If you’d prefer reasoned debate, it will start with a collective realization that mobs can’t do much except make noise. They’re not actually very big, for starters — the number of people who replied to Rowling’s tweet wouldn’t fill most Texas college football stadiums, and reasonable people don’t choose their views by polling the crowd at the Aggies-Longhorns game.
More important, most mobs aren’t committed to the effort beyond flicking a thumb. Institutions that ignore the mob are often astonished at how little difference all the outrage makes to their business — and I’d bet Rowling won’t see much evidence of this controversy in her royalty statements.
The censorious power of Mrs. Grundys always depends on the cooperation of the governed, which is why their regime collapsed the moment the baby boomers shrugged off their finger-wagging. If Rowling provides an unmissable public demonstration that it is safe to ignore the current crop, we can hope others will follow her example, and the dictatorship of the proscriptariat will fall as quickly as it arose.
Megan McArdle writing in the Washington Post, quoted by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, 2020-01-02.
October 7, 2024
October 6, 2024
QotD: Putting the past on trial
Historical context is all very well. When it comes to Woolf, perhaps a few details about her novels To the Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway would be appreciated, or some information about her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. But no, instead we are to be hectored about her “challenging, offensive comments and descriptions of race, class and ability which would find unacceptable today”. One wonders what the person responsible for these judgmental remarks has ever accomplished, if anything at all. These petty moralists are like the crabs in the bucket, pulling down the most accomplished out of envy and spite.
The best approach to writers of genius is humility, but this quality seems to be on the decline. We see evidence of this in the self-importance of those who have rewritten books by P.G. Wodehouse, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl. It should go without saying that Wodehouse’s prose cannot be improved, least of all by know-nothing activists who have inveigled their way into the publishing industry.
I recently bought the complete set of Fleming’s James Bond books, but I had to seek out second-hand copies to ensure that they had not been sanitised by talentless “sensitivity readers”. Yes of course, these books include sentiments that are unacceptable by today’s standards. But what’s so wrong with that? “All women love semi-rape” is a shocking sentence – in this case, it’s by the female narrator of The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) – but what purpose does censoring the passage actually serve?
The rewriting of books and the creation of cautionary QR codes are symptoms of our current strain of puritanism. These are the descendants of those religious zealots who shut the theatres in 1642 out of fear that the masses might be corrupted. And while I concede that Ian Fleming’s views on relationships between the sexes may not have been progressive, I don’t feel the need to be berated about it before enjoying the adventures of James Bond.
It’s not as though Bond is even meant to be a likeable character; the man has a licence to kill, for heaven’s sake. This isn’t someone you’d wish to invite to a dinner party. In that regard he’s reminiscent of the hero of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, a character based on the bully from Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes. He’s a violent boorish rapist, but the novels are still entertaining because most of us aren’t reading them for moral instruction.
In exploring the gamut of human experience, writers will often feel compelled to recreate the grotesque, the uncomfortable, the outrageous, even the downright evil. Who ever supposed that works of fiction should restrict themselves to rose-tinted idealisations of human existence? Imagine Macbeth without the regicide, or King Lear without the eye-gouging, or Titus Andronicus without the cannibalism. Would Dante’s Divine Comedy retain its power if some “sensitivity reader” excised the Inferno?
Andrew Doyle, “Putting the past on trial”, Andrew Doyle, 2024-07-04.
October 4, 2024
Star Trek – “From Quoting Shakespeare to Diversity Woman’s Hour”
Every week, Substack helpfully compiles a list of posts that might be of interest to me, like this one by Isaac Young, discusses the fading phenomenon of Star Trek. (Disclaimer: I was a huge fan of the original TV series, but stopped watching the various Star Trek TV shows late in the Next Generation era and haven’t seen much after that … this essay covers parts of the canon that are largely terra incognita for me.)
In order to understand what a thing is, I believe you must first understand how it dies. Endings are the most important part of a story because they are the culmination of everything that came before. They dictate the legacy and the memory. It is through the ending that we can finally put the body of work in its proper context. What is Romeo and Juliet if we cut the final act out, and can you really understand the play if you stop just before their suicide? So therefore, in order to understand this franchise, I have to begin this essay with Star Trek‘s suicide.
Whatever we make of the heroism of James T. Kirk, the high-minded principles of Jean-Luc Picard, and the reactionary realism of Benjamin Sisko, we have to come to grips with the tragic reality that those things did not last. They were discarded for feminism, queerness, and diversity. And what do those things mean? Modern Star Trek has been quite clear about that. It’s about emasculated men and raging girlbosses. It’s about celebrating every sexual appetite except the one that produces functional families. It’s about fetishizing racial revenge and elevating mediocrity at the expense of excellence.
You’ll find Star Trek has never been more vulgar, more profane, more debauched. It’s small-minded in everything from the cast to production values to the storytelling. It’s about lecturing to the untouchables about their privilege and holding victimhood as the highest virtue. All those tiny elements which we ignored or snickered at in previous shows became the substance of their successors, while those parts we loved about Star Trek — the parts that made it great — were left behind or turned into nostalgia-bait.
The awkward reality of being a normal person from twenty years ago is that every franchise and IP has stabbed you in the back — viciously. And yet despite this, I still harbor a great love for the films and tv series of yesteryear. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this essay. It is out of a great sense of love and admiration that I am dedicating this piece, and that is how I want readers to understand my review. I’m not here to tell you Star Trek was evil or anything like that. I’m here to tell you that Star Trek was great — brilliant even, but the rot was there from the beginning.
Looking back, what should I say was the core of Star Trek? Or rather, what was the nature of Star Trek? Was it in those ephemeral elements which turned out to only be in passing? Or was it those elements which had been there from the beginning, and are only now being noticed, like flesh peeling away to reveal the bones of a rotting corpse? And to continue this metaphor, what should I make of this bloated, festering body when its soul has clearly long departed?
But how can I judge old Trek for the new? How can I possibly analyze this franchise with this lens when it has clearly fallen to ideologically captured writers? Surely this once beloved series will course correct once Hollywood hears all the negative feedback from fans.
I don’t know who still believes that anymore, but I feel obligated to address this criticism for that one person who still doesn’t understand how we got here. The world didn’t suddenly turn crazy in 2016. Wokeness is not an aberration or an anomaly, but the logical endpoint of liberalism. It is egalitarianism, personal freedom, and materialism taken to their natural conclusions. It is Star Trek‘s values as they actually operate in the real world.
I can look at franchise, see it as a product of the Left, and reliably chart its degeneration through understanding those values and their decline. Star Trek isn’t bad because it fell to a bad writer’s room or predatory corporate interests. It’s bad because we’re currently in a culture-wide crisis that is affecting every form of media entertainment.
If there is one thing I want to get across in this essay, it’s that what we’re witnessing is the real Star Trek as it springs from its stated values. This is the most honest the series has ever been. Once you strip away the Shakespeare, the heroic characters, the sci-fi concepts, the witty banter, and all the moral framing, this rot is what you’ll find underneath. It’s always been there. The bad news is that Star Trek as the political propaganda it has always been is quite ugly. The good news is that those things which made Star Trek great, those things which reached for the good, the true, and the beautiful—those things are eternal. And they aren’t going to die with Star Trek.
October 3, 2024
Refuting one old myth about “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre”
In the visible portion of a pay-walled post, Andrew Doyle explains why we should stop using the hoary old anti-free speech cliché that was refuted nearly 50 years ago by the US Supreme Court:
There are few people who are courageous enough to openly admit that they oppose freedom of speech, and so we would be forgiven for thinking that the authoritarian mindset is rare. In truth, those who believe that censorship can be justified typically resort to a set of hackneyed and specious arguments. It doesn’t seem to matter how often these misconceptions are conclusively rebutted, they continue to be trotted out with depressing regularity.
Take yesterday’s Vice Presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, in which one of these very misconceptions was parroted once again. This is how it happened:
JD Vance: You guys attack us for not believing in democracy. The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to …
Tim Walz: Or threatening, or hate speech …
JD Vance: … use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship. Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas, and then let’s come together afterwards.
Tim Walz: You can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.
The cliché that “you can’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre” originates in the 1917 United States Supreme Court ruling against Charles Schenck, a socialist who had issued a broadside calling for young men to refuse military conscription and was convicted under the Espionage Act. These were the circumstances under which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the statement: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a theatre and causing a panic”. Note that the word “falsely” is invariably dropped when quoted by advocates for censorship.
Leaving that telling little edit aside, it should be remembered that this was never a legally binding statement. Walz maintains that this is “the Supreme Court test”, but Holmes merely used the analogy to justify upholding Schenck’s prosecution. In fact, the decision of the court in Schenck v. United States was overruled in 1969.
Do I need to say that I didn’t watch the debate? I don’t even watch the debates when I actually have a vote to cast, so I’m going on highly selective sources to at least pretend to care about the VP debate. I do like a waspish line on almost any politician, so Bridget Phetasy’s description gave me a mental image of the event that seems highly truthy: “The vibe of this debate is adult confronting the coach who molested him”. J.D. Tuccille has more:
To illustrate the contrast between the recent presidential debate and this week’s vice-presidential match, I’ll say that I dread either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris taking office as president, but I fear the policies of veep hopefuls J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. At the top of both party’s tickets are individuals of uncertain competence and shaky basic decency, while their sidekicks come off as the designated adults, ready to step in if the winning presidential candidate falters, and more than excited to implement their chosen programs, God help us. That said, Vance had a much better night than Walz.
From the very beginning, J.D. Vance gave us a glimpse of what Trump might be like minus a personality disorder and with focus. He looked cool and collected, with his arguments organized in his head. He was also able to quickly pivot to address — or dodge (this is politics, after all) — the CBS moderators’ questions.
By contrast, Walz appeared like he was sweat-soaking his notes into illegibility as he tried to remember which part of the previous night’s memorized cram session he should spit out. He eventually regained some of his footing, though he generally seemed nervous and unprepared.
“The vibe of this debate is adult confronting the coach who molested him,” quipped podcaster and writer Bridget Phetasy, who isn’t known for being merciful.
The Democrat’s discomfort probably came to a head when he was asked to explain why he long claimed to have been in Hong Kong in 1989, with front-row seats to the Tiananmen Square massacre, when news reports and photographic evidence showed he was at home in Nebraska. Much hemming, hawing and references to a small-town upbringing ensued, which was painful to watch. The closest he came to admitting he lied was conceding, “I’m a knucklehead at times” and that he “misspoke.”
QotD: Historical echoes in the American left and right
The Trump movement does have some real [historical Nazi] characteristics. Many low-level people feel remarkably empowered to do things, to get creative to help the cause (and also make some coin; how many Trump medals, flags, and coffee cups does one buy?), and to get out there and just stir the pot for the Orange guy. Then we saw The Donald at the top not exercising real power, other than to exhort others to get shit done, whatever unnamed shit that needed doing.
My first run-through suggests that calling the Juggs and their minions “filthy commies” actually is not just a kneejerk response, but it lands mostly true, in the ways that matter. The Jugg argument that Trump and his people are a bunch of Nazis also has some real truthy elements to it as well (though the true elements are generally probably far afield from the Nazi stuff the Juggs have in mind).
Commies and Nazis gain traction when the basic job of governance is found lacking, and the caliber of people tasked with getting things back in line is not up to the task. Then the various totalitarian solutions become more popular. Even when the intentions are pure (I will give most of the Trump people that assumption), unfettered ambitions, allowed to flower, will go bad if the normal checks and balances of the system are all out of whack. It is just human nature.
Our systems are all out of whack. That is why AOC can call for impeachment of [six US Supreme Court justices] with a straight face, and there is no broadly based “hey, wait a minute, Bucko” response. Things might be too far gone, and there is no way to pull back into a system that actually well serves the average American (think of what constituencies the typical elected official actually serves — the deep state apparat, the ultra-rich guys, and the corporate lobbyists). It all means the Trump movement is a tool, not to restore something, but to accelerate the “get through it and start afresh”. With that in mind, the November results tend to be more of “six of one, half a dozen of the other” than people think they are.
“Dutch”, commenting on “How Juggs Think the World Works”, Founding Questions, 2024-07-02.
October 2, 2024
Poilievre should learn from “Two Tier” Keir’s political stumbles
Sir Keir Starmer swept into office just four months ago, but if you tracked the unforced errors, gaffes, stumbles and bumbles it might as well have been four years instead. Most politicians winning nearly 2/3rds of the seats in Parliament can expect a lengthy “honeymoon” period, but “Two Tier” Keir is far from a typical politician … he’s terrible at his new job. In The Line, Andrew MacDougall charts some of the worst self-inflicted wounds Starmer’s government has suffered and indicates how Pierre Poilievre can avoid them:
Prime Ministers Starmer and Trudeau at the NATO summit in Washington.
Image from Justin Trudeau’s X account.
If Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre thinks he’s halfway home to a happy life in power, he should look across the pond to see the misery now engulfing Sir Keir Starmer and his new Labour government.
Where to start? Sadly for Starmer, there is a smorgasbord of bad political choice.
[…]
And while Starmer did his level best to stay vague during the election campaign about his planned solutions, as all good opposition leaders do in order to minimize incoming attacks, he was meant to have a plan to sort it all out once he got into the building. But there’s no plan. And that’s according to sources inside 10 Downing Street. That’s right: we’re just three months into a majority parliament and a government with a virtually unopposable mandate and the calls are already coming from inside the building saying it’s all gone to shit.
As I was saying, it’s all very late-stage Trudeau.
Fortunately for Canadians who are desperate for a diversion from Trudeau’s path, Pierre Poilievre is a better politician than Keir Starmer. A vastly better politician. And while that might sound like a pejorative in an era where no politician is trusted, the pile of public policy muck heaps facing Western governments won’t be cleared without someone who understands — deeply and intuitively — the politics of the current time.
Starmer understands none of the current dynamic. He defeated the U.K. Conservatives because the U.K. Conservatives defeated themselves. The country would have taken anyone to stop the Tory psychodrama, even a boring North London lawyer who wouldn’t know politics if it smacked him on his newly-tailored arse. People are angry that nothing appears to be working as it should. Not the hospitals. Not the borders. Not the economy. And not their culture. Everything feels different and/or worse to what they’ve come to expect and they blame the (waves arms frantically) “establishment” for their ills. There’s a reason Nigel Farage’s Reform party won its first seats and came second in nearly a hundred more.
People who are already feeling stretched don’t want to hear, as they’ve heard from Starmer, that their taxes are going up. They want to hear they’re going to go down. “Axe the tax”, anyone? They don’t want to hear that things suck; they want to hear how things will get better. They don’t want to be sung hymns about the benefits of immigration. They want to see someone spot the problem that’s gotten out of control and assure them that it’s not racist to do something about it. They want someone who looks and sounds like them, not another politician in a suit saying things politicians in suits always say. They want radical change, not minor dial adjusting on the dashboards of power. Anything else is more of the discredited same.
Canada’s late-stage Trudeau inheritance is daunting. It cannot be avoided. But it must first be acknowledged, not by simply pointing at the last guy and saying “It’s all his fault” (i.e. the classic politician move), but by mirroring the real distress being felt by the many who’ve lost out where and as the traditional power brokers have won. This is where the room to manoeuvre comes from. Something has gone wrong and it’s going to take something different to produce a different result.
Duelling reports on how Javier Milei’s Argentinian “shock therapy” is working
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander tries to find something approaching the truth between the pantingly enthusiastic libertarian reports and the angrily negative progressive reports:
How is Javier Milei, the new-ish libertarian president of Argentina doing?
According to right-wing sources, he’s doing amazing, inflation is vanquished, and Argentina is on the road to First World status.
According to left-wing sources, he’s devastating the country, inflation has ballooned, and Argentina is mired in unprecedented dire poverty.
I was confused enough to investigate further. Going through various topics in more depth:
1: Government Surplus
When Milei was elected, Argentina went from constant deficits to almost unprecedented government surplus, and has continued to run a surplus for the past six months.
This wasn’t fancy macroeconomic magic. Milei just cut government spending:
- He eliminated 9 of 18 government ministries, including the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity.
- He laid off 24,000 government workers (and hopes to increase that to 70,000).
- He cut fuel subsidies (paywalled link)
- He may have cut (or at least not increased, which given inflation levels is an effective cut) funding for universities, which now complain they have no electricity and are giving classes in the dark.
- He has changed the way inflation affects pensions in what was realistically a large budget cut.
- Et cetera.
This source says he cut the size of government by about 30% overall. Unsurprisingly, this eliminated the Argentine deficit.
[…]
6: Overall
When Javier Milei took office, he promised to do shock therapy that would short-term plunge Argentina into a recession, but long-term end its economic woes.
He has fulfilled his campaign promise to plunge Argentina into a recession. Whether this will long-term end its economic woes remains to be seen.
I think he gets credit for some purely political victories (completing the budget cuts he said he would complete), for decreasing inflation, and for improving the housing market. But in the end, history will judge him for whether his shock therapy eventually bears fruit. I don’t think that judgment can be made yet, and I don’t see many economists eager to go out on a limb and say that there are strong signs that his particular brand of shock therapy will definitely work/fail.
There are disappointingly few Milei prediction markets, probably because it’s hard to operationalize “he makes the economy good”. This multi-pronged mega-market has few traders, and weakly predicts a mix of good and bad things, maybe leaning a little good. But here is a more specific one:
… which compared to Argentina’s historical GDP growth rate seems — no, sorry, Argentina’s historical GDP growth rate is too weird to draw any conclusions.
And maybe the most important test:
October 1, 2024
TikTok’s Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) community
The more we experience the joys of widespread social media, the more people seem to discover ways to bring attention to themselves for genuine or dishonest reasons. Freddie deBoer looks at the DID-sufferers on TikTok and assesses the chance that such a rare disorder can have had so many newly discovered sufferers:
Let me turn back to the TikTok “systems”, the strange, maybe-shrinking world of adolescent women on social media who pretend to have an incredibly rare and debilitating mental illness and treat it as a fun and quirky alternative lifestyle.
This piece from The Verge, though a little misguided, is a good jumping off point for this topic. The basic story is pretty simple. Dissociative identity disorder (DID), long referred to as multiple personality disorder, is a remarkably controversial diagnosis that has long captured the public imagination. It’s not hard to see why; the idea of someone who switches from one personality to the other is lurid and dramatic, making it easy fodder for television. (The number of episodes of legal dramas about DID is immense.) The condition also invites a particularly stark consideration of the question of individual agency and culpability for bad deeds. As you can imagine, pretending to have “alters” can be very convenient; a notorious case involved an embezzler whose only defense for his crimes was that he had multiple personalities and one of them stole the money. There have long been researchers and clinicians in psychiatry who doubt the very existence of DID, and even among those who are friendlier to the concept, the disorder is known to be incredibly rare. Many prominent cases of DID have proven in time to be fraudulent. The most famous American case, that of “Sybil“, was particularly tragic. The woman who supposedly suffered from the disorder, who faced a childhood of abuse and neglect, would go on to admit to her psychiatrist that she had made the alternate personalities up. (We know because we have the letters.) But the doctor, who had been made wealthy and famous thanks to her work with Sybil, threatened to withdrawn her financial support if Sybil did not recant that confession. Having no other choice, she did.
What DID TikTok asks us to believe is that, in the span of maybe half a decade, tens of thousands of adolescent women developed DID, an exceedingly rare disorder marked by symptoms entirely unlike those on your For You page. The Verge article, written by Jessica Lucas, is typical of the media’s take on this issue, to the degree that they’ve written about it at all: relentlessly sympathetic to the DID TikTok adolescents even when grudgingly admitting that there’s a lot of fakery. And admit that she does, as it would be essentially impossible to pretend otherwise. Even the wokest wokie couldn’t help but look at this shit and conclude that a lot of it is bullshit.
The cases of DID that are considered to be particularly valid or believable are very few, and the people who have suffered in them have been people living absolutely wasted lives, lives filled with abuse and instability and addiction and misery; the overwhelming majority of DID TikTokers appear to be living perfectly stable and successful adolescent lives. Those with DID have almost never professed to be able to switch from one alter to another on command; many DID TikTokers playact that exact behavior for their viewers. Alters are notoriously uncooperative towards each other; TikTok DID videos routinely feature alters happily participating in “roll calls” in which they switch from one identity to the next, conveniently timed for the creation of #content. (The DID people claim that really they’re just opportunistically capturing organic switches, but a) it’s very clear that many of these videos are filmed in one day and b) that would still require alters to willingly turn the camera on and get into the costume etc, which is not at all how alters have traditionally acted.) In the DID literature alters are almost never aware of what’s happening when another alter is “fronting”; on DID TikTok they almost universally are, justified with the convenient idea of “co-consciousness,” which is one of many evolutions of DID these people have implemented to allow their little pageant to continue. Most people with DID diagnosis, historically, have not been photogenic women with an interest in getting more followers. I could go on.
Lucas’s piece is particularly useful for the remarkable, remarkably depressing story of Dr. Matthew Robinson, a clinician and researcher from Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital. (The site of Girl, Interrupted, among other things.) Like a lot of people in psychiatry, Robinson noted with alarm that his hospital had “been inundated with referrals and requests from schools, parents, and our own adolescent treatment and testing services to assess for symptoms of what [patients] call DID.” He proceeded to discuss the difficulties this sort of situation provokes in an already-overtaxed mental health system, and spoke frankly about the fact that a considerable number of the people presenting with this disorder obviously do not in fact have it. He stated plainly that which many are too circumspect to say, which is that these TikTokers are faking. The consequence, of saying this in a lecture with his professional peers, was review-bombing of the hospital online, threats, a call to have Robinson’s medical license revoked, and sufficient harassment that McLean pulled online videos of the lecture. The online mob engaged in the typical social justice-vocabulary freakout campaign, McLean folded, and as stated in the piece, most researchers are now too scared to publicly comment on this absurd situation. If someone tells you that there is no such thing as a social justice-inflected cancellation campaign, you can point to this exact scenario and to the vicious and vengeful disability rights movement in general.
To be clear, I think that probably literally zero of the people who perform DID on TikTok have the disorder. Zero. I imagine that a significant portion of them have deluded themselves into thinking they do. But I’m quite confident that most of them are very well aware that they’re faking.
The pros and cons of living the digital life
Spaceman Spiff considers how much of modern western life is now being experienced online rather than in the real world and what are the trade-offs inherent in the switch to the life digital:
Life is what you pay attention to. Increasingly many of us are immersing into virtual worlds and spending less time out in the real world. We are attending to digital realms.
Everything it seems is going online, from shopping to entertainment to work. Almost no aspect of life remains untouched by the slow creep of technology.
Our entertainment is digital and our social networks are found online. For increasing numbers this may be their only connection to others.
Even work is becoming unavoidably remote with Zoom and comparable tools now standard fare.
The digitization of life continues apace. As a result, we are present in the real world less and less and this cannot be altogether healthy.
Many benefits
There are obvious benefits to our new digital world.
Thanks to the internet much has become convenient and easy. We can access a wide array of goods and have them delivered for a small fee.
The scale of the options is impossible to beat. The real world could not possibly provide the options on display. We can peruse virtual warehouses with everything. No bookstore is as big as Amazon.
The post-Covid world accelerated aspects of digital adoption, particularly video-based conferencing and other virtual tools. This is now ubiquitous, particularly in work settings.
One-click ordering and fast delivery makes everything else seem unreasonably tedious and complicated. It is a hassle going to a physical location to buy clothes or books or food when you can pay a slave to deliver it.
But people sense they lose something with digital tools even when it is convenient to not travel or leave home. It is not the same as face to face. Importantly it brings the world into our homes, so we cannot easily escape.
Other less visible changes are apparent too. We seem to socialize less. We go out less often.
We dine in and often by having unhealthy food delivered, all chosen and prepared by others. The appeal of going out and mixing with strangers is waning.
Behind this is a gradual bureaucratization of everything as we are continually reminded of external dangers; germs, extreme weather, domestic terrorism, none of which are likely to ever touch us but we are told are ever present. These require interventions we never get to vote on but affect us nonetheless.
The safety-obsessed post-Covid world wants you at home where you are safe and sound. Digital tools have proliferated to serve this need.
But of course, for all the benefits we can enjoy for living the internet lifestyle, there are also significant negatives …
September 30, 2024
“This quite obviously proves that free speech is a tyrannical concept”
At The Critic, Titania McGrath decries the manifest horrors of letting ordinary people say whatever they want … without punishment:
“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle
The government has repeatedly pointed out that the riots in the UK were directly caused by bad words on the internet. One of those arrested was an elderly retired midwife from Devon, who had accidentally read an inflammatory Facebook post whilst browsing for cupcake recipes. Within ten minutes, she found herself punching Persian toddlers and throwing grenades at a mosque.
For all the endless whingeing of free speech extremists, Starmer appreciates that words must be controlled to ensure that his subjects behave themselves. Surely most reasonable people would rather have their liberties restricted than live in a fascist state?
The next step is to see Elon Musk extradited. It was bad enough that he renamed Twitter as “X”, which is just a swastika with a few bits chopped off. But he has also allowed users to say whatever they like. As a result, wrong opinions are being duplicated at an alarming rate.
“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” wrote Robert Reich in the Guardian. Although I don’t approve of his surname, he makes a valid case.
Back in 2013, Starmer was quoted as saying that too many Twitter prosecutions could “have a chilling effect for free speech”. These were dangerous words, and although Starmer has since changed his mind, he should probably be calling for his own prosecution.
If you don’t want to be arrested, don’t say the wrong things. It really is that simple.
Saving German democracy seems to require not following the law for some reason
[Update below] I’m sure that Germany is being well-served by their politicians who only seem to want to obey the law when it suits them. I mean, that’s how you save democracy, right? By ignoring democratic laws for a “higher good” every now and again?
Jürgen Treutler, the supergenius fascist who discovered that all you need to do to establish fascism is follow all democratic laws and procedures rigorously and to the letter.
They never tire of telling us that we live in a democracy.
This means that that dreaded mass known as “the people” are permitted – with however much groaning and reluctance – to present themselves every four years to choose their representatives. These representatives then betake themselves to the parliament, where they form some manner of government, which proceeds to rule us in highly democratic ways. This is is literally the best thing ever, except for the fact that “the people”, in their profound stupidity, cannot always be relied upon to vote for the right parties. Sometimes they vote for the wrong ones, and in these cases democratic solutions must be found to rein in the rabble’s undemocratic exercise of democracy.
The people of Thüringen have proven themselves particularly inconvenient to democracy, in that they have exercised their democratic rights to vote overwhelmingly for the evil, fascist and antidemocratic party known as Alternative für Deutschland. What makes the AfD so evil and fascist is never quite explained, but we hear all the time that they are very bad so the point must be beyond question. The people of Thüringen transgressed against democracy so powerfully, that they gave the AfD 32 seats of their 88-seat state parliament – far more than they granted to any of the upstanding, democratic parties. These parties include such paragons of democratic virtue as Die Linke (the Left Party), which somehow manages to be both officially democratic and also the direct successor to the DDR-era Socialist Unity Party (they got a mere 12 seats); the Linke-offshoot party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wageknecht (they got 15 seats); the Christian Democrats (they got 23 seats); and the Social Democrats (they got 6 seats, lol).
Now, a naive person might think that the AfD, being the party most favoured by the people of Thüringen, should enjoy certain parliamentary prerogatives. Existing procedures, for example, grant the strongest party the right to propose candidates for the office of parliamentary president. The president is the person who presides over the meetings of the parliament; he is like a glorified committee chair and his powers are not all that great. The very idea that the AfD might have the right to suggest their own candidates for president, however, strikes enormous fear into the hearts of the “democratic” parties, who are determined to save Thuringian democracy by all the antidemocratic means at their disposal. If necessary, we must destroy democracy itself, to save the Thuringian parliament from the spectre of a democratically elected AfD president.
This brings us to the absolute unprecedented clownshow that unfolded yesterday at the Thuringian parliament in Erfurt. It was set to be a day of boring, routine procedure, when the newly elected parliament would constitute itself and elect a president. Thüringen is anomalous, in that this state – alone of all the federal states of Germany – has a specific law mandating adherence to parliamentary procedures. New parliaments cannot just change these procedures on the fly; they have to be officially constituted as a legislative body first. These legally mandated procedures require that an acting “senior president” preside over the first meeting of the new parliament. This senior president is simply the oldest member of the dominant party – in this case an affable rotund AfD politician named Jürgen Treutler.
Update: eugyppius updates the state of play in Thuringia after the relevant court rules that the law can be set aside in this case:
In not-so-good news (but as I predicted), the state constitutional court in Thüringen ruled in favour of the CDU last Friday. The other parties were able to change the procedural rules in the Thuringian parliament and exclude the AfD not only from the office of president, but also from the entire executive committee of the Landtag. The “democratic” parties have also altered procedural rules to reduce AfD representation on parliamentary committees, effectively preventing the strongest party in the Landtag from exercising their blocking minority there.
They really are determined to destroy the democracy to save it.
QotD: Compound eyes as models of how the surveillance state operates
The compound eye is a good way to imagine how the surveillance state will keep tabs on the subjects in the near future. Unlike the dystopian future imagined by science fiction, it will not be one eye focusing on one heretic, following him around as he goes about his business. Instead it will be tens of millions of eyes obtaining various bits of information, sending it back to the data-centers run by Big Tech. That information will be assembled into the broad mosaic that is daily life.
For example, rather than use informants and undercover operatives to flesh out conspiracies against the state, the surveillance state will use community detection to model the network of heretics. Since everyone is hooked into the grid in some fashion and everyone addresses nodes of the grid on a regular basis, keeping track of someone is now something that can be done from a cubicle. There is no need to actually follow someone around as they go about their life.
For example, everyone has a mobile phone. At every point, the phone is tracking its location, which means it is tracking your location. It also knows the time and day when you go into various businesses. Most people use cards to pay miscellaneous items, so just that information would tell the curious a lot about you. Combine that information with the same information from other phones that come into close proximity with your phone and figuring out the community structure is simple.
Of course, the mobile phone is not the only input device. Over Christmas, millions of Americans were encouraged to install surveillance devices in their homes by friends and family. Maybe it was an Alexa listening device from Amazon or a Nest Doorbell surveillance device from Google. All of these gadgets are collecting data on your life inside and around your home. It is then fed to the same data-centers that have all of your movements and associations collected from your phone.
The Z Man, “The Compound Eye”, The Z Blog, 2020-01-08.
September 28, 2024
The rise in niqab and hijab use among Muslim women in Britain
In The Conservative Woman, Gillian Dymond discusses the cultural significance of Muslim women’s distinctive styles of clothing in modern Britain:
AS I WENT to the shops the other day in Whitley Bay, a strangely incongruous figure passed me. It was a woman in a niqab. In a recent article on his Substack, Joshua Trevino wrote an elegy for London: “I had not seen this many women in hijabs since a brief stint working in Jordan decades ago, and I had never seen this many women in a niqab, ever.” Up here on the north-east coast of England, it is different. True, even in Newcastle hijabs proliferate, but I had never before encountered the full niqab there, let alone in the small seaside town where I live.
The Government, I understand, are considering bringing in a law which would criminalise Islamophobia, as defined by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims. “Islamophobia,” this states, “is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness“.
This, as Andrew Doyle points out here, is nonsense, incorrectly conflating a belief-system with racial identity. Let’s be accurate: Muslims can be of any race, English included. Moreover, different Muslims exhibit different kinds and degrees of “Muslimness”, from the Sufi, mystically seeking the divine, through the undogmatic, many of whom happily dispense with headscarf and hijab and the more bellicose interpretations of the holy books, to the kind of male fanatic who, on seeing a female co-religionist wearing Western dress and sporting lipstick, seizes her by the hair and slams her head on the dashboard of the car she has been shamelessly driving.
There is a variety of “Muslimness”, in short, whose intolerance cannot be tolerated in a tolerant society, and whose existence requires not protective legislation, but public acknowledgement of its incompatibility with the British way of life.
I do not know how the woman whose eyes peered through the slit in her black draperies felt about parading her glaring lack of integration on a street in north-east England. Did she go proudly and self-righteously into the alien throng, or had she been forced out of the house, heart pounding, to run the gauntlet of raised eyebrows in her eye-catching gear? What did she think of the women around her, hair and faces exposed, arms bare to soak up every last ray of autumnal sunshine, some of them, fresh from the beach, wearing shorts? Did she despise their “immodesty”? Did she envy them?
Who knows? There can be no casual breaching of the niqab’s anonymity, no spontaneous communication, when confronted by a garment which puts up barricades against the usual signals and responses of easy human intercourse.
On the other hand, the mentality of the men who insist on enveloping their wives and daughters head-to-foot in long black shrouds before they are allowed out in public is very clear indeed. These men have been taught to view women as assets to be protected, and they no doubt believe that the heavy-handed protection they impose is necessary, because they take it for granted that no man is able, or should be expected, to control his sexual urges in the face of female allurements. As for any woman who does not remain decently covered in deference to the male’s helpless susceptibility, she should know the consequences, and deserves everything coming to her.
QotD: Doom! Doom! And more Doom!
Monty used to use this image at Ace of Spades H.Q., and I certainly think it’s appropriate to include it here.
Lately I’ve become an awful old woman. My reaction, during the con, to the little card hotels leave in your bathroom, in the hopes that you’ll save them laundry money — you know the one that says that if you want to help save the Earth or the Environment (I don’t remember which, precisely, these pagan divinities all run together in my head) you’ll hang up your towel and use it another day — was to sigh and say: Deary, the Earth has been here for billions of years before I was born. It will be here for billions of years before my very atoms have been dispersed in its general Earthness. I can’t save it. There isn’t a tupperware large enough. And besides where would I put it? Who would dust it?
In the event, the only audience for my musings was my husband who consented to chuckle at it, as he went on. And we didn’t hang up the towels. We might have, had they made a sensible business appeal “if you save us money, we’ll be able to keep our prices lower” but we’re not at home to religious pandering to religions not our own. As far as I’m concerned they might as well ask me not to use electricity so as to spare the feelings of Zeus, god of thunderbolt.
So, yes, you see, I have become an awful woman. Or if you prefer, I’ve become a fool or a sadist in Heinlein’s definition of such: Someone who tells the truth in social situations.
But you see, I am so very tired of all the genuflecting and bowing to the doom du jour, as well as the market distortions, worsening of problems and outright damage to people and deaths or grievous arm (not to mention not being born) while trying to avoid largely imaginary dangers and issues.
What do I mean? Well, how many people had no children because they were pounded about the face and head with the impending doom of “overpopulation”? How many of those people, now nearing their last decades, bitterly regret the childlessness? Worse, how many people in how many third world countries were encouraged to be sterilized due to both the “coming doom” of overpopulation, and the horrific mid-century misapprehension that children caused poverty? How many women in China were forcibly aborted? How many toddlers confined to dying rooms? How many women in India were strongly persuaded to abort female children, or expose unwanted ones newly born? (Yes, I know it might have happened anyway, but the westerners were encouraging people to have fewer and fewer children, which only fed that nonsense.)
Other dooms? So many dooms, so little time to catalogue them. When I was little, I knew I’d probably starve or die of thirst due to overpopulation. What was worse, it was overpopulation far away, since most people near me couldn’t afford more than one or two kids, if they ever hoped to live a middle class life. (Spoiler: it was taxes, requiring work from both parents that caused poverty, not an excess of children.) I also expected to freeze in the coming ice age, caused by all the pollution, from people making things in factories, having cars, and using electrical light. Also, as it happened, in the seventies we were told fossil fuels were running out, so while we were freezing, we wouldn’t even be able to take a flight somewhere warmer, to escape the advancing glaciers. But that was all right, because we were all going to die in a nuclear exchange that would happen any day now, in a conflagration between the USSR and the US, whom we were assured were absolutely equal in morality, and both just wanted supremacy for … no reason really.
Of course, the things urged to stop all of this ranged from criminal — the aforementioned forced abortions and killing of children — to the merely dangerous — urging the nuclear disarmament of the West (mostly propaganda from the Soviet Union, mind) which we were assured would bring about peace and not world communism (which in the way of such things would shortly after be followed by world famine and world depopulation.)
By the time the Gaia cultists flipped from a fear of freezing to a fear of boiling, I only half went along, and only until I realized once more it made no sense whatsoever.
Sarah Hoyt, “Doom Doom Doom!”, According to Hoyt, 2024-06-26.
September 27, 2024
So much “modern art” ages like milk
Most of Andrew Doyle’s latest column is behind the paywall, but I found myself nodding along to the first portion about the descent of modern art:
The works on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) have been curated with care. On my recent visit I began on the fifth floor, where you can admire art from the 1880s until the 1940s. On the fourth floor you will find works from the 1950s to the 1970s, and then two floors below are the collections from the 1980s until the present day. I wonder whether this arrangement is deliberate; the literal descent of the visitor from one floor to the next reflecting the figurative descent of artistic quality through the century.
And so while on the upper floor you can admire the melting clocks of Salvador Dalí’s most famous and haunting work, The Persistence of Memory (1931), and René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928), a curious meditation on romanticised desire, by the time you reach the second floor there are some cuddly toys glued together into clumps which are dangling from the ceiling. I didn’t bother to check who was responsible for this nonsense.
I have often tried to defend some of the more intriguing efforts at modern conceptual art, but I also recognise that we must be able to admit when art is simply bad. I felt the same when I saw the most recent sculpture to grace the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. It is a piece by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles entitled Mil Veces un Instante. It consists of over seven-hundred death masks of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people arranged into a cuboid. The faces are meant to represent those who have been the victims of violence, including the artist’s friend Karla who was murdered in Juárez in December 2015.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of the passion behind the project, or how the tragedy of this death informed the vision of the piece, but as a work of art it is banal. Like many conceptual pieces inspired by voguish identity politics, it is propagandistic and uninspiring. The Pink News has claimed that those who dislike the piece are “bigots”. I would say they simply have good taste.
I suppose it is an improvement on Heather Phillipson’s godawful “The End”, a sculpture of a dollop of whipped cream with a cherry, a drone and a fly on the top which was finally taken down from the fourth plinth in 2022. I doubt that anyone except the artist and her close family members were disappointed to see it gone. While I understand the subjectivity of such matters, surely we should be aspiring to higher standards when it comes to art in public spaces?
