Quotulatiousness

January 9, 2024

“[P]olitical violence is never ever acceptable in the United States political system”

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

Mark Steyn gets the message:

~I’m glad to see I wasn’t the only one who got a mordant laugh out of this line in Joe Biden’s Feast of the Insurrection sermon:

So “political violence is never ever acceptable in the United States political system. Never, never, never. It has no place in a democracy. None.”

An odd thing to say about a “political system” in which Lieutenant Michael Byrd was able to kill Ashli Babbitt in cold blood as his Capitol Police colleagues were able to do likewise to another defenceless woman, Mariam Carey. I would hope to be wrong, but I would be surprised if America gets through this year without more “political violence” — because one side seems to be fomenting it as a pretext for intensifying what Mr Kelly calls their “monopoly” on it.

That monopoly is part of a broader problem in the United States: the abolition of equality before the law. If you can avoid getting dispatched as swiftly as Ms Babbitt, you will nevertheless have what remains of your life ruined by detention without trial, solitary confinement, double-digit years of prison with no possibility of parole … Americans have gotten the message. Do you recall, after the Canadian truckers’ heroic Covid protests inspired the world, there was talk of a similar American Freedom Convoy?

Oh, you don’t remember? Me neither. That’s because it all fizzled out, as its proponents figured that the dirty stinkin’ rotten corrupt US Department of Justice would just treat it as January 6th on wheels.

~Of course, it didn’t work out too great for the Canadian truckers, either: Frozen bank accounts, protracted prosecution … Small potatoes by US DOJ standards, and Lieutenant Byrd wasn’t around to shoot them dead, but it has certainly been fierce and targeted by Canadian standards. Why? Because in Ottawa the “traffic disruption impacted residents’ lives in many ways”.

On the other hand, “pro-Palestinian” groups are currently disrupting traffic in Toronto. For over a week they’ve shut down the Avenue Road bridge over the 401. Why?

Well, it’s a key artery into Toronto’s and Canada’s most Jewish neighbourhood. But, relax: they’re not anti-Jew, they’re just anti-Zionist. After all, many of these Jews in Armour Heights and Bathurst Manor are out every night bombing Gaza daycare centres. It’s part of the same expansive definition of “pro-Palestinian” that has seen International Delicatessen Foods attacked because it has the same acronym as the Israeli Defence Force. But don’t worry, they’re not anti-Semites, just acro-Semites. If I were the famous Japanese tea master Takeno Jōō, I would hire additional security. But fortunately he died in 1555 …

Yet, as I said, it all comes down to equality before the law. The Canadian truckers handed out coffee and doughnuts to locals and are still in the dock two years on. Whereas on the blockaded Avenue Road overpass the Toronto Police deliver coffee and doughnuts to the pro-Hamas lads:

Roll up the Jews to win! In the old days, the German coppers pleaded that they were just obeying orders, but, as Kate MacMillan points out, the Toronto constables are just taking orders. Did you hear the way that fellow put it? “The police are now becoming our little messengers.”

January 8, 2024

Vivek Ramaswamy versus the HR team

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

Chris Bray finds the humour in Vivek Ramaswamy’s most recent viral video moment:

I’m not sure which part of the employee handbook he violated, but Vivek Ramaswamy was obviously called into a conference with HR.

“Mr. Ramaswamy, security will now escort you to your desk to collect your personal belongings.”

Federal debt has now passed $34 trillion, is well over 100% of GDP, and is on track to top $40 trillion in maybe two years. What are we going to do about that? We’re going to spend over a trillion dollars a year in the foreseeable future to cover the interest on that debt. Worth noticing?

The United States fought the Taliban for twenty years, accomplished nothing, and then let them take all of Afghanistan instead of just the half they controlled when we invaded. How did that happen? How did we spend thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on literally nothing? We trained and funded the Afghan National Army, which then turned out to not actually exist at the very first moment it was expected to function without us. Should we work to understand that failure? Should we maybe ask where the money went?

And so on. Pick your own top ten things that need to be discussed and examined. Covid policy, the emerging disaster of learning loss from school closures, the failure and increasingly obvious danger of the mRNA injections, our long history of remarkably unwise foreign interventions, the Frankenstein’s monster of our corporate-state merger and revolving door regulatory capture, the ideological rigidity of academic culture, whatever. There are crushingly obvious and disturbingly consequential failures all over our recent national record.

So our presidential candidates are facing persistent and aggressive questioning about … their willingness to denounce white supremacy. Is racism bad? Is racism bad? Is racism bad? Will you denounce it? Will you denounce it? Will you denounce it, denounce it, denounce it?

“[A]ll philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatic, have been very inexpert about women”

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

Theodore Dalrymple on the food police and the linguistic distortions forced on traditionally technical and scientific journalism:

The world, said James Boswell, is not to be made a great hospital; but to a hammer everything is a nail, and to doctors and medical journals everything is either a medical problem or a medical solution.

Looking at the website of the Journal of the American Medical Association today, I came across a paper with the title “Effect of an Intensive Food-as-Medicine Program on Health and Health Care Use”. It was published just above “A Young Pregnant Person With Old Myocardial Infarction”.

Could that pregnant person possibly be a woman? Heaven forfend that so prejudiced a thought should occur to us! If it occurred to you, dear reader, I suggest that your brain still needs washing. The word woman is here abjured by JAMA as completely as, say, it would abjure (rightly) the word bitch with reference to a woman. In other words, the word woman is now treated as if it were in itself an insult, a rather strange result of pro-feminist indoctrination.

The paper begins, “A patient in their 30s presented to the hospital …” No doubt I am deeply reactionary, almost a dinosaur in a world of mammals, but is not their the plural possessive adjective, and is not “a patient” singular? If the authors of the paper were really not sure whether the pregnant person was a man or a woman, surely they should have written “A pregnant person in his or her 30s …”? That would have been a step too absurd (so far) even for the editors of JAMA, assuming that the paper in question was published with some kind of editorial oversight. I anticipate further linguistic absurdity in JAMA with a mixture of amusement and irritation; that there will be one is a racing certainty (a Dutch friend of mine was going to write a book about Dutch social policy titled Creative Appeasement).

The paper, by the way, gives new meaning to the first two sentences of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil: “Suppose truth to be a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatic, have been very inexpert about women?”

January 4, 2024

“Missing from Gay’s note was some important … context”

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

Oliver Wiseman and Bari Weiss consider the resignation-under-pressure of Harvard President Claudine Gay:

Why did Claudine Gay step down yesterday as president of Harvard? In a letter announcing the bombshell decision, Gay wrote that it was in “the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”

She also blamed racism: “It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” Gay wrote in her email Tuesday.

Missing from Gay’s note was some important … context.

In particular, there was no mention of the twin scandals that have plagued Gay and captured the attention of the country in recent weeks. The first: her handling of antisemitism and free expression on Harvard’s campus since October 7, including her appalling appearance before Congress in December.

The second: the ever-growing list of plagiarism allegations against Gay. On Monday night, the dogged journalists over at The Washington Free Beacon reported six more charges of plagiarism. That brought the number of allegations against Gay close to 50 and implicated half of her published works in the scandal. The next day, Gay was gone, making her the shortest-serving president in Harvard’s history: the Kevin McCarthy of higher ed.

Within minutes the crowing began. Major props went to Bill Ackman, the billionaire investor who has relentlessly criticized his alma mater since the attacks of October 7; to Chris Rufo, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow who was early on the story of plagiarism allegations against Gay; and to Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium (more about him in a minute).

But does Gay’s resignation — and apparently she will remain on the faculty — actually change things?

Our sense — and recent events have only reinforced it — is that Claudine Gay is only the symptom of a deeper rot, both at Harvard and across higher education more generally.

One of the people who has been outspoken about that deeper crisis is Jeffrey Flier, who was the dean of Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016 and is a member of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a group founded by Harvard academics last year to fight the free speech crisis on their campus. (Harvard ranks dead last with a score of 0.00 in FIRE’s college free speech rankings.)

We spoke to Flier hours after Claudine Gay’s resignation. He said he sees the present crisis as a chance for the university to fix itself. “Her departure may have been necessary. But the university needs to do more than appoint a new president,” he explained.

“Before October 7, few people thought fixing problems at Harvard was a really urgent need. I am with a group that wanted real change, but relatively few people were listening. But now there is real opportunity for change,” explains Flier.

QotD: Displays of intelligence as a status good

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

… noblemen in France (in the rest of Europe too, but France’s old kingdom was special for how wide the disparity was) were used to being by far the richest in their surroundings. And they were used to the peasants being less than dirt under their feet. Or their chariot wheels.

And then that changed, in what is a cultural eye-blink. Forget the crazy slogan. Humans don’t like change. Particularly they hate change that challenges their status. Unable to actually increase their net worth (within the prescribed realms in which noblemen could do such) or stop spending, the nobility instead went for displays of wealth. Big and extravagant ones. And the wigs were … quite, quite insane.

So what does that have to do with Facebook?

For a few generations, since the left captured the academia, entertainment and the industrial-news complex, aka, the opinion makers, to be a leftist has been synonymous with being smart.

And being smart, since the renaissance, but definitely since the world wars has been the greatest social “good” there is.

No, I’m not saying the left was smart. Increasingly, most of them weren’t, because as it became a matter of social display, the easily led started imitating it.

No, I’m saying that to parrot leftist ideas was to be considered smart. Partly because of the left’s conceit that Marxism was “scientific” there has always been, attached to the modern left the idea that to believe as they do is “rational” and “smart” and that their opponents are stupid.

Not only did they hold onto this while their ideas were proven wrong by reality over and over again, but having captured academia, they pushed leftist ideas as synonymous with being educated. I mean, if you’d attended an elite school, you received these ideas, and the way to signal you’ve attended the school is to parrot it. Thus leftism became the old school tie (mostly around the neck of our economy, but never mind.)

While they had full control of the media, be it entertainment or informational, they could reinforce the message, as well as revile anyone who challenged them as stupid, wrong and illiterate, and GET AWAY WITH IT.

With intelligence being the highest status-good in our society, the left had secure status. Forever, they thought.

The change has been very rapid. The fall of the USSR and [the rise of] talk radio were the beginning, and since the internet took off, they’ve been trying to hold on to the tail of the comet, as it streaks away from them.

I’ve said it before and I maintain it. If Mr. Obama had been president in a country where the information tech was the same as in the 30s, all his failures would have been hidden, and people would believe him a staggering genius, instead of the little man who wasn’t there. Because that’s how the industrial-media complex presented him.

And then … And then they went all in for Hillary! They were “With her” 300%.

Unbelievably, it didn’t work.

I think they’d suspected, before, that things had changed. But they could still tell themselves stories, dismiss the opposition, preen on having all the power. And then … it failed.

Since then they’ve been running scared with social insecurity. They display their “brilliance” for all the world, and it didn’t work? Oh. Must signal louder, larger, crazier.

All the “Wokeness” over everything possible (and mostly imaginary) in the last few years? That’s social signaling by a social group losing power and trying to regain it.

The less it works, the more extravagant it will get. I am in premonitory awe over what will happen should Trump beat the margin of fraud in 2020. You thought the Democratic Socialist meeting was funny? You ain’t seen nothing yet. They won’t be able to open their mouths without announcing “point of personal privilege” and their pronouns, and interrupting each other with ever finer intersectional victimhood.

If you think having a woman who won an SF award malign the person the award is named after with a bunch of ahistorical nonsense, and seeing the institution cave within days was peak wokeness, you’re deluding yourself.

Soon and very soon the “Wokeness” displays will be the equivalent of having live birds in your hair.

Because in their subconscious, if they just signal loud enough they’ll regain their status as “smart” and “educated”.

Meanwhile, we’ll be buying popcorn stocks and saying “Is that a ship on your head, or are you that insecure?”

Sarah Hoyt, “Is That A Ship On Your Head?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-09-01.

January 3, 2024

“One of the oddities of trans healthcare is that it masquerades as progressive”

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

In The Critic, Victoria Smith outlines the history of medical misogyny from Aristotle to modern-day “trans healthcare”:

The neglect of female bodies in medicine has a long history. The male-default bias, writes Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women, “goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, who kicked off the trend of seeing the female body as a ‘mutilated male’ body (thanks, Aristotle)”:

    The female was the male ‘turned outside in’. Ovaries were female testicles (they were not given their own name until the seventeenth century) and the uterus was the female scrotum. […] The male body was an ideal women failed to live up to.

As Criado Perez notes, this bias lives on in male-centric medical research and undifferentiated treatment recommendations. “Women are dying,” she notes, “as a result of the gender data gap.” The belief that there is nothing specifically different about female people — cut a bit here, add a bit there, and we’re the same as men — has led to our symptoms being ignored and our pain dismissed.

Over the past few years, there have been a number of books — Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women, Cat Bohannon’s Eve, Leah Hazzard’s Womb, to name a few — which have aimed to correct the imbalance. This is important both to save lives and ease suffering, and because, on a very basic level, it is insulting for half the human race to have our bodies treated as lesser, imperfect versions of a male ideal. We are more than that. We exist in our own right.

There are many in medicine, however, who still seem to think that Aristotle was right. Last week, for instance, the World Health Organisation announced it would be developing new guidelines into “the health of trans and gender diverse people”. While this might sound positive, as Eliza Mondegreen notes, many of those leading the development group hold highly regressive views about sex, gender and bodies. It is only possible to believe that a person could change sex if you have not given much consideration to the “second” sex at all.

One of the oddities of trans healthcare is that it masquerades as progressive despite having evolved from — and continuing to rely on — an understanding of sex difference which is regressive, male-centric and superficial. Because no one wants to admit it, this has led to a plethora of articles along the lines of “Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary” and “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic“. While these claim to be adding extra detail and nuance to our understanding, what they do in practice is revert back to privileging the male default. Sex is all so varied, all so different, they tell us, we might as well not bother setting any standards for what counts as “femaleness”. We’re all just human, aren’t we? Only some bodies have tended to be considered more human than others. Rebranding “the male default” “the sex spectrum” is a sneaky way of insisting, once again, that female people are nothing more than males with a few minor tweaks.

This is the new medical misogyny, built on the back of the old version. Unfortunately, because it positions itself as anti-conservative and even pro-feminist, many writers of texts that address the old version feel obliged to go along with the new. It’s not difficult to see why. Who wants their work to be undermined by bad faith accusations of transphobia? Isn’t it easier just to say “it’s clear that trans women are women” — as Bohannon has done — on the basis that at least this will enable you to challenge the centring of male bodies elsewhere?

January 2, 2024

Deplatforming the Substack Nazis

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

Well-known Substack Nazi Freddie deBoer explains why “we” need to immediately throw all the Nazis off all the publishing platforms to save democracy:

Professional mediocrity Jonathan M. Katz has started a little bit of an echo of 2021-era media handwringing about what kind of content is allowed on Substack. You may remember that in early 2021, when Substack’s (now shuttered) advance program gave money to me and several other disreputable sorts — that is to say, writers who do not enjoy the approval of The Village — it kicked off a minor fuss about, like, male privilege or something. (These things are always a little vague.) Katz thinks Substack has a Nazi problem and should either aggressively prune every writer who doesn’t own a Kamala Harris t-shirt or else the company should be ostracized from the media community. This is a little funny in that it assumes that there will be a media community in another six months, which given financial trends is not a great bet. Mostly the piece just makes me very tired; The Atlantic is of course the perfect venue for such an essay, since 90% of the people who write there are elite liberal art grads who disappeared up their own ass twenty years ago and who derive the lion’s share of their self-worth from writing for a high-falutin place like that. The Atlantic published Frederick Douglass! But now I’m afraid it publishes David Brooks, and I think Spencer Kornhaber is chained to a desk somewhere, forced to churn out five pieces a day about how Beyoncé’s work constitutes a new Black dream imaginarium, or whatever else Tumblr thought six months ago. I’m not impressed, Jonathan, is the point.

Nevertheless, points must be made.

  1. This will blow over and no one will remember it. Most people who read and write on Substack have no idea there is a controversy and wouldn’t care if they did. If 2020 proved anything, it’s that even the loudest controversies have a habit of suddenly dying down as soon as the news cycle changes. Remember when we were having a racial reckoning, and it was the most important thing ever, and then people were back to blogging about fast fashion and Squid Game? I remember!
  2. All of this is always panhandling first — everyone who’s ever performatively quit this platform or any other has been doing so to juice subscriptions or generate sympathy that could lead to a staff writer job. It’s one of the most aggressively, shamelessly self-celebratory genres I can imagine.
  3. A basic part of the point is that, as the past decade and a half proves, contemporary liberals have an incredibly expansive view of what a fascist is. I am a pro-choice, pro-reparations, pro-trans rights, pro-Palestinian, pro-redistribution Marxist, and I am routinely called a fascist by the kind of people who are pushing this line. I promise you that if Substack started banning “literal Nazis”, people would make an effort to include me — it’s happened before on other platforms — and if that effort arose, a lot of people pushing the “we’re only talking about literal Nazis” line would have no problem pushing for me to be deplatformed. Because it’s “only literally Nazis” but then “well Tucker Carlson is basically a Nazi” and then “well Sean Hannity is just like Tucker” and then “well Glenn Greenwald is shrill” and the next thing you know anyone who doesn’t have an Obama bobblehead on their dashboard is banned by policy from these platforms. (Maybe if liberals wanted people to take the fascist threat more seriously they shouldn’t have spent the past fifteen years calling everyone they don’t like a fascist.)
  4. You cannot censor your way out of extremism, and that is an “is” statement, not an “ought” statement. I highly recommend you click that link. The question of whether we should censor far-right figures off of the internet is irrelevant in the face of the fact that we can’t do that. As I point out in the piece, Germany and France have very aggressive laws against Nazism, and they have never stopped having a significant Nazi problem in their societies. Those laws don’t work! The flow of information cannot be stopped, especially in the era of the internet! We couldn’t shut down ISIS’s communications. China, both one of the most repressive and most technologically advanced societies on earth, have not been able to stop digital communications by activists and resistance groups. There will always, always, always be some sketchy server farm in Chechnya that will host these people, and there will always be Indonesian crypto exchanges with no physical address that will facilitate payments for them. If they can’t stop terrorists, I assure you that they can’t stop those “manosphere” frauds. Whatever hope of total control of information died the day some computer science professor figured out how to send ASCII porn to a colleague. What is it going to take for you guys to understand that there is no button to push marked “shut up all the Nazis”?
  5. Before malevolent doofus Elon Musk bought Twitter, it was a hive of self-impressed pussyhat liberals who had hegemonic control over the conversation thanks to Twitter’s sympathy towards their position; after he bought Twitter, it became a cesspit of anime racists and crypto scams, and those useless liberals are big mad that their clubhouse got taken over. Now a bunch of people who think they’re entitled to an audience have sat around for a year typing “Guys? … is anyone there?” into Mastodon and they’re really wounded about it all. I absolutely, 100% believe that Twitter’s demise has contributed to the urge to attack Substack. People who enjoyed pride of place on that version of the network are now looking to throw their weight around in the old style, not seeming to understand that without Twitter functioning as the organizing committee, the juice just isn’t there anymore.
  6. Can someone please tell me who the actual “literal Nazis” are? Katz does a lot more broad gesturing in his Atlantic piece than he does actually proving that there’s a problem or its size. Shouldn’t there be some effort to a) quantify this problem, b) compare it to the size of the platform as a whole, and c) determine if the problem is growing? Is this a crazy thing to ask?

Nobody will like the new rules

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

Chris Bray points out just how bad the “new rules” are going to be … and not just for the Bad Orange Man:

The danger is that you concede an argument about a personality or an event, then find at some future point that you’ve accepted new systems and structures that are far more broadly applicable than you noticed at the moment you accepted the new rules. Everyone of every political persuasion should see the weapon on the table, because it’s going to be pointed at you and yours: libertarians, anti-war leftists, populists, paleocons, others too weird to name. Outliers. If your votes and your views fall outside an extremely narrow band of corporate-state “centrism”, what follows is about you.

So.

Bill Mitchell, a media figure and DeSantis supporter, doesn’t see the big deal:

The problem is that Trump is “super toxic”, so whatever. Orange Man is bad, so the things you do to Orange Man are unobjectionable. Of course you can take him off the ballot — he’s a jerk. That’s, like, the Constitution.

But the constant background music for me in these discussions is that the government of Canada construed a peaceful protest against vaccine mandates as a national emergency, on par with a foreign invasion, and started freezing bank accounts and mobilizing force for mass arrests. A “Western democracy”, hearing dissent, started turning off the dissenters’ money, which means that government took away the ability of peaceful protesters to pay for things like housing and food. The patience of the global political class for disagreement is narrowing, fast and hard. (Cf. e.g. Ardern, Jacinda.)

So see what’s happening in the United States, and see where it points. On January 6, thousands of protesters turned into maybe hundreds of rioters; many people at the Capitol were peaceful and calm, while some weren’t. Almost none were armed, none used guns, and the question of law enforcement infiltration, provocation, and entrapment remains open.

But no one published a manifesto calling for the violent overthrow of the United States government, and the crowd didn’t line up at the Capitol with rifles and homemade bombs to launch waves of armed attacks on Congress. Compare: here’s Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground declaring war on the United States, and announcing on the radio that “our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution”. Find me that moment on January 6, the explicit declaration of armed revolution aimed at the destruction of the federal government. No one has been charged under the Insurrection Act because no one has violated the Insurrection Act. The “insurrection” is a political construction, not a legal case.

So a riot can be an “insurrection”, in the complete absence of insurrection charges and convictions, if Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D-Longhouse) feels like an insurrection happened. She can “rule” on that.

Lone officials can unilaterally declare that American citizens are ineligible for participation in elections, because the activities of [insert name of bad people here] can be politically construed as insurrectionist — in the absence of due process and a jury trial.

January 1, 2024

“On numerous occasions in 2023 I’ve been tempted to go places with a placard saying ‘Ultimi barbarorum‘”

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

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked:

Portrait of Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677)
Unknown artist, from the Herzog August Library via Wikimedia Commons.

My favourite story about Spinoza concerns the time he lost his cool. A philosopher, a Jew and history’s finest defender of Enlightenment, Spinoza was normally a picture of quiet reason. But when he heard about the lynching of Johan and Cornelis de Witt he became gripped by an uncommon fury. The de Witt brothers were key political figures in the Dutch Republic, the enlightened new nation in which Spinoza enjoyed such great liberty to think and write. On 20 August 1672, at The Hague, they were set upon by a ferocious mob that held them responsible for the invasion of the republic by a French-English alliance. They were murdered, mutilated and clumps of their flesh were eaten.

Spinoza was enraged. He made a plan to visit the site of the mob’s savagery to hold a one-man protest. Think Greta Thunberg, but enlightened. He prepared a placard to hold up. But his landlord restrained him, fearing he too would be slain by the mob. And so history was denied the image of one of our great philosophers staging a lonely, angry protest. What did his makeshift placard say? It had two words on it. “Ultimi barbarorum“. Rough translation: “You are the greatest of barbarians”.

This year more than any other I’ve understood how Spinoza felt. On numerous occasions in 2023 I’ve been tempted to go places with a placard saying “Ultimi barbarorum“. To the kibbutzim of southern Israel following Hamas’s fascistic savagery against the Jews there on 7 October. To George Washington University after students projected the words “Glory to our martyrs” on the side of the library building: young Americans of unimaginable privilege taking pleasure in the butchery of Jews. To the lovely, leafy campus of Columbia in New York City where students planned to hold a meeting on Hamas’s stirring “counter-offensive”. To those “pro-Palestine” marches in London at which the morally treacherous middle classes marched alongside individuals dressed as Hamas terrorists and extremists chanting for yet more slaughter in Israel: “Jihad, jihad, jihad!”

To New York University where students shouted, “We don’t want no Jew state / We want all of it”: a cry by the comfortable for Hamas to finish the genocidal job of eliminating Jews in the Middle East. To the streets of Manhattan where protesters shouted “Shame on you!” at an Israeli woman whose daughter was kidnapped and brutalised by Hamas. Shaming the victims of racist terror – a low even for the unhinged woke. To any gathering of politically minded Gen Zers, to be frank, after polls found that huge numbers of them view Jews as an “oppressor class” and believe Hamas’s pogrom was “justified”. And to the Sydney Opera House, where radical Islamists chanted “Gas the Jews” and “Fuck the Jews” mere days after Hamas murdered the Jews. Nazi-style parades, uncontained glee at genocidal violence, on the streets of a Western city.

At every place I’ve wanted to say “Ultimi barbarorum“. To call out both barbarism and its intellectual apologists. To express Spinoza-style disgust for these new enemies of Western civilisation. For make no mistake, that’s what they are. From Hamas to the radical Islamists in Europe who feel inspired by Hamas to the West’s own sons and daughters of privilege who make excuses for Hamas – all have proven themselves in 2023 to be the adversaries of truth, culture and reason. Surely no one will now deny that Western civilisation is under assault on two fronts: from without and within?

The West’s bourgeois left loves to larp as Marxists, often quoting the great Rosa Luxemburg: “Socialism or barbarism!” This year we discovered which side of that clash they take – it isn’t Luxemburg’s. The apologism for Hamas in privileged circles has been mind-blowing. Hamas’s bestial violence against the Jews has been denied, downplayed or outright justified. A “day of celebration” is how one privately educated pretend radical in Britain described the racist butchery of 7 October. This sympathy with barbarism, this receptiveness to acts of staggering dehumanisation, goes beyond Israelophobia. It speaks to more than the witless hate for Israel that’s been rampant in right-thinking circles for years.

December 30, 2023

Social prosecution … because they can’t send you to the Gulag

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

Theophilus Chilton reposted an older article from 2019 that clearly still has relevance:

For the past few years, we have been seeing a tremendous increase in a phenomenon which I refer to as “social prosecution”. This has taken place as the Left finds itself in a position of increasing power over the culture and the means of cultural discourse (e.g. social media, flow of information on the internet, etc.). Yet, the Left has not been able to establish more than a relative parity with the nominal Right in the formal political arena. As a result, the Left has had to seek alternative means for punishing its enemies since they don’t have much ability to do so formally yet.

Before I proceed to the main discussion about social prosecution, I’d like to lay a little groundwork first. It’s often said that politics is downstream from culture. In other words, as trends, assumptions, mores, and whatnot within a society’s cultural milieu begin to change, these values will begin to be reflected in the political realm after a bit of lag time. However, an equally salient fact is that culture, in turn, is downstream from power – which is not to be confused with politics.

Power is the ability to shape or change your circumstances in a real way, one that is actually effective. As a result of the Left’s long march through the institutions, they have gained significant (and in some cases total) control over most areas of information control and influence – the academy, entertainment, social media, journalism, and much more. This allows them to alter the direction in which western cultures evolve, which then translates into political change on down the road. That is an exercise of real power, no matter how silly we may be tempted to think Clown World is. But, it’s necessarily a slow process.

We all know the Left would love to be able to persecute and destroy its opponents completely, if only it were in a position to be able to. We know this because that’s what the Left always does when it achieves political power. It even does this to the extent of cannibalising itself of those who are not the “right kind” of leftists, the sort of purity spiraling that was observed in the early portion of Solzhenitsin’s Gulag Archipelago, whereby the Bolsheviks were as quick to purge Social Democrats, Anarchists, and other leftists as they were those on the Right. It’s seen even today in the USA on a smaller scale in the form of intra-leftist fighting and virtue signaling between various intersectional special interest groups.

What we all need to understand is that when it comes to the Left, there is really no such thing as a “moderate leftist” or “left-leaning centrist”. There are only leftists who cannot exercise the power they would like, and therefore cannot reveal their radicalness to the extent they would wish to, but who WILL do so as soon as they sense the opportunity. The default setting for the Left is permanent revolution, whether they are currently able to act on that impulse or not. This is why Cthulhu always swims left – apart from nominal rightist opposition (which, let’s face it, has been purposefully tepid in most of the West for over a generation), there really are no brakes checking the Left’s movement in that direction.

So what can the Left do when it finds itself in the position of having “soft” power (through control of institutions, opinion-shaping, etc.) such that it can influence the culture, but their ability to exercise political power has not “caught up” yet?

This is where social prosecution comes in. It is a technique that the Left uses as a “cheat code” to harm its enemies, even though it would seemingly have no formal power available to really be able to do so (through being restrained by residual constitutionalism, control of political offices by political enemies, etc.). It does so by playing to its strength – power over culture dissemination (which is not the same thing as culture creation, we should remember) and the flow of “social information” via social media, “woke capital,” and so forth. It uses these to create social circumstances in which those with the wrong attitudes, who express the wrong opinions, or are even merely representative of the wrong demographic or cultural idea, can be targeted (akin to Alinksy’s Rule 12 – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it”) and neutralised.

December 28, 2023

“Lich and Barber … now hold the record for the longest “mischief” trial in Canadian history”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

“Autonomous Truck(er)s” describes the “Lawfare Archipelago” as Justin Trudeau’s government persecutes Tamara Lich and Chris Barber for their part in organizing the Freedom Convoy movement in 2022:

It has been almost two years since Canada’s Freedom Convoy took the country, and the world, by storm. In what has been hailed around the globe as the most popular protest anywhere against the international Covid Regime, represented in Canada by the venal and vindictive Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Truckers of the Freedom Convoy still occupy a place as heroes to millions.

Everyone remembers how the Freedom Convoy was crushed by Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Measures Act, and how bank accounts were frozen, credit cards, insurance, the entire financial lives of hundreds of people that were completely shut down. The police crackdown on peaceful protesters, smashing of windows and other vandalism committed against the protesters vehicles, trampling people with horses, the beatings, the arrests; an overwhelmingly disproportionate and wholly unnecessary asymmetric response.

In December of 2023, however, a number of those truckers and their supporters are still facing adversity and punishment, including potential jail time, with ongoing court cases, and in the situation with The Coutts 4, a trial which hasn’t even started yet.

These cases are illustrative of the corruption of the Canadian political system, the media, the courts and ‘justice system’, and the subversion of some of the founding pillars of western civilization.

Canada is no longer a free country by any stretch of the imagination.

Part 1 : Tamara Lich and Chris Barber

On Thursday, November 30, just a few weeks ago, I traveled to Ottawa to take part in an interview for a documentary film being made by former CBC journalist and now freelance podcaster Trish Wood, whose working title is The Trials of Tamara Lich. Trish had stumbled upon my writings and podcasts here at Substack, and invited me on her show to discuss the situation with the Coutts men being held as political prisoners. Impressed with my work on that, as well as my history in trucking and perspectives on the deeper meaning behind the Freedom Convoy, she wanted me to appear in this documentary; I was honored to be asked and happy to oblige.

As of this writing, the trial is on Christmas break, and may, possibly resume in March 2024. It should be noted that for the primary charges that Lich and Barber are facing, in their roles as organizers of the Ottawa portion of The Convoy, a 100% peaceful protest whose only acts of violence or property damage came at the hands of the police, they now hold the record for the longest ‘mischief’ trial in Canadian history.

Given the actions of our government, perhaps it is they who should be the accused.

Chris “Big Red” Barber, a trucker from Saskatchewan who specializes in hauling oversize agricultural equipment, became one of the faces of the Freedom Convoy through his frequent TikTok videos, sharing news about the protest to his many followers online.

It is these TikTok videos that appear to be the bulk of the evidence the Crown has against Mr Barber, though sharing information on a publicly available platform seems the kind of “crime” one would expect to be prosecuted in the country where TikTok is headquartered, The People’s “Republic” of China. The basic dictatorship, we should recall, that is “admired” by Prime Minister Trudeau.

Quelle surprise, coming from Cuba’s most infamous son.

The deeply unsurprising lack of evidence on the part of the Crown is one reason why this case continues nearly two years later; Trudeau, and the Laurentian Elite by whom he was groomed for glory, cannot accept that they went way out over their skis in the gross mismanagement of Covid, and their utterly disgusting treatment of the Freedom Convoy.

An example must be made of Barber and Lich, who are both facing ten years in prison should the Crown get the convictions they desire. “Copping a Tenner”, as they used to call a trip to one of Stalin’s Gulag Camps, is quite a cost to satiate Trudeau’s latent authoritarian proclivities and his narcissistic vanity. One wonders if this is not also an effort to prove to his real constituency, the forces of global corporatism and control exemplified by WEF leader Klaus Schwab, that Trudeau will preserve the image of the brand.

December 19, 2023

Behind enemy lines at the WPATH symposium

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

Eliza Mondegreen reports her experiences at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health gathering in Montreal last year:

This was no ordinary medical conference. Over the course of three days, I learned a great many things. That eunuchs are one of the world’s oldest gender identities and that doctors should not judge their strange desires for castration but fulfil them. That, “ideally, patients wouldn’t be actively psychotic” when they initiated testosterone, but that psychotic patients consent to take medication like stool softeners and statins all the time and “people don’t pay that much attention”. That it would be “ableist” to question an autistic girl’s insistence on a double mastectomy. That patients who claim to have multiple personalities that disagree about which irreversible steps to take toward transition can find consensus — or at least obtain a quorum — using a smartphone app.

It is hard to shock me these days — but as I moved around the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s symposium in Montreal in September 2022, I often felt as if I’d slipped sideways into some strange universe that operated in accordance with other laws: where up is down and girls are boys and medicine has left its modest brief — healing — far behind in its breathless pursuit of transcendence.

I wasn’t really supposed to be there. I hadn’t misrepresented myself — I am what I claimed to be: a graduate student researching gender identity — but this was a convocation for believers and I’m a sceptic. When WPATH, the world’s most prestigious and influential gathering in transgender healthcare, came to Montreal, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see up close the people and ideas I had pursued through so many articles and books.

[…]

It’s difficult to imagine clinicians practising in other areas of medicine not asking such basic questions, especially when the basis for treatment is so murky. But a good gender clinician, looking at a patient, does not see what non-believers like you or I might see. A good clinician falls under the sway of the same fantasy as the patient and conspires with her to bring her transgender self into existence. Under this framework, there is no “really trans” or not. There is only what the patient says and the readiness of the clinician to put herself at the service of the patient’s vision.

A bad gender clinician, by contrast, feels an “entitlement to know” why a patient feels the way she does or why she seeks a particular intervention. She clings to a traditional conception of her role as a “gatekeeper” who evaluates and prescribes. She thinks she can “discern a ‘true’ gender identity beyond what is articulated by the patient”. She may believe she can “identify the ‘root cause’ of a transgender identity”, which is seen as pathologising. She may try to leave the door open to desistance — the most common outcome before gender clinicians started interfering with normal development by deploying puberty-blocking drugs — in which case she is guilty of “valuing cis lives over trans lives”.

A bad gender clinician is easily “intimidated” by complicated patients, while a good gender clinician knows how to secure consent even in the trickiest cases. Mental health difficulties become “mental health differences”. Severe autism or thinking you have multiple personalities living inside your head become empowering forms of “neurodiversity”. When it comes to assessment, “careful” and “comprehensive” have become dirty words: “The answer always seems to be more assessment and more time. That’s gatekeeping.”

During the Denver conference, presenters role-played how to secure informed consent for a hysterectomy and phalloplasty in the case of a schizophrenic, borderline autistic, intellectually disabled “demiboy” with a recent psychiatric hospitalisation. At no point do the role-players encounter any real barriers. Instead, they persevere. At first, the patient struggled to understand why a phalloplasty might require multiple surgeries, but then the clinicians “explained everything” and the patient understood. This is called “lean[ing] into the nuance of capacity”.

The moral of this story is clear: failure to achieve informed consent is a failure on the part of the clinician, a failure of imagination and flexibility, not a recognition that some patients — whether because of age or mental illness or intellectual disability — will simply not be able to consent.

Henry Dundas, cancelled because he didn’t do even more, sooner to abolish slavery in the British Empire

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

Toronto’s usual progressive suspects are still eager to rename Dundas Street because (they claim) Henry Dundas was involved in the slave trade. Which is true, if you torture the words enough. His involvement was to ensure the passage of the first successful abolitionist motion through Parliament by working out a compromise between the hard abolitionists (who wanted slavery ended immediately) and the anti-abolitionists. This is enough, in the views of the very, very progressive activists of today to merit our modern version of damnatio memoriae:

Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville.
Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

Henry Dundas never travelled to British North America and likely spent very little of his 69 years ever thinking about it. He was an influential Scottish career politician whose name adorns the street purely because he happened to be British Home Secretary when it was surveyed in 1793.

But after 230 years, activists led an ultimately successful a push for the Dundas name to be excised from the 23-kilometre street. As Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said in deliberations over the name change, Dundas’s actions in relation to the Atlantic slave trade were “horrific“.

Was Dundas a slaveholder? Did he profit from the slave trade? Did he use his influence to advance or exacerbate the business of slavery?

No; Dundas was a key figure in the push to abolish slavery across the British Empire. The reason activists want his name stripped from Dundas Street is because he didn’t do it fast enough.

[…]

The petition was piggybacking off a similar anti-Dundas movement in the U.K. – which itself seems to have been inspired by Dundas’s portrayal as a villain in the 2006 film Amazing Grace, a fictionalized portrayal of the British anti-slavery movement.

Dundas was responsible for inserting the word “gradually” into an iconic 1792 Parliamentary motion calling for the end of the Atlantic slave trade. A legislated end to the trade wouldn’t come until 1807, followed by an 1833 bill mandating the total abolition of slavery across the British Empire.

The accusation is that – if not for Dundas – the unamended motion would have passed and the British slave trade would have ended 15 years earlier.

But according to the 18th century historians who have been brought out of the woodwork by the Cancel Dundas movement, Henry Dundas was a man working within the political realities of a Britain that wasn’t yet altogether convinced that slavery was a bad thing.

The year before Dundas’ “gradual” amendment secured passage for the motion, the House of Commons had rejected a similar motion for immediate abolition.

“Dundas’s amendment at least got an anti-slavery statement adopted — the first,” wrote Lynn McDonald, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, in August. McDonald added that, in any case, it was just a non-binding motion; any actual law wouldn’t have gotten past the House of Lords.

The parliamentary record from this time survives, and Dundas was open about the fact that he “entertained the same opinion” on slavery as the famed abolitionist William Wilberforce, but favoured a more practical means of stamping it out.

“Allegations … that abolition would have been achieved sooner than 1807 without his opposition, are fundamentally mistaken,” reads one lengthy Dundas defence in the journal Scottish Affairs.

“Historical realities were much more nuanced and complex in the slave trade abolition debates of the 1790s and early 1800s than a focus on the role and significance of one politician suggests,” wrote the paper, adding that although Wilberforce opposed Dundas’ insertion of the word “gradually,” the iconic anti-slavery figure “later admitted that abolition had no chance of gaining approval in the House of Lords and that Dundas’s gradual insertion had no effect on the voting outcome.”

Meanwhile, the British abolition of slavery actually has some indirect ties to the road that bears Dundas’s name.

The road’s construction was overseen by John Graves Simcoe, the British Army general that Dundas had picked to be Lieutenant Governor of the colony of Upper Canada.

The same year he started building Dundas Street, Simcoe signed into law an act banning the importation of slaves to Upper Canada – and setting out a timeline for the emancipation of the colony’s existing slaves. It was the first anti-slavery legislation in the British Empire, and it was partially intended as a middle finger to the Americans’ first Fugitive Slave Act, passed that same year.

December 18, 2023

“I hashtag these foolish dupes ‘Useful Yidiots'”

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

Barbara Kay isn’t fond of the Jewish groups that provide media cover for antisemites:

Have you heard the expression, “Two Jews, three opinions”? Truly, we have always been a contentious people.

In judging the worthiness of any particular internal debate, our sages applied the criterion of motivation. Constructive debate, they decreed, was noble; debate intended to wound was ignoble. I consider “ignoble” any public rhetoric by Jews that provides both comfort and ammunition to our enemies.

These Jews can be found in academia and the media, as well as in anti-Zionist groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and the If not Now movement. All preface their public statements with “Speaking as a Jew” or similar tropes. They’re willingly trotted out by Israel-loathing activists to deflect charges of demonstrable antisemitism in their ranks. On X, I hashtag these foolish dupes “Useful Yidiots”.

For candour and ignobility, it is hard to beat a 2008 Facebook post by Useful Yidiot Michael Neumann, Trent professor of philosophy, and, not incidentally, the son of German Jewish refugees:

    (My aim is to) help the Palestinians (and) I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose … If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don’t care.

Neumann’s savage tone is typical of a certain sub-genre of Useful Yidiots. These are psychologically warped intellectuals who interpret their own or their family links to the Holocaust as a de facto moral credential endowing them with authority to promote the odious libel against Israel of Holocaust inversion: that is, the pernicious false allegation that Israel is to the Palestinians what the Nazis were to the Jews.

In their febrile imaginations, Israel is pure evil, while the Palestinians are blameless victims with no agency in the creation of their alleged Holocaust-level circumstances, and no power to effect change in their destiny. All expressions of Palestinians’ hatred for Jews (at Israel and abroad) and any form of violence against them qualify as justified “resistance”.

There is no better example of the type than Norman Finkelstein, in progressive circles a much admired historian, who has devoted his entire professional life to Holocaust inversion. His parents — alone of their entire families — survived Auschwitz and Maidanek. How their tragedy inspired Finkelstein’s rabid loathing for mainstream Jewry and Israel, always presented under cover of a near-ecstatic empathy with Palestinian suffering, is a question for psychoanalysts to solve if they can, but rabid is certainly the word for it (conservative intellectual and journalist Douglas Murray termed Finkelstein a “psychopath”).

December 17, 2023

How RFK, Jr. helped destroy British Columbia’s resource-based economy

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

Elizabeth Nickson found herself added to one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fundraising mailing lists:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.

I am on RFKJr’s campaign mailing list, probably through Children’s Health Defence and they asked me for money, and I said sure, just as soon as he fixes the catastrophe he caused in the province where I live.

Got a message back!

It read, “Elizabeth, I am sure Robert would fix whatever harm he caused, can you explain?”

No problem, I said.

1. In British Columbia, we had the largest industrial forest in the world

2. It paid for education and universal “free” health care.

3. The environmental left decided to shut it down.

4. The reason for their protest was that the government, as was common practice, had sold cutting permits with long leaseholds. A new socialist government announced it was pulling the permits and taking those forests back.

5. In order not to lose all the invested money, which they had not only paid for upfront and in annual leasing charges, but paid taxes on, some for decades, lessees immediately clear cut their lands. Clear cuts are ugly. (but they are fire breaks)

6. That triggered the protest.

7. RFK Jr came in under RiverKeepers and supercharged the protest. His celebrity and glamour made the protest major international news. I was in London, I heard about it. More kids joined the protest. And then more and more. Until the government caved. Would it have happened without his presence? I do not think so. He gave very young people who had no access to power, nor any hope of it, ever, a very heady hit of significance and their lives took on huge huge meaning. For many it remains the high point of their lives. Because for the province, it was all downhill from there. All promise vanished and a grinding slow growth followed.

8. Over the ensuing ten years, cutting was diminished and heavy regulation covered the rest. By 2002, written regulations piled on top of each other stood seven feet high, taller than a man.

9. Forested communities died.

10. 100,000 families lost their livelihood.

11. Resource jobs have huge multipliers, not only forested towns died, so did regional metropolitan centers. Greens, replete with success, hit other resource industries – mining, ranching – which died. More families bankrupted.

12. They were told to go into tourism.

13. Which pays minimum wage and can only support a family if everyone, even the children, work. And, it’s seasonal.

14. Over time, the unmanaged forests became clogged with overgrowth, little trees like carrots pulled all the water from the forest floor, desiccated the soil and then pulled water from aquifers. The forests became tinder. And increasingly every summer, they explode in fire.

15. The government needed money.

16. Casinos provided it.

17. Asian cartels – you cannot imagine how violent they are – moved in and used the casinos to launder most of the drug money from North America. They bribed immigration, they bribed city government, they threatened anyone who tried to stand in their way.

18. They were so successful, human trafficking and child sex trafficking shot up. We have the second largest port on the west coast of North and South America. Through it streams container loads of drugs and trafficked children and women. At the port, you just stand aside, if you want to live. You think most of the fentanyl comes in through Mexico? Nope. It comes in through us.

19. The cartels do pay taxes. You think Black Rock is bad? These guys kill if they don’t get what they want. They are buying every business they can, to launder money through. The cartels also launder money through real estate in the city. That means housing is insanely expensive and property taxes are sky high. Canadians can’t afford to buy houses or live in the ones they own. A family making a median income has to pay 100% of income to buy a median priced house.

20. Crime is a) a driver of the economy and b) a principal source of government revenue.

21. Green has destroyed the province.

And that, I am afraid, is what celebrities do. It is why they are so hated, and one of the reason Hollywood is dying. They destroy the lives of ordinary men and women, and then move on to greater heights. Their lives are so privileged, they have absolutely no idea how people make money. And RFKJr, mind-numbingly privileged from birth, is the same. When asked about climate change, he says it’s happening but taxes won’t work. “Regenerative agriculture” he says, vaguely. It is true, regenerative agriculture could capture a lot of carbon, the amount debatable but it has promise. But cutting regulation? He has no, zero, absolutely no idea of how regulation punishes the non-elites. His is a black hole of ignorance and that is common; a majority have zero idea. Zero.

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