Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2025

Carney’s insane determination to keep the Digital Services Tax

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

One of the most noted features of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s attitude toward, well, everything is his unwillingness to take the concerns of his opponents into account. He seems to feel that he always knows best and therefore any opposition is therefore, by his definition, wrong. The government had been warned by pretty much every observer that the attempt to impose a protectionist digital service levy had incredibly high chances of triggering blowback … and it has:

Mark Carney’s thought process when he encounters dissent, probably

In other words, you can have many reactions to the current DST battle, but surprise should not be one of them. Canada pushed ahead despite efforts at an international agreement on the issue and later dismissed the increasing friction over the issue with the U.S., which has been signalling its opposition to the DST for many years. Donald Trump has taken action, but his views are not dissimilar from Joe Biden’s on the issue nor Members of Congress from both parties. Further, the companies directly affected by the rules have been similarly responsive. For example, Google began levying a 2.5% DST fee on Canadian advertisers last year in anticipation of the DST taking effect in 2025, thereby passing along much of the DST cost to Canadian businesses and consumers.

To be clear, Canada is free to adopt whatever tax policies it wants and tech companies should pay their fair share of taxes. Ensuring tech companies collect and remit sales taxes on digital sales and services is now well established in Canada. But the government’s policy of “making web giants pay” by going above taxes all companies pay with a percentage of revenues to support Canadian film and television, millions for the news sector, and now the DST was always going to spark a reaction.

Further, the Canadian DST is exceptionally complex, covering a wide range of digital revenues that occur in Canada. The baseline applicability is for companies that generate 750 million euros (about C$1.1 billion) in global revenue of which at least $20 million is digital services revenue in Canada. Digital services revenue can arise from (1) online marketplace services revenue (which would cover an Ebay, Airbnb or Uber), (2) online advertising services revenue (Google or Microsoft), (3) social media services revenue (Facebook or TikTok), and (4) user data revenue (any company that collects and sells user data). Targeting these services means there is a lot stake, estimated by the Parliamentary Budget Officer at $7.2 billion over five years.

Other countries have DSTs, but Canada was the only one to introduce one despite an agreement to institute a moratorium on new DSTs years ago at the OECD. And then it was one of the only countries to reject an extension of that moratorium. The government insisted it would move ahead without delays and indicated it was confident it could avoid retaliation.

Given the trade tensions with the U.S. since the election of Donald Trump, unilaterally dropping the DST in the midst of a trade battle did not make much sense as we needed policy certainty under a broader deal. In other words, the DST was a card we had to play as part of a negotiation. But once we played that card by announcing the tax would take effect next week, it virtually guaranteed the U.S. would respond as it did. The priority should have been a broader deal. The government could have adopted a Trump-style delay for a month to give more time for negotiations. It could have have followed the UK model of weaving it into a broader agreement and committing to a larger digital trade deal. Instead, the government continued years of dismissing the trade risks associated with the DST, potentially creating bigger economic problems in the process.

Dan Knight on how Ottawa deliberately baited Trump, despite all the warnings that this was an incredibly stupid idea:

Donald Trump has officially walked away from the negotiating table. The trigger? Canada’s ill-conceived Digital Services Tax (DST) — a reckless, retroactive grab for revenue targeting U.S. tech firms. Trump isn’t mincing words: he’s calling it a “blatant, discriminatory attack” on American innovation, and now he’s moving to punish Canada economically for it.

So what exactly is this tax?

The Digital Services Tax, passed by the Liberal government and implemented under Mark Carney’s leadership, applies a 3% levy on revenue — not profits — earned by large digital firms operating in Canada. And it’s retroactive. That means it’s being applied to earnings from as far back as January 1, 2022, with companies forced to make lump-sum payments by June 30, 2025.

This tax specifically targets companies with global revenue of at least 750 million and Canadian digital revenue of at least CAD 20 million. Translation: It’s a direct hit on American giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, Airbnb, and Uber, and it spares Canadian firms and EU-based entities from equivalent exposure. It’s not tax fairness — it’s protectionism with a smiley-face sticker.

Trump has responded in kind. As of June 27, all trade negotiations with Canada are suspended. Retaliatory tariffs — already mounting since February — are set to escalate. Trump is drawing a red line, and he’s daring Canada to cross it.

What’s at stake?

Everything. Canada sends over 75% of its exports to the United States. We’re talking about nearly a trillion dollars in annual trade. With Trump now actively leveraging tariffs and ending negotiations, entire sectors — from automotive to agriculture, energy to manufacturing — are in the crosshairs.

Already this year, Trump has slapped 25% tariffs on Canadian imports, with specific hits to steel, aluminum, vehicles, and auto parts, and 10% tariffs on Canadian oil, gas, and potash. These moves have already disrupted markets. Ending trade negotiations is a body blow to an already wobbly Canadian economy — still reeling from Trudeau-era mismanagement and Carney’s corporate globalist agenda.

So who could have seen this coming?

Almost everyone.

QotD: People in the past believed their own religion

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

What I think this show [Game of Thrones] has fallen into is the assumption – almost always made by someone outside a society looking in – that the local religion is so silly that no one of true intelligence (which always seems to mean “the ruling class” – I am amazed how even blue-collar students will swiftly self-identify with knights and nobles over commoners when reading history) could believe it. This is the mistake my students make – they don’t believe medieval Catholicism or Roman paganism, and so they weakly assume that no one (or at least, none of the “really smart” people) at the time really did either. Of course this is wrong: People in the past believed their own religion.

It is an old mistake – Polybius makes it of the Romans, writing in c. 150 BC. Polybius notes that Roman religion was “distinctly superior” for maintaining the cohesion of the Roman state, but that “they (= the ruling class) have adopted this course for the sake of the common people” (Plb. 6.56.6-8), by which he means for the sake of the “fickle multitude” which must be “held in invisible terrors and pageantry”. Polybius, I should note, immediately contradicts himself – one benefit of this religion, he says, is that Roman magistrates (read: elite Senators) do not steal from the public treasury even when they are not watched, which would seem to imply that even many very elite Romans believed their own religion (also, irony alert: those famously incorruptible Romans …). Poor men, after all, are not elected to watch the treasury.

Fortunately, Polybius is not our only source on Roman culture, so it is possible to say – and I want to be clear here – Polybius is wrong (on this point at least). Roman elites took their religion very seriously. There are exceptions, of course – Julius Caesar was an Epicurean philosophically, although this does not seem to have altogether disrupted his performance of the duties of Rome’s highest priesthood (he was Pontifex Maximus). Nevertheless, such philosophically minded men were generally regarded with scorn by even the Roman elites (Cicero heaps such scorn on Cato in the Pro Murena in what were clearly intended as friendly “ribbing” before a mostly elite audience), who nevertheless greatly valued religious character (in contrast, Cicero is quick to accuse his hated enemy Catiline of irreligion before the Senate). Roman leaders vowed temples and sacrifices in duress, and built and gave them in victory. Lavish dedications to the gods from all levels of Roman society confirm the overall picture: the Romans believed their religion. Yes, even the elite Romans (there is, I should note, some complicated in that elites tended to separate what they viewed as religion from common “superstition”, but that’s a topic for another day.) And, if anything, the evidence for elite “buy-in” to Medieval religion is far more voluminous.

Yet none of the main characters of Game of Thrones, apart from perhaps Catelyn Stark, is devoted to their region’s traditional religion in any private sense. I cannot recall at any point any character protesting an action on account of religion – no marches held up by high holy days (a regular occurrence in ancient and medieval literature), no groups, individuals or places religiously exempt from violence. The Faith has certain rules about sexuality, but they’re rules that are not only flouted privately by individuals in the show, but also quite publicly by the last ruling dynasty for centuries.

Moreover, none of the ruling characters seem to have any religious functions – or if they do, they simply ignore them most of the time. Keep in mind, these people believe that their gods – be it the Seven or the Old Gods – are powerful divine beings who are directly and immediately interested in the world and who act on that interest. Keeping such beings happy is vitally important – it is not an afterthought. No society, so far as I can tell, has ever believed there is enough gold or enough armies to save you if you have enraged the gods. There is simply no off-setting an angry divinity (and before the smart guy asks, “what about a favorable divinity?” the Greeks had an answer for that – go read Euripides’ Hippolytus. It ends badly for the mortals).

The lack of religious duties or functions for characters who are kings is particularly surprising. Kingship has three core roles in almost all human cultures where the institution appears: kings are 1) chief judge, 2) chief general, and 3) chief priest. That third role appears more or less prominently in almost all societies. In ancient Egypt and (at times) in Mesopotamia, kings were held to literally be either earthly incarnations of major gods or minor gods in their own right. Roman Emperors held the office of Pontifex Maximus, and took over as the chief priest of the state, before becoming gods on their deaths. The Chinese emperor was the “Son of Heaven” and was tasked with maintaining the right relationship with the divine (the “mandate of heaven”). The emperors of Japan are purported to be direct descendants of the goddess Amaterasu (and they have a family tree to back it up).

The relationship between medieval kings and the Church was more complicated, because of the existence of a clear religious head (the Pope) outside of secular authority, but medieval kingship retained a strong sense of religious purpose. Coronation rituals often involved the clergy and were essentially religious rituals, because kingly power was still thought to be bestowed by God. Kings, in turn, had a special role in keeping their kingdom in right relationship with the divine, both through just rule (which included protecting the Church) and through the performance of religious rituals. Those rituals, of course, worked both ways: both believed to be religious efficacious (as in they helped bring about God’s good favor), but also valuable tools of building royal legitimacy (hat tip to my colleague Elizabeth Hassler’s excellent dissertation on the topic of holy kingship). In some places (England and France most notably), kings were thought holy enough to be able to heal certain diseases miraculously by touch – a king who couldn’t was clearly insufficiently pious.

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-04.

June 28, 2025

Punctuation microaggression

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

We appear to have an entire generation — Gen Z — suffering undue trauma from, checks notes, aggressive and distressing punctuation marks:

“American typewriter keyboard layout” by Любослов Езыкин is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

What is more delicious than casting sweeping judgements over entire generations? Contrary to prevailing wisdom, studying and mocking the mores and manners of Generation Z is not only morally just but entirely natural. Not to mention good fun.

At the end of this paragraph, re-read this string of sentences. Study the punctuation. You’ll notice that each sentence ends with a satisfying symbol. What Americans call a period and what Britishers call a full stop signifies the end of the sentence — that the sentence contains a complete thought. How lovely.

That unassuming little dot was good enough for Shakespeare, Hemingway, Ibsen, Miller — every writer who mastered the well-mannered violence of the English Language. They understood, too, the writerly compulsion to kneel before that impossible mistress. Submission sets the writer free.

Submission, however, is not in vogue. Submission implies hierarchy, which implies standards — forbidden notions to anyone under 45.

Generation Z. The Zoomers. Those with the misfortune to have spawned here on Earth between 1997 and 2012. This swarm of digital natives has never known a world without the internet. Or, it appears, one with grammatical standards.

According to linguists, Zoomers view the full stop as Bill Clinton views a well-adjusted woman: with intrinsic horror. For Zoomers, the full stop is the mark of unbridled aggression. Zoomers refuse full stops — period.

In The Telegraph, one-linguist-cum-exorcist said that Zoomers find the full stop deeply troubling. That little dot before these seven words provokes a generational panic attack: “Full stops signify an angry or abrupt tone of voice”.

Another expert chimed in. Dr Lauren Fonteyn tweeted, “If you send a text message without a full stop, it’s already obvious that you’ve concluded the message. So, if you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it, and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone.”

To renew my sense of horror, I probed further. In a 2015 study at New York’s Binghamton University, undergraduates perceived text messages ending with a full stop as “less sincere” than the same message without one.

Language, like the fish, rots from the head. Researchers also found that exclamation marks, those hyperactive symbols of faux cheer, achieved the opposite of full stops. Those employing an exclamation mark appeared “more sincere and engaged”.

June 27, 2025

RAF Brize Norton apparently had almost no security for its planes at all

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

Domestic terrorists got into RAF Brize Norton, one of Britain’s main airbases, last week and committed damage that may range into the tens of millions of pounds … and were in and out with the RAF none the wiser:

So this was a serious attack; it’s also an intensely embarrassing one. The terrorists got in and out completely undetected; it appears nobody at Brize Norton was aware of the attack until the perpetrators had already escaped. This would be bad enough if they’d been Spetsnaz-trained infiltrators, flitting silently from shadow to shadow towards their targets. In fact, however, they were a couple of unwashed hippies from Palestine Action, and they “infiltrated” the base on electric motorbikes. It is absolutely staggering that they were able to get in, attack two valuable aircraft and then get out again without being intercepted.

Or maybe it isn’t. This is the station commander of RAF Brize Norton:

Gp Capt Henton appears to have spent her entire career in non-operational roles. She also seems to have some very strange ideas about concepts such as masculinity and even patriotism. In a paper she wrote (which is available online) Henton appears strongly critical of traditional military culture, particularly that in the combat units she has never been part of. Is it just coincidence that, under the command of someone who is effectively an HR manager in a uniform, traditional military concerns such as security appear to have been badly neglected?

It’s undeniable that security at Brize Norton was neglected. One of the things I was trained in, as an Intelligence Corps operator, was protective security. We tended to focus on the protection of classified information, but the same principles apply to the protection of anything else (for example aircraft), and one of those principles is that if the security around an asset is weak in one respect — for example, physical barriers like fences — you can plug that gap by deploying other assets — for example, guards.

I used Google Street View to do a perimeter recce of Brize Norton, and took this screenshot looking from Station Road at the eastern end of the base’s runway:

This shot is taken from a public road, outside the base. The only perimeter security is a simple, easily climbed wooden fence less than six feet high. For a long stretch it has no “topping” — security jargon for razor wire or other anti-climb obstacles. There is also no perimeter security lighting along this section of the road. There aren’t even streetlights on the road itself. This is a massive weakness in physical security, which any terrorist can easily identify using open-source tools like Google Street View. The red ellipse I have drawn on the image highlights aircraft — seven of them, a mix of Voyagers and A400M transports — parked on the apron. They are less than three-fifths of a mile (900m in new money) from the perimeter fence, a distance that an electric scooter can cover in around 90 seconds. This level of physical security is completely unacceptable for the protection of such valuable assets, so it should have been supplemented with armed guards. It wouldn’t take all that many. A twelve-man guard under the command of a corporal could easily supply a pair of two-man prowler patrols, one on the apron and one randomly checking vulnerable points around the perimeter. That would have been enough to intercept and stop this attack.

The fading Boomer Laurentianus

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

Last week in The Critic, Charles Kirwin described the people who saddled us with three terms of Justin Trudeau and hope to continue their reign of error by supporting Mark Carney with his Europhile whims and intolerance for dissent:

Boomer Laurentianus is a Canadian subspecies of Boomerus Senectus, so named because he models himself on the so-called Laurentian Elite, Canada’s governing class that inhabit the “Laurentian corridor”, the narrow strip of land along the Saint Laurence river between Montreal and Toronto that, for a certain kind of Canadian, is the only bit of the country that matters.

In spirit, he is a child of the sixties and still believes he is a radical at heart. Despite this he expects to be treated with the deference reserved for those awarded the Victoria Cross, despite his closest experience to combat being glancing longingly at pictures of the cancelled Avro Arrow or campaigning to defend the local parking lot from being turned into affordable houses.

Like his British and American cousin, he supports progressive policies like safe supply of drugs, lenient sentences and bail conditions for criminals, and whatever economic policies keep his pension fund high and his property values increasing. Naturally, he lives in neighbourhoods untouched by the crime and addiction that are the direct result of the policies he supports.

It is important to note that while his modes of thinking and beliefs are those of the Laurentian Elite, his mind is shaped by the institutions of the Laurentian Elite: The Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Governor General’s Literary Award, various other high-minded organisations that form the intellectual life of Laurentian Canada, Boomerus Laurentianus is not necessarily “of” them.

Molson Canadian is the spirit of his patriotism. In 2000, Molson released a beer advertisement in which a typical Canadian played by actor Jeff Douglas shouts into a microphone to an audience of Americans, dismissing various Canadian stereotypes (we say aboot, drive dogsleds, are all lumberjacks and fur traders et cetera) and notes some of the differences that make Canada not the US. “I have a Prime Minister not a President … I believe in Peacekeeping not policing … I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack while travelling”. The advertisement is something of a cult hit in Canada and has been parodied by just about everyone including William Shatner.

This one-minute advertisement swells at the heart of the Boomer Laurentianus view of his country. It is both superficial and, in places, factually incorrect (the equivalent of the US president is not the Prime Minister but the King or Queen of Canada). But he has built his entire sense of nationalism around myths such as peacekeeping or being liked by foreigners more than Americans. This last point is sacred to his sense of identity.

Boomerus Laurentianus exists in a superposition state usually reserved for Schrödinger’s cat wherein he is both completely American and not American at all. It was often claimed of Rhodesians that they were “More British than the British”. Boomer Laurentianus is more Yank than the Yanks. Despite his reverence for the CBC, he gets his recipes from the New York Times and his opinions from CNN. He watches American television, travels to the US frequently, may even own a second home there. He can almost convince himself that they are the same country, sometimes to the point of putting up signs supporting, Democratic political candidates, seemingly unaware that he cannot vote in foreign elections.

QotD: The dangers of “doing too much principal component analysis”

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

John: I’ve never read a fashion magazine or watched a runway show, so I just naively assumed that models were stunningly attractive and feminine. But as Mears points out, the models are not actually to most men’s tastes. They tend to have boyish figures and to be unusually tall.1 Is this because the fashion industry is dominated by gay men, who gravitate towards women who look like teen boys? Whatever the origins of it, there is a model “look”, and the industry has slowly optimized for a more and more extreme version of it, like a runaway neural network, or like those tribes with the rings that stretch their necks or the boards that flatten their skulls. There’s actually a somewhat uncanny or even posthuman look to many of the models. The club promoters denigrate women who lack the model look as “civilians”, but freely admit that they’d rather sleep with a “good civilian” than with a model. The model’s function, as you say, is as a locus of mimetic desire. They’re wanted because they’re wanted, in a perfectly tautological self-bootstrapping cycle; and because, in the words of one promoter: “They really pop in da club because they seven feet tall”.

[…]

By the way, the fact that models are beautiful in a highly specific way, and that there exist women who are similarly beautiful but condemned to be “civilians”, is a good reminder of the dangers of doing too much principal component analysis.2 In so many areas of life, we are obsessed with collapsing intrinsically high-dimensional phenomena onto a single uni-dimensional axis. You see this a lot with the status games that leftists play around privilege and oppression — I feel like a rational leftist would say that a disabled white lesbian and a wealthy scion of Haitian oligarchs are just incomparable, each more privileged than the other in some senses and less in other senses. But no, instead there’s an insistence that we find an absolute total ordering of oppression across all identity categories, a single hierarchy that allows us to compare any two individuals and produce a mathematical answer as to which one is more deserving of DEI grants. My hunch is a lot of the internal tensions and bickering within American leftism are actually produced by this insistence, which makes sense because it’s totally zero sum.

But the disease of trying to pin everything to a single number is hardly confined to the left. You see it on the right in the obsession with IQ, as if a single number could capture the breathtaking range of variation of cognitive capabilities across all humanity. I mean for goodness sake, Intel learned the hard way that this doesn’t even work for computers, and human brains are much weirder and more complicated than microprocessors. But the even dumber version of this is the 1-10 scale of female beauty. There’s something so sublime about seeing a beautiful human being, because so much of it is either bound up in subtle interrelationships between different features (this is why plastic surgery often makes people uglier — there’s no such thing as a “perfect nose”, and if you pick one out of a catalog you’ll probably end up with one that doesn’t fit your face), or it’s irretrievably evanescent — a fleeting glance, or the way her hair falls across her face just so, gone the moment after it happens. Taking something so ineffable and putting it on a 1-10 scale only makes sense as a form of psychological warfare. And I get it, amongst the young people relations between the sexes have degenerated to the point of more or less open warfare, but come on, this is pornbrained nonsense.

Speaking of both the DEI olympics and the classification of female beauty, some parts of this book are really charmingly naive, and I snickered a bit at Mears’s mystification at why all of the models are white and blonde. The really funny part is that she says something like: “I expected this legacy of white supremacy to be in retreat given that so many of the big spenders in clubs these days are from Asia and the Middle East”. Is she really not aware that men of other races have an even stronger aesthetic preference for white women than white men do?3

John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.

    1. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.

    2. Not the only danger of too much principal component analysis!

    3. Gabriel: Kimberly Hoang did an ethnography as a bar girl in several Vietnam bars. At the bar that catered to Vietnamese elites, the other bar girls made her lighten her skin with cosmetics and wear a black minidress, with the target look being tall, pale, and slender K-pop idol. When she moved to another bar catering to white sex tourists, the other bar girls told her to wear bronzer and a slutty version of traditional Asian dress with the target look being exoticized sexiness. See: Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. University of California Press.

June 26, 2025

NYC doubles down on Luxury Beliefs

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

New York City voters appear to have selected the ultimate “luxury beliefs” candidate as the presumptive next mayor of NYC in Zohran Mamdani:

The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.

Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.

Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.

And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.

Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.

It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.

And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.

“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.

As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.

But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.

German police raid homes to counteract online “hate speech” by “digital arsonists”

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

Things are getting worse for free speech in Germany, as eugyppius reports:

Apollo News reports on the newest, most irregular German holiday, which consists of the police conducting coordinated raids on and interrogations of ordinary people who are alleged to have said rude things on the internet:

    On Tuesday morning police across Germany conducted raids targeting “hate speech and incitement” on the internet. According to the news agency dpa, there are currently 170 operations underway, including house searches and other measures. Those accused are charged with insulting politicians and inciting hatred …

    The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is in charge of the operation … In North Rhine-Westphalia, several police authorities struck simultaneously at 6 a.m. Police from Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Bielefeld, Münster, Hagen, and Bonn are among those involved. Fourteen suspects are to be questioned and two search warrants executed.1 The individuals in question frequently express themselves on social media, such as on X.

    … The Action Day against alleged hate posts has been taking place regularly for years. On June 18, the BKA joined forces with the reporting center “REspect!” to participate in the “International Day Against Hate and Incitement”. People were called upon to report posts that allegedly spread hate.

Today was the twelfth such “Action Day against Hate and Incitement on the Internet”. That is only an approximate title; it varies slightly across press sources. This dubious ritual began in 2016, after Merkel opened the German borders to the entirety of the developing world and our politicians grew tired of people calling them imbeciles online. Police are very open that the goal of these coordinated Action Days is intimidation – or, as they put it, “deterrence”.

Our federal police love this holiday so much they often celebrate it twice a year, which is why are already on the twelfth such day, even though we have only had nine years since the establishment of this custom. Sometimes our betters even throw in bonus action days that for some reason don’t count, as during Covid when they conducted a special “Action Day against Political Hate Postings” after the seventh “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings” but before the eighth “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings”. Who knows how many such action days we have really had, especially considering that since 2020 the broader EU has adopted this sporadic holiday and occasionally coordinates its own Continent-wide “Action Day against Hatred and Incitement on the Internet”.

[…]

By calling these Action Days idiotic, I don’t mean to minimise them. They are borderline illegal, for they exploit what should be purely investigative tactics (interrogations, house searches) to scare and punish people in advance of any criminal conviction. The emphasis is not only on right-leaning posters, but invariably and most disgracefully on ordinary people with relatively little social media reach, whose posts in many cases have been seen a mere handful of times. The message is clear: They can get you, whoever you are; they can get anybody. Living in a country whose authorities amuse themselves by periodically harassing their own citizens in this way is disturbing. It’s an absolute scandal that all the major political parties support this, save for Alternative für Deutschland. It’s a reason to vote AfD all by itself.

June 25, 2025

Experts – “The shorter, the better”. Audiences – “Gimme more long-form, stat!”

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia notes that the experts are all-in on shorter videos, but actual audiences are clearly now more interested in much longer-form treatments:

When I saw the numbers, I couldn’t believe them.

Every digital platform is flooding the market with short videos, but the audience is now spending more time with longform video — and by a huge margin.

Source: Tubular Labs

Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years.

That’s a staggering six-fold increase. But even short videos are now getting longer. Social media consultants call this the “long short” format. Sometimes they are used as teasers to draw viewers to still longer media (often on another platform).

Movies are also getting longer. At first glance, that makes no sense — more people are watching films at home on small digital devices, where Hollywood fare has to compete with bite-sized junk from TikTok and Instagram.

You might think that filmmakers would feel forced to compress their storytelling, but the opposite is true. They are learning that audiences crave something longer and more immersive than a TikTok.

At first, Hollywood insiders tried to imitate the ultra-short aesthetic, but they failed — sometimes in colossal fashion. (Does anyone remember the Quibi fiasco?)

Now they not only embrace long films, but happily release sprawling mega-movies longer than the Boston Marathon. Dune Two ran for 166 minutes — not even Eliud Kipchoge does that. Oppenheimer clocked in at 180 minutes. Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon lasted a mind-boggling 206 minutes.

The studios would have vetoed these excesses just a few years ago. Not anymore.

Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes.

Two of those long hit songs came from Taylor Swift — who has been a champion of longer immersive musical experiences, most notably in her insanely successful Eras tour. She set the record for the biggest money-generating roadshow in music history, and did it with a performance twice as long as a Mahler symphony.

These Swift concerts run for three-and-a-half hours (just like Scorsese at his most maniacal), and include more than 40 songs. They’re grouped in ten separate acts, each built around a different era in her career.

Ten acts? Really?

Even Wagner stopped short of that. But the Eras tour generated more than $2 billion in revenues. And all this happened while experts were touting 15-second songs on TikTok as the future of music.

I’ve charted the duration of Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences.

The New York Times complained about the length of her most recent album — calling it “sprawling and often self-indulgent.” It mocked her for believing that “more is more.”

It summed up her whole worldview with a dismissive claim that she has fallen in love with “abundance”. In fact, the Times opened its article with that accusation.

But I note that a year after the Times laughed at Swiftian abundance, the hottest topic in the culture is a book with that same word as its title. (Full disclosure: I’ll be doing a live Substack conversation with its co-author Derek Thompson in a few days.)

Abundance has dominated the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for the last several months. Even more to the point, the word seems to tap into the public’s hunger for something bigger, deeper, and more expansive than it’s been getting.

H.G. Wells’ Things To Come: Through The Eyes of its Time

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 10 Jan 2025

H.G. Wells’ Things To Come played much differently in 1936 than it does today. So much so that it offers us an insight into the politics of the period if we can step back from our post-WWII understanding and look at it on its own terms.

Link to the Coupland essay.
http://digamoo.free.fr/coupland2000.pdf

00:00 Intro
02:08 Revolution Envy
05:15 The Gulf of Time
06:32 Wells and the BUF
08:02 Empire and Establishment
12:11 The World State
15:18 To Understand the Past …

June 24, 2025

Political violence increases as the power of the state increases

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

Many people note that they don’t remember political conflicts being quite so nasty in years past as they are now, but the more power that accretes to the state the higher the perceived — and actual — risk of allowing the state to fall into the hands of your opponents. We’d be far better off if partisans would consider the possibility that the latest addition to state power they support will be used by their political opponents after the next partisan shift in electoral fortunes … if you fear this power in the hands of a Trump, you shouldn’t put it in the hands of a Biden.

As should be obvious to anybody following news about riots, assassinations, and arson attacks, politics have become far too important in America. With government large, growing, and reaching into every nook and cranny of our lives, Americans perceive politics as too much of a high-stakes game to lose. And so, they have divided into hostile camps to make sure their side comes out on top — and some turn ideological conflict into literal war.

A Surge in Political Violence

That point came home to me after Israel launched its preemptive attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. My wife’s rabbi (she’s Jewish and I’m not) called me and asked if I was willing to work security during services on Saturday. “No Kings” protests were planned across the country for the day, with the potential to turn nasty at the hands of people who insist anybody wearing a Star of David bears responsibility for the Israeli government’s actions. Tensions were already high after the Molotov cocktail attack on Jews in Boulder, the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and the firebombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence on the first night of Passover.

So, I spent much of Saturday standing in front of the synagogue, wearing a ballistic vest, with a pistol holstered on one hip and pepper spray on the other.

Underlining the point was that two Minnesota state lawmakers were targeted by an assassin the same Saturday — fatally in the case of one legislator and her husband. The day’s protests were predominantly, but not entirely, peaceful. That’s better than we’ve seen at recent protests against immigration enforcement that turned violent in Los Angeles and Portland, and at some pro-Palestine demonstrations.

That’s all recent. If we go back in time just a little, there’s the bombing of a fertility clinic by an “anti-natalist”; attacks on Tesla cars, dealerships, chargers, and owners by people opposed to Elon Musk’s temporary role in the Trump administration; and, notably, the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, has become something of a celebrity.

“Targeted violence is becoming normalized online and in the real world,” warned a December 2024 report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, affiliated with Rutgers University. “Memes, viral content, gamification and the lionization of Luigi Mangione are constructing frameworks that endorse and legitimize violence, encouraging harassment and further acts of violence against corporate figures.”

The report added that “the spread and scope of justifications for murder have significantly eroded what was once a barrier between mainstream society and fringe online communities that supported violence and glorified killers.”

Fandom Has Always Been UNHINGED

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

Jill Bearup
Published 23 Jun 2025

Listen, nobody asked for a history of fanfiction but here we are regardless. From Helen of Troy fix-it fic to Holmes fans unsubscribing en masse when the detective was killed in The Final Problem, fandom has always been this chaotic, and fanfiction has always been with us. In one form or another.

00:00 Did you ask for this? Nah.
01:20 Ancient authors ripping off other ancient authors
03:06 Virgil was a Homer fanboy
04:10 Dante was a Virgil fanboy
05:18 Don Quixote and the Case of the Unauthorised Sequel
08:01 The Statute of Anne
12:35 Gulliver’s Travels NSFW fanart
14:40 Geniuses and Originality
16:51 The Berne Convention
17:20 Character Vibes are not Copyrightable
20:46 The First Modern Fandoms (were Genuinely Unhinged)

Link to Der Spiegel article on copyright and innovation: https://www.spiegel.de/international/…

“Britain’s bill for Caribbean slavery comes to £19 trillion – fifteen times the current annual budget of the UK government”

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The demands for reparations for historic wrongs will continue to grow, but the chances of any of the hustlers making the demands are remarkably slim, and thank goodness for that, because if the principle ever gets established we’ll be on a never-ending beggar-my-neighbour jag:

Britain’s bill for Caribbean slavery comes to £19 trillion — fifteen times the current annual budget of the UK government — according to the 2023 Brattle Report. And if the “Glasgow — City of Empire” display at the Kelvingrove Museum is anything to go by, Scotland owns a large share of that, since Glasgow was “one of the major port cities” involved in the slave-trade, whose profits played “a crucial role” in its economic development and prosperity.

The Tall Ship in Glasgow Harbour

The debt-collectors are already knocking at the door. In March 2023, Clive Lewis, MP and shadow Foreign Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, called for the UK government to start “meaningful negotiations” over reparations with Caribbean countries. The following autumn, Lewis’s parliamentary office became the centre of a reparations-campaign, funded by Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien. And in April this year, Sir Keir Starmer received the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, into No. 10. “We’ve known each other many years as good colleagues and now as leaders who think alike”, said Starmer. Mottley has stated that Britain owes Barbados £3.9 trillion and it was she who pushed for reparations onto the agenda of the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit last year.

But the case for reparations doesn’t add up. Yes, some Britons were involved in inhumane slave-trading and slavery, mainly from about 1650 to the early 1800s, when they transported over 3.2 million slaves from Africa to the Americas. Yet, while campaigners portray British involvement as uniquely dreadful. It wasn’t.

Up until the end of the 18th century AD slavery and slave-trading were universal institutions, practised since the dawn of time on every continent by peoples of every skin colour. In North America, indigenous societies in the Pacific North-West were built on slave-labour, since subsistence required the rapid processing of salmon, and the quantity of work outstripped the supply of female labour. So, raiding for slaves was endemic. Thousands of miles to the south, the Comanche ran “the largest slave economy” in the 1700s — according to Oxford’s Pekka Hämäläinen. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Arabs had been busy slave-raiding and -trading since at least the 7th century AD. According to one authority, the Muslim trade transported 17 million slaves mainly from Africa, but also from Europe, to the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. This is one context out of which reparations-advocates like to abstract British slavery.

Another is African complicity. British slave-ships off the coast of West Africa didn’t have to raid inland to obtain their slaves. They just waited on the coast for them to be brought. Africans had been busy enslaving and trading other Africans for centuries, first to the Romans, then to the Arabs, and finally to the Europeans. As early as 1550 the Kingdom of the Kongo was exporting up to 8,000 African slaves annually to the Portuguese.

The final context that campaigners studiously ignore is the fact that Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading (in 1807) and slavery (in 1833) throughout its territories. It then used its dominant power to suppress both slave-trading and slavery from Brazil, across Africa and India, to New Zealand for the second half of the British Empire’s life. In the 1820s and ’30s, the Slave Trade Department was the Foreign Office’s largest unit. By mid-century the Royal Navy was devoting over 13 per cent of its total manpower to stopping transatlantic slave-trading. The cost of this alone to British taxpayers was at least the equivalent of up to £1.74 billion today or 12.7 per cent of the UK’s current expenditure on development aid — for half a century. According to the eminent historian, David Eltis, the nineteenth-century costs of slavery-suppression exceeded the eighteenth-century benefits.

The West Africa Squadron, which freed 150,000 African slaves.

June 23, 2025

80% of top-grossing movies are prequels, sequels, spin-offs, remakes or reboots

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

Ted Gioia on the death of creativity in the movie business, which also seems to be tracking almost exactly with the trend in music business profits:

I’m not shocked when I look in the mirror. Yeah, the Honest Broker isn’t getting any younger. But that’s the human condition.

Maybe I should start using a moisturizer. What do y’all think?

Nah. I’ll just let this aging thing play out.

On the other hand, I’m dumbfounded at everything in public life getting older — even older than me! Consider the current political landscape.

With each passing year, the US Congress looks more like the College of Cardinals (average age =78) or the Rolling Stones (average age = also 78).

We’re gonna need a lot of moisturizer.

But Congress is young and spry compared to Hollywood.

Back in 2000, 80% of movie revenues came from original ideas. But this has now totally flip-flopped.

Today 80% of the movie business is built on old ideas — remakes, and spin-offs, and various other brand extensions. And we went from 80% new to 80% old in just a few years.

[…]

Look at music — and you see the same thing.

The share of old songs on streaming will soon reach 80%. It’s not quite there yet — the latest figures are 73%. But it was at 63% back in 2019. So it’s just a matter of time.

In 2000, streaming didn’t exist, so we looked to the Billboard chart to gauge a song’s success. And new music made up more than 80% of charted songs. So here — just like the movies — we’re flip-flopping from 80% new to 80% old over the course of a few years.

I don’t have good figures on publishing. But I’m pretty sure that AI-generated books and articles will soon represent 80% of the marketplace. Maybe we’ve already reached that threshold.

AI is deliberately designed to cut-and-paste, rehashing past work as its modus operandi. And it will do this to every field — replacing originality with repetition and regurgitation.

This is the new 80% rule.

Just imagine if traditional businesses operated this way.

  • “Welcome to our restaurant, 80% of the food is leftovers.”
  • “Welcome to our boutique, 80% of clothing is secondhand.”
  • “Welcome to our dating service, 80% of the choices are your ex-girlfriends (or ex-boyfriends).”

None of that sounds very appetizing.

US strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities

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

One of the most frustrating aspects of internet culture today is the need for instantaneous “analysis” of military events. We all understand the desire for such insight, but the accuracy of information available in the immediate aftermath of any event is highly variable. Between the need to control the narrative on the part of the participant powers, the propaganda value of being “first” to report, and the impossibility of accurate damage assessment, it’s a wise move to discount almost everything you hear about a big event for some time. Chris Bray suggests that the old “72 hours rule” may be insufficient for something like the US bunker busting strikes against Iranian nuclear research facilities:

First, wait a while. Sean Hannity just announced that “a source” told him the attack was a complete success, and all of Iran’s nuclear sites were fully destroyed. I’d hesitate to believe that, is the gentle way to put it. I’d also hesitate to believe the stories being told from the other direction, and don’t forget that Trump’s attack on Qasem Soleimani produced a full week of OH NO WORLD WAR III JUST BEGAN stories in the establishment media. The likelihood is that none of what you’re hearing this week is fully true. Wait and watch. I hope that Iran and the US are backchanneling while engaging in belligerent public posturing, but by definition we’re not going to see the backchanneling. We’ll see. The 72 Hour Rule is in effect, here, at the very least.

Second, the ludicrous story in which Trump is violating law and political norms with unilateral military action is, as always, a deliberate performance of political amnesia. These are our political norms, for crying out loud.

We should probably fix that. But the people who tolerated an American war in Libya without direct congressional authorization, and who tolerated an American war in Yemen without direct congressional authorization, and who tolerated an American war in Syria without direct congressional authorization, aren’t actually going to impeach a president over military strikes in the Middle East undertaken without direct congressional authorization. It’s a show. The More Than a Week Rule requires us to view this action in the longer and generally quite unfortunate context of American foreign policy, and the politicians who are outraged by unilateral military action in the Middle East have zero standing on that score.

Third, and related, the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force is still in effect, and still being stretched and massaged beyond its intent and meaning, but note that Congress still hasn’t repealed it. A Congress that wished to restrain presidential military action in the Middle East would probably start there, and they haven’t.

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds has a few thoughts on the matter:

People have been singing about it since 1980, but yesterday’s bombing raids on Iranian nuclear facilities were the first bombing attack since the 1979 hostage seizure.

Despite numerous calls for action against the Islamic Republic, Operation Midnight Hammer was the first U.S. military action against important Iranian assets on Iranian territory. The bombs fell less than 24 hours ago, but here are a few preliminary takes.

Competence. The most striking thing about the attacks was the extreme competence displayed by the Air Force, the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth, the various intelligence assets involved, the State Department, and the entire administration. There were no leaks. (How did they avoid leaks? Basically, they didn’t tell any Democrats what was coming. Take note.)

Not only were there no leaks, but President Trump and the diplomatic apparatus kept the Iranians in the dark, giving the impression of waffling in the White House even as things were being lined up. They received unintentional help in this from Sen. Charles Schumer, who had been for some time pushing the “TACO” acronym — Trump Always Chickens Out — in the service of a storyline that Trump was all bluster and no follow-through. The Iranians, apparently dumb enough to believe Democrats and the mainstream news media (but I repeat myself) were snookered.

New Diplomacy: In dealing with the Iranians in the 1980s, Donald Regan told President Reagan that America had been repeatedly “snookered” by a bunch of “rug merchants”. The Iranians were in fact very good at leading Americans down the garden path, invoking (often imaginary) splits between “hard-line” and “moderate” Islamists in their government as excuses for delay and backtracking.

In truth, as Henry Kissinger once said, “An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition“. After these raids, and the many Israeli attacks that led up to them, all of Iran is out of ammunition.

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