Quotulatiousness

April 24, 2022

“This is the status of mental illness in youth culture today, where […] they would like the laurel of victimhood without the actuality of being victimized”

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

Freddie deBoer has become convinced that there’s no such thing as “Multiple Personality Disorder”, despite the vastly increased numbers of young people with social media accounts who have built their online personas around their MPD or dissociative identity disorder (DID) issues:

The technical name is dissociative identity disorder, but it’s more commonly referred to as multiple personality disorder. It’s been in a thousand cheesy cop shows and legal dramas, too many novels written in MFA programs, and untold freshman Into to Psychology textbooks. M. Night Shyamalan’s films Split and Glass are typical of pop culture portrayals of the disorder as a lurid and impossibly dramatic disorder, with clear and distinct switches between entirely separate personalities that occur at the most narratively convenient times. And in recent years there’s been an explosion of interest and claims of diagnosis of the disorder, coincident with the rise of Tumblr and TikTok, where there are thriving communities of adolescents who claim to have dozens of “alters” and who refer to themselves as “systems”, along with a whole boutique identity vocabulary that they’ve developed. The number of views of videos tagged with #DID on TikTok is in the billions.

And yet.

And yet dissociative identity disorder is probably not even real. Its presence in the DSM has proven to be persistently and deeply controversial. Diagnostic criteria and standards are perceived by many to be highly impressionistic and unacceptably subject to the biases of the evaluator. The disorder reflects a cinematic and exaggerated vision of what mental illness looks like, which may make it more attractive to people looking for a diagnosis. DID is often presented as a kind of get-of-accountability-free card, as someone who claims to have it can always say that past bad behavior was caused by another personality and is thus not their responsibility. Many high-profile cases have been revealed to be frauds or, at least, the product of a therapist or doctor forcing patients to think they have it. The most famous DID patient, Chris Costner Sizemore of The Three Faces of Eve, claimed that her alters were not the product of childhood trauma but that she was born with multiple selves with fully-formed personalities, which completely contradicts the established etiology for the disorder.

Some who have claimed to have it have done so only after being accused of a crime. (An embezzler’s sole defense in a trial in the early 1980s was that an alter stole the money.) Diagnosis often involves the use of “recovered memories” and hypnosis, both of which are controversial if not outright discredited. And claiming to have it does not even require conscious dishonesty, just an active imagination and too much awareness of DID’s presence in culture. Regardless, the mere existence of the disorder provokes angry disagreement in a way that simply does not exist for other major psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Even proponents of the prevalence of DID acknowledge major overlapping symptoms with schizophrenia and major difficulties in diagnosis.

[…]

Even if we accept the disorder and are particularly generous in our criteria, the number of genuine cases from the past one hundred years is probably somewhere in the three digits. It’s that rare, if real. And its newfound prevalence among adolescents is particularly hard to understand, given that the condition has generally been identified among those in their 30s and 40s and is even rarer among the young. As stated in a 2011 lit review, “Despite continuing research on the related concepts of trauma and dissociation, childhood DID itself appears to be an extremely rare phenomenon that few researchers have studied in depth.”

The people who have traditionally been treated for DID have suffered, greatly, and not in the cool arty time-to-dye-my-hair-again type of suffering common to social media performance, but actual, painful, pitiable suffering. Those patients who have been diagnosed in the past with the disorder, by doctors, and who have spent years and years dealing with the consequences, are often truly debilitated people, whether the disorder itself is real or not. They require intense therapy, are often medicated with powerful drugs, and are frequently subject to long-term hospitalization. They tend to live broken and pain-filled lives, like most people with serious mental illness.

Of the dozens of high-follower DID accounts that I’ve seen, almost none are experiencing any of that. Plenty of them are in therapy, but judging from how they talk about it, it all seems to be of the customer service variety of therapy. Hardly any of them say they’re medicated, which I guess makes sense — every last one I’ve seen comes from the school that sees mental illness as some adorable personality quirk that makes them unique and high status, rather than as a source of great pain and personal destruction. They don’t take meds because they don’t think there’s anything to treat. And, indeed, they aren’t living debilitated lives. On the contrary, they’re flourishing, going about self-actualized and successful lives, getting into Ivy League schools, bragging about their social media clout, being girlbosses. This is the status of mental illness in youth culture today, where we are expected to extend every accommodation to those who say they have mental illness even as they would seem to require no accommodation at all; they would like the laurel of victimhood without the actuality of being victimized.

þ to Colby Cosh for the link.

QotD: Love in an age of Instagram

Filed under: Health, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    I really like the girl I’m dating, except for one thing. On every date, she asks me to take photos of her for Instagram. Afterward, she consults me repeatedly on which will “get the most likes.” I’m starting to get really annoyed, and I find it cuts into my enjoyment of our time together. She even did this on my birthday! — Irritated

Psychologist Erich Fromm wrote, “Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.'” He died in 1980, 30-some years before Instagram-infused love: “I need you, love, because my telescoping selfie stick won’t fit in my cute purse.”

This girl’s far from alone in turning every occasion short of stints on the toilet into a photo op. Social media (and Instagram especially) transformed fishing for compliments into a business model. #admirationvampires

Some young women — especially 20-somethings with a still-murky sense of identity — might feel they don’t exist in any meaningful way if they don’t post pix and videos of themselves to score likes and gain followers. #KeepingUpWithTheInstadashians

There’s also the lure of easy money for those who can rack up an audience: potentially making big “influencer” bucks just by showing up to events in some pop-up shop’s dress and striking a bunch of poses they copied off Beyonce.

Amy Alkon, “The Camera Sutra”, Advice Goddess, 2021-12-25.

April 18, 2022

Once upon a time, the American military wanted to know precisely nothing about the sex lives of servicemen

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

Yet another trip into a far distant past, this time in the US armed forces, long before the Current Year:

General Edward Ord (1818-1883), the designer of Fort Sam Houston, saw action in the Seminole War, the Indian Wars, and the American Civil War.
Undated photo from before 1883 via Wikimedia Commons.

For much of its history, the American military has had an aversion to hearing in any official way about the sexual conduct of servicemembers. In one of the US Army’s most notorious 19th-century legal conflicts, Captain Andrew Geddes reported from a remote post in Texas that Lieutenant Louis Orleman had been forcing his teenaged daughter to have sex; in a written statement to his commanding officer, Geddes wrote that Orleman “had been having sexual intercourse with her for the past five years, or since she was thirteen years of age, and that he had placed a loaded revolver to her head, threatening that he would blow out her brains if she did not consent to his horrible desires.” Thus informed, then-Brigadier General Edward Ord convened a court-martial — to conduct a trial of Captain Geddes, for putting such an appalling thing in writing.

As Louise Barnett concludes in her book about the trial, “acknowledging the possibility of incest by bringing charges against Orleman would have officially validated and magnified a scandal that would have haunted the Army, and the Department of Texas, for years to come. Fortunately for Orleman, this course of action was unthinkable because incest itself was unthinkable in America in 1879.”

Similarly, a rich and colorful history of the early American navy attempts to count recorded acts of sodomy at sea, and finds them buried in euphemism within official reports of sailor misconduct: “improper conduct too base to mention”, or “filthy conduct”, or “improper conduct on the berth deck”. As the historian James Valle has written, naval courts-martial finding themselves hearing testimony about shipboard sodomy tended to adjourn quickly, or to end testimony and immediately vote to acquit — after which the accused tended to vanish from a ship’s rolls, without explanation, the very next time the ship made port. “Consequently,” Valle concludes, in the early republic “not one navy man was ever convicted of homosexuality by a formal court-martial.” Herman Melville mentioned the unmentionable by writing, in White Jacket, of complaints regarding shipboard acts “from which the deck officer would turn away with loathing.” They didn’t want it to happen, but if it happened, they didn’t want to know about it.

The exceptions are, you know, interesting. In the early years of the Cold War, the sudden arrival of the threat posed by nuclear weapons and the emerging political power of the Eastern Bloc produced a moral panic in which security officials in the federal government hunted communists by looking for homosexuality; the “lavender scare” ran alongside the red scare. And so, as Elizabeth Lutes-Hillman has written, the Cold War military justice system became endlessly obsessed with sexual difference, throwing aside the usual disinclination to take notice of sexual behavior in the ranks: “Courts-martial instead became a performance of military values for the culture at large, setting the boundaries of deviant behavior for the armed forces, and so, to a certain extent, for the American body politic.” To drag that language about the performance of values down to the plane of action, Lutes-Hillman reports the example of the shore patrol in Norfolk, Virginia, which proudly reported in the late-1950s that it had caught 231 sailors in acts of sodomy by drilling holes in the wall of the local YMCA.

Putting all of that together, the American military has mostly preferred to avert its eyes from the sexual behavior of servicemembers, except in moments of transition and political crisis. If the armed forces are really interested in the question of which bed you spent the weekend in, Private Snuffy, something different is happening. For something more than 200 years, the default message from a company commander on Friday afternoon has generally been, “Handle your business, don’t interrupt my weekend with a phone call from a police department, and you’d best be in formation when the flag goes up on Monday morning.” Normal is the view that servicemembers are grown-ups whose intimate matters aren’t military business. Historically, if the armed forces officially have sex on the brain, something has been disrupted; anxiety and disorder outside the military have seeped into the ranks.

Now. To go back to an example from last year, this:

… suggests a number of obvious questions, starting with how did the United States Navy know this? Is this liberation, or is it intrusion? (BREAKING: The Department of the Navy proudly announces which helicopter pilots are into dudes, and stand by for detailed information on which surface warfare officers are bi-curious. We’re still asking around on that one, so.) It’s like the shore patrol is drilling holes in the wall at the YMCA again, but this time it’s so they can bus in a cheering section. The chain of command is right outside your door, you guys, and we hear what you’re doing in there, and OH MY GOD WE’RE SO PROUD OF YOU DO YOU NEED SOME CONDOMS? The Department of Defense isn’t a regular mom, it’s a cool mom.

April 17, 2022

The end of the (pandemic-induced) book boom

Filed under: Books, Business, Economics, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte metaphorically collects his winnings from predicting nearly a year back that the boom in book sales during 2020/2021 would not last once the pandemic lockdowns began to ease off:

I noted last June in SHuSH 103, “Big Guys Lose Their Minds”, that book sales, especially for the leading firms — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster — were ramping up during the pandemic, reaching 10% to 20% above 2019 levels. I also noted that the numbers were making some of these publishers giddy.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, for instance, gave an interview in which he proclaimed that humanity had entered a new era of permanently higher book sales and added that he was ratcheting up his spending to meet the increased demand.

“We are being aggressive in terms of buying books. We’ve seen the book pie grow, maybe 15 percent,” says Murray, “and so our response, which is part opportunistic and part defensive, is to be aggressive in buying right now. Because if that pie remains large, we want to make sure that we get a nice share of the larger pie … we want to make sure that we have a lot of new, exciting books in the future that will maintain our revenues at the current levels.” Yikes.

In that June newsletter, I anticipated the world returning to normal and book sales falling back to earth as vaccinations took hold and the coronavirus waned (we also promised to check back in a year — so here we are, a few months early).

It did not feel dangerous, that prediction. While it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a temporary spike (or drop) in sales due to extraordinary circumstances and the beginning of a long-term trend, it’s always safest to pick extraordinary-and-temporary amid an unprecedented pandemic with people locked up and not behaving normally. Also, my buddy Jack David at ECW Press agreed with me and he’s been doing this forever. And it wasn’t like Brian Murray had any evidence to back his claim that an era of permanently higher book sales had dawned.

[…]

The share prices of big publishing companies don’t tell the same sort of story because they tend not to be pure-play book publishers: Simon & Schuster, for instance, is owned by multimedia giant Viacom; HarperCollins by the omnipresent Rupert Murdoch; Penguin Random House is less than a quarter of Bertelsmann’s business. But first-quarter 2022 revenue figures for those firms are available and they show that the great give-back is underway in the book world, too.

The headline in Publisher’s Weekly reads “The Book Sales Boom is over”. Here’s the US data:

And that’s just the beginning. Sales will continue to slide throughout 2022 and into 2023 as the world normalizes, people concentrate on doing all the things they’ve not been able to do the past two years, run through the extra cash they accumulated in the pandemic, and resume their former library borrowing habits.

What happens at the big publishing companies? If, as Murray’s comments would lead you to suspect, they’ve budgeted and spent for the good times to continue, unhappy times await.

April 16, 2022

How much of teenagers identifying as transgender is “social contagion and the development of a new youth subculture”?

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

The sheer number of children and teens who are deciding that they are “trans” is far in excess of previous generations. How much of this phenomena may be accounted for by social contagion?

My teenage daughter has decided that she is “trans”. So have all her friends. Not some of them. Not most of them. Every. Single. One.

She had never heard of trans, and had no signs of gender dysphoria, until she was moved to a new, cool trans-friendly school by her unsuspecting, politically liberal parents. There she met a group of geeky (or dare I say nerdy?), smart, slightly (but not very) gender nonconforming, artsy kids. As I understand it, they all discovered “trans” together. The old “cis” friends were swiftly discarded in favour of this exciting new peer group.

Exploring “trans stuff” online with friends is a source of great interest and excitement — a real social event. What’s not to love about 245 gender identities, complete with their own unique flags? Then there are those cool neo-pronouns. Forcing your out-of-touch old parents to refer to you as “ze” or “ey” (how do you pronounce that again??) in the name of “inclusivity” is just too delicious to resist. The manga, the cute avatars in computer games, the blue or pink hair — all part of the fun as well. Mocking the outgroup (in this case so-called “cis” people in general and the dreaded TERFs in particular) is also good for a laugh — especially if they happen to be your parents as well.

There is even a special vocabulary with lots of new terms — deadnaming, misgendering, sex assigned at birth, and much more. If these concepts need to be explained to your uncool parents (accompanied by eye rolls of course), so much the better.

Bonding with friends, searching for their identity and place in life, working out their sexuality, separating from family — these are all normal developmental tasks for teens. For many, youth subcultures can be a natural part of that. Some are harmless. Some, like drug use and extreme dieting, not so much. But in the case of the latter, sensible adults usually intervene to help steer the young people in the right direction. Not in the case of trans. Here we have adults steering kids down a dangerous path, which involves permanent, life altering drugs and surgeries for which there is no good evidence base.

For many of these kids, LGBTQ+ is a youth subculture. It really is as simple as that. Recent surveys have been identifying skyrocketing rates of “trans” or “queer” identification in young people. One found that an astonishing 39% of young adults in the US aged between 18-24 identified with the label LGBT — the figure for teens <18 may well be even higher. Of course this figure includes gay and lesbian people as well as those identifying as trans. Another poll, which looked only at gender, found that nearly 10% of US high schoolers identified as “gender diverse”. Yet another survey gives a lower figure of 1.8%. Whichever figure is correct, this is a huge explosion in numbers over a very short period of time. As endocrinologist Dr Will Malone asks; “How do we reconcile these numbers with 2013 data reporting the prevalence of adult gender dysphoria to be a rare 2-14 in 100,000?”

Social contagion and the development of a new youth subculture, that’s how.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

April 15, 2022

QotD: Men without hobbies shouldn’t ever retire

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

I took an older guy somewhere during my early-morning Uber shift, and we got to chatting about retirement. He was in his early sixties and was thinking about retirement in the next couple of years or so — he’d reached all the retirement “qualifications” in terms of his age, length of service, and so on — and when I asked him what he was going to do after retirement, he said quite simply, “I don’t know.” He had no outside interests other than his work, he said, and had no hobbies or anything to keep him occupied when he would quit working.

This set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head, because I’d confronted the very same thoughts when I planned on retiring back in 2016 on reaching age 62 (which seems to be the “killer” age discovered by the researchers).

Worse than that, I either know men personally or have heard of many instances of men who have died soon — very soon — after retiring early. (When men retire at a later age, they paradoxically seem to live longer, as the study shows.) Sometimes, men die within six months of getting their gold watch, after many decades of working with little or even no time off for illness. Where I differ from the study is that I think I know the real reason why this happens.

We’re working dogs.

As long as men have work to do, we do fine. We have a purpose in life, we get up in the mornings with a day’s work ahead of ourselves, and this gives us a reason to live. It’s all tied up, I believe, in our inherent nature as providers and all that goes with it. When that activity stops earlier than expected — at 62, most of us have at least fifteen or even twenty more years to live — subconsciously we still feel that we are capable of working, providing and in short contributing to ourselves and others.

But when that ends, it’s as though a switch is turned off somewhere and our brains simply say, “Oh well, that’s it,” and we die. It may be that illness has been kept at bay through our industry and now given an empty playing field, so to speak, it takes over; or it may be that we do things that are more dangerous (the study mentions driving more as one activity), or perhaps we working dogs just feel useless and our existence, pointless.

Kim du Toit, “Working Dogs”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-02-15.

April 9, 2022

It wasn’t the Wuhan Coronavirus that crippled the world economy — it was government reaction to the pandemic

Filed under: Cancon, China, Europe, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dan Sanchez points out the undeniable truth that most of the economic damage we’ve sustained over the last two years wasn’t due to the pandemic itself, but to the incredibly disruptive public health measures almost every western government implemented in response (with huge connivance on the part of the legacy media and the social media companies):

… it will not be the coronavirus making us poorer, but the fallacy, embraced by officials from Beijing to DC, that central planners can manage society-wide problems, like “healing” a global pandemic or “fixing” a global supply chain.

As the great economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek explained, societies and economies are inconceivably complex, and it is literally impossible for anyone to centrally plan something so far beyond their comprehension. To think otherwise is, as Hayek called it, a “fatal conceit”.

The fatal conceit of central planners is manifest in the very term “global supply chain”. The metaphor of a “chain” portrays the economy as something static and linear: something simple enough for a single mind to “fix”.

But, as Leonard Read vividly showed in his classic essay “I, Pencil”, even a seemingly simple good like a pencil is not the product of a single supply chain. Every good in the economy is descended from a vast “family tree” of innumerable factors of production. And all the family trees of all goods are intricately interconnected, making the economy, not a “chain”, but as economist Murray Rothbard depicted it, “a highly complex, interacting latticework of exchanges”.

This vast, dynamic latticework is self-healing and self-fixing: through the actions and interactions of its constituent individuals. Blundering, arrogant central planners only get in the way and make things worse.

That has been the lesson of free-market economists and social theorists going back to Adam Smith. The western world partly embraced that lesson, and it flourished as a result, becoming a beacon to the world. Starting in the 1970s, even Communist China emulated its example, opening up its markets. This was a humanitarian miracle for the Chinese people and a boon for us all. If not for Chinese manufacturing being integrated into the global division of labor, it is hard to imagine the west having the modern high-tech living standards and super-comfortable working conditions we enjoy (however precariously) today.

Whereas once China liberalized in emulation of the west, now the leaders of the “free world” are emulating (and, in the case of Canada’s prime minister, openly admiring) the authoritarianism of the CCP. As crises continue to mount, it is clear that this turn toward tyranny is putting our future at risk.

April 3, 2022

Of all the things the future might hold, “food shortages” was never one of the entries I expected to see on the Bingo card

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the astonishing news that we may be facing actual food shortages in the near future:

Food shortages. Food. Shortages. That’s how incompetent this vast superstructure of over-paid, over-benefited, bullies are. Out of their vast superstructures, their buildings filled with “administrators”, their massive computer systems that track everything and everyone, unending flows of money that they just print when they need it, they have created food shortages.

We haven’t had food shortages since the Blitz in London. You basically have to have been under bombardment by Nazis to have food shortages in the western democracies. Furthermore our wealth has grown since the early 1940s by about 1000%. You have to be bombed by 100 many Nazis as there were Nazis per capita, to have food shortages in the 21st century.

That’s how malignant they are.

I guess destroying millions of businesses in the last two years, blowing up national and sub-sovereign debt way way way past sustainable level, ruining children, setting them back years, having to start math, reading, science all over again, their minds so slippery they have lost a half-decade of learning. Let’s not forget all the doctor’s visits that didn’t happen, the cancers that ran away, the heart disease that bolted given the nightmare stress they created. The domestic violence that spiked, the depression that spiked, the loneliness that turned into addiction. And then they launch a “vaccine” that has killed more people than the cold virus they engineered using elements of HIV using our money.

Everything they do turns to shit.

They expect us to forget this. We won’t. No one outside their civil services, their pet (read funded) satellites, their quangos, the PPPs that have subsumed corporations in their vicious enterprises, believes a word they say anymore. It is all bullshit, all the time.

Why the hell do we put up with them? What kind of forelock-tugging stupor leads us to believe anything they say about anything? They are the stupidest people the world has ever seen. And the most malignant, and that is saying something because history is filled with Game-of-Thrones level malignity.

This is all easier to understand once you take on board the fact that they hate us and want us to die.

Even before the lockdown pandemic theatre we all put up with for much of the last two years, the other globalist hobby horses had been out for quite some time:

The over-arching scam they are using is “climate change”. Which is not happening. No one with even basic statistics on board can read into the science and within a few hours know what a complete fabrication this is. The climate (and nature) is so complex, we probably know about 5% of what we need to know to make the decision that three billion people must die. Early on, it was engineers who realized it was false because engineers build things that can’t be faked. If a building, mine or bridge collapses, it’s because they fudged the math. Climate Change is entirely fudged math.

Everything about green energy is falsified. It doesn’t work. Other than of course, for the people who “invested” in it, which means their returns come from government subsidies, ie other people’s life energy. Here we find an ethical uncoupling at the deepest human level: Who are you to profit by the energy of others, by something that is destroying the energy system? Because destroy it, it does. Nowhere does “green” “energy” deliver sustained power. Literally nowhere. It is always breaking down, always failing, meaning that every winter the coal mines are 100% busy. It might work if the backup systems are reliable, or the climate absolutely perfect, in the desert say, but only on a small scale, never country, state or even county-wide.

“Coal is on the way out”, my CBC radio producer daughter said to me a couple of years ago. I looked at her, and managed not to laugh. Coal delivers 50% of the electricity on the east coast of North America. And it will continue. For fucking ever. Until we have nuclear.

So now, we have energy shortages. Our current inflation is caused by our administrative elites closing down energy creation and transport in the US, Canada and Europe. Energy prices have skyrocketed. Which means old people freezing in their homes.

April 1, 2022

Sarah Hoyt on the “Irrational Regime Hypothesis”

Filed under: Government, Health, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt on finding ways to make sense of the irrational-to-us actions of western governments since the start of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

I have the same need to make sense, to see “reason” out of things that don’t seem to. And I can’t stand it when something doesn’t FIT. If you want to drive me insane, you do something completely out of character for which there is no rational explanation. I’ll obsess over it for years, whether it’s in my favor or not.

This is why I knew the covidiocy was a sham of some sort. Not only weren’t the homeless dying like flies; the third world, despite some reports, also weren’t dying like flies. And the big cities in the US were encouraging homeless to crowd and congregate while everyone else was locked up. It didn’t add, unless the whole thing were a sham perpetrated by several groups for several related goals. (A prospiracy more than a conspiracy. I could expound on the cross-purpose goals I’ve uncovered so far, but that’s another post, right?)

In the same way, this whole “We really are in a shadow war with Putin! The cold war is back! Putin is crazy! He’s invading the Ukraine for funsies! Putin is invading because we crowded him! Biolabs in Ukraine!!!!!!” But at the same time — to give Trump his due — Putin, in this head to head (supposed) context, hasn’t dumped the contents of Biden’s laptop (of course they have it. I mean our FBI has it, and they are rapidly approaching status of enemy, domestic) into our national discourse. (I mean, it would complete disorganize us, and lose us whatever international prestige we still have, such as it is.) Or Putin could have dumped all the other Kompromat I’m sure they have on the not-very-bright and not particularly stealthy Biden crime family. Why hasn’t he?

And Biden, despite his continuous gaffes that take us to the brink of nuclear exchange, at least in theory, is STILL USING PUTIN TO BROKER THE SUICIDAL IRAN DEAL. And hasn’t opened up the Keystone pipeline and started authorizing drilling, which would sink Putin and possibly save the Democratic party. (Yes, Greens, but seriously. It’s either a war and an emergency or it’s not.)

This morning, this thread hit my mailbox from three separate sources (and if you’re not following Trent Telenko on Twitter, create a burner account to do so. I’m going to need to do it, since I refuse to log in to my real account (I just use it to echo my blogs) and Twitter is getting pushy about logging in. It’s worth dipping a toe into the sewer for the man’s insights, honest).

You should go and read the whole thing, but until you do, let me quote a bit, so you get what we’re talking about. Again, the thread is here:

    Alright, this is the promised thread🧵explaining the “Irrational Regime Hypothesis.”
    This is a national/institutional behavior template.
    Warning: once you see this template. You cannot unsee it.

    The basic concept is that for certain unstable regimes (or even stable ones with no effective means of resolving internal disputes peacefully, particularly the succession of power) domestic power games are far more important than anything foreign, and that foreigners are

    … only symbols to use in domestic factional fights.
    The need to show ideological purity & resolve – “virtue signaling” in modern terms – as a means of achieving power inside the ruling in-group becomes more important than objective reality
    Only the internal power matters

    … as outside reality is merely a symbol to be used in the internal power game.

    The ruling Imperial Japanese military faction of 1931 – 1945 was a classic example of this irrational regime hypothesis.

    Trent Telenko, on twitter

And suddenly the back of my mind clicked. Not conspiracy, which is hard on this scale — Not kabuki which didn’t feel quite right — but like the Covidiocy? Prospiracy. “We’re all going this way because we think it fits our goals.”

Now I want you to consider that it’s not one, but two irrational regimes, we’re dealing with.

This has been bothering the heck out of me, because it smells like they’re cooperating, only that’s not QUITE the right pattern.

None of this makes sense, unless you have TWO irrational regimes (Ours and Russia’s. China is too, but it’s another ball of wax. China doesn’t really believe other nations are real, anyway. They’re just Barbarians and China is all-under-heaven, so this is all much of a muchness on that front.) that are using each other as scarecrows to quiet the opposition at home.

March 29, 2022

Giving up vegetables for Lent

Filed under: Food, Health, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Felipe Fernández-Armesto on updating the traditional Christian observance of Lent for our virtue-signalling, social media age:

“Bruegel the Elder, Fight between Carnival and Lent, detail 6” by f_snarfel is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

For Lent, I am abstaining from vegetables. It may seem counter-intuitive, because “Carnival” or “Carni Vale” — which the English in their glum way call “Shrove Tuesday” and the French, more cheerfully, call “Mardi Gras” — means “Goodbye to Meat”.

The worldly, historic purpose of Lent is to eke out deficient livestock, doomed, unless slaughtered, to die, emaciated and inedible, on sparse or frozen pastures. Nowadays, however, vegetables seem a sacrifice both reasonable and pious.

If I wanted to be lampooned in Private Eye, I’d say that vegetables are the new meat: marketed as dietetically superior, and flattering to a moral form of snobbery.

Like meat in the old days, they are the preferred food of people who want to look down on the rest of us. Flesh and fish are now humbling meals, consumed in self-abasement. “Veganuary” and “Dry January” — wicked, secularist attempts to subvert the sanctity of Lent — repel me from conventional kinds of penance.

I want to defy the absurd propaganda of meat-haters, who try to shame the ill-informed into vegetarianism with mendacious allegations about the environmental cost of carnivorism. Scientifically, they’re on a par with Pythagoras’s denunciation of “passion proteins” and the meat-phobic campaigns of the nineteenth-century evangelists who hawked joyless, overpriced breakfast cereals.

I also want to expose the folly of people who, in flight from the butcher’s shop, grab textured soy concentrate from supermarket shelves: theirs is the idiocy of the ersatz. If you want something like meat, have meat. If you don’t want meat, have something unlike it. My sacrifice would be greater, of course, if I disliked rare steaks and juicy roasts. But I like vegetables, too. So that’s all right.

March 21, 2022

QotD: “Protect the NHS”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The relations between the population and the state in Britain are those of duty and obligation: the duty and obligation of the population toward the state, not the other way round. During the first Covid lockdown — one is beginning to forget how many there have been — the population was enjoined to stay at home in order to “protect the NHS”, the behemoth centralized health-care system that has served it so ill for more than seventy years. In essence, the population was asked to modify its behavior for the convenience of a state bureaucracy. The government might as well have said, “Protect the Inland Revenue: Pay Your Taxes”.

The government was able to get away with so ludicrous a slogan because of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the second half of the 20th century, namely that the institution of the National Health Service was a great social advance. It was nothing of the kind: Before it was founded, the country had one of the best health systems in the developed world and soon found itself with among the worst. The intention of the new service was egalitarian — treatment free at point of care and paid for from general taxation — and no one really bothered to check whether its effect was egalitarian. And since it has very unpleasant aspects for practically everyone, rich or poor, the British people still believe that it is egalitarian in its effect, when it is nothing of the kind. Such benefits as it confers are conferred in the rich, educated, and articulate, for the general principle of British public administration is for something to be done only if not doing it is likely to cause the relevant bureaucrats more trouble in the end. The rich, educated, and articulate can make trouble; the poor, uneducated, and inarticulate can only shout or throw bricks at the window (usually bulletproof and often soundproof, too).

The British population, believing that equality is a good in itself irrespective of whatever is equalized thereby, has come to regard the sheer unpleasantness of the NHS — to obtain treatment from which is an obstacle race in shabby buildings operated by exhausted and disgruntled staff — as evidence of its essential moral virtue, for it is unpleasant for all. Everyone is a pauper at the NHS’ gates, and where everyone is a pauper, no one is.

In addition to being treated better, the rich, educated, and articulate have escape routes, albeit expensive ones. Private medicine is still permitted in Britain, but in conditions of scarcity prices rise and so it is vastly, indeed fantastically, more expensive than it need be, or is elsewhere in Europe. The rich can also go abroad for treatment, and do.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Beneath the Surface”, Taki’s Magazine, 2021-12-09.

February 23, 2022

From Shell Shock to PTSD – Understanding the Trauma of War – WW2 Special

Filed under: Britain, Germany, Health, History, Military, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 22 Feb 2022

Humanity has spent millennia developing ever more efficient ways to kill. This reaches its apogee in WWI and WWII, the most terrible conflicts in human history. Broken bodies bring with them broken minds. The trauma of war brings with it the mysteries of shell shock, war neurosis and PTSD.
(more…)

February 13, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 9, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then things got weirder.

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

[…]

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

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

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

February 8, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morale amongst the protesters is high.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer is yes.

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

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

[…]

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

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

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