Quotulatiousness

February 13, 2022

Update on that “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

First up, David Warren has a few “little truths” to share:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

My mind is in Ottawa, and all other places in Canada and abroad where people are struggling to get their lives back — now, before they die. These people are overwhelmingly the self-employed, and workers in small businesses: such as truck drivers, who bought their own rigs. They have consistently been made to pay in many ways for government lockdown measures, and are generally despised by the “laptop class”, who cannot lose their jobs, and work from home.

Few people in the Big City (which includes Toronto and Ottawa) have ever met a trucker, or would think of chatting with him. They may patronize small “boutique” operations, for conspicuous consumption. But Amazon drivers deliver their regular goods, and their services, too, are mostly dialled up.

True, the Batflu has sometimes interfered with their holiday bookings, so I must add, boo hoo.

A Rasmussen report on public opinion recently showed that in America, three-quarters of Democrats supported vaccine mandates, more than half thought those who refuse should be fined, and almost half would give them gaol sentences. Nearly a third thought the “vaccine hesitant” should have their children taken away. As Californicators, and the inhabitants of most urban constituencies, seldom have children, this can be received with rolling eyeballs. For luckily, there are Republicans in the more rural places, whose votes are sometimes counted.

Ottawa (outside “the Valley”) offers a caricature of this point of view. I recall my days as a columnist, published in the Ottawa Citizen. (Eventually, I was deleted.) To walk downtown was to invite verbal assaults by those who recognized my mug in the paper. Some were actually friendly, and said hiya. But I was often called a fascist, or something else obscene, by people who didn’t notice I was human. “Are you David Warren?” the grim inquiry would come. I tried to counter it with some jest. (“It depends: do you like David Warren?”) This might cause my assailant great pain. (Humour is violence, as every Leftist knows.) But it was tiresome for both of us.

One may check election results from the middle of that town, to learn that a large majority of its inhabitants vote Liberal, in the manner of zombies. One thinks of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Rex Murphy (paywalled, unfortunately, so no link) suggests that things are desperate within the imperial capital thanks to the ravaging barbarians beseiging Caesar Justin:

How deep is the terror in our once cozy capital? I am told there are certain fine bakeries in Ottawa where it is no longer possible to get a fresh croissant. There are advisories warning about heading out alone to go to yoga classes. And there are rumours that DoorDash delivery from the better Italian restaurants can take over an hour. It is a horror, a scene too grim for the human mind to grasp, or the human heart to bear. In occupied Ottawa, you may, unasked, be offered soup. Where is the United Nations? Is the Security Council asleep?

Not to despair completely, however, as Canadians know that when the politicians fail, the police stand idle and the military are still, they have the Ottawa press gallery.

It is they who alerted us to the Confederate flag guy. The tribunes of the CBC have been all over him. There’s hardly been a report without the mention of a Confederate flag at the protest. Mention of the wildly more numerous Canadian flags have been wisely subdued.

The national press have been unmatched in getting the word out on what the brigands and racists and misogynists and white supremacists and yobs and Islamophobes and louts have inflicted on our national capital. With strong earplugs and stouter hearts, they have braved the chaos, enduring “taunts”. They shuffled past parked transport trucks, some of them with Alberta drivers in the cabs!

But the real glory belongs further up. The fact that Canada is, for the moment at least, still functioning as a country is a miracle due to the steel will and captivating oratory of our resolute prime minister. Much like England in those tenebrous days of 1939, our country has found its Churchillian voice.

In the free exerpt from his Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan admits that despite acquiring deep knowledge and understanding of Canadian culture from the invaluable South Park, he did not see the truckers’ protest coming:

To be honest, I didn’t quite see the Canadian truckers coming. I’ve watched a lot of Canada coverage over the years (mainly via South Park, I concede) and the whole anti-vaxxer, campfire-burning, horn-tooting, macho revolt among our gentle neighbors to the north nonetheless took me by surprise.

Rob Ford was a harbinger, I guess. It’s as if the ancient, manly, lumberjacky Canadian id was finally roused from its cultural slumber by a soy-boy prime minister, forcing truckers to take a jab or forfeit their livelihood. And some reports suggest that the vaccine issue seems just the proximate trigger for the rage, and not the real source — a rage which has been steadily building for some time, especially in the pandemic, in the most progressive-left country on the planet.

And there’s something very blue-collar male about this populist anger. Trump, of course, identified the testosterone tribe he helped define and rally:

    I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

You can see similar “tough people” fault-lines in the other recent Covid contretemps involving Joe Rogan. The millions of men (71 percent male, and evenly split between high school and college grads) who listen to Rogan’s legendary podcast have rallied to him, even as the media establishment has been waging a fully-flexed campaign against him and some of his Covid coverage. There’s something about masking — chin-diapers — and mandating vaccines, and vaccines themselves, that some men seem to find feminizing.

February 11, 2022

Ottawa in the year of the honk

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

At SDA, Kate shares part of an email she sent to a friend who works in the national media:

We watched pipelines get cancelled, LNG plants yanked, Caledonia thrown to the wolves — and Spendy McBlackface take a knee over some dead guy in Minneapolis.

Did the national media and professional left really think the business of bringing government and industry to a standstill would always remain the exclusive jurisdiction of Liberal rent-a-mobs?

And that’s the real problem, yes? There’s no one to call them off. Think about that. The professional protests of the left have structure, a chain of command and big money funders to direct them.

These protests don’t. They’re completely organic, which means they can spread and grow without the help of a Soros backed foundation. And it’s fucking glorious.

In The Line, Matt Gurney‘s latest update from Ottawa:

At the start of this week, I spent two days among the protesters in downtown Ottawa, wandering the lines of trucks on Wellington, on Kent, and the other roads all around Parliament Hill. I’ve tried to convey for readers what it’s like to be there — at least, what it’s been like for me to be there. This is a complicated protest and a complicated event. It has layers.

Are there good, frustrated people just trying to be heard in the crowd? Yes. Are there bad people in the crowd, including some who’ve waved hate symbols and harassed or attacked others? Yes. Are there people taking careful care of the roads, sweeping up trash and shovelling ice and snow off the sidewalk? Yes. Are there hard men milling about, keeping a wary eye on anyone who seems out of place? Yes. Is it a place where some people are having good-natured fun? Yes. Is it a place some other people would rightly be afraid to go? Yes. And so on.

But it’s even more complicated than it looks. And Ottawa Police Services chief Peter Sloly wants you to know that.

Sloly is in a tough spot. I don’t honestly know the backstory of the how and why the Ottawa protest was allowed to settle into the downtown core the way it did. It was obviously a massive intelligence and planning failure, but what kind of failure? And whose? Did they not have enough information? Bad information? Did they have good information that, for whatever reason, they didn’t accept or trust? That’s not the sort of thing you can discover wandering the site. But I can tell you that some of the protesters themselves are surprised by how easy it was for them to set up shop.

I have the terrible feeling, and I’ve spoken with five separate sources in government roles or in adjacent security positions who all confirmed this, that Sloly is one of the damn few people in Ottawa who understands the situation he’s in, and he’s trying to get everyone else to notice, or at least to catch up to his understanding. My sources, alas, seem to think that most others involved in decision-making are only just now starting to realize the enormity of the challenge in the capital. Sloly figured it out last week.

The chief is very political. I say that with no disrespect. Becoming the chief of a major police force isn’t something that happens because you catch the most bad guys. It happens because you’re good at working your way up through the power structures of a very particular institution. Sloly talks like a politician. But if you listen closely, and if you follow along across his briefings, you start to see a theme. From the moment he first mentioned that there might not be a policing solution to this protest, and hinted that we need the armed forces, he’s been signalling to the public that Ottawa, as a city, has lost control of itself. That’s a blunt description, but as I noted in a Twitter thread after a pretty remarkably stark Ottawa Police Services Board meeting on the weekend, Sloly was clear: the city needs to be rescued. It has lost control, it is outnumbered, and it cannot fix this problem with the resources on hand.

February 9, 2022

“The nominal mayor of Ottawa, who apparently serves under the police chief, is another thoroughgoing jackass”

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

On Tuesday morning, David Warren had some suggestions for reconstructing Ottawa since the truckers seemed to be doing a lot of useful civic work voluntarily:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

The Ottawa police chief is an embarrassment, but he seems to validly represent the more tight-assed ratepayers, who have objected to the honking of the big trucks; and the ratepayers are an embarrassment, too. (I’ve tried to warn my readers against the perils of democracy.) The chief cop’s theatrical effort to impound some fraction of the Freedom Convoy’s fuel supply, to demolish their food kitchens, and hand out tickets for things like not having licences on their garbage-collecting carts, is now on display. The nominal mayor of Ottawa, who apparently serves under the police chief, is another thoroughgoing jackass.

I once worked out of Ottawa myself; it is our national capital, I was told. And it is where I acquired my notion of the profound corruption that is brought to that town by the Liberal Party — who dominate its bureaucracies whether they are in or out of power. The arrogance, of the gliberal hot-shots, as well as their extravagant waste and incompetence, has left marks on all the Ottawa institutions, and a good place to begin a clean-up would be by “cancelling” the civil service. (They could be taught to load trucks, instead.)

Too, we should defund the municipal police, or more precisely, replace them. A new police force might possibly be funded just by selling off the spiffy vehicles of the old force (after the cost of repainting them), and their dapper “Zomo” gear might fetch a pretty penny in the costume shops.

The truckers have been polishing the streets, removing even cigarette butts and gum wrappers. They have been guarding the Terry Fox statue on Parliament Hill, and could be asked to mind those of all the other defunct worthies, and slaveholders. (There weren’t any up here, as slavery was outlawed in Upper Canada from the start of the Loyalist settlement, but we can pretend.) Sir John A. Macdonald, our hard-drinking and politically incorrigible founding prime minister, may need special protection.

Among the beneficial effects of the truckers’ protest was to catalyze the ouster of “conservative” “leader” Erin O’Toole:

In the last few months, support for O’Toole from different wings of the party seems to have quietly eroded. A fight over legislation banning conversion therapy was one part of this, particularly the way that senior leadership reportedly sprang a surprise unanimous consent motion in parliament to quickly rush it through, much to the surprise of most of the caucus and especially to an important former supporter of O’Toole and important social conservative within the party, Garnett Genuis, who happened to be (conveniently for party leadership) out of the country on party business at the time. Genius was one of the key supporters of O’Toole who got him elected, but was one of many who appears to have flipped away from O’Toole towards the end.

In the last week of O’Toole’s leadership, a truck convoy opposing Covid measures that has essentially set up camp in parts of downtown Ottawa around Parliament Hill has divided the caucus, with O’Toole constantly shifting positions on it to the satisfaction of absolutely no one. This inability to clearly define and stake out a position was ultimately probably what ended his leadership. As I wrote last week in the National Post, “It has become harder and harder to defend O’Toole because it is increasingly hard to know what you’re defending when you do so. O’Toole seems unable, or unwilling, to clearly articulate positions and even when he does he often ends up backtracking a few days later.”

With O’Toole out, the Conservatives have selected a Manitoba MP and the deputy leader of the party, Candice Bergen, as the interim leader. The race to replace O’Toole is, as of right now, up in the air, with rules and candidates all still to be announced. The presumptive frontrunner is the shadow finance minister, Pierre Poilievre. He is extremely popular amongst the Tory base, unapologetic, and easily the party’s most gifted and talented communicator. He has strong name recognition already, and if he runs will be the clear favourite. Other names being thrown around are previous candidates Peter MacKay and Leslyn Lewis, current MPs Michelle Rempel-Garner and Michael Chong, and the mayor of Brampton Patrick Brown.

A Liberal backbencher has broken ranks with Justin Trudeau to call for an end to the Wuhan Coronavirus restrictions and a return to normal life for Canadians:

The federal government needs to quickly offer a road map for the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, according to Quebec Liberal MP Joël Lightbound, citing mental health concerns from pediatricians and the parents of depressed children, and the inability of many to earn a living from a “MacBook at their cottage.”

Lightbound, MP for Louis-Hébert, chair of the industry committee and the Quebec Liberal caucus, and a former parliamentary secretary to the finance minister, said the Liberal government has changed in policy and in tone since last year’s election campaign and appears unwilling to adapt to the evolution of the pandemic.

“Now the approach stigmatizes people and divides people,” he told reporters this morning, pointing to the loosening of restrictions in European countries with lower vaccination rates than Canada.

Lightbound said he raised his concerns in caucus to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but owes it to constituents to publicly voice his concerns and is ready for potential political consequences for speaking out.

But, he added, other Liberal MPs share his concerns and the party has historically been “open for dissent and different opinions.”

Matt Gurney‘s second day report from the streets of Ottawa isn’t as upbeat as yesterday’s installment:

My second report (of three planned) from Ottawa will be a grimmer read than the first. But we might as well start with a moment or two levity, of a kind.

On Tuesday afternoon, I returned to the site of the main protest, on Wellington Street, right along the southern side of Parliament Hill. The crowd was, in a general sense, the same as described in my first dispatch. The barbecues were going, the coffees were being poured, and the speeches were being made off the back of a flatbed truck, with a large Canadian flag, suspended from the chain of a large mobile crane hanging over it. The crowd had been entertained for some time by some singing, mostly of upbeat recent-ish pop hits. The singer was enthusiastic, positive, cheerful and, alas, not very good. She got plenty of applause anyway, especially each time she did a shout out to “Freedom!”

And then things got weirder.

One of the main responses to my first dispatch was skepticism that a tall white dude who easily blends in with the protest crowd was getting a “representative” view at the protest site. I shared that concern! And I was really explicitly clear about that in the first piece. You can take my reporting with all the lumps of salt you want. I am indeed a white dude, and so is almost everyone else at the protest site. It’s not universally white, but it’s overwhelmingly white. People wanted to know if my experience would have been different if I were a woman, or a person of colour, or wearing a mask, or any combination of those. I am also curious about that. I just don’t know, and can’t know. But I did make a point today of watching how anyone who was wearing a mask, or a person of colour, or a woman fared in the crowd. In my two hours on site today, I observed no problems. I don’t draw any conclusions from that, nor do I deny that it might take some bravery to walk through that crowd as a masked woman of colour. But in terms of what I saw, that’s all I can honestly tell you.

[…]

It’s a different place at night. Not in a good way. I got there around 8 p.m. or so on Monday. The streets had almost emptied out. Most of the office workers had gone home by then, I guess. The cheerful revellers had cleared out, too. The music had stopped, the folding tables mostly cleared and put away, and the encampment was quiet. The roving police patrols I’d noticed keeping such an overt presence during the day were gone as well. Instead, the officers had pulled back, way back, and taken positions on the streets and at intersections around the protest site. I saw one foot patrol go in, but just one, and not very far.

By 9:30 p.m., as I continued my walk through the area, there was a very clear difference between the vibe on either side of the police positions. Outside, the city was quiet — the horns had stopped, and there were no fireworks, and it felt like a pretty normal Canadian city. People milled about walking their dogs or picking up food. The nicotine addicts puffed away outside doorways of condo towers and office buildings.

Inside those cordons, though, things were not so good.

February 8, 2022

Neil Young and the rebellion of “the Grumpy Old Woke Bros”

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

Julie Burchill on the (one hopes) last opportunity for elderly, wrinkly 60s and 70s rock stars to virtue signal their protests to a rapidly diminishing body of fans:

For a while now the generation gap has been making a comeback in politics in a way not seen since the youthquake of the 1960s. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” has become “OK Boomer”. Oldsters have been demonised for everything from Brexit to Covid. Personally, at 62, looking at the lives today’s teenagers can expect, I thank my lucky stars that I was young in the 1970s and 80s, when you could say what you liked and go where you wanted. But this dwindling of fun and freedom has as much to do with the stifling nature of woke culture as it does with the other virus.

So I wouldn’t blame teenagers if they were cross. But those doing the most to promote the alienation of young and old aren’t hot-blooded bright young things. They are old men who appear to identify as young, despite sharing the same unsavoury grey whiskers. Of course, if someone with a penis can be a woman, a greybeard can be a teenager. They’re the Grumpy Old Woke Bros.

We can trace this unhappy breed from the then 68-years-young Ian McEwan spluttering at an anti-Brexit rally in 2017: “A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth. By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.” Since then the likes of Alexei Sayle, Billy Bragg and Stewart Lee have joined in from the monstrous regiment of woke entertainers, adding Damon Albarn (a youthful 53 – and an OBE, the rebel!) to their rankled ranks last week when he said of Taylor Swift “She doesn’t write her own songs”. (This isn’t the first time Albarn has had beef with young female pop stars. He said of Adele in 2015: “She’s very insecure”, to which she replied “It ended up being one of those ‘Don’t meet your idol’ moments … I was such a big Blur fan growing up. But it was sad, and I regret hanging out with him.”)

Though we think of grumpiness as being an English trait, let’s not forget Neil Young (76) who spat his dummy out last week over sharing Spotify with Joe Rogan. Young is a latecomer to the wonderful world of wokeness, whose welcome to the spotless ranks was somewhat marred by the emergence of a 1985 interview in which he backed Ronald Reagan’s gun control policy and added for good measure, AIDS having recently been discovered, “You go to a supermarket and you see a faggot behind the cash register – you don’t want him to handle your potatoes”.

“… across the developed world the elite rise up against the masses: it’s like an anti-1848, prefiguring the post-democratic era that the 2020s will usher in”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A round-up at SteynOnline of various “elites” in Canada and elsewhere rising up against the sexist, hate-speechin’, Islamophobic, transphobic, Putin-controlled white supremacists who are demanding an end to rule-by-decree:

In Ottawa, attempts by agents provocateurs to provoke violence at the Freedom Rally have gone nowhere. So last night, “anti-hate” buffoon Bernie Farber, friend to censors everywhere, was reduced to hate-hoaxing for Justin by circulating “anti-semitic flyers” sent to him by a “friend” “in Ottawa”. Inevitably, within moments, they were revealed to be from something entirely different in Florida some weeks ago. So Bernie explained that his imaginary friend in Ottawa had seen actual hate flyers in Ottawa but had accidentally emailed him a similar flyer from America or something … These days Farber disgraces even himself.

Meanwhile, the Ottawa police have begun arresting citizens trying to deliver food to the truckers. There is no basis in Canadian law for the actions these goon coppers are taking, but the attitude of their dreadful police chief is: hey, the law is whatever I say it is. So he has ordered the arrest of citizens for “mischief”. By mischief, he means bringing sustenance or heat to protesters passing the night in temperatures of twenty below.

~Many parts of the western world are in a very dark place right now, but none more so than Canada. Its unseen prime minister, who came into office promising “sunny ways”, can no longer appear in public and sweepingly, tweetingly declares that he doesn’t need to because the sort of chaps you run into out there are rubes who don’t even know they’re Islamophobes, transphobes, thisaphobes, thataphobes, too dumb even to be aware they’re working for Putin.

As Tucker and I used to joke five years back, across the developed world the elite rise up against the masses: it’s like an anti-1848, prefiguring the post-democratic era that the 2020s will usher in. The present showdown between the Bollywood Bridesmaid and the truckers who deliver his quinoa has made it about as explicit as you can get. The good humour in the face of elite contempt is impressive. Here are a couple of typical “angry” “hate-filled” “white supremacists”:

Who are the real “Sunny Ways” guys? A serial blackface fetishist is calling the masses racist and the court eunuchs of Canada’s state-funded media dutifully tag along.

~The truckers are rallying against “vaccine mandates”, which have no justification in science: The Prime Minister, who is as vaxxed, jabbed and boostered as any mammy singer on the planet, is supposedly hors de combat because he’s down with a second dose of the Covid.

Oh, but don’t worry! To be sure, the common understanding of the word “vaccine” is that you won’t catch what you’re being vaccinated against. But what we really mean is that, if you do get it, it won’t be serious, you won’t be in the ICU, and you certainly won’t die of it.

And by “certainly” we mean, well, probably. Israel, en route to be the world’s first entirely fourth-jabbed nation, currently has a daily death toll higher than before it started giving anyone the first jab. There is no public-health justification for making liberty conditional on compliance with the developed world’s failed strategy of coerced vaccines and constant testing.

At SDA, Francisco provided some quick notes on the situation on the streets in Ottawa over the last couple of days:

Looks like the cops got a couple of slip tanks and some jerry cans. A couple of pickup trucks got towed for having slip tanks on them. Nothing major. The new rule is if you have the paperwork to prove you’re a trucker you can transport fuel to your own vehicle but not to someone else’s. A campaign has started to get everyone on the hill to carry an empty jerry can with them at all times. Let the cops figure out which ones have fuel.

There was a show of force by police. Estimate was up to 100 officers in one group. They got their photo-op for the corporate press. Looks great on TV but it had no real impact. Everyone is still there.

Word on the street is that the goal for the police is to get everyone out of there today, clean things up tomorrow and have parliament resume on Wednesday. To which I say good luck.

Morale amongst the protesters is high.

Again take everything I just wrote here with a grain of salt. It’s a fluid situation and good intel is hard to come by in the heat of the moment.

I am not a lawyer, but I’m deeply puzzled at what part of the Criminal Code the Ottawa police are depending on for these imposed restrictions on fuel, food, and other supplies being provided to the truckers by ordinary Canadians. I don’t recall any provision in the law allowing police to confiscate the legal goods of ordinary people on a whim.

Brendan O’Neill on the shitshow that was the original fundraising campaign to help the truckers on their way to Ottawa:

We need to talk about GoFundMe’s withholding of millions of dollars from the Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates. This is union-busting 21st-century style. This is a multimillion-dollar company using its corporate clout to starve working-class activists of funds. This is a signal from Silicon Valley, clear and loud, that it will wield its power to crush any form of political agitation from “the lower orders” that pushes too hard against the political consensus. Anyone who thinks this clash between a profit-making fundraising website and drivers pissed off at being pushed around by Covid authoritarians is just another weird online spat needs to think again. This is far more than that. It is a scoping out of the battlelines over freedom and power that are likely to define the internet era.

GoFundMe’s deprivation of funds to the truckers protesting against Canada’s vaccine rules is, to my mind, one of the most egregious and anti-democratic acts yet carried out by the California-based elites who oversee the World Wide Web. These truckers, such essential workers, are revolting against Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s introduction of a new rule earlier this month stipulating that truckers who cross the Canada-US border will need to be vaccinated or else go into quarantine after every trip. This is a mad demand. It would severely undermine some truckers’ ability to earn a living. So truckers have risen up. They drove their vast rigs across Canada in what came to be known as the Freedom Convoy before stopping in the capital Ottawa where they have been blocking roads and causing fainting fits among middle-class liberals who cannot understand why these oiks won’t just carry on dropping off sacks of kale to the local Whole Foods and stop going on about their pesky rights.

There has been an outpouring of support for the truckers. Canadians and Americans tired of corona-authoritarianism are cheering the truckers for honking a huge collective horn at the elite consensus on Covid. Despite the best efforts of woke politicians and columnists to depict the truckers as QAnon on wheels, as a motorised version of Mussolini’s March on Rome, many people know that in truth they are decent working people who simply object to the state making their lives that bit harder. People also know that the woke set’s attempts to delegitimise the Freedom Convoy by flagging up “far-right” comments made by a tiny handful of the truckers is a tactic as old as capitalism itself. Elite opponents of working-class organisation have always used smear and innuendo to try to nullify the throng. Seeing this smear campaign for what it is, lots of folk decided to give the truckers a few bucks. But GoFundMe had other ideas.

GoFundMe says the 10million Canadian dollars raised via its website, on a page titled “Freedom Convoy 2022”, will not be given to the truckers after all. It cited police reports about “violence” in the convoy. What violence? Where? Thousands and thousands of people have joined the truckers’ protest and yet there have only been three arrests. One person was arrested for being in possession of a weapon, one for causing “mischief”, and one for making a threatening comment on social media. As far as mass protests go, this is a staggeringly low level of allegedly criminal behaviour. I once visited the Occupy camp at St Paul’s in London and witnessed at least three misdemeanours in the one hour I was there (public urination, threatening speech, and a disturbing of the peace by a man on smack who kept shouting “GET TAE FUCK”). For a mass, angry, revolting movement, Freedom Convoy is uncommonly peaceful. GoFundMe’s “violence” blather is clearly a jumped-up pretext for its political decision to punish the truckers.

On Friday, GoFundMe issued a statement saying that Freedom Convoy was a peaceful movement when it first started but it has since “become an occupation”. And so, “no further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organisers”. Instead, the $9million that remains in GoFundMe’s coffers will be distributed to “credible” charities or refunded to the people who donated if they fill in a form. As if to make it super clear that this is all very political, Facebook has now removed a page promoting a Freedom Convoy in Washington, DC and deleted the personal account of the trucker who set it up. “It’s censorship at its finest”, he said, and he’s not wrong. This looks like a cut-and-dried case of the new capitalist oligarchies siding with the political establishment – in this case, Justin Trudeau – to shrink and silence the consensus-threatening cries of ordinary people.

I didn’t donate to the original crowdfunding campaign for the truckers on GoFundMe, but after that company attempted to quite literally steal $10 million away from the truckers and donate the money instead to causes they approved of, I scraped up a few bucks to add to the replacement fundraising efforts with GiveSendGo and I will actively avoid ever sending GoFraudMe a penny.

Matt Gurney has driven in from Toronto to see for himself what the protest looks like:

Depending on which person you’re using as your explainer of the local vibe, you could reasonably walk away convinced that most of what was happening in Ottawa was a pretty big party, or a hostile invasion by thugs and harassers. I wanted to find out which one it was, so on Sunday, I drove in from Toronto, arriving early Monday morning. I spent hours wandering the city, particularly the area immediately around Parliament Hill, trying to answer that question. Is this a huge group of friendly people? Is this a mob of unruly, dangerous types?

The answer is yes.

The following is my view of the situation in Ottawa, and should be seen entirely in that light. I should also note that I’m a tall, unsmiling white dude with a buzzed head who wandered the area in a gigantic and delightfully warm NFL hoodie, and it’s very possible that my experience was skewed by the fact that I blended in. There are other protest sites at other parts of the city, as well, and I’ll be heading out to some of them later. The observations below are what I saw around Parliament, and within perhaps a 10-minute walk of it.

The first thing you should know is that the protest is, in the main, friendly, at least to someone like me. The photos you’d have seen do it justice. Large transport trucks and smaller personal vehicles are packed tightly together along major streets around Parliament, and the road space and surrounding sidewalks have been colonized by the occupants. Booths and folding tables are everywhere, some selling trinkets, others for supplies or flyers and leaflets. I suspect this will anger locals tired of the protest, but I have to call it as I see it: the overall vibe was quite friendly. I spent about two hours wandering the largest sites, and was struck by the amount of direct eye contact. There’s none of the usual practiced disinterest in those around you that you internalize when you live in a big city (Ottawa is big enough, in that respect). The protesters are eager to make eye contact and to chat, about everything — the weather (warmer!), the Superbowl, and, oh, how Trudeau has to go and the pandemic is a lie. And how about those Maple Leafs?!

[…]

For all the friendly chatter, there is another element in the group. I haven’t owned any bars, but I’ve spent some very pleasant evenings in them, plus an entire career observing people, and I have passable danger-spotting skills. (My success rate at avoiding getting suddenly sucker-punched at dive watering holes hovers at very near 100 per cent!) There is a harder, nastier edge to this group, what my bar-owning friend would have called “the hard men.” It’s not large, at least not in the area immediately around Parliament during daylight — there are other areas I’ll be checking out later today, and the vibe may well change. The group around Parliament is overwhelmingly quite pleasant and, as noted, unusually friendly and eager to chat. But anyone who denies there’s another element there, though, is blind to it, wilfully or otherwise.

Again, I’m a big white guy, and I blend in by default, but more than once I felt myself being calmly but directly observed by exactly the type my bar-owning friend spoke of. There are hard people there, often in small groups, talking quietly by themselves, or standing silently, watching the comers and goers. If you know what to look for, and not all of us do, they’re easy to spot. The more friendly, chatty types give them a wide berth. I spent a few interesting moments standing by a folding table stacked high with hygiene supplies, observing three stone-faced men participating in a kind of staredown with one of the roving police units. The police simply stopped and stood in place. No one said a thing. After maybe a minute, the hard men left. The police marched off. A woman behind the table with the toilet paper and tooth paste tubes looked at me with relief.

February 6, 2022

In Critical Race Theory, racism “only applies to powerful whites (and fellow travelers) vis-a-vis powerless blacks”

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

Andrew Sullivan on Caryn Elaine Johnson (stage name Whoopi Goldberg) and how her unconsidered anti-semitic worldview has been moulded and shaped by Critical Race Theory:

Whoopi Goldberg, I think it’s safe to say, is not a deep thinker, and wouldn’t claim to be. She’s also clearly not an anti-Semite. She’s a talented entertainer and merely reflects many (but not all) of the assumptions of Hollywood types — well-intentioned, rarely ruffled, cultural leftism. But that’s precisely why her comments on The View about antisemitism and the Holocaust are so interesting. They expose some aspects of “anti-whiteness” and “antiracism” as these CRT ideas have trickled down into the public consciousness, and also a deep, long-standing sense among some African-Americans that Jews in America are not usually the oppressed, but often the oppressor. These are things no one wants to explore very much — because it’s complicated, fraught, and, well, who needs the grief?

So here we go! Anti-Semitism is seen as not racism, because for Whoopi, and critical theorists, “racism” is defined as an essentially Euro-American social construction, which didn’t exist before the colonial era, and only applies to powerful whites (and fellow travelers) vis-a-vis powerless blacks. Racism is not, for them, a universal, instinctual, tribal, evolution-rooted suspicion of different-looking others that is always with us, and can happen anywhere. It is solely rather the deliberate, historically contingent oppression of the non-white by colonial “white supremacy”. However much truth this contains about American history (and it does contain a lot of it), it’s a terribly parochial view that misses a huge amount in the world, throughout history, and in America.

As Adam Serwer explains, this parochial view of racism also “renders the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust illegible”. Well, yeah. Any theory of racism that cannot explain the Holocaust is not just illegible, it is untenable. It would mean that the conflicts between, say, Tutsis and Hutus, Germans and Slavs, Jews and Arabs, Burmese and Rohingya, or Han and Uighur, are not instances of racism — because they are not examples of “white targeting non-white”. It wouldn’t include the Bible’s description of the Jewish people’s own enslavement by the Pharaohs, for goodness’ sake. And that’s a problem for any concept of racism — let alone one that now controls much of American culture.

Here, for example, is the Anti-Defamation League’s woke definition of “racism” the day Whoopi made her remarks (a definition swiftly changed after the contretemps): “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” But since Jews are deemed “white people”, by this definition, how could the Nazis have been racist? The same would also have to be said, would it not, about Louis Farrakhan today? He may sound like a Nazi about Jews, but his skin color means he cannot be racist.

Whoopi’s gaffe helps explain why the mainstream media now describes young black men assaulting Jews and Asians as expressing … “white supremacy”! This is what the WaPo op-ed page, referring to growing Latino support for Trump, called “multiracial whiteness”. If they are non-white and bigots, they miraculously become white. And notice how bigotry is exclusively ascribed to a single “race”: whites. Without whites, we’d have no racism at all.

This is not the only way critical theorists distinguish anti-Semitism from racism. “Whiteness”, disproportionately including Jewishness, is wrapped up in systems of oppression, especially capitalism, and defined by control of money and power. Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility that “white supremacy” exists in mainstream America by noting how many “white people” there were in various positions of power in 2017:

    Ten richest Americans: 100 percent white (seven of whom are among the ten richest in the world). US Congress: 90 percent white. US governors: 96 percent white. Top military advisers: 100 percent white. President and vice president: 100 percent white. US House Freedom Caucus: 99 percent white. Current US presidential cabinet: 91 percent white. People who decide which TV shows we see: 93 percent white. People who decide which books we read: 90 percent white. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent white. People who decide which music is produced: 95 percent white. People who directed the one hundred top-grossing films of all time, worldwide: 95 percent white.

She goes on to emphasize Hollywood’s influence, in particular. Now just put the word “Jewish” where the word “white” is, and her list reads a bit differently, doesn’t it: “People who decide which books we read: 90 percent Jewish. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent Jewish.” It’s an assertion that one race hoards power, controls the media, and directs the culture, a race so powerful it permeates everything. Sound a little familiar?

QotD: Marcus Tullius Cicero

Filed under: Europe, History, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of the most gifted and successful politicians of his day. Unlike nearly all of his peers in the Roman Senate, his family had not been in Roman politics for generations on generations, but rather was new to it. Cicero’s family was a wealthy one, but hailed from the town of Arpinum, about 60 miles from Rome, making Cicero an outsider to elite Roman politics. He made his name as a legal advocate, rather than (in more typical Roman fashion) as a military man. He was the first of his family to enter the Roman Senate (making him a novus homo or “new man”) and was the first such new man to rise all the way to the consulship (the highest Roman office) in thirty years, which should give some sense of the magnitude of that achievement. Moreover, Cicero had managed to get elected in the first year he was eligible, which would have been a banner achievement even for a member of Rome’s traditional upper-class. During that consulship (63 B.C.), he further distinguished himself by foiling a planned coup centered around the influential figure of Catiline (L. Sergius Catilina).

Cicero was a key politician in the Late Republic, but it was his misfortune that his life was spent in an era where words meant less than weapons. He sided with Pompey against Caesar, but was granted clemency after Pompey’s defeat. He was not involved in Caesar’s assassination – he was still too much an outsider for some of the stuck-up Roman elitists who made up the conspiracy (though he correctly pointed out at the time that leaving Antony alive would be a fatal mistake). In the aftermath of the assassination, he identified (correctly) Antony as the key threat to the Republic and worked to discredit him politically in a devastating series of speeches named the Philippics (in honor of a similar set of speeches made by the Athenian Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander). Cicero’s political assault on Antony succeeded – his reputation was ruined and his popularity in Rome never recovered – but it cost Cicero his life when Antony, in league with Octavian, moved into the capital and had Cicero murdered. Cicero’s literary legacy survived him, however, in part because it was useful for Augustus’ own political ends (e.g. Plut. Cic. 49.5-6).

Cicero’s position as the most eloquent orator of the Latin language – and probably its best prose stylist – is largely uncontested. It was his speaking skills – honed in the courts – that made him so politically successful. He was also a prolific writer and a tremendous amount of his writings survive, including both legal and political speeches, private letters, handbooks on oratory, and a set of philosophical works. As anyone who has read Cicero can tell you, he also has a deserved reputation for pride and self-aggrandizement. While many of Cicero’s contemporaries and readers down to the modern era have been impressed by Cicero’s thinking and eloquence, I feel confident in asserting no one – alive or dead – will ever be more impressed by Cicero than Cicero was impressed by himself.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: A Trip Through Cicero (Natural Law)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-12-12.

February 5, 2022

A new biography of Nigel Farage

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

For a man who’s never been elected to Parliament, Nigel Farage has been a major mover-and-shaker in British politics. In the Literary Review, Steve Richards reviews One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick:

Most political figures come and go. Nigel Farage, in contrast, seems always to be around, close to the centre of the political stage. Sometimes he is leading a political party. Occasionally he is setting up a new one. Between such roles he is on television. Currently, the former leader of UKIP and the Brexit Party hosts a nightly show on GB News.

The consequences of Farage’s ubiquity have been seismic, reshaping the UK and the wider political landscape. He sought a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and then a hard Brexit, and ultimately got everything he wanted. The Conservative Party’s embrace of a form of English nationalism was partly a response to the threat that Farage posed. The near-silence of the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the subject of Brexit is a form of vindication for him. Starmer knows that Brexit is having calamitous consequences but does not dare to say so. No wonder Michael Crick concludes that “it’s hard to think of any other politician in the last 150 years who has had so much impact on British history without being a senior member of one of the major parties at the time”.

Among Crick’s admirable passions is his interest in those individuals or forces that have shaped the major political parties from outside the mainstream. He wrote an important book on Militant, the left-wing group that in the 1980s sought to infiltrate the Labour Party and for a time made life hellish for Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, the two party leaders during that stormy decade. His biography of Jeffrey Archer, the Conservative MP who became a bestselling author and then a convicted prisoner, was revelatory. Now he has set his sights on Farage, who has never been an MP and yet has been such a prominent figure in recent years.

As Crick always does with his subjects, he has researched meticulously every twist and turn in Farage’s life. He regrets that his investigations were constrained by the pandemic. He need not worry too much. His diligence has enabled him seemingly to have unearthed every internal dispute in UKIP and the Brexit Party, along with the eccentric figures who lined up on different sides in them. The characters that emerge would fit neatly into a Dickens novel. One of the most unsavoury right-wingers to feature in the book is now an avid supporter of the Green Party, lives in Germany and is passionately opposed to Brexit – a novelistic metamorphosis. We are also reintroduced to Farage’s old friend Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP MEP and economics spokesman, who in 2013 famously hit Crick with a party conference brochure as the journalist pursued him down the street after he had made characteristically indiscreet and outrageous remarks in a speech to UKIP members.

This book is full of fights, usually between party members. We see Farage repeatedly falling out with other potential leaders. More prominent members who cannot hide their real views in public have to be admonished. Some flirt with the BNP. Even during the triumphant 2016 referendum campaign, there were two pro-Brexit camps, one led by Farage and the other by Dominic Cummings. Farage and Cummings loathe each other and their campaign groups fought bitterly for pre-eminence. This is the most striking theme of the book. UKIP and the Brexit Party, which Farage set up in 2019 to campaign for a hard Brexit, were utterly dysfunctional most of the time. They make the UK’s main political parties, all going through various existential crises at the moment, seem models of smooth, sophisticated professionalism. The amateurism extended well beyond the eccentric characters near or close to the top. Neither party offered coherent policy programmes beyond opposition to the UK’s membership of the EU.

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

February 3, 2022

QotD: Canadian political discourse

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Y]ou can end all argument on any issue in Canada by saying a proposal is “American-style”. I’m waiting for someone to seriously argue for abolishing elections, since they lead to “American-style argument, disunity and wasteful spending on political campaigns”.

Damian Penny, “More Chaoulli-related thoughts”, Daimnation, 2005-06-13.

Dave Rudell formulates a Canadian version of Godwin’s law in the comments:

    Maybe we need an analogy to Godwin’s Law for political discourse in Canada. It could be something like; as the length of a political discussion among (between) Canadians increases, the probability of someone using the phrase “American-Style” approaches one. Of course, we’d also have to add the corollary; the person who invokes the phrase “American-Style” has probably just lost the argument.

January 31, 2022

“Over the span of human history, yelling at someone to ‘Calm down!’ has a failure rate of 100 per cent”

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

A few days ago, Matt Gurney reported on the trucker convoy just as the first vehicles began to arrive in Ottawa (and the Prime Minister announced he’d been exposed to someone with the Wuhan Coronavirus and would go into isolation).

Posted to Twitter by @KatherineZupan https://twitter.com/KatherineZupan/status/1486164240364814337/photo/1

I don’t remember who said this; I’d give proper credit if I could. But I do remember it made me laugh, largely because it was true. Over the span of human history, yelling at someone to “Calm down!” has a failure rate of 100 per cent.

Two years into this pandemic, Canadians are angry and frustrated and anxious. Much of this is driven by the stress of COVID, but not all of it. There are good reasons to be angry. There are also bad reasons to be angry and right now people from both categories are streaming into our nation’s capital.

As I write this, it is Friday morning. The first protesters have begun to arrive in the capital for a large protest. It’s been described as a trucker convoy, though initial reports suggest many people are arriving in their normal, everyday vehicles. There’s no reliable estimate yet of its size, but while it doesn’t seem to be tracking toward the tens of thousands of vehicles some of its boosters had claimed, it’s clearly large enough. Hundreds of vehicles? Low thousands? We’ll find out. However many there are, though, the people inside them are angry, and they want to be heard.

[…]

I’m a realist. There will always be a fringe — a fringe on both sides of the spectrum. The right-wing fringe, which is the concern today, is fired up and self-sustaining. It’s global in scope and has detached itself so thoroughly from the mainstream that traditional outreach tools like education via media and societal institutions won’t work — the media and the institutions are among the preferred targets of the fringe. You’re not going to talk these guys down by citing the Toronto Star, or, indeed, The Line. The movement can sustain itself on social networks with all the misinfo it can create indefinitely. We’re stuck with it. But if we want to keep it a fringe, we need to isolate it and wall it off by keeping our moderate institutions strong and competent.

And we’re not doing that, are we? The greatest bulwark against expansion of the fringes is a confident, functional centre, and as we often recount here at The Line, Canadian institutions (and many others more generally across the Western world) are in a bit of a state, aren’t they?

We have a military that can’t fight. A federal government that can’t procure pistols for the army or pay its own employees. The best and brightest public health leaders we’ve got told us that the risk to Canada from COVID-19 was low, until it wasn’t, and then they thoroughly botched the response. Inflation is heating up, food insecurity is rising, you can’t buy a house anywhere near one of our major cities unless your parents can spot you the first million bucks, and in much of the country, the schools haven’t functioned properly in two years. Hell, here in Toronto, it took the city 10 days — ten! — to clear the snow from the streets after a recent blizzard.

Canada is increasingly, as Lauren Dobson-Hughes wrote so aptly here, not fit for purpose. All of us know that things can be better and need to be better, and it’s not happening. And we all know why — our political class, as a whole, isn’t up to it. It’s either beyond their ability or simply not of interest. The elected officials and their would-be successors are too often content to dunk on their opponents and wage meme wars while the problems we face get worse and more obvious and the partisan divide ever-more entrenched. Some of the challenges are hard, but not all of them are as hard as we make them. And so what we’re left with is anger, a churning rage that is constantly searching for a new outlet or grievance. Again, is it any surprise that both the Conservatives and the Liberals are opposed by more than 70 per cent of the electorate?

January 30, 2022

Fighting progressive illiberalism with populist illiberalism

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

In the free-to-non-paying-subscribers segment of this week’s Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan laments the ratcheting illiberal tactics of both the opponents and supporters of Critical Race Theory in American schools:

I’ve spent a lot of time these past few years concerned with left illiberalism, especially the replacement of liberalism with critical theory as the guiding principle of our republic. But at the same time, of course, right illiberalism has gone into overdrive, in a polarizing vortex. Being a conservative liberal, or a liberal conservative, is becoming close to impossible. And this week, as I pored over a mass of bills to ban the praxis, pedagogy and content of critical theory in public high schools, I felt as if I were being tossed between the blue devil to my left and the deep red sea to my right.

One core point: the illiberalism is real on both sides. Not always in equal measure, now or in the past, but definitely on both, feeding off each other. And in public education, once again a battleground in the culture war, it seems quite obvious to me that the left bears the burden of responsibility for the conflict.

Critical theory’s long march through the institutions reached its peak some time ago in higher education — and has gone on to capture media, corporate America, medicine, the federal government, tech, science, and every cultural institution. Over $14 billion have been spent on philanthropic “equity” initiatives since the summer of 2020 alone. Of course children’s education would be affected. What hasn’t been? And of course critical theorists aim directly at children. The woke, like the Jesuits, understand the value of instilling certain concepts at a very young age. How else to transform the world?

That’s why Ibram Kendi has bequeathed the world not just one but two books on how to rear “antiracist babies”. The publisher says the new one, Goodnight Racism, “gives children the language to dream of a better world and is the perfect book to add to their social justice toolkit.” My italics. Another recent book, Woke Baby, instructs toddlers to be “a good revolutionary”, and another one explains how “activism begins in the cradle”.

You truly think that in school districts where teachers are saturated in equity training, whose unions invite Kendi to be their keynote speaker, that this is all being made up? Just peruse through all the “equity” conferences, courses, syllabi, lesson plans and curricula that now dominate public ed. Many parents found out only because they overheard what their kids were being taught online during the pandemic. Or you can just surf the web as the woke dismantle schools for the gifted, abolish SATs, describe merit as racist, and lay waste to excellent schools merely because too many Asian-American kids are succeeding in them.

What we’re seeing now is the reaction to this left-wing power grab. And — guess what? — it’s a right-wing power grab. If the left has stealthily changed public education from above, the right has now used the only power they have to fight back — political clout in state legislatures. 122 separate bills have been introduced since January 2021, 71 in the last three weeks alone. They all regulate speech by teachers in public schools, but many are now also reaching into higher education — a much more fraught area — and outright book banning. The bills are rushed; some appear well-intentioned; others are nuts; many are very vague, inviting lawsuits to clarify what they can mean in practice. In most cases, if passed, they will surely chill debate of race and sex and history — and increasingly of gender, sex and homosexuality — in high schools. And that’s a bad thing for liberal education.

January 27, 2022

What is this “Mass Formation Psychosis” thing that so many are suddenly fascinated with?

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

I started seeing the phrase “Mass Formation Psychosis” popping up a lot recently, but I hadn’t bothered looking into it until quite recently. In an effort to figure out what it’s supposed to be and why people are talking about it, I did the lazy thing I usually do and had a quick wander through some of the blogs I follow to gather up their respective takes on it. Here’s one from earlier in the week from Severian at Founding Questions:

In the depths of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong decided that China must overtake at least Great Britain, if not the US, in steel production (this was back when the US actually made shit, you understand, so … you know, like a hundred years ago). But since that was impossible with China’s existing steel mills, Mao hit on a solution: He’d just have the peasants do it! Right in the backyards of their collective farms.

No, I’m not kidding. They really did that. The “steel” produced was worthless, of course, and indeed the whole zany scheme probably contributed to the Great Famine, as peasants ended up throwing farm implements, cooking pots, anything and everything that could be melted down into their backyard furnaces. Yeah, they’d need them for the harvest, but the harvest was a month or two away, and the commissar and his pistol demanding more more more! steel was right now.

And that’s the great thing about a totalitarian dictatorship (if you’re the dictator) — if your madcap caper runs aground on reality’s rocks, you can simply declare victory and move on. What backyard blast furnaces? Never heard of them … and neither have you, comrade, if you know what’s good for you. Problem solved.

But … what if, for some bizarre reason, Mao’s slaves had just kept throwing things into their backyard furnace? If Mao had come down personally from the Forbidden City and said “Yeah, we’re good here, save your hoes and scythes and woks and whatnot,” but they still they persisted?

That’s the situation in which Tapioca Joe and the Juggalos find themselves vis a vis Covid.

Severian linked to Robert Stacy McCain’s call for making today “Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day”, which in turn linked to this Substack post from Robert Malone.

As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.

What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.

These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.

January 23, 2022

“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has become the world’s first Influencer Nation”

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

In the free-to-cheapskate-free-subscribers version of The Line‘s weekly Dispatch, they look at how the Liberal government’s approach to social media has evolved from a useful way to stay in contact with the voters to, effectively, the primary communication channel to flatter themselves and conduct industrial-strength virtue signalling sessions:

Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”

When Justin Trudeau and his merry band of iPhone-packin’ Liberals came to power in 2015, they quickly established themselves as world leaders in the use of social media to backscratch, logroll, big-up, and otherwise tell one another, and the world, how awesome they thought they all were. We at The Line found it all pretty obnoxious out of the gate, but given Trudeau’s repeated electoral successes, it’s clear that YMMV on this sort of stuff.

But one thing that has happened over the past seven years is that social media has gone from a significant vehicle for the branding and promotion of the Liberal government, into something close to an end itself. It’s not clear when the shift happened, but at some point the Liberals went from Twitter being used as a way of selling policy, to policy being little more than a device for getting the shamrock Twitter army riled up. Similarly, where once Instagram was a way for Liberal ministers to show off while doing Liberal minister-y things, it’s pretty clear that now, the only rationale for a Liberal minister to do anything is if it serves the imperatives of the ‘gram.

To put it plainly: Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has become the world’s first Influencer Nation.

Understanding that Canada’s federal government is now little more than a social media account is the best — nay, only — way we have found of making sense of what Trudeau’s Liberals are up to. For example, earlier this week the Prime Minister’s Office sent an email around that contained a “readout” (that is, a more or less invented summary) of a conversation Trudeau allegedly had with some of his ministers and senior officials. The subject matter was “the latest developments in Ukraine,” and it is absolutely the sort of thing the prime minister of Canada ought to be discussing with his minister of defence, his minister of foreign affairs, and the clerk of the privy council.

But as the sort of thing that you would summarize as a readout and mail to members of the press gallery, it’s utterly preposterous. Paul Wells of Maclean’s, bless his heart, found the time and energy to chapter-and-verse it, and please do read the whole thing. But we would draw your attention to the second last paragraph of the readout:

    Together, the Prime Minister and ministers raised the need to find a peaceful solution through dialogue. They reaffirmed Canada’s steadfast support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and considered current and future assistance to Ukraine. Prime Minister Trudeau emphasized that any further military incursion into Ukraine would have serious consequences, including coordinated sanctions.

Does this sound like any conversation you’ve ever had, or overheard? Is anyone credulous enough to think this is remotely how the discussion went? This isn’t the summary of an actual cabinet meeting; at best, it’s a placeholder bit of boilerplate for someone hell bent on trying to write an Aaron Sorkin movie about Canadian politics. But what it really is a sort of reverse New Yorker cartoon contest: It’s the caption for an Instagram post that you’re supposed to imagine in your mind’s eye.

The Abandoned Hill With Two Members Of Parliament

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 6 Jul 2020

Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, is a now-desolate hillfort run by English Heritage. But it was once one of the most important sites in southern England: so important that it had two members of Parliament. Then, it became a “rotten borough”: and a warning about power.

Thanks to English Heritage: more information and how to visit: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/v…

Research and script assistance from Jess Jewell
Drone camera by Jamie Bellinger
Edited by Michelle Martin: https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin
Audio mix by Graham Haerther: https://haerther.net

Filmed safely, following all local and national guidance: https://www.tomscott.com/safe/

SOURCES:
Corfield, P. (2000). Power and the professions in Britain 1700-1850. London: Routledge.

Dodsworth, W. (1814). An historical description of the cathedral church of Salisbury: including an account of the monuments, chiefly extracted from Gough’s “Sepulchral Monuments,” and other authentic documents: also, biographical memoirs of the Bishops of Salisbury, from the earliest period by W. Dodsworth, verger of the Cathedral

English Heritage’s own research page: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/v…

http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/…

I’m at https://tomscott.com
on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott
and on Instagram as tomscottgo

January 21, 2022

Boris is in trouble, threaten the BBC to take the heat off him!

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

In Spiked, Gareth Roberts wonders why Britons should continue to pay an annual license fee to support a media conglomerate that demonstrably hates them and their country:

Culture secretary Nadine Dorries, the most ardent of Boris Johnson stans, obligingly threw the deadest of cats on to the table at the weekend to distract from the woes of her beleaguered boss. She announced a two-year freeze on the BBC licence fee and dangled the prospect of scrapping it entirely.

Dorries must be well aware that any threat to the BBC always results in a Furies’ chorus of anger, horror and prophecies of woe, coming from precisely those people the Tory grassroots are likely to detest. And up they obligingly popped – Polly Toynbee, Nish Kumar, Gary Lineker, all present and correct. This wasn’t so much political theatre as a pantomime with stock phrases and responses. She’s behind you!

Behind all this repetitive call and response, there is something different this time around, on both sides. Dorries was noticeably blatant and direct when she tweeted that this licence-fee consultation “will be the last” (though she seemed less so in the Commons a couple of days later). And her detractors seemed more at a loss, struggling to find the counter examples of BBC excellence that used to come quickly and easily to hand. Citizen Khan creator Adil Ray tweeted a BBC promotional video asking “What has the BBC ever done for us?” that was made 36 years ago. Comedian Simon Day provided a list of great BBC comedies going back to the 1950s, which contained only one show commissioned in the last 15 years.

Canada’s CBC has a similar attitude toward Canadian culture and (ugh!) Canadians that the BBC displays, but the CBC gets direct government subsidies rather than a formal TV license required of all British TV owners. It’s quite reasonable to wonder what benefit Canadian taxpayers and British license-holders derive from all this financial support of increasingly unwatched TV and online propaganda that mocks and belittles them:

What this seems to show is that the BBC is now in a fix. In a way, the BBC hasn’t changed all that much. It is doing now what it has always done, reflecting and embodying a certain section of the middle class. When that section was sane, or at least fairly sane, that could be irritating on occasion, but we all forgave it because it had its heart in the right place. But in the past decade, the nominally “liberal” middle class has, to put it politely, gone both doolally and totalitarian.

To consume the BBC since about 2012 is to be never more than 10 minutes away from being scolded or berated, usually based on some spurious identity-politics talking point imported from the sick vortex of American academia. (On Radio 4 this happens much more frequently, about every 35 seconds.) It is unbearable, like paying £159 a year, on pain of imprisonment, to be told off by a particularly irritating polytechnic lecturer.

BBC News gets a lot of stick for this, understandably, but the Beeb’s drama, comedy and documentary output is now infested with it, too. It’s the same crushingly banal suite of opinions across everything.

Life before Blair was a grey, damp horror, a cultural wasteland of prejudice where Oswald Mosley had huge amounts of support (strangely enough, insinuating that people’s grandparents were all fascists doesn’t endear them to you). Working-class whites are bigots who can’t be trusted with basic information in case they start a race war. Fiona Bruce has kittens live on air when a doctor states the simple fact that it’s impossible to change sex. The BBC’s younger journalists have to be told that people have different opinions. If upper-class or working-class people can’t be shamed or blamed for something, the BBC just isn’t interested. It is stultifyingly bourgeois.

The BBC is often valued, and often trumpets itself, as a thing that brings the nation together. I think it has transmogrified into doing the opposite, with a superior sneer that treats Britain like something it’s found on its shoe.

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