Quotulatiousness

November 28, 2023

Geert Wilders

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

Mark Steyn on the suddenly fascinating-to-American-media Dutch politician Geert Wilders, with whom he has had a long association:

Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV).
Photo by Wouter Engler via Wikimedia Commons.

Times are bad, and the respectable chaps are explicit about their eagerness to make them more so — more mass immigration, more green bollocks, more “digital identity”, more “variants” and more “public health”, more mutilation and sterilisation of your middle-schoolers …

This last week I’ve received a bazillion queries demanding to know what I make of Geert Wilders. It’s true that a lot of commentary on his victory is close to witless: in America, he is apparently “the Dutch Trump” — because they’re both, er, blond. As David Reaboi pointed out on Twitter, Wilders has been a thorn in the side of the Dutch state since the days when “Trump was donating to Democrats”. In 2005, when The Donald was still sufficiently “respectable” that Hillary Clinton attended his wedding, Wilders had already been expelled from his party for objecting to Turkish membership of the European Union.

So he’s been at this a long time – and yours truly goes back a long way with him. He did me the great honour of inviting me to write the introduction to his book, Marked for Death, which is a cracking read — not just my bit, but his parts too: Geert writes way better in English than most anglo politicians do. (We have a few copies at the SteynOnline bookstore, and I’ll even sign it for you: the perfect Christmas gift for the “far right” members of your family.)

But here’s the most relevant aspect of how Wilders was ahead of the game. I try not to let my own twelve years in the dank septic tank of Washington pseudo-justice get to me, but, as you know, for me the only salient point about this US election season is that the multitudes of prosecutors and judges of the American state are willing to torture the plain meaning of the nation’s laws in order to get Trump convicted of … something, anything, as long as it gets him banged up in gaol for the rest of his days.

This is the central fact of our increasingly post-democratic age: the criminalisation of political opposition. If you’re in European-style multi-party systems, they’ll deny you bank accounts and seize your kids’ iPads, and if necessary find twenty coppers to jump you in the street. But, if you’re in America’s bloody awful frozen two-party system, the leader of Party A will unleash the resources of the world’s most lavishly funded Deep State on the leader of Party B and persuade anyone around him to cop a plea on crimes they didn’t commit — mainly because those crimes don’t actually exist.

In that sense, rather than Geert being the Dutch Trump, Trump is the American Geert. Until Biden came along, no other settled western democracy had been as zealous as the Netherlands in prosecuting opposition politicians for their policy platforms.

November 27, 2023

The slackening pace of technological innovation

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

Freddie deBoer thinks we’re living off the diminishing fumes of a much more innovative and dynamic era:

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall – three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

At one point, I was giving my little spiel about how we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation – that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side. You’ve heard this from me before, and as before I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

Of course definitional issues are paramount here, and we can always debate what constitutes major or revolutionary change. Certainly the improvements in medical care in the past half-century feel very important to me as someone living now, and one saved life has immensely emotional and practical importance for many people. What’s more, advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable. The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter? I think a few weeks of pooping in the backyard and having no running water to wash your hands or take a shower would probably change your tune. And as impressive as some new development in medicine has been, there’s no question that in simple terms of reducing preventable deaths, the advances seen from 1900 to 1950 dwarf those seen since. To a remarkable extent, continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.

ANYWAY. You’re probably bored of this line from me by now. But I was talking about this to these college kids, none of whom were alive in a world without widespread internet usage. We were talking about how companies market the future, particularly to people of their age group. I was making fun of the new iPhone and Apple’s marketing fixation on the fact that it’s TITANIUM. A few of the students pushed back; their old iPhones kept developing cracks in their casings, which TITANIUM would presumably fix. And, you know, if it works, that’s progress. (Only time and wear and tear will tell; the number of top-of-the-line phones I’ve gone through with fragile power ports leaves me rather cynical about such things.) Still, I tried to get the students to put that in context with the sense of promise and excitement of the recent past. I’m of a generation that was able to access the primitive internet in childhood but otherwise experienced the transition from the pre-internet world to now. I suspect this is all rather underwhelming for us. When you got your first smartphone, and you thought about what the future would hold, were your first thoughts about more durable casing? I doubt it. I know mine weren’t.

Why is Apple going so hard on TITANIUM? Well, where else does smartphone development have to go? In the early days there was this boundless optimism about what these things might someday do. The cameras, obviously, were a big point of emphasis, and they have developed to a remarkable degree, with even midrange phones now featuring very high-resolution sensors, often with multiple lenses. The addition of the ability to take video that was anything like high-quality, which became widespread a couple years into the smartphone era, was a big advantage. (There’s also all manner of “smart” filtering and adjustments now, which are of more subjective value.) The question is, who in 2023 ever says to themselves “smartphone cameras just aren’t good enough”? I’m sure the cameras will continue to get refined, forever. And maybe that marginal value will mean something, anything at all, in five or ten or twenty years. Maybe it won’t. But no one even pretends that it’s going to be a really big deal. Screens are going to get even more high-resolution, I guess, but again – is there a single person in the world who buys the latest flagship Samsung or iPhone and says, “Christ, I need a higher resolution screen”? They’ll get a little brighter. They’ll get a little more vivid. But so what? So what. Phones have gotten smaller and they’ve gotten bigger. Some gimmicks like built-in projectors were attempted and failed. Some advances like wireless charging have become mainstays. And the value of some things, like foldable screens, remains to be seen. But even the biggest partisans for that technology won’t try to convince you that it’s life-altering.

November 25, 2023

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I was initially quite interested in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, but given the criticism from historians, I doubt I’ll make the effort to see the film in the theatre. I’ve quite enjoyed some of Scott’s earlier “historic” movies, but it appears that he’s taken the historical figure of Napoleon and “interpreted” it to better fit his preferences for a film. Bret Devereaux‘s initial response is rather telling:

For this week’s musing, I want to comment at least briefly on dust-up surrounding Ridley Scott’s latest film, Napoleon and historians. As was evidently heavily reported, Ridley Scott responded to historians doing critiques of the film’s historical accuracy by telling them to “get a life” and suggesting that the earliest works on Napoleon were the most accurate and that subsequent historians have just progressively gotten more wrong.

I think there are two questions to untangle here: is the film accurate and does it matter? Now I haven’t yet seen the film, I’ve only seen the trailer. But my response to the trailer seems to have been basically every historian’s response to the trailer: Napoleon shows up at all sorts of places, doing all sorts of things he didn’t do. In particular, the battle scenes I’ve seen in the trailer and other snippets bear functionally no relationship to either Napoleonic warfare in general or the Battle of Austerlitz in particular (the bit with large numbers of soldiers drowning in a frozen lake was disconfirmed at the time; the lake was drained and few remains were found).

All of this is not a huge shock. All of Ridley Scott’s historical movies take huge liberties with their source material. Sometimes that’s in the service of a still interesting meditation on the past (Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Duel), sometimes in service of just a fun movie (Gladiator). Ridley Scott, in particular, has never mastered how basically any historical battle was fought and all of the battle scenes in his movies that I’ve seen are effectively nonsense (including Gladiator, which bears functionally no relationship to how Roman armies actually fought open field battles). Cool looking nonsense, but nonsense. Heck, Gladiator‘s entire plot is basically nonsense with some characters sharing historical names and very little else with their actual historical counterparts (the idea of Marcus Aurelius aiming to restore the republic in 180 is pretty silly).

So it isn’t a surprise that Ridley Scott’s grasp on Napoleonic warfare is about at the level of a not particularly motivated undergraduate student or that he has finessed or altered major historical details to make a better story. Its Ridley Scott, that’s what he does. Sometimes it works great (Kingdom of Heaven), sometimes it works poorly (Exodus: Gods and Kings).

Does it matter?

Unsurprisingly, I think that Ridley Scott is being more than a bit silly with his retorts to historians who are using his film as an opportunity to teach about the past. That’s what we do. Frankly, I find the defensiveness of “get a life” more than a bit surprising, as I assumed Ridley Scott knew he didn’t have much of a grasp on the history and was OK with that (or better yet, did have a grasp on it, but chose to alter it; I do not get this sense from his commentary), but it rather seems like he thinks he does know and is now very upset with the D+ he got on his exam and has decided to blame his “nitpicky” professor instead of his not having done the reading.

That said, when it comes to criticism (in the sense of “saying things are wrong“, rather than in the sense of “critical analysis”), I think there is a distinction to make. In the past I’ve framed this as the degree to which works “make the claim” to some kind of historical validity. It might be a fun exercise to talk about the armor in, say, Dungeons and Dragons or The Elder Scrolls and we might even learn something doing that, but neither of those works is making any claim to historical accuracy or rootedness. And so the tenor of the discussion is quite different.

But here I think Ridley Scott is to a significant degree making the claim. Of the battles, Ridley Scott says, “It’s amazing because you’re actually reconstructing the real thing” and that he “started to think like Napoleon”, which is once again both clearly making that claim (“the real thing”) and also just a remarkable thing to say given how much of a mess his battle scenes generally are. He also comments that “the scale of everything is so massive … I’d have 300 men and a hundred horses and 11 cameras in the field” and while that’s far more cameras than were on any Napoleonic battlefield, that’s just not a statement which suggests that Ridley Scott is even very aware of other achievements in recreating historical battles. Gettysburg (1993) had something on the order of five thousand reenactors on the field for filming and it is by no means the largest such effort! Spartacus (1967) had a cast of eight thousand Spanish soldiers to play the Roman legions.

So while I do not know if Napoleon is a good movie or not – I haven’t seen it yet – it seems pretty clear to me that Ridley Scott did make the claim for some of its fundamental historicity and the response of historians has been to reject that claim. And I think it’s actually quite fair to also skewer the apparent whiny arrogance of Scott making that claim baselessly and then responding petulantly when historians handed him that “D+, please come see me after class”. If you want to make historical fiction, by all means do – Scott is very good at it! – but do not be upset if historians call it what it is.

“Three or more reporters, arranged in a scrum … are dumber together than any of them alone”

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

I’m not a fan of the legacy media, although I’ve met good folks who worked or still work in the field, and the modern incarnation of the media has become so much more transparently a PR team for the big progressive wet dreams of bigger and bigger government and more and more centralized control over peoples’ lives. I’ve never met Paul Wells, but he’s respected by some of the media people I’ve met and generally has interesting things to say, perhaps more so that he’s his own boss and publishes on Substack these days:

Images returned for an image search for “Stephen Harper media scrum”

One reason I don’t like to play along with subscribers who assume this newsletter is a running critique of “the mainstream media” is that I know too many journalists. The best ones are wonderful and most are fine. Most are better at some part of the craft than I am. They don’t hesitate to make that fourth or fifth call, they’re forever willing to butt their heads against the surreal access-to-information regime, they understand interest rates, whatever. They often (not always!) admit errors publicly, which gives the occasional schoolyard bully a chance to make fun of them for doing what bullies never do. Many have an appropriately tragic sense of what it means to work in an industry that has been collapsing for 20 years.

But as a robust rule, reporters don’t mass well. Three or more reporters, arranged in a scrum — the term of art for an impromptu news conference that the newsmaker can leave at any moment — are dumber together than any of them alone. I caught glimpses of this early on. The first time I ever had to scrum a prominent politician at an important moment, I couldn’t believe how bad most of my more experienced colleagues’ questions were. My National Post column and my first book often featured satirical descriptions of scrum dynamics. But it really got bad when Stephen Harper was prime minister.

Harper was a master at generating dumb scrums. The ingredients for a dumb scrum are (1) pre-existing mutual animosity between newsmaker and reporters; (2) a tight limit on time or the number of permitted questions; (3) a few minutes before the scrum to allow the reporters to work on ways to maximize their advantage. This last is not essential but it’s a tremendous catalyst of dumbness, because reporters who are trying to select the best questions always ask worse questions.

If 10 reporters know they will only have time for two to four questions, their responses become predictable. They will need to “get him” (the newsmaker) on “the story of the day”. That is, they need to collect audio and video clips of the newsmaker talking about a dramatic event that happened within the last several hours. That’s because broadcast has room for fewer words than print does, so broadcast’s needs are more rigid. It’s simply pointless to urge colleagues before a scrum to get the newsmaker reminiscing about his youth, or to drag up some disagreement from 2019 that might be newly relevant, or to debate the fine points of trade law. The questions that work in scrums are of the “Aren’t you …” or “Didn’t you …” kind.

Unfortunately, such questions are child’s play to defuse. A junior staffer can tell her cabinet minister what to expect in a scrum, and in 70 guesses over a month she might be wrong three times. Scrum questions are always narrow and pointed, even though every reporter learned early that it’s their very narrowness that makes such questions easy to dodge. “Aren’t you siding with the convoy protesters when you …?” “Not at all. I’m calling for basic fairness.”

Often, the goal in a scrum is to record the newsmaker confessing to a terrible error, ideally a complete moral breakdown. Sometimes it’s not even personal, although the aforementioned pre-existing mutual animosity definitely helps. It’s just that it would be fantastic radio if the newsmaker did collapse in an audibly self-incriminating heap. This too is an easy bullet to dodge. Once I know you are trying to get me to confess my soulless incompetence, all I have to do is talk about anything else, and I win.

Dumb scrum dynamics are hard to avoid. They’re the product of simple physics — there is no time for a thoughtful exchange — mixed with collegial generosity. Reporters with more complex ambitions have to take one for the team, so the clip people can get their clip. None of the rules I have described is set in stone. In 2015 I spent several days covering Stephen Harper’s last campaign, and my colleagues let me simply ask my questions without telling them what I’d ask. But I had to do it in rotation, which meant I got two questions in a week. Meanwhile most of them worked together to concoct questions he could see coming from a mile away.

“It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing”

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

Janice Fiamengo on the blatant disregard for violence as long at that violence is not directed at women:

The news headline by the CBC, Canada’s state-funded broadcaster, could hardly have been more blatant: “Ottawa had 16 homicides in 2022—and nearly half of the victims were women or girls“. In other words, more than half of the victims, as is always the case, were boys and men, a state of affairs that no one at the CBC has ever found troubling enough to lament or even notice. Only when the female homicide rate approaches gender parity in one (unusual) year is it a “collective crisis”, as the subheading alleges.

It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing.

[Author’s note: Perhaps I should have stopped here. What more is there to say about the extraordinary indifference of most people, men and women, to violence against men and the craven desire to deny female culpability? There’s nothing new in this essay, no new angle or stats, no rousing call to action, nothing beyond the marshalling of dreary evidence and sadly sarcastic observations unlikely to change any mind or cause any gynocentric cheek to blush. I had intended to finish it in time for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Men, on November 18, but was stymied partly by a sense of helpless anger, the weight of which pressed down on every sentence. The section at the end, about the death of Benjamin Rain, was the last straw.]

Feminists have long touted their concern for victims, yet that is never in shorter supply than in their one-sided discussions of violence, in which the only deaths allowed to matter are female deaths, presented for readers’ contemplation with poignant circumstances, names, and expressions of horrified sadness, as in the above-mentioned article. Dead men remain largely anonymous, and few readers could guess from the typical reports of feminist organizations that women are ever lethally violent.

Indifference to male suffering and death are the norm all over the world, of course, but the Anglophone feminist movement has markedly increased it, fudging numbers and manipulating language to focus empathy exclusively on women and girls. The CBC article devotes significant space to discussing the risible concept of femicide, a relatively recent coinage that makes no secret of its female supremacism, purporting to highlight how women and girls are killed “simply for being women” and “primarily by […] men”, as if every woman, even one killed by accident (as we’ll see), is evidence of gender bias.

The idea that women are killed because they are women is preposterous, impossible to support with evidence, and obviously intended to solidify the impression that women outnumber men as victims of murderous violence. An organization called the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability provides an elaborate taxonomy of forms of femicide to drive the idea home, deliberately blurring the lines between intimate partner homicide, a favored focus, and other killings of women, which are collectively deplored as “brazen acts of hatred“.

Even a cursory reading of the details, however, exposes the vacuousness of the terminology as well as the sleight of hand by which men’s alleged misogyny is misleadingly linked to the totality of the women’s deaths. Only two of Ottawa’s seven murdered women were killed by current or former intimate partners. One of the dead women was attacked and killed by her two adult daughters (an act called “non-intimate femicide”), while another was the victim of a stray bullet that killed her by accident and was probably intended for a man (if you can believe it, the Canadian Femicide Observatory calls this type of death “associated/connected femicide”).

It is impossible to conclude that all or even most of these — certainly unfortunate — deaths can logically be said to have occurred, as the mantra holds, “due to the existence of gender norms and stereotypes, discrimination directed toward women and girls, and unequal power relations across genders“. The determination to find gender discrimination at the root of all female suffering — and thus to justify yet more programs, initiatives, and taxpayer dollars for feminist organizations, as well as more collective shaming of men — seems unstoppable.

QotD: Political language mirrors the ritualized nature of political life

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

Elected officials speak in a language that’s unique to their status group. If you’ve ever tried to attend a city council or school board meeting, you’ve watched them open with the onanistic portion of the thing, handing out certificates and doing grip-and-grins. “Bob, I just want to echo your wonderful comments about this amazing program.” They see themselves first, then others of their class, then they go blind. The first duty of a public official is to take a lot of selfies.

In a crisis, they recite. We’ve all watched them do this. “This is not who we are.” “Let me be clear: Hate has no home here.” You know what they’re going to say before they say it, and you know the tone before you hear it. The current mayor of Los Angeles is very fond of “our message has been very clear” and “we’re going to link arms and stand together”, so you’re not surprised to hear her respond to a question with something like, “Well, Maria, thank you for that great question. Our message has been very clear: We’re going to link arms and stand together.” Listening to elected officials speak is qualitatively different than listening to people speak. They perform the ritual behaviours of their status group.

[…]

They become debilitated by a lifetime of ritual language. If a staffer hasn’t told them to look somber and say “I’m sorry for your loss”, they don’t know how. It isn’t a line they’ve been equipped with for the event. Hey man your kids burned to death I almost lost my Corvette once, man. All kiddin’ aside, man!

[…]

They aren’t people anymore. They can’t talk like people. They don’t have normal human affect. What’s particularly interesting is that this learned inability to read human cues is recent and narrow. Bill Clinton, as much a politician as anyone who has ever lived, had a well-known ability to see people and signal his empathy, or at least to do a brilliant job of faking it. Similarly, Donald Trump is obviously very very fond of Donald Trump, who is amazing, trust me, everybody says so, but he has a normal human ability to spontaneously bullshit with the normals. Elite disconnection isn’t inevitable.

The broken personal thing behind all the broken institutional things is a loss of basic human connection and behavior. It’s a learned disconnection, and they can’t hide it.

Chris Bray, “The Mask Becomes Your Face”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2023-08-22.

November 24, 2023

It sometimes seems that the only thing that isn’t “violence” these days is actual violence

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

David Sedaris at The Free Press:

“Gen Z” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Words, we are now regularly reminded, are violence. So too is silence. I read not long ago that capitalism is violence, as is misgendering someone. Ignoring someone is violence, but so too is paying them attention. A friend recently called on one of her assistants to deliver a statistic during a business meeting and was later charged with “casual violence”. Apparently Deborah needed to give advance warning that she was going to ask a question, one that might possibly put her employee — someone who was well paid to know stuff and be able to spew it forth — on the spot.

Who are these hothouse flowers, all so easily and consistently wounded? People whose parents never hit them, that’s who. People who don’t know what real pain is, but still want to throw the word around. When I was a child, a slap across the face was too minor to qualify as “casual violence”. It was simply what you got for talking back or holding everyone up. It never hurt all that much; what stung was the swiftness of it, the surprise. Who knew my mother could move so fast, like someone belted in the martial arts. I don’t feel like it traumatized me to be knocked around a little. Blood was rarely drawn. No limbs were broken. Could my parents have made their point without resorting to violence? Probably, but it would have taken more time, and with six kids to dress and get out the door that was a precious commodity. I see parents now who worry they’re being abusive if they don’t spend at least an hour putting their child to bed. An hour! I said to my sister, Amy, “Do you remember ever once being tucked in? Can you imagine Mom and Dad reading to us, or singing? Can you imagine them kissing us?”

“Ugh,” she said. “Stop!”

And look at us! We’re fine. We can handle stuff. We never get offended by anything.

Our parents thought we were okay, at best, and I think that really helped us in the long run. Ask someone now if they have kids, and they’re pretty much guaranteed to use the word amazing, as in “I have an amazing six-year-old daughter.”

“Amazing because she just discovered a cure for herpes or because she speaks three words of Spanish,” I always want to ask. “I mean, just how low have you set that bar?”

One of the worst things that’s happened to us as a country is that people are having fewer children — 1.8 as opposed to five 50 years ago. Sure, it’s good for the environment — fewer people means less demand for resources. The problem is that single children receive a freakish amount of love and attention. Most graduate at least twelve times before leaving high school. Their every move is recorded and celebrated, and it gives them an outsize sense of their own importance.

The solution isn’t for every couple to start having five kids again, but maybe for one chosen couple to have five, and the other four couples to go without — either have a full litter you can’t pay that much attention to, or nothing at all.

If our schools are a mess it’s in large part due to these parents who think their kids are special, who get mad if you contradict their brilliance, if you give them a bad grade or, God forbid, try to take their phones away. Had one of my teachers told my mother that I was acting up in class, she’d have said, “Thank you so much for letting me know.” Then she’d have come to wherever I was — in front of the TV, or at the side of the TV making my way to the front of it — and slapped my sister Gretchen so hard her eyes would have crossed.

“What was that for?” Gretchen would have asked.

“Oops, wrong kid,” my mother would have said. Then she’d have slapped me twice as hard to make up for her mistake.

November 23, 2023

Clown world is what you get when children run things in the real world

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

Theophilus Chilton on the overgrown children who populate what used to be the adult world in the West:

If you’ve been around dissident Right circles for any length of time, you’re probably seen the term “clown world” used to describe the modern Western world. If you’ve paid any attention at all to the state of the world around us, you know just how apt of a description that term really is. Modernity as it is expressed today transcends the types of degeneracy and corruption that have been seen in previous decadent periods and has plumbed to nadirs of human depravity that previous generations would have literally found unspeakable because they would not have had the vocabulary to even describe them. To any rational adult observer of any previous age, no matter how dissolute, today’s western social, political, and moral situation would seem completely clownish and unserious.

That this would be the case is practically inevitable given the type of people involved within the plethora of left-wing causes and intersectionality factions. As a general rule, the political and cultural Left are very childish, not just in their behaviour, but also in their worldview, demeanor, and mindset. Any normal person who has ever dealt with them on social media (or the real world, if you’ve had the misfortune) can abundantly testify to this. Now, I’m not really talking about the “boss lefties”, the people who really run the show concerning left-wing activism. Rather, I’m describing the rank-and-file lefties who fill out the echelons of “ground level” activism – ranging from the antifa street drek to the college students whining about microaggressions to the HR representatives in multinational corporations.

I sincerely believe that to understand the psychology of those on the Left, one must approach the issue from the standpoint of juvenile behaviourism. Observing how and why children – as in actual children – act as they do will shed light on why those on the Left are the way they are. I want to emphasise that what I’m saying here isn’t meant to be the usual derogation that people on opposite sides of the political divide routinely throw at each other. I am literally saying that, for whatever reason, the stunting of the emotional and rational growth of the minds of those who are drawn to the hard core of the Left results in similarities in psyche and behaviour between the two groups.

The first and most obvious similarity revolves around the acceptance of wishful thinking as a credible alternative to verifiable reality. This manifests itself in two related ways – the willingness to believe fantasies that have no credible claims to being truth, and the concurrent unwillingness to accept legitimate evidences which disagree with those fantasies.

Anyone who has kids knows that when a small child wants to believe something, they’re going to believe it, no matter what you say or show them to the contrary. Children do this because they do not have a firm grasp on the nature of reality, since they’re still essentially learning from the world around them what reality even is. They haven’t quite learned yet “how the world works”, so to speak, hence they’re still open to “other possibilities”, and assume that if they want these possibilities to be, then they can be.

Sadly, left-wing activists and SJWs operate on essentially the same set of basic premises. Despite all evidences to the contrary, they will believe that homosexuality is normal, people can actually change their sexes, adult-child sexual relationships are healthy, large-scale third world immigration is enriching, computer simulations that predict extremes of global warming are credible reflections of actual climatological science, and so forth. Instead of accepting that arguments to the contrary can even exist, much less penetrate their self-contained fact space, leftists will attempt to mold reality to their preferences by dismissing contrary arguments with one of more “signaling phrases” (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, etc.). In this way, they believe they have negated the very existence of those contrary arguments, thus preserving their preferred perceptions.

Another area of similarity is seen in the social dynamics of cliquishness, which both children and leftists display in social settings. We should understand that cliquishness involves much more than the mere existence of in-groups and out-groups. Everybody has groups to which they belong and do not belong, and that is a fundamental factor in human sociability. What makes cliquishness different is that it involves the purposeful engineering of social dynamics for the objective of establishing the power of and loyalty to one or a small group of actors within a set which normally would act as a broad in-group. In other words, it functions as a way of destructively dividing a body of people who you would typically find bound together by more commonalities than differences. For children, this could be classmates within a school setting. For adults, it could mean anything from an office or church environment all the way up to the national level. Ostensibly, children at a school are all there for the same purpose. In the corporation, workers are, in theory, all supporting the company’s stated goals. Within a nation, a sense of asabiyya, of social solidarity, is supposed to obtain.

The whole purpose of left-wing activism is to destroy social solidarity, and to do so in an ever-changing and unpredictable manner. Within cliques, the accepted in-group is ever-shifting and individual members can be subject to sudden changes in status among the group based on anything from personal whim to the requirements of a newly imposed ideological orthodoxy. This is seen regularly on the Left and serves to demonstrate the fragility of the Left’s intersectionality alliance.

November 20, 2023

The Fact-Checkers found the phrase “kill switch” isn’t in the bill, “proving” it false

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

Jon Miltimore has yet another example of “fact-checkers” carrying water for politicians to obscure actual facts when they’re politically inconvenient:

In November 2021, former US Representative from Georgia Bob Barr wrote a little-noticed political column claiming that buried inside President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure legislation was a dangerous provision that would go into effect in five years.

“Marketed to Congress as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving, the measure will mandate that automobile manufacturers build into every car what amounts to a ‘vehicle kill switch'”, wrote Barr, who was the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president in 2008.

Like most Americans, I had never heard of this alleged “kill switch” until a few days ago when Representative Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican, proposed to strip the mandate’s funding.

“The right to travel is fundamental, but the government has mandated a kill-switch in new vehicles sold after 2026,” said Massie. “The kill-switch will monitor driver performance and disable cars based on the information gathered.”

Nineteen Republicans joined all but one Democrat in opposing Massie’s amendment, which failed.

True or False?

The claim that the feds would mandate that every new motor vehicle include technology that could disable the vehicle seemed ludicrous. So I started Googling.

To my relief, I saw several fact-checkers at legacy institutions had determined the “kill switch” mandate was not true.

“Our rating: False,” said USA Today.

“ASSESSMENT: False,” said the Associated Press.

“We rate it Mostly False,” concluded PolitiFact.

(Snopes, a reliably left-leaning fact check group, was a little less conclusive, saying the claim was a “mixture” of true and false.)

Unfortunately, my relief evaporated once I looked at the bill itself.

Sec. 24220 of the law explicitly states: “[T]o ensure the prevention of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities, advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor vehicles.”

The legislation then goes on to define the technology as a computer system that can “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle” and can “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected” (emphasis added).

How the system will make this determination is unclear, as is the government’s potential role in apprehending suspected drunk drivers (more on that later).

But the law’s language could not be more clear: New motor vehicles must have a computer system to “monitor” drivers, and the system must be able to prevent vehicle operation if it detects impairment.

“[W]hen low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie”

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

Rob Henderson explains some of the reasons smart people can believe dumb ideas:

Many have discovered an argument hack. They don’t need to argue that something is false. They just need to show that it’s associated with low status. The converse is also true: You don’t need to argue that something is true. You just need to show that it’s associated with high status. And when low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie.

In the 1980s, the psychologists Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo developed the “Elaboration Likelihood Model” to describe how persuasion works. “Elaboration” here means the extent to which a person carefully thinks about the information. When people’s motivation and ability to engage in careful thinking is present, the “elaboration likelihood” is high. This means people are likely to pay attention to the relevant information and draw conclusions based on the merits of the arguments or the message. When elaboration likelihood is high, a person is willing to expend their cognitive resources to update their views.

Two paths to persuasion

The idea is that there are two paths, or two “routes”, to persuading others. The first type, termed the “central” route, comes from careful and thoughtful consideration of the messages we hear. When the central route is engaged, we actively evaluate the information presented, and try to discern whether or not it’s true.

When the “peripheral” route is engaged, we pay more attention to cues apart from the actual information or content or the message. For example, we might evaluate someone’s argument based on how attractive they are or where they were educated, without considering the actual merits of their message.

When we accept a message through the peripheral route, we tend to be more passive than when we accept a message through the central route. Unfortunately, the peripheral route is more prevalent because we are exposed to an increasingly large amount of information.

The renowned psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor have characterized humans as “cognitive misers”. They write, “People are limited in their capacity to process information, so they take shortcuts whenever they can”.

We are lazy creatures who try to expend as little mental energy as possible.

And people are typically less motivated to scrutinize a message if the source is considered to be an expert. We interpret the message through the peripheral route.

This is one reason why media outlets often appoint experts who mirror their political values. These experts lend credibility to the views the outlet espouses. Interestingly, though, expertise appears to influence persuasion only if the individual is identified as an expert before they communicate their message. Research has found that when a person is told the source is an expert after listening to the message, this new information does not increase the person’s likelihood of believing the message.

It works the other way, too. If a person is told that a source is not an expert before the message, the person tends to be more skeptical of the message. If told the source is not an expert after the message, this has no effect on a person’s likelihood of believing the message.

This suggests that knowing a source is an expert reduces our motivation to engage in central processing. We let our guards down.

As motivation and/or ability to process arguments is decreased, peripheral cues become more important for persuasion. Which might not bode well.

However, when we update our beliefs by weighing the actual merits of an argument (central route), our updated beliefs tend to endure and are more robust against counter-persuasion, compared to when we update our beliefs through peripheral processing. If we come to believe something through careful and thoughtful consideration, that belief is more resilient to change.

This means we can be more easily manipulated through the peripheral route. If we are convinced of something via the peripheral route, a manipulator will be more successful at using the peripheral route once again to alter our initial belief.

November 19, 2023

Ted Gioia wonders if we need a “new Romanticism”

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

He raised the question earlier this year, and it’s sticking with him to the point he’s gathering notes on the original Romantic movement and what it was reacting against:

The issues that enraged the original Luddites certainly have many modern echoes.

I realized that, the more I looked at what happened circa 1800, the more it reminded me of our current malaise.

  • Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution — and people started resisting the forces of progress.
  • Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories — a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone.
  • Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism — Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide [Wiki], the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories [Wiki], and all those gloomy Gothic novels [Wiki]. What happened to the Enlightenment?
  • As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives — an 180 degree shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse.
  • Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments — embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.

That’s the world, circa 1800.

The new paradigm shocked Europe when it started to spread. Cultural elites had just assumed that science and reason would control everything in the future. But that wasn’t how it played out.

Resemblances with the current moment are not hard to see.

    “Imagine a growing sense that algorithmic and mechanistic thinking has become too oppressive. Imagine if people started resisting technology. Imagine a revolt against STEM’s dominance. Imagine people deciding that the good life starts with NOT learning how to code.”

These considerations led me, about nine months ago, to conduct a deep dive into the history of the Romanticist movement. I wanted to see what the historical evidence told me.

I’ve devoted hours every day to this — reading stacks of books, both primary and secondary sources, on the subject. I’ve supplemented it with a music listening program and a study of visual art from the era.

What’s my goal? I’m still not entirely sure.

November 18, 2023

Believe all women … unless they’re Israeli

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Kristin Raworth and Ariella Kimmel protest against the objectively pro-Hamas silence of so many feminist organizations about the terror attacks of October 7th:

On October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and committed the worst massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. More than just a massacre, Hamas tortured their victims, including brutally raping women, young and old. Yet the silence of many women’s organizations and leading voices who stand tall, claiming to be “strong feminists”, is deafening.

When the #MeToo movement started, the mantra was “believe all women”. As high-profile women spoke out, the feminist movement stood with them. So why, in the wake of the most horrific terrorist attack in Israel’s history, which included rape, do these women not deserve the same solidarity?

A month later it is not just the complete silence of the women’s organizations that causes pain, it is the active justification and gaslighting of the Jewish community, which has including denying the truth of what happened on October 7th, by demanding proof, rather than believing survivors. Many may recognize these tactics as those used as abusers against their victims in cases of domestic and sexual violence, a tactic that has become known as “DARVO” — Deny, Attack, and Reverse, Victim Offender.

When reports first surfaced of the sexual assaults committed by Hamas, many of us took to Twitter, the only place where we knew to raise our voices. Immediately our replies were filled with folks who otherwise would believe survivors, but were seemingly comfortable demanding immediate forensic evidence in this case. Survivor accounts were not enough; even a video released by the Israeli government that painted a clear picture of Hamas’ brutality was not enough. Hamas terrorists themselves recounting their actions was not enough.

Sarah Jama, an MPP in Ontario, has gone so far to publicly state that the accounts of rape are a lie pushed forward by the “zionist lobby”.

We have seen people like Ghada Sasa, a former board member of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, going on a podcast and not just claiming that Hamas treated civilians fairly, but that Israel was to blame for the massacre at the Nova music festival.

Meanwhile member of Parliament Niki Ashton claimed that a “feminist government” would call for a ceasefire; yet she has not once condemned the use of rape by Hamas as a war crime. This is a highly selective read of feminism.

November 17, 2023

Israeli government responds strongly to Justin Trudeau’s accusations of deliberate killings of civilians

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

I guess the electoral calculus shows that there aren’t enough Jewish votes to be gained by backing Israel, so Justin Trudeau is going for the Islamic vote instead:

It’s not typical that an Israeli leader will issue an English-language excoriation of a friendly government in a time of war, but this week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an exception for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“While Israel is doing everything to keep civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing everything to keep them in harm’s way,” said Netanyahu in a statement addressed to the Canadian leader. He added, “the forces of civilization must back Israel in defeating Hamas barbarism.”

    .@JustinTrudeau It is not Israel that is deliberately targeting civilians but Hamas that beheaded, burned and massacred civilians in the worst horrors perpetrated on Jews since the Holocaust.

    While Israel is doing everything to keep civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing …

    — Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) November 15, 2023

Netanyahu was reacting to prepared remarks Trudeau delivered in B.C. where he accused Israel of killing “women, children and babies”. The statement — which did not place any blame on Hamas for the carnage — urged Israel to exercise “maximum restraint” as “the world was watching”.

It’s but the latest incident in an official Trudeau government response to the Israel-Hamas conflict that has been checkered by confusion, contradiction — and a noticeable alienation from Canada’s usual international allies.

In the first days after the Oct. 7 massacres, Canada was left out of a strongly worded joint statement issued by five fellow members of the G7.

“The terrorist actions of Hamas have no justification, no legitimacy and must be universally condemned,” read the statement co-signed by the leaders of the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy and France. The statement then urged Israel to “set the conditions for a peaceful and integrated Middle East region.”

Ottawa explained that the statement was issued by Quint – an organization of five countries separate from the G7 that has never included Canada.

But while it might make sense for Quint to exclude its other G7 ally, Japan, it’s more conspicuous that the co-signers never called the G7 member with a substantial Jewish population and a lengthy history of diplomatic support for Israel.

And while Trudeau’s official reaction to the Oct. 7 massacres carried much of the same sentiments, it did include a routine equivocation absent from the Quint statement: Israel had a right to defend itself “in accordance with international law”.

November 16, 2023

The US military may need to find a modern-day Patroclus

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

John Carter explains why the sudden swerve in US military recruitment from all-diverse-all-the-time to an ad that might have been created in the 1960s … and why it still won’t help:

He is the very essence of a modern major general.

    Sing, o muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans …

Thus opens the foundational epic of European civilization.

Achilles is angry because his woman, Briseis, has been appropriated by Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks. He expresses this discontent by going on strike. While the rest of the Greek army fights and dies outside the walls of Troy, Achilles lounges in his tent, content to sit out the combat until Agamemnon comes to his senses and returns his war bride. If Achilles were simply any other warm body with a spear, this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but he is Achilles – the greatest warrior of the Heroic Age. Without him, the Greeks are at a severe disadvantage. Achilles’ petulance is therefore a problem for Agamemnon.

The lesson is hardly a subtle one. Kings and generals need to keep their soldiers happy. They especially need to keep their best soldiers happy. If they don’t – for instance, by taking their women from them – morale will suffer, and they may well find themselves without the crucial support of their warriors when it most matters.

Washington seems to have missed that lesson, and now, they’re paying the price.

For the last decade they have been relentlessly and mercilessly whipping American whites: defaming them as racists, mocking their intelligence and manliness, tearing down their statues, erasing the names of their ancestral heroes, replacing their fictional archetypes with diverse doppelgangers in the media, disadvantaging them in education and employment, demanding that they attend racial struggle sessions. The list of outrages and humiliations is long and all too familiar, permeating as it does every one of our institutions.

But now, the Empire of Lies faces a problem.

War has returned to the world. History, its rumoured demise notwithstanding, once again stalks the land. Russia mauls the Ukraine; Israel is beset with enemies; the Empire’s influence in Africa frays by the day; China salivates over Taiwan.

Meanwhile the American domestic economy, long since hollowed out by the extractive rent-seeking of financial parasites, lurches from one crisis to the next. The Great Satan remains powerful, for the present, but the young bucks can scent that the silverback is not what he used to be. Their provocations increase in daring and intensity. If they aren’t slapped down, their boldness will only increase.

The criminal regime that has insinuated itself into the halls of American power is running against a clock. They must have a war to cover the slow collapse of their fake economy. They must have a war to prevent rival regimes from displacing their American golem. But their golem is crumbling. Therefore they must have a war sooner rather than later, because with every moment of delay America becomes weaker, while China and Russia become stronger.

Their problem is that no one wants to fight for them.

The core warrior population of America has always been the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian regions, the good ol’ boys of the South, and the farm boys of the Midwest. Hillbillies and rednecks, in other words. Many families from these areas have multi-generational traditions of service. Dad served in Vietnam, Grampa in WWII, Great-Grandpa in the Great War, and Great-Grandpa’s Pappy fought under Lee in the War of Northern Aggression.

These are precisely the white populations that have been singled out for the most unrelenting and vicious racial abuse over the last several decades. They are the one group that it’s okay to defame in the media, depicted as ignorant, bigoted, backwards, and inbred. The people running Hollywood seem to have a special disgust for them. For generations they have born this with a sort of stoic good cheer, accepting their role as the heel in the great kayfabe of American political drama even as they shouldered a disproportionate burden of blood, tears, and sweat in America’s imperial wars.

The events of the last two decades seem to have put an end to that. It wasn’t just the psychotic frenzy of race communism that gripped the regime’s mind, although that certainly played a factor as the military has hardly been immune to it. Who wants to serve in an armed forces that has thrown meritocracy in the trash to make sure the commissioned ranks include as many strong black lesbians as possible, that spends more time making sure the enlisted ranks understand the nuances of pronoun usage and the finer points of critical race theory than training for war? Demoralizing as all that has been, the absolutely pointless debacle of the Neocon Forever War in the Middle East has played at least as large a role.

November 15, 2023

Can we criticize the Climate Goblin now?

Filed under: Environment, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill asks if it’s allowed to criticized Greta “The Climate Goblin” Thunberg now:

Can we criticise Greta Thunberg now? For a time, anyone who raised even the mildest objection to the pint-sized prophetess of doom risked being damned as a bully. Surely this moratorium on Greta-scepticism will end following her platforming – to use woke lingo – of an activist with very iffy views. An activist who has trivialised the Holocaust and seems pretty chilled about Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. Calling out Greta for her fact-lite blather about the planet being “on fire” may have been forbidden – pulling her up for hanging out with Holocaust relativists must not be.

Thunberg has made waves by switching her focus from saving the planet to saving Gaza. Like every other Gen Zer with a TikTok and an insatiable urge to signal his / her / zir virtue to the world, she’s become an overnight authority on Israel-Palestine. She posed with a placard saying “Stand with Gaza“. She turned Fridays for Future – where pious rich kids bunk off school to raise awareness about climate change – into “Justice for Palestine” stunts. And on Sunday, she made a climate protest in Amsterdam pretty much all about Palestine.

She invited activists to the stage. One was Sara Rachdan, a Palestinian studying in Amsterdam. It didn’t take German newspaper Bild long to discover that Ms Rachdan holds views which – how should we put this? – are not very pleasant. On Hamas’s pogrom, Ms Rachdan said: “This is finally Palestinians taking action [against] the occupation”. She’s dabbled in Holocaust denigration. She shared a blood-spattered graphic comparing Israel’s actions in Gaza with the Nazis’ actions in Auschwitz. Repulsively, it implies the Jewish State is worse than the Nazis. Where 127 kids a day were killed in Auschwitz, 178 a day are currently dying in Israel’s war in Gaza, it alleges.

Shorter version: the Jews are more accomplished child-killers than even Hitler’s henchmen were. This is rank Holocaust relativism. Comparing the greatest crime in history to this horrendous war denudes that crime of its unique horror. It renders it ordinary. It was no big deal – just the same kind of thing you see on your TV screens every night from Gaza. The implication of moral equivalence between the Nazis’ minutely planned gassing of Jewish children and the deaths of Palestinian kids as a terrible byproduct of Israel’s war on Hamas is beyond immoral. It is the gravest of inversions, treating the Jewish State’s war against anti-Semitic mass murderers as indistinguishable from the Nazis’ acts of anti-Semitic mass murder.

Of course, there’s nothing to suggest Greta shares Ms Rachdan’s views. But isn’t her woke generation obsessed with “platforming”, with only rubbing shoulders with the perfectly politically correct and no one else? Indeed, Thunberg ostentatiously flounced out of the Edinburgh Book Festival earlier this year because it received funding from a firm that invests in fossil fuels. Take oil money and she’ll dodge you like the plague; describe an anti-Semitic pogrom as an act of resistance and she’s all over you like a cheap suit. Care to explain, Greta?

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