Quotulatiousness

June 24, 2023

“… every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jen Gerson is irked by the federal government’s latest petty diktat to “save the planet” from single-use plastic bags that bans the use of bags that are not made of plastic:

Those who follow my work will know that I am an unreformed Calgary evangelist. I like this city for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that I’m a member of the Calgary CO-OP, a chain of local grocery stores. For those who are lucky enough to enjoy something like this, a co-op offers particular advantages over their conventional counterparts; we get a small share of the profits that the chain earns every year, for example. The stores stock local produce, meats, grain, and processed foods from Calgary-based suppliers, and from nearby farms. CO-OP also provides a number of top-notch house brand supplies. National chains are simply not as nimble, nor as local. They can’t be.

But I admit that one of the things I enjoy most about CO-OP is its green grocery bags. When stores across Canada began to phase out the use of single-use plastic bags, I was despondent. The environmental rationale for the ban was thin, but mostly I was annoyed because I’m chronically disorganized and can never remember to bring reusable bags.

So when CO-OP replaced plastic bags with a fully compostable alternative, I was delighted. Granted, we would have to pay a small fee to purchase these bags, but the per-unit cost was actually less than what we would normally spend on a box of Glad compost-bin liners. So it all evened out.

To make matters even better, unlike paper straws, the compostable bags are superior to their plastic alternatives. CO-OP advertises this point on their site: “They are stronger than a plastic checkout bag. You can carry a medium-size turkey or three bottles of wine with no problem.”

I can also attest to this. The bags are an absolute win for everybody involved.

So when I discovered on Thursday that Ottawa plans to ban these items, considering them a “single-use plastic”, I lost my goddamn mind.

Not only will this represent a small inconvenience for me and my family, but it is also one of the laziest, most idiotic decisions issued from this remote, non-responsive federal government I have yet to encounter.

The bags do not contain plastic.

Let me say that again, because apparently the sound of western voices doesn’t quite travel all the way to the the slower bureaucrats in the back: “THE BAGS DO NOT CONTAIN PLASTIC”. You fucking muppets.

[…]

Look, Ottawa, are you there? Are any of you listening, or am I just screaming into the void? For the sake of the entire country, I hope, I pray that there is somebody with an IQ above 92 capable of not just reading this desperate missive, but of really, truly understanding it.

This shit — this, right here.

This. Shit.

This is why we hate you.

This is why we fucking hate you.

Nobody outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle sees a headline like “New Initiative from Ottawa!” and thinks: “Oh, how exciting. I’m so keen to see what grand notion those crafty MPs in Ottawa have cooked up now! Come, Maude, let us settle ourselves before the The National at Six so we can understand how our fine federal government is working to make our lives better.”

Nobody does that. Because every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way.

June 5, 2023

“… if I were a teenager and I read on a cigarette the words, ‘Poison in every puff!’ I’d think it was a catchy marketing jingle”

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

Christopher Gage on the Canadian government’s ludicrous next anti-smoking campaign, putting scary messages on every single cigarette in a pack:

I resisted smoking until age ten. Back then, the local boys and I would tramp over the local fields in search of dried ferns upon which to practise the deadly, seductive art of smoking.

By high school, we’d graduated onto the proper cancer sticks. Every morning, we’d pool together our lunch money, and skulk outside the off-license in wait for a nameless reprobate to slip into the shop and, for buyer’s rights of one cigarette, smuggle us ten Lambert and Butler.

Since then, save four years of misguided, anti-smoking zealotry, I’ve smoked with a sinful enthusiasm. Few share my woeful pursuit.

This week, Canada announced a “world-first”. They’ll soon begin printing health warnings directly onto cigarettes.

Neophiles with an addiction to “progress” laud this wearisome world-first. Giddy are the pink-lunged puritans.

Sorry to be facetious, but if I were a teenager and I read on a cigarette the words, “Poison in every puff!” I’d think it was a catchy marketing jingle. I’d happily sign up for a lifetime of chuffing away my health.

Perhaps they should market specifically to Millennials. “Who cares? You’ll never buy your own home,” is particularly resonant.

This is all part of a scheme to cut smoking rates to below five percent by 2035.

Reader, what happens then? Once the health fascists defeat us smokers, from whom shall they siphon their righteous fix?

The irony: as smoking declines, obesity balloons. Between 2003 and 2017, obesity deaths spiked by a third. One in four deaths is now related to one’s weight. Corpulence chalks more bodies than the cancer stick.

I’m yet to see a warning label plastered on the side of a family bucket of KFC. But give it time.

You can live as long as you like, as long as you don’t like living.

March 11, 2023

“… when people are sticking warning labels on P.G. Wodehouse, something is seriously wrong”

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

In The Conservative Woman, Alan Ashworth stands aghast at the very notion of putting a content warning on an adaptation of a P.G. Wodehouse short story:

Dominic Sandbrook in the Mail on Sunday draws attention to BBC Radio 4 Extra and its latest repeat of an adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City. It is preceded by an announcement that listeners should steel themselves for “some dated attitudes and language”.

You don’t say. The story was written well over a century ago, appearing first as a serial in The Captain magazine in 1908 and 1909 before being published as a book by A & C Black in 1910.

In it Psmith (the P is silent) and his old school friend Mike Jackson are reunited when they find themselves working for the New Asiatic Bank, a thinly disguised portrait of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (now HSBC) where Wodehouse himself endured a torrid spell before his writing career took off.

The two chums have several run-ins with management and Mike is eventually fired before Psmith solves all his problems and has him reinstated. Of course, as always in Wodehouse’s world, there is no sex, no angst, nothing to frighten the horses.

So why the BBC announcement? Sandbrook writes: “At first I wondered if this must be some mistake. Perhaps the warning had been transposed from some more dangerous programme, such as a stand-up show by Bernard Manning?

“But the warning was meant for Psmith. So what were these toxic and potentially traumatising attitudes? For the life of me, I still don’t really know.

“At one point, Psmith talks of going ‘out East’, where you have ‘a dozen native clerks under you, all looking up to you as the Last Word in magnificence’. But was that it? Did that merit a warning?

“As it happens, this radio adaptation was made in 2008. Did the actors realise they were participating in something steeped in sick imperialistic assumptions? I doubt it.

“Venturing into the cesspit of social media, I often find Left-wing pundits insisting there is no such thing as cancel culture and that the whole thing is an evil Tory myth.

“But when people are sticking warning labels on P G Wodehouse, something is seriously wrong. Indeed, you could hardly find a more ludicrous target, because he was one of most tolerant, generous-spirited writers imaginable. So generous-spirited that he’d probably have laughed this off. ‘I never was interested in politics,’ Wodehouse once remarked. ‘I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling.’

“Being cut from a meaner cloth, however, I do feel worked up about it. When I think of these finger-wagging commissars sitting in judgment on a writer who has given so much pleasure to so many readers, I feel like Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha, gearing herself up before a titanic tirade.

“Do we really need a warning that P G Wodehouse is ‘dated’? What next? A lecture before Hamlet, to warn us that poisoning your wife or killing your uncle is now considered poor form? A warning before Roald Dahl or Ian Fleming?

“But, of course, Dahl and Fleming don’t need warnings now, for they have been posthumously updated.”

December 16, 2022

QotD: Little-known types of eclipse

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

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between the Moon and the Sun.

A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun.

A terrestrial eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between you and the Sun. Happens once per 24 hours.

An atmospheric eclipse occurs when an asteroid gets between you and the sky. Generally fatal.

A reverse solar eclipse occurs when the Sun gets between the Moon and the Earth. Extremely fatal.

A motivational eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you and your goals. You can’t let it stop you! Destroy it! Destroy the Moon!

A marital eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you and your spouse. You’re going to need to practice good communication about the new celestial body in your life if you want your relationship to survive.

A capillary eclipse occurs when your hair gets between your eyes and the Sun. Get a haircut.

A lexicographic eclipse occurs when “Moon” gets between “Earth” and “Sun” in the dictionary. All Anglophone countries are in perpetual lexicographic eclipse.

A filioque eclipse occurs when the Holy Spirit gets between the Father and the Son.

An apoc eclipse occurs when the Great Beast 666, with seven heads and ten horns, and upon the horns ten crowns, and upon its heads the name of blasphemy, gets between the Earth and the Sun. Extremely fatal.

Scott Alexander, “Little Known Types of Eclipse”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-05-02.

December 12, 2022

QotD: Oversensitivity is not constrained by the mere passage of time

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This newspaper lost its editor-in-chief and guiding light to academia a few weeks ago, and we — you know, the talent! — are all still moping. Meanwhile, however, the job is open, and is being publicly advertised. The pay is pretty good, but if you are thinking of applying, you should really be conscious of what a top editor has to deal with these days. BBC News provided a good example on Wednesday, offering a brief account of a controversy at the Teesdale Mercury, a rural paper in princely, scenic County Durham. (The county called Durham in England, that is.)

It seems a reader of the Mercury ran across a brief news item about the suicide of a 16-year-old girl in its pages, and was horrified at the sensational, detailed nature of the report. The story described Dorothy Balchin as being “of a reserved and morbid disposition” and described the romantic disappointment — a beau’s emigration to Australia — that preceded her suicide. The newspaper noted that a photograph of her boyfriend was found immediately below her hanged body, and even printed the text of two notes she left. In other words, the news copy broke every rule that newspapers now normally observe in mentioning suicide.

But of course no one had thought of any of those rules in the year 1912.

Which is when the story had appeared in the Mercury.

Which didn’t stop some reader from complaining to the paper in the year 2019.

Colby Cosh, “Want a newspaper job? Dream of making films? Be careful what you wish for”, National Post, 2019-05-09.

October 20, 2022

Canadian firearms law – as deliberately opaque and confusing as the human mind can concoct

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

In The Line, Tim Thurley peels back the covers and provides a glimpse of the inanities, stupidities, and political opportunism that shape Canadian firearms legislation:

A typical arrangement of guns seized by Toronto Police back in 2012. Most of these weapons would be in the “restricted” or “prohibited” categories under the Firearms Act, and pretty much by definition not typically available to the majority of Canadians.

Canadians often assume our government is doing its best. Not the politicians, sure, but there is a broad assumption that at least the bureaucrats tirelessly working behind the scenes to implement political decisions must have a grasp on the facts and exhibit some consistency in decision-making. In few places is there a larger discrepancy between this perception and the grimmer reality than in how the government classifies firearms.

I’ve long had an interest in firearms policy. Those familiar with it will know how onerous the Access to Information process is and wonder why I partake on my own time and dime; I can answer only that a graduate M.Sc. thesis on legislative impacts on firearm homicide and time working in politics and government have made me a glutton for punishment. More seriously, it’s a fascinating field, and I have some insight into political and policy processes. And as any specialist in a hot-button policy area knows, there is nothing more frustrating than seeing bad policy enacted in your field again, and again, and again.

Firearms are classified into three categories under the Firearms Act: non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited. All three require a separate level of licence, obtained with escalating difficulty after multiple courses and checks. (Prohibited licences are no longer issued to the regular public, but some Canadians hold them as part of a grandfathering in of prior licence holders.) Each category is primarily determined by firearm design. A simple overview: restricted firearms are some rifles and most pistols, prohibited firearms are shorter-barrelled pistols or fully automatic (or converted to another mechanism therefrom), and non-restricted firearms are anything else meeting the legal definition of a firearm, typically meaning typical hunting rifles and shotguns.

That’s a simplified version, but that’s the system.

In theory.

In practice, as my requested documents confirmed, firearm classification in Canada is an opaque and byzantine nightmare. A messy plethora of firearms which meet the functional criteria for being non-restricted, subject to the least stringent oversight and controls, are prescribed by regulation as either restricted or prohibited, and therefore subject to more controls or outright banned. Since functional differences are accounted for by law and did not apply in these cases, the deviations must have another explanation.

In short, politics.

Take the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks. Despite the unlicensed murderer smuggling his firearms from the United States, the Liberals took the opportunity to issue an executive Order-in-Council that banned a bunch of legally owned Canadian guns mostly because it was an easy wedge for the next election. The facts of the case were irrelevant, as was the fact that the banned firearms were responsible for a minuscule fraction of Canadian homicides. The government did not even bother writing the ban by how the firearms functioned, which while unhelpful from a homicide-reduction perspective, would have at least been a coherent position. The order, among other things, simply identified a few well-known guns by name and banned those.

This is where the concept of “variants” matters. When a firearm is designated by regulation as restricted or prohibited, the designation includes all variants of the firearm, which then receive the same classification. This makes sense. Ridiculous as classifying firearms by name over function already is, it would be yet more ridiculous if a mere renaming by a manufacturer, for instance, was sufficient to evade a legal classification.

Most ridiculous of all is that the public does not and cannot know what constitutes a “variant”. The Firearms Act does not define it. The Canadian government does not define it. Nor do its agencies, even the one responsible for determining variants: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The Mossberg Blaze 47 saga is illustrative of this problem. It is uncontroversial to assume that a precise mechanical copy of an original Russian AK-47 with a different name and slight design changes is still an AK-47. But when Mossberg, the manufacturer, slapped a plastic frame bearing some resemblance to Kalashnikov’s famous design on its Blaze rifle — a cheap, non-restricted, rimfire rifle suitable for, at worst, a particularly aggressive colony of rabbits — that new gun, dubbed the Blaze 47, somehow transformed from an unthreatening small-game rifle to a dangerous AK-47 variant prohibited under Former Prohibited Weapons Order No. 13.

The amazing transformation of a simple .22LR plinker into a facsimile of a dangerous “black fully semi-automatic murder machine”.

These head-scratching decisions have confused firearm owners and manufacturers, who wasted decades trying to understand how the government decides to classify their guns. It all seemed very random.

Surprise! It is!

August 26, 2022

It’s now apparently illegal to tell a Californian elected official that they’re “not God”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray discusses the recently signed California law intended to prevent proles from “bullying” elected officials from now on:

The Romper Roomification of the American political class continues apace.

I’ve written several times about SB 1100, a tedious bill written by tedious people to stop the “bullying” of tedious elected officials at the tedious public meetings of tedious local legislative bodies. Hold on a moment while I see if I can work the word tedious into that sentence one more ti— nope, we’re good.

This week, California’s tedious governor signed the tedious thing, so everybody has to be nice from now on and not hurt anybody’s tedious widdle feewings. The tedious California legislature spews out so many tedious bills that Newsom doesn’t usually offer signing statements on the things, group-signing them in box lots and paying about as much attention to them as anybody else does. So.

For a look at what the state has supposedly just prohibited, do yourself the very mild favor of reading this piece of tedious pearl-clutching from some television news idiots in San Francisco:

Here’s the example of “bullying”, using the tedious example of the tedious Los Gatos politician Marico “Tedious” Sayoc as the tedious designated martyr:

    Last year, anti-vaccine and anti-LGBTQ groups targeted Los Gatos Mayor Marico Sayoc during town council meetings.

    One Los Gatos resident spoke at the podium during an October meeting to say, “Madam Sayoc, you are not God! How dare you force your ideologies on our children! We the people of Los Gatos do not consent to the forced mutilation of our bodies, mind, and sovereignty.”

They targeted her! For example, they spoke during the public comment section of a public meeting and told an elected official — loudly and angrily, but still — that they disagreed with her. The public spoke at … public comment.

Taking the story at face value, telling a member of a suburban city council that she isn’t God is bullying, and state law now prohibits the bullying of the members of city councils, so you can no longer tell the members of California city councils that they aren’t God, because that’s being mean. If I’m reading the theological implications correctly, I believe this means that the members of California city councils have now been legislatively elevated to the status of actual gods, and will therefore no longer know death or suffering, and so we’ll have to sacrifice livestock to propitiate them or they’ll destroy our crops. But we may have to wait for the courts to weigh in on all of that.

In practical terms, the bill means literally nothing at all. After amendments that removed some even dumber stuff, the version passed by the legislature and signed by Newsom just says — I am not making this up — that city councils may remove individuals who are disruptive, which the law defines as people who engage in disruption. Free tautology lessons in the senate chamber, stop by anytime.

July 7, 2022

QotD: Predestination

Filed under: Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Credo quia absurdum est has a long and shameful pedigree. See, for example, the notion of Predestination. Technically, “double predestination” is the absurd part — the idea that God must’ve decided who was going to Hell long before He even created the world. It’s all but impossible to teach this idea to students, because modern people — to their credit, and for once I’m not being sarcastic when crediting modern people with anything — realize how ball-scratchingly stupid that is. Hell, maybe it’s true, but no sane person can possibly live with it.

Modern people see that as carte blanche to do whatever we want, because hey, if we do it, God made us do it … which, if you think about it for half a second, means God Himself is responsible for “sin” (quotation marks necessary, because it can’t be evil if I have no possible choice in the matter). Calvin, Knox, et al thought of that too, of course — they were crazy, not stupid — and they even had an answer: Shut up, that’s why. Not the most theologically sophisticated reasoning, but when you’re being burned at the stake for Arminianism it’s remarkably persuasive. Meanwhile, you’d best live like the holiest Puritan that ever lived … even though it’s exquisitely pointless, because you’re almost surely damned.

Severian, “Public Piety”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-29.

January 20, 2022

“McLuhan came to be regarded by the Baby Boomer generation as a guru and prophet; a visionary who had discovered something profound, not merely about the media, but about life and the universe”

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

In Quillette, Graham Majin looks at the life and works of Marshall McLuhan:

Marshall McLuhan, 1945.
Library and Archives Canada reference number PA-172791 via Wikimedia Commons.

The media ecosystem of the early 21st century is marked by a collapse of trust in journalism. How did we get here? As we look back, like a detective searching for clues, one moment stands out as significant; the publication on March 1st, 1962, of The Gutenberg Galaxy, written by a then-obscure Canadian academic named Marshall McLuhan. This book set in motion a line of falling dominoes, the consequences of which continue to affect us profoundly today.

McLuhan came to be regarded by the Baby Boomer generation as a guru and prophet; a visionary who had discovered something profound, not merely about the media, but about life and the universe. During the 1960s, he became a major celebrity, especially in the US. He featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine, was frequently interviewed on TV, and made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie Annie Hall. There was even a prog rock band named in his honor. The American media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy writes that “no other figure who was not of the movement itself received so much positive notice in the alternative newspapers that served dissident youth communities.” In 1965, the celebrity journalist Tom Wolfe asked breathlessly, “Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Pavlov?” Wolfe described McLuhan as an almost Christ-like figure:

    A lot of McLuhanites have started speaking of him as a prophet. It is only partly his visions of the future. It is more his extraordinary attitude, his demeanor, his qualities of monomania, of mission. He doesn’t debate other scholars, much less TV executives. He is not competing for status; he is alone on a vast unseen terrain, the walker through walls, the X-ray eye.

Writing in 1967, John Quirk agreed that McLuhan was a “savant and prophet” and explained that, “McLuhanites hold that the new technologies will lend men the awareness and instruments necessary to solve contemporary problems and inaugurate a bright new era.” McLuhan was a master of the catchy one-liner and the original source of Timothy Leary’s famous counterculture catchphrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

McLuhan’s division of media into two types was certainly influential although that influence wasn’t particularly useful:

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan observed that the decline of Catholicism, the rise of Protestantism, and the drift towards secularism all coincided with the development of printing. He hypothesized that the invention of printing had produced the European Enlightenment and Victorian liberal democracy. It was not what was printed, but printing itself that was responsible. McLuhan classified all media into two types: “hot” and “cool”. Printed books and newspapers, he suggested, were “hot” because they were bursting with information. Pre-Renaissance forms of communication, on the other hand, like the spoken Catholic Mass, were “cool”. This was because the Mass was spoken in Latin and hence contained little or no information that ordinary people could understand. Handwritten books were also categorized as “cool”.

Baby Boomers were quite receptive to McLuhan’s message, as it told them very much the sort of thing they wanted to hear:

He had produced a Boomer-friendly, sanitized version of his thesis in which magic and fantasy replaced religion. He also took care to flatter his Boomer audience by telling them that they were uniquely in tune with a deeper reality their parents could not see or understand. “We of the TV age,” he wrote, “are cool. The waltz was a hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the industrial time in its moods of pomp and circumstance. In contrast, the Twist is a cool, involved and chatty form of improvised gesture.”

McLuhan told the Boomers that they might appear irrational to their parents, but this was simply because the old generation was raised on obsolete “hot” media. As a result, he said, they had lost touch with their emotional side and become unnaturally rational and impartial: “Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action. To act without reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of Western literate man.”

McLuhan was a key influence on the Boomers, but his ideas failed when logically analyzed:

Trying to deconstruct McLuhan’s arguments reveals glaring absurdities. For example, it is self-defeating to claim that the content of a message is unimportant. On the contrary, all messages must convey information which corresponds with, or claims to correspond with, some state of affairs in the real world if they are to be useful. A news article without news, a weather forecast that does not mention the weather, or a traffic report lacking information about traffic might all be deliciously McLuhanesque, but they are not helpful. Even the Bible, revered by McLuhan, would be meaningless if it were merely a book of random words and blank pages. As Finklestein summarized, McLuhan’s argument is “absurd, when analyzed.”

McLuhan might well be the patron saint of fake news.

August 26, 2021

QotD: Toronto, the centre of the universe (according to Torontonians)

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

Toronto is a sucking vortex of stupid due to being the axis about which the world revolves. But you already knew that having become dizzy from your slow orbit so far from the centre of things.

Ghost of a Flea, “And while I am being annoying”, Ghost of a Flea, 2005-05-02.

June 29, 2020

Today on NeoNaziHuntingExpeditions, we track down Neo Nazi Bronies

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

In Quillette, Daniel Friedman examines the claims made in a recent Atlantic investigation into Nazis in the My Little Pony community (that is, adult fans of the show, not little girls … I think):

Image found by searching for “Neo Nazi Bronies”, listed URL – http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014960111

The evidence of this Nazi problem in the My Little Pony fandom is that, on a My Little Pony imageboard called Derpibooru, over 900 images were tagged as “racist,” and images mocking Black Lives Matter were upvoted by users while images supporting the movement were downvoted, even as the site’s administrators made a statement of support for the protests. After much controversy, the imageboard banned uploading images “created for no reason other than to incite controversy” and removed the 926 images tagged “racism” or “racist.” This move was extremely controversial within the Derpibooru community, many members of which oppose any moderation.

Atlantic reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany suggests that the strong free-speech norms of the Derpibooru boards stem from its origins on 4Chan, which Tiffany describes as “the largest den of chaos and toxic beliefs available on the Internet.” She describes the Brony community as being divided between those who “genuinely enjoy My Little Pony and the wholesome escapism it provides” and trolls who think it is “edgy and provocative to be an adult obsessed with cartoon ponies.” This frames the Derpibooru imageboard as a place where innocent cartoon fans are unknowingly subjected to subversive, racist memes and images that may send people down a rabbit hole of far-right content.

However, claims that a significant portion of the Brony community are Nazis, or that a significant amount of the content on Brony imageboards is right-wing propaganda or racist memes has to be put in the proper context. First of all, the 926 images tagged “racist” exist on a board that hosts over two million images. If you order all the site’s various tags by how many images fall within their categories, there are 12 full pages of other, more popular tags you have to scroll through to find the “racism” tag. One thousand two hundred and seventy-five images are tagged “politics” and include images both supporting and opposing Black Lives Matter. Discussion of these issues is a tiny fraction of one percent of the content on the My Little Pony imageboard.

By contrast, 315,867 images on the Derpibooru forum are tagged as sexually explicit, a further 127,414 images are tagged as sexually suggestive and 105,521 images are tagged as containing “questionable” sexual content. The truth is that Derpibooru’s lax moderation norms and anti-censorship culture don’t exist to protect objectionable political content; this imageboard is unmoderated because it is an enormous repository of fan-made My Little Pony pornography.

The Atlantic article fails to place the 926 racist images in the context of the larger scope of the two million images hosted by the Derpibooru board, because less than one-quarter of one percent of the site’s content is of a political nature. And the Atlantic article avoids mentioning the half-million pornographic images the site hosts, because doing so reveals that the community’s widespread opposition to content moderation on their imageboard is about protecting sexually explicit content rather than creating a space for hateful politics to flourish, and it further reveals that the Bronies are 500 times more interested in having sex with My Little Pony characters than they are in spreading racist pony memes.

The article creates an impression that the alt-Right is using seemingly-innocent cartoon fandoms as a Trojan horse to conceal and spread a sinister ideology, but the truth is that the only thing these guys are interested in hiding inside a horse is their dicks.

May 16, 2020

Remy: “Surfin’ USA” (Beach Boys Lockdown Parody)

Filed under: Government, Health, Humour, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 15 May 2020

Remy discovers the dangers of exercising alone.

Written and performed by Remy. Music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom. Video produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

LYRICS:
If you go out on the ocean
Across the USA
And you’re wearing a swim shirt
‘Cuz of your scrawny weight (it’s for the sun, I swear)

Well, uh, you just might notice
The police in your wake
Cuz it’s illegal to be surfing
In the USA

They’re catching them out paddle boarding
Letting their children play
While they’re releasing this guy
A logical checkmate

You’re out in nature alone now
No one in six-foot range?
Well it’s illegal to be surfing
In the USA

If only you had flashed some children
It’d be your release date!
But you’re going to jail for surfing
In the USA

You’ve been distancing for months now
To keep the spread rate down
The only places you’ve been going
Are where there are no crowds

You’re making sacrifices
For your community
Now put your hands on your head because you are surfing
In the USA

He’s helping the flattening the curve now
He’s exercising alone
Rocking a super baggy swim shirt
To hide his muscle tone (I said it’s for the sun)

If only you had flashed some children
It’d be your release date!
But you’re going to jail for surfing
In the USA

The Wuhan Coronavirus, the excuse for an emergency without end

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the seven-hundred-and-fifty-third day of our captivity:

Emergency without end is the staple of almost every futuristic dystopia — and that’s true for real life, too. So Americans shuffle shoeless through the airports for twenty years while their governments negotiate with the very organization that enabled those attacks — the Taliban — to restore them to power. Is a culture that cannot see off goatherds with fertilizer really going to rouse itself to decouple from a global superpower that supplies everything from its crappy “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts to its surgical masks and pharmacy medications?

~For my own part, I have been reading ancient accounts from Occupied France and Vichy for tips on finding workarounds for restraints on the citizenry. As wily and innovative as the French Resistance were, I wonder if their efforts would even be possible in an age when cheap Chinese-made drones can hover unseen and monitor every conversation.

[…]

Even without governors terrorizing those tavern-keepers or hairdressers who defy them, the lockdown has exaggerated the contradictions: The state wants open borders for “migrants” but a security perimeter around the homes of its citizens. Maybe the absurdities become so obvious that there is widespread rejection of them. Or maybe, one by one, the poor put-upon over-surveilled citizenry take a cue from their undocumented non-brethren. Perhaps I should just mug an illegal immigrant and steal his fake ID…

~The emergency is already feeling permanent. It starts with the social norms: Dr Fauci tells us the handshake is gone for good. That’s not a small loss. I don’t care for the suggested replacements, like the lame-o hand-on-heart gesture. I bow from the neck to the Queen — and just last year I did so to her Canadian vicereine, Mme Payette. Her Excellency then stepped forward and gave me a hug. But I don’t suppose she’s doing that anymore…

People ask me why I haven’t been on TV lately. Well, I mainly like going on TV to behave like a person who’s on TV. So, if you notice, on the “Fox & Friends” live-audience shows, I come bounding in like Tigger and do a lot of gladhanding with those on the aisle (including the odd hug), and then I give Steve and Brian manly handshakes and do a little light kissy-kissy with Ainsley. And all that — the basic language of telly for seventy years — is gone, apparently forever.

[…]

The WHO, the Beijing public relations firm whose pronouncements the BBC, The New York Times et al insist on taking as gospel, now says Covid-19 is here to stay — like HIV. With HIV, it wasn’t that difficult to avoid catching it, because it required the exchange of bodily fluids, which is a fairly intense and specific degree of intimacy. With Covid, we are rolling a protective condom down over every routine social intercourse.

A contributor at the Continental Telegraph explains why he no longer supports the lockdown:

First, it turns out that the drastic steps we were taking were based on one model. That no one outside the team using it was allowed to review. We were even told that we couldn’t check the coding because it was so old & patched together that it’s too hard to follow. That’s like saying you can’t check the brakes because you won’t be able to see all the duct tape and Velcro we’re using. Further, we’re told that this software doesn’t provide the same results from one run to the next.

Next, I heard about Dr. Ferguson’s history of wildly overestimating the fatalities from mad cow disease and bird flu (50k compared to <200, 200 million versus <500 respectively). Also, the CDC’s estimate of Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone (1.4 million compared to 8k). And let’s not forget the U.S. Public Health Service’s overshoot on the number of AIDS infections in 1993 (450k versus 17k). At this point I gave more thought to the issue of modeling – prior to retiring I was an actuary and modeling was what I did for a living. A few points about how modeling works: The more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to build a good model. And, more importantly, the more difficult it becomes to test your model and confirm that it accurately mirrors the real world. And this looks like one of the most complex systems to model I’ve ever heard of. How can you test this against reality? I don’t think you can. You can run simulations and confirm it looks like you expected, but that doesn’t mean the virus behaves like your model. Another point about modeling is that the results are extremely dependent on the assumptions you’re using. And in this case two critical assumptions are how infectious the virus is and how lethal it is. We still have a poor understanding of these variables months after we started Lockdown. Then a lot of us noticed that the goal shifted from “flattening the curve” to avoid a catastrophic overflow at hospitals to Lockdown until “fill in the blank” (in some states a vaccine, in others no deaths for 14 days, etc.). And the lockdown rules are inconsistent and illogical – in Michigan you can’t buy plant seeds but you can buy lottery tickets. To add insult to injury, many of the people with their foot on our necks violate the rules (the mayors of Chicago and New York, Dr. Ferguson, etc.). I’m stunned and angry at how little attention the human costs of the Lockdown receive. We know that this will lead to increased suicides, homicides and drug overdoses. Let’s not forget more child abuse, domestic violence, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, the list of miseries goes on a very, very long way (I may write up an article just on this, the Lockdown harpies should have to admit to all the harm they’re so enthusiastically spreading).

May 15, 2020

Canada’s weird election laws

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

Chris Selley points out some of the oddities of the federal Elections Act:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

It seems like about a hundred years ago, but one of the disquieting revelations of last year’s federal election campaign was that the Elections Act’s rules covering third-party spending are completely bananas.

Readers may recall Elections Canada warning environmental groups that they couldn’t just go on spending money in the fight against climate change without registering as third parties, with all the paperwork and bureaucracy that entails, all because People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier had supposedly made it a “partisan issue.” Now we have another bunch of overripe bananas on our hands: As the National Post first reported, the Commissioner of Canada Elections is investigating an anti-abortion organization called RightNow for having allegedly “recruited, trained and coordinated volunteers that were directed to over 50 campaigns” during the 2019 campaign.

RightNow’s mission is to identify pro-life candidates with a chance of winning, and connect them with volunteers eager to help them with their nomination and election campaigns. Readers may not find this particularly controversial. Members and supporters of all manner of groups, most famously and numerously labour unions, campaign alongside political candidates all the time. A quick rummage around Facebook from last year’s campaign finds both Toronto NDP MP Andrew Cash (who was eventually defeated) and Nova Scotia Liberal candidate Bernadette Jordan (who is now federal fisheries minister) thanking Unifor members wearing “Unifor Votes” t-shirts for their canvassing help. Photos on Unifor’s own Facebook page chronicle an October 5th event in Winnipeg called “Politics and Pancakes event plus canvassing for (NDP MP) Daniel Blaikie.”

[…]

At first blush, there doesn’t seem to be anything legally untoward with this — or indeed what RightNow was doing on a much smaller scale. (USW claimed $1.1 million in third-party expenses, PSAC $345,000, CUPE $161,000. RightNow splashed out a whopping $8,255.71.) “Volunteer labour” is explicitly exempt from the Elections Act prohibition against third parties donating to political parties or candidates, either in cash or in kind. But in an April 22nd letter to Albertos Polizogopoulos, RightNow’s legal counsel, the commissioner’s director of investigations, Mylène Gigou, argued that “the recruiting, training and coordinating of volunteers are core political activities of a political campaign” — and in performing those activities, RightNow may have “circumvented” the third-party donation prohibition.

This is, of course, preposterous. On what principle would we allow members or supporters of third parties to volunteer in election campaigns — as any healthy democracy ought to — while prohibiting spending so much as a dime to recruit said volunteers? “Training” or “coordinating” could be defined as narrowly as telling people what sorts of things to say on people’s doorsteps and what sorts of things not to. You don’t just turn people loose with your campaign materials, like sheep on a grassy meadow, and hope for the best.

May 10, 2020

Justin Trudeau’s allergy to scary black fully semi-automatic “military style” rifles gets even less coherent

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley on the federal government’s purely virtue signalling gun ban:

In a recent column, I questioned whether the Liberals’ new “ban” on certain kinds of semiautomatic rifles — “ban” in quotation marks, inasmuch as current owners can keep them — constituted the sort of good public-health policy we’re demanding nowadays in the face of COVID-19. I concluded it did not. Even if you support the idea of banning such weapons, you can’t really support this endeavour except in the way a starving man might welcome his least favourite meal. Indeed, gun control advocates are nearly as annoyed by it as gun rights advocates, and rightly so.

The Liberal “ban” targets certain semiautomatic rifles falling under the undefined term “military-style,” while leaving other semi-automatics alone. It focuses on rifles, which collectively are the least lethal form of previously legal weapons, while leaving handguns — which are used in 65 per cent of firearm homicides — alone. “You don’t need an AR-15 to bring down a deer,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says, yet the “ban” exempts current owners of these weapons who use them to hunt for the purposes of sustenance.” Upon its unveiling, it was very nearly perfectly incoherent. And it’s nearer still now.

In recent days the Liberals have touted the “ban” as a way of protecting women and girls in particular. “These guns make it easier to commit mass murder,” Trudeau added. “And the culture around their fetishization makes our country inherently more dangerous for the people most vulnerable. And that is women and girls.” Trudeau cited reports about increasing domestic violence during the pandemic, and grim statistics about the number of Canadians killed by their spouses.

There is very little evidence to support this case for the “ban.” And when you go looking for it, you wind up only with more questions.

To be fair, there is very little evidence to support any position on gun control. Nobody comprehensively keeps track of how many Canadians are killed using currently restricted weapons, or by the weapons the Liberals are “banning,” or even by rifles as opposed to shotguns — so we certainly don’t know how many men and women are killed by these various kinds of firearms.

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