Quotulatiousness

August 7, 2024

“Two Tier Keir” fails the latest challenge

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

Violent protests continued in many British cities over the weekend, and despite promising to crack down on violent groups, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer fluffed it again:

Young Muslim men rampaging through Birmingham should have offered the government a convenient chance to quash the accusations that the Prime Minister is “Two Tier Keir”.

Fuelled by rumours that the far right were organising a protest in the area, the demonstration soon took on a dark life of its own. Young men in balaclavas harassed journalists, driving Sky News’ “communities correspondent” off the air, with an attempt even being made to slash the wheels of the Sky van. LBC’s Fraser Knight was chased out of the area. Mr Knight explained that “6 men ran after us down a road with what looked like a weapon”, and that “cars followed us”. “There wasn’t a safe place for us to go for miles,” he says.

Meanwhile, a white man was attacked outside a pub by a mob of masked men, and attempts were made to stop random drivers. This violence and intimidation, of course, mirrors that which has been perpetrated in riots elsewhere.

But there is a difference. Where were the police in Birmingham? We have seen riot police wielding dogs and batons against the far right, and Keir Starmer was promising that rioters would face the “full force of the law“. In Birmingham, though, the police appear to have acted with a light touch. One officer was recorded apparently dismissing the violence as a “small scuffle“.

Local MP Jess Phillips is famed for her outspoken and combative manner, so one might have expected swift condemnation. (Indeed, given that Phillips was recently bragging about how “unflappable” she is around criminals, it’s a shame she wasn’t there to resolve things.)

Actually, Phillips’ first public response to the disorder was to quote tweet a video of a group of masked men and write:

    To be clear all day rumours have been spread that a far right group were coming and it was done entirely to get Muslim people out on the street to drive this content. It is misinformation being spread to create trouble.

Okay, I can believe it. But surely this was time to tell them to disperse and go home? Phillips then quote tweeted Richard Tice MP, who had published a video of the Sky News team being intimidated. “These people came to this location because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them,” she wrote:

    This misinformation was spread entirely to create this content. Don’t spread it MR Tice!

Sure, again, we get it. The gathering was fuelled by misinformation. But when a group of journalists — with a female correspondent, no less — is being intimidated by masked men flashing trigger fingers at the camera, it has clearly evolved into something more hooliganistic. These men were not confronting a skinhead in a “Blood and Honour” t-shirt. They were confronting a woman trying to do her job.

Esmerelda Weatherwax gathers reports from local media in Birmingham over the weekend:

A huge crowd gathered in Bordesley Green this evening following rumours that a “far right rally” was going to take place … hundreds of mostly young men in balaclavas and face masks gathered outside the McDonald’s at the junction of Bordesley Green and Belchers Lane.

300 or so people mostly Asian and male, many dressed in black and wearing masks or coverings, turned up after the rumour spread rapidly online.

Despite the rumours circulating today, there was no rally and the crowd was seen later dispersing, with some young men using the opportunity to show off on motorbikes.

A 45-year-old from Bordesley Green said he was there to stand up against fascism … “We don’t want this portrayed as Muslim men causing trouble …”

Yardley West and Stechford Cllr Baber Baz was among the crowd this evening and said there was a “strong response from the community”. Cllr Baz added: “As long as it remains peaceful which I am sure it will we are sending a strong message to the EDL that they are not welcome here and will not divide our community.”

A Sky News reporter was forced off air after she was sworn at, with one man on a bike riding towards the camera before saying: “Free Palestine, f*** EDL“. A man wearing a balaclava and wielding a knife “stabbed” the tyre of a Sky News van after its reporter was forced off air, it has been reported. Sky News had to cut short its broadcast in Bordesley Green after its reporter was sworn at on TV.

August 6, 2024

Britain’s immigration debate turns violent

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

At The Last Ditch, Tom discusses how the immigration issue has become the issue in modern Britain:

Protest and counter-protest in Middlesbrough over the weekend of August 3-4.

Margaret Thatcher famously quoted Kipling’s Norman and Saxon to President Mitterand of France in an EU meeting;

    The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
    But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
    When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
    And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing”, my son, leave the Saxon alone.

She was trying, perhaps not as delicately as her diplomats would have wished, to explain how the apparently calm British will react – eventually – to being wronged.

I spent twenty years in three other countries and worked closely in business with people from many more. I have often smiled to myself since returning when I hear British people speak of our unique sense of fair play. It’s not unique at all. Everyone has it. We do not own fairness. We do not own tolerance.

We do, however, traditionally pride ourselves on both and the way we see ourselves has shaped our reactions over the last twenty-five years as we welcomed more immigrants than in the previous two millennia. A few years ago I listened quietly to a Bangladeshi friend – a would-be human rights lawyer – talk about racism in our country. I asked her where in the world was a better place to live as a member of an ethnic minority. On reflection, she agreed with me that there is nowhere.

I am not saying we couldn’t treat each other better. Of course we could and should try. But let’s take a moment, as our streets burn and our elites condemn us as far-right racists, to be proud of how we’ve behaved in general towards so many new arrivals in such a short time.

[…]

One day history may reveal which politician in the capital of an old European empire realised there was a ready supply of workers in the former colonies. People who spoke our languages and were familiar with our systems of government – because both had been forced on their ancestors. It was a perilous idea that may yet prove to be the end of European civilisation but he must have looked like a genius to his peers.

The doors were opened and cheap labour flooded in. From the lofty heights where the elites survey us, it looked like a perfect solution. On the ground, not always so much. Mostly we’ve been welcoming, accepting and tolerant. We’ve sometimes even gone beyond tolerance and flattered our new arrivals that they’ve enhanced our magnificent old culture with their jerk chicken and curries.

Yet already when I was a youngster practising criminal law problems had begun to emerge. A custody sergeant with whom I used to chat when waiting to see clients in the cells told me suicide rates among Muslim girls in our Midlands city were disturbingly high. Asked why that was, he said they were not suicides, but honour killings – the first time I’d heard that phrase. No-one, he said, commits suicide by pouring paraffin over themselves and setting themselves alight. It’s just too painful. Muslim men were killing their daughters and sisters. Asked why there were no prosecutions, he said senior police officers made it clear to their subordinates that it was “racist” to suggest the dead girls’ families’ stories of suicide were untrue.

Fresh out of my university law faculty, I sneered that his bosses were right and he was a racist. I will never forget the last words he said to me;

    Young man, then you’re part of the problem.

And I was. In that moment, I’d turned away from murdered women to preserve my smug world view. Just as, decades later, council staff and police officers in cities all over Britain turned away from young girls groomed and raped by Muslim men, for fear of being called bad names.

Gary Fouse in the New English Review asks whatever happened to Merry Olde England:

If you have been following the news out of England for the past week, you might think that the country has all but fallen into civil war. Riots and various forms of violent protests and counterprotests have broken out in cities all over the country in reaction to a shocking murder that occurred in the town of Southport last week. On July 29, a group of little schoolgirls were attending some sort of Taylor Swift-themed dancing class when a 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants (who was born in England) attacked them with a knife. Three of the schoolgirls (ages 6. 7, and 9) have died and eight others went to the hospital with serious knife wounds.

The entire nation has erupted in shock and anger. Obviously, the anger is being directed at immigrants in general — given the country’s out of control migration situation and long-simmering tensions with the largely-radicalized Muslim communities. It seems that now-finally — the people have had enough. At least one migrant shelter has been attacked, and several Muslim young men are showing up to counter-protest and do battle with young white men. Now the cops in several cities are trying to keep the two sides apart.

I should state at this point that I will not condone the violence and destruction that is taking place and the objects being thrown at police who are trying to keep order. While I do not condone the violence, I think I can understand why it is taking place. I recall back in the 1960s when there were many riots in inner city areas of the US during the Civil Rights era and in response to the murders of black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. Many responsible black leaders condemned the violence but also added that they could understand the reasons for it. It was a different era then in America, and in the South, segregation had the force of local laws behind it. Many blacks felt that the government was not responding to their grievances.

[…]

The fact is that far too many nations in the West, including ours, have suffered from bad political leadership. We see it in our cities, we see it in our state capitals, and we see it in Washington DC. Bad political leadership results in bad cities, bad states, and a bad country. The fish rots from the head, and what we need to do-in England-in France, in America, etc is elect responsible people who recognize that their government’s number one duty is to protect the citizens. When a government fails to do so, eventually what happens is what we see in England today.

August 4, 2024

QotD: Canada’s “middle class”

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

Class is everywhere in this election, invoked seemingly every time someone wants to put a sympathetic face on a policy proposal or make a point about being in touch with ordinary Canadians.

There’s the “middle class” that’s constantly prioritized, flattered and fetishized by every campaign and candidate; critiques of people who come from such a privileged class they can’t possibly understand the concerns of normal people; sometimes bizarre pitches aimed at those who want a better future for their kids and just need a boost (camping, anyone?); and leaders who come from hardscrabble backgrounds — except that maybe they don’t quite.

But if class is an ever-present anthem running through campaign 2019, it’s a tune no one seems to know the proper words to, or they’re deliberately mumbling nonsense lyrics and assuming no one else will notice.

[…]

Then there is the electorally beloved — and conveniently poorly defined — “middle class”. Given all the campaign trail hot air devoted to lauding the values and hard work of this population and lionizing their noble struggles, you would think that at some point, other corners of the electorate would get ticked off about being ignored by politicians in favour of these golden children.

But they don’t, because pretty much everyone thinks that’s them.

Shannon Proudfoot, “The ‘family shame’ of Canadian politics: class struggle”, Maclean’s, 2019-10-04.

August 3, 2024

“Multiculturalism is when yummy food”

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

Fortissax pours scorn on the defenders of multiculturalism-at-all-costs for one of the most common arguments in favour:

“Multiculturalism is when yummy food” is a real position people take. If you ask them what benefits of multiculturalism are, they’re going to say food and nothing else. Westerners don’t watch Bollywood films, they don’t listen to Desi music, they don’t watch cartoonishly bad Latin American dramas, usually for Hispanic abuelas still living in Mexico where every actor is suspiciously fairer-featured than everyone in their whole family. People can’t say “I love the food, the music, the culture” because they don’t engage in any of this. Salsa isn’t even popular; it hit its peak at the end of the 1990s because white boomer Americans approached an intensely Anglicised, sanitised form of Latin-American culture as introduced to them through the likes of Enrique Iglesias and other English-speaking Latin pop artists.

I don’t believe all leftists say this out of sincerity. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to any criticism of multiculturalism. They don’t put a lot of thought into it. The justification is usually related to how “bad” that “white people food” is. This follows the same thread of accusations that “white people can’t dance”, “white people can’t jump”, “white people can’t fight”, and “white people can’t fuck”. It’s another lib-coded tract to bash English-speaking white Americans over the head with, to justify demographic displacement by portraying them as boring, ugly, weird, or uncool. On some level, they probably know food isn’t worth human lives, but they have to reinforce their moral view or the whole thing collapses, and they have to admit fault for doing things and promoting ideas that are so destructive that people would want to unalive them. If they give up now, it’s over. It’s sunk cost fallacy.

For the rest who’re wholly sincere: it’s just straight up bullshit. Foreign restaurants serve you a Westernized version of their slop. Their bulk food suppliers are Western, the ingredients are Western-derived, but they sell it as “authentic” when it isn’t. That crab rangoon you just spent $40 on Doordash was bulk bought at Costco during a last ditch grocery run. They’re selling you the experience. A sampling of the real thing, deliberately fitted to your people’s general dietary preferences. All of these “ethnic”, “exotic” restaurants do this. Everyone knows about “secret menus” at Chinese or Indian restaurants. Anybody who works in culinary, hell, anybody whose watched the UK version of Hell’s Kitchen where Gordan Ramsay tries to rescue failing restaurants owned by small business owners can tell you most of these people aren’t using fresh or original ingredients. You go to any “Japanese” restaurant in North America, the staff are a random assortment of Asian, or sometimes Korean or Chinese, or maybe even Filipino but it doesn’t matter because they look Asian enough to boomers, correctly guessing people can’t tell the difference at a passing glance.

August 2, 2024

Trudeau won’t – can’t – go voluntarily

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

In The Line, Michael Den Tandt explains why the Biden option isn’t a viable one for Justin Trudeau at this stage of the Canadian electoral cycle:

US President Joe Biden talks to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, March 2023.

It’s a tough time to be a backbench Liberal MP in Canada, yes? The tone, emerging in anonymous leaks to reporters, is grumpy, surly, unhappy. This is unsurprising. We’re in year ten of a ten-year political cycle that feels stretched and road-beaten, by any standard.

Plus, to our south, there’s this shining model now of the transformative power of change. One day President Joe Biden is clinging by his fingernails to his party’s nomination, with the convicted felon Donald Trump seemingly headed for a big win in November. The next, Biden’s out, new hope Kamala Harris is raising tens of millions in campaign donations, and reporters are lasering in on Trump’s highly quotable running mate, J.D. Vance.

All in a week. So, couldn’t something similar happen in Ottawa? Couldn’t Prime Minister Justin Trudeau take a step back, hit the beach or the lecture circuit, make way for fresh blood, and at least give the Liberals a shot at survival in 2025? What’s he waiting for?

Anything is possible. But this scenario is unlikely. That’s because Justin Trudeau isn’t Joe Biden; Chrystia Freeland isn’t Kamala Harris, and Canada isn’t the United States.

Most obviously, the cycle: The cycle is everything. Individuals are all but powerless in its clutches. As it nears a decade it adds lead weights, like those a deep-sea diver might wear, to the feet of Canadian incumbents. Even the most promising of change agents — former prime minister and justice minister Kim Campbell is Exhibit A — will be brought low by its power.

The argument can be made made that the Progressive Conservative party’s obliteration in 1993 (reduced from majority status to two seats) was not just due to late-cycle fatigue, that Campbell herself had run a wobbly campaign. Some will note the deep weariness with the constitutional wrangling that dominated Canadian discourse during the Brian Mulroney years, or the hangover of Mulroney’s, at the time, keen personal unpopularity. Fair points.

But underlying those events was still the implacable cycle — as in 2006, when prime minister Paul Martin, having seen that Liberal government reduced to a minority in 2004 (despite his personal popularity at the time), lost power to a rising Stephen Harper. In the throes of the federal sponsorship scandal (I will spare you the details, but you can find them here if you’re interested in the arcana), Martin was described by gifted wordsmith Scott Reid, then his communications director, as “the wire brush” who would scrape away the stain of sponsorship. It was a bold attempt to rhetorically seize the change wave. But the wave was strong and Martin lost.

46-second beatdown in Paris – Olympic hypocrisy on full, disgusting display

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR reacts to the Olympic boxing travesty of a male boxer being in the ring with a female boxer:

I have mixed feelings about the beatdown of Angela Carini at the Olympics and the feminists complaining that she should never have been put in the ring with a biological male.

On the one hand, yes, it’s disgusting that a man pretending to be a woman battered Carini to the point where she threw the match in justified fear of being killed in the ring.

On the other hand, this travesty seems like such an obvious consequence of feminist doctrine and the feminization of politics that I think most of the women (and “male feminist” allies) decrying it should shut the hell up until they seriously rethink their premises.

It wasn’t “the patriarchy” or defenders of traditional gender roles pushing for this. It was a consequence of decades of insistence that men and women are interchangeable, that gender roles are “socially constructed” – mutable at whim, and that people’s feelings about their own victimization and self-assigned identity trump objective facts.

Feminism and political correctness put Carini’s face in the path of Imane Kelif’s fists. It’s the same ideological cluster that has led to an epidemic of rapes by biological males in women’s prisons and homeless shelters.

Most women – and far too many weak-kneed men – said nothing for decades as this fantasy ideology of feelz laid waste to our cultural norms. And in news that I’m completely sure is utterly unrelated, over 50% of young women identifying as “liberal” have a diagnosed mental disorder.

Maybe, just maybe, feminists and postmodernists and critical theorists ought to stop punching Angela Carini’s face?

QotD: The essential target of ideological propaganda

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

The Soviets weren’t history’s first attempt at a totally ideologized society — that would be Revolutionary France — but as students of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks concluded that Robespierre and the gang hadn’t done enough to get the masses onside. Thus the Soviets seemed to assume that they needed to propagandize everyone. The Nazis followed a similar trajectory, because they, like the Soviets, were ideologically committed to the idea that the laboring masses were the backbone of their movements.

The Third Reich didn’t last long enough to figure it out, but in their 70-odd years the Soviets learned that “the masses” can be more or less ignored. They’re no threat to the regime. Your average Soviet “citizen” — Ivan Sixpack — would follow pretty much any rule, so long as he had a steady and predictable life course. That’s no slander on Ivan; it’s just the way people are. If you want proof, go look around — if I’d told you, back in the summer of 2019, about all the masks and the social distancing and the lockdowns and everything else, you’d have laughed at me. “There will be blood in the streets! No one will stand for it!”

The reaction of “the masses” (a term I hate; it’s patronizing, but it’ll have to do) to COVID was instructive: They either did as they were told, with nary a peep of complaint, or they simply ignored it … with nary a peep of complaint. From the rulers’ perspective, either one was fine, because they’re functionally the same thing. We all know that whatever the ruling class thought they were going to get out of the Kung Flu panic — and it’s not at all clear; we’ll get there — “public health”, as in the actual health of real members of the public, was nowhere on the list. As with “climate change” and all their other “crises”, their highly visible behavior showed how seriously they took it — which was, of course, not at all.

Indeed, from the rulers’ perspective, it was actually better that some large fraction of the underclass didn’t comply — that way, the mental energy of the Karens was channeled down, not up. Karen could start complaining about Whitmer, Newsom, and the rest not living by their own rules, and had she done so, that might’ve posed a problem for the rulers. But thanks to the maskless proles (and, of course, asshole class traitors like me), Karen always had a bunch of much softer targets to hector.

That’s the function of “propaganda” in my sense. It’s designed to create a narrative, the purpose of which is to channel dissatisfaction down the social scale.

What the Soviets learned, and their SJWs successors have internalized, is that you really only need a small cadre of “middle class” (for lack of a better term) producers to keep things running. Those are the targets of narrative-reinforcing propaganda.

Indeed, it’s only a subset of that already small fraction that needs to be propagandized. As the Soviets quickly learned, true technical experts are more or less ideology-proof. That’s because their technical expertise takes up all their time; they’ve oriented their personalities around it. You could read a novel like Red Plenty to get the sense of it (Z Man has a review somewhere if you want it), but I suggest a much easier path: Watch the fun old movie Boiler Room, with Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, and in a brief but memorable scene, Ben Affleck. I’m sure that seems odd — it’s a movie about sell-at-all-costs stockbrokers, based loosely on Jordan Belfort’s Stratton Oakmont scam; what could be more explicitly capitalist?

But note how they live: They own ludicrous cars and live in huge mansions, but the cars hardly get driven, and the mansions are unfurnished. There’s a scene where they all get together in Vin Diesel’s living room to watch a movie (Wall Street, natch). There’s a huge tv and a couch, but everything else is boxed up, and they’re eating takeout pizza. Giovanni Ribisi says something like “did you just move in this weekend?” and the other guys say no, he’s been living here for years, he just never got around to unpacking his stuff. That’s the mindset of the true technical intelligentsia. Those stockbrokers think they’re doing it for the money, and so they have the outward trappings of rich people, but they’re really doing it because that’s who they are — they’d be just as deliriously happy competing for subway tokens or scraps of confetti, so long as they had one more scrap than the guy on the next phone.

Given that, the only group that really needs to be propagandized is — you guessed it — Karen. The entire narrative of COVID was very obviously designed by hormonal cat ladies, for hormonal cat ladies. Cards on the table: Though I thought Kung Flu was overblown and ridiculous from the beginning, since I know a little history, I didn’t base my conclusions on my reading in the medical journals. I didn’t read medical journals, and unless you’re a doctor I bet you didn’t, either. My opposition to the Kung Flu panic was entirely visceral: THIS IS MEAN GIRL SHIT.

Severian, “Narrative Collapse III: Magic Masks”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-07.

August 1, 2024

“Donald Trump isn’t a real man, because Hulk Hogan”

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

It’s always appropriate to criticize public figures — it goes with the job — but you actually should find things to criticize when you do it, otherwise it comes across as lazy bitching:

I’m a charter member of the “no one is above criticism” club. Everyone is fair game. People who run for office are really fair game. So I think it’s just fine to criticize Donald Trump, and to criticize JD Vance, and to criticize Trump/Vance 2024.

But what’s so obvious, over and over again, is that the people writing the most insistent criticism are playing critic. They know that they’re supposed to say that Donald Trump is very very very bad, so they … do that? A lot? But the substance of the criticism tends, with remarkable frequency, to be a set of non-sequiturs and self-refuting rhetorical dead-ends. They’re criticizing because they’re supposed to, not because they have criticisms to offer.

Take David French. Please. Here’s his latest: Donald Trump isn’t a real man, because Hulk Hogan.

The I-didn’t-think-this-through flavor of this piece can’t be exaggerated. It makes so little sense, so poorly, with such odd structure and framing, that it nears the level of Thomas Friedmanism. David French doesn’t know anything, or understand anything, but he really throws himself into it.

So.

Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Dana White were at the Republican National Convention, French writes, so the Republicans are being macho, unlike Democrats, who are demonstrating a style of manhood that focuses on being kind, decent, and nurturing. Republican manhood is about complaints and empty rage; Democratic manhood is about building things and caring for others. Making the comparison concrete, French explicitly compares the macho grievance artist Trump to precisely four wonderfully gentle and caring men: Admiral William McRaven, the US Senator and former astronaut and fighter pilot Mark Kelly, “Mark Hertling, my former division commander in Iraq”, and the former Marine Corps General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Those four men are the model of a masculinity that nurtures, loves, and builds; Trump is the model of a masculinity that only destroys and tears down. David French hates machismo, so the list of men he admires is made up entirely of combat arms officers.

Do you … see the problem? Because David French doesn’t. At all. Donald Trump is a real estate developer, someone who spent his entire adult life actually building things:

It’s just fine to criticize Trump as a businessman, if you feel inclined to do that. But he’s a builder and a developer; that’s his actual background. He makes things. He spent his life making things. And his political message is about making things and protecting people who make things, whether you agree with the specifics of his policy arguments or not

July 31, 2024

“You really can’t hate them enough”

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

Elizabeth Nickson links to a short excerpt from Michael Walsh’s introduction to his upcoming Against the Corporate Media:

Today’s journalists now openly celebrate the death of objectivity, arguing that reporters have biases like everybody else, so why pretend that they don’t? In clear violation of their own — and now very much outmoded — Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, they happily ignore such tenets as:

  • Identify sources clearly.
  • Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity.
  • Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
  • Expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations.

Thus, after nearly a century’s consensus about journalistic best practices, we have come full circle to the days of naked partisanship that marked the earliest American newspapers. Gossip has become news, journalistic crusades are fabricated out of whole cloth and attributed to anonymous sources as justification. It’s noteworthy that the word “objectivity” nowhere appears in the current SPJ code, which was revised in 2014. Why would it? Objectivity has become the mortal enemy of the current vogue for “explanatory” or “advocacy” journalism — otherwise generally known as propaganda.

The transformation of journalism from rank advocacy to lukewarm “objectivity” and back to even ranker political propaganda (nearly all news stories today are couched in political terms, including those about pop music and sports) is one of the principal subjects of this book. Accordingly we have assembled a corps of forty-two journalists — some grizzled veterans, some newcomers, some of whose primary occupations lie in the wider fields of book publishing, fiction, non-fiction, television, and even Hollywood — to analyze the startling changes that have come over the profession in our lifetimes.

You really can’t hate them enough.

Even greater than the abandonment of “objectivity” as a pernicious influence on journalism is the internet, the great destroyer of printed periodicals, which has laid waste to the newspaper and magazine industry and has fallen under the control of the social-media giants, such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, and is now subject to favoritism and even censorship by near-monopolies like Google, a search engine that also now controls visual media via its ownership of YouTube. Whether the patrician Walter Lippmann would have admired his wishful handiwork now that it is a reality is open to question, but surely he would celebrate the intrusion of the American federal government, along with governments around the world, into both de facto and de jure informational control of cyberspace. In many countries around the world, the press and attendant broadcast media are now directly and unabashedly controlled by government entities which, in many cases, openly fund and censor them.

Even in a work of this length, it is of course impossible to touch upon every aspect of the current state of the media. From the point of view of one who has labored in it, off and on, for more than half a century, it is parlous and getting worse. Ask someone with less than ten years’ experience in the field and you may well — very likely will — get a different answer: that it’s liberated, responsive, unfettered. Still, my work as a historian has convinced me of the truth of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s famous axiom, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The Paris-born Karr, who lived from 1808 to 1890, was, of course, a journalist himself, in addition to being a critic, novelist, and flora-culturalist. But that was back in the day when “journalists” were men of accomplishment in other fields.) That is to say, the fundamental things apply in all walks of human endeavor, and among these things is mankind’s innate desire to convince others of the rightness of his position on any given subject. The question always has been: What’s the best way to go about it?

July 30, 2024

The new and improved malaise for the 21st century

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

Back in the 1970s, US President Jimmy Carter identified the theme of the decade as “malaise”, and now, thanks to generations of feckless politicians, burgeoning bureaucratic empires, and economic stagnation, it’s back in an even malaisier form for the Current Year:

“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Some time ago, I noticed that a general fatigue had taken a place alongside the malaise that was already being felt by many Americans and Canadians. The malaise stemmed from the overdue recognition that their lives were not going to get any better, and that they would have to work harder to just maintain a standard of living that they were already used to.

The fatigue came from a different, but not too distant place; the politicization of everything these past one and a half decades meant that there was no escape [from] the political. Whether sports, video gaming, or even fashion, everything had to be run by the cultural police before it could be deemed “not problematic”. The problem was (and still is) that everything to this type is “problematic”. This would not be a problem at all if this type were not empowered by the powers-that-be, but for some strange reason the cultural police quickly became ubiquitous, and their constant hectoring and lecturing ground most people down to the point where fatigue set in.

Everything became political, so therefore there was nothing that was not political. The fact that sanctions began to be placed against those who dared to buck the new trends in social mores meant that this was a totalizing form of politics. It wasn’t fascism, nor was it communism … but it was (and is) totalitarianism in a new form all its own. The rise of populism on the right in the West (as this trend is also present in Europe, but is not as thoroughly embedded there as it is in North America) is almost entirely a reaction to this. Freedom and liberty, as traditionally understood in the Anglosphere (i.e. “as long as I don’t harm others, I can do or say what I want”) took a back seat to what they call “equality”, a first step towards the more extreme demand known as “equity”.

Economic precariousness combined with the permanent presence of the Sword of Damocles above your head is a brilliant way to get people to shut up and get with the program. It is very coercive, but it is for the “greater good”, they tell us. What we already see is that it does not convince all, and that it has a negative effect on trust in governing institutions and national elites. The level of control by the managerial elite over the daily lives of its citizens is now at a micro-management one. Everyday, most people have to think carefully before speaking for fear of committing some aggression that could lead to the termination of their employment. They must mouth elite-approved social mores just in order to be able to tread water, as boat rocking is a secular sin. Why would the powers-that-be want to ever give up such a tool of mass control? The people are not to be trusted, which is why this totalizing system must remain in place. Just imagine if it were removed: the dreaded 1990s would return … or something.

Jacob Siegel has written an interesting essay on the concept known as “Whole of Society”, and how it has become a totalizing system:

    To make sense of today’s form of American politics, it is necessary to understand a key term. It is not found in standard U.S. civics textbooks, but it is central to the new playbook of power: “whole of society“.

    The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for the government to control public life that can, at best, be called “Soviet-style”. Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.“

    In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them — creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.

The catch:

    “The government” — meaning the elected officials visible to the American public who appear to enact the policies that are carried out across the whole of society — is not the ultimate boss. Joe Biden may be the president but, as is now clear, that doesn’t mean he’s in charge of the party.

Siegel writes that the “whole of society” approach arose during Obama’s shift away from the War on Terror to something called “CVE” (Countering Violent Extremism) i.e. the shift away from focusing on Islamist terror towards fighting America’s own citizens who are not with the new political, social, and cultural programs:

    But the true lasting legacy of the CVE model was that it justified mass surveillance of the internet and social media platforms as a means to detect and de-radicalize potential extremists. Inherent in the very concept of the “violent extremist”, was a weaponized vagueness. A decade after 9/11, as Americans wearied of the war on terror, it became passé and politically suspicious to talk about jihadism or Islamic terrorism. Instead, the Obama national security establishment insisted that extremist violence was not the result of particular ideologies and therefore more prevalent in certain cultures than in others, but rather its own free-floating ideological contagion. Given these criticisms Obama could have tried to end the war on terror, but he chose not to. Instead, Obama’s nascent party state turned counterterrorism into a whole-of-society progressive cause by redirecting its instruments — most notably mass surveillance — against American citizens and the domestic extremists supposedly lurking in their midst.

    A reflection on the 20-year anniversary of Sept. 11 written in 2021 by Nicholas Rasmussen, the former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, captures this view. “Particularly with the growing threat to public safety and security posed by domestic violent extremism, it is essential that we move beyond the post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy paradigm that placed the government at the center of most counterterrorism work.” Instead of expecting the government to deal with terrorist threats, Rasmussen advocated for “a much wider, more expansive and inclusive ‘whole-of-society’ approach” that he said should encompass “state and local governments, but also the private sector (to include technology companies), civil society in the form of both individual voices and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academia.”

July 29, 2024

“Queering” the Olympics

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

The 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris have started, with the traditional “fuck you!” to those the elites most disdain, who in this case are apparently the more than two billion Christians around the globe:

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill notes that our kakistocratic elites are still not tired of “queering” everything they possibly can, especially if it gets up the noses of those disgusting dirt people in the provinces:

Is anyone else bored of “queering”? Everything’s getting “queered” these days. We’ve had “Queering the Curriculum“. “Queering the Arts“. And my personal favourite: “Queering Palestine“. This entails academics “unpack[ing] the multiple intersections of queer politics and the Palestinian struggle”. Hot tip for these profs: if Hamas ever invites you to discuss your theories, don’t agree to meet them on the high floor of a building. “Queering the Pavement” is the only thing they’re interested in.

Now, with soul-zapping inevitability, we’ve had the “queering” of the Olympic Games. Yesterday’s rain-sodden opening ceremony in Paris was super LGBTQIAzzz. There were drag acts everywhere. A bearded bloke twerked for the world. A bollock-naked man in blue paint was served on a platter of fruit to a gaggle of diet-dodging drag queens. Look, if I wanted to be exposed to the camp debauchery of drag culture, I’d go to a kindergarten.

It really was a naff, dispiriting affair. It was the first opening ceremony to take place, not in a stadium, but in the heart of the hosting city. Boat after boat after boat carried the Games’ athletes along the Seine as 300,000 spectators in soaked plastic macs craned their necks for a glimpse. It seemed to go on forever. It was so bad that even square liberals on X started using the favoured slogan of the right: “STOP THE BOATS”.

The weather didn’t help. The lashing rain hampered the audio, making it hard to hear the ceremony’s star turns, Celine Dion and Lady Gaga (an upside of the downpour, I suppose). What we could hear was just weird. Like when a headless Marie Antoinette sang the opening bars to an ear-splitting heavy-metal ditty. The ceremony organiser, Thomas Jolly, said he wanted his spectacle to be a “celebration of being alive” – here we had a celebration of being dead.

Then there was the “queering”. Just as you can’t switch on the BBC, visit a library or have a quiet pray these days without encountering a drag queen, so you can’t watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics without seeing portly men in moob-hugging outfits voguing and gloating. It was more Eurovision than Olympian. More Ru Paul than Ancient Greece. More “Sashay away” than “Citius, Altius, Fortius“. That’s the original Olympic motto. It means “Faster, higher, stronger”. Because, believe it or not, we were once a species that celebrated the moral beauty of sporting heroism rather than the ability of a middle-aged man to lard himself into a sequined gown.

The part of the ceremony that caused the biggest stink was the camp Last Supper. A bunch of drag acts gathered around a buxom woman adorned in an aureole halo crown in an unmistakable mimicking of da Vinci’s painting of Christ and the apostles at their final meal. Wearing the smug look of all glib performance artists who love nothing more than to piss off “normies” – because they lack the talent for anything else – the drag queens giddily got into their disciple positions and heaped holy adoration on the lady Jesus. You could almost hear their thoughts: “Ooh boy, this is going to piss off old farts – yes!”

“… those who aren’t on board with your side are assumed to simply be deficient human beings”

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

Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the increasing, conscious racial segregation of supporters of Kamala Harris, in this case the “Karens for Kamala” Zoom call for white women:

Screencaps from the Zoom call.
Reason magazine.

“Karens for Kamala?” actress Connie Britton joked.

Britton was one of two celebrities, several politicians, and, reportedly, more than 100,000 others on a Zoom call advertised as a way for white women to “show up for Kamala Harris”. What transpired echoed advocacy around Hillary Clinton eight years ago. It was also oddly reminiscent in tone, if not substance, of missteps we’ve seen from conservatives like Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), in which those who aren’t on board with your side are assumed to simply be deficient human beings.

Also, pop star Pink was there. And Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) told a story about her and Britton having to drink toad venom after eating bad seafood.

The virtual gathering was organized by gun control activist and Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, who modeled the meeting after recent calls set up by and for black women and black men who want Harris for president.

According to Elizabeth Minnella, who served as a sort of master of ceremonies of the call, more than $1.8 million was raised last night. Urging viewers to group chat their friends with a fundraising link, Minnella said she would be dropping it into her favorite group chat, titled “Witches for Harris”.

“I am here tonight, embracing myself in your incredible, profound white women midst, because we’ve got a fucking job to do, y’all,” said Britton, who has starred in shows like Nashville, American Horror Story, and The White Lotus. She went on to suggest that because Vice President Kamala Harris is a woman, she will “listen. And lead with empathy, integrity, and the power of the truth”. When President Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee and endorsed Harris to take his place, “the world blew up. Did you feel it?” asked Britton. “It was seismic. Cosmic, even. And since then — have you seen it? Have you seen Kamala glisten in the brilliance and shine of her true power and leadership? And what does that feel like? Feels like self-love.”

“Women, when we are capable of opening up to our own voices and gifts, can access a love of self that is reflective … and can shine outward to unknown depths,” Britton continued. “Which brings me back to us. Beautiful, beautiful white women. Here we are gathered together.”

If Britton sounds a bit gender essentialist, a bit patronizing, a bit woo-woo — well, that was just in keeping with the overall vibes of the call. At least Britton’s “Karens for Kamala” joke was one of the few moments in which speakers weren’t positively radiating self-seriousness.

If there was an underlying theme, it was that white women needed to use their privilege to elect Harris — or else.

“White women, we have 100 days to help save the world!” Watts said.

July 28, 2024

The “Michelangelo of fake news”

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

The latest anonymous reviewer in Astral Codex Ten‘s “Your Book Review” series considers the work of Michael Baxter and his Real Raw News site, your go-to source of unfiltered unfake news about America:

If you’re a follower of U.S. news outlets, you’ve seen some big stories unfolding over the past year: The unprecedented four criminal indictments lodged against former President Trump. The ongoing AI explosion. The backlash against “DEI”, “woke”, and “cancel culture” as exemplified by Elon Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter to “X”.

Visit a hundred different news sites, and you’ll get varying takes on these stories. Some will be liberal, some centrist, some conservative, some libertarian or neoreactionary or third-way or whatever. Most will attempt or feign objectivity (most badly). But all will largely be discussing the same stories.

And then there is one site where a very different narrative is unfolding:

    The admiral and several other officers were already in position when guards delivered [Merrick] Garland to the gallows at 10:05 a.m. He was led to the platform where the hangman and a rabbi awaited his arrival, one lowering the circle of rope and the other asking whether Garland wanted prayers recited as he transitioned to the afterlife.

    “Go f*** yourself,” Garland told the rabbi.

    Admiral Crandall asked Garland if he had any last words—besides insulting the rabbi.

    “I do, Crandall,” Garland said.

    A lengthy silence followed.

    “We don’t have all day,” the admiral said.

    Garland sneered. “You’re so far up Trump’s ass I can see the soles of your shoes.”

    “Clever,” the admiral said.

    The hangman put the noose around Garland’s neck and a cloth sack over his head.

    “Let’s do it,” the admiral said.

    The floor beneath Garland’s feet fell away, and he dropped. His neck snapped, ending his miserable life.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Real Raw News.1

The World According to Michael Baxter

Some people write fanfics about Harry Potter. Some people write fanfics about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then, well, some people write fanfics about Donald Trump.

Spewing forth from a single WordPress site that doesn’t even display properly in mobile, Real Raw News presents itself as the lone bastion telling the real story of what is going on in America, for everyone who isn’t fooled by the fake news of all the other media outlets.

The articles of RRN are all the work of one Michael Baxter, and after enough time spent reading the site, one realizes that Baxter is no crank – he is instead a creative genius, the Michelangelo of fake news. Just as Michelangelo took four years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Baxter has spent three and a half building his own elaborate world of plots, counterplots, and bloody, implacable justice.

At Real Raw News, Donald Trump is still president – just a temporarily embarrassed one, who has had to abandon the public-facing side of his job in order to lure the “Deep State” out of hiding into its own annihilation.

In the world of Real Raw News, at least, it’s working. In this corner of the World Wide Web, America is going through a revolutionary purge rivaled only by the worst excesses of Joseph Stalin’s government – with the important difference that this time, the perpetrators thankfully all deserve it.

The basic summary of the past four years of world history, according to RRN, are as follows:

  • Following widespread and blatant fraud in the 2020 election, endorsed as legitimate by the media, Donald Trump pretended to surrender power to Joe Biden. In reality, though, he retained the support of the U.S. military, and continues to exercise presidential power from a secret bunker at Mar-a-Lago.
  • Military forces loyal to Trump, empowered by the Insurrection Act and other executive orders secretly placing the country under martial law, have been conducting special forces operations to hunt down and secretly arrest various high-profile Americans on charges of treason.
  • Joe Biden, who is not really president and perhaps not really Joe Biden either, is somehow still exerting dictatorial powers over much of America, assisted by Deep State-aligned government agencies like the IRS, the FBI, and of course, FEMA. Any time there is a natural disaster, Trump-loyal military forces do battle with FEMA operatives. These battles have killed hundreds.
  • A chief goal of Biden’s not-really-in-power dictatorship is spreading Covid-19 vaccines, which are an evil plot to do … something. They contain ingredients like the “zombie drug” scopolamine, pesticides, HIV, and wasp venom. Vaccines variously cause heart attacks, mass sudden death, or berserker rage.
  • Vladimir Putin launched the war in Ukraine to hunt down a network of child-trafficking pedophiles. The Deep State has some kind of weird plan to merge America with Ukraine.
  • The lack of evidence that all this is happening is entirely explained through coordinated media silence as well as the widespread use of body doubles and clones.

The heart of Real Raw News, and the source of most of its entertainment value, is its accounts of the supposed secret military tribunals occurring at America’s Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, better known as Gitmo2. For more than three years, the site has produced one article after another describing the arrest, trial, and execution of dozens of major and not-so-major figures in American life.

    1. “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?”

    Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers:

    1. A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.
    2. Scott told us to be less conventional in our choices.
    3. I am a liberal arts graduate and I’m definitely not going to make the finals reviewing some nerdy non-fiction book.

    2. Baxter also places a few tribunals in Guam.

J.D. Vance is an ideological extremist who has pushed an idea also supported by … Canadian deputy PM Chrystia Freeland

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

There’s much viewing-with-alarm and pearl-clutching going on over some of J.D. Vance’s more outré notions floated before he became Trump’s running mate:

U.S. Senator J.D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People’s Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan, 16 June, 2024.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the amusing features of this week’s U.S. election turbulence has been sudden media scrutiny of Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance, a former author and pundit newly named as Donald Trump’s running mate. Readers will know I’m a sadistic student of electoral reform crusades, and in 2021 Vance advocated for one of the myriad of utopian ideas that has never quite reached prime time: parents should be given extra votes that they can exercise on behalf of their minor children.

[…]

Critics of Vance are screaming about the sacred principle of “one person, one vote” — but of course the centrists and liberals who have toyed with the same idea support it precisely because children are persons who deserve political representation. (They would be represented second-hand by their parents until the age of majority, but us adults are all represented that way in democratic decision-making now, right?) Earlier this week Reason magazine published a short excerpt from a pro-Demeny paper by two American law professors with strong conservative, originalist credentials: there isn’t all that much daylight between their arguments and Corak’s.

Are the arguments actually any good? Some of them seem circumstantial or even aesthetic. We’re in a transitory era of gerontocracy because of a baby boom that happened eighty years ago, and nobody under 70, whatever their ideology, likes this universal predicament much. But on the grounds of revealed preference, the lack of actual real-world Demeny experiments is a big problem.

If we want the proxy votes to go to custodial parents who are involved with a real child and conscious of its particular interests, you’re suddenly talking about integrating election systems with family law. I.e., an unfathomable technical nightmare. But assigning control of the extra child votes automatically to biological parents, including deadbeats and those who have surrendered children to adoptees or foster families, seems like a non-starter. (And would also be an unfathomable technical nightmare.)

You can say that the democratic principle is more important than the mere design details of a child-voting system, and this is the kind of thing election reformers say all the time — but would you book a seat on an airplane that was built on aerodynamic principles with no attention to detail?

July 27, 2024

Cancelling Orwell (again)

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Daily Sceptic, Paul Sutton recounts a recent discussion with some Oxford graduate students where the topic of George Orwell came up:

The students maintained that the important thing is quality of writing but, paradoxically, this can only be judged by a strict contemporary “evaluation” of any Right-wing or outdated views. Inevitably, this contextualisation then reveals that said writers are “problematic” and “not as good as XYZ” – usually some figure who fits their sensibilities, and coincidentally one who’s almost always female – or at least better suited to the diversity required by these commissars.

So far, so well known and wearily familiar. The absolute impossibility of literature under such a mindset – one enthusiastically endorsed by graduate students who professed to live for literature – is utterly depressing. We’re in effect dealing with its cancellation.

I made a perfunctory effort in observing their complete inconsistency, but things got more interesting when Orwell was discussed. Of course, Orwell famously wrote against their stand, not least in his brilliant defence of Kipling’s literary merit and his refusal to allow orthodoxy to dictate his aesthetic preferences, in “Benefit of Clergy“.

Unfortunately, Orwell’s stint in the Burmese Imperial Police made him a despicable figure to the students, little better than a Waffen SS or Gestapo officer. True, he’d belatedly retrieved himself by his “eventual writing” in the 1940s, but he’d spent many years performing the dirty work of the British Empire. His famous essay, “A Hanging“, showed him enthusiastically hands on at it.

I’d honestly never heard such a narrow and limited view, and was intrigued. As a preposterous misrepresentation, it needs little rebuttal. “A Hanging” is indeed a brilliantly disturbing account of an Indian murderer being hanged, a man who’d have been executed at that time in any country. The essay explores the deep unease Orwell felt about his role, so it’s a lie to claim it shows him uncritically doing his job, let alone revelling in his exertion of British authority.

Such an interpretation shows a shocking lack of understanding. As does the idea that Orwell only recanted any pro-Imperial views in the 1940s; his underrated Burmese Days was published in 1934 and he wrote extensively about his disgust for the job he did in the late 20s and 1930s. Of course, he didn’t only feel disgust, nor would he pretend that the British brought only misery and were unique as imperial exploiters.
What I’m most interested in is how an alternative Orwell was then offered up, a writer who’d accepted the British Empire was “problematic” yet offered a nice comforting view of how nice and comforting life can be – if you agree with the progressives, that is.

Step forward Jan Morris and his trilogy Pax Britannica. Now, I haven’t read this non-fictional account of the British Empire but from background knowledge, it’s not in any way a replacement for Orwell or even remotely comparable. It’s an exhaustive historical work, not a personal creative one. But this trilogy was extolled by the students as what Orwell should have done when discussing empire. There was the implication that Orwell could now be – somewhat thankfully – ignored.

Bizarrely, the Englishman then introduced Joyce, first saying that the man was a lifelong sponger who’d have probably fleeced him, but as a writer was the very model of a pan-European, liberal and open to all cultures. Again, the grubby contradictions and sheer banality of such a perspective are eye-popping – from a DPhil student in perhaps the country’s finest university.

And I’ve a nagging feeling that Jan Morris – a famous case of gender realignment (he “transitioned” to female in 1972) – was picked for the “acceptable author” reasons. That’s the problem with “author context” vetting – as with “diversity hires”. Much as I’ve enjoyed Morris’s travel writing, especially Oxford, it’s staggering for this author to be proposed as some alternative to Orwell! Not only in terms of obvious lesser importance, but they’re not remotely comparable in terms of genre or aims. How could any serious reader – let alone one at a leading university – talk such gibberish?

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