History being the study of human beings and how they do, you need a baseline grasp of how humans are. It doesn’t matter how smart you are — if you don’t have a good baseline grasp of human nature, History, the discipline, will always elude you.
[This is true of any Humanity, of course. Shelley and Keats have to be in the conversation for “greatest English poet,” right up there with Shakespeare. One or both of them might’ve been more naturally talented than the Bard. But Shakespeare was clearly a man of long, deep experience, whereas the Romantics … weren’t. For every “Ozymandias” or “To a Nightingale”, there’s at least one reminder that these guys died at 29 and 25, respectively. To call “The Masque of Anarchy” sophomoric is an insult to sophomores. “Like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number.” Ugh. Good God, y’all].
Which is why that “social construction” stuff is so popular. Yeah yeah, it has some real (though really limited) explanatory power, but mostly it’s an excuse for kids who believe themselves clever to avoid contrary evidence. Calling, say, “masculinity” “just a social construction” frees you of the burden of entering the headspace of men who do things as men, because they’re men. To stick with a theme: Shakespeare could’ve written something like “the Masque of Anarchy” — probably as a wicked bit of characterization in Hamlet: The Wittenberg Years — but Shelley never could’ve written MacBeth’s “sound and fury” soliloquy. Shakespeare had obviously seen violent death; Shelley obviously hadn’t.
Knowledge of human nature is almost nonexistent in the Biz.
Severian, “How to Teach History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-23.
May 12, 2023
QotD: Great (but young) Romantic poets
May 10, 2023
When scapegoating stops working
Chris Bray documents what he calls the “kingdom of the non-sequitur” today:
Americans have lost faith in a broad range of institutions: academia, government at every level and in every branch, media of all kinds, and crony corporations. I just linked to poll results to support that claim, but I suspect you don’t need to be convinced, and the sense of declining trust shows up in your daily discussions with friends and family. The institutional cartel, embodied in the form of a ruling class or new elite who are defined by their uniformity of thought and ritual expression, arrive at the discussion with a top-down model of culture: Trust the experts! “Dr. Fauci says to get vaccinated.”
So they see the loss of trust, and they instinctively look for the driver who’s making the bus go down the low-trust road — the high-status bad actor who’s inculcating the loss of faith in the helpless minds of the ignorant poors. In the current model, Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson tricked people into losing faith in institutions because they spread conspiracy theories and disinformation. So the problem is solved: Hit the off switch on Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson (and fascist billionaire Elon Musk’s mind control platform), and faith in institutions is necessarily reborn. If Donald Trump can’t be president again, people will trust the government again.
This confidence that the loss of faith is caused by top-down manipulation is so stupid it’s making me squirm in my seat as I think about it: Your true self actually likes Gavin Newsom, Congress, woke universities, homeless encampments, and drag queen story hour for children, but Fox News TRICKED YOUR BRAIN, peasant. You can’t possibly be losing faith in institutions yourself, on your own motive force. Have a Bud Light and an mRNA injection, and we’ll talk in the morning when you feel better.
And so the need to purge the folk devils, the manipulative purveyors of discontent, manifests itself over and over again in a ritual behavior as old as humanity itself, the performance of “the crops are failing because this woman is a witch.” Burn the witch, and we restore the corn and the hogs before winter arrives.
If [Person A] is a folk devil and a scapegoat, then everything [Person A] does is dark and cruel. OH MY GOD LOOK AT HIM PETTING THAT KITTEN NOW DO YOU SEE HOW DANGEROUS HE IS!?!?!? Cultural performers show up on the page with a kind of tacit assignment, an agreement they’ve made at the level of choosing an identity and seeking a social status. Folk devils are devils, because people who don’t hate folk devils are of a low-status outgroup. Yes, all of life is just like high school.
May 9, 2023
How to destroy an industry with one simple trick
Ted Gioia on the precipitous rise and calamitous decline of the clickbait journalism model:
I was going to call this story the “tragedy of American journalism”. But when you dig into the details, it’s more a farce.
Let’s start with act one of this comedy. I could almost begin anywhere, but I picked an especially ridiculous case study — just wait until you learn the reason why.
Did that catch your attention?
It was supposed to. And I learned that from a now (mostly) forgotten website called Upworthy.
Almost exactly 10 years ago, Upworthy was “the fastest growing media site of all time”, according to Fast Company. They had turned news into a science. Upworthy was the future of journalism.
“Upworthy is known for its use of data to drive growth, testing up to 16 different headlines for a single story,” enthused that bright-eyed reporter for Fast Company. The end result was headlines so irresistible, millions of people clicked on them.
Here are some examples:
- A Gorgeous Waitress Gets Harassed By Some Jerk. Watch What Happens Next.
- A Teacher Ran to a Classroom to Break Up a Fight, but What She Found Was the Complete Opposite.
- It’s Twice The Size Of Alaska And Might Hold The Cure For Cancer. So Why Are We Destroying It?
- If You Could Press A Button And Murder Every Mosquito, Would You? Because That’s Kinda Possible.
You get the idea. The headline is in two parts — and it’s just a come-on. You have no idea what the article is about until you click on the link.
That was the whole point. But just wait until you learn the problem with this.
Facebook and other social media sites eventually discovered that people clicked on these links, but didn’t spent much time with the Upworthy articles — and rarely gave them likes and shares.
The stories just weren’t very good — and certainly not as interesting as the headlines. So the algorithms started to punish clickbait articles of this sort.
The Upworthy empire collapsed as quickly as it had risen.
In retrospect, the problem with this gimmicky strategy is obvious. If you trick people into clicking on garbage, your metrics are impressive for a few months. But eventually people can smell the garbage without even clicking on it.
There’s also a deeper reason for this collapse — which I’ll get to in a moment. And it helps us understand the current problems with journalism. But first we need to look at a couple more case studies.
May 8, 2023
Gordon Lightfoot, RIP
Mark Steyn on perhaps the best-known song of the late Gordon Lightfoot:
Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971
Detail of a photo from Wikimedia Commons
In November 1975 Lightfoot chanced to be reading Newsweek‘s account of the sinking of a Great Lakes freighter in Canadian waters. He’s a slow and painstaking author, which is one reason he’s given up songwriting – because it takes too much time away from his grandkids. But that day forty-three years ago the story literally struck a chord, and he found himself scribbling away, very quickly:
The legend lives on From the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said Never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy …“Gitche gumee” is Ojibwe for “great sea” – ie, Lake Superior – as you’ll know if you’ve read your Longfellow, which I’m not sure anyone does these days. Evidently Hiawatha was on the curriculum back east across Lake Huron in young Gordy’s Orillia schoolhouse. The Gitche Gumee reference may be why, when I first heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, I assumed its subject had sunk long before the song was written. In fact, it sank on November 10th 1975 — just a few days before Lightfoot wrote the number. When she’d launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, and, when she passed through the Soo Locks between Lakes Superior and Huron, her size always drew a crowd and her captain was always happy to entertain them with a running commentary over the loudspeakers about her history and many voyages. For seventeen years she ferried taconite ore from Minnesota to the iron works of Detroit, Toledo and the other Great Lakes ports … until one November evening of severe winds and 35-feet waves […]
That said, human tragedy alone does not make for singable material. The last contact from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was with another ship, the SS Arthur M Anderson. Yet “The Wreck of the Arthur M Anderson” would have been a far less evocative title. Arthur Marvin Anderson was on the board of US Steel, as Edmund Fitzgerald was on the board of Northwestern Mutual. But there is something pleasingly archaic about the latter name: in fact, as I think of it, I believe the last Edmund I met was one of Gordon Lightfoot’s fellow Canadian singers — the late operetta baritone Edmund Hockridge. Pair “Edmund” to “Fitzgerald”, and you have something redolent of Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson, of shipwrecks off Cornwall or the Hebrides. Perhaps that’s why “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” either sounds like an old Scots-Irish folk tune or, alternatively, actually is one. For any IRA members reading this, Bobby Sands, the hunger striker who starved himself to death in a British gaol, wrote in his cell a song called “Back Home in Derry”, about Irish prison deportees en route to Australia and set to a tune remarkably like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, which it seems unlikely he ever heard.
I see some musicologists claim the tune is in Dorian mode, although it sounds Mixolydian to me (like “The Wexford Carol”). Whichever it is, there is a perfect union between the emphatic melody, the crash of the waves, the antediluvian moniker of Northwestern Mutual’s chairman, and even the obvious filler phrases, so typical of ancient folk songs:
The lake, it is said
Never gives up her dead— which returns far more effectively in the final verse:
Superior, they said
Never gives up her dead— as if Gitchee Gumee is some vast ravening beast. Go back to Orillia, to Fourth Grade in 1947, and the parents listening to Mr and Mrs Lightfoot’s little boy sing “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” as if a bit of synthetic shamrock from an old Tin Pan Alleyman were a genuine Irish lullaby from the mists of Emerald Isle antiquity. That’s the genius of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”: It was born sounding as if it’s a hundred years old. And its agelessness is all the more amazing when you consider that it’s essentially an act of journalism, an adaptation of a news report about something that happened a few days earlier – just the facts, ma’am, with minimal artistic license:
In a musty old hall
In Detroit they prayed
In the maritime sailors’ cathedral …“Maritime sailors” is surely a redundancy, and it’s not a cathedral but the “Mariners’ Church”, which doesn’t quite go the distance syllable-wise. And a parishioner wrote to Lightfoot to say the church isn’t in the least bit “musty”, so these days he finds alternative adjectives.
But that’s all details. The power of the song lies in its storytelling. It immortalized the fate of the freighter not just for the families of the dead, “the wives and the sons and the daughters”, but for everyone, and it made the Edmund Fitzgerald the Titanic of the Great Lakes – except that the Titanic never inspired any song like this. The mournful toll of the lakes in the penultimate stanza is Gordon Lightfoot at his very best:
Lake Huron rolls Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams Like a young man’s dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go As the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered …The gales of November howl and the waves rise up and devour the ship. And then the gales subside and the placid surface betrays no trace of twenty-nine men, taken deep into the rooms of an ice-water mansion and never to be found.
Grrrrrrl Power is the only acceptable mode for new female characters, it seems
Janice Fiamengo on the strictly monotone representation of female characters in recent years:
The trend to make female movie characters tough and abrasive has been proceeding for some time. We can all predict that the new partner in the police procedural, let’s say a petite black woman whose entrance surprises (and thus reveals the bigotry of) the white man she’ll be working with, will turn out to be the biggest badass on the force. She’ll almost certainly save her partner’s life — and unearth a crime-solving detail he’d overlooked — before the first episode is over. At the same time, viewers will be treated to her sneering refusal of the partner’s banter, her steely gaze, and her fearless embrace of outrider status. She’s a woman with wise-cracking disdain for men as a group who takes quick revenge for even the smallest hint of sexism, benevolent or otherwise, from her fellow officers. And she quickly earns not only their respect but also their unwilling awe.
Whether police officers, first responders, detectives, firefighters, FBI — or, for that matter, nurses, ER doctors, politicians, or lawyers — the message is clear: these women are at least as capable and fearsome as any man: tough-minded, smart as a whip, and street-wise. Even in this era of agitation about the trans peril to women’s sports, the fictional females are as physically strong and combat-ready as any male, their fists and kicks aimed with staggering accuracy. Even tiny Lucy Tara on NCIS Hawai’i comes to the rescue of her far-larger male colleagues in impressive physical struggles with suspects.
But physical characteristics, the notable fearlessness and strength, are to some extent less striking than the women’s personalities and demeanor. An entire character transformation has been taking place, as traditionally feminine characteristics have been decisively minimized and masculine bravura brought to the fore. These women are, seemingly without effort, brusque, foul-mouthed, and contemptuous, particularly of male authority — and we’re to love them for it. They’re often beautiful, but they never try to be. With hair pulled back and aggressive booted stride, they are independent, uninterested in male approval, and largely indifferent to men as romantic partners, unless they are shown pursuing their occasionally voracious sexual needs, at which times their approach is direct and unsentimental. After an evening of bronco-riding athleticism, they wake up in a tousled bed with a slight grimace and duck out of the lover’s offer of breakfast. They’re not interested in commitment or any continued intimacy. A call comes in on their cell phone, they pull on their clothes nonchalantly, and walk out of the man’s life. They’ve already forgotten him as they prepare to conquer evil once again.
A popular new Netflix series, The Diplomat, takes these now-standard elements to the next level, profiling an ambitious, sexy, oft-frowning, brilliant, and explosively hot-tempered woman, Kate Wyler, who engages in uncontrolled physical and verbal abuse of her husband without remorse or narrative comeuppance. Though one might expect that a portrait of reckless physical violence by one spouse against another would be evidence at least of a serious character flaw — if not criminality (as it certainly would be if the male spouse were delivering the blows) — it is not at all clear in this case that the character’s actions deserve any condemnation. Her violence is simply the most extreme manifestation of her (rather admirable and plucky) unconventionality in breaking the rules of propriety in order to save the liberal world order.
Father Ted as Ireland’s answer to Fawlty Towers
Conor Fitzgerald on the tragically short run of the classic Irish comedy Father Ted:
Fondly remembered and occasionally quoted, Father Ted has its place in the broad canon of the British sitcom. But in Ireland, even 25 years since its finale, it has always been so much more. Its status is closer to Fawlty Towers in England or Cheers in the United States: the national sitcom, a piece of light entertainment that nevertheless Says Something Meaningful About Us.
Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.
It’s not the sort of thing that national epics are normally made of. The programme is about three Catholic Priests — Fathers Ted Crilly, Dougal McGuire, and Jack Hackett — on Craggy Island, a remote settlement off the west coast of Ireland. All three priests have been exiled to this purgatory by the terrifying Bishop Len Brennan (their misdemeanours are never referred to directly, but Ted often makes oblique reference to the fact that “the funds were only resting in my account”). Most episodes revolve around an absurdist version of Church life, Ted’s schemes to escape the island and their interactions with the island’s townsfolk.
Rarely for domestic Irish TV, it was a sitcom written by Irish people and it was set within a central Irish institution, the Catholic Church. And the dearth of representations of Irish people in entertainment meant it crystallised many Irish archetypes for the first time. Ireland itself hadn’t always been a welcoming place for satirists. Ted star Dermot Morgan knew this well — his major project before Ted had been a political comedy radio show named Scrap Saturday, which upset all the wrong people, and was eventually cancelled amid allegations of political interference.
Unlike Scrap Saturday, Ted never sought to be political or self-consciously “relevant”. But Craggy Island is a capsule of Irish life at this time of major social change — not least for gender relations and the Church. Take one married couple, John and Mary, who own the corner shop on Craggy Island. They contrive to show a winsome, loving front to the priest whenever they encounter him, but turn to violent bickering once his back is turned. At one point, Mary tries to drown John in a bucket of water; at another, Father Ted comes into the shop and finds John has locked Mary in a cupboard. When he leaves, they’re arguing over a shotgun.
This peck-and-scratch marriage is still funny, but in 2023 the laughter it provokes is nervous. It’s a product of an Irish society still processing the reality of divorce, only legalised by a referendum in Ireland in 1995, the same year Ted first aired. Though it was not uncommon at that time for people to separate, the divorce campaign had been ugly and emotional. One billboard for No bore the slogan “Hello divorce, goodbye daddy”. The referendum was passed by the tiny margin of 9,000 votes.
Divorce was only one step in the very gradual withering of religious power in Ireland — far more gradual than the rest of Europe. Remember that abortion was only legalised in Ireland five years ago. When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect.
May 7, 2023
The Line reports on “a Liberal policy convention in Fantasia”
It used to be said that the marketing department in any given organization was where the rubber met the sky (three drink minimum), but the Liberal convention in Barad-dûr-by-the-Rideau now owns that territory:
Once upon a time, Canada was led by a serious man named Pierre Elliot Trudeau. No matter what you think of his tenure as prime minister, there is no question that he took the job, and the country, seriously. Today his offspring, both biological and ideological, prance around the Canadian political landscape, smug and entitled and all the rest of it. But none of them has the foggiest idea of what they are doing with with the power they inherited, or why, or for what purpose.
[…]
For the evening entertainment on Friday, they brought out Jean Chrétien — another fantastically unserious person — to do his usual petit gars de Shawinigan routine. And did the old coot ever deliver, bragging yet again about keeping Canada out of Iraq, jabbing at Pierre Poilievre, and joking that he expects The Globe and Mail to call for a royal commission into Hillary Clinton showing up at the Liberal convention and interfering in Canadian elections.
Oh, our sides. They split. No matter that two days ago was World Press Freedom day. No matter that Friday also happened to be NNA night, where the Globe and Mail won nine awards. This is the Liberal convention after all, where one of the main policy proposals up for debate is a suggestion from the B.C. Liberals to essentially nationalise the news. Why not aim a few kicks at the media. The Liberals are paying for it anyway, aren’t they?
In his speech, Chrétien played to the latest Liberal idée fixe, which is that all of the party’s troubles since 2018 — from SNC Lavalin to WEgate to the egregious handling of Chinese interference — are all due to the clickbait chasing yellow journalists at the failing Globe and Mail.
For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to live through the nineties, Chrétien is the Liberal prime minister who brought you such hits as “what me worry?” about a Quebec referendum on secession; a joke about his PMO ordering the RCMP to pepper spray UBC students protesting his decision to invite a brutal dictator to dinner on their campus; and the Shawinigate and Adscam scandals, both of which are still routinely taught and referenced as case studies in ruling party greaseballery at its most unctuous.
But Liberals be Liberals. As National Post columnist Chris Selley noted: “This is deadly serious shit and this buffoon is playing it for laughs, just like [he] always played deadly serious shit.”
The “deadly serious shit” Selley had in mind is surely the river of scandal coursing through the Liberal Party in Ottawa over Chinese interference in Canadian politics, with tributaries flowing in from riding associations across the country, the Trudeau Foundation in Montreal, and numerous other parts of the Canadian political landscape. On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported on a CSIS analysis from 2021 which alleged that the family of Conservative MP Michael Chong was targeted by China’s security apparatus for unknown sanctions, in response to Chong’s sponsorship of a House of Commons motion calling China’s persecution of the Uighurs a genocide.
On Tuesday an understandably alarmed Chong was given an emergency briefing about the threat by CSIS director David Vigneault, in a meeting arranged by the prime minister.
This isn’t just about Michael Chong. Every member of parliament, every member of the government, should be up in arms over this. The Chinese diplomat in Canada involved, Zhao Wei, should have been sent home immediately, but Melanie Joly is still weighing the pros and cons.
As appalling as the targeting of Chong is in its own right, more scandalous still is the government’s response — equal parts utterly incompetent, unbelievably shady, and shamelessly partisan.
The scandal begins with the fact that Chong himself was never told about the CSIS report. Why is that? On Wednesday, the prime minister claimed it was because the threat identified in the CSIS report wasn’t deemed serious enough by the intelligence agency, so it never circulated outside of the agency. The first Trudeau had heard of this, apparently, was when he read about it in the newspaper.
But on Thursday, Michael Chong told the House of Commons that he’d been told, in a call from Trudeau’s current national security advisor Jody Thomas, that the report had actually made its way to the desk of one of her predecessors. When Trudeau was asked to explain this apparent contradiction on Friday, he said: “In terms of what I shared, I shared the best information I had at the time on Wednesday, both to Mr. Chong and to Canadians.” When asked who had given him this information, Trudeau declined to answer.
Look, we’ve seen this game before, countless times, with this government and this prime minister. Trudeau’s habit of responding to allegations of wrongdoing or incompetence or mismanagement by first denying any knowledge of the issue, then discrediting the source, and finally throwing unidentified third parties under the bus, is a well trod path for this deeply unserious man.
Given the pattern, we’re pretty skeptical of Trudeau’s claim that he’d been given incomplete information. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise us in the slightest if it turns out that he just made the whole thing up.
May 6, 2023
The federal Liberals want even more control over the internet
Paul Wells notes that a policy proposal at the Liberal conference this week indicates just how much the Liberal Party of Canada wants to control free expression on the internet:
Here on the 2023 Liberal convention’s “Open Policy Process” page are links to “Top 20 Resolutions” and “Fast-Tracked Resolutions”. The latter go straight to the plenary floor, the former go through a smaller preliminary debate and, if they pass, then on to the plenary. These things move fast because, in most cases, Liberals are paying only listless attention to the discussions. Policy is for New Democrats. Well, I mean, it used to be.
But sometimes words have meaning, so this morning I’m passing on one of the Top 20 Resolutions, from pages 12 and 13 of that book. This one comes to us from the British Columbia wing of the party.
It’s in two screenshots simply because it spreads across two pages. This is the entire resolution.
BC Liberals want “on-line information services” held “accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms” by “the Government”. The Government would, in turn, “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.
This resolution has no meaning unless it means I would be required to clear my posts through the federal government, before publication, so the “traceability” of my sources could be verified. I don’t suppose this clearance process would take too much more time than getting a passport or a response to an access-to-information request. Probably only a few months, at first. Per article.
After publication, “the Government” would hold me accountable for the veracity of my material, presumably through some new mechanism beyond existing libel law.
I’m not sure what “the Government” — I’m tickled by the way it’s capitalized, like Big Brother — would have made of this post, in which I quote an unnamed senior government official who was parked in front of reporters by “the Government” on the condition that he or she or they not be named. But by the plain meaning of this resolution, I would not have to wonder for long because that post would have been passed or cleared by the Government’s censors before publication, and I’m out of recourse if that process simply took longer than I might like.
May 5, 2023
JunkScientific American
Stephen Knight calls out the woke editors of once-proud publication Scientific American for their anti-scientific support of the gender warriors:
A dangerous strain of utopian thinking has taken hold of the “progressive” left. Many now share the delusion that if we pretend certain falsehoods are true, then various forms of oppression and bigotry will magically disappear. Worse still, the proponents of these falsehoods demand their unequivocal affirmation from the rest of us.
Today’s leftists rightly insist on the importance of scientific truth when it comes to questions like climate change, vaccine safety and evolution. But they will discard scientific facts the moment they become inconvenient to their own worldview. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more pronounced than on the issue of gender, where transgender ideology has almost entirely supplanted scientific truth among the left. More alarming still is the fact that many scientists and scientific institutions, which really should know better, are colluding in this deception.
The latest scientific institution to promote gender pseudoscience is the once-venerable Scientific American magazine, which this week published an article headlined “Here’s why human sex is not binary”.
Make no mistake, sex in human beings really is binary and immutable. There are few things more emphatically true in our scientific understanding of the world than the human sex binary. Human beings cannot change their sex – we are either male or female, as determined by which type of gametes our biology is organised to produce (sperm or eggs). These are observable, testable scientific facts. And this objective truth matters in very real and consequential ways – to our society, to law, to healthcare and to the safety of women and children.
Trans ideologues claim that the categories of male and female are on a “spectrum”, or that they represent nothing more than a subjective feeling. These ideas have already had disastrous consequences for society. It is thanks to these ideas that male rapists have been placed in women’s prisons in the UK. It is why, just this weekend, a biological man won an elite women’s cycling race in America – finishing 89 seconds ahead of the closest female competitor and netting $35,350 in prize money. We would simply recognise this as “cheating” were it not for the hold that gender ideology has over our institutions – and for the opprobrium that is visited on anyone who dissents.
After some silly and irrelevant trivia about the biology of lizards and fish (humans are neither fish nor lizards), the Scientific American article concludes by claiming that anyone who upholds the human sex binary is “trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society”. This single claim inadvertently reveals a great deal about what is wrong with the trans movement. Unable to refute the truth of the human sex binary, gender ideologues resort to demonising those who notice it as having ulterior, sinister motives.
This isn’t the first time Scientific American has lent its (now waning) credibility to gender nonsense. Back in 2018, it published an article titled “Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is overly simplistic”. To this day, this piece is gleefully shared around by gender activists, emboldened by this apparent vindication of their ideology from a credible, scientific publication. However, the author of the piece has since clarified that reality actually is as simplistic as humans having only “two sexes”.
May 4, 2023
Despite all the evidence, Canada’s official motto doesn’t translate as “we broke it”
In The Line, Justin Ling adds more to the towering pile of evidence that “Canada is broken”:
If The Line has an editorial position, it is probably thus: Everything is broken.
This newsletter, of course, comes at the idea more earnestly than, say, the leader of the Conservative party. When my friend Matt Gurney advances that proposition, it is a lament. When Pierre Poilievre does: It’s wishful thinking.
While citizens of this country can’t always agree on what, exactly, is busted in our country, or why, or who is responsible — we can all agree, I hope, that things in this country could use a tune-up, at the very least. Canadians, after all, are imbued with a cloying optimism. An insufferable belief that things can be fixed. It’s a good thing.
Lucky for us, we have plenty of words written about how to fix much of what ails us. Because we, as a country, have a compulsive need to inquire about those problems. Our national pastime isn’t hockey, it’s the royal commission.
And we’ve got a government in office that loves to study the nature of the problem. There’s good work, these days, for the special rapporteurs and retired judges amongst us. And if you’re a Canadian that loves a good public consultation, you must be run ragged.
Yet we also have a government in office that has a pathological inability to take advice. And this problem may help explain why it feels like we’re sliding backwards.
[…]
When the government tapped an expert panel to study the use of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons — literally torture — Correctional Services Canada blocked them from doing their job, and the public safety minister ignored their cries for help and then let their contracts lapse. Thanks to some scrutiny, the government renewed the study, then ignored it when the numbers showed they were still torturing people. Oops!
The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — a body Trudeau created — warned in 2019 that Ottawa wasn’t taking foreign interference seriously, particularly when it came to China. “In short, government responses were piecemeal, responding to specific instances of foreign interference but leaving unaddressed the many other areas where Canadian institutions and fundamental rights and freedoms continue to be undermined by hostile states.” Prescient!
One of the most absurd examples is the sexual misconduct crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. When Trudeau came into office in 2015, he had an external review on his desk from Marie Deschamps. One good external review deserves another, so the Liberals ordered one from Louise Arbour in 2022. What she found was harrowing: “We have been here before. Little seems to change.” Not only had the government failed to implement the Deschamps report, it was still failing to live up to the recommendations from the 1997 Somalia Inquiry. Fuck!
[…]
At the very centre of this tootsie-pop is, surprise, elitism. This Liberal government, armed with its paper-thin mandate, is convinced that they — and only they — are the verifiers of good ideas. And we should be grateful for whatever decision they deign to make.
If they farm out an idea to the public service, and the idea doesn’t come back in the form they envisioned, no matter: Send out the McKinsey signal. For just a few million dollars, their crack team of subject matter non-experts can prepare a PowerPoint presentation laying out the exact policy the political staff wanted in the first place.
The Liberals take a similar approach to consulting with the unwashed masses. When the government consulted the public on their plan to police “online harms,” they published a “what we heard” report that was broadly supportive of their plan.
Can we see the submissions? Journalists and academics asked. No. Came the reply.
QotD: Gesamtkunstwerk
As I said, that’s awfully heavy for an album whose most famous song asks how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat, but it’s nonetheless an accurate description of what Roger Waters was trying to do with the integrated concept album / movie / stage show. Whether or not he knew he was attempting a Gesamtkunstwerk in the full Wagnerian sense is immaterial, as is the question of whether or not he succeeded. Nor does it matter if The Wall is any good, musically or cinematically or lyrically.* The point is, he gave it one hell of a go … and nobody else has, even though these days it’d be far, far easier.
Consider what a band like Rush in their prime would’ve done with modern technology. I’m not a musician, but I’ve been told by people who are that you can make studio-quality stuff with free apps like Garage Band. Seriously, it’s fucking free. So is YouTube, and even high-quality digital cameras cost next to nothing these days, and even laptops have enough processor power to crank out big league video effects, with off-the-shelf software. I’m guessing (again, I’m no musician, let alone a filmmaker), but I’d wager some pretty good money you could make an actual, no-shit Gesamtkunstwerk — music, movie, the whole schmear — for under $100,000, easy. You think 2112-era Rush wouldn’t have killed it on YouTube?
I take a backseat to no man in my disdain for prog rock, but I have a hard time believing Neal Peart and the Dream Theater guys were the apex of rock’n’roll pretension. I realize I’ve just given the surviving members of Styx an idea, and we should all be thankful Kilroy Was Here was recorded in 1983, not 2013, because that yawning vortex of suck would’ve destroyed all life in the solar system, but I’m sure you see my point.** Why has nobody else tried this? Just to stick with a long-running Rotten Chestnuts theme, “Taylor Swift”, the grrl-power cultural phenomenon, is just begging for the Gesamtkunstwerk treatment. Apparently she’s trying real hard to be the June Carter Cash of the New Millennium™ these days, and hell, even I’d watch it.***
The fact that it hasn’t been attempted, I assert, is the proof that it can’t be done. The culture isn’t there, despite the tools being dirt cheap and pretty much idiot proof. Which says a LOT about the Current Year, none of it good.
* The obvious comment is that Roger Waters is no Richard Wagner, but that’s fatuous — even if you don’t like Wagner (I don’t, particularly), you have to acknowledge he’s about the closest thing to a universal artistic genius the human race has produced. It’s meaningless to say that Roger Waters isn’t in Wagner’s league, because pretty much nobody is in Wagner’s league. And philistine though I undoubtedly am, I’d much rather listen to The Wall than pretty much any opera — I enjoy the symphonic bits, but opera singing has always sounded like a pack of cats yodeling to me. I’m with the Emperor from Amadeus: “Too many notes.”
** If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then please, I’m begging you, do NOT go listen to “Mr. Roboto.” Whatever you do, don’t click that link …
… you clicked it, didn’t you? And now you’ll be randomly yelling “domo arigato, Mister Roboto!!” for days. You’ll probably get punched more than once for that. Buddy, I tried to warn you.
*** Anthropological interest only. I know I’m in the distinct minority on this one, but she never turned my crank, even in her “fresh-scrubbed Christian country girl” stage. Too sharp featured, and too obviously mercenary, even back then.
Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.
May 2, 2023
QotD: The musical importance of the city of Córdoba
Is it New York or London? Paris or Tokyo? Los Angeles or Shanghai? Nashville or Vienna? Berlin or Rio de Janeiro?
That depends on what you’re looking for. Do you value innovation or tradition? Do you want insider acclaim or crossover success? Is your aim to maximize creativity or promote diversity? Are you seeking timeless artistry or quick money attracting a large audience?
Ah, I want all of these things. So I only have one choice — but I’m sure my city isn’t even on your list.
My ideal music city is Córdoba, Spain.
But I’m not talking about today. I’m referring to Córdoba around the year 1000 AD.
I will make a case that medieval Córdoba had more influence on global music than any other city in history. That’s probably not something you expected. But even if you disagree — and I already can hear some New Yorkers grumbling in the background — I think you will discover that the “Córdoba miracle,” as I call it, is an amazing role model for us.
It’s a case study in how communities foster the arts — and in a way that benefits everybody, not just the artists.
[…] a thousand years before New Orleans spurred the rise of jazz, and instigated the Africanization of American music, a similar thing happened in Córdoba, Spain. You could even call that city the prototype for all the decisive musical trends of our modern times.
“This was the chapter in Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side,” asserts Yale professor María Rosa Menocal, “and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.”
There’s even a word for this kind of cultural blossoming: Convivencia. It translates literally as “live together.” You don’t hear this term very often, but you should — because we need a dose of it now more than ever. And when scholars discuss and debate this notion of Convivencia, they focus their attention primarily on one city: Córdoba.
It represents the historical and cultural epicenter of living together as a norm and ideal.
Even today, we can see the mixture of cultures in Spain’s distinctive architecture, food, and music. These are both part of Europe, but also separate from it. It is our single best example of how the West can enter into fruitful cultural dialogue with the outsider — to the benefit of both.
Ted Gioia, “The Most Important City in the History of Music Isn’t What You Think It Is”, The Honest Broker, 2023-01-26.
May 1, 2023
“And I, for one, welcome our new CRTC internet overlords”
In this week’s Dispatch from The Line, among other maple-flavoured items is the discussion of how the newly passed Bill C-11 will impact Canadians’ everyday online experience:
We at The Line have spent a lot more time trashing Bill C-18 than its cousin, C-11; the reason for that is fairly simple, if unflattering. Both bills are unwieldy little monsters, rife with competing agendas and we only have so much time and energy to spare. Of the two, though, C-18 affects us and our business more directly as it attempts to force Big Tech companies into secret negotiations to prop up dying legacy media outlets.
C-11, which passed this week, is the Liberals’ attempt to overhaul the Broadcasting Act to bring major streaming services like YouTube and Netflix under the heel of the CRTC. This is generally a pretty bad idea — and we’ll get into that in a second. But the passing of the first major overhaul of the act since the ’90s will, we expect, be heralded by the usual suspects of CanCon leeches who see in the legislation an opportunity to siphon evil Big Tech profit while forcing major platforms to force-feed Canadians into consuming more home-grown shite.
Anyway, part of the bill, it is hoped, will force online streamers to feature more Canadian content for Canadian users, particularly content that highlights the usual progressive checkboxes. And while this does make us roll our eyes a bit — just make good stuff and let people choose what they want for themselves! — we admit that this provision is the less objectionable aspect of C-11.
After this, matters get much more dicey. The attempts to force tech companies to pay for more CanCon will almost certainly backfire in the long run: companies like YouTube have already promised that they will comply with legislation by creating pass-through fees for their creators. In other words, if the government forces YouTube to pay a percentage of its profits into a CanCon fund, YouTube will generate that revenue the only way it can — by skimming more cash from its content creators and re-directing some to the creation of Canadian shows that are then commercialized by major broadcasting networks like Rogers. Seems fair!
Where the bill goes off the rails is over years-long battle over user-generated content protections. Upon hitting the upper chamber, the senate actually advocated for amendments that would ensure that Joe Blow YouTuber wasn’t going to fall under the auspices of CRTC regulation — changes that were rejected by the House. How the CRTC defines a content generator worthy of its regulation, or uses any of its new powers, is now up for consideration by the CRTC itself.
Obviously, we at The Line are concerned about how a regulator is going to employ poorly defined and vaguely stipulated legislative powers to control how Canadians are presented which content, and by whom. We are open to the hopeful possibility that the CRTC is so completely in over their heads that all of the concerns about the bill prove fruitless and overblown. But as a rule, we don’t like to rely on the incompetence of our betters to assure our protections and freedoms.
And that brings us to the major philosophical problems with C-11; the first is that legislation should generally not generate more confusion and uncertainty. As a rule, we think that our laws should be written in such a way that an ordinarily intelligent person with a standard education should be able to understand the laws that govern them. By this measure, the Broadcasting Act — like many others — fail a very basic test. C-11 is written so poorly that even experts seem to disagree about the scope of the bill and how our media landscape will be affected by it in the years to come.
[…]
There is, arguably, no reason for the CRTC, nor for the Broadcasting Act in its current form, to exist anymore. Digital space isn’t finite. Canadians can easily find news and entertainment that is relevant to them. We don’t need the government to ensure that Canadian content is produced and funded. Or, if some government intervention is deemed necessary, it need not amount to anything more complicated than a simple tax, with revenues diverted to one of this country’s myriad granting agencies to aid production. Instead, we have a government that seems hellbent on extending the power of a regulator at the very moment in history that this regulator is most redundant.
Given that we’re being led by an increasingly insular government that equates all criticism to disingenuous misinformation, and seems to want to stamp out the evils of wrong opinions on the Internet in the coming Online Harms bill, well, let’s just say we’re increasingly concerned and perturbed.
The Presidential re-match nobody wants
At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage contemplates the potential re-match of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2024 election … and shudders:
Perhaps for good reason, any American with their eyes on the White House must be at least 35 years of age when assuming office. Mercifully, this rule prevents anyone with a TikTok account from being taken too seriously.
Apparently, Americans apply this rule to its very extreme.
This week, President Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election, promising in a video announcement to “finish the job”. Quite what job he refers to is anyone’s guess. Though in better shape than Great Britain (a bar so low it’s a carpet) America is not having the best of days, weeks, months, years, decades, or twenty-first centuries.
Biden wasted no time. His sales pitch? He’s not Donald Trump. Evidently, the Biden team assumes Trump will steamroller over Ron DeSantis en route to the Republican party nomination. It’s 2020 again.
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but every time I see “2020” written down, or the mere words “twenty-twenty” seep into my eardrums, my heart flutters, my brain jangles, and a panic attack seizes control of my body with all the charm and consideration of a central African coup d’état.
Americans seem to agree. Seventy percent of Americans don’t think the 80-year-old Biden should run for re-election. Even 51 percent of Democrats nod their heads. Meanwhile, sixty percent, including one-third of Republicans say Trump, 76, should not run for president.
President Biden is not the most spring of chickens. Half of those who think he should sit this one out say Biden’s age is a “major” reason behind their thinking.
To put it mildly, this decade hasn’t quite gone the way of the “Roaring Twenties”. In 2019, I told anyone with ears that this decade would be the decade of decades. Reader, the jury is out. By “out” I don’t mean they’re busy making their considerations. By “out” I mean the jury is riddled with hollow-point bullets.
Perhaps that’s why a 38 percent plurality told pollsters they felt “exhausted” over the very idea of a Biden versus Trump rematch. Twenty-nine percent said they felt “fear” whilst just under a quarter felt both “sadness and fear”.
Which brings me to vice president Kamala Harris. This week, we learned of Biden’s intention to rehabilitate Harris’ image. Harris hasn’t had the most illustrious of tenures. Why? Well, let’s just say VP Harris is suited to other modes of employment. Ideally, Harris would find her feet in jobs which don’t require speaking in coherent, plain sentences and jobs which place a premium upon one’s ability to laugh at the most inappropriate of times. Reader, I’m about as socially attuned as a headbutt. Unlike Harris, I’m not literally one stopped heart away from the presidency.
It cannot be that a country of 330 million people, one which correctly claims to be the greatest country on earth, must limit itself to re-running the worst year in recent history.
And yet, there’s quite some time to go before the serious business of campaigning kicks into gear. If this horrendous decade has taught me anything, it’s that conventional wisdom isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
