This one surprised me: the vending machine was invented not for Coca-Cola or cigarettes or snack foods, but for books.
Richard Carlile was a shit-disturbing English bookseller. He insisted on selling Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason despite it being seditious and blasphemous for its attacks on organized religion, particularly the Church of England. Impressively stubborn, Carlile was arrested in 1819, imprisoned, and fined a massive £1,500 for selling Paine’s work. While a guest of the state, his wife, Jane, and other associates kept selling The Age of Reason, leading to more arrests.
Sometime around his release in 1822, Carlile came up with the idea of automating sales. His device was crude, but effective. A person inserted coins and pulled a lever that opened a compartment from which a copy of The Age of Reason could be retrieved without human intervention. Police had no one to arrest for selling seditious material.
The book vending machine didn’t keep Carlisle out of jail — he would spend nine years locked up for acts of political rebellion. Nor was he able to patent his device. I admire the hell out of him, tho.
Jump ahead to the early twentieth century and vending machines were being used in France and Germany to sell newspapers, postcards, maps, as well as books. The idea crossed the English Channel in 1937. Allen Lane, who single-handedly invented the modern paperback and founded Penguin Books with his brothers in 1935, launched the Penguincubator two years later. Based on the German machines, it was described by the Times as “an unfamiliar contraption of metal and glass”. Lane installed it at 66 Charing Cross Road, outside Collet’s bookshop.
Lane’s contraption was no more successful than Carlile’s. It got wheeled out of Collet’s shop at closing time every night and wheeled back in every morning when the shop opened. Another Charing Cross bookseller recalled seeing letters shoved under the shop’s door each morning complaining of coins lost in the machine. Customers also learned that you only had to pound the side of the box in order for it to disgorge about a third of its inventory. The Bookseller reported that when this was pointed out to the manager of Collet’s, he “gave his incontinent robot a terrific thrashing. As a result of this all the rest of the Penguin’s promptly fell out.”
That perhaps explains why I couldn’t find a mention of the Penguincubator in Stuart Kells’ otherwise excellent book, Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution.
Ken Whyte, “Have I got a business for you!”, SHuSH, 2024-09-06.
December 8, 2024
QotD: Who invented the vending machine?
November 26, 2024
“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other”
I don’t mean to make poking fun at Twit/X alternative sites like Bluesky a regular thing, but the performative flouncing as progressives announce they’re leaving Twit/X for a more congenial — for which read “censorious” — site continues to amuse.
Bluesky welcomes former Twitter/X luminaries
I’m going to take a pop at a sub-group of flouncers, though, the ones moaning about being called hurty words. This includes a number of individuals who genuinely seem to think it’s their role in life to go looking for nasty bigoted shite, then report it to Twitter’s overlords (and now Bluesky’s overlords as well, if things like [the image on the right] are anything to go by).
“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other” seems a fair assessment.
And yes, I have to engage in a little ritual genuflection here, because I have genuinely been called a large number of nasty names in my life. And despite that, dibber-dobbers still give me hives.
If I had a quid for every use of “dyke” (and related) sent my way, I would be matching millions with sundry oil sheiks, and that’s before we get to the ire directed at any columnist with whom ordinary members of the public disagree. I am old enough to have received thousands of abusive letters (about both novels and columns), some of them written in green ink. People are allowed to dislike me and my kind, or to argue that I’ve written a load of cobblers. They’re also allowed to dislike you and your kind. It would be astonishingly easy for me to wander over to Arabic Twitter and report lots of sincere Muslims for saying bigoted things about homosexuals. I don’t engage in this behaviour because I don’t expect the world to be my friend.
Relatedly (and this is directed at ethnic minorities as well as fellow gayers), a lot of folks from “historically disadvantaged groups” have become dab hands at dishing it out over the last twenty or so years. A necessary corollary of this behaviour is “learn to take it”. Yes, that means you. People are not going to stop saying hurty words to each other. People are also going to judge you based on the behaviour of your worst activists and vote accordingly (see recent US election results).
What of the core claims being made? Is Twitter genuinely worse now, a victim of what goes by the name “social media enshittification“?
Well, yes and no. I know many people dislike what Musk has done to Twitter, but when he made “likes” private, he stopped his site being used as a vector for HR vindictiveness (something about which HR mavens have complained, by the way, at least privately). It’s also now substantially more difficult to generate a pile-on using a quote-tweet, as well as possible to read tweets (but without interaction) from people who are hot on the block button.
The latter change has allowed me to establish why Baroness Nicholson had me blocked. I’d always wondered, because she’s had me blocked for as long as I can remember, yet like me, she can legitimately be described as “sex realist” or “gender-critical”. Musk’s change meant I was able for the first time to see an entire thread underneath one of her tweets, so learned that she blocks anyone — friend and foe alike — for swearing. Women who know her socially and get on with her well “IRL” have been blocked for saying “bugger” and “shite” on Twitter.
Well, glad that’s cleared up. Good to know.
The worst change Musk has made involves deboosting external links. This first emerged in April last year, in response to Substack releasing Notes (which Musk considered so derivative of Twitter’s code as to be a “clone”). At first only direct links to Substack were affected. If you had your own domain — as I do — you were fine. However, external link deboosting is now being applied uniformly. Everyone from a local tradesman selling new driveways and conservatories to the BBC and the Spectator now has to make use of some tedious version of “link in following tweet” or “link in bio”.
If Musk doesn’t fix this, he will legitimately lose the journalists and commentators currently on the site. Those people came, originally, to share stuff from their mastheads, and this applies regardless of politics. I first gained a following thanks to professional experience — yes, it was once fine for commercial solicitors to natter on the socials about the Enterprise Investment Scheme and how it related to start-ups and spin-outs etc — and later through Speccie columns along with a couple of books. A tweet from Tim Harford praising my second novel (with a link, bless him) went “viral” and led to thousands of sales. Pieces for the magazine proved popular. Just as I enjoyed Twitter for other people’s links, other people paid me the same courtesy.
Spotted on Instapundit:
November 12, 2024
Canada in the news … for all the wrong reasons
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper explains why your non-Canadian friends may be finding their opinions on the dysfunctional Dominion getting more and more sour in recent years:
… within just the last few years, multiple foreign outlets have profiled Canada for the singular purpose of asking what happened to it, and worrying if Canada’s ills will soon be their own. What’s more, these articles are not limited to a single topic; so much is going sideways in Canada right now that everything from our assisted-suicide regime to our economy to our internet legislation is attracting overseas notice like never before.
Below, a cursory guide to some of them. If you’re noticing that your non-Canadian friends suddenly have a darker picture of your home country than they used to, here’s a clue as to why.
“Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream”
Ever since the 2019 federal election, The Economist‘s coverage of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has usually followed a general theme of noting that the bloom is off the rose of his photogenic ascendancy to power in 2015. But in a trio of articles published last month, the publication laid into the Canadian leader as an icon of what not to do.
Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream, published on Oct. 14. Canada’s Trudeau trap, published on Oct. 17. And then, just for good measure, Justin Trudeau is paying for solar panels in the cold, dark Arctic.
[…]
“Canada Is Disintegrating”
The Telegraph in the U.K. ran an entire series of essays last week on the topic of Canada taking it to the limit on progressive laws covering everything from drugs to national identity.
[…]
“Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech”
The June tabling of the Online Harms Act prompted a wave of foreign coverage unlike few pieces of Canadian legislation. Although virtually every non-U.S. country has legislated controls on extreme speech, the Online Harms Act went noticeably farther than its peer countries in two respects: It prescribes a life sentence for the speech crime of “advocating or promoting genocide”, and it authorizes pre-emptive custody for anyone suspected of committing hate speech in future.
November 9, 2024
Bill C-413 “is aimed at preventing her fellow Canadians from saying anything positive about Indian residential schools”
Nina Green suggests that Bill C-413’s sponsor might be the first person in Canada to face criminal charges in that piece of legislation if her private member’s bill gets Royal Assent:
On 31 October 2024 Member of Parliament Leah Gazan called a press conference to lobby for Bill C-413, her private member’s bill designed to criminalize her fellow citizens for disagreeing with her views.
Gazan led off the press conference with this statement:
Good morning, everybody. I’m Leah Gazan, and I’m the Member of Parliament from Winnipeg Centre, and we’re here to discuss support of Bill C-413 to amend the Criminal Code to include the willful promotion of hate against Indigenous peoples by condoning, downplaying, justifying the residential schools.
To evoke an emotional response, Gazan used the word “violence” a dozen times during her press conference, falsely equating speech with violence, although violence by definition involves physical force.
Gazan’s bill is obviously not aimed at preventing physical violence against Indigenous people. It is aimed at preventing her fellow Canadians from saying anything positive about Indian residential schools.
Earlier, on 27 September 2024, Gazan made the bill personal, telling CTV News that “my family has been impacted by residential school”, implying that she had been motivated to introduce her bill because of the serious harm residential schools had inflicted on her own family.
In fact, the exact opposite is true. Residential schools had a positive effect on Leah Gazan’s family.
On her father’s side, Gazan is Jewish, and her maternal grandfather was Chinese. Thus her only possible connection to Indian residential schools is through her maternal grandmother, Adeline LeCaine, the daughter of Leah Gazan’s great-grandfather, John LeCaine (1890-1964).
What we learn about John LeCaine turns out to be surprising. He was the son of a white North West Mounted Police officer, William Edward Archibald LeCain (1859-1915), and Emma Loves War, whose Lakota Sioux family sought refuge in Canada with Chief Sitting Bull and 5000 of his people after the massacre of Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. […]
Since he had a white father and an American Indian mother, John LeCaine was, in the terminology of the day, a half-breed, and ineligible to attend a residential school since federally-funded Indian residential schools were reserved for status Indians under the Indian Act. However an exception was made, and both John LeCaine and his sister Alice LeCaine (1888-1976) were admitted to the Regina Industrial School. John LeCaine attended for seven years, from 1899 to 1906 when he was 9 to 16 years of age. While there he learned to read and write English proficiently, and mastered agricultural and carpentry skills which equipped him to apply, like white settlers at the time, for a homestead, which he proved up in 1913. In 1914 he wrote to the Department of the Interior asking for a ruling on whether his two half-brothers — who were full-blooded Sioux — could also apply for homesteads.
The proficiency in English he acquired at the Regina Industrial School enabled John LeCaine to became a writer and a historian of the Lakota people. In later years he mapped the places he and his stepfather, Okute Sica, had visited on a journey to the Frenchman River in 1910, and wrote a collection of stories told to him by Sioux Elders, Reflections of the Sioux World, as well as other articles, including some published in the Oblate journal, The Indian Record.
November 5, 2024
“… in an effort at harm reduction, I selected the proven authoritarian over the aspiring totalitarian”
In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille explains why he voted for “literally Hitler” instead of “the historic first woman president” in today’s US election:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 
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For me and millions of other Americans, the 2024 U.S. election is already effectively over. Like most Arizonans, I mailed in my ballot and it awaits the count. Now, I suffer through the remaining days of hectoring political ads and finger-waggers nagging me about how I should have voted. This country doesn’t lack strong opinions about two of the worst candidates to ever grace a presidential race. Unfortunately, I felt obliged to vote for one of them, and in an effort at harm reduction, I selected the proven authoritarian over the aspiring totalitarian; I marked my ballot for Donald Trump.
There’s no doubt that Trump is a thin-skinned narcissist. Legendarily intolerant of criticism or even disagreement, he wants broadcast licenses pulled from news networks that he thinks have been mean to him and called for government to crack down on cable operations that aren’t actually subject to government regulation. The man needs perspective as much as he needs a social studies class.
This is, many Democrats and their media supporters will eagerly tell you, evidence of “fascism“. But, as John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told The New York Times, “Trump isn’t capable of philosophical thought”. Trump’s authoritarianism isn’t an ideology; it’s a personality disorder.
That should be enough to disqualify a candidate for president. You’d think that, in a nation of 330 million people, if one major party chooses to run a profoundly problematic and authoritarian nominee for president, the other could find somebody more qualified. But you’d be wrong. In Kamala Harris, Democrats picked a vacuous sociopath uninterested in policy, but willing to serve as a vehicle for those around her who have tried their hands at totalitarian speech controls, and who are increasingly hostile to Israel, the only majority-Jewish state on the planet, and to Jews as a people.
In 2021, The Washington Post reported that former staffers for Vice President Harris complained she “would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared”. That failure to prepare for responsibilities and public appearances feeds her propensity for word salads, leaving the impression she’s reciting the results of a dropped Scrabble board.
In a Biden-Harris administration already lacking for adult supervision — President Joe Biden’s failing mental faculties are now a matter of record, as is his inability to make decisions — that suggests a potential President Harris would have no firmer hand on the wheel. That would leave the relatively faceless minions around her free to continue to exercise their instincts. And their instincts are terrible.
October 24, 2024
It’s called “piercing the corporate veil” and it’s a terrible idea
Tim Worstall explains why the EU’s latest brain fart is not just a bad idea in its own right, but a truly horrific precedent for the future:
Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.
… But now, this, now this is even more important than that. We can deal with free speech by the judicious use of lampposts. This is worse:
The European Union has warned X that it may calculate fines against the social-media platform by including revenue from Elon Musk’s other businesses, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Neuralink Corp., an approach that would significantly increase the potential penalties for violating content moderation rules.
Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules.
In English law that’s known as “piercing the corporate veil”. It’s also something we don’t do. Because that corporate veil is the very thing, the only thing, that makes large scale economic activity possible.
It has actually been said — and not just by me — that the invention of the limited company is the third grand invention of all time. Agriculture, the scientific method, the limited company.
Before the limited co everything was done through partnerships. Every individual involved in the ownership of something was liable for all of the debts of that thing. Which, when you’ve got 5 or 10 blokes trading isn’t that bad an incentive upon them to be honest.
Now think of large scale activity. We want a blast furnace — plenty of folk say Britain should have one after all. £3 to £5 billion these days. OK. No one’s got that much. So, we need to mobilise the savings of many thousands of people to go build it. But without limited liability that means all of those thousands are liable for all the debts — off into the future — of that blast furnace.
“Invest £500 in the new, new British Steel. And if we fuck up then in 10 years’ time they’ll come and take your house.”
Err, yes.
Large scale economic activity depends upon being able to separate the debts of one specific activity from the general economic life of all its backers. If this is not true then no one will invest in large scale economic activity. Therefore we won’t have large scale economic activity. Which would, you know, be bad.
October 17, 2024
Democratic Germany considers banning 2nd-largest political party “to save democracy” of course
It’s totally a normal democratic urge to try to outlaw the second-largest political party in Germany and not in the least bit “authoritarian”, right?
This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.
Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD are accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.
A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talkshow tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “right wing extremism”, all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would’ve long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.
Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by political editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue“. The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.
Let’s read it together.
Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky”, “too soon” and “simply undemocratic”, and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising”.
The problem … is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down,” Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD senior president was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.
What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans“, the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.
October 11, 2024
German free speech – only applicable when used to criticize the “far right”
C.J. Hopkins discovers the stark contrast between actual freedom of speech and German freedom of speech:
The first rule of New Normal Germany is, you do not compare New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. If you do that, New Normal Germany will punish you. It will sic the Federal Criminal Police on you. It will report you to its domestic Intelligence agency. It will ban your books. It will censor your Tweets. It will prosecute you on fabricated “hate-crime” charges.
I know this, because that’s what happened to me. I broke the first rule of New Normal Germany. I compared New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. I did it with the cover artwork of my book.
Yes, that’s a swastika on the cover. A swastika covered by a medical mask. I tweeted that artwork in 2022. The German authorities prosecuted me for that, and convicted me for that. So, now I’m a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.
That’s the second rule of New Normal Germany. You never, ever, display a swastika. Displaying a swastika is not “in Ordnung“. Displaying swastikas is totally “verboten“.
Unless you are the Health Minister of New Normal Germany, and you’re comparing your political opponents to the Nazis. Or unless you are a popular German celebrity, and you’re comparing the Russians and their supporters to the Nazis. Or unless you are a mainstream magazine, and you’re comparing German populists to the Nazis.
In which case, displaying a swastika is fine. And is not “verboten“. And definitely not a “hate crime”.
And that’s the third rule of New Normal Germany. If you agree with the government, obey their orders, and parrot their propaganda, you are not a “hate criminal”. If you are the government, like an actual minister in the government, like the Minister of Health, you’re definitely not a “hate criminal”. And, if you are part of government’s propaganda apparatus, needless to say, you’re also not a “hate criminal”.
However, if you criticize the government, or if you compare the government to Nazi Germany, and if you do that using your book-cover art featuring a swastika behind a Covid mask, then you’re absolutely officially a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.
September 10, 2024
Chilling effect (with a British accent) – “No one is now sure what they are allowed to say”
Spaceman Spiff makes a bid to star in one of Gauleiter Keir Stürmer’s big show trials, coming far too soon to a town hall near you:
In Britain many of us now walk on eggshells.
The country and its systems are broken. Free speech is being outlawed. Many are frightened to say anything, although it doesn’t stop them noticing and thinking.
Recent emphasis on invented categories of offence — misinformation, disinformation and now malinformation — mean almost anything can come under the purview of the State and its informers, from ill-timed comments to jokes and humorous observations.
Famously, memes based on simple observation are admissible in Britain’s world-famous show trials, including this one no doubt:1
It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.
Everything must be monitored because less and less can be tolerated by those in positions of authority. Their narratives are failing, and they are panicking. They are getting desperate.
Noticing is verboten
Many of the topics that trigger the strongest response by the British Government are simply unpopular policies that normal people can no longer ignore.
More accurately, policies that directly affect growing numbers of law-abiding taxpayers who did not vote for them.
Do not discuss immigration
Mass immigration is the supreme example. Britain’s cities are being flooded with “asylum seekers”, most of whom are economic migrants with no right to settle in the country.
Many are alien peoples from distinct cultures with no connection to Europe and a poor track record of assimilation.
They are aided by an army of well-funded human rights lawyers who distort laws designed to help the genuinely dispossessed, which most immigrants are not.
Thanks to our generosity many privileges are extended to foreigners that are unavailable to natives such as free housing and financial help on the understanding these are used sparingly and temporarily to aid the desperate.
These myriad of kindnesses did not emerge to serve those who want the benefits of first-world living while dodging the corresponding costs; the development of high-trust social structures, the communal spirit that transcends tribalism, and the selflessness it all requires. These are rare phenomenon much of the world cannot produce or maintain, and they are being squandered in Western nations by the selfish obsessed with demonstrating their own virtue.
No serious discussion of immigration is tolerated at any level in Britain. However, this does not stop the erosion of goodwill upon which most of their schemes depend. The generosity they abuse is a limited resource and the magnanimity upon which it depends is evaporating quickly.
1. Many are being jailed in Britain for posting memes and related social media content. The judges often go to some lengths to confirm it is not the content of the material they are questioning as they are perfectly legal, but the perceived intent behind the posting itself.
This unprecedented legal descent into clairvoyance, hate speech and arrogance is relatively new. It will not age well and tells us more about the decline in competency in the judiciary than anything else. Standards are clearly not what they once were.
To put this kind of absurd reasoning on display in irremovable public court records speaks to the level of delusion and arrogance we are now dealing with in Britain. Our social betters are truly lost in a world of their own.
September 9, 2024
Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act
In the National Post, Barbara Kay explains why the Trudeau government will probably be urgently trying to get Bill C-63 through into law when Parliament resumes sitting later this month:
The sands of time were already running low for Justin Trudeau’s government. Jagmeet Singh’s just-announced withdrawal from their mutually supportive contract has widened the waist of the hourglass. Parliament resumes sitting on Sept. 16, and the Liberals will urgently seek to pass Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, now in its second reading.
If passed in its present incarnation, this deeply flawed bill will drastically curtail freedom of speech in Canada (which, to be fair, is not an outlier on digital crackdowns in the West. Switzerland, of all places, just passed similar legislation).
We already have hate-crime laws in the Criminal Code that address advocacy for genocide, incitement of hatred and the wilful promotion of hatred. Apart from its laudatory intentions in removing online content that sexually victimizes children, Bill C-63 seeks to curb all online hate speech through unnecessary, inadvisable and draconian measures inappropriate to a democracy.
The law would create a new transgression: an “offence motivated by hated” which would raise the maximum penalty for advocacy of genocide from five years to life imprisonment. What kind of mindset considers the mere expression of hateful ideas as equivalent in moral depravity to rape and murder? Such instincts call to my mind the clever aperçu by anti-Marxist pundit David Horowitz that “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out”.
Another red flag: The law would give new powers to the federal cabinet to pass regulations that have the same force as legislation passed by Parliament, and that could, say, shut down a website. Unlike legislation, regulations created by cabinet do not require debate, votes or approval of Parliament. They can be decided in secrecy and come into force without public consultation or debate.
Yet another is the restoration of the “communication of hate speech” offence to the Canadian Human Rights Act, a provision similar to the one repealed in 2012. Frivolous or malicious complaints could be made against persons or organizations, granting complainants significant potential for financial reward at no personal cost, win or lose. Moreover, under this law, a complainant’s sense of injury from published words would trump a defence of objective truth. This is an open invitation for myriad social malcontents and grievance-mongers to swarm the system, with no regard for the inevitable harm done to those who they target.
August 31, 2024
Britain’s police double down on “non-crime hate incidents” as a tool of repression
Andrew Doyle admits he was over-optimistic by predicting that the British police forces’ use of “non-crime hate incidents” — after court judgments and Home Office instructions to stop using them — would not last for much longer. That was in 2022:
“Metropolitan Police London England” by William Mewes is marked with CC0 1.0 
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I have a tendency to be over-optimistic. In my 2022 book The New Puritans, I wrote about “non-crime hate incidents” and how they were still being recorded by police, in spite of the Court of Appeal’s ruling that they were “plainly an interference with freedom of expression” and direct instructions from the Home Office that the police must stop this illiberal and unethical practice. However, I concluded that ultimately “it seems unlikely that ‘non-crime hate incidents’ will last for much longer”.
Of course I was wrong, because I had not counted on just how authoritarian a new Labour government might be. It was bad enough that the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson scotched the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act just one day before parliament went into recess — presumably to avoid having to debate the matter — but now the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has reversed the Conservatives’ pledge to limit the recording of “non-crime”. Labour is bringing back this absurd policy, and has convinced itself that this is somehow a progressive measure.
It should go without saying that the police have no business recording “non-crime”, particularly when such records are based on accusations alone (that is to say, the “perception” of the “victim” is what counts, rather than actual evidence of hatred). The Tory government should have eliminated the entire practice in its entirety, but instead decided that such “incidents” ought to stay on record if there was a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick had a phrase for this: “pre-crime”.
So let’s leave aside the woefully inadequate restrictions put in place by the Tories. Let’s also leave aside the obvious point that hatred, along with all other emotions, will never be eradicated through legislation and that the state is wasting its time trying to alter human nature. Let’s focus instead on why the Labour government is so determined to control the speech and thought of its citizens.
How does it help anyone for the name of the schoolboy who accidentally scuffed a copy of the Koran at a school in Wakefield to be on police records? His “non-crime” was duly recorded after the event, but why? Does the government really suppose that this child is one step away from torching a mosque? Even if he had deliberately scuffed the Koran, what has this to do with the police? I don’t much approve of defacing books, but vandalism of one’s own property is a matter for individual conscience.
Of course, Labour will say that the recent riots have proven the necessity for cracking down on the private thoughts of citizens. In truth, these acts of violence are being exploited to justify further authoritarian policies. We have seen how quick our politicians are to seize upon these moments to advance their own goals. The murder of Sir David Amess had precisely nothing to do with social media, and yet politicians immediately began to argue that his death was evidence of the need to curb free speech online. This was grotesque opportunism from a political class that does not trust the public.
August 30, 2024
Two-Tier Keir’s “mask off” moment(s)
Millennial Woes presents a disturbingly long summary of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s responses to popular non-violent protests:
The situation in Britain now is so perverse that, if you could convey it to people from a century ago, I think they, after getting over the disbelief and astonishment and accepting that this really was true, would assume it could not possibly have come about by chance. Whatever their complaints about the Britain of 1900, they wouldn’t have believed it capable — on its own — of the degeneration we have seen. They would insist that it must have been wickedly subverted, every failsafe removed, and entire systems of governance, culture and morality repurposed, made to achieve the opposite of their purported function.
I hardly need list the symptoms of this, but for the sake of posterity …
- The control nexus (of which the government is merely one node) ships massive numbers of unassimilable foreigners into the country against the repeatedly expressed wishes of the natives, and in clear violation of their best interests.
- Natives who complain about this are hounded, doxed, demonised, made unemployable, and often imprisoned.
- Their children are systematically indoctrinated by fiction media to accept their dispossession. They are encouraged to despise the “bigoted” attitudes of their parents and grandparents, and to loathe their nation’s history. The boys are encouraged to idolise non-native men. The girls are encouraged to race-mix with them.
- Teachers deliver the same indoctrination in the classroom — in every classroom. You won’t be allowed to become a teacher unless you voice enthusiasm for such things. Alternative views have been eradicated from the classroom and the lecture hall.
- Natives are systematically disadvantaged in numerous sectors of education and employment.
- Natives are demonised in fiction and news media while non-natives are made to look wonderful.
- The mass sexual abuse of native children by non-natives is systematically down-played by news media, who shift discussion to false “equivalents”.
- Natives’ history is systematically distorted in education and fiction media.
- The very existence of the natives, as a group, and their ownership of their homeland, are systematically denied by education, fiction media, news media, and phoney “science”.
- The police do whatever they are told to do, kneeling for the participants in one riot, hunting down the participants in a different riot.
- Judges pass obviously outrageous prison sentences upon certain people, for blatantly political reasons. These people are denied bail and pressured to plead guilty for fear of sentences even more outrageous. All of this is to send a message to other people: “don’t dare complain or the same will happen to you”.
- The media rushes to concoct fake narratives about events, to keep the public misinformed.
- A so-called “charity”, which is heavily linked to the government and the civil service, seeks to indoctrinate the young and ruin the lives of “troublemakers”, and actively aids the government in concocting fake narratives in order to control public thought and direct events.
- Fake news from such Establishment agents is forgiven, fake news from the Establishment’s enemies is answered with threats of prosecution.
- The media “memory hole” stories of appalling violence by non-natives, explain away such incidents with talk of mental illness, tell natives “don’t look back in anger”, and at all costs defend the suicidal ideologies that make such incidents possible.
- The prisons are emptied of rapists, child molesters and murderers so that troublesome natives can be assigned their cells. They are placed alongside non-natives who might well be violent to them, and journalists gloat about it.
- The slaughtering of three little girls by a non-native is dismissed by the Prime Minister, who says “it doesn’t matter” that the rioting was a response to this outrageous crime, which was enabled by the outrageous government policies that the natives have been complaining about for decades. Their shock, their trauma, their resentment, their dignity, their pain… “doesn’t matter”. This is in stark contrast with how he reacted to Black people rioting several years before.
- The natives’ freedom of speech is continually undermined, one government after another actively seeking to erode it further.
- Not one single organisation is fighting for the wellbeing, rights or interests of the natives.
- Any political party that would do anything about any of this is refused the right to stand in elections, debanked, demonised and, in most cases, destroyed.
Any one of these examples would, in itself, be cause for great alarm. The whole lot together indicate a society that is not just largely, not just fundamentally, but wholly opposed to the continued existence of its native population. To underline: British society is actively perpetrating the destruction of the native British people.
It has been said that the ruthless authoritarian response of the fledgling Starmer government to this summer’s (White) riots is a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party. Others have called it a “mask off” moment for the British Establishment, which transcends the particular party in office. Indeed, things that didn’t happen under the Conservatives have suddenly happened under Labour; things that one would more neatly associate with the former have instead happened under the latter. That can only mean either that the Labour Party has utterly lost its sense of itself, or that the particular party in office simply doesn’t matter, because the Establishment abides.
I think, in fact, all of these statements are true. It has been a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party, and for Keir Starmer himself, and for the Establishment which enables and directs them. The Labour Party has lost its sense of itself — or, to put it less romantically, has been completely repurposed. And the Establishment does abide; no matter which party is in office, things only ever evolve in one direction. And after all, while Starmer’s behaviour casts a bad light on him, he is only Prime Minister in the first place because the Establishment wanted him, not someone who might have reacted to these riots in a different manner. (Boris Johnson is good at stoking war abroad, but not so willing to stoke it at home.)
But in the end it doesn’t really matter. We don’t need to pin the blame on Starmer, Labour, the British Establishment or Davos; they are all one and the same miasma. Yes, the Conservative Party might have reacted differently to the riots, so to some extent we can blame Labour’s ideology or Starmer’s personality, but the pendulum is kept swinging for a reason. One empty suit is shifted out, another is shifted in. Each one might be enthusiastically on-board with the agenda or compelled to go along with it, this being the only variance. And thus the Establishment abides, always getting what it wants against the wishes of the natives, and always degrading and dispossessing them.
August 23, 2024
The EU’s bureaucratic aristocrats agree “Spaceship Man Bad!”
As eugyppius explains, the “Eurocrats are having a very big sad” and Spaceship Man Bad isn’t deferring to their autocratic whims:
The Brussels Eurocrats around Emmanuel Macron are having a big sad about Twitter right now. They fear the platform fuels “the amplification of hateful content” and “disinformation”, which are multisyllabic ways of saying that there is too much unapproved and uncurated discourse on the site. You cannot just have people taking to their keyboards to type, like and retweet whatever they want. You especially cannot have that in Europe, where we suffer under the immensely liberal and democratic Digital Services Act, which mandates all manner of social media censorship to protect traditional European freedoms, like freedom of expression.
Twitter is a useful website; I use it to try out ideas and also for news-gathering purposes. As much as I’ve benefitted from the platform, however, I find the establishment derangement surrounding it to be extremely bizarre. There is little chance that Elon Musk’s relaxed moderation regime will lead to fascism, and still less chance that heavy censorship there will do anything about tHe ExtREmE RiGhT. The real reason that Twitter bothers establishment pundits and politicians, is its inherently confrontational nature. Our smug and self-satisfied oligarchs don’t like getting dragged and dunked on by the rabble. They want to tweet their lunacies without anonymous anime-themed accounts showing them up for the fools that they are, and they are very, extremely, fulminously enraged that Musk won’t do anything to improve their user experience.
One of these dissatisfied users is Thierry Breton, the Macron-appointed Commissioner for the Internal Market of the European Union. As everybody knows, on 12 August, Breton posted a letter to Musk ahead of Musk’s Twitter discussion with Donald Trump, to remind the American entrepreneur of his obligations to censor content. Breton has long been a thorn in the side of his EU colleagues, who regard him as a shallow self-promoter, and his game rapidly backfired. The next day, the EU Commission clarified that “The timing and the wording of the letter were neither co-ordinated nor agreed with the president nor with the [commissioners].” The American House Judiciary Committee then added to Breton’s humiliation by condemning his “threats” and his “attempt to intimidate individuals or entities engaged in political speech in the United States”. Musk also had some choice words for the EU Commissioner:
The Macronistes don’t care that they are wildly unpopular and that everybody hates them. They just don’t want to hear about it. They could simply delete their Twitter accounts, but people would still be saying mean things about them on the internet somewhere. They’d have to lie awake in bed at night, staring at the ceiling and stewing about it. Better by far would be to delete Twitter itself, or at least to block access to the platform across all 27 EU member states.
August 21, 2024
The Great Enshittification – technological progress is now actually regressing
Ted Gioia provides ten reasons why all our lovely shiny technological improvements have turned into a steady stream of enshittified “updates” that reduce functionality, add unwanted “improvements” and make things significantly less reliable:
By my measure, this reversal started happening around a decade ago. If I had to sum things up in a conceptual chart, it would look like this:
The divergence was easy to ignore at first. We’re so familiar with useful tech that many of us were slow to notice when upgrades turned into downgrades.
But the evidence from the last couple years is impossible to dismiss. And we can’t blame COVID (or other extraneous factors) any longer. Technology is increasingly making matters worse, not better — and at an alarming pace.
[…]
But I have avoided answering, up until now, the biggest question — which is why is this happening?
Or, to be more specific, why is this happening now?
Until recently, most of us welcomed innovation, but something changed. And now a huge number of people are anxious and fearful about the same tech companies they once trusted.
What caused this shift?
That’s a big issue. Unless we understand how things went wrong, we can’t begin to fix them. Otherwise we’re just griping — about bad software or greedy CEOs or whatever.
It’s now time to address the causes, not just complain about symptoms.
Once we do that, we can move to the next steps, namely outlining a regimen for recovery and an eventual cure.
So let me try to lay out my diagnosis as clearly as I can. Below are the ten reasons why tech is now breaking bad.
I apologize in advance for speaking so bluntly. Many will be upset by my frankness. But the circumstances — and the risks involved — demand it.
August 15, 2024
“The Establishment … are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration”
Spaceman Spiff risks getting the full power and majesty of the British legal system arrayed against him for offering an opinion critical of the authorities and the ongoing immigration policies of this and previous British governments:
Britain is experiencing civil unrest in response to the recent murders of three young girls at the hands of an individual whose family was allowed to enter Britain from Africa and settle in Wales.
The Establishment response is similar to comparable European states like Ireland or Germany. They are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration.
Vocal rejection of multiculturalism and evidence of its failure in Britain is treated as a hate crime, a subject that cannot be discussed.
This has done nothing to quell discomfort and has done little more than show us Britain’s elites are lost in a bubble that is increasingly divorced from reality.
Mass immigration is deeply unpopular
Immigration has been an issue since the 1950s. Since the 1990s it has featured as one of the key issues in every election, often the top issue for most.
Conversely it has been summarily ignored by the educated classes who run the country. Immigration is here to stay, and Britain must change to accommodate it.
The elite section of society promoting immigration is especially indifferent to those most affected, low wage workers. There is also a strong cultural component beyond the economic arguments, an understanding the drive is to make Britain less white with very vocal attempts to champion non-natives in every area of life.
For many decades the educated classes have viewed notions of patriotism or national loyalty with suspicion. Many fancy themselves as internationalists more in tune with the educated in foreign nations than their working-class compatriots.
Now, after decades of immigration, whole communities have been displaced. Some areas of Britain have no Europeans living there. Some tourists complain parts of London do not look English.
[…]
It is the height of arrogance to believe we can somehow circumvent the wisdom accumulated throughout history. And the price being paid is by the British people who are losing their homeland.
Those behind our utopian schemes are working harder and harder to shore them up. Not just mixing cultures but expensive climate initiatives, radical feminism and fractional reserve banking to name only a few of today’s fads. None of them were ever going to work and now they are obviously failing.
The announcements represent the beginning of the end of bad ideas that were doomed from the start. A sane government would take note and begin a plan to reset Britain starting with listening to concerns about mass immigration.
Instead our ruling elite are digging in, and that will probably mean increased civil disturbance as more and more recognize they have no voice and no say.
Given who we are, who we really are under the political correctness and the good manners, this is absolute insanity on their part. Perhaps just the latest decision in a long line of bad ideas unable to accommodate reality. The distortions within their bubble are strong and they are becoming impossible to hide.
The end is nigh for the believers in Western liberalism.
