDU leadership never to say another word about banning the AfD. If everyone will just shut up, Merz believes his party can “avoid further debate” and avoid “giving voters the impression that the CDU is aiming to eliminate a rival party” – which is of course exactly what the CDU were hoping to do until the BfV fucked everything up with their retarded 1,108-page collection of dyspeptic Facebook-grade political takes.

There’s still a few scattered calls for ban proceedings coming from the left, but their heart isn’t in it and they don’t matter anyway. Without Union votes, no ban application will ever get to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Raed Saleh, an extremely obnoxious politician who heads the SPD faction in the Berlin House of Representatives, whined to the press this morning about how “appalling and disgraceful” it is that outlawing the opposition is no longer on the table and that his party is now being asked to “engage in political debate” with the AfD instead. Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig, also of the SPD, likewise fervently hopes that the AfD might still be banned and she thinks the Interior Ministry should spend more time “evaluating” that BfV dumpster-fire assessment. Since Hubig is Justice Minister and not Interior Minister it doesn’t really matter what she thinks the Interior Ministry should be doing. I don’t understand why so many are citing Hubig’s remarks like they mean anything.

The implosion of this ban-the-AfD arc seems like kind of a big deal to me. Since 2021, the party have been “under suspicion” of right-wing extremism, but despite four years of snooping the BfV have been able to come up with nothing that is not some combination of legally irrelevant, harmless, banal, uninteresting, stupid and a complete waste of government resources. At some point, you have to put the question: If the AfD are so evil and so Nazi and so fascist and so Hitler, why can’t anybody, anywhere, adduce any evidence of their evil Nazi Hitler fascism?

May 23, 2025

“‘[D]isrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”

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

William M. Briggs uses the most recent installation of a statue of a black woman in highly public spaces to explore the idea that even black people “have Black Fatigue”:

Statues of fat ugly lumpen surly ill-kempt statues of black women, all in poses to accentuate their quarrelsome uselessness, are being placed in prominent places in the West. The Latest, rising like a creature in a 1960s Japanese monster movie, is in Times Square. The person who created these blots of bad taste said they were “a way of ‘disrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”.

He’s right. These figures do represent triumph. DIE requires elevating the least and representing them as the best, and forcing all to pretend the charade is real. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a more perfect representation of the true spirit of DIE than these misshapen piles of metal. They demand you say they are equivalent to great men whose statues we are no longer allowed to have.

If it were only statues, there would be no story. But everybody knows that bad black behavior of all kind is being ignored, excused or outright celebrated.

One example will suffice. After the lifelong thug and criminal lowlife George Floyd met his expected end — poisoning himself with drugs and engaging in all manner of misbehavior — our rulers and “elites” fell to their knees, even in Congress itself, to show their adoration of black criminality. Not to mention Floyd’s own statues which cropped up like poisonous mushrooms, each encouraging emulation of Floyd’s exasperating antics.

It’s so bad now that parents of white kids murdered by blacks rush out to forgive or excuse the killers, lest anybody dare to think they would condemn bad black behavior.

The question is why.

Before you answer, understand this is not only your “racist” Uncle Sergeant Briggs asking this question. Blacks themselves are asking.

There is an entire growing genre of YouTube videos of blacks telling us they grow weary of the constant misadventure of “ratchet blacks” (their word, not mine) and our culture’s welcoming attitude toward them. Take “Why Black Fatigue Is On The Rise“. Black fatigue is the natural exhaustion from having to deal routinely with with misbehaving blacks, where “dealing with” means having to pretend, while in polite society, we are not seeing what we are all seeing.

Watch just the first two minutes if you haven’t the time for more. The man in the inset quite rightly points out that blacks are now, as everybody always wanted, being judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. The problem is the content of their character, or at least the character of those who are celebrated for misdeeds. As one commenter to the video said, the problem are blacks who are “Offended by everything. Ashamed of nothing. Entitled to everything. Responsible for nothing.”

The natural desire for separation, and to be with ones’ own, leads blacks to label blacks not confirming to expected behavior as “acting white”. The natural solution would be a formal separation: you go your way, we go ours. That, of course, would never be countenanced, and is anyway not desired by the majority. One thing absolutely demanded by our elites is “diversity”, by which they mean strict uniformity of belief. Our betters weep fake tears over things like colonization, which we know are fake because when we ask them to let us go our own way they say no.

If we can’t separate, then we have to find a way to get along with each other. Whatever this way is, it can’t have a basis in transparent lies.

Bill Bailey – The Doctor Who theme re-imagined as Belgian jazz

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Royal Ballet and Opera
Published 29 Jul 2021

Comedian Bill Bailey re-imagines the Doctor Who theme as Jacques Brel-esque Belgian jazz. Taken from his DVD Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra.

QotD: The decline of the photography business

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

… photographers work in a hard-fought, competitive market. The ubiquity of camera phones means there are now few full-time newspaper photographers, for example. Television killed the photo magazines where the “greats” of photography mostly earned their crusts. The rise of Getty Images and the like has destroyed residual income from stock photography. More images are being generated than ever, but less money is being earned for making them. Their main problem is like that of actors, however. It’s a fun, creative job that many people want to do but there are too few customers to pay more than a minority of them. If they were not so disdainful about economics, both professions would find the outcome of that predictable. Mostly they just see it as “wrong” however.

There are playful souls among them but they tend to be more than averagely earnest. There’s an historical reason for that. In the early days of photography it was derided by fine artists as mere mechanical trickery. Painters and sculptors thought of photographers as the Church had once thought of them — as low class artisans unworthy of respect and to be cheated of their pay wherever possible. In consequence photographic pioneers longed to be seen as artists too and paid a lot of attention to “serious” subjects and “social” issues.

[…]

In amateur photography, the comfortable pensions of teachers and university lecturers mean there are far too many of them in a leisure field that requires a certain amount of investment in kit — adding further layers of pseudo-intellectual pomposity, musty from a lifetime of never being challenged. I am a member of the Royal Photographic Society, but though I enjoy a few of its workshops from time to time, mostly find its members smug and insufferable. I hesitate every year before renewing. Its beautifully produced magazine, for example, unquestioningly peddles the conventional thinking of the BBC class. I have learned to appreciate the images while ignoring the priggish text around them.

Tom Paine, “Where we are and what we see”, The Last Ditch, 2020-05-20.

May 22, 2025

Lucy Connolly, political prisoner

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

I’m no firebrand on social media — I’d probably have a lot more followers if I were — but I can easily imagine a situation like the one that got Lucy Connolly sent off to the British gulags for an ill-judged social media post:

In what has become an emblematic case of the UK’s betrayal of free speech, Lucy Connolly has now lost her appeal for early release. This mother and childminder had posted an offensive tweet in the direct aftermath of the Southport murders, in which a psychopath brutally attacked children with a knife at a yoga class. She had believed the false claim that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker, and written online that she had no objection to people burning down hotels where immigrants were residing.

The tweet was taken as evidence that Connolly had intended to “stir up racial hatred” and incite violence during the febrile climate of the summer riots. It had been deleted within hours, no violence occurred as a result, and yet she was sentenced to 31 months in prison. Given that the severity of Connolly’s sentence was doubtless related to unofficial government pressure on the judiciary, many have made the case that Connolly is a political prisoner.

For all our shared revulsion at the tweet, we must remember that we are still talking here about words, not actions. It was completely right that Philip Prescott, a man who attacked a mosque as part of a mob during the riots, was sentenced to 28 months in jail. But Connolly has received an even longer sentence having committed no acts of violence at all. Many rapists and paedophiles have been treated far more leniently. I know of no sound argument that could possibility justify this state of affairs. It is the very definition of two-tier justice.

Let’s get the caveats out of the way. Nobody is defending what Connolly wrote. It was unpleasant, rash, misjudged, and much else besides. Here is the post in full.

Grim stuff. But it by no means fulfils any serious definition of incitement to violence. For one thing, she is not calling on hotels to be torched, but is rather making clear that she would not care if that occurred. This distinction is key, but has been overlooked. Moreover, Connolly has zero influence or clout. It is not as though anyone reading this could have taken it as an instruction or order and acted accordingly. Those wishing to appreciate the full context of why Connolly behaved as rashly as she did should read this excellent piece by Allison Pearson for The Telegraph.

It should go without saying that in a free society some people are going to say ghastly things. That’s the price we pay for liberty. The judge in this case made a statement in his ruling that has been widely interpreted as political: “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive. There is always a very small minority of people who will seek an excuse to use violence and disorder causing injury, damage, loss and fear to wholly innocent members of the public and sentences for those who incite racial hatred and disharmony in our society are intended to both punish and deter.”

Trump, “the American Mussolini”, versus ever-so-democratic Mark Carney

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

In the National Post, John Robson contrasts the authoritarian dictator at the helm of the American ship of state with our peaceful, democratic, and fully accountable to the voters prime minister:

President Donald Trump greets Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at the West Wing entrance of the White House.
(Official White House Photo by Gabriel B Kotico)

It was the best of budgets, it was the worst of budgets, it was the age of restraint, it was the age of profligacy, it was the epoch of the legislature, it was the epoch of the executive, it was the season of open debate, it was the season of closed doors, it was the spring of Canada, it was the winter of America. Or possibly the other way around.

The confusion arises because as a patriotic Canadian I keep hearing how U.S. President Donald Trump is an American Mussolini who has abolished the last vestiges of the old Republic, so we should drink rye not bourbon or some other decisive action easily performed while sitting down. Yet the news media mysteriously insist that the Bad Orange Man is having trouble getting his budget through some quaint relic called the United States Congress while Green Mark Carney isn’t bothering to get his spending plans rubber-stamped by some quaint relic called the Canadian Parliament. How can it be?

Tuesday’s the Morning newsletter from the New York Times, which is no MAGA outlet, reads: “Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump’s legislative agenda.” But with only three spare votes in the House, “there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don’t agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they’re too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them.”

Likewise The Atlantic, part of the thundering herd of independent liberal American minds, says: “The struggle to pass Donald Trump’s second-term agenda in Congress has never been between Republicans and Democrats … it’s been a battle between the House and Senate GOP, between moderates and hard-liners, and, most salient, between Republicans and reality.”

Egad. What manner of rambunctious folly is this? Open debate within the Maximum Leader’s own party? Dictatorship! By contrast here in decorous Canada can someone remind me which inane or malicious measures from former prime minister Justin Trudeau were ever put at risk by the principled courage, truculence or mere pandering even of his NDP coalition non-partners, let alone the trained seals in red?

Periodically one would bark. But which ever bit? To be sure, as the Canadian Press noted on Sunday, “Prime Minister Mark Carney says the Liberal government will present a federal budget in the fall, allowing time for clarity on some key economic and fiscal issues to emerge”. But if there’s going to be a brawl, it will be inside his office, or head, with his finance minister promising to brush aside Parliament with an “economic statement” before Carney overrode him, saying the government would introduce “a much more comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget in the fall”.

May 21, 2025

AI hallucinations capture the Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list

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

Good luck finding some of the highly recommended books on the Chicago Sun-Times list of summer reading … they don’t actually exist (yet):

Critics aren’t perfect.

Sometimes they get facts wrong. Sometimes their judgment is faulty. Sometimes they dangle their modifiers or split their infinitives with everybody watching.

I’ve been there. And it’s awkward.

But I’ve never seen anything as embarrassing as the “Summer Reading List for 2025” in the Chicago Sun-Times.

It gave glowing reviews to books that don’t exist. And I bet you can guess why.

Yes, the newspaper relied on AI to write the article.

The article starts with a recommendation for Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende. This is Allende’s “first climate fiction novel” where “magical realism meets environmental activism”.

It’s a shame that Allende never wrote this book. Nor did anyone else — the book simply doesn’t exist.

(I’ll predict, however, that an AI-generated book with this title will show up on Amazon within a few days. When you live in a world of AI hallucinations, this is how the business model plays out.)

The next book on the Sun-Times list is The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. This novel is also non-existent. But the storyline — about rogue AI that gains consciousness — makes me think that the bots are now mocking us.

It doesn’t get better. The first 10 books on the summer reading list are entirely hallucinated.

As the story of the fake reviews spread on social media, the Sun-Times got into damage control mode. It issued a public statement denying responsibility.

But that just makes matters worse.

Why are they publishing garbage without vetting it? And the denial is also implausible.

Somebody at the newspaper must have given the okay to this. The printing presses don’t run themselves (although maybe that will be the next stage of the AI business model).

How is this happening?

We are now several years into the AI revolution. I’m constantly hearing about new, improved bots that are smarter than super-geniuses, and can replace lowly humans.

But the bizarre lapses are getting worse — and more dangerous.

AI is routinely making stupid, nonsensical mistakes that even the most incompetent employee would never make. I’ve met some incompetent journalists over the years, but none would make a boneheaded move of this magnitude.

And this is after a trillion dollars has been sunk into AI by the most powerful corporations in the world. This is after they have soaked up much of the energy grid. This is after all the training and vetting and upgrading.

We’re not talking about beta testing or first generation AI. Silicon Valley is actually bragging about this tech — but it’s stupider than the worst journalist in the country.

Canadian voters got fooled again

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

Roxanne Halverson on Canadian voter gullibility that Mark Carney and the Liberals took full advantage of in the election campaign:

Offer not applicable in Canada, apparently.

Liberals voters on your elbows up crusade — do you feel foolish, do you feel shamed? Are you ready to admit that you were duped? That you were played like the fiddle in the Devil went down to Georgia. How does it feel to know that you fell for Mark Carney’s fear mongering fabricated crisis that made him Prime Minister. Or is your Trump Derangement Syndrome so severe that you cannot recognize how the Liberals used it and used you to win an election they didn’t deserve to win. It wouldn’t be so bad if only you had to pay the price, but unlike the phony COVID mantra, of we’re all in this together, we really are all in this nightmare together for another possible four years of Liberal rule and corruption, and we’re all going to pay the price. That includes those of us who didn’t get fooled again, but most of us are the same ones who also didn’t get fooled in the last three elections that gave the country the Liberals under Justin Trudeau for a decade of destruction.

Did you see the interview Prime Minister Mark Carney did with Sky News Australia?

You really should watch it. Because in it he admits what those of us who didn’t vote for him knew, and what he, himself also knew. There was never any real threat from Trump to annex Canada. And when pushed on it by the Sky News interviewer Samantha Washington who asks if he inflated the threat as political tool to inflame voters who hated Donald Trump, Carney dances around it saying one minute it wasn’t a threat and the next minute, well he thought it was and so did the Canadian people and well maybe he did use it to kind of stir them up. Essentially he was trying to dodge the fact that he lied and knew all along that Trump wasn’t really going to make Canada the 51st state.

So, let’s begin with the Trump threat — the existential threat to the existence of our country! According to Carney, Trump “wanted to take Canada, he wanted to break it“. But when asked by Washington about that ‘existential threat’, Carney walked it back. In his words, “No the existence is not at stake, it was more of economic crisis, and had a heavy element of national security comes with it, the extent to which we will be cooperating with others, particularly with the United States“.

Now wait a minute, Carney told voters — the elbows uppers — that Canada’s existence was at stake. And now he’s adding in a national security element? I don’t recall Trump ever saying anything about invading Canada or threatening our national security, in fact it was quite the opposite, he said the United States would always protect Canada for any foreign threat. His interest in national security had to do with Canada’s porous border and the fentanyl trade that the Liberals chose to ignore. This response is a typical Carney word salad dancing around answering the question. Something he seems to have in common with his predecessor Justin Trudeau. But at its core, he says, no Canada’s existence was never in danger.

Yet, he repeatedly told crowds at rallies that the US wanted to break us, when it was really just an economic crisis — something Canada has faced many times before, often due to bad Liberal policies.

But that’s what Mark Carney, with the help of his cartel media echo chamber, drummed into the heads of the elbows up crowd during his leadership campaign and during his entire election campaign. Trump was going to come and take our country — “he wants our resources, he wants our land, and he wants our water“.

Now here’s another word salad, walking back the ‘threat’ from Trump. When Washington asked him why he met with Trump when he was still disrespecting Canada by talking about making it the 51st state, even during their meeting in the Oval Office, which he said it, as she described it, “right to your face“. According to Carney this was ‘different’, and then he delivers another word salad because apparently, “Trump was expressing a desire … he had shifted from an expectation to a desire for that to happen. He was also coming from a place where he recognized that that wasn’t going to happen. I made it clear to him in that context.”

May 20, 2025

Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis

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

News broke the other day that former President Joe Biden is suffering from a highly advanced cancer and it only reinforces the questions about who was really performing the role of the President during Biden’s term in office:

Well, now it almost isn’t funny anymore.

Here’s the progression of the Democrats’ desperate attempts to shame you out of talking about Joe Biden’s mental and physical health:

“Stop talking about this because it’s not true.”
“Stop talking about this because he’s not the president anymore.”
“Stop talking about this because he has cancer.”

You may notice a pattern.

I think it was Andrew Klavan who made me realize the First Commandment of the Democratic Party: Thou shalt STFU. All their gaslighting, shaming, whataboutism, and other dishonest rhetorical techniques are attempts to stop you from talking about whichever lie they’re telling at that particular moment.

Why would they stop at cancer?

A lot of medical professionals are pointing out that a prostate cancer diagnosis doesn’t just come out of the blue like this. It’s easily detectable in blood work, it takes years and years to progress, and it should’ve been detected at his last annual physical.

Even Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (an oncologist, Rahm’s older brother, and certainly no MAGA-head) says Biden must have learned of this diagnosis many years ago.

If Biden was undergoing cancer treatments during his presidency — remember all those unexplained trips to Delaware? — it would explain a lot of his behavior. “Chemo brain”. And of course he and Jill would keep it under wraps, because it would only strengthen a 25th Amendment challenge.

Who else knew about this, and when did they know it?

And who the hell was performing the duties of the president of the United States for four years?

Keep in mind that Joe Biden loves using his personal tragedies as a Get Out of Jail Free card. We heard it in that just-released Robert Hur audio from October 2023, when Biden deflected a question he didn’t want to answer about his handling of classified documents by complaining that his son Beau died. He couldn’t remember the exact year, but he used it as an excuse anyway.

If he’ll use his dead son, why wouldn’t he use a cancer diagnosis?

eugyppius also notes that such an advanced case can’t have just popped up recently, reinforcing the notion that his term in office was partially or completely a “regency”:

Yesterday evening, Joe Biden’s office announced that the former president had been diagnosed “with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones“. Biden must have had this cancer for a long time for it to have spread that far, and thus it seems very strange that someone receiving presidential levels of medical care should have been diagnosed only just last week. Many in our circles posit that insiders have known about Biden’s illness for years, but that they have kept his diagnosis and treatment under wraps for political reasons. Among other things, they argue that this explains a July 2022 gaffe in which Biden complained that environmental pollution is “why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer“.1

In fact, I think a simple cover-up is the most harmless possibility here. It’s likely that doctors have diagnosed Biden’s cancer so late because the former president was subject to a high degree of isolation and medical neglect while in office. Perhaps family and close advisers carefully managed Biden’s annual physicals to avoid any inconvenient findings as part of a broader campaign to hide his dementia. Alternatively, it’s possible that signs of cancer were discovered at some point, but that Biden’s inner circle avoided confirming the diagnosis or pursuing treatment. Either way, the late diagnosis and the advanced cancer together suggest that Biden has been left sick and untreated for a long time.

As I wrote last year, Biden’s presidency was an informal and unacknowledged regency. Biden himself did not have the mental capacity to rule on his own, and so a confined circle of close advisers and family effectively directed the actions of the presidential office on his behalf.

Importantly, this regency was not “the White House” or “Biden’s staff” or “the Democratic Party” in general. It was much smaller than all of those things. The regents worked hard to obscure Biden’s dementia from Congress, from large parts of Biden’s own campaign, from the Democratic Party and from many others within Biden’s White House. They ensured that even internal meetings unfolded in highly scripted and predetermined ways, so that cabinet and other officials could not gain a clear idea of Biden’s mental state. They berated and intimidated anyone voicing concern about the president’s health behind the scenes. And they had very simple reasons for doing all of this: If Biden’s dementia were to become common knowledge and not merely an object of private suspicion (however widespread), the regency would be shown up as illegitimate and potentially broken.

Regents exercise power by restricting access to their charge and restricting their charge’s access to information and the outside world. It is thus unsurprising to find that Biden’s regents subjected him to strict social isolation, particularly towards the end of his term …

    1. The White House clarified that Biden was referencing his earlier diagnoses for non-melanoma skin cancer.

Gen Z is blaming Capitalism for the sins of Cronyism

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

Lika Kobeshavidze at the Foundation for Economic Education explains why angry Gen Z’ers are blaming capitalism but should instead be blaming crony capitalism for the economic plight they find themselves in:

Image Credit: Custom image by FEE

Across college campuses, on TikTok feeds, and in everyday conversations, a familiar narrative is gaining steam: capitalism is broken.

Rising rents and stagnant wages fuel the claim among some young people that free markets have failed an entire generation. According to a 2024 poll by the Institute of Economic Affairs, more than 60% of young Britons now view socialism favorably. In the United States, the trend is similar, with Generation Z increasingly skeptical of capitalism’s promises.

But much of this idealism is rooted in distance — many of the young people romanticizing socialism have never lived through the economic dysfunction or political repression it often brings. For those who experienced Soviet shortages, Venezuelan collapse, or East Germany’s surveillance, the word socialism doesn’t suggest fairness or opportunity — it suggests fear, failure, and control. There’s a reason so many fled those systems to come to freer countries. What sounds utopian in theory has too often turned dystopian in practice.

But blaming capitalism misses the mark. The real culprit is cronyism, the unholy alliance between big government and big business that twists markets, blocks competition, and rewards political connections over genuine innovation.

[…]

Cronyism is not limited to one country or one political party. Across the United States and Europe, the symptoms are the same.

In the US, Canada, and the UK, the dream of homeownership slips further away for young people. Sky-high housing prices are blamed on “market failure”, but the real cause lies in layers of government-imposed barriers: restrictive zoning laws, burdensome permitting requirements, and endless bureaucratic delays. Big developers who can afford to navigate or influence the system survive. Everyone else gets locked out.

In Europe, the pattern repeats. France’s labor laws, designed to protect workers, instead stifle opportunity. Hiring becomes risky and expensive, especially for young people. Large corporations, with the resources to manage compliance costs, consolidate their dominance. Small firms and startups never get off the ground.

There’s also a persistent myth that big business fears government intervention. In reality, the largest corporations often embrace it, because it keeps them on top. Tech giants like Facebook and Google now lobby for more regulation, knowing that complex new rules will strangle smaller competitors who can’t afford fleets of compliance officers. Green energy subsidies, meant to combat climate change, often end up showering billions on well-connected firms while locking out emerging innovators.

Cronyism doesn’t reward the best ideas. It rewards the best lobbyists.

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