Quotulatiousness

July 21, 2023

Country music world (and legacy media) convulsed by country song that isn’t woke

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

There’s been a lot of wailing by the usual suspects about a recent video released by Jason Aldean for his song “Try That in a Small Town”, alleging all sorts of horrible things including promotion of lynching, outright racism, and inciting violence:

… writer Zachary Faria notes that the left is rabidly protective of Black Lives Matter. In fact, they’re so protective of it that they’ll take issue with criticism of literally anything that ever even happened at a Black Lives Matter protest.

Entire neighborhoods were burned to the ground? A small price to pay for social justice, at least in their minds.

So the idea of people standing up to them — warning them to try that in a small town — is despicable.

Remember that these are the same people who continue to accuse Kyle Rittenhouse of murder despite having been acquitted of the crime. These are the same people who call the kid a racist despite him having shot three white dudes. They say he acted unprovoked despite one trying to take his gun from him, another hitting him in the head with a blunt object, and a third literally pointing a gun at him.

Through it all, they act like Rittenhouse should have just rolled over and allowed his murder to happen, all because the cause of Black Lives Matter cannot be criticized.

Where Aldean sinned is because he, too, thinks ill of the riots that engulfed every major city in this nation.

He’s harkening back to a time when communities were full of people protecting one another. That’s a very good thing, and I’m someone who would love to see that happen again.

Instead, the people claiming that Aldean’s song is about lynching are telling on themselves.

There doesn’t seem to be any part of the song that says a thing about black people or anything like that. In fact, most of the people involved in the riots, at least as I saw them, seemed to be white. But the fact that this is where the leftists went tells us plenty. It tells us they think the only kind of person who would cross that line is a black person.

July 20, 2023

Three phases of a cultural cycle

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

Chris Bray visits an art museum and shares some thoughts provoked by his experiences:

There’s a moment, in a museum supported by a deep permanent collection, when you transition from glowing oil paint depictions of Lord Major Fluffington P. Farnsworth-Hadenwallace, Seventh Earl of Wherever, Ninth Duke of Someotherplace, posing in his lordly estate with a bowl of fruit and his array of status decorations, to the shocking emergence of late-19th century innovations in painting, and you find yourself thinking that huh, this Renoir dude really knew his stuff, like you’re the first person to ever notice.

Good eye, Sterling

These explosive moments of creativity were usually social: artists gathering, talking, seeing the work of other artists and thinking about new ways of seeing and showing. Individual acts of artistic liberation appeared in the context of an emerging cultural freedom. Renoir and Monet hung out together.

You can see the tide coming in and going out. You can watch enormous waves of joyful innovation, or — respectful nod to the German Expressionists — anxious and anguished innovation. It’s on the wall: here’s the moment when people experienced unusual freedom of vision. You can see artists pursuing beauty with disciplined attention, in a cultural atmosphere that allows the pursuit.

And it’s just so abundantly clear that something opened in the world, somewhere between 1870 and … 1950? Or so? And then it began to close, and the closure recently began picking up force. There are periods of general creativity and periods of general stultification and retrenchment; there was one Italian Renaissance, one Scottish Enlightenment, and so on. Weimar Germany, sick as it was, fired more brilliant art into the world in twenty years than many cultures produce in a period of centuries, though a certain teenager who lives in my house would like you to know that Fritz Lang sucks and please stop with those boring movies and I’ll be in my room.

So it seems to me that the first part of the cultural cycle is the making phase, the period of astonishing innovation; then comes the consolidation and appreciation, the moment the heirs to sewing machine fortunes show up and notice how good everything is; then comes the phase when a few monk-equivalents try to keep the record of accomplishment alive in the context of a hostile or indifferent culture, while most institutions reject innovation and turn to scolding, wrecking, and cannibalization. The fifth Indiana Jones movie. She-Hulk. Like that. I just spent twenty minutes in a Barnes and Noble, and the “new fiction” section may still be making me feel tired next week.

We’re living through a decline in fertility — in literal fertility, in rates of people being married and making babies and hanging around to raise children — at the moment when cultural fertility also seems to be going into freefall. Your results may vary, but I’m finding the moment manageable, largely with piles of earlier books and the occasional sprint to a place like the Clark. Fecundity and sterility appear in cycles, but you can time travel. You can reach back. Mary McCarthy got me through June, and Willa Cather is helping with July. Evelyn Waugh covered roughly February through May.

If you’re near the Berkshires, a worthwhile Edvard Munch exhibit is around until mid-October.

It’s very strange to be in the river and then to suddenly notice that it isn’t running — you’ve hit a long stretch of dead water, so still it starts to stink. I assume it will pass. But until then …

July 19, 2023

Infohazards on the internet of lies lead us into the clutches of “egregores”

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

The latest review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf from John Psmith, is on the 1872 novel Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky”. I didn’t read the post immediately, as Russian literature and I aren’t even nodding acquaintances. I should have remembered that both of the Psmiths have an amazing ability to tell you a lot more than a “review” would normally contain, and this one certainly lived up to expectations, including a brief discussion of philosopher Charles Taylor’s ideas about pre-modern versus modern concepts of the self. Most pre-modern cultures believed in external influences having disproportional impact on the person, while most modern cultures believe the influences arise internally within the mind. Most pre-modern cultures also feared the self could be taken over, or possessed, by malevolent external entities, ideas, or thoughts:

Dostoevsky obligingly gives us a character who’s clearly possessed in exactly this sense — a dissolute nobleman around whom the various radical conspiracies swirl. He is, simultaneously, a subversion of the brooding Byronic hero archetype that was so popular in 19th century European literature, and an eerie anticipation of the modern concept of the serial killer. How did he get this way? Remember the modern view of our desires is that they come from within us, and indulging them leads to inner harmony. But the older and truer view is that they can come from outside, force their way into our skulls through an opening, set their hooks in our brains, lay their eggs. These fledgling desires start out small and weak, but to indulge them is to feed them, grow them, until they take over their host and move its mouth and limbs around like a puppet. In this sense the porn addict, the drug addict, and the rage addict are all alike: sensual dissipation gets boring eventually, and you need harder and harder stuff to feel the same thrill, until one day you reach for something so hard you lose yourself forever.

The Dostoevskian twist to all this is that the proto-serial killer is far more sympathetic, and ultimately more redeemable, than the revolutionaries. The radicals’ motivations spring from the same emotional source as his, theirs are just sublimated into politics, which is why the form of the dystopia doesn’t really matter to them, all that matters is that there be a boot stomping on a human face. The sexual sadism of the serial killer is unflinchingly portrayed as less disordered and less socially destructive than its political equivalent and, ultimately, as rather basic. It’s actually quite easy to miss all of this because it’s so deeply at odds with modern sensibilities. Not just “serial killers are better than communists actually,” but also “serial killers are really pretty boring actually,” and all from the guy who just invented serial killers.1

But what if the radicals aren’t sublimating anything at all? What if there’s another kind of demon, another kind of infohazard, another kind of meme, which rather than infecting or possessing individuals, instead tries to do that to entire societies? Such a being might still work through individuals, the way a Haitian voodoo spirit speaks through a chwal, but here the individual puppet is not a target, but rather an instrument or a transmission vector. The internet jargon for such a being is an “egregore,” and you’ve encountered them before: the bizarre fad that sweeps through a middle school class like a wildfire, the war fever that grips a nation and turns it overnight into a basket of bloodthirsty lunatics. Dance crazes, viral TikTok challenges, internet-mediated mental illnesses. There’s a classic Futurama gag involving the Brain Slug Party, but the real joke is that every party is the Brain Slug Party, they’re all egregores. Have you ever spoken with somebody who had hashtags in their Twitter bio? If you looked carefully, you may have seen the slender, silvery proboscis emerging from the back of their neck and vanishing into the ether. If you listened carefully, you may have heard the alien metallic clacking of the egregore’s mandibles, as it sent messages down that tube for the meat puppet to vocalize.

Sometime in the mid-19th century, an egregore was born in the Russian Empire. It went by a thousand different names — among them: anarchism, communism, nihilism, democracy. What’s that? Those four ideologies are completely opposed to one another? That’s the entire point! It wasn’t actually any of those things, it was an egregore, its true name was something like Melkhorbalai or Uztaa-Binoreth. It wore those other names like skins when it was convenient to do so, which is why in the real life history of 19th century Russia we see countless examples of individuals switching between communism, anarchism, and democracy like they were flavors of ice cream.

The egregore wanted none of these things: it wanted to grow, to spread, to manifest itself into this reality. Madly, it willed destruction, and the more destruction it caused the stronger it got, and the easier further destruction became, a runaway exothermic reaction endlessly feeding on itself. So the reformist zeal of the 1840s became Nechayev’s insane nihilism of the 1870s, then the even more insane terrorism of 1900-1917 with which I opened this review, until finally, strengthened by half a century of blood sacrifice, that rough beast slouched towards St. Petersburg to be born. The trauma of that birth ripped apart first Russia, then Europe, then it almost ate the rest of the world too.

Could anything have stopped it sooner? In Dostoevsky’s story there’s one character who tries lamely to stand in the way of the swirling, coalescing, immaterial malevolence. He is a reactionary, a newly-freed former serf,3 and (like Dostoevsky himself) a repentant former revolutionary. He’s young and hip, but has old and edgy views, a perfect stand-in for online “trads”. Given Dostoevsky’s own views it would be easy to make him the hero of the story, but Dostoevsky is too great a writer for that, and instead makes him a pathetic LARPer:

    “I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself?”

    “I believe in Russia … I believe in her orthodoxy … I believe in the body of Christ … I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia … I believe …” Shatov muttered frantically.

    “And in God? In God?”

    “I … I will believe in God.”

How great a description is that of all the crusader-avatar twitter accounts named “DeusVult1571”? Imagine one of them blubbering: “I believe in based aesthetics … I believe in Western civilization … I believe in the Hajnal line … I believe …” Ah, but do you believe in God? Probably some of them do, but for many others it’s a pose, or a meme, or a philosophical premise that they must accept in order to turn the rest of the brand they’ve assumed into a self-consistent whole.2 For these, the god they worship is just another egregore — one small and weak for now, less threatening perhaps than some others, but feed it, let it grow, and see how fast it turns on you.

The other force that could have resisted the growing darkness is the parents’ generation, the liberals of 1848, Turgenev’s boomers. We already know how that turned out in real life, but while Dostoevsky didn’t live to see it happen, he had these peoples’ number. Once so bold in condemning their government and sneering at their civilization, they are suddenly timid in the face of their children, terrified of being seen as uncool or conservative or just not with it. That’s a good way to raise a psycho, and Dostoevsky more than hints that everything which follows is ultimately their fault. And it’s a bad way to face down an egregore. Doing that requires boldness and … well:

    “But this is premature among us, premature,” he pronounced almost imploringly, pointing to the manifestoes.

    “No, it’s not premature; you see you’re afraid, so it’s not premature.”

    “But here, for instance, is an incitement to destroy churches.”

    “And why not? You’re a sensible man, and of course you don’t believe in it yourself, but you know perfectly well that you need religion to brutalise the people. Truth is honester than falsehood …”

    “I agree, I agree, I quite agree with you, but it is premature, premature in this country…” said Von Lembke, frowning.

    “And how can you be an official of the government after that, when you agree to demolishing churches, and marching on Petersburg armed with staves, and make it all simply a question of date?”

“Premature, premature”, is what the useless normies will bleat when our own radicals are blowing up Mt. Rushmore and pulling down statues of George Washington. Who are these radicals? I have no idea what the egregore will call itself this time. It doesn’t matter. Its true name sounds to human ears like a high-pitched mechanical screeching and clicking, a sound calculated to drive men mad, and to drive madmen into making it real.

    1. I’m told that the internet jargon for this is an “unbuilt trope.”

    2. Dostoevsky positions a former serf as the defender of “Holy Russia,” Orwell suggests that if there is hope it lies in the proles, Bismarck believed the poor would serve as a reactionary bulwark against liberalism, and MAGA believes that various dispossessed and subaltern groups will keep America great. Are they all correct? No. They’re all wrong. The lower classes have no special compass for political or religious truth, they’re just almost definitionally slightly behind the times. When an egregore is rapidly accumulating strength, they’re likely to oppose it out of inertia, but they’re as vulnerable as anyone to its blandishments, and will just as vigorously defend the new thing once it has taken over.

    3. Look, I have a lot of sympathy for these guys. Like the Russian radicals of the 1870s, they correctly observe that there’s something insane and rotten about our society, but unlike those radicals they’re attracted to something that’s really out there and really true and good. “Fake it til you make it” is not the worst strategy ever invented for securing a mature and authentic faith in a supreme being. But once you’re in that state, there’s a clock running, your time is limited, there are other things out there in the night, attracted by the smell of lost and receptive souls.

Ever wonder where the term “two-spirit” came from?

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

In Spiked, Malcolm Clark explains the origin of the now commonly used term as a portmanteau for many different words — with significant variation in meaning — in indiginous languages:

Typical media presentation of Two-spirit individuals

The term two-spirit was first formally endorsed at a conference of Native American gay activists in 1990 in Winnipeg in Canada. It is a catch-all term to cover over 150 different words used by the various Indian tribes to describe what we think of today as gay, trans or various forms of gender-bending, such as cross-dressing. Two-spirit people, the conference declared, combine the masculine and the feminine spirits in one.

From the start, the whole exercise reeked of mystical hooey. Myra Laramee, the woman who proposed the term in 1990, said it had been given to her by ancestor spirits who appeared to her in a dream. The spirits, she said, had both male and female faces.

Incredibly, three decades on, there are now celebrities and politicians who endorse the concept or even identify as two-spirit. The term has found its way into one of Joe Biden’s presidential proclamations and is a constant feature of Canadian premier Justin Trudeau’s doe-eyed bleating about “2SLGBTQQIA+ rights”.

The term’s success is no doubt due in part to white guilt. There is a tendency to associate anything Native American with a lost wisdom that is beyond whitey’s comprehension. Ever since Marlon Brando sent “Apache” activist Sacheen Littlefeather to collect his Oscar in 1973, nothing has signalled ethical superiority as much as someone wearing a feather headdress.

The problem is that too many will believe almost any old guff they are told about Native Americans. This is an open invitation to fakery. Ms Littlefeather, for example, may have built a career as a symbol of Native American womanhood. But after her death last year, she was exposed as a member of one of the fastest growing tribes in North America: the Pretendians. Her real name was Marie Louise Cruz. She was born to a white mother and a Mexican father, and her supposed Indian heritage had just been made up.

Much of the fashionable two-spirit shtick is just as fake. For one thing, it’s presented as an acknowledgment of the respect Indian tribes allegedly showed individuals who were gender non-conforming. Yet many of the words that two-spirit effectively replaces are derogatory terms.

In truth, there was a startling range of attitudes to the “two-spirited” among the more than 500 separate indigenous Native American tribes. Certain tribes may have been relaxed about, say, effeminate men. Others were not. In his history of homosexuality, The Construction of Homosexuality (1998), David Greenberg points out that those who are now being called “two spirit” were ridiculed by the Papago, held in contempt by the Choctaws, disliked by the Cocopa, treated by the Seven Nations with “the most sovereign contempt” and “derided” by the Sioux. In the case of the Yuma, who lived in what is now Colorado, the two-spirited were sometimes treated as rape objects for the young men of the tribe.

QotD: If they were serious …

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

So it goes with the Juggalos. There are still nodes of the Apparat that perform competently to brilliantly. Since we’ve been using the Pacific War, let’s go ahead and call Tubman’s Illegitimate Gangster Regime (TIGR) the “Flying TIGRs”. It’s clear that the Flying TIGRs really really want their war with China, in the same way it seemed clear at the time that Wheels Roosevelt really really wanted his war with Japan (more correctly, really really wanted his war with Germany, but Japan had to be the patsies). And yet, they keep doing things that make no goddamn sense — indeed, they make anti-sense.

I suppose this should be a post unto itself, but very briefly, If They Were Serious about war with China, you’d expect a few very basic things. Massively stepped-up armaments production, if nothing else, and if you wanted to be really slick about it, you’d do it under the guise of replenishing all the stocks we sent to our plucky allies in Ukraine — purchase orders for 100x the total amount shipped to Keeeeeve, that kind of thing. But that’s the kind of retooling that’s hard to hide, because it would also involved massively stepped-up mining, refining, and so on, not to mention upgrading the transportation infrastructure and so on.

None of those things appear to be happening. And since even an all hands on deck, Nazi-style crash rearmament program has a lag time of a few years, If They Were Serious about premiering Showdown in the Taiwan Strait anytime in the next decade, they’d be jamming that shit out NOW. Right now. Afterburners full.

You also need soldiers to use all that stuff, so you’d expect massively stepped-up military recruiting. Which would entail, at minimum, a push to get American boys into some kind of fighting shape. Which not only isn’t happening, but the exact opposite is happening. Unless you want Uncle Sugar to pay for your “top surgery” or your addadicktome, why would anyone enlist? When you further consider that the same TLAs who are so smoothly rolling out their Hate the Han™ campaign could easily order up some ultra-jingoistic remakes of Stallone movies from the 1980s, it seems as if They are not, in fact, Serious …

… but some of the nodes are, because failure is a distributed system. I love playing If They Were Serious — it’s my favorite drinking game — but alas for me, it relies on the Assumed Internal Consistency Fallacy. Like the Japanese Navy, or the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, or even poor Adm. Kimmel, you’ve got certain nodes of the Apparat performing competently to brilliantly in the service of skull-fuckingly stupid objectives, or NO objectives. The Flying TIGRs are even dumber than [Hitler], who at least called a meeting to say “Hey, how’s about we invade Russia in the winter?” While it’s clear to everyone who matters that the TIGRs really really really really really want their war, nobody’s in charge, so everyone is left to figure it out as best they can, on their own initiative, with the resources they have to hand.

And again, much like the Wehrmacht etc., the better the competent nodes perform, the harder and faster the overall system failure. We’re going to end up charging headlong into a war with China because the TLAs at Twitter etc. are doing such a great job making Hate the Han™ the Current Thing. Meanwhile, one imagines Brandon’s handlers telling their Chinese paymasters that no no, that won’t be happening, please don’t cut off our paychecks. And since they’re pretty good at their job, too — their job being “telling Beijing what they want to hear while lugging away huge sacks of cash” — it’s gotta fuck with the People’s Liberation Army command staff.

Consider further that the Army (etc.) are, Kimmel-style, doing a pretty decent job of carrying out their on-paper objectives. Kimmel was told “Get the Fleet ready for a likely confrontation with Japan a few years down the line”, and he did it. The Fistagon has told all its commanders to get ready for a war with China, yeah, sometime down the line … but right now, the important thing is to get as many gays, girls, and trannies as possible into uniform while promoting the Diversity that’s already in uniform as far up the chain of command as possible. General Sasqueetchia, in command of the Fightin’ 45th Mechanized Hairdresser Battalion, says thanks for a job well done … and it IS a job well done, according to the only actual orders anyone has received.

Fun times, right?

Severian, “Failure Nodes”, Founding Questions, 2023-04-18.

July 17, 2023

The WEF considers whether to use the carrot or the stick next time

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Environment, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the World Economic Forum’s latest gathering in China:

Last week the WEFers held their summer camp in China. More to come, they warned us. More pandemics, more catastrophic global warming, more inflation, hell on wheels, they promise us, Armageddon is coming. Be very afraid.

The following was a particularly lovely event:

“How to Stay Within Planetary Boundaries — Carrot or Stick?” which focused on whether to incentivize or force compliance with “climate goals”. It was hosted by some joker who edits a magazine called Nature Energy, no doubt funded by the WEF and read by exactly nobody. And some very po-faced morons of various colors, paid in the six figures, cited a bunch of falsified statistics ending with these pretty little paragraphs:

    We are — broadly speaking — agreed that we need to get on track towards a net-zero, climate-safe and nature-positive future, but we know this will not be easy. And we’re going to need to change behaviours of both individuals but also the way that our industries and corporations and also our governments work and practices.

    We’re going to need to do this through a mixture of carrots and hopefully perhaps not so many sticks, in some kind of mix. And there is a very active and live debate as to how we go about this. But we’re likely to see an increasing move towards more stick-like interventions …

These guys, they make me laugh. Seriously? How stupid do they think we are? How hated are they? All over the world, they are loathed and laughed at. Every time one of them is taken out, we laugh and laugh and laugh. Larry Fink from BlackRock? Hiding, Scared. Mocked, publicly humiliated. We need a lot more of that.

[…]

They have to destroy western culture, because we middle-class-unnecessary-eaters are too damned uppity. They have stolen so much that when the tipping point arrives, and it will, they will be hung from the highest tree. “Better to ruin those likely to catch and imprison us, and feed on peasants and serfs, the desperate in the rest of the world.”

Proof?

OK, let’s review the Biden/Trudeau/Macron/Sunak economy shall we? Since the out-in-the-open globalist theft of elections during the past three years — Sunak was installed, Trudeau is the most hated man in Canada, Biden is gaga and Macron is just crazy — this is what the bottom 50% are experiencing. Short form, ground into the dirt.

Ninety percent of the jobs “created” were those gained back after the pandemic. Most jobs are going to the foreign born – they work cheap.

    Of the roughly 900 days Joe Biden has been in the White House, real wages have fallen for almost 700 days — about 75% of Biden’s time in office. All total, the collective drop in real wages has been 3% rather than the robust real wage gains workers deserve and expect.

Every single American has lost $36,000 to Biden’s inflation. It has crippled us, especially those working in the real (not digital) economy — Uber drivers, truckers, farmers, manufacturers, ranchers, the bottom 50% — gas prices have gone up 50%. Home heating up 23%, milk 16%, beef 25%, eggs 83%. Home prices 32%, rents 15%, electricity 21%.

Let’s not even talk about interest rates. Ten raises in the last 30 months. Last week the Bank of Canada gave its people $26 million in bonuses. Meanwhile, people are losing their houses.

How much more punishment are we expected to take? This is directly caused by their mad hatter spending during the pandemic — which was fake but for a few months in early 2020 — and their subsequent restriction of the energy supply. Restriction of energy causes prices to skyrocket because producing anything requires energy.

Canada has been one of the biggest freeloaders in NATO for more than 40 years

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

From the weekend Dispatch from the editors of The Line, some indication that even the American legacy media are tired of Canada’s generations-long peace dividend freeloading at the expense of our allies:

American media doesn’t often notice Canada, and as much as Canadians like to whinge about being ignored, the lack of interest in our affairs from south of the border is usually a good thing. If you’re looking for a rule of thumb here, it’s this: attention from the Americans is almost always negative.

A case in point this week was an editorial published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, headlined “Canada is a military free-rider in NATO”. The subhed was “Ottawa still spends only a pathetic 1.38% of GDP on defense”. The editorial makes a number of points almost all of which will be familiar to readers of the Line, which are all variations of: Canada shirks its NATO commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence, while engaging in relentless virtue signalling and moral preening, both domestically and to its allies. It treats national defence as social project, while doing little to nothing in the way of actually projecting the power that is needed to defend the values it purports to advance.

There are some absolutely killer lines in the editorial, beginning with the lede: “Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Lithuania this week for the annual NATO summit, but it’s too bad there wasn’t a junior table where he could sit.” A few paragraphs later: “Last week Ottawa put in its two cents against cluster munitions. But asking its citizens to meet their actual obligations to the cause of freedom is apparently too much to ask.” And then: “Nowadays Ottawa can be counted on to ‘fight’ for human rights, which is to say that it talks a lot about them.”

Again, for anyone paying attention here in Canada, these are not new arguments. But the editorial does add one twist at the end, suggesting that if Canada can’t be bothered keeping its NATO commitments, then perhaps it should be kicked out of the G7 and replaced by a country willing to play a leadership role. They suggest Poland as a possibility.

Reaction in Canada has been surprisingly muted. On our own social media feeds, we noted a lot of rather sad attempts at dismissing the editorial — the paper is a Rupert Murdoch owned rag; this is Trumpist nonsense; Europeans juice their defence spending through useless mandatory service requirements. But curiously, we didn’t see anyone try to pull a Julie Dzerowicz and argue that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Canada is actually punching above its weight in NATO.

Look, some of us here at The Line have been reading harsh editorials on Canada’s defence spending for decades. (We’ve written a few, too!) And we’ve never seen anything remotely this harsh from an American outlet. This is absolutely devastating stuff, and it can’t be simply shrugged off because of the source.

A bit of history: In 1995, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling Canada “an honorary member of the Third World” in an editorial that also referred to the Canadian dollar as the “northern peso”. This was in response to Canada’s national debt and tax rates hitting unsustainable levels. We were an economic basket case, and the Americans were starting to notice.

Lots of Canadian commentators dismissed the editorial on the grounds that the WSJ was just pushing the supposedly-discredited Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney “neoliberal” agenda. But later that year the Chrétien government, with Paul Martin as finance minister, introduced one of the most significant budgets in Canadian history. They slashed federal spending in ways not seen since the end of the Second World War, slashed the public service, gutted the department of defence. But three years later they had balanced the budget, inaugurating an extended period of federal fiscal responsibility that lasted until the election of the Trudeau Liberals in 2015.

The point is not that there’s a cause and effect here — Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin didn’t sit down and go “oh shit, the Journal has weighed in, we have to do something”. It’s that when serious American media get around to noticing stuff about Canada, it is usually because the stuff they are noticing has become such a problem for other countries that our national Emperor’s New Clothes routine is no longer tenable. It is a sign that things have to change, and quickly.

Remember, the Liberal government doesn’t deny that Canada is a NATO laggard and a free rider on defence. Justin Trudeau has admitted as much, both publicly and privately. But up till now, his attitude has been to sort of smirk at the Americans, give his usually smarmy shrug, and say “what are you going to do about it?”

What the Wall Street Journal editorial does is suggest that there could be real consequences for our professed indigence. It is one thing to be left out of AUKUS, which the Liberals continue to falsely characterize as a submarine procurement deal. Getting kicked out of the G7 would something else entirely — it’s the sort of thing the sorts of people who vote Liberal tend to care about.

Canada’s current attitude to collective defence is not sustainable. Our allies have noticed. Either we change, or our allies will change things for us.

QotD: Cavalry combat in Rings of Power versus history

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

… the scene [in Rings of Power] as a whole seems poorly executed. We’ve gotten some good views of the topography of this village and it is very small. The village is at a three-way road intersection, with the inn at the meeting point on what I am going to call the East side (we see the sun rising over it once and it faces Orodruin); the inn has a small fenced-in area behind it. Beyond that there are four small houses on the road and one further up the hill and the land slopes from high in the north and east to low in the south and west. Finally on the west side there is our small bridge over the stream; a forest directly abuts the village on the south side.

The first thing we see is the cavalry in a great mass riding down into the village with Orodruin clearly behind them; they must be approaching then along the East road. Then we see a 2-horse wide column of cavalry crossing the narrow bridge from the West (at 39:14), then a bunch of orcs gather up into a mass to engage that cavalry force as it gallops up the main road into the village (from 39:16 to 39:26) before getting hit by the vanguard of that column in a really dumb moment we’re going to come back to at 39:30. And now look up at the village above there again and note that it takes one cavalry column at full gallop 16 seconds to go from that bridge to the inn, but the massive wave of cavalry coming over the hill from the other direction has still not managed by this point to actually enter the village proper. They have, apparently, frozen completely solid the moment they were off screen.

So it seems like, while galloping wildly to the rescue of a village they didn’t know was under attack, the Númenóreans also took the time to carefully work their way around the village in order to strike it from two sides at once (somehow filtering through the forest without being noticed, rather than working around the more open terrain to the north side; I cannot communicate clearly enough that cavalry generally avoids moving through forests for a reason), then galloped in at full speed. But the one direction they do not attack from is the North road, which is the only area that is clear and unobstructed (good cavalry ground) and where the slope of the ground is favorable (they’d be charging down hill) with enough space to form up into a proper charge. Instead when we see Galadriel next, she is charging up that hill.

So on the one hand this battle plan doesn’t make any sense, but at the same time I feel I must note just how inferior this is as film-making to the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings (or even, dare I say it, Game of Thrones). I had to rewatch these scenes, slowly and carefully multiple times to get any sense of where anyone was. By contrast, good battle scenes are careful to make sure the audience understands the geography of the space. Hell, the “battle” scenes in Home Alone are careful to establish the geography of the place (I found the video at that link, by the way, a very approachable introduction to some elements of film study). In The Lord of the Rings we get a lot of big wide shots at high altitude showing us where the armies are in relation to each other […]

Moreover, Peter Jackson’s cavalry doesn’t simply show up. In both of his Big Cavalry Rescues at Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith he follows the same highly effective pattern of first revealing the presence of the cavalry, then pausing a moment for the cavalry to form up and to give the characters there time for some dialogue and character beats. At Helm’s Deep this is a short exchange between Éomer and Gandalf, while at Minas Tirith it is Théoden’s big defining character moment and speech. From a realism standpoint, it gives the audience time to understand where the cavalry is and how they’ve set up (and a sense that this is organized, planned and prepared).

But this brief delay before “the good stuff” also serves an obviously important emotional narrative aspect that Rings also loses here: it builds anticipation. By the time Théoden is giving his speech outside Minas Tirith, the audience has been waiting for about an hour since the beacons were lit for this very moment of emotional release, waiting for the score to be evened, waiting for the emotional satisfaction of the bad guys getting their come-uppance and so Jackson draws that out just a little bit longer, which builds the anticipation that creates that intense emotional response when the charge at last surges forward. You can even hear the emotions he wants you feel in the music, which starts low and subdued but builds and builds as Théoden sets up his army and gives his speech, booms across the charge itself but then cuts hard to silence in the moment of impact – the moment of greatest suspense (will the charge work?) – before surging back as the charge succeeds, culminating in a big overhead shot showing the good guys winning. It is not historically perfect, but the emotional beats land flawlessly and Rings just fumbles shockingly on both counts.

The resulting melee is also confusing. This village is tiny and while we don’t have a good idea of Adar’s remaining force, it isn’t huge because it seems to all fit in this village which looks to be a fair bit smaller than a regulation soccer pitch. A cavalry charge should be able to run from one side of this road to the other in under 10 seconds (moving at c. 12m/s, a rough horse’s gallop speed); the two leading edges of this charge should be slowing down to meet in the middle in well under five seconds. Consequently the decisive phase of this battle, the one in which orcs are trying to hold the open ground between the buildings (these wide mud streets) should last only seconds, but instead it draws out into a minutes-long melee because, as far as I can tell, the Númenóreans have next to no idea how to fight on horseback.

The thing is, fighting from horseback is quite hard but it is also quite simple. If using stirrups, one’s feet remain in the stirrups pretty much the whole time because the goal here is to retain a firm seat on the horse. Horse archers will sometimes stand up just a little in the stirrups to create a stable firing platform, but only a little bit and at speed an observer may not even notice they are standing at all. But showrunners, it seems, just love putting in all sorts of equestrian tricks; Game of Thrones had to make the Dothraki shoot while standing on the saddle (not a great idea), and so Rings of Power has to do some trick riding. In this case they have Galadriel flip over the side of her horse upside down to slash at an orc while dodging an arrow […]

A close look and you can see that this trick requires a special handhold on her saddle just for the purpose (just like the Game of Thrones standing horse-archers required special trick saddles for that stunt too). And she then cuts an orc’s head off while flipping herself back on to the horse, a sword-stroke that is traveling in the opposite direction of her horse’s movement (it is moving forward, she is swinging backwards), which she cannot brace properly and thus, if it had hit anything but CGI would have been a fairly weak strike; fortunately for Galadriel, CGI orcs are very flimsy so their heads come straight off. The whole thing is a too-clever-by-half effort to look cool, which I also find a bit confusing because Elves don’t seem to me to fight on horseback very often in the Tolkien legendarium; they do it from time to time, but the great elf heroes tend to fight on foot, so it’s not clear to me why Galadriel has to also be the best rider. But that routine is then topped by the baffling idiocy of Valandil here who, despite having a perfectly good sword (though he seems to have lost his spear in the fighting) decides his best plan of attack is to jump off of his horse and tackle two orcs […]

Needless to say a high speed falling dismount is a good way to injure yourself in an actual battle but also that jumping off of your horse is not a good use of you or the horse. Meanwhile the rest of the Númenórean cavalry seem to have mostly come to a stop and are now having stationary fights with orc infantry; some of them get pulled down off of their horses which, yes, is the predictable result of being stupid enough to bring your cavalry to a full stop without of any kind of mutually supporting formation or infantry support. I think many of the problems in this sequence stem from the apparent need to have this seem like a fight that could go either way, when in practice this should have been a short and decisive engagement the moment the cavalry arrived, given that the cavalry is more heavily armored, faster, has the advantage of surprise and presumably outnumbers the orcs given how small the village is. I suppose it might take a bit longer because Adar’s first wave of orcs are hitting their respawn timer so there were adds. Once again the utter inability of the show to keep track of just how many orcs there are ruins any sense of tension but also any hope of the battle making sense; it sure seemed like there were just a few dozen orcs left, which ought to make a battle against 300 armored riders a remarkably short and one-sided affair.

But the moment in this whole fight that broke me completely actually came quite early right after the Númenóreans crossed the bridge. […] I will admit that I burst out laughing when this happened: the horseman ride up in a pair holding on to opposite ends of a chain, which they then use to clothesline about two dozen orcs while steadily fanning out. Once again this is one of those too-clever-by-half Hollywood tactics moments, which defy both physics and logic. The first problem is that I’m not clear on how long this chain is: they need to be holding it tightly or it is just going to snag on the first impact, but they also fan out meaning they need to keep letting out more chain to cover the increasing distance between the two horses. In practice looking at the stills it seems like the chain isn’t under much of any tension at all, which would make it fairly useless as a weapon here – sure a metal chain will have some momentum to it, but not enough to knock multiple ranks of armored troops down.

But of course the broader problem is that if the plan is to merely smash into the orcs with a lot of kinetic force you should just trample them. Putting all of that impact energy in the chain is just going to pull the rider off of their horse since the sole point of contact for that energy is their arms. By contrast, medieval knightly cavalry eventually adopted high-backed saddles, couched lances and lance-rests on their armor all to help keep the knight in his seat through the force of a heavy impact at full speed (cavalry with or without these various devices might need to let their point trail at impact that it wasn’t pulled from their hand but rather the movement of their horse pulled it from their target, a motion pattern easily observed in the modern sport of tent-pegging). But just carrying a chain gives none of these advantages or options: if there’s enough force to knock down a half-dozen orcs, there’s enough force to knock a rider out of his saddle.

Of course in an actual battle this wouldn’t even get this far because the other disadvantage of this chain is that it sacrifice’s the reach of a spear. Now, credit where credit is due, the Númenóreans do seem to have standard issue spears (good!), except for these two guys with the chain (a tactic that only works when advancing two-by-two, which is a terrible way to fight, through a narrow space where cavalry should not be, but nevertheless apparently one the Númenóreans come ready for as standard). No one seems to use their spears on horseback (they shift to swords immediately), but at least they have them. The advantage of a spear or lance of course is that it is a weapon which can project beyond the head of the horse, thus reducing some of the reach advantage an infantryman might have, while concentrating all of the energy of impact at a single point.

But the riders here have to hold this silly chain on their laps, which puts it several feet behind the head of their horse and because it isn’t perfectly taut it lags their motion meaning that it impacts the orcs several feet behind that, which means – as you can see above – the entire horse has to gallop past the target orc before he is hit by the chain. Any any time during that operation that orc could strike at the horse or the rider, spilling them both to the ground and to make the whole thing worse because the riders can’t have a sword or a shield in their hands, they can’t even defend themselves if an orc decides to do this.

Much like the ships, much like the falling tower trap, much like the nonsensical ring forging, it is another instance of the creators attempting to be novel and clever without really understanding the historical practices they are working from. Cavalry tactics, like battle tactics, like ship design, like metalworking, were fields of human endeavor that absorbed the sharpest minds humankind has to offer and persistent experimentation and adaptation for centuries, resulting in highly tested, highly refined patterns of behavior. I will not say that improvement on those practices is impossible, but it would certainly be very hard, the sort of thing which would itself require extensive dedicated study and experimentation. It is not the sort of thing likely to be accomplished in a writer’s room brainstorming session, which is why efforts to “outsmart” the past tend to end up looking silly, rather than clever.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part III: That Númenórean Charge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-02-03.

July 16, 2023

Tricksy Tucker Carlson “tricked conservatives into accidentally thinking that they don’t like the former vice-president”

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

Chris Bray helps dispel the hypnotic trance so many American conservatives have been suffering under:

Tucker Carlson busy hypnotizing innocent conservatives to think they hate poor Mike Pence.

A stupid trend is emerging in the coverage of campaign discourse.

By now you’ve probably seen footage of Tucker Carlson interviewing Mike Pence in Iowa, a discussion that produced a memorable exchange regarding Ukraine. Politico would like you to know that it was a kind of hypnosis routine, a mental hijacking in which Carlson tricked conservatives into accidentally thinking that they don’t like the former vice-president.

The former Fox News host, reports the all-seeing Sally Goldenberg, “primarily used his perch to press candidates on issues of importance to him: namely, the United States’ role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.” As the United States sends cluster munitions to Ukraine and calls up thousands of reservists for “combat-ready” service in Eastern Europe, a journalist is asking political leaders about Ukraine only because it’s a quirky itch his ego needs to scratch — a selfish personal cause, pursued for whatever odd reason. Here’s Goldenberg’s eighth paragraph, and compare it to what you saw with your own eyes:

    Carlson — a fierce Trump defender who later soured on the ex-president — challenged, interrupted and contradicted the soft-spoken Pence at nearly every turn. As a result, the devout Christian candidate faced hostility and jeers at a summit that would have once provided him with a friendly audience.

The hostility and jeers were inorganic and manufactured; they didn’t happen because the audience didn’t like Pence or his answers, but as a result of the performative maneuvering of an interviewer who challenged and contradicted him. It’s simply not possible that the audience actually didn’t like Pence or his answer; rather, journalism’s David Blaine pulled a “hey, do you wanna see some magic?” on them, whisking them away into a world of illusion. Tucker Carlson entered a thousand helpless brains and drove a Pence-loving audience away like a bus. The story goes on the say that “establishment Republicans expressed dismay,” accusing Carlson of “pro-Kremlin misinfo.” They don’t have to write these stories any more — they can just cut and paste from all the previous versions.

This is a template for all future campaign coverage: Voters were accidentally hypnotized today into wrongfully [fill in blank] after [select: Tucker Carlson / Donald Trump] challenged and contradicted more responsible leaders.

July 15, 2023

Environmental fanatics want to impose “austerity on steroids”

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

Brendan O’Neill points out the hypocrisy of the progressives who protest against anything smacking of government austerity — often merely a slowing down in the rate of increase of funding that they condemn as “cuts” — yet fervently desire to impose a form of austerity that would literally lead to hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths:

There are countless contradictions on what passes for the left these days. We’re against sexism, they cry, and then they’ll while away entire days hounding every uppity broad who dares to question the trans ideology. We’re anti-racist, they say, even as they yell “Uncle Tom” at any person of colour who deviates from their white liberal orthodoxies. Be kind, they tweet, in between their venomous crusades against TERFs, gammon, boomers, deplorables, “semi-fascists”, you name it.

We’re against austerity, they insist, and yet then they agitate for an austerity of apocalyptic proportions. This, surely, is the most stark incongruity of the modern left. They rail against every library closure or reform of welfare payments as an intolerable assault on people’s living standards, and then they take to the streets in their thousands in support of a degrowth agenda that would plunge vast swathes of humankind into penury. They’re far meaner than any right-wing penny-pincher they claim to oppose.

[…]

Environmentalism is austerity on steroids. Consider one of JSO’s key demands: “No new oil or gas”. This would be – there’s no other word for it – psychotic. Not only would such a crazed policy instantly throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, by decommissioning the rigs and mines where they make their living – it would also make it all but impossible to keep society going. The infantile moralism of modern greens would have us believe that vile oil and gas are only used to propel 4x4s and airplanes packed with the rich and other “bad things”. In truth, every facet of our lives requires energy from oil and gas. The delivery of foodstuffs, house-building, schools, hospitals, life-support machines, heaters to protect the elderly from death in winter – all need energy derived from fossil fuels. Or consider libraries. The left wept when Osborne’s cuts led to library closures, but you try running a library in your post-fossil-fuel dystopia. Without oil, gas, electricity and trees torn down to make books, libraries would cease to exist.

As Alex Epstein argues, to “rapidly eliminate fossil-fuel use” would make the world “an impoverished, dangerous and miserable place for most people”. Fossil fuels provide 80 per cent of the world’s energy. Just three per cent comes from solar and wind power, so beloved of green anti-modernists. And even that measly slice of global energy production is, in Epstein’s words, “totally dependent on fossil fuels, especially natural gas, for 24/7 back-up”. That is, if the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, we have to crank up the fossil fuels. Ours is a world in which three billion people still use less electricity than your average American fridge. Agitating for less energy production in such a time is callous beyond belief. It would issue a death sentence on the world’s poor. George Osborne is Father Christmas in comparison with these crusaders against the gains and wonders of modernity.

One heartbeat away

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

Joe Biden is old and his age is clearly a factor in his declining ability to carry out his duties as President. If he dies or is forced to leave office before his term is up, Kamala Harris would succeed him. If that isn’t a scary thought, you haven’t been paying attention:

When it comes to preferences based on identity of one kind or another, it is difficult to know where to start with this insufferable and corrupt woman who may be the next President of the United States of America. First, she is a woman, or at least identifies as one. Second, she is a woman of colour. Third, she is black. Fourth, she is an Indian American woman. And last, but definitely not least, she is a woman of Afro-Caribbean heritage. In other words, she is highly qualified to achieve success in Biden’s America.

The daughter of two college professors, Kamala Harris is poised to become the first female president of the United States for one reason alone: her demographics. She is a very visible poster child for all that is wrong with the system of preferences and favoritism based on identity and immutable characteristics which has replaced the ideals of meritocracy and colour blindness.

Sadly, Vice President Harris is not alone. Those willing to trade their identity for professional advantage are growing in number by the day. Indeed, such individuals are being encouraged and are found aplenty throughout state and federal government, public schools and academia, corporations, and increasingly in law enforcement and the military.
Recently, Harris attended the Essence Festival of Culture, organised by Essence, a magazine aimed at black women. Asked to explain the role of culture in enhancing and securing the achievements of African-Americans, she treated her audience to one of her delectable word salads that have become the hallmark of her vice presidency.

“Culture is …” she informs us after a slight pause, “it is a reflection of our moment and our time. Right?” she asks, seeking reassurance from her interlocutors. “And present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment. That is a reflection of joy. Because,” she adds, in an inexplicable allusion to Psalm 30, “[joy] comes in the morning,” before bursting into that cackling laughter which can engender suicidal thoughts in vulnerable people, including the current author.

She goes on: “We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life. And I think about it in that way too.”

My goodness! Are those the words of a woman who could have access to the nuclear codes in just under two years? I am afraid they are. They are the words of someone whose rise to legislative and executive power has been determined entirely by the immutable characteristics of sex and race and the calculus of political advantage.

Only a nation which has abandoned the meritocratic values that made it great could produce such a paragon of ineffable mediocrity as Kamala Harris. Only a nation which has lost its aspirations to greatness will continue to elevate men and women to positions of high rank on the basis not of talent, ingenuity, and character, but demographic attributes that check the right boxes and ignore merit, privileging cosmetics over competence. If this madness continues (and it will take a lot more than the recent SCOTUS ruling to make it go away) such a policy will eventually spell doom for America, maybe sooner than you think.

July 14, 2023

QotD: Resolving “disagreements” on Wikipedia

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

I keep telling anybody who’ll listen, anytime the subject comes up: Always go to the Wikipedia talk page when you do your “researching” on Wikipedia! Take what you read in the main article with a huge grain of salt if you find a big back-and-forth melee going on in the talk page, for you can take it to the bank that if there’s a disagreement going on between conservative and liberal editors, it will be “resolved” by way of the liberal editors locking the article down after they’ve made sure to get the last word in. Which means what you’ve just read is mostly nothing but pure bovine product. If you’re gleaning this information for any kind of actual purpose, it goes without saying that this is something you should know. Information is meaningless without the “meta data”; without context.

And if there isn’t anything going on back there at all, you should probably still take the main article with a grain of salt because you might be reading a bunch of “everybody knows” gibberish without too much thought behind it.

M.K. Freeberg, “Latest Wikipedia Talk Page Mess: Socialism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2012-12-01.

July 12, 2023

“Folksy” Joe Biden has always been a nasty piece of work

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

One of the most puzzling things about how Joe Biden has been represented in the legacy media is that — despite mountains of evidence that he’s a hot-tempered bully who has always been eager to belittle and demean other people — he still gets fawning coverage of his supposed kindly personality:

Joe Biden likes to present himself as a folksy type, the kind you’d think of as a kindly old uncle or something. He tells stories about Corn Pop and virtually anything else and the press eats it up.

But it’s a veneer, a mask Biden wears so the public will like him.

We’ve seen it slip a time or two, but Axios has a story that hints that what we’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg.

    In public, President Biden likes to whisper to make a point. In private, he’s prone to yelling.

    Behind closed doors, Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast.

    The president’s admonitions include: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!” and “Get the f**k out of here!” — according to current and former Biden aides who have witnessed and been on the receiving end of such outbursts.

    …

    “There’s no question that the Biden temper is for real. It may not be as volcanic as Bill Clinton’s, but it’s definitely there,” said Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.

    Whipple’s book quotes former White House press secretary Jen Psaki as saying: “I said to [Biden] multiple times, ‘I’ll know we have a really good, trusting relationship when you yell at me the first time.'”

    Whipple notes: “Psaki wouldn’t have to wait long.”

    Zoom out: Biden’s temper comes in the form of angry interrogations rather than erratic tantrums.

    He’ll grill aides on topics until it’s clear they don’t know the answer to a question — a routine that some see as meticulous and others call “stump the chump” or “stump the dummy”.

    Being yelled at by the president has become an internal initiation ceremony in this White House, aides say — if Biden doesn’t yell at you, it could be a sign he doesn’t respect you.

Go and read the whole thing, because this is troubling, and not just because I dislike Biden.

While Axios goes out of its way to paint this as just an impassioned politician who demands much of his staff, that’s not what I’m seeing here.

Instead, I’m seeing an abusive man who is taking advantage of his powerful position to bully his subordinates.

I won’t pretend I’ve never lost my temper before. Doing so would be a lie. However, my yelling at someone has never been a sign of respect. It’s been a sign that I lost control.

And if Biden is doing it this often, there’s not much chance the man has any control over much of anything.

Of course, this is a report from Axios. Maybe it’s not really a thing. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it because I can’t stand Biden.

QotD: Media gullibility on military issues

Filed under: Media, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One reason I don’t say much about the Ukraine war, for instance, is that I’m out of my depth, and simply don’t want to put in the necessary work to get up to speed. I don’t know a thing about contemporary Russian equipment (or NATO equipment for that matter). My grasp of strategy begins and ends with “playing Risk! against drunk frat boys”. If I went out there, I’d be a babe in the woods. “What was that bang?” “Oh, that’s the Q-35 matter modulator.” “What was that bang?” “That’s the Lepage glue gun. It glues a whole formation of bombers together in midair.”

The Media, of course, does not do this. They’d be happy to write up a whole big feature story about how the Russians’ Q-35 matter modulator wasn’t nearly what Vlad Putin, that lying bastard, bragged it up to be. And with the new Lepage gun gluing all those Russian planes together, the brave Ukrainians will be in Moscow for Easter!

Are they lying? Not really. Some very serious-looking persyn in a snazzy uniform with a lot of very colorful ribbons told them that the Q-35 matter modulator isn’t all that, and why would some brave freedom fighter lie to them? And besides — this is crucial — “fact checking” the stats on the Q-35 matter modulator would entail that you’ve never heard of it before …

… which is anathema to our intrepid reporterette’s sense of xzhyrself as a hard-hitting newshound who is very very Smart. After all, she scored a 35,000 on her SATs and graduated from the Assjammer School of Journalism with a 9.98 GPA. She’s got fellowships and awards and whatnot out the yingyang, plus 1.2 million Twitter followers. And it says “war correspondent” right there on her Facebook page. If the Q-35 matter modulator weren’t actually a thing, surely she would know.

Severian, “The Becky Cycle”, Founding Questions, 2023-02-27.

July 11, 2023

Western legacy media is suffering from an overdose of Professionally Correct speech

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

David Friedman can’t help but notice this phenomenon:

When the question of alcohol and health came up on “Doctor Radio”, a satellite radio program, all of the participants agreed that evidence showed that consuming a moderate level of alcohol, something like one beer a day for a woman, one or two for a man, or the equivalent in other drinks, was good for you, better than no alcohol at all. All of them also agreed that they would not advise their patients to do so.

Why? They mentioned that there were problems with prescribing something that depended on the exact dosage and that a higher level of consumption was likely to lead to auto accidents, but distinguishing one beer a day from three is not a difficult problem even for those who are not doctors. My conjecture was that the real explanation was the reluctance of doctors to appear to be on the wrong side. Everyone knew that alcohol was a bad thing, a source of auto accidents and various medical (and other) problems. By giving a truthful account of the medical evidence the doctors on the program might appear to be pro-alcohol; all good people are anti. Hence they had to qualify their conclusion as a purely theoretical matter, not something that would affect what they told their patients. Think of it as a different version of PC — Professionally Correct speech.

A similar pattern exists for ice cream. Multiple independent studies have found evidence that consuming ice cream reduces the chance of getting diabetes — and found ways of explaining the evidence away. In several cases they have gone so far, in public statements, as to report that yogurt is protective against diabetes, other dairy products are not, when ice cream in their study showed as strong, in some studies a stronger, effect than yogurt.

Yogurt, as everyone knows, is a healthy food. Ice cream, as everyone knows, is bad for you.

From time to time I see a news story on some piece of scientific research that somewhat weakens the case for taking strong action against global warming. I believe that every time I have seen such a report it was accompanied by a quote from the researchers to the effect that global warming was a serious problem and their work should not be taken as a reason to be less worried about it. They almost certainly believed the first half of that, but their work was a reason to be less worried even if not to stop worrying.

Good people are on the side that believes that warming is happening, is anthropogenic, is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with immediately. Bad people deny one or more of those claims. If that is what all the people who matter to you, such as the fellow members of your profession, believe, and you are so unfortunate as to produce results that strengthen the bad people’s case, it is prudent to make it clear that you are still on the side of the angels. Just as, if you are so unfortunate as to be an honest doctor aware of the evidence in favor of alcohol, it is prudent to make it clear that you have not transferred your allegiance to demon rum.

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