Quotulatiousness

September 9, 2023

The Republican race – “There don’t seem to be a lot of takers for ‘pretending this is normal'”

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

Mark Steyn on the establishment GOP’s attempt to run the 2024 campaign as though nothing has changed other than the calendar:

I mentioned on Monday that on his long-running Radio Derb John Derbyshire drew his listeners’ attention to an observation of yours truly:

    I can’t improve on Steyn — nobody can — so I’ll just quote him from that piece.

I always feel Derb thinks I’m a bit of a pantywaist on the hardcore issues, but in today’s America even a reasonably sentient pantywaist should be able to get to the nub of the issue. Here’s the bit Derb quoted:

    So two years later the American Right still talks about the justice system and the election campaign as if either term means what it does in functioning societies. As I said above, I don’t intend to comment on this week’s Trump indictment either, nor do I wish to talk about who would make the best president, who has the best platform, who has the skill-set to implement the platform … That would be all well and good if we were in, say, France, but, when the dirty stinking rotten corrupt U.S. justice system is criminalizing political opposition, there’s no point pretending this is a normal situation, right?

“There’s no point pretending this is a normal situation, right?” And yet at least three-quarters of the candidates in that Republican debate insisted on doing just that: This is just a normal quadrennial election in the greatest country in the history of countries where we’re renowned around the planet for our uniquely peaceful “peaceful transfer of power”, etc, etc.

Sorry, I don’t buy that — and evidently nor does the GOP base. Which is why Trump has a forty-point lead over his nearest rival, and Nikki Haley’s alleged triumph on stage in that debate has seen her numbers soar to — stand well back! — 6.1 per cent. The avowedly normal vice-president, senator and three governors nipping at her heels can barely muster ten percent between them. There don’t seem to be a lot of takers for “pretending this is normal”.

John Derbyshire quoted me in the context of the latest sentences on the January 6th “insurrectionists”. Dominic Pezzola broke a window at the Capitol and was given ten years; the government had asked for twenty. Joseph Biggs moved a crowd-control barrier and was sentenced to seventeen years; the government had wanted him banged up for thirty-three.

So the prosecutors and the judges seem to have reached a cozy understanding that, whatever sentence the former demand, the Court will be totally reasonable and cut in half. You want another? The feds demanded thirty years for Zachary Rehl; the judge gave him fifteen. And this is after two-and-a-half years in gaol awaiting their “constitutional right” (don’t wave that constitution at me!) to a speedy trial.

Oops, wait, I spoke too soon. The US Attorney wanted thirty-three years for Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, but this time the judge decided to up it to two-thirds of the feds’ demand: twenty-two years. For a guy who wasn’t in Washington on January 6th.

All this of course in an ugly and violent land where actual career criminals who like to beat up disabled women with their own canes have the run of the playground. And with the connivance and support of the Democrat Party, even when very occasionally it all goes wrong for one of their own.

Oh, well. Mr Tarrio is a Proud Boy. I’m not really a Proud Boys type, if only because their founder, Gavin McInnes, has been a bit of an arse about me re Cockwombling Cary Katz and the CRTV cases. Still, I’m all about first principles — and a decade for breaking a window is not, even by lousy American standards, the verdict of a “justice” system.

September 8, 2023

The legacy media really value Conservative gab-fests like the current CPC convention

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

Chris Selley explains why the fringe views of obscure Conservative riding associations get so much more juice in the legacy media than equivalent brain-farts from Liberal or NDP groups:

Whatever lands in your news hole from the Conservative Party of Canada convention, which kicks off Thursday night in Quebec City, it’s a safe bet you’ll hear the result of the vote on Policy Resolution 1258. Sponsored by the North Okanagan—Shuswap riding association, it reads, in part, as follows: “A Conservative government will protect children by prohibiting life-altering medicinal or surgical interventions on minors under 18 to treat gender confusion or dysphoria”.

Needless to say this hasn’t gone down very well at the Ottawa press club, where discussion generally confines itself to two countries. “The pitch is similar to ones found across the United States, including in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in May banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth,” the increasingly breathless Canadian Press reported. “(It’s) a move many health professionals, parents and advocates of LGBTQS+ youth says places them at greater risk for suicide and depression.”

This is a distraction that leader Pierre Poilievre really doesn’t need. As I wrote last week, on the question of how schools should treat children who wish to change name or gender at school even quite reasonable policies can receive extraordinarily negative press if they are perceived to have been drafted by intolerant people. It’s as if the policies, reasonable on paper, might have some kind of cooties that could harm the children they affect. (That said, in some cases journalists and commentators don’t even seem to have read the policies in question.)

Policy Resolution 1258, like New Brunswick’s and Saskatchewan’s supposedly extreme “social transitioning” policies, isn’t at all extreme by world standards. Gender issues have enflamed the American culture wars, true enough — at last count 19 states, including Florida, had implemented new rules on “gender-affirming care” for kids (and in some cases adults). Naturally Canadian conservatives are watching, some approvingly.

So the legacy media loves intramural disputes within parties on the right, both because it gives them interesting things to report and pontificate about, and also because as a class, journalists tend to skew very heavily progressive. This leads naturally to a difference between how Conservative fringe opinions and progressive fringe opinions are treated in the media.

Especially for a neutral like myself, and especially given how much power party leaders have amassed relative to everyone else, there is a certain pleasure in making a party leader squirm. In the often hidebound and unimaginative world of Canadian politics, that can have benefits. These resolutions often serve as a sort of conscience-check for the party in question: Why aren’t the Liberals liberal enough? Why aren’t the Conservatives conservative enough? Sometimes the party even listens.

That said, I have no idea why parties inflict this on themselves. Mostly these resolutions just stir up trouble. Opposition parties and media alike use these resolutions to craft the dastardly narratives of their choice. The Conservatives in particular suffer from this, and in particular from the Ottawa media.

When the Conservatives ran advertisements claiming the Liberal government wanted to legalize hard drugs — a 2018 policy resolution brought forward by the caucus itself — CTV News declared the ads objectively “false.” The Liberals routinely chuck overboard progressive-minded proposals that come from the party’s left — on legalizing prostitution, for example, or electoral reform — and they’re never heard about again.

The Conservatives’ more right-wing policy proposals seem to get chucked into a giant narrative cauldron and fished out by reporters whenever necessary to prove that there is, in fact, a narrative that needs propagating: on abortion, on climate change, on euthanasia, on gender dysphoria, you name it, and no matter what the leader of the day — the guy everyone knows is in charge — might say.

UN official denounces Canada’s migrant worker program as a “form of slavery”

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

That this scathing report made it to the CBC’s website must really hurt for the federal government, who have a collective “white saviour” complex about their immigration stance:

Temporary foreign workers picking fruit in a Canadian orchard.
Image from http://www.yorkfeed.com/apple-picking-urgently-canada/

A United Nations official on Wednesday denounced Canada’s temporary foreign worker program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery”.

Tomoya Obokata, UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, made the comments in Ottawa after spending 14 days in Canada.

“I am disturbed by the fact that many migrant workers are exploited and abused in this country,” he said.

“Agricultural and low-wage streams of the temporary foreign workers program constitute a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Obokata’s comments echo those of Jamaican migrant workers who, in an open letter to their country’s ministry of labour last month, described their working conditions in Ontario as “systematic slavery”.

The special rapporteur role was created by the UN in 2007. Its mandate includes investigating and advocating against forced or coerced labour.

Obokata said migrant workers face deportation if they lose their work permits, which also prevent them from changing employers if they face abuse.

“This creates a dependency relationship between employers and employees, making the latter vulnerable to exploitation,” he said, adding that many workers are reluctant to report abuse because they fear losing their permits.

Thousands of workers come to Canada each year to work through the program. Statistics Canada estimates that temporary foreign workers make up 15 per cent of Canada’s agricultural workforce.

The system came under scrutiny during the pandemic. Auditor General Karen Hogan reported in 2021 that the federal government did not do enough to ensure those workers were being protected.

Obokata said he spoke with a number of migrant workers who described having to work excessive hours with no access to overtime pay, being denied access to health care and being forced to live in cramped and unsanitary living conditions.

September 7, 2023

The not-at-all hidden authoritarian desires of the climate activists

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on the increasingly blatant wish of the comfortable greenies to impose actual judicial punishment on those who disagree with their agenda:

Greens have been dreaming about jailing “climate criminals” for a very long time. Climate-change deniers in particular will “one day have to answer for their crimes”, said eco-author Mark Lynas a few years back. Well, Gaia’s authoritarian army might finally be getting its way. The new Energy Bill currently before the UK House of Commons provides for “the creation of criminal offences”, possibly including jail time, where there is “non-compliance” with energy-saving regulations. Shorter version: keep the lights on for too long and you could end up in the slammer.

The Telegraph is reporting that property owners who fail to adhere to “energy-performance regulations” could “face prison” under the government’s crazy plans. There is concern that homeowners, landlords and business bosses could be whacked with fines of up to £15,000 or a year behind bars if they fall foul of regulations on energy consumption. The government says it has no plans to make it a crime to be an eco-unfriendly user of light and heat, but the bill allows for the creation of such crimes. And this has rattled some MPs. They’re concerned that ministers would be able to “create new offences with limited parliamentary scrutiny” thanks to the new bill.

What is the aim of all this tightening of the screws on energy use? Of the possible future criminalisation of us thieves of heat and light? To help Britain reach its Net Zero targets, of course. Like other Western nations, we’re committed to achieving Net Zero emissions by 2050. And if that means strongarming the little folk into reducing their energy use, so be it. Let’s be clear about what the new bill’s provision for the creation of crimes really represents: the state threatening to punish anyone who refuses to convert to the religion of Net Zero and to sacrifice their energy to the jealous god of environmentalism.

We can now see the iron fist in the green glove. There’s been a creeping criminalisation of eco-disobedient behaviour for some time now. In the UK, we’ve had “rubbish police” looking through people’s bags of trash and slapping them with a £100 fine if they are not properly recycling plastic and paper. Under Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes, officious local councils erect eyesore bollards to stop people from driving on certain roads, and fine them if they fail to comply. In recent years, more than a million such fines have been served on defiers of the LTN regime, raising more than £100million for the Net Zero cultists who rule over us.

Then there’s London mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), now expanded to cover every inch of London. Hundreds of cameras have been installed across the capital, a vast infrastructure of Stasi-like watchmen, to ensure that drivers of “dirty” vehicles have paid the daily ULEZ toll of £12.50. A fine of £500 awaits any driver of a sinful car who hasn’t. To those saying “Of course the government isn’t going to fine people for un-green behaviour!”, wake up – officialdom has been doing this for years.

September 6, 2023

Some key planks from Scott Alexander’s presidential platform

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

I was a bit surprised to find that Scott Alexander has decided to toss his hat into not one, but two party primaries for the 2024 presidential nomination:

The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform:

Ensure Naval Supremacy And Reduce Wealth Inequality By Bringing Back The Liturgy

The liturgy was a custom of ancient Athens. When the state needed something (usually a new warship) it would ask for volunteers among its richest citizens. Usually one would step up to gain glory or avoid scorn; if nobody did, the courts were allowed to choose the richest person who hadn’t helped out recently. The liturgist would fund the warship and command it as captain for two years, after which his debt to the state was considered discharged and he was given a golden crown. Historians treat the liturgy as a gray area between voluntary service and compulsory taxation; most rich Athenians were eager to serve and gain the relevant honor, but they also knew that if they didn’t, they could be compelled to perform the same service with less benefit to their personal reputation.

Defense analysts warn that America’s naval dominance is declining:

    Only 25 per cent of America’s 114 commissioned surface combatants (cruisers, destroyers, and littoral combat ships) are less than a decade old. By comparison more than 80 per cent of China’s 141 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes have been commissioned in the past decade. In the same time period, the United States commissioned 30 surface combatants … The nearly 600-ship Navy of the late 1980s deployed only 15 per cent of the fleet on average. Today, with fewer than 300 ships, the US Navy deploys more than 35 per cent to service its global missions, contributing to a material death spiral.

So America is short on warships. But it is very long on rich people with big egos. An aircraft carrier would cost the richest American billionaires about the same fraction of their wealth as a trireme cost the richest Athenian aristocrats. So I say: bring back the liturgy!

The American rich already enjoy spending their money on exciting vehicles — yachts for the normies, rockets for the more ambitious, Titanic submersibles for the suicidal. Why not redirect this impulse towards public service? Imagine the fear it would strike into the hearts of the Chinese when the USS Musk enters Ludicrous Mode in the waters off the Taiwan Strait, with Elon himself at the wheel. Imagine how efficiently the USS Jeff Bezos will deliver its payloads! And does anyone doubt that billionaires – usually careful to avoid taxes — will jump at the chance to do this?

The Athenians had a parallel liturgy for rich people who would select and sponsor theater productions, but I think we can skip this one for now.

[…]

Legalize Lying About Your College On Resumes

Colleges trap Americans in a cycle of burdensome loans and act to reinforce class privilege. I have previously advocated making college degree a protected characteristic which it is illegal to ask people about on job applications. But this would be hard to enforce, and people would come up with other ways to communicate their education level.

So let’s think different: let’s make it legal to lie about your college on resumes (it is already not technically illegal to lie on a resume, but companies can ask for slightly different forms of corroboration which it is illegal to lie on). Everyone can just say “Harvard”, and nobody will have any unfair advantage over anyone else.

Start An Internet-Pop-Up Trade War With The European Union

For too long, Americans have groaned under the weight of foreign cookie-related-pop-ups which they and their elected representatives have no control over. It’s time to fight back.

When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR.

Appoint Donald Trump Constitutional Monarch

This would require a constitutional amendment, but I’m sure I could convince enough people.

The British experience suggests that the role of a constitutional monarch is to flaunt how rich they are, get 24-7 news coverage regardless of whether or not they do anything interesting, and have scandals. Donald Trump is the best person in the world at all three of these things

Trump wants to be on top, but is not that interested in governing. Meanwhile, American liberals (by revealed preference) want to continue thinking about him every hour of every day forever, but also don’t want him to govern. Constitutional monarchy would satisfy everyone’s preferences. If Trump is destined to destroy democracy — and everyone agrees that he is — let’s make it happen as gently and non-destructively as possible.

Obviously the royal family can’t participate in regular electoral politics, which means no Trump would ever be able to run for office ever again. This is the only way we are ever getting rid of them, you know this is true, please don’t throw away this chance.

I would support reverse primogeniture-based inheritance — ie the youngest son takes the throne — just so we can have a “King Barron”.

“[T]he preemptive hype about [Bottoms] has been fundamentally false, fundamentally dishonest about what constitutes artistic risk and personal risk in 2023″

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

Freddie deBoer — whose new book just got published — considers the way a new movie is being marketed, as if anything to do with LGBT issues is somehow still “daring” or “risky” or “challenging” to American audiences in the 2020s:

Consider this New York magazine cover story on the new film Bottoms, about a couple of lesbian teenagers (played by 28-year-olds) who start a high school fight club in order to try and get laid. I’m interested in the movie; it looks funny and I’ll watch it with an open mind. Movies that are both within and critiques of the high school movie genre tend to be favorites of mine. But the preemptive hype about it — which of course the creators can’t directly control — has been fundamentally false, fundamentally dishonest about what constitutes artistic risk and personal risk in 2023. The underlying premise of the advance discussion has been that making a high school movie about a lesbian fight club, today, is inherently subversive and very risky. And the thing is … that’s not true. At all. In fact, when I first read the premise of Bottoms I marveled at how perfectly it flatters the interests and worldview of the kind of people who write about movies professionally. As New York‘s Rachel Handler says,

    [Bottoms has] had the lesbian Letterboxd crowd, which treats every trailer and teaser release like Gay Christmas, hot and bothered for months. After attending its hit SXSW premiere, comedian Jaboukie Young-White tweeted, “There will be a full reset when this drops.”

And yet to read reviews and thinkpieces and social media, you’d think that Bottoms was emerging into a culture industry where the Moral Majority runs the show. One of the totally bizarre things about contemporary pop culture coverage is that the “lesbian Letterboxd crowd” and subcultures like them — proud and open and loud champions of “diversity” in the HR sense — are prevalent, influential, and powerful, and yet we are constantly to pretend that they don’t exist. To think of Bottoms as inherently subversive, you have to pretend that the cohort that Handler refers to here has no voice, even as its voice is loud enough to influence a New York magazine cover story. This basic dynamic really hasn’t changed in the culture business in a decade, and that’s because the people who make up the profession prefer to think of their artistic and political tastes as permanently marginal even as they write our collective culture.

Essentially the entire world of for-pay movie criticism and news is made up of the kind of people who will stand up and applaud for a movie with that premise regardless of how good the actual movie is. And I suspect that Rachel Handler, the author of that piece, and its editors at New York, and the PR people for the film, and the women who made it, and most of the piece’s readers know that it isn’t brave to release that movie, in this culture, now. And as far as the creators go, that’s all fine; their job isn’t to be brave, it’s to make a good movie! They aren’t obligated to fulfill the expectation that movies and shows about LGBTQ characters are permanently subversive. But the inability of our culture industry to drop that narrative demonstrates the bizarre progressive resistance to recognizing that things change and that liberals in fact control a huge amount of cultural territory.

And here’s the thing: almost everybody in this industry, in media, would understand that narrative to be false, were I to put the case to them this way. This obviously isn’t remotely a big deal — in fact I’ve chosen this piece and topic precisely because it’s not a big deal — and I’m sure most people haven’t thought about it at all. (Why would they?) Still, if I could peel people in professional media off from the pack and lay this case out to them personally, I’m quite certain many of them would agree that this kind of movie is actually guaranteed a great deal of media enthusiasm because of its “representation”, and thus is in fact a very safe movie to release in today’s Hollywood — but they would admit it privately. Because “Anything involving LQBTQ characters or themes is still something that’s inherently risky and daring in the world of entertainment and media, in the year of our lord 2023” is both transparently horseshit and yet socially mandated, in industries in which most people are just trying to hold on and don’t need the hassle.

“[W]hy does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? … it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it”

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

Patrick T. Brown in The Free Press on how he had to leave out the full truth on climate change to get his paper published:

If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer — from Canada to Europe to Maui — you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change.

Here’s the AP: Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal”.

And PBS NewsHour: Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise — Spain must do more to prepare, experts say.

And The New York Times: How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.

And Bloomberg: Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.

I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.

The paper I just published—”Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California” — focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives — even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

[…] as the number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years — there are close to six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were in the early 1960s — it has become more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. So while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become extraordinarily more competitive.

In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value.

In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.

September 5, 2023

The worst Prime Minister in Canadian history?

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

My own opinion is that the Trudeaus, taken together, are certainly the worst family to have been political leaders of Canada, but is Justin Trudeau the single worst PM in history?

Like father, like son, a dynastic peril. I should mention at this point that the best short article on Justin Trudeau’s unfitness for office was posted on this site by my wife Janice Fiamengo some two years back. It would be folly for me to try to outdo her writerly excellence, unflappable tact, and marksman-like precision. Here I offer an updated summing-up of why Justin Trudeau is surely unprecedented in the annals of Canada’s ideological destitution. The daily spectacle we are witnessing, the eruption of political sludge and magma from the depths of government policy, puts paid to any promotional salvage operation.

This is a prime minister who has been implicated in numerous scandals and cited for several ethics violations, all to no avail. He has imposed a needless and prohibitive carbon tax upon a groaning nation and propelled the national debt into the fiscal asteroid belt. He is soft on terrorism, having awarded a $10.5 million reparation payment to al-Qaeda terrorist, and the son of Ahmed Said Khadr, Omar Khadr, who had been imprisoned in Guantanamo for killing an American medic in Afghanistan. Trudeau also sympathized with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a Muslim immigrant from Chechnya, who killed three people and injured another 170, saying, “there is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded”.

As noted, this is a prime minister who has bought the media with elaborate financial gifts, who admires the “basic dictatorship” of Communist China, and has made no secret of his fondness for Castro, waxing eloquent in his eulogy for the dead dictator, and who, like his father, has adopted an energy policy intended to phase out the western petroleum industry in the interests of a “just transition” to inefficient green renewables, and thus cripple the economic foundation of the country in perpetuity.

This is a prime minister who mandated draconian COVID-19 protocols — masks, quarantines, lockdowns, vaccines. The entire effort is now known to have been a colossal blunder whose results were ineffective at best and noxious, even lethal, at worst. Concerning the vaccines, Trudeau now claims that he did not force anyone to take them but “chose to make sure all of the incentives and all of the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated”. In other words, offer them an incentive they can’t refuse. The “incentives” amounted to interventions like losing one’s job, livelihood, social freedoms, and Charter rights. Even people who did remote work had to be vaccinated; if they were fired, they were ineligible for Employment Insurance.

Giving Trudeau’s protestations the lie, in a Sept. 16, 2021 interview aired on the French-language program “La semaine des 4 Julie“, he referred to unvaccinated Canadians as “extremists”, as people who “don’t believe in science or progress and are very often misogynistic and racist”. “A leader who expresses such detestation for his own people,” Janice writes, “and encourages frightened followers to participate in their dehumanization should not be trusted with the reins of government.” It’s hard to disagree.

We should never forget that this is a prime minister who in February 2022 invoked the dictatorial powers of the Emergencies Act — a Trudeau habit — to crush a peaceful, legitimate, and justifiable protest against the vaccine mandates by a brave and patriotic cohort of the country’s truckers and who authorized the banks to freeze protesters’ accounts, reminiscent of the Nazi 1938 Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property issued by Hitler’s government. The mind boggles.

QotD: “Karl Marx was right after all”

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

Alas, as my fictional namesake said somewhere, time has a habit of turning all our lies into truths. It turns out Karl Marx was right after all. Who, I ask you, is more cartoonishly evil, more like the caricature capitalist of paranoid Communist fantasies, than Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? Tim Cook? Jack Dorsey? Sundar Pichai?

We’re actually living, comrades, in the class-warfare world Marx preached in the 1840s. Everything Marx said about the factory owners of the First Industrial Revolution, that seemed so luridly absurd that even other Socialists criticized him for it, is true of the tech fascists of the Biden-Harris Revolution. Solzhenitsyn cites Russian writers from the late nineteenth century noting that Marxian socialism would end up as nothing more than dialectically-constructed feudalism, and lo, here we are. America in 2021 looks almost exactly like the USSR looked upon Lenin’s death …

… that was 1924, gang, and in case you’ve forgotten, what happened next was a vicious intra-Party civil war, in which Stalin crushed his enemies. AOC makes a pretty unlikely Trotsky, but it’s no less ludicrous than the thought of Nancy Pelosi as Koba … but that’s just the thing, isn’t it? We’ve been noting here for years that the modern Left is dedicated to being the Hollow Men in all things. They’re Revolutionaries without a Revolution — they go on and on (and on and on and on) about fighting the power and sticking it to the Man, even though they, themselves, have been the Man since at least 1974. They’re moralizers without morality — you’ll be scolded for not being as perverse as humanly possible. And, of course, their politics is a cult of personality without the personality — not even Orwell or Kafka could’ve come up with the Party installing an obvious dementia patient as its figurehead, not even if you’d dropped LSD in their tea.

As always — and yes, even in the depths of Stalin’s terror — the real rulers are the nomenklatura, the apparatchiki. Not even Koba the Dread can be everywhere. Being Hollow Men, our Postmodern Leftist masters have decided to dispense with the whole Kremlin thing. Who needs the NKVD, the gulag, the dreaded Lubyanka? The Junior Volunteer Thought Police “fact checking” everything on social media will do it for free, and much more efficiently, at which point their fellow travelers in the banking system will simply cut the badthinkers off. The only reason the gulag persisted after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” was that the Soviets, those fools, wanted to exploit their natural resources themselves, to build things themselves; labor camps were thus integral to the Soviet economy. Our masters don’t care about that, and their masters, the Chinese, certainly don’t. Much more efficient, and psychologically effective, to let the unperson simply starve in the middle of the town square, pour encourager les autres.

But hey, at least we’ll have some fun figuring out who the new Trotsky is. Again, my money’s on AOC — she’s so stupid that she’s bound to do something irrecoverably dumb sooner or later, after which she gets the digital icepick. That’ll be a hoot. Enjoy what parts of the spectacle you can, comrades – if you’re a student of human folly, you’re going to love the next few decades, because Marx was right about that too, the bastard — second time as farce.

Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.

September 4, 2023

Our own little Cyberpunk Dystopia

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

Kulak suggests we get comfortable with the tropes of Cyberpunk Dystopias, since we’re already living in one:

One need not spend long in radical or dissident Right discourse to encounter talk of Psy-ops and demoralization campaigns.

Some of this traces back to Yuri Besmenov’s work on subversion, some to speculation about “Operation Mockingbird” type media manipulation schemes, and some to simply obvious symbolic work being done for seeming for no reason except to horrify, offend, “blackpill”, and create a sense of helplessness amongst regime enemies.

One can point to the massive sentences for Jan 6th protestors, the recent charges of Trump (outside any norm or existing political theory or constitutional theory), or most ridiculous: Dystopia Porn news stories.

I recently heard a story repeated by a commentator of a news story of a trans-woman working with doctors to be amongst the first to receive a womb transplant which would allow a biological male to gestate a baby, this person was excited, completing the South Park plotline (seriously 2005 s09e01 “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” look it up), stating that they were excited that they might be the first trans-woman to get an abortion.

Why would the medical establishment play along and at least pretend to enable this obviously malicious and self-destructive wish? Why would the media bother to report such a crazy person’s putrid desire?? This religious commentator could only describe it as “satanic”, and speculated that it was a psy-op meant to break decent people’s will …

Setting aside the question of intention, and whether it wasn’t “just” medical professionals salivating at a paying guinea pig, and the media looking for clicks that aligned with their propaganda …

Why would it demoralize!?

Abortions happen by the hundreds of thousands annually, and the nightmare of the trans-medical process is visited on thousands of souls more sympathetic than this South Parkian weirdo every year … outside of the immediate outrage, such a bizarre one-off intersection of the two is basically of no broader political import … indeed if one is of the social conservative set one has seen rather major political victories on both fronts, with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the end of adolescent gender treatment across wide sections of Europe.

And yet for this one-off story of someone saying they would like to do something evil and stupid … you got outrage and horror and many an invocation of “It’s so over”.

What are the point of Psy-ops? What is the goal of demoralization?

Well as a perfidious leaf I am uniquely positioned to tell you, indeed, indeed one might say my country only exists because of the greatest psy-op in human history …

No not anything to do with Trudeau sr. or the liberal government’s corruption and bribery to keep Quebec from leaving …

The founding Canadian Psy-op occurred in 1812 … carried out by the greatest psychological warfare operative in human history, and Canadian national hero:

General Sir Isaac Brock

According to former President Jefferson, the conquest of Canada was to be “just a matter of marching” … indeed it should have been, the woefully outnumbered British Regulars and under-trained Canadian Militia should have been in no position to hold Upper Canada (now Ontario) and by rights should have lost what is now English Canada to American expansion … The defence of Canada depended on keeping America’s superior numbers on the far side of the St Lawrence/Great Lakes waterway bound up and unable to deploy in force for such an invasion …

… a seemingly hopeless task since they already had a beachhead for such an invasion at Fort Detroit (site of the current, well former, major city).

So Brock went on the attack, marching on Detroit with vastly inferior numbers to even the garrison.

His 1300 men of three different nationalities (British, Canadian, and Native) attacked 2500 unified defenders across the massive Detroit River, in a prepared defensive position.

It should have been suicide … he didn’t lose a single man.

Brock dressed his militia in excess redcoat uniforms of British regulars to make it appear as if he had more professionally trained soldiers … then throughout his maneuvers created the illusion that he had vastly more men than his opponent, marching his men in circles to create the illusion from the walls of the fort that he had thousands more than reality.

He then wrote to his opposite general William Hull begging him to surrender, stating that he did not believe he could control his 3000 Indian allies (in reality just 600) and prevent scalping and war crimes once battle broke out.

Hull wrote back asking for three days to arrange the surrender, Brock gave him three hours.

Once surrendered, Hull’s men spat on him seeing the inferior force they had just turned their guns over to.

At a court martial General Hull was sentenced to be shot, however, President Madison commuted his sentence to mere dismissal from the service … beginning a 200+ year-long tradition of US military retreat and lack of accountability.

In 1945 Canadian forces would repeat this obscene tactic at the battle of Zwolle, when soldier Leo Major single-handedly tricked ~1500 German soldiers into believing they were surrounded by superior forces and retreating.

“… the ‘Teachers should tell parents’ people outnumber the ‘Teachers must not tell parents’ folks by something like four-to-one”

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

In the free-to-cheapskates segment of The Line‘s weekly round-up post, they discuss the suddenly “brave” Conservative provincial premiers jumping onto a hot culture war topic on the side of the vast majority of Canadians:

New Brunswick now has Policy 713, that requires teachers or school officials to notify parents and obtain consent if a child younger than 16 wishes to change his or her name or pronouns. Saskatchewan has announced a similar proposal; Ontario is considering one, too.

The Line looks upon these proposals with extreme skepticism. To be frank, we wish the provinces weren’t doing this. We think it’s strategically misguided: every moment a Conservative spends defending “parental rights” is a moment in which they are not talking about highly salient economic issues that affect far more people. Further, we don’t trust their motives. Either they’ve decided to pick this fight because they thought parental consent was going to be a winner for them, or they simply felt pushed into it by the more excitable elements of their respective bases. (We assign a probability assessment of absolute zero to the notion that the leaders might be doing this out of moral conviction.)

So yeah, it’s cynical and exploitive policy, but gosh, is it ever popular policy, too. Polling shows it’s like 80-per-cent approval popular.

Because of course it is.

Again, we stress that we don’t support the imposition of sweeping legislation. Absent evidence of abuse or mismanagement, we think parental notification of social transition should be handled on a case-by-case basis. In the midst of a moral panic on trans issues, we’d prefer to keep politicians as far away from this third rail as possible, with long pointy sticks and cages if necessary.

However, we also recognize that cynicism cuts both ways. We have also borne witness this week to some hysterical rhetoric from those who seem to seriously believe that schools should be forbidden from sharing this information, if the minor in question so chooses.

These people are in the minority, as we suggested above. The polling shows that the “Teachers should tell parents” people outnumber the “Teachers must not tell parents” folks by something like four-to-one. This is the kind of lopsided result you almost never see on contentious policy issues — the numbers are what we would expect if we asked Canadians “Is ice cream tasty?” or “Do you enjoy cuddling a puppy?” And of course this is so. Parents are, generally speaking, not going to have a whole lot of time for the suggestion that children will be better off if the state, at any level, adopts a policy of withholding information from them.

We don’t support what the conservative premiers are doing, because we think they’re doing it for cynical reasons, but we would absolutely oppose any policy that goes in the opposite direction. And the majority of the country — a massive supermajority — is onside with us on this one.

There are no easy answers here, because we do not dismiss the concerns raised by the minority. We absolutely agree and accept that there are going to be families and parents that may react badly, even dangerously, to their child changing their name or pronoun. But the answer isn’t to involve teachers and schools in a coverup; it’s to have policies in place that give any child that may fear for their safety all the help they need, including, if necessary, intervention. To this end, we would note that teachers are mandatory reporters — they must report a variety of issues (or concerns) because society has learned through tragedy and horror what happens when parents and other guardians are excluded from knowing details of their child’s life. If teachers have reasonable grounds to suspect abuse, mental health issues and more, they are legally required to inform authorities and families. Limiting their ability to inform parents would cut against this necessary and overdue progress. Further, we have already passed laws banning “conversion therapy.”

Your Line editors support the right of trans people to live lives of legal equality, safety and dignity, and we honestly believe that most Canadians would agree with us on that. We also note that the rising tide of trans activism has raised complicated concerns that exist at the edges of reasonable accommodation, and must necessarily raise thorny concerns about how we manage competing rights between disadvantaged people. Can minors consent to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? Is it fair to allow trans women who enjoy the permanent physical advantages bestowed by male puberty into female athletics? When should trans men be permitted in women’s prisons and shelters, if ever? These questions demand a thoughtful and nuanced response. They don’t disappear the moment someone screams “trans women are women!” and threatens to kill that bigoted TERF J.K. Rowling. They aren’t resolved by hysterics and warnings of suicide.

By staking out maximalist positions on the most difficult topics, and granting no ground for concession and compromise, trans-rights activists have polarized their own cause. Shouting down critics worked for a while, but the pendulum is now rapidly swinging back to the plumb line. Labelling every concerned parent a transphobe is tired and played out. It’s failing as a strategy of persuasion. Which brings us to the current moment; the place of four-to-one support for cynical policies proposed by conservative premiers. Keep it up, and we suspect it’ll be nine-to-one in short order.

Backlashes are rarely measured, sane, or logical, and we fear this one is already teasing out some very dark and long-repressed demons, even among people who once counted themselves allies of LGBTQ people and causes. We are seeing this backlash in a rise in hate crimes, growing counter-protests, and in a decline in support for LGBTQ people generally. And, yes, we are seeing it in in heavy-handed and misguided legislation both here and in the U.S. We aren’t arguing that any of this is justifiable; rather, we are merely noting that it has long been inevitable and predictable. We were warned.

One of the only real questions we have is how self-styled progressive parties and leaders are going to navigate trans issues when the population is very much not on their side. We talk a lot about how the conservatives are beholden to the most vocal minorities within their parties; but we fear that the progressives suffer the same fundamental problem.

We’d like to think that the Liberals and the NDP will handle trans issues maturely, responsibly and well. But we know better. They’ll go all in, setting everyone up for a very nasty confrontation that we think they’ll lose, and badly. Brace yourselves, friends.

September 1, 2023

How the term “the Deep State” morphed from left-wing to (extreme, scary, ultra-MAGA) right-wing jargon

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

Matt Taibbi wants to track the changes in political language in US usage, starting today with “Deep State”:

In July of last year David Rothkopf wrote a piece for the Daily Beast called, “You’re going to miss the Deep State when it’s gone: Trump’s terrifying plan to purge tens of thousands of career government workers and replace them with loyal stooges must be stopped in its tracks.” In the obligatory MSNBC segment hyping the article, poor Willie Geist, fast becoming the Zelig of cable’s historical lowlight reel, read off the money passage:

    During his presidency, [Donald] Trump was regularly frustrated that government employees — appointees, as well as career officials in the civil service, the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service — were an impediment to the autocratic impulses about which he often openly fantasized.

This passage portraying harmless “government employees” as the last patriotic impediment to Trumpian autocracy represented the complete turnaround of a term that less than ten years before meant, to the Beast‘s own target audience, the polar opposite. This of course needed to be lied about as well, and the Beast columnist stuck this landing, too, when Geist led Rothkopf through the eye-rolling proposition that there was “something fishy, or dark, or something going on behind the scenes” with the “deep state”.

Rothkopf replied that “career government officials” got a bad rap because “about ten years ago, Alex Jones and the InfoWars crowd started zeroing in on the deep state, as yet another of the conspiracy theories …”

The real provenance of deep state has in ten short years been fully excised from mainstream conversation, in the best and most thorough whitewash job since the Soviets wiped the photo record clean of Yezhov and Trotsky. It’s an awesome achievement.

Through the turn of the 21st century virtually no American political writers used deep state. In the mid-2000s, as laws like the PATRIOT Act passed and the Bush/Cheney government funded huge new agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the word was suddenly everywhere, inevitably deployed as left-of-center critique of the Bush-Cheney legacy.

How different was the world ten years ago? The New York Times featured a breezy Sunday opinion piece asking the late NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake — a man described as an inspiration for Edward Snowden who today would almost certainly be denounced as a traitor — what he was reading then. Drake answered he was reading Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry by Marc Ambinder, whose revelations about possible spying on “eighteen locations in the Washington D.C. area, including near the White House, Congress, and several foreign embassies”, inspired the ACLU to urge congress to begin encrypting communications.

On the eve of a series of brutal revelations about intelligence abuses, including the Snowden mess, left-leaning American commentators all over embraced “deep state” as a term perfectly descriptive of the threat they perceived from the hyper-concentrated, unelected power observed with horror in the Bush years. None other than liberal icon Bill Moyers convinced Mike Lofgren — a onetime Republican operative who flipped on his formers and became heavily critical of the GOP during this period — to compose a report called “The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight“.

QotD: Process thinking about the Russo-Ukraine war

Filed under: Europe, Military, Politics, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Process thinking has goals, of course, but they’re all interpersonal. The outcomes, small-o, of Process thinking all have to do with relationships within the group. Why are there blacks in ads for camping gear, despite no black person ever having gone camping in the history of the human race? Because the set designer assumes the writer wants it, and the writer assumes that the creative director wants it, and the creative director assumes the client wants it … which he does, but only because he in turn assumes that the creative director wants it, and etc. To return it to politics, it’s all Narrative.

Combining them, consider the Ukraine Narrative as one giant ad campaign. The lack of Outcome-thinking hit all of us from the very moment it became The Current Thing. What, exactly, are we doing in Ukraine?

Note that there is a case to be made. I don’t agree with it, obviously, but I can make one, and of course it’s ruthlessly Outcome-driven: In a world where States have no friends, only interests, it is consistent with Realpolitik to weaken your rivals when it can be done at low cost and minimal risk. We’re doing to Russia what Russia (and China) did to us in Vietnam — they were quite open about aiding their fraternal socialist brothers in the struggle against Capitalism and Western Imperialism.

One can — and of course in this case would — argue that fucking around in Ukraine is neither low-cost nor low-risk, but that too is Outcome-thinking. You can persuade me, an Outcome thinker, with facts and reason. Steve Sailer is almost a caricature of an Outcome thinker at this point, and he’d be just super at demolishing my hypothetical Realpolitik argument for US aid to Ukraine.

But not only do the Process-“thinkers” in [Washington, DC] not have an Outcome in mind, it never crossed their minds to have one in the first place. This is why I keep coming back to Jaynes [Wiki]. We — normal people — keep trying to assign goals to people like Victoria Nuland. The only goals we can come up with, though, are bugfuck insane — she seems to really believe that not only can Ukraine win the current conflict, but that they’ll march all the way to Moscow, Regime-Change everyone, and invite all the Western parasites in to carve up the country …

… nothing else makes sense, but “sense” left the building with Elvis. There is no Outcome. Which is likelier:

  1. that she has some top secret Master Plan in a manila folder in a safe somewhere, that reads “Ukraine captures Moscow; Exxon CEO is on the first flight in”; or
  2. Her behavior seems purposive the way the eerily coordinated gyrations of a school of fish or a flock of birds seems purposive? It looks coordinated, but it can’t actually BE coordinated — it happens too fast for all the individual members to process the signals.

I’ve done a lot of Ukraine shit in the stoyak roundups, and I have never once seen a Victory scenario. The closest even the wildest-eyed optimist comes is very clearly Underpants Gnome shit:

  1. Send Wunderwaffen to Zelensky
  2. ???
  3. Victory!!!

And the third term — the crucial one, Victory — is never ever defined. Let’s assume the Wunderwaffen work and the Big Spring Counteroffensive that they’ve almost literally been advertising, Mad Men-style, goes off flawlessly. What then? At what point do we call off the dogs? Again, unless you seriously believe in Victoria Nuland’s Master Plan — a real document in a real safe, that she got Brandon’s puppeteers to forge his signature on — there simply IS no answer. Their “plan” for “victory” on the battlefield is exactly the same as Bud Light’s “plan” for “victory” with the [Dylan Mulvaney] ads.

It’s all Narrative, all Process. The only outcomes anyone involved considers are all small-o, and they’re all interpersonal. Nobody thinks about battlefield victory — the actual movement of lines on a map, let alone the reality of fighting and dying. But they obsess over being seen to believe in victory. To return to Geo. Orwell‘s commentary:

    Creatives spend perhaps half their time in protracted meetings where the primary activity is herding cats, making sure everyone agrees on the current direction of things … until the direction changes, a couple of hours later.

And everyone is fine with this, because everything of importance happens interpersonally.

I’m going to reuse this quote, but this time quote it in full. Two paragraphs, and they’re long, but extremely important. Here’s the first:

    The art directors and copywriters who dream up what you see in commercials tend to have a few things in common. The copywriters imagine themselves future screenwriters or novelists, the art directors imagine themselves movie directors eventually. For them, every commercial is a little self-contained movie with a plot and characters, even though no one in the real world gives fifty milliseconds of thought to the character of the TV housewife using that new dustbuster. They very seldom discuss sales, in the sense of “Will this sell more widgets?” In fact they mostly loathe “hard sell” advertising, where you emphasize price.

Emphasis mine, because the question “Will this sell more widgets?” is the definition of Outcome thinking. And if you’re trying to herd cats — as anyone who has had to endure this kind of meeting knows — measurable results are the enemy. Because I really want you to consider the answer to the following question: What’s in it for you, personally, if Acme Corp. sells a thousand more widgets?

Unless you’re a salesman on commission, the answer, for all practical purposes, is: Nothing. Maybe a small bump in your end-of-year bonus, if you get a year-end bonus, but that’s the absolute best case scenario: Another hundred bucks on a single paycheck, six months down the line.

And while I’m certainly not going to sneeze at a hundred dollars, consider what that Benjamin cost you. Half the office hates you now, because you were right. You’re smarter than them, you bastard, and now they know it. You showed them up. Oh, and you’ve also alienated the other half of the office, because what should have been a thirty minute meeting stretched for two hours because you stuck to your guns. Thanks, asshole, I got caught in rush hour and didn’t get home until 7:30. I hope you choke on your $100 bonus. (And don’t think you’re going to get any love from the people who agreed with you in the meeting from the get-go, because they’re all jealous they didn’t think of it themselves).

Now consider the second paragraph, that gets to the heart of Process thinking:

    They [“creatives”] favor “conceptual” advertising, where instead of telling you why this cellphone is superior to another, they show you an ironic or cute story involving the cellphone, or maybe you merely show exciting, vibrant people dancing with the thing, with bright colors and music video tropes. This goes back to the recent discussion here of cultural conformity and “mood boards”. Mood boards have been a very big thing in advertising, even more so than twenty years ago. “Look and feel” takes precedence over most things, especially in corporate, nationwide campaigns. For example, you will see Lexus nationwide commercials where the car drives heroically through some surreal industrial or desert landscape, with extreme lighting and lots of flashy cinematography. Local dealer ads for Lexus will concentrate on terms and pricing, and art directors hate doing local dealer car ads. Not artsy enough.

“Conceptual” ads are collaborative ads. With Outcomes, you’re either right or wrong; it either sells more widgets or it doesn’t, but everyone contributes to “mood”. No one can be proven right via sales figures, but no one can be proven wrong, either. Jane sucks at Outcome-driven advertising, because none of her ads moved the sales needle. But Jane is great at “mood boards”; Jane’s a real team player; Jane makes everyone in the meeting feel special. When Jane runs the meeting, we achieve consensus in thirty minutes. When you run the meeting, Mr. Will This Sell More Widgets, it goes on for hours, and we never get the answer — IF we get the answer — until the next quarter’s sales figures come in.

Apply that to the Ukraine Narrative, and test it against Nehushtan‘s heuristics:

    “We have always been at war with Eurasia”: what you have to support turns on a dime and doesn’t have to be consistent with anything that went before.

Check. What you “believe” changes as the “mood board” changes, and the “mood board” changes as the group consensus changes in the pitch meeting. We’re all susceptible to this to some degree — someone with stronger Google-fu than mine can no doubt find that old psych experiment from the Fifties, with something like Müller-Lyer lines. No doubt you recall hearing about it: They planted some kids in the crowd who insisted that the shorter lines were really longer, and since these kids were absolutely adamant in their “belief”, eventually most of the class “agreed” that the shorter lines were actually longer.

That’s all consensus stuff, Process stuff. What does it really cost me to say that the shorter line is actually the longer? If it’ll get Jane to finally shut the fuck up, ok. If Jane happens to be really popular, and especially if I think agreeing with her will get me closer to her panties, then the faster I’m going to agree. And if Jane happens to hold my entire career in her hands, and can get me kicked out of the Cloud, to wander the Cursed Earth among the Dirt People …

    “Two Minutes Hate”: doesn’t matter who or what the target person is, they are always slotted into the same role, given the same attributes, and the same criticisms are made of them.

Severian, “What is Leftism? (and what to call it?)”, Founding Questions, 2023-05-30.

August 31, 2023

The sciences have replication problems … historians face similar issues

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

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the history profession’s closest equivalent to the ongoing replication crisis in the sciences:

… I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis. Replication is when you can repeat an experiment with new data or new materials and get the same result. Reproducibility is when you use exactly the same evidence as another person and still get the same result — so it has a much, much lower bar for success, which is what makes the lack of it in history all the more worrying.

Historical myths, often based on mere misunderstanding, but occasionally on bias or fraud, spread like wildfire. People just love to share unusual and interesting facts, and history is replete with things that are both unusual and true. So much that is surprising or shocking has happened, that it can take only years or decades of familiarity with a particular niche of history in order to smell a rat. Not only do myths spread rapidly, but they survive — far longer, I suspect, than in scientific fields.

Take the oft-repeated idea that more troops were sent to quash the Luddites in 1812 than to fight Napoleon in the Peninsular War in 1808. Utter nonsense, as I set out in 2017, though it has been cited again and again and again as fact ever since Eric Hobsbawm first misled everyone back in 1964. Before me, only a handful of niche military history experts seem to have noticed and were largely ignored. Despite being busted, it continues to spread. Terry Deary (of Horrible Histories fame), to give just one of many recent examples, repeated the myth in a 2020 book. Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.

[…]

I don’t think this is just me being grumpy and pedantic. I come across examples of mistakes being made and then spreading almost daily. It is utterly pervasive. Last week when chatting to my friend Saloni Dattani, who has lately been writing a piece on the story of the malaria vaccine, I shared my mounting paranoia healthy scepticism of secondary sources and suggested she check up on a few of the references she’d cited just to see. A few days later and Saloni was horrified. When she actually looked closely, many of the neat little anecdotes she’d cited in her draft — like Louis Pasteur viewing some samples under a microscope and having his mind changed on the nature of malaria — turned out to have no actual underlying primary source from the time. It may as well have been fiction. And there was inaccuracy after inaccuracy, often inexplicable: one history of the World Health Organisation’s malaria eradication programme said it had been planned to take 5-7 years, but the sources actually said 10-15; a graph showed cholera pandemics as having killed a million people, with no citation, while the main sources on the topic actually suggest that in 1865-1947 it killed some 12 million people in British India alone.

Now, it’s shockingly easy to make these mistakes — something I still do embarrassingly often, despite being constantly worried about it. When you write a lot, you’re bound to make some errors. You have to pray they’re small ones and try to correct them as swiftly as you can. I’m extremely grateful to the handful of subject-matter experts who will go out of their way to point them out to me. But the sheer pervasiveness of errors also allows unintentionally biased narratives to get repeated and become embedded as certainty, and even perhaps gives cover to people who purposefully make stuff up.

If the lack of replication or reproducibility is a problem in science, in history nobody even thinks about it in such terms. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone systematically looking at the same sources as another historian and seeing if they’d reach the same conclusions. Nor can I think of a history paper ever being retracted or corrected, as they can be in science. At the most, a history journal might host a back-and-forth debate — sometimes delightfully acerbic — for the closely interested to follow. In the 1960s you could find an agricultural historian saying of another that he was “of course entitled to express his views, however bizarre.” But many journals will no longer print those kinds of exchanges, they’re hardly easy for the uninitiated to follow, and there is often a strong incentive to shut up and play nice (unless they happen to be a peer-reviewer, in which case some will feel empowered by the cover of anonymity to be extraordinarily rude).

August 30, 2023

Extreme maskaholism alert!

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

In City Journal, John Tierney says we can safely ignore the mask-lovers latest attempt to move us back into the misery of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic years:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Unfazed by data, scientific research, or common sense, the maskaholics are back. In response to an uptick in Covid cases, they’ve begun reinstating mask mandates. So far, it’s just a few places — a college in Atlanta, a Hollywood studio, two hospitals in Syracuse — but the mainstream media and their favorite “experts” are working hard to scare the rest of us into masking up yet again.

Never mind that at least 97 percent of Americans have Covid antibodies in their blood as a result of infection, vaccination, or both. Never mind that actual experts — the ones who studied the scientific literature before 2020 and drew up plans for a pandemic — advised against masking the public. Never mind that their advice has been further bolstered during the pandemic by randomized clinical trials and rigorous observational studies failing to find an effect of masks and mask mandates. Scientific evidence cannot overcome the maskaholics’ faith.

It’s tempting to compare them with the villagers in Cambodia who erected scarecrows in front of their huts to ward off the coronavirus — but that’s not fair to the villagers. Their Ting Mong, as the magic scarecrows are called, at least didn’t hurt any of their neighbors. The mask mandates imposed harms on the public that were well known before Covid, which was why occupational-safety regulations limited workers’ mask usage. Dozens of studies had demonstrated “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome“, whose symptoms include an increase of carbon dioxide in the blood, difficulty breathing, dizziness, drowsiness, headache, and diminished ability to concentrate and think. It was no surprise during the pandemic when adverse effects of masks were reported in a study of health-care workers in New York City. More than 70 percent of the workers said that prolonged mask-wearing gave them headaches, and nearly a quarter blamed it for “impaired cognition”.

A possibly toxic effect of prolonged mask-wearing, particularly for pregnant women, children, and adolescents, was identified in a review of the scientific literature published this year by German researchers. They warn that mask-wearers are rebreathing carbon dioxide at levels linked with adverse effects on the body’s cardiovascular, respiratory, cognitive, and reproductive systems. Writing for City Journal, Jeffrey Anderson summarized their conclusions: “While eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels.”

Because of research linking elevated carbon dioxide levels with stillbirths, the German researchers note, the U.S. Navy began limiting the level on its submarines when female crews began serving. The researchers warn that this level of carbon dioxide is often exceeded when wearing a mask, especially an N95 mask, and they point to “circumstantial evidence” that mask usage may be related to the increase in stillbirths worldwide (including in the U.S.) during the pandemic. They also observe that no such increase occurred in Sweden, where the vast majority of citizens followed the government’s recommendation not to wear masks.

No drug with all these potential side effects would be recommended, much less mandated, for the entire population — and a drug that flunked its clinical trials wouldn’t even be submitted for approval. Yet the Centers for Disease Control, disdaining any cost-benefit analysis, continues to recommend masking for all Americans on indoor public transportation, and for everyone living in areas with high rates of Covid transmission. At the start of the pandemic, even Anthony Fauci advised against masks because there was no evidence of their efficacy. But then, in response to media hysteria, he and the CDC went on to recommend masks anyway, and justified themselves by citing cherry-picked data and consistently flawed studies.

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