Quotulatiousness

March 5, 2025

Trump’s next target – Europe

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

Andrew Doyle thinks that the next step of Donald Trump’s culture war will be highlighted by a struggle over freedom of speech with the UK and the regulators of the European Union:

British PM Keir Starmer talks with US President Donald Trump in the White House.

New battle lines are forming in the culture war. While the woke movement appears to be in retreat, the forces of authoritarianism are regrouping for a fresh assault. Rather than maintaining a straightforward conflict between right and left, the next phase of the culture war will most probably be waged between Europe and the United States. It has all the qualities of a novel by Henry James for the digital age, with the distinctions between the old world and the new brought once again into sharp focus.

Free speech will be the key issue. Most of us will have seen the footage of vice-president J. D. Vance last week in the Oval Office taking Keir Starmer to task for the “infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British” but also “American technology companies and by extension, American citizens”. Starmer pushed back, saying “in relation to free speech in the UK, I’m very proud of our history there”. It’s a bit like Hannibal Lecter boasting about his ongoing commitment to vegetarianism.

The word “history” was apt, given that Starmer’s government is seemingly determined to ensure that free speech is consigned to the past. One of its first acts after seizing power was to ditch the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. In February, Angela Rayner revealed her plans for the establishment of a sixteen-member council on “Islamophobia” which could see the criticism of religion criminalised. Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper has been staunchly defending the police for recording “non-crime”, while the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, has suggested that the best approach to tackling the controversy is to simply rename “non-crime hate incidents” as something more palatable. Apparently Lord Herbert believes that the problem is the nomenclature, not the fact that citizens are being investigated by the armed wing of the state for lawful behaviour.

All of this is before we get to Starmer applying pressure to the judiciary to mete out draconian sentences for offensive posts and memes on social media, and the government’s determination to crack down on online “disinformation”. Ours is an authoritarian government, and Starmer’s Orwellian denial of the truth of his position in the Oval Office is to be expected. Autocrats throughout history have enacted censorship “for the public good”. Today, they target “disinformation”, a term so vague that it can be applied to anyone who questions the narrative of the ruling class.

And so, as I say, the new front of the culture war will most likely be transatlantic. The US government will simply not tolerate the widespread censorship of its citizens by laws passed overseas. Jim Jordan, chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, has already issued subpoenas to eight US tech companies to divulge all communications they have had with the UK government regarding “content moderation” (i.e., censorship). Jordan is particularly concerned about the Labour government’s intention to empower OfCom to regulate social media, and he has specifically mentioned UK officials who “have already threatened to use UK laws to police American speech”.

N.S. Lyons suggested in the latest post at The Upheaval that Vice President J.D. Vance’s real message to the European leaders can be rephrased as “Give Up the Information War and GTFO”:

The political elite of Europe and the Anglosphere appeared shocked by J.D. Vance’s wonderfully blunt speech in Munich last month. The U.S. Vice President declared Washington’s top security concern to be “the threat from within” the NATO alliance and castigated assembled leaders for their increasingly brazen assaults on “democratic values”, including censoring speech, suppressing popular opposition parties, and canceling elections. But if this shock isn’t feigned then it is rather remarkable, given that these elites were in their own way already effectively at war with the United States. All Vance did was point out the nature of this hidden conflict.

Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” globalist liberalism is over. The United States, he indicated, now has a core interest in seeing a Western world that is collectively strong because its sovereign nations are strong, with the self-confidence to independently defend themselves physically, culturally, and spiritually. His emphasis on promoting free speech and democratic legitimacy tied into this message, but was about far more than the importance of “shared values” or even Washington’s new friendliness to nationalist parties. Practically, it was an implied warning that the role Europe has been playing as a proxy actor in the political and ideological conflicts raging in the United States will no longer be tolerated. More specifically, it was a declaration that ongoing transatlantic institutional, technological, and legal support for America’s embattled left-wing deep state must end – or else.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fueled by “low-information voters” and their consumption of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, including from foreign actors, and that if their “information diet” could just be controlled then they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton would later put it, social media platforms had fundamentally changed the information environment and “if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control”.

This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the U.S. Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the “wrong” information on the internet, but “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”, as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.

Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of “independent” (state-funded) “fact-checking” organizations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was, as one federal judge later described it, effectively “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”.

A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the U.S. Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries around the world. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could for example force internet companies the world over – including U.S. companies – to change their behavior in order to comply and avoid losing access (this imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the “Brussels Effect”, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century).

February 21, 2025

“… a sea change in American foreign policy priorities”

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

Theophilus Chilton on how the markedly changed US foreign policies under Donald Trump are roiling the old certainties of so many western “transnational” elites:

Last Friday, an event occurred which represents a sea change in American foreign policy priorities, but the importance of which may have been missed by many. Vice-President Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference. In this speech, he basically pulled no punches, calling out the various Western European governments for their support for mass immigration, their opposition to free speech, and the erosion of democratic functions within their governments. The speech itself presented a stark contrast between the new American administration and the “leadership” that currently exists in most European countries. It represents a decisive rupture between an American executive which is in the process of refuting the influence of a globalist transnational “elite” over its country and European governments which are still firmly ensconced in that elite’s thrall.

The thing is, Vance was pretty much right about everything he said. Mass immigration, especially that part of it coming from Africa and the Muslim world, is absolutely destroying the social fabric of every European nation as well as dragging down their standards of living toward third world levels. Euro governments, in fact, do absolutely hate freedom of speech and apply strictures that medieval monarchies would never have dreamed of instituting. For all their talk about the importance of democracy and the “threat” to it represented by Trump and his administration, Euro countries make an absolute mockery out of the entire concept. Those European slaves of the globalists can grumble and sit there aghast at Vance’s words, but the simple fact of the matter is that he was right in every way in the criticisms he leveled against them.

After all, these are the people who overturn Romanian elections because actual Romanians voted for the wrong person — all to “defend democracy”. These are the people who ban political parties to “defend democracy”. These are the people who let “migrants” stab little girls to death to “defend democracy”. These are the people who arrest Christians for singing hymns on a public street to “defend democracy”. These are the people who do armed midnight raids and throw people into prison for sharing memes on social media to “defend democracy”. You get the picture. Populism and popular sovereignty are such a threat to these regimes because their democracy is a sham, a foil used to give a pretended legitimacy to globalist policies which are destroying the actual people of these various countries.

For all the breathless hyperventilating about Russia “invading Europe” (which it is in no position to do, LOL), the fact is that there is nothing that the Russians could do to the people of Europe that would be worse than what their own governments already subject them to.

What makes this all the more amusing is the excited “nationalism” we’ve been seeing from the lefties and globalists in several of the countries that have been in the Trump/Vance crosshairs over the past month. A good example would be in Canada, in response to the tariff threats that Trump made to try to push the Canadian government into being a little more proactive about securing their side of the border from the fentanyl and illegal aliens that enter the USA. Watching the Canadian government fall all over itself trying to fake an exuberant pride in their Canadian-ness, even as they continue to turn their country into an Indian colony and treat their own White Canadian population like a bunch of expendable paypigs has been enlightening, to say the least. Obviously, what’s driving the reaction is not a genuine love of country or people, but loyalty to the transnational elite that is piqued at recently being disempowered in the USA.

In all of this, it’s important to remember that the enemies here, the people who deserve our ire and derision, are not the peoples of Canada, the UK, the European countries. It is the transnational clique and their progressive Left hangers-on, the same people who were until very recently doing the exact same things to the American people, too. We need to be very clear that regular, everyday Americans and regular, everyday Frenchmen, Germans, Canadians, Italians, and all the rest are on the same side here. We have the same enemy. The European and other peoples are victims of their own governments, first and foremost. I mean, their own governments are now formally making them eat the bugs as part of their anti-human green agenda, just to give one example.

February 19, 2025

Europe’s moral leaders stand strong against grotesque American fascism

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

You have to hand it to the great and the good of Europe … they sure can find every. last. rake. to step on as they hysterically react to the slightest hint of disagreement or contradiction:

Germany is right. Opposition parties must be forbidden or firewalled. Political criticism must be criminalized. The public sphere must be firmly controlled by government, with guardrails against disagreement and heterodoxy. If we don’t do these things, we might descend into authoritarianism.

Margaret Brennan’s bizarre response to JD Vance’s speech in Munich — free speech? but that’s the weapon the Nazis used to commit the Holocaust! — wasn’t mere ignorance or accident. It’s a maneuver. You’re going to see more of it, in an urgent wave of moral inversion. Case in point, from the New Republic today:

Remember that Vance said things like this:

    The good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.

    And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organisers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them …

    I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.

So governments should live in dialogue with the populations they govern; citizens should speak freely; banning or limiting political parties makes society less free and less open. From start to finish, Vance spoke for liberty and openness, for free expression and societies organized through unfettered debate.

The calculated response — the calculated response, a deliberate deflection — is: Oh no, he’s saying we should turn into Nazis! Look at the subhed to the thing in the New Republic: arguing for freedom is aligning ourselves with international fascism.

Openness is genocide. Freedom is fascism. Speech is violence. Free societies arrest people for saying the wrong thing. Free speech — you mean like ADOLF HITLER!?!?

Read the piece in the New Republic, and look closely at Michael Tomasky’s language, which is full of Stasi-adjacent framing: “The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a ‘suspected extremist’ organization by the German domestic intelligence agency.”

January 28, 2025

What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls

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

Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:

Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.

“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”

What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.

Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.

“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”

It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.

A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies

This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?

The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.

That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.

“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”

The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”

That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).

January 25, 2025

“How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; … be Fascism redux?”

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

As discussed yesterday, one of the many “hitting the ground running” acts of Donald Trump at the beginning of his second term in office has been to issue executive orders to dismantle a lot of progressives’ favourite policies, and many of them are calling it “fascism”:

Trump-the-Presidency 2.0 has already proved to be rather different from the 1.0 version. It is not merely that this time around he won the US popular vote. It is that he has “hit the ground running” with a whole stack of executive orders.

Watching the reaction to this has become — to put it mildly — a somewhat bifurcated experience. Lots of people, who were relieved at his victory, applaud what they see as a return to common sense; a rejection of censorship; a rejection of a politics intrusive into any and all aspects of life.

Conversely, there are also lots of — typically very online — people who see it as Fascism redux, as the equivalent of the end of Weimar Germany being live-streamed. How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; of removing DEI commissars from the US Federal Government; that includes appointment of women and persons of colour to senior positions; be Fascism redux?

The short answer is: it isn’t. The question then becomes, how can it be seen as such? This is where the long-run consequences of anti-discrimination law kicks in.

Anti-discrimination law creates a legal-bureaucratic structure that operates on the basis that the general citizenry is continually hovering on the edge of wrong think (racism) and wrong act (discrimination). The presumption becomes — without all this active effort — racism and discrimination will be unleashed.

This is nonsense. Anglosphere countries have low levels of racism and anti-discrimination norms have become widely accepted. Where there are discrimination issues, they are mostly problems of cultural distance that have a significant element of practicality from differing expectations between groups.

Nevertheless, it is very much in the interests of the legal-bureaucratic structure that anti-discrimination law sets up that propensities to wrong act and wrong think be seen as real, and endemic. Even better, is if the problem is seen as even larger than originally conceived.

So, we get a double expansion. The first expansion is in the range of protected groups. This provides a broadening of the social ambit of the potential wrong thinking (racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia …) and of the potential wrong acting (who might be discriminated against).

As this moral dimension becomes so elevated—not least because there are so much employment involved, but also as considerable social leverage is created by for those who can set what is, or is not, legitimate action and speech—there is expansion of what constitutes wrong think and wrong act. There is large, indeed expanding, ambit for intellectual and other entrepreneurs to identify new sins of discrimination, new sins of unequal consideration, new ways wrong think propagates, and new ways of signalling one’s rejection of such sins.

It is better still if uttering true things becomes a wrong act, expressing wrong think, for people are prone to do that, to notice things. Of course, if you start trying to shun, shame and punish folk for expressing true things, for noticing things, you are likely to generate quite a lot of resentment. This is useful, for such pushback just further “establishes” the propensity to wrong think and wrong act. Hence Transphobia and Islamophobia becoming such markers of wrong think—there are so many true things to not notice.

There is even a term for someone who notices inconvenient patterns — far right. A term that has become the classic thought-terminating cliché in the service of not noticing.

January 22, 2025

“Do not give institutional power to activists” or “moral projects to bureaucrats”, but “Progressivism systematically does both”

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

Lorenzo Warby on the dangers of enabling totalitarians and suffering the useful idiots in any political system:

The overthrow of Robespierre in the National Convention on 27 July 1794, Max Adamo (1870),
Wikimedia Commons.

Do not give institutional power to activists, as activism — being power without responsibility that readily lauds bad behaviour — attracts manipulative “Cluster B” personalities. Moreover, activism degrades realms of human action by imposing pre-conceived outcomes and constraints on them. We can see this is in all the entertainment franchises whose internal logics of story and canon have been debauched in the service of political messaging.1

Do not give moral projects to bureaucrats, as such projects elevate the authority of the bureaucrats who become moral masters, devaluing the authority of the citizens turned into moral subjects, and so undermines any ethic of service to said citizenry. Such projects also frustrate accountability, as the grand intentions can, and will, be used to shield the bureaucrats from scrutiny. Indeed, moral projects rapidly become moralised projects, whose grand intentions protects, even aggrandise, the self-interest of the bureaucrats.2

Progressivism systematically does both — give institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats. Hence progressivism has so often proved disastrous for human flourishing. Indeed, it has a powerful tendency to use the grandeur of its moral intentions to free itself from moral constraints: to be moralised, rather than moral.

As various folk “walk away” from what left-progressivism has become, a common sentiment is some version of “this is not the Left I remember” or “this is not what the Left used to stand for”. Yet, one of the striking things about Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (aka “wokery”) within contemporary societies is how thoroughly it is replicating mechanisms of social control familiar to any student of Communism, of Marxist Party-states.

This “not the Left I joined” is typically a notion of “the Left” that does not include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu … So it is an historically illiterate, “wouldn’t-it-be-nice”, Leftism. Yet it is precisely the Left that does include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu and so on whose echoes are being played out in our societies.

When we look around our contemporary societies, we have commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc); Zhdanovism, in the remarkable ideological conformism in the arts, entertainment and gaming (usefully discussed here); Lysenkoism in science journals, especially the genderwoo sex-is-non-binary nonsense, though genetics research and male-female differences also have aspects of it; and censorship that was originally paraded as stopping “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information. Critical Pedagogy — which has become influential in Education Faculties and teacher training — is explicitly about replicating Mao’s Cultural Revolution model of permanent revolution. We have the same, disastrous, patterns of institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats.

    1. There is a large difference from the “we want to be included, we want a say” activism that abolished first the slave trade and then slavery, that abolished laws against Jews and Catholics, that gave us universal male and then female suffrage — what I have called the Emancipation Sequence. Such political movements included previously excluded folk in freedoms and political processes that already existed. They did not give institutional power to activists nor moral projects to bureaucrats.

    2. The institutional shrinkage of the Church has not abolished the meaning-and-morality role it used to play, it has just shifted it into academe and the welfare state apparat, making both simultaneously more arrogant and less functional.

December 8, 2024

QotD: Who invented the vending machine?

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

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.

November 26, 2024

“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other”

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

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

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

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”

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

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”

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

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 .

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

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

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

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

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”

Filed under: Books, Germany, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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”

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

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.

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