Quotulatiousness

September 22, 2023

“The Online News Act … has been an utter disaster”

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

Michael Geist on the ongoing disaster the federal government created with the Online News Act:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked this week about concerns with the implementation of Bill C-18, to which he responded that other countries are quietly backing Canada in its battle against tech companies. I posted a reality check tweet noting that Meta is not returning to news in Canada, the law’s regulation stipulating a 4% fee on revenues is not found anywhere else, and that Bill C-18 has emerged as a model for what not to do. With the House of Commons back in session, it is worth providing a more fulsome reality check on where things stand with the Online News Act. While the government is still talking tough, the law has been an utter disaster, leading to millions in lost revenues with cancelled deals, reduced traffic for Canadian media sites, declining investment in media in Canada, and few options to salvage this mess.

For those that took the summer off, Bill C-18 received royal assent in late June. Over the past three months:

1. Meta has blocked all news links in Canada and cancelled existing deals with Canadian news outlets. The blocked links covers both Canadian and foreign news in light of the broad scope of the law. While the Australian experience lasted a few days, the blocking in Canada has now gone on for weeks and there is little reason to believe that the company will reverse its position to comply with the law by simply not linking to news.

2. The government responded to the blocked news links by stopping to advertise on Facebook and Instagram and encouraging others to do the same. The boycott has had little effect as the Liberal party is still advertising on the platforms with a new round of ads this week, the Prime Minister is still posting on the platforms, and reports indicate that Facebook has not experienced a reduction in user activity. In fact, reports suggest that the experience on Facebook without news has improved. Further, a Competition Act complaint has not sparked any action.

3. Google responded to Bill C-18 by advising it too would remove news links from its services before the law takes effect in December. That position enabled it to wait for the government to release draft regulations that provide further detail on the application of the law and the standards for obtaining an exemption from the mandatory bargaining process that can lead to final offer arbitration overseen by the CRTC.

Several more items of concern at the link.

QotD: Progressive hollow men

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

Ever feel like you’re living in a bad movie? I’ve recently found there’s a worse sensation: Feeling like you’re living in a good movie. There’s a scene in Apocalypse Now where Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz recites the opening stanzas of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men:”

    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

The poem was written in 1925, but that’s why Eliot was a great artist — he anticipated the soyboi, the soulless urban bugman, by almost 100 years. The Left is nothing but “Hollow Men”-style contrasts. They’re religious fanatics without a religion. They Fucking Love Science™, but think gravity is a social construction. They insist that Blacks are literally being lynched in Current Year America, and yet hardly a day goes by without news that yet another professional race hustler is really White. Their political campaigns, it goes without saying, are Cults of Personality without the personality. Above all, they are moralizers without morality – the things they scold us about are so self-contradictory, or so absurd on their face, that one is forced to conclude that this by design.

Severian, “The Hollow Men”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-19.

September 20, 2023

“Future Edward Gibbons’ [will] have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet”

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

In The Line, Andrew MacDougall finds something good to say about social media:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Say what you will about social media, but one unalloyed good is the future Edward Gibbons’ of this parish are going to have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet.

Future historians will not only know what happened as we cratered, but, thanks to our ubiquitous digital sketch pads, they will have all of the horrific micro detail. They will know how many times we circled the bowl, what we were saying about circling the bowl as we were circling it and which streaks we were or weren’t arguing about as we went down. Social media is an infinite canvas home to a limitless number of voices and — while we might not be richer for it in the present — our future societal homicide detectives will be forever grateful that we left so many stains to analyze.

For example, when historians consider — as they surely will — whether the moment Canada truly began to crumble was when a WestJet cabin crew allowed Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to grab the conch and address a planeload of (mostly) Conservative Party of Canada delegates on his way back from a successful party convention, we will have a panoply of voices to consult. From all walks of life and social stations, too. What, for example, did a famous singer like Jann Arden have to say about the whole episode?

Well, thanks to our good friend ex-Twitter we don’t have to guess; we know. And what Arden said was: “Hey @WestJet you and I will not be doing business ever again. This is so ridiculously disappointing.”

In life, I try my best not to be insensitive, but imagine having so little going on that this is considered a good use of your time? Imagine possessing such a delicate constitution that you would rather chain yourself [to] the be-vomited reclining seats of Air Canada than ever fly WestJet again. When you live in Calgary. And what has to be going on to then quote-tweet a bunch of nasty replies and joust with a network of digital cretins, as Arden went on to do. Dozens of them. Who stirs the sewage and then pins the best turds to their page?

As someone who has spent (far) too much time wasting time on platforms like ex-Twitter, I feel I speak from experience. I’ve picked a fair few fights I didn’t need to pick. Both with randoms, and rock stars. I have fed the trolls and I have done performative tweeting. And you know what I’ve learned? The only people who win are our algorithmic overlords. People like Arden are the modern-day Olds-and-Milner lab mice hammering the dopamine reward button — look at me get likes and retweets! — until they (metaphorically) die.

September 18, 2023

It turns out that buying up the rights to old rock songs wasn’t a good investment after all

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

Ted Gioia enjoys a little bit of schadenfreude here because he was highly skeptical of the investments in the first place, although the geriatric rockers who “sold out” seem to have generally made out like bandits this time around:

Back in 2021, investors spent more than $5 billion buying the rights to old songs. Never before in history had musicians over the age of 75 received such big paydays.

I watched in amazement as artists who would never sell out actually sold out. And they made this the sale of a lifetime, like a WalMart in El Paso on Black Friday.

Bob Dylan sold out his entire song catalog ($400 million — ka-ching!). Paul Simon sold out ($250 million). Neil Young sold out ($150 million). Stevie Nicks sold out ($100 million). Dozens of others sold out.

As a result, rock songs have now entered their Madison Avenue stage of life.

Twisted Sister once sang “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. But even they took it — a very large payout, to be specific. A few months ago, the song showed up in a commercial for Discover Card.

Bob Dylan’s song “Shelter from the Storm” got turned into a theme for Airbnb. Neil Young’s “Old Man” was rejuvenated as a marketing jingle for the NFL (touting old man quarterback Tom Brady).

Fans mocked this move. Even Neil Young, now officially a grumpy old man himself, expressed irritation at the move. After all, the head of the Hipgnosis, the leading song investment fund, had promised that the rock star’s “Heart of Gold” would never get turned into “Burger of Gold”.

That hasn’t happened (yet). But where do you draw the line?

I was skeptical of these song buyouts from the start — but not just as a curmudgeonly purist. My view was much simpler. I didn’t think old songs were a good investment. […] But even I didn’t anticipate how badly these deals would turn out.

The more songs Hipgnosis bought, the more its share price dropped. The stock is currently down almost 40% from where it was at the start of 2021.

Things have gotten so bad, that the company is now selling songs.

On Thursday, Hipgnosis announced a plan to sell almost a half billion dollars of its song portfolio. They need to do this to pay down debt. That’s an ominous sign, because the songs Hipgnosis bought were supposed to generate lots of cash. Why can’t they handle their debt load with that cash flow?

But there was even worse news. Hipgnosis admitted that they sold these songs at 17.5% below their estimated “fair market value”. This added to the already widespread suspicion that current claims of song value are inflated.

QotD: Feelings

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

The desire not to have one’s feelings hurt has been erected into a right, a right increasingly enforceable at law. Of course, not everyone’s feelings are treated with the solicitude that we show to a nice fluffy colorful species of animal that is, regrettably, on the verge of extinction. But there is no doubt that treating people’s feelings with this solicitude tends not only to preserve them but to cause them to flourish and multiply. The more you are preserved from hurt feelings, the more of them you have.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Once More With Feelings”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-05-13.

September 17, 2023

How much mis-, mal-, and dis-information do you encounter on an average day on the internet?

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

I don’t know the answer to that question … although I suspect it’s a pretty big proportion of what you’ll see, especially if you stick to legacy media sites who regularly indulge in cover-up, state propaganda, and outright lies while condemning other media as “conspiracy theorists”. Chris Bray, on the other hand, thinks there are hopeful signs that we’ve passed peak disinformation as the pandemic lockdowns get further behind us:

I’ve been trying to come up with a count: If you consume a typical amount of news media and social media product, how many individual pieces of dishonest, misleading, and calculatedly or ignorantly unreal “information” do you take on board over the course of a typical day?

Walter Kirn’s one-sentence summary of contemporary media is stuck in my head: “This is a world-concealing layer of diversionary and illogical and internally inconsistent noise, under which the world exists somewhere.” How much noise do you have to purge to merely get to zero, not at all informed but not not deeply misinformed? And if you encounter the deep thoughts of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, does the deficit merely double, or is it much worse than that?

Democracy means you must not question or oppose the head of state

I’ve been reading on The Site Formerly Known as Twitter this week that Elon Musk’s refusal to activate the privately owned Starlink network over Crimea is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which now apparently apply to corporate product, and also high treason, for which Elon Musk should be executed. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it’s like the Internet allows strangers to use your brain as a toilet. Although, as the Twitter randos always end up explaining, I just feel this way because I’M PUTIN’S NAZI BUTTBOY.

All day, every day, 24/7/365 — well, maybe with some breaks for sleep, but only if you stop looking at your phone at night — you take on garbage. Your brain is loaded with information barriers, dressed up as information. You read and hear sentences that are designed to prevent understanding.

QotD: One of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history

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

[In the 1960s and 70s, mob-controlled cigarette smuggling seriously cut into tobacco taxes.] What the PTB should’ve done at that point, of course, was simply repealed the taxes, learned to live within their means, and stopped trying to nag their citizens into good behavior …

Ok, ok, is everyone done laughing yet? Go ahead, get it all out of your system; I’ll wait. Everyone back? Ok, moving on:

What the PTB actually did, of course, was a multi-level propaganda campaign. It was brilliant. It took a few years, of course, but the evidence is all around you. Quick: When’s the last time you saw anyone smoking in a mainstream movie? Even period films about the Forties, say — the ones where they take infinite pains to get just the right period-appropriate shade of Formica on the diner’s countertops — ignore the obvious historical reality of people puffing away like chimneys.

Indeed, it’s all but universal now, and has been for a long time, that characters who smoke are the bad guys.

Here again, look at college kids. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but it’s really the best example I know of the phenomenon. Any time I taught the Early Modern period, I had to mention the massive economic and cultural effects of tobacco. So I encouraged kids to try it for themselves — everyone here is over 18, I said, so it’s perfectly legal. Want to know what all the hype was about? Just run down to the gas station, buy a pack, and light one up!

Around the turn of the century, I always had a few smokers in class, so I could say “bum one off So-and-So”. Even that would get me a few uneasy chuckles. A few years later, and not only were there no smokers in my classes, but the kids would be actively uncomfortable with the suggestion. By the end of my teaching career, when I couldn’t care less anymore, I was openly taunting them about it. You people have no problem with potheads, I’d say. I bet well over half of you are on Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax, Klonopin, shit that’s bad for you, in ways we don’t even understand yet, but you’re balking at one cigarette? It’s unsafe? Oh, come on, some of you are going to leave here and go light up a completely unfiltered ditch weed, and as for the rest of you, you know all about crazy sex fetishes I’ve never even heard of. You get blackout drunk at the football games every weekend, but oh no, you can’t have one cigarette, it’s so unhealthy.

Such is the power of propaganda, and it’s the only repression that works for the PTB when they’ve truly set their faces against a behavior …

Severian, “The Mob, Faux-tism, and the Ever-Rising Costs of Compliance”, Founding Questions, 2021-02-02.

September 16, 2023

Public health officials don’t seem to realize just how badly they’ve damaged their credibility

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

Chris Selley on the apparantly huge gap between how ordinary Canadians view their public health officials and how those officials think they’re viewed:

Throughout the pandemic, polls have shown a decline in confidence in public health: Researchers at McMaster University and Vox Pop Labs found that in March 2020, 59 per cent of Canadians had “a great deal of trust” in public health officials. Two years later that had plummeted to 37 per cent.

We have recently enjoyed months of being able to ignore COVID-19. Even the relentlessly, uniquely pessimistic Canadian media seemed to have exhausted themselves. So I found it a bit jarring to see Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, suddenly back on the TV this week admonishing us to “get your mask ready” for fall and book yourself in for a booster. Dr. Kieran Moore, Tam’s counterpart at Queen’s Park, is due in the coming days to give Ontarians what will likely be a similar update.

If this year’s flu/RSV/COVID season is as bad as last, it will be fascinating to see how Canadians react. Perfervid opposition to masking and vaccination are minority positions: In the midst of last year’s autumn surge in childhood hospitalizations, a Nanos Research poll found 69 per cent of Canadians would support a return of mask mandates “if authorities deem(ed) it necessary”.

But are people ready to hear it, again, from the same public-health officials who have all-but destroyed their entire field in the last three years — seemingly without realizing it? It will be intriguing to see.

Tam’s original sins remain totally unexplained — at an official inquiry, for example, hint hint — never mind expiated. For days and weeks in early 2020, while our peer countries were closing borders and preparing for a pandemic, Tam assured us “the risk to Canada is low”. She lied that World Health Organization rules prohibited us from closing borders. She told us masks were worse than useless, and the only excuse anyone can offer is that she was fibbing to prevent Canadians from hoarding PPE. (I think she actually believed it. Either explanation is a firing offence.)

Remember the utterly incoherent advice the Public Health Agency of Canada provided to incoming travellers in the early days? Remember the built-to-fail, purely political quarantine hotels that Tam said weren’t necessary until they suddenly were — just as she said 14-day quarantine at home wasn’t necessary until it suddenly was? We were weeks if not months behind most of our peer countries. Regardless of your position on any given restriction, none of it made any sense.

September 15, 2023

Donald Trump as a political autoimmune condition

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

Kulak has a very interesting view on the role of Donald Trump within the American body politic:

People ask me why I’m so keen on Trump

Trump is not an exceptional political thinker, he’s a fairly awful organizer and a worse hirer of people (despite his claims otherwise)… Indeed one need only look at his choices for the Department of Justice, or his COVID response to see him consistently hiring the absolute worst enemies of his supporters and indeed himself…

He seemingly only hired people anyone on the 2008 Ron Paul campaign could have predicted would have betrayed him… and indeed would have been able to predict it in 2008.

(ex Bush people are loyal to the regime, hate their own base, and view ordinary Americans as the enemy? Who would have guessed!)

And yet little of that matters.

And to understand why, you have to understand Autoimmune disease.

Autoimmune diseases result when the immune system, the thing that is supposed to protect the body from outside threats… goes haywire and attacks the body, in response to something that is no threat at all.

All immune responses and most external disease treatments have some drawbacks … Minor immune responses like a fever or the mucus responses of the sinuses make physical exertion torturous for example … But as the response gets more extreme the more they threaten the patient itself … a medical response like Cemo might kill cancer, but its also a poison… potentially fatal to a patient if not measured precisely … Likewise, the body’s immune responses can be fatal: High Fevers can result in death or brain damage … and the Anaphylaxis response, a flood of chemicals and white blood cells meant to combat the most dangerous exposures … can and does kill people.

Of course, we are all familiar with allergies, where a harmless exposure such as certain pollens or nuts can provoke devastating and sometimes fatal Autoimmune responses.

Trump provokes such an autoimmune response in the regime.

He is not a Hitlerian master of oratory or political organizing and maneuvering, he’s not even the most impressive populist America has produced … And he’s certainly not a bloodthirsty ideological and military/political genius like Lenin or Mao (which sadly the Right-Libertarians have failed to produce, despite rivaling the communists in their output of theory and economics texts)

Yet Trump activates the class and ethnic disgust response of the regime so violently that the American regime might actually kill itself trying to reject him.

Trump should have been like Ronald Reagan, an aging artifact of an older generation, keen to compromise with the regime, easily appeased with deals that would make him at least look like he’s winning … and ultimately un-committed to combating Either the security state or the Civil Rights priesthood… the first of whom defeated JFK and the combo of whom took down Nixon.

And yet this man who showed up stating he wanted to make “big beautiful deals” and who was incapable of even hiring anyone who thought like his movement …

They went to DEFCON 1 and nearly destroyed the republic to stop him.

Because they hate his voters that much …

It’s a point Severian has made several times:

If they were capable of taking a “loss”, they [the Democrats] could’ve made Trump into the best friend they ever had. That guy was begging them to be allowed to “grow in office”. Had the Cloud People said a few nice things about him on Twitter, he would’ve done anything they wanted.

But their own convulsive reaction to the Trump insurgency made it impossible for them to do the clever thing, and their ongoing attempts to “get” Trump through any legal mechanism they can come up with has made him more politically powerful. They might have to put him up in front of a firing squad to get rid of him at the rate they’re going … but Trump as a martyr would be even more deadly to their plans than Trump as federal inmate 98722580.

The old “war of the sexes” has been won decisively by women … and the aftermath won’t be pretty for any of us

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

I saw an article earlier today in The Free Press on the plight of young men in the dating scene these days (discussed earlier this month here and in July here). In short, men who don’t meet certain arbitrary minimums will have almost no chance with modern women in their age cohort. If you’re not at least six feet tall (males average 5’9″ worldwide), earn at least six figures (US men average under $60K per year), and have a penis at least six inches long (official estimates say American men average 5.1″ to 5.5″), you might as well give up on the dating scene.

Tom Knighton links all that from the Free Press article with some advice for young men on the off-chance they ever do have a date:

First, let’s look at this from Fox News, where a mother laments some of the issues at college with regard to Title IX and rape accusations.

    If my two sons were starting college this Fall I would tell them this: be doubly sure you get consent — for her sake and yours. Maybe even record that consent (how romantic!). Your education and future may depend on it.

    Under Biden’s proposed Title IX rules, if a college student is accused of sexual assault or harassment, he will no longer have the right to a live hearing, to cross-examine his accuser and witnesses, or to be represented by an attorney. Instead, a school administrator can decide to forgo a hearing and weigh the “credibility” of each party on his own, acting as investigator, judge, and jury in the case.

    The standard for determining guilt will also be weakened from “clear and convincing” to a “preponderance of the evidence” — in other words, that there’s a 50.1 percent or greater chance an assault occurred. Not great odds in what are often “he said, she said” cases.

    …

    College students — mainly young men — should be worried. Biden’s Title IX changes are a reversal of rules implemented by the Trump administration in 2020, and a return to the “believe all women” attitude laid out in the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter.

This suggests a fraught landscape for young men, many of whom might just decide not to risk it.

As it is, our educational system actually favors women in many ways.

The primary, middle, and high school classrooms are constructed in a way that actually favors the way girls typically learn as opposed to how boys do. As a result, girls tend to get better grades and a leg up on getting into college.

Further, as a protected class, even before the recent Supreme Court ruling, women had a bit of an edge at being accepted to college under affirmative action guidelines, though race did tend to play a larger factor.

Now you’re favoring women’s position in a “he said/she said” environment of sexual assault allegation, even when there’s no other evidence. I say this because I’ve covered these stories off and on for years now. That’s how it happens in a surprising number of cases.

It’s a situation where young men are disfavored and operating at a disadvantage from day one, then it gets worse from there.

Schools often have all kinds of support services for female students on top of the support services open to all students. Guys, however, get no such help.

With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that women graduate college at a much higher rate than men.

The relationship between graduating university and earning a higher salary isn’t as robust as it used to be, but it’s still financially advantageous to have a degree in most careers. More and more women do and fewer and fewer men do. That means more higher-income women are competing for fewer high-status men. That tiny proportion of men benefit disproportionally from their increasing rarity in the dating pool.

Men aren’t graduating college at a similar rate to women? Well, who cares? At least women aren’t being kept out of education.

Men can’t find romantic partners and instead, turn to online porn? Well, who cares? At least women are empowered enough to be picky.

I’m not saying we should dictate anything to do with people’s personal choices, but we could at least start to realize that young men are in crisis mode and that we might want to do something about that before we have real problems.

Then we have the potential decrease in the population as fewer and fewer families are starting and I just don’t see good things happening going forward.

Large numbers of angry young men with no chance at forming relationships with women and generally under- or unemployed? This is not a scenario for a happy or stable future.

QotD: Modernism into Post-Modernism

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

The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism — relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, “How interesting, how exciting.”

Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 1994.

September 14, 2023

Canadians’ opinions have flipped on the immigration issue this summer

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

Tristin Hopper covers the rapid change in public opinion from majority in favour of the Liberal government’s expanded immigration targets to majority opposed in recent polling:

A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing PPC leader Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province – https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434c

A majority of Canadians now seem to think that immigration is too high, according to a recent Nanos poll. Of respondents, 53 per cent said that the government’s plan to accept 465,000 new permanent residents was too high. It’s a sharp turnaround from just a few months prior, when a similar Nanos poll in March found that only 34 per cent of Canadians thought immigration was too high.

Canada has long been one of the most pro-immigration countries on earth, and since at least the 1990s the mainstream Canadian position on immigration levels was that they were just fine. On the eve of Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister in 2015, an Environics poll found that a decisive 57 per cent of Canadians disagreed with any notion that there is “too much immigration in Canada.”

But if this sentiment is changing, it might be because Ottawa has recently dialled up immigration to the highest levels ever seen in Canadian history. Below, a quick guide to just how many people are entering Canada these days.

Immigration is nearly double what it was at the beginning of the Trudeau government (and way more when you count “non-permanent” immigrants)

In 2014 — the last full year before the election of Justin Trudeau — Canada brought in 260,404 new permanent residents. This was actually rather high for the time, with Statistics Canada noting it was “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years”.

But last year, immigration hit 437,180, and that’s not even accounting for the massive spike in “non-permanent” immigration. When the estimated 607,782 people in that category are accounted for, the Canadian population surged by more than one million people in a single calendar year. Representing a 2.7 per cent annual rise in population, it was more than enough to cancel out any per-capita benefits from Canada’s GDP rise for that year.

It’s about on par with the United States (a country which is eight to 10 times larger)

Proportionally, Canada has long maintained higher immigration than the United States. But in recent months immigration has gotten so high that Canada is even starting to rival the Americans in terms of the raw number of newcomers.

Last year, while Canada marked one million newcomers, the U.S. announced that its net international migration was about the same. Given the size of the U.S. (331 million vs. 40 million in Canada), this means that Canada is absorbing migrants at a rate more than eight times that of the Americans.

When these trends first began showing themselves in early 2022, CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal credited it with driving down Canadian wage growth. “The last time I checked, the U.S. is 10 times larger than we are,” he said.

September 13, 2023

“It is premature to write the epitaph for a politician that has defied gravity as many times as Justin Trudeau”

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

I have to admit that Justin Trudeau is a very talented political campaigner and Canadian politicians always need to take that into account in dealing with him. I’m very much not a fan, but he has accomplished something I didn’t think was possible — his efforts in office have persuaded me to move Pierre Trudeau down to second-place in my personal list of “Worst Prime Ministers of Canada”:

For the longest time, Justin Trudeau was the party’s best asset. It didn’t matter if the Liberals trailed the Conservatives by a few points, the prime minister was viewed by Canadians as the best choice to continue to lead the country when compared to the other party leaders.

That hope now lies in tatters. Trudeau now trails Pierre Poilievre by double digits for preferred prime minister. More importantly, Trudeau trails his party on the generic (“who would you vote for?”) ballot question by nine points. What this means in plain language is that a significant number of people are still willing to vote for the Liberals, even though they no longer believe that Justin Trudeau is the best candidate to be prime minister. In only one demographic — women over the age of 55 — does the prime minister lead Poilievre. More importantly for Trudeau, only 45 per cent of Liberals believe he would make the best prime minister; 77 per cent of Conservatives believe the same thing about Poilievre.

For the first time in his decade as leader, Justin Trudeau is a drag on the Liberal Party of Canada.

This has been wondered about for months. I have always believed that Trudeau gave the party a better chance of success in the critical places in which it absolutely must win (in Quebec, in the B.C. Lower Mainland and in the GTA) than any other hypothetical leader would. He is a uniquely talented political campaigner. He went from third to first in the campaign in 2015, he recovered from a blackface scandal that would have ended a lesser campaigner in 2019, and he almost-single-handedly saved a Liberal campaign in 2021 that fell flat out of the gate and needed almost three weeks to find anything that even remotely resembled a coherent message.

That was then, though, and today, this is the longest and most significant stretch of time since election night in 2015 where Trudeau has been a personal liability for Liberals. This is a massive change that I’m not sure the public, and even many Liberals, have fully appreciated.

There is still an argument to be made, even at this late stage, that Trudeau remains the sole unifying force for a party whose main objective is the pursuit of power. That he is the only leader capable of forging the fractured elements of the current Liberal coalition together. You could convince me of these arguments.

Why Do People In Old Movies Talk Weird?

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BrainStuff – HowStuffWorks
Published 25 Nov 2014

It’s not quite British, and it’s not quite American – so what gives? Why do all those actors of yesteryear have such a distinct and strange accent?

If you’ve ever heard old movies or newsreels from the thirties or forties, then you’ve probably heard that weird old-timey voice.

It sounds a little like a blend between American English and a form of British English. So what is this cadence, exactly?

This type of pronunciation is called the Transatlantic, or Mid-Atlantic, accent. And it isn’t like most other accents – instead of naturally evolving, the Transatlantic accent was acquired. This means that people in the United States were taught to speak in this voice. Historically Transatlantic speech was the hallmark of aristocratic America and theatre. In upper-class boarding schools across New England, students learned the Transatlantic accent as an international norm for communication, similar to the way posh British society used Received Pronunciation – essentially, the way the Queen and aristocrats are taught to speak.

It has several quasi-British elements, such a lack of rhoticity. This means that Mid-Atlantic speakers dropped their “r’s” at the end of words like “winner” or “clear”. They’ll also use softer, British vowels – “dahnce” instead of “dance”, for instance. Another thing that stands out is the emphasis on clipped, sharp t’s. In American English we often pronounce the “t” in words like “writer” and “water” as d’s. Transatlantic speakers will hit that T like it stole something. “Writer”. “Water”.

But, again, this speech pattern isn’t completely British, nor completely American. Instead, it’s a form of English that’s hard to place … and that’s part of why Hollywood loved it.

There’s also a theory that technological constraints helped Mid-Atlantic’s popularity. According to Professor Jay O’Berski, this nasally, clipped pronunciation is a vestige from the early days of radio. Receivers had very little bass technology at the time, and it was very difficult – if not impossible – to hear bass tones on your home device. Now we live in an age where bass technology booms from the trunks of cars across America.

So what happened to this accent? Linguist William Labov notes that Mid-Atlantic speech fell out of favor after World War II, as fewer teachers continued teaching the pronunciation to their students. That’s one of the reasons this speech sounds so “old-timey” to us today: when people learn it, they’re usually learning it for acting purposes, rather than for everyday use. However, we can still hear the effects of Mid-Atlantic speech in recordings of everyone from Katherine Hepburn to Franklin D. Roosevelt and, of course, countless films, newsreels and radio shows from the 30s and 40s.
(more…)

September 12, 2023

Justin Trudeau should just stay away from India … it’s an ill-omened place for him

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

Paul Wells on the latest subcontinental pratfall of Prime Minister Look-At-My-Socks:

Later, word came from India that Justin Trudeau’s airplane had malfunctioned, stranding him, one hopes only briefly. It’s always a drag when a politician’s vehicle turns into a metaphor so obvious it begs to go right into the headline. As for the cause of the breakdown, I’m no mechanic, but I’m gonna bet $20 on “The gods decided to smite Trudeau for hubris”. Here’s what the PM tweeted or xeeted before things started falling off his ride home:

One can imagine the other world leaders’ glee whenever this guy shows up. “Oh, it’s Justin Trudeau, here to push for greater ambition!” Shall we peer into their briefing binders? Let’s look at Canada’s performance on every single issue Trudeau mentions, in order.

On climate change, Canada ranks 58th of 63 jurisdictions in the global Climate Change Performance Index. The country page for Canada uses the words “very low” three times in the first two sentences.

On gender equality, the World Economic Forum (!) ranks Canada 30th behind a bunch of other G-20 members.

On global health, this article in Britain’s BMJ journal calls Canada “a high income country that frames itself as a global health leader yet became one of the most prominent hoarders of the limited global covid-19 vaccine supply”.

On inclusive growth, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has a composite indicator called the Inclusive Growth Index. Canada’s value is 64.1, just behind the United States (!) and Australia, further behind most of Europe, stomped by Norway at 76.9%.

On support for Ukraine, the German Kiel Institute think tank ranks Canada fifth in the world, and third as a share of GDP, for financial support; and 8th in the world, or 21st as a share of GDP, for military support.

Almost all of these results are easy enough to understand. A small number are quite honourable. But none reads to me as any kind of license to wander around, administering lessons to other countries. I just finished reading John Williams’ luminous 1965 novel about university life, Stoner. A minor character in the book mocks the lectures and his fellow students, and eventually stands unmasked as a poser who hasn’t done even the basic reading in his discipline. I found the character strangely familiar. You’d think that after nearly a decade in power, after the fiascos of the UN Security Council bid, the first India trip, the collegiate attempt to impress a schoolgirl with fake trees, the prime minister would have figured out that fewer and fewer people, at home or abroad, are persuaded by his talk.

But this is part of the Liberals’ problem, isn’t it. They still think their moves work. They keep announcing stuff — Digital adoption program! Growth fund! Investment tax credits! Indo-Pacific strategy! Special rapporteur! — and telling themselves Canadians would miss this stuff if it went away. Whereas it’s closer to the truth to say we can’t miss it because its effect was imperceptible when it showed up.

In a moment I’ve mentioned before because it fascinates me, the Liberals called their play a year ago, as soon as they knew they’d be facing Pierre Poilievre. “We are going to see two competing visions,” Randy Boissonault said in reply to Poilievre’s first Question Period question as the Conservative leader. The events of the parliamentary year would spontaneously construct a massive contrast ad. It was the oldest play in the book, first articulated by Pierre Trudeau’s staff 50 years ago: Don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. It doesn’t work as well if people decide they prefer the alternative. It really doesn’t work if the team running the play think it means, “We’re the almighty”.

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