Quotulatiousness

July 27, 2025

“[T]he wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “‘hate has no home here'”

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

Chris Bray looks at the kind of people who supported the lockdowns during the pandemic and heartily condemned those lesser folks whose careers and livelihoods were threatened and how they hope for examples to be made of the “leaders” of the Freedom Convoy back in 2022:

Let’s start with a comparison to the good people in Canada, the wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “hate has no home here”. Cheri DiNovo is, let me put this very gently, an instantly recognizable social type, “one of Canada’s best-known and most ardent queer ministers and an Ontario politician who would help pass some of the province’s most integral LGBTQ2S+ policy”. You already know her by her facial expression:

slay, girlboss

As the leaders of the Freedom Convoy face sentencing in court, DiNovo has this to say about their monstrous cruelty:

The Freedom Convoy: white supremacist homophobes who harassed and brutalized LGBTQ+ people and immigrants and the disabled, lashing out in a stunning wave of public cruelty. It was like a NUREMBERG RALLY with trucks, obviously. Here, look at some of the monstrous acts of public brutality committed at this mass expression of hate and rage:

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DANCED TOGETHER THINK ABOUT IT

Rupa Subramanya, a journalist who uses the old and mostly forgotten technique of talking to people, wandered the crowds in Ottawa (in her own neighborhood) and reported that Freedom Convoy protesters mostly talked about their desire to recover a sense of hope. Their grievances were clear, thoroughly explained, and entirely defensible. Here’s a sample paragraph, a discussion with one of the VICIOUS WHITE SUPREMACISTS:

    Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”

See this clearly against Cheri DiNovo’s framing, and remember it:

The white supremacist protesters who hate immigrants; for example, Kamal Pannu, a Sikh immigrant and trucker.

In fact, Sikhs make up a substantial share of the trucking industry in Canada, and so had a significant presence at the Freedom Convoy:

See the WHITE SUPREMACISTS saying that they HATE IMMIGRANTS!?!?!? Because Cheri DiNovo does. She thinks categorically: good people who support the Liberal Party, Literally Adolf Hitler who doesn’t. She has no capacity for seeing the thing itself, as it was on the ground, in physical reality. Literally nothing, no evidence or substance of any kind, could ever have prevented her from saying that a protest against Justin Trudeau’s government was white supremacist and homophobic. She’s out of her fucking mind. She has no connection to any form of reality, at all, in any way, ever. She doesn’t see anything. She doesn’t know anything. She’s ignorant noise and infinite sanctimony, with a pair of legs to carry it around.

This is “left” politics in the Anglosphere. Symbol symbol symbol, you NAZI! It doesn’t connect. It’s all chanting and performance and status-signaling, and it never leaves the house. It left reality behind ten years ago, and now it’s out there sailing past Pluto. For adherents of the Manichean religion of wokeism, categorical thinking covers all bases. People who don’t get mRNA injections are misogynistic racist bigots, obviously.

Update: Fixed broken link.

I’m sure I would never have heard of Sean Feucht until they tried to silence him

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

It’s hard to believe how Canadian municipal and provincial authorities deal so gently with disruptive pro-Hamas protests that regularly threaten the lives and property of Canadian Jews compared with the positively authoritarian way they are reacting to “MAGA” Christian performer Sean Feucht‘s concerts:

QotD: London coffeehouses and Paris salons of the Ancien Régime

Filed under: Books, Britain, France, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Marie Antoinette arrived in Paris at the end of this era of strict censorship, which helps explain why her honeymoon with French public opinion was short-lived. The official press, notably the Mercure and Gazette, continued churning out fawning snippets of society news about the royal couple. But the scandal-mongering libelles and pamphlets had their own paragraph men, called nouvellistes, who picked up “news” from well-informed sources posted on benches in the Tuileries, Luxembourg Gardens, and, of course, under the tree of Cracow. Police efforts to repress nouvellistes‘ gossip proved futile in the face of high demand. One famous libelle of the era, Le Gazetier cuirassé promised “scandalous anecdotes about the French court”. (It was printed in London, out of reach of official French censors.) Another publication printed in London starting in the 1760s was the famous Mémoires secrets, an anonymous chronicle of insider gossip and anecdotes from Parisian high society. A scurrilous book about Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry, also appeared as a collection of gossip that nouvellistes had picked up around Paris.

Despite the libelles circulating in Paris, the Bourbon monarchy was still relatively protected compared with the hurly-burly across the channel in London, where coffeehouses buzzed with political innuendo and intrigue. Some French philosophes, it is true, attempted to replicate London’s coffeehouse culture at Parisian cafés, such as the Procope on the Left Bank. (Voltaire frequented the place, where he liked to add chocolate to his coffee.) Other regulars at the Procope — named after the Byzantine writer Procopius, famous for his Secret History — were Rousseau, Danton, and Robespierre, as well as Americans Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

The Parisian equivalent of the coffeehouse was the salon, which differed from London coffeehouses in both ambience and function. Whereas London coffeehouses were boisterously public, salons were essentially closed spaces, usually held in private homes. Most were by invitation only. Many were hosted by women, usually titled or wealthy ladies with an interest in culture and politics — such as Madame de Rambouillet, Madame Necker, Madame Geoffrin, and Mademoiselle Lespinasse. There was also the Marquise du Deffand, a friend to Voltaire and the English man of letters Horace Walpole, to whom she bequeathed not only her papers, but also her pet dog, Tonton.

As access to these rarefied spaces increasingly became a symbol of social success, admission got more tightly controlled. (Madame Geoffrin expelled Diderot from her salon because she found his conversation “quite beyond control”.) Still, those who frequented salons represented a great diversity within the elites — from rising young writers and established authors to powerful politicians and eccentric aristocrats. The tacit rule was, as in London coffeehouses, that wit was more important than rank. Many great French writers launched their careers thanks to their admittance. One was the philosopher Montesquieu, who found success at the salon of Madame Lambert.

Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.

July 25, 2025

Autism, then and now

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

At Psychobabble, Hannah Spier traces the rise of autism from its first formal definition to something that 1 in 36 kids is diagnosed with:

When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group.

From experts, instead of raised alarms or calls for serious public health investigation (as would be expected for any other childhood disorder) we get calls for inclusivity and a self-congratulatory attitude toward their advancement in diagnostic understanding and tools. Another example of ideological capture of psychiatry by cultural sentiment.

Characters like Sheldon Cooper and Sherlock Holmes have helped turn the image of autism into a badge of honour. It means you’re socially odd, intellectually superior, and emotionally detached in an edgy and endearing way. For many, especially mothers with narcissistic tendencies hungry for a narrative of exceptionalism, this offered a seductive reframing of their child’s misbehaviour and non-conformity as evidence of giftedness. She could thus become the one who gave birth to the quirky but special genius. She alone saw the hidden brilliance beneath the “weird” behaviour. She became the martyr and the insider to an elite subculture. It’s Munchausen by proxy, 2025 edition.

People with narcissism and psychopathic traits exploit wherever they can, we know this. And yet again, psychiatry, the ones who should be the best at recognizing these, made it easy pickings by flinging the diagnostic gates wide open. Longtime readers will recognize the pattern: I’ve written before about the diagnostic creep in trauma, expanding definitions that blur the line between disorder and ordinary variation. The same diagnostic creep has unfolded here. Autism, once narrowly defined, was steadily loosened through each revision of the DSM.

The Great Diagnostic Expansion

Originally, Kanner’s autism was unmistakable: nonverbal children, socially disconnected, cognitively impaired, often with seizures. These were not quirky introverts. These were children who required full-time care and specialized schooling. In the DSM-III of the 1980s, it was called infantile autism. The criteria required clear onset before 30 months, marked language delays, gross deficits in social interaction, and repetitive behaviours. These were developmental dysfunctions, not misunderstood personalities. And neither clinicians nor parents had a problem naming them as such.

Then came the DSM-III-R in 1987, which introduced pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) and broadened the field significantly. Suddenly, language delay and intellectual disability were no longer central. Subclinical cases were included. Asperger’s Syndrome followed in the DSM-IV in 1994, adding high-IQ individuals with no language delays but poor social functioning. A child who spoke on time but didn’t understand jokes, had poor eye contact, and rigid routines was now also autistic.

But the most dramatic change came with DSM-5 in 2013. The subtypes were eliminated. Autism became one spectrum. The criteria were thinned down to two domains: social communication difficulties and restrictive, repetitive behaviours. A person needed to meet just six out of twelve traits, spread across these two clusters. Language and cognitive delay? Optional. Even the requirement for early onset was removed. A diagnosis could now be given based on historical symptoms. Questionnaires like the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) are so broad and subjective they can be easily gamed. This made it possible for 30-year-olds to recall feeling “socially overwhelmed” in school and not liking itchy clothing to receive the same diagnosis as a nonverbal child requiring lifelong care.

The diagnostic category has become a black hole, pulling in people with no clinical resemblance, collapsing distinction into sameness. From what I’ve observed, three distinct autism “patients” now account for much of the increased prevalence, none of whom would have qualified under the original criteria.

The ongoing conflict in Gaza

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

On his Substack, John Spencer responds to a New York Times op-ed that claims Israeli forces in Gaza are engaged in genocide:

In his New York Times op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It“, Omer Bartov accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As a professor of genocide studies, he should know better. Genocide is not defined by a few comments taken out of context, by estimates of casualties or destruction, or by how war looks in headlines or on social media. It is defined by specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. That is a high legal bar. Bartov did not meet it. He did not even try.

I am not a lawyer or a political activist. I am a war expert. I have led soldiers in combat. I have trained military units in urban warfare for decades and studied and taught military history, strategy, and the laws of war for years. Since October 7, I have been to Gaza four times embedded with the Israel Defense Forces. I have interviewed the Prime Minister of Israel, the Defense Minister, the IDF Chief of Staff, Southern Command leadership, and dozens of commanders and soldiers on the front lines. I have reviewed their orders, watched their targeting process, and seen soldiers take real risks to avoid harming civilians. Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent.

Bartov claims that five statements by Israeli leaders prove genocidal intent. He begins with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on October 7 that Hamas would “pay a huge price”. That is not a call for genocide. It is what any leader would say after the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history. He also cites Netanyahu’s statements that Hamas would be destroyed and that civilians should evacuate combat zones. That is not evidence of a desire to destroy a people. It is what professional militaries do when fighting an enemy that hides among civilians.

Bartov presents Netanyahu’s reference to “remember Amalek” as a smoking gun. But this is a phrase from Jewish history and tradition. It is engraved at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and also appears on the Holocaust memorial in The Hague. In both places, it serves as a warning to remain vigilant against threats, not as a call for mass killing.

He also highlights Defense Minister Gallant’s use of the term “human animals” to describe Hamas fighters. That is not a war crime. After the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians on October 7, many would understand or even share that reaction.

Unable to find intent among those actually directing the war, Bartov turns to far-right politicians like Bezalel Smotrich and Nissim Vaturi. These individuals do not command troops, issue orders, or shape battlefield decisions. I have studied the actual orders. They focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible. Their rhetoric is irrelevant to the legal case.

Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.

Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime. More than 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid have entered the territory. Israel has supported hospitals, repaired water pipelines, increased access to clean water, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad.

July 24, 2025

When tolerance becomes a fatal flaw

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

At The Crescent and the Guillotine, Paul Friesen explains why too much tolerance leads to the eventual collapse of social order and perhaps even the culture itself:

It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.

It was Karl Popper who warned that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance, or it would cease to be tolerant at all.1 A delicious paradox, too often quoted and too rarely heeded. For we have taken the first half of the dictum — the imperative to tolerate — and chiseled it into law, into policy, into university mission statements and NGO pamphlets. But the second half — the requirement to draw a line, to say “no further” — has been treated like garlic in a vampire movie: an antique, anathema, unfashionable.

And so, the paradox has become pathology.

Our courts allow sharia arbitration councils to function in British cities, adjudicating matters of family and inheritance with standards that would make a 12th-century canon lawyer flinch. Our schools include faith-based curricula that require hijabs for seven-year-olds and teach that homosexuality is satanic filth. Our public broadcasters will air a documentary about the importance of free speech, followed immediately by a segment about why cartoons of Muhammad are “unhelpful”.

This is not multiculturalism. It is masochism. It is the belief that liberalism must be so open-minded that its own brains are spilled onto the prayer mat. It is the fetishization of identity at the expense of liberty. It is the ideological pacifism of a society too terrified to assert its own values, lest it be accused of “racism” by those who mistake ideology for ethnicity.

We have enshrined the rights of the theocrat while criminalizing the instincts of the secularist. The result is not harmony — it is humiliation.

[…]

The West’s greatest achievement is not democracy, nor capitalism, nor even the separation of powers. It is the separation of truth from tribalism — the idea that individuals are not to be judged by their creeds, but by their conduct. That women are not property. That speech is not violence. That blasphemy is a right, not a crime.

These are not Western values. They are universal values, discovered in the West by accident of history and preserved through blood, rebellion, and satire. They are the principles that allowed Jews, heretics, atheists, and apostates to live not just safely, but freely. And they are now under threat — from within.

The real problem is not Islam. It is the Western inability to demand anything of those who import their gods and their grievances into liberal society. We treat every imported superstition as sacrosanct and every local tradition as suspect. We require ex-Muslims to whisper their fears while we amplify the complaints of veiled Islamists who denounce our culture from our own podiums.

We are not being pluralistic. We are being duped.

And the cost of this self-deception is measured not just in freedoms surrendered, but in lives lost.

Lives like that of Yameen Rasheed, the secular Maldivian blogger who thought he could use satire to push back against theocracy — stabbed to death in his own hallway. Lives like that of Farkhunda Malikzada, beaten and burned in the streets of Kabul by a mob of men — because someone thought she burned a Qur’an. Lives like that of Samuel Paty, beheaded outside a French school by a refugee he welcomed — because he dared to show a cartoon in a civics class.

These are not random tragedies. They are the predictable outcomes of an ideological toxin given immunity in the bloodstream of liberal society.

What do all these victims have in common? They did not die at the hands of misunderstood minorities or “oppressed voices” who simply needed better integration programs. They died at the hands of men who were indoctrinated — sometimes abroad, often at home — with the idea that God’s honor is more valuable than human life, and that dissent is not to be debated but extinguished.

And more damning still: they died in environments that should have protected them. Environments that instead prioritized sensitivity over security, dialogue over clarity, understanding over justice. Environments where the ever-watchful eye of diversity officers and DEI consultants was trained, not on the assailants, but on the tone of the victims.

We have created a culture where courage is pathologized, clarity is punished, and moral equivalence is the new orthodoxy. When Islamist mobs swarm the streets chanting slogans that would make the Inquisition blush, we are told to “listen to their anger”. When feminists protest the veiling of children, they are told to “respect cultural differences”. When Jews complain about chants of “From the River to the Sea”, they are informed that they are “overreacting”, “weaponizing trauma”, or — most insultingly of all — “confusing Zionism with antisemitism”.

This is not inclusivity. It is assisted suicide.

    1. I refer here to Karl Popper’s 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies, specifically in Volume 1: The Spell of Plato, Note 4 to Chapter 7. Here’s the relevant passage, paraphrased for clarity:

    “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

    Popper argues that a tolerant society has the right — not to suppress opinions — but to defend itself against those who would destroy tolerance itself, especially if such groups refuse to engage in rational discourse and instead promote violence or coercion. It’s often called “the paradox of tolerance“.

July 22, 2025

Bitter reality is coming for the laptop class

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

Spaceman Spiff foretells the end of the managed paradise of the “unsophisticated sophisticates” of the privileged laptop class who have been able to keep their dream alive at the expense of everyone outside their rarefied and protected bubbles:

There seems to be a section of society populated with gullible conformists who believe many of the manufactured narratives designed to manage society.

Most are the credentialed products of universities. The laptop class of professionals who operate the corporations, institutions and key organizations.

Their worldview is comprised of stories which are downloaded and stored as mental models. Adhering to these narratives can then devolve into belief systems that are placed beyond criticism. This in turn can easily degenerate into a kind of fanaticism.

Ideas like mass migration and the destruction of reliable energy sources are crazy and yet they are primarily in existence thanks to the efforts of this layer of society, the professionals who implement policies desired by the ruling class.

While some among them are cynically exploiting today’s fads for their own ends, many seem to be true believers.

How can they believe these things so completely? What is going on?

Rebels searching for causes

Most of today’s great crusades seem to have the same characteristics. They are easily downloaded and consumed, they are socially rewarded within some circles, and they are not immediately obvious as issues at all.

The most popular are pre-prepared to an almost comical degree and thoroughly focus-grouped to ensure minimal friction among their consumers.

Many even come with slogans attached. Diversity is our strength is every bit as artificial as two weeks to flatten the curve, but it goes down easily with no thought required, which is the point.

The ideas that stick are the ones most useful to demonstrate virtue. Showing off to your peers you are non-sexist, non-racist and non-homophobic helps secure your place in many professional hierarchies where visible in-group membership matters.

The most prized causes appear to be non-obvious where the conclusions are not reachable with the evidence available.

This confusing aspect makes many question some new idea or policy, but in the laptop class often triggers a sense of smugness that they see beyond the obvious to the obscure thanks to their impressive intellects. Criticism can then be dismissed as simplistic providing a rewarding sense of superiority.

Much of the above is evident in the belief systems of today’s professional classes.

[…]

What to make of all this?

Does any of this matter? Yes it does. It is this section of society that ultimately puts in place the ruinous ideas of the ruling class.

They are in the corporate offices, the local councils and the schools. They are running the television stations and the publishing houses. They are captured by groupthink. Everyone they know thinks as they do. All criticism is easily dismissed.

Very little can penetrate this bubble. Except one thing.

Over time reality intrudes. Models should be updated to accommodate new findings and observations, but that is challenging when they have been uncritically downloaded to satisfy psychological needs.

Contrary evidence threatens one’s sense of self so scrutiny is avoided. When these avoidances ultimately fail some dig even deeper. Magical thinking seems to be everywhere.

The ultimate effect is either a reassessment of one’s worldview, or a psychotic break from reality. We see examples of the latter; Trump Derangement Syndrome is one well known borderline psychosis but there are others.

The internet keeps getting worse. Let’s talk about why.

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

Jared Henderson
Published 16 Jul 2025

Why do major online platforms keep getting worse? Cory Doctorow’s work helps us understand the pattern of growth, decline, and eventual demise.

→ Timestamps
00:00 Beginning
00:51 How Platforms Die
08:29 The Death of a Platform (From the Inside)
12:14 Ads, Everywhere
14:47 Yes, I Make Money from Ads
16:32 Bots
22:04 The Internet We Need
(more…)

July 21, 2025

“Normal”? Dude, that’s extremist right-wing hate speech!

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

The Bone Writer on the huge increase in young people “identifying” as something other than what unreconstructed cavemen used to call “normal”:

Walk through any high school, scroll through TikTok, or attend a freshman orientation, and you’ll see the new hierarchy of modern identity:

  • Straight white male? Bottom rung.
  • Bisexual nonbinary neurodivergent? Stunning and brave.
  • Confused, anxious, fluid? You’re seen. You’re valid.
  • Rooted, stable, and clear? YOU must be dangerous.

It’s not just a cultural shift anymore. It’s a cultural mutation. A slow but total dislocation from reality.

We are no longer celebrating the diversity of life. We are celebrating the diversity of escape routes from it.

Identity as a Compass? No … It’s Identity as Camouflage

There was a time when “identity” meant something integrated, a clear expression of who you are, shaped by your values, your upbringing, your nature.

Now, identity is:

  • A product
  • A protest
  • A mask

It’s often less about expressing truth and more about shielding from judgment.

And nowhere is that clearer than in the explosion of LGBT+ self-identification, especially among the young.

The Numbers Don’t Lie but No One Wants to Look at Them

In 2012, Gallup found ~3.5% of Americans identified as LGBT.

By 2021? Over 20% of Gen Z now identify somewhere on the spectrum.

Among Gen Z women, bisexual identity has grown by over 400%.

Do you really believe this is all “just visibility”? Do you really think the human genome changed this much in 10 years?

Of course not.

What changed was the culture. And culture now rewards deviation and punishes normativity.

Reported by Axios in 2021

Was Juan Perón a Fascist? The Cold War Origins of Peronism – W2W 037

Filed under: Americas, Economics, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 20 Jul 2025

Was Juan Perón really a fascist, a socialist, or something entirely different? In this episode of War 2 War, we explore the rise of Peronism in post–World War II Argentina and how Perón tried to position his country between the superpowers of the Cold War.

Through labour reforms, nationalist rhetoric, media control, and brutal repression of dissent, Juan and Eva Perón created a powerful populist regime that borrowed ideas from both fascism and socialism, while claiming to reject both. From Argentina’s “Third Way” to its complicated ties with the US, USSR, and even Nazi fugitives, we examine the ideology, contradictions, and legacy of Peronist rule.

Was Peronism a unique form of authoritarian populism, or just another face of fascism?

Join us as we uncover the foundations of Argentina’s Cold War identity and the true political nature of Juan Perón.
(more…)

AI slop seems to have finally triggered significant pushback

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

Ted Gioia says that he’s seeing strong indicators that the AI slop superabundance has helped create a widespread rejection of it and all its works:

2025 has been the year of garbage culture.

Creators watch in horror as dismal AI slop threatens their livelihoods — and the integrity of their fields. It’s everywhere, spreading faster than a pharaoh’s plague.

In recent months, we’ve been bombarded with millions of lousy AI songs, idiotic AI videos, and clumsy AI images. Error-filled AI texts are everywhere — from your workplace memos to the books sold on Amazon.com.

Even my lowly vocation, music journalism, gets turned into a joke when it’s accompanied by slop images of fake events.

No, these things did not really happen.

But something has changed in the last few days.

The garbage hasn’t disappeared. It’s still everywhere, stinking up the joint.

But people are disgusted, and finally pushing back. And they are doing so with such fervor that even the biggest AI companies are now getting nervous and pulling back.

Just consider this surprising headline:

This was stunning news. YouTube is part of the biggest AI slop promoter of them all — namely the Google/Alphabet empire. How can they possibly abandon AI garbage? Their bosses are the biggest slopmasters of them all.

After this shocking news reverberated through the creative economy, YouTube started to backtrack. They said that they would not punish every AI video — some can still be monetized.

But even the revised guidelines are still a major blow to AI slop purveyors. YouTube made clear that “creators are required to disclose when their realistic content is altered or synthetic”. That’s a huge win—we finally have a requirement for disclosure, and it came straight from the dark planet Alphabet.

YouTube also stressed that it opposes “content that is mass-produced or repetitive, which is content viewers often consider spam”. This is just a step away from blocking slop.

Update, 22 July: Ted posted a follow-up with a bit more evidence that the pushback is working:

In my latest article I criticized Spotify for allowing uploads of unauthorized AI tracks to the profiles of dead musicians.

But the company may finally be listening to criticisms of its AI policies. In this case, Spotify has now taken steps to stop the abuses, and a spokesperson reached out to me today with an update and expressing a clear and proper policy on AI fraud.

I share it below (and have also updated my article):

    We’ve flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed. This violates Spotify’s deceptive content policies, which prohibit impersonation intended to mislead, such as replicating another creator’s name, image, or description, or posing as a person, brand, or organization in a deceptive manner. This is not allowed. We take action against licensors and distributors who fail to police for this kind of fraud and those who commit repeated or egregious violations can and have been permanently removed from Spotify.

They acted quickly, and I give them credit for that.

Update the second, 23 July: Ah, Spotify giveth and Spotify taketh away:

“Spotify is publishing new, AI-generated songs on the official pages of artists who died years ago without the permission of their estates or record labels,” reports 404 Media.

This scandal came to light because of an AI song attributed to Blaze Foley, who died in 1989. The bogus track is accompanied by an AI-generated image of a man who bears no resemblance to the singer.

What’s going on here? Is this just ignorance or carelessness at Spotify? Or does it represent something more sinister — another example of the company’s willingness to deceive users in the pursuit of profits?

These scams must stop. If Spotify doesn’t fix this mess immediately, courts should intervene.

But the dead musician scandal is just a start — because other bizarre things are happening at Spotify.

The whole situation is positively surreal.

July 20, 2025

Generational differences about … ugh … talking on the telephone

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

As a late boomer — and unlike most of my cohort — I’ve always hated talking on the telephone to someone. I’m sure part of it is my innate shyness and social awkwardness: if I can’t see how the other person reacts to my verbal blundering, how can I correct myself in time to salvage something from the call? As a result, I’m rather more sympathetic to younger Millennials and Gen Z’ers who have a common generational aversion to telephone calls:

“Candle-stick phone with courtesy pay box” by CodeName47km is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

I’ve been working to wean myself off the phone. I try to use it only when it feels necessary: we require an answer now, things are too complex to lay out in an email, or I want to be sure what I’m saying is received as I intend it. Sometimes these calls are spontaneous. Increasingly, I schedule them, or ask permission first.

I’ve done this because it’s how business communications work today, and I don’t like to remind people that I’m getting on. I also do it in deference to my colleagues, all of whom are much younger than me. They prefer email, texts, or the group chat.

The landline decision was forced by our acquisition of Fitzhenry & Whiteside, which has had the same telephone number for decades. F&W has many more authors than does Sutherland House, and a good number of them are over sixty. We’re trying to make the transition to new ownership seamless. We didn’t want people calling up to hear “this number is no longer in service”. So the newly installed phone sits on a stand beside the desk I share with Shalomi. I call it Shalomi’s phone and make her answer it when she’s around. Mostly it goes to voicemail and tells people how to contact us by email.

Accustomed as I’ve become to phone-free work, I was taken aback this week when I asked one of our interns to call a printer — we needed a quick quote — and she responded, “I don’t do telephones”. She looked at me bewildered. I responded in kind.

My mind was racing to figure out if I’d mishandled the matter. I’d just read that story in the New York Times about the “Gen Z stare”, the blank look given by a young person (usually in a service job) where a verbal response would be common. It is often interpreted as a freeze on the part of the starer, an inability or reluctance to engage, perhaps rooted in anxiety, perhaps a remnant of the pandemic’s social dislocations, although some insist the starer is telling their interlocutor “you’re in my space and you ought to back off”.

I heard from a number of people about that article this week, and while the Times had not mentioned phone usage and etiquette, my conversations did. Apparently there are a lot of young people who don’t know how to answer their phones. They see a call pop up on their screen and they stare at it, waiting for it to go away. Or they press answer and listen without saying anything. Some, I’m told, answer even scheduled calls from people they know with silence.

I’ve heard parents say they didn’t expect they’d have to teach their children to answer a phone. A university lecturer explained that journalism professors now demonstrate use of a telephone before instructing students on how to conduct an interview over it. Apparently, the same goes for rookie salespeople.

Poking around online, I found a BBC article reporting that a quarter of people aged eighteen to thirty-four never answer their phones, more than half of them interpret any unexpected call as bad news. CBS reports 90 per cent of Gen-Z are anxious about phone calls.

In fairness, a lot of adults are similarly leery of their phones. They don’t want to engage with spam dialers or scammers — they answer and listen for the brief pause that betrays a call centre. Some let every unrecognized call go to voicemail. The savvier ones have figured out that your iPhone, properly configured, will send calls from people not in your contacts directly to voicemail.

Back to our intern. Eventually, I recovered myself. This wasn’t an instance of Gen-Z awkwardness or anxiety around real-time conversations. She is bright, confident, and as socially adept as anyone in the office. I asked if she had a phone. She did. I asked if she used it for calls. She said only to speak to her mom, who pays for her phone. Perfectly reasonable. And it was her personal phone, not a company phone, so she was under no obligation to use it at work. So we suggested she make the call on the company phone, which she cheerfully did.

We spoke later about generational differences with regard to communications technology. She likes the control one has over email communication as compared to the unpredictable nature of phone calls. I told her about life when no one had phones, yet we could all somehow manage to show up at the same place and the same hour. I can hardly believe I lived in such times. Hearing this must have hit her like I was once hit by the reporter Ray Stannard Baker’s account of how he used to walk up to the White House, knock on the front door, and ask to speak with the president.

Star Trek and the New Frontier Story

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

Feral Historian
Published 28 Feb 2025

Star Trek has been the “new frontier” story for so long that it’s become more retro than futurist. But that doesn’t mean the frontier story itself is dead, only that there’s a disconnect between the future we want and the visions of it that we have.

00:00 Intro
02:19 Time and Space
06:06 Inhabited Spaces
09:44 A story of the Past

July 19, 2025

No issue is so important that we can’t have a proper debate on the merits

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

On Substack, Lorenzo Warby refutes the claim that some issues are just too important/too urgent/already decided:

One of the features of the “progressive” politics of the unaccountable classes — those who are just paid for turning up — is the demand that there be “No Debate” about various issues. The most obvious instances are “No Debate” about Trans and “No Debate” about climate change — hence demands that climate scepticism be outlawed.

All such “No Debate” claims are crap. First, any “No Debate” claim is presumptive evidence that what you are pushing is either not true or, slightly more subtly, is a mountain of bullshit erected on a molehill of truth. Robust cases for claims about the world are not afraid of debate.

Various moral urgency claims are mounted to support such “No Debate” claims. How do we determine moral urgency? From the evidence. If the evidence is clear, debate will not threaten that alleged urgency. On the contrary, it will reveal the urgency more clearly.

The underlying philosophical dynamic underlying “No Debate” claims is Critical Constructivism — the claim that reality is socially constructed; that all statements and knowledge claims are, in fact power claims; and that the righteousness of a claim can be determined by their (alleged) effects on (morally differentiated) social groups.

The underlying social dynamic is the use of affirmed beliefs to determine and display righteousness. If affirming X shows one to be one of the righteous, then not believing X shows one to be of the unrighteous. This is typically expressed in various terms of moral abuse (racist, Transphobe, Islamophobe, etc) whose use in media and academe has soared since 2014.

This is not because Western societies have become more bigoted — on any reasonable measure they have become far less so over time — but because the politics of Righteous Affirmed Belief has dramatically surged and so has therefore the stigmatisation of dissent.

To claim that affirming X shows ultimate moral propriety requires stigmatising not-X. For something is morally proper — indeed morally trumping — only if the opposite is morally improper. Thus is moral propriety is enforced by stigmatisation. Hence silence is violence — one must profess righteousness. Hence also words are violence — if affirmation of belief is the ultimate marker of righteousness then expressed disbelief becomes the ultimate marker of abusive malevolence. These dynamics lead to a great deal of preference falsification — people publicly affirming, or at least not opposing, claims that they do not privately believe.

Old and tired: the Overton Window … New and hot: the Trump Door

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

In The Line, Mike Colledge considers how Trump has managed to change the political environment that used to be fairly well described by the Overton Window:

Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons

The Overton Window, named after Joseph Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, is used to explain how policy ideas gain acceptance and move from idea to policy. The “window”, as Overton saw, could include a wide range of ideas from those with little to no support to those that have matured, gained public traction, and could be supported by the public as legitimate policy options for governments. The “window” was not static. It could — and did — shift, expand, or contract based on social movements, economic pressures, cultural trends, and/or the actions of leaders in the public and private sectors.

Those who wanted to push ideas into the window and gain acceptance and support usually had to spend considerable effort — and sometimes years — promoting and making the case for their cause and moving it into the mainstream. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and Greta Thunberg’s ongoing efforts to push for action on climate change are examples of leaders using their profile to push and keep climate change action in Overton’s Window.

Lately, though, it feels like the Overton Window has been replaced by the Trump Door. While Overton observed and studied what was happening, Trump is more of an active participant. Overton provided us with an analytical framework; Trump’s door is more of a tactical approach.

And this is a big change. The world moves much faster than it did in the mid-90s when Overton first created his “window”. The democratization of communications and the speed of communications means anyone can comment, report, or share an opinion instantly (and often without considering the consequences). Increased polarization means that leaders looking to act and to reinforce support for their desired policies do not have to wait for a majority to support a given policy before they act. They merely need a vocal plurality of their own supporters to move forward with an idea.

Trump hasn’t so much smashed the window as he has replaced it with a large swinging Western saloon-style door. He has shown no interest in framing and positioning an issue for the public’s consideration in hopes of building support from a majority. He is throwing ideas into and out of the public-consideration saloon as fast as possible. Some ideas he throws in as distractions. Others he throws in as announcements of his intent regardless of the public’s perspective.

To those of you saying in your head “I don’t think Trump thinks this deeply about what he is doing,” you could be correct. But the net impact of his actions is the creation of a Trump Door that, unlike a window, is not transparent and, again unlike Overton’s Window, is not about building public acceptance. It is a tool to achieve his goals as fast as possible. When obstacles require a shift in policy — given there is no need to engage the public — he simply throws another idea into the saloon.

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