Quotulatiousness

November 20, 2022

Printing books in China is economical, but also allows China to censor what you print

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, China, Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte explains why some of Sutherland House’s books are now being printed in China … and illustrates some of the risks of having them printed there:

We decided last spring to offshore some of our book printing to China (see “The Crisis in Book Publishing”, SHuSH 138). It was not a difficult decision. The difference in price is enormous.

For instance. Next week we’re releasing a book called The Prison Lady: True Stories and Life Lessons from Both Sides of the Bars by Phyllis Taylor. Presales have been strong. We need to print more copies. We can’t go back to the original Chinese printer, which charged us $2.08/copy, because it takes months to get books from Guangzhou to Toronto. We need the books now. So we shopped around. The best North American price we could find is $4.39/copy.

Why is that a problem? The book is a paperback priced at $22.95. The retailer takes half that, leaving us $11.50. After our distributor and sales agent take their fees and we pay the author her royalty, we’re left with $6.32 out of which we pay for editing, cover art, design, overhead, and shipping. And printing. If the printing bill comes to $4.39 a copy, we make no money.

Those of the economics of a straightforward paperback. A friend of mine recently called about a quote from a Canadian printer for a full-color illustrated book that came in at $15.31/copy. It seemed steep, so I sent the exact same specs to a Chinese printer who quoted $5.27/copy.

[…]

Our initial plan was to print four of our spring books in China (we’re also using printers in Turkey and India). The files for the first two of the four were delivered last month. On Nov. 7, we received the following email from the printer:

    After more detailed review of some of the written content of these two books, there are some significant censorship concerns related to certain references to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.

    As you may be aware, China vehemently enforces a “one China” principle in which Hong Kong and Taiwan are part of the “one China”. Therefore, China censorship will not allow any reference to either Hong Kong or Taiwan as its own country.

    With this in mind, there is some “sensitive wording” on page 46 of The Big Exitย that would not be possible to print in China due to it implying that Hongย Kong and Taiwan are “countries”.

The Big Exit isn’t about politics. It’s a book about end-of-life choices or, more particularly, how we can dispose of the remains of a billion boomers over the next several decades without wrecking the planet (conventional burial and cremation are both environmentally reckless). The censorship issue arose in this paragraph, which the printer helpfully circled in bright red:

I grant that while Hong Kong still shows up in a lot of data as its own country, it is technically an administrative region of China. Taiwan’s independence is also disputed by China. Against China’s claims, we have the Frank Zappa rules of diplomacy which recognize as “a real country” any place with its own beer and its own airline. Taiwan and Hong Kong both qualify.

In any event, we are now printing The Big Exit in India.

November 3, 2022

Amnesty? How about “no”.

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

Tom Knighton on the recent trial balloons being sent up by certain media folks to test the willingness of us proles to “forgive and forget” their authoritarian cheerleading over the last two+ years:

Recently, a story over at The Atlantic proposed an amnesty over what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was that we just let bygones be bygones and no one holds anyone else accountable for what happened.

Lives were ruined, people died alone and miserable โ€” and in some cases, because they were alone and miserable โ€” but we’re supposed to ignore all of that.

At Spiked, Lauren Smith says that the nasty authoritarian tendencies of those in power during the pandemic should absolutely not be forgotten:

As the Covid-19 pandemic fades from view, some may be tempted to forget those miserable two years of lockdowns, social distancing and other restrictions on our liberties. This is certainly the view of a widely shared article in the Atlantic, which calls for a “pandemic amnesty”. American economist Emily Oster asks us to “forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid”. It quickly becomes clear why Oster would prefer us to move on.

During 2020 and 2021, Oster was very much on the side of lockdown. And she supported vaccine mandates in universities and for workers. In fairness to Oster, she did not support every Covid measure. She did, for instance, criticise how long it took for schools to re-open in the US back in the summer of 2020. Yet ultimately, she belonged to the side that was happy to criminalise meeting a friend for coffee or to separate people from their dying loved ones.

Now, with hindsight, Oster regrets some of her positions. The crux of her argument is that the people baying for more lockdowns, harsher restrictions and vaccine mandates couldn’t possibly have known any different at the time. She says that they couldn’t have known that outdoor transmission of Covid was rare, that schoolchildren were always a low-risk group and that cloth masks were virtually useless in preventing viral spread.

Many, however, did know these facts, including back in the spring of 2020. But those who said them out loud were quickly turned into pariahs.

Although Oster admits that those on the anti-lockdown side got many things right, she says this was merely a question of “luck”. But it should not have taken any great foresight to see the danger of lockdowns. They were responsible for the most significant loss of liberty in the history of the democratic world. Their impact on economic output was as profound as that of any war. Not since the days before universal education had so many kids been shut out of school. Worse still, those who did warn of these inevitable and dangerous consequences were met with derision and censorship.

This is a pretty representative viewpoint of the lockdown mindset:

Twitter’s evolution from protecting celebrities to shaping “the narrative”

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

At Common Sense, Walter Kirn recounts his own recognition of how Twitter has changed since he first opened an account in 2009 (incidentally, the same year I did … but unlike Walter, I still have about the same number of followers there as I did in my first year):

The platform belonged to celebrities back then, who hawked their movies, albums, and TV shows in words that were their own, supposedly, fostering in fans a dubious intimacy with figures they knew only from interviews. One of these stars, an investor in the platform, was Ashton Kutcher, the prankish, grinning actor who became omnipresent for a spell and then, stupendously enriched, largely vanished from public consciousness. It seemed that Twitter had sped-up fame such that it bloomed and died in record time.

The power of the new platform struck me first in 2012. Two incidents. The first one, a small one, occurred in Indianapolis, where I’d gone to watch the Super Bowl. I attended a party the night before the game at which many Hollywood folk were present, including an actor on a cable TV show who played a roguish businessman. The actor was extremely drunk, lurching about and hitting on young women, and it happened that my wife, back home, whom I’d texted about the scene, was able to read real-time tweets about his antics from other partygoers. A few hours afterward she noticed that these tweets had disappeared. Instant reality-editing. Impressive.

I concluded that Twitter was in the business not only of promoting reputations, but of protecting them. It offered special deals for special people. Until then, I’d thought of it as a neutral broker.

[…]

My own habits on Twitter changed around that time. Observational humor had been my mainstay mode, but I realized that Twitter had become an engine of serious opinions on current affairs. On election night in 2016, while working at another journal, Harper’s, I was given control of the magazine’s Twitter feed and asked to think out loud about events while following them on cable news. I saw early that Trump was on his way to victory โ€” or at least he was doing much better than predicted โ€” and I offered a series of tart remarks about the crestfallen manners of various pundits who couldn’t hide their mounting disappointment.

The official election results were still unknown โ€” Clinton retained a chance to win, in theory โ€” but before the tale was told, my editors yanked my credentials for the account and gave them to someone else. The new person swerved from the storyline I’d set (which reflected reality) and adopted a mocking tone about Trump’s chances, even posting a picture of a campaign hat sitting glumly on a folding chair at his headquarters in New York City.

It struck me at first as pure denial. Later I decided that it was far more intentional โ€” that my left-leaning magazine wished to preserve the illusion for its readers that the election’s outcome was unforeseeable, possibly to maintain suspense or so it could later act startled and disturbed in concert with its TV peers. Its Twitter feed, as a record of its reactions, had to align with this narrative.

I grew convinced that night that Twitter meant trouble for me. It had become an opinion-sculpting instrument, an oracle of the establishment, and I knew I would end up out of step with it, if only because I’m of a temperament which habitually goes against the flow to challenge and test the flow, to keep it honest. Mass agreement, in my experience, both as a person and a journalist, is typically achieved at a cost to reality and truth.

October 7, 2022

The “two movies on the same screen” effect: most Canadians see impending collapse but our “elites” think everything’s peachy

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

Tara Henley contrasts the reality many Canadians are facing day-to-day with the out-of-touch “laptop elites” who, as a class, did great through the last two and a half years and who have no clue at all why anyone would see the state of the country as anything like a collapse:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

There has been much discussion lately about the state of our nation โ€” and whether or not we, as a society, are in decline.

Former journalist and Justin Trudeau speechwriter (and current Substacker) Colin Horgan published a provocative essay at The Line last month, arguing that our country is vulnerable to extremists who believe that “the current system of liberal democracy is inherently corrupt and corrupted, verging on collapse, and that, in the extreme, its downfall can and should be hastened by acts of violence”.

Horgan worries that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre โ€” who’s been actively speaking to this ambient vibe of distress and dissatisfaction โ€” could accelerate such destabilization.

Poilievre does not say extreme things, Horgan concedes, but Poilievre’s message is “still poison” because “what he telegraphs is the vision of a social order at a tipping point, with the suggestion that it can be easily pushed over”.

In short, Poilievre has tapped into “an Internet language of decline”.

There’s a thriving cottage industry in the Canadian legacy media doing everything they can to tar Poilievre as a Canadian Hitler and to continue the re-typing and re-phrasing of government talking points for the mass market. The government subsidies to “approved” media outlets will help keep the lights on a bit longer as they continue to lose audience share — and trust.

Our quality of life has been eroded for some time now. Wages have been stagnant for decades. Precarious work is the order of the day, both for the working class and professionals. Rents and property prices are through the roof; according to the Globe and Mail, since 2000, domestic home prices have increased by 420 percent. Inflation is high. Gas is expensive. Food costs are up. We are coping with a crisis of social isolation. Our opioid epidemic rages on.

Meanwhile, pandemic policy has benefited the laptop class and harmed the most vulnerable among us. (See lockdowns and school closures, for starters.)

Indeed, there has been extreme winners and losers during the COVID era, which saw a massive transfer of wealth upwards. Billionaires in this country, in fact, saw their wealth increase 68 percent during the pandemic.

Should we be surprised that those on the losing end are expressing their frustration?

[…]

Things have only gotten worse as the pandemic has dragged on and citizens have been hit with high inflation and rising interest rates (while also staring down other looming financial catastrophes).

According to an Angus Reid poll out this week, nine out of ten Canadians have cut their household budgets due to inflation and high prices. And 46 percent of Canadians say their personal finances are worse off now than they were at this time last year.

But if the material conditions in this country are dire, so too is the national mood.

In fact, there is a gaping wound at the centre of our national psyche.

Essential workers have laboured throughout the COVID crisis, endangering their health and that of their families, in order to keep society running. In return for their heroic efforts, the unvaccinated among them โ€” many of whom previously contracted COVID and have natural immunity โ€” have seen themselves ostracized and smeared as racists and misogynists. Their fundamental values have been mocked in the public square, and their basic rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression, have been compromised. Some have lost jobs, social lives and more for declining vaccination.

To comprehend the human toll this has taken, one need only look to the grassroots #TrudeauMustGo campaign on Twitter.

The consequences of vaccine mandates should have been covered in great depth by our national press. But instead, the Canadian media largely fell down on this story, often generating coverage that uncritically reproduced the Liberal party line.

Trust in the Canadian news media is now at its lowest point in seven years.

And judging from the reader mail I get, the Liberals’ decision to turn vaccine mandates into a wedge issue has had significant social consequences โ€” tearing apart families, communities, and workplaces in ways that may take years to recover from.

All told, what we are witnessing is not merely a state of decline. It is a form of collapse. A collapse of the social contract. A collapse of the expectations we grew up with โ€” that if you worked hard and respected the law, you could have a home, a family if you chose, and, crucially, a say in our democracy.

What we are living through is a collapse of life as we knew it in Canada.

What was once a stable, prosperous, diverse democracy is now a nation divided, rife with fear and anger, and financial and social instability.

Not only has our Prime Minister failed to grasp this, but he’s actively stoked tensions.

September 24, 2022

PayPal shuts down the Free Speech Union’s account for some reason

Filed under: Britain, Business, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ellie Wheatley on PayPal’s arbitrary decision to cut off the Free Speech Union’s account without notice:

The irony of the Free Speech Union’s PayPal account being shut down is that it proves we are in need of the union more than ever.

The online payment company shut down the FSU’s account (thus making it more difficult for people to donate) without any clear explanation as to why it did so. The same was done to its founder, Toby Young, and his online newspaper, the Daily Sceptic.

The shame is, PayPal is an innovative tech company that has made transferring money almost seamless for millions across the world. You can donate money to an organisation within seconds; there’s no faff trying to find your credit card, or having to re-type your details for the twentieth time that week. It’s a brilliant service that has made life easier for many people, businesses and charities. PayPal is not a political company, it’s a tech company worth over $102bn, so why have they been banning other organisations from using their services?

Although PayPal said they couldn’t comment on the decision, they did proclaim that they “weren’t discriminatory”, but is this really true?

Is it unclear whether they shut down these accounts simply because they disagreed with what the FSU and Toby Young stand for. Although PayPal hasn’t clarified what exactly FSU and Toby Young did wrong, it appears that they must have breached their acceptable use policy. This includes myriad of things but the most prominent are hate speech and “misinformation” on topics such as the COVID vaccine.

Hate speech is one thing (although it seems that anything can be deemed offensive and hateful now) but “misinformation” about topics being a breach of policy takes us down a dark and sinister path.

Misinformation is a term that is often used to label content that goes against the elite or prevailing “groupthink” point of view. Questioning mainstream thought is unacceptable, and it breaches Big Tech’s policy, thus you can (and often will) be shut out.

September 23, 2022

Sarah Hoyt on the Overton Window

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

At According to Hoyt, Sarah considers the Overton Window:

Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960โ€“2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons

The Overton window is not natural to human society. It is the product of the mass-information-media-entertainment era.

No?

Sure, in some villages, or some other places, there are things you can’t see/say. That is usually because someone in that society, be it a village or a nation, is going to get under your nose for saying it. (At one point, you could get arrested in Portugal for shouting “Portugal is a sh*tty country!”)

Having “Unsayable” and “Unthinkable” and “if you say that in public you’ll be shunned” is always a sign of an oppressive society, whether the punishments are physical or mental, beatings or mere shunning.

Having beliefs that are beyond the pale โ€” in fact, the existence of the pale โ€” are a sign of an unhealthy society, one in which a truth is being enforced that is different from reality.

No? Fight me.

Look, yeah, sure, there are things people in all eras didn’t discuss in certain company due to manners or delicacy. One didn’t discuss sexual acts in front of children, not equipped to understand them, in most of the west since the onset of Christianity. One didn’t say certain things in front of elders either. “Gentlemen don’t discuss politics or coitus”. But that was a matter of โ€” in a small gathering, or a confined society โ€” keeping the social gears lubricated, and keeping disagreements at bay. What “couldn’t be said” varied.

However, the Overton window is something else. It is “you can’t report certain things, even if they are true, at the risk of becoming a social pariah”.

It avoids discussions of really important things, like how our kids are being sodomized by public education. Or how welfare really doesn’t contribute to the welfare of anyone. Or how Child Protective Systems is a money-laundering scam, in which kids die. Or how our government-funded science has become all government and almost no science. Etc.

It encourages rape rings like Rotherham, and has most of the black population of the US believe they are more at risk of police shootings than whites, which is plainly not true, but can’t be said, because the media has deemed saying so is “racist” (Somehow.) So people live in fear, rather than knowing they’re not at higher risk than anyone else.

And while speaking of risk, the media, and its control of information and encouragement of shunning dissenters, has led to fear of a “slightly more dangerous” flu, and led to elderly people living their last years in isolation and terror, and also led to our kids being isolated into loss of social function.

Furthermore, the only way to keep the Overton window over a whole country is to enforce strict control over the media, and even social media, and to ruthlessly crush down dissenters, so that everyone appears to agree, leading to shock-rejection of those who manage to break through the wall of government-encouraged-enforced lying.

A wall that they try to keep even when the lies are patently absurd and harmful. (Like the idea anyone who dislikes the Biden reign of terror is a terrorist or insurgent, or for that matter racist.)

The Overton window can suck what I don’t have.

September 21, 2022

Jonathan Kay on cultural appropriation

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay put together “a somewhat lengthy manifesto” on the topic of cultural appropriation in response to a request from Robert Jago who wanted to do an interview with Kay on this issue:

Justin Trudeau (Canada’s most prolific cultural appropriator) with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

“Cultural appropriation” typically gets defined in a way that depends on whether one is defending it or denouncing it. If you’re defending it, you prefer to look at the big picture: Every new kind of art form, literary genre, style of dress, or cuisine typically represents a mix of inherited and borrowed elements. Shakespeare’s sonnets were written in an Iambic pentameter that Chaucer had “appropriated” from the French and Italians. So if Indigenous or African poets want to appropriate it from the English, no one has any basis for complaint. If you define cultural appropriation in this big-picture way, the concept isn’t just permissible. It’s artistically necessary, and indeed inevitable.

But if you’re denouncing cultural appropriation, on the other hand, the argument is more persuasive when your frame of reference is small, local, and community-rooted. I’m thinking of the (white) novelist or film director who passes through a region, and hears some garbled version of folklore that relates to a nearby Indigenous community. The guy thinks, “Oh wow, that’ll make a great novel” (or TV show, movie, etc.), and then makes a mint without consulting (let alone cashing in) the Indigenous community.

So the debate over cultural appropriation is like a lot of debates: It’s really easy to win if you get to define the terms. And since both sides pick definitions that suit them, it can become a dialogue of the deaf.

Indeed, there’s often no dialogue at all. Rather, both sides are apt to retreat into apocalyptic language about, respectively, (a) totalitarian censorship, and (b) white supremacist (cultural) genocide. This is absolutist language that leaves no room for nuance or discussion.

The cultural-universalism side of this dialogue is represented by people like me. I write about every topic under the sun, and so I get my back up when someone tells me that I’ve got to “stay in my lane”. My whole career is built around hopscotching from one idea to the next without worrying (much) about who gets offended. For me, the imposition of rules on what people are allowed to write about isn’t just an annoyance. It’s an existential threat to the creative faculties.

But if you’re on the other end of this โ€” say, you’re a member of a small Indigenous community whose history and folklore have yet to be recorded or celebrated in any definitive form โ€” you don’t care about some white guy in Toronto whining about how he can’t do the equivalent of wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo. A small First Nations community might get only one real shot at telling its story to the world. If that shot gets used up by an outsider who strip-mines the locals’ oral history for a bestseller, that can no doubt feel like existential threat to one’s cultural autonomy. It’s like: “So you took our land, punished us for using our own language, sent our kids to residential schools, and now all we really have left is our culture, and you want to steal that, too?”

There’s this trite expression that often gets trotted out these days: Intent doesn’t matter, only the harm you cause. But of course, intent does matter. And if an author, director, or artist intends to respectfully and accurately include a community’s story in his or her work, then, for me, that’s very much a mark in their favour. That said, I absolutely do not think that this means there is an obligation to “honour” or “uplift” the community in question โ€” let alone express “solidarity” or “allyship” with them. Doing so means you’re writing activist propaganda. What I mean, rather, is that you shouldn’t be intending to mock or belittle whole swathes of humanity.

The problem is that, in Canadian cultural circles at least, this isn’t really the standard that’s applied. I’ve spoken to a number of Canadian writers who, out of the best of intentions, invest their own funds in “sensitivity readers” โ€” a process that can be not only expensive and time-consuming, but also creatively ruinous, since these consultants often are bursting with ideas about how to turn your novel or movie into a specimen of the above-referenced activist propaganda. I know one woman, in particular โ€” a novelist โ€” who appeared before a First Nations tribal council, and got its official permission to include a character in her book whose identity related to their community. But then a community member, someone not even involved with the band leadership, went after the woman and tried to smear her as racist. This is after she’d dotted every I and crossed every T of the sensitivity-reader process.

September 17, 2022

A royal assault on free speech | The spiked podcast

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

spiked
Published 16 Sep 2022

Tom, Fraser and Ella discuss the clampdown on republican protesters. Plus: the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the madness of Mermaids.
(more…)

August 8, 2022

The British left briefly rediscovers an interest in free speech … no, wait, they’re back to loving Big Brother again

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

In Spiked, Tom Slater recounts the brief moment last week that the great and good of British left wingers found nice things to say about freedom of speech. A very brief moment:

The British left โ€“ or what passes for it today โ€“ briefly pretended to care about free speech this week. Which was kind of cute. It was all sparked by Tory leadership no-hoper Rishi Sunak’s bonkers suggestion that people who “vilify” Britain should be put on the Prevent anti-radicalisation programme, alongside all the Islamists and fascists. “Who are the real snowflakes?”, thundered one left-wing commentator. “Fascism creeps ever closer”, warned Richard Murphy, a one-time adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, as he wondered out loud if he might soon end up in “some camp of Sunak’s choosing for ‘re-education'”.

This is probably the meme that Darren Brady posted which drew the attention of Hampshire Police’s crack “hurty words and pictures” squad last week.

Such principled expressions of horror, over an insanely authoritarian policy that almost certainly will never be implemented, might have had a bit more weight had the exact same people not studiously ignored a very real incident of state censorship โ€“ and attempted re-education โ€“ that went viral last week. I’m referring, of course, to Hampshire Police’s arrest of 51-year-old army veteran Darren Brady, all because he posted an offensive meme, which arranged four “Progress Pride” flags to resemble a swastika โ€“ a clumsy commentary on the authoritarianism of the contemporary LGBT movement.

The details chillingly echo Richard Murphy’s tweeted fever dream. Reportedly, the police had visited Brady 10 days before they tried to arrest him, informing him that he had committed an offence by posting the flag meme. They offered him a deal: pay for a ยฃ60 “community-resolution course” and they’d downgrade his offence to a “non-crime hate incident”, which would still appear on an advanced background check. Brady refused and contacted Harry Miller, leading campaigner against thoughtpolicing, who was present at the arrest and spent a night in the cells himself for trying to obstruct the cops. Going by the footage, now seen around the world, the (several) officers who attended Brady’s home had no idea what offence he was supposed to have committed, saying only that he had “caused anxiety”.

So, state censorship? Yep. Threats of re-education? Yep. The police showing up at someone’s door for no other crime than expressing an opinion? Big yep. Just because it was done in a Keystone Cops sort of fashion doesn’t make the treatment of Brady any less sinister. And yet there hasn’t been a peep of protest from the left-leaning intelligentsia. The armed wing of the state is going about harassing and arresting people purely for upsetting someone on the internet. And yet the people who pass themselves off as liberal, progressive, radical even, are clearly not the tiniest bit bothered about it.

Brady isn’t an isolated case, either. Britain is fast becoming a warning to the Western world about “caring” censorship, about trying to quite literally police “hurtful” speech. According to one investigation, nine people a day are arrested in the UK over offensive things they post on the internet. On top of that, more than 120,000 people have had so-called non-crime hate incidents recorded against their name. These alleged incidents needn’t be investigated or even be credible to be recorded. So much so that an Oxford professor once managed to get a hate incident recorded against then home secretary Amber Rudd, for a speech she gave about immigration that he later admitted he hadn’t even listened to, let alone witnessed in person.

August 6, 2022

Britainโ€™s woke Stasi | The spiked podcast

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

spiked
Published 5 Aug 2022

The spiked team discusses the rise of Britain’s thoughtpolice, Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip and Beyoncรฉ’s act of self-censorship.
(more…)

July 28, 2022

“… this time it will be worldwide”

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

Elizabeth Nickson recounts her journey from dedicated environmentalist to persecuted climate dissident and explains why so many of us feel as if we’re living on the slopes of a virtual Vesuvius in 79AD:

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

I was experiencing a time-worn campaign to shut down a voice that conflicted with an over-arching agenda. And in the scheme of things, I was nothing. But in fact, I was almost the only one, everyone else had been chased out. I was an easy kill, required few resources. It was personal, it was vicious beyond belief, and it had nothing to do with truth. If I had continued my work in newspapers, they would have attacked my mother and my brothers, two of the three of whom were fragile.

As of now, this has happened to hundreds of thousands of people in every sector of the economy. The chronicles of the cancelled are many and varied, and they all start with the furies, unbalanced, easily triggered and marshalled to hunt down and kill an enemy. These programs, pogroms, are meticulously planned, they analyze you, find your weakness, and attack it. In my case, it was my solitude, my income, my need to look after my family that made me an easy sacrifice.

I was such an innocent. I thought with my hard-won skills, my ability to reason, to number crunch, to apply economic theory and legit charting, and report, the truth would be valuable, useful.

Every single member of the cancelled has had their faith in the culture badly shaken. They all thought, as I did, that we were in this together, we needed the truth in order to make good decisions, decisions that would promote the good of all.

Not now. Not anymore.

The truth I found behind the fields and forests of the natural world is animating people on the streets in Europe today, the Dutch, French and German farmers. It animated the revolution in Sri Lanka.

Because what I and hundreds of others had found was censored, the destructive agenda has advanced to the point where their backs are against the wall. They don’t have a choice. They have to win. And they are in the millions.

Same with Trump’s people. They aren’t mindless fans or acolytes or sub-human fools. Their backs are against the wall. They have no choice but to fight.

But because I and the many like me, who know what happened, were shut down, disallowed from writing about it, cancelled and vilified, no one understands why this is happening in any depth. City people mock and hate rural people. My photographer colleague/best friend in New York: “racists as far as the eye can see”. My old aristocratic bf London: “Pencil neck turkey farmers”. No city person can take on board that they have allowed legislation and regulation which is destroying the rural economy because they have been brainwashed by the hysteria in the environmental movement. This destruction is not the only reason but it is the fundamental reason for our massive debts and deficits. The base of the economy has been destroyed. We have lost two decades of real growth.

And we did it via censorship.

There is a truism about revolutions in China. All of a sudden, across this great and massive country with its five thousand year culture, people put down their tools and start marching towards the capital, hundreds of millions all at once.

We are almost there. But this time it will be worldwide.

June 28, 2022

Pierre Poilievre … not the Canadian Trump?

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

Allan Stratton points out to sheltered central Canadian urban voters that populism has a long history in Canadian politics, and didn’t need to be imported from the US:

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre is oft accused of importing divisive American right-wing populism to our politics. His endorsement of the trucker protest against vaccine mandates โ€” though not the legal violations of its organizers โ€” has been portrayed as a play for Christian nationalists, racists and fascists. Likewise, his attacks on Davos and the World Economic Forum are said to welcome Trumpian conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and Great Replacement nativists.

Common wisdom suggests that this strategy may win Poilievre the Conservative party leadership, but will render his party toxic to respectable, mainstream Canadian voters.

There’s a lot of smoke and at least some fire to this critique: The People’s Party of Canada will find it hard to tag Poilievre as a centrist squish.

But thanks to our constitution, the Supreme Court and our general political culture, all more liberal than their American counterparts, social conservative attacks on abortion and LGBT rights seem off the table.

Further, far from a Trumpian nativist, Poilievre is in favour of immigration and wants to cut the red tape that blocks immigrants from employment in their fields, something the current federal government has failed to accomplish into its third mandate.

My fear, as someone who shares many concerns about the prospect of a Poilievre government, is that commentators are misreading the broad appeal of his populism, leading Liberals to unwarranted overconfidence.

Sure, Poilievre’s strategy shares some Trumpian elements, but it’s equally rooted in a progressive Canadian tradition that dates back to the early 19th century and was prominent in the last half of the 20th.

If the Liberals don’t course correct, they may discover that while they are attacking Poilievre as a far-right extremist, he is eating their traditional liberal, working-class lunch.

In broad strokes, I imagine Poilievre channelling Louis-Joseph Papineau and William Lyon Mackenzie during the Rebellions of 1837-38. Instead of the Chรขteau Clique and the Family Compact, I see him fighting the Laurentian Consensus, another powerful, unelected group, this time composed of academics, bureaucrats, media apparatchiks and Central Canada think-tankers who dominate our culture and financial establishment โ€” and who arrogate to themselves the right to determine Canadian values and the ways in which we are allowed to describe and think about ourselves as a nation.

For those of us who grew up on the left under Mike Pearson, Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau and David Lewis, it is hard to stomach the recent illiberal turn in elite liberal discourse. It once assumed the importance of free speech, understanding that censorship has always been used by the powerful to suppress the powerless. Yet today, in academia and the arts, free speech has been recast as “hate speech”, and our Liberal government is passing C-11, which seeks to regulate what we read and how we express ourselves online.

June 23, 2022

The government believes that anyone opposed to Bill C-11 is “spreading misinformation”

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

Happily for the Canadian government (if not for Canadian internet users), if Bill C-11 gets passed, they can sic the CRTC on those critics … isn’t that convenient?

Last week, shortly after midnight in Ottawa, the House of Commons Heritage Committee concluded its deliberations on the Online Streaming Act, which will grant a federal regulator authority over the global Internet.

You may think putting the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and its nine government-appointed commissioners in charge of the entire online world is a good thing. Or you may think it’s a bad thing. But I’m guessing we can all agree that Bill C-11, the world’s most extensive internet regulation legislation so far, is a Thing.

And you’d think a thing that big would be deserving of respectful, honest debate and thoughtful review. If there’s something in the legislation that is bad in a way that isn’t intended, you’d want it caught and fixed, right? We are, after all, about to grant authority over 21st-century communications to people in charge of something called The Broadcasting Act. An act that was passed in 1993 to make sure nothing terrible โ€” like people preferring NFL over CFL football or the Oscars over the Genies โ€” results from watching too much American TV. Given that thousands of successful Canadian free enterprise Tik-Tokers and YouTubers fear new rules will disadvantage them in favour of the CRTC’s certified cultural broccoli, you’d think thatโ€™d be worth a think.

But you’d be wrong.

[…]

But then Liberal MP Tim Louis of Kitchener took this government’s truth-torquing communications strategy to a breathtaking level of self-righteous fantasy โ€” one that dripped with contempt for all but he and his clan.

He calmly rose in the House of Commons and quietly accused C-11’s critics of deliberately spreading “misinformation” โ€” a chilling threat given the government’s plans to deal with he same in “Online Harms” legislation later this year.

Louis did not even try to say, as did Mendicino’s deputy minister, that there was a misunderstanding of some kind. He did not attempt to make it clear that there are people who โ€” as reasonable people often will โ€” disagree. He did not dismiss the bill’s critics as being overwrought, incorrect and yet honourable. He stood up in the House of Commons and, barefaced, declared that views, lived experiences and legal analyses โ€” including the testimony of CRTC Chair Ian Scott โ€” are “simply untrue”. In other words, it’s all #fakenews.

And we are all liars.

June 19, 2022

Why Hate Speech Laws Backfire

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ReasonTV
Published 26 Feb 2022

Here’s a brutal irony about regulating hate speech: Such laws often end up hurting the very people they are supposed to protect.
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That’s one of the central lessons in Jacob Mchangama’s important new book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. Mchangama heads up the Danish think tank Justitia. He’s worried about a proposal that would make hate speech a crime under European Union (EU) law and give bureaucrats in Brussels sweeping powers to prosecute people spewing venom at religious and ethnic minorities, members of the LGBT+ community, women, and others.

Europe’s history with such laws argues against them. In the 1920s, Germany’s Weimar Republic strictly regulated the press and invoked emergency powers to crack down on Nazi speech. It censored and prosecuted the editor of the anti-Semitic Nazi paper Der Stรผrmer, Julius Streicher, who used his trial as a platform for spreading his views and his imprisonment as a way of turning himself into a martyr and his cause into a crusade. When the Nazis took power in the early ’30s, Mchangama stresses, they expanded existing laws and precedents to shut down dissent and freedom of assembly.

Contemporary scholarship suggests that there can be a “backlash effect” when governments shut down speech, leading otherwise moderate people to embrace fringe beliefs. Mchangama points to a 2017 study published in the European Journal of Political Research that concluded extremism in Western Europe was fueled in part by “extensive public repression of radical right actors and opinions.”

In 1965, the United Kingdom passed a law banning “incitement to racial hatred,” but one of the very first people prosecuted under it was a black Briton who called whites “vicious and nasty people” in a speech. More recently, Mchangama notes that radical feminists in England “have been charged with offending LGBT+ people because they insist there are biological differences between the sexes. In France, ‘an LGBT+ rights organization was fined for calling an opponent of same-sex marriage a ‘homophobe.'”

“Once the principle of free speech is abandoned,” warns Mchangama, “any minority can end up being targeted rather than protected by laws against hatred and offense.”

That’s what happened in Canada in the 1990s after the Supreme Court there ruled that words and images that “degrade” women should be banned. The decision was based in part on the legal theories of feminist author Andrea Dworkin, whose books on why pornography should be banned were briefly seized by Canadian customs agents under the laws she helped to inspire.

First Amendment rights are still popular in the United States, with 91 percent of us in a recent survey agreeing that “protecting free speech is an important part of American democracy.” But 60 percent of us also said that the government should prohibit people from sharing a racist or bigoted idea.

Hearing hateful words and ideas outrages and discomforts most of us, but Mchangama’s history of free speech underscores that state suppression can grant those words and ideas more power and influence. And that the best antidote to hate in a free and open society is not to hide from it but to openlyโ€”and persuasivelyโ€”confront it.

Listen to my Reason Interview podcast with Jacob Mchangama at https://reason.com/podcast/2022/02/16….

Written by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor.

May 21, 2022

Despite government denials, CRTC will have the power to censor YouTube videos confirms CRTC Chair

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

It’s long since got to the point that you never can take a Liberal cabinet minister’s word without verifying it for yourself. Today’s example is the constant denial from the government that their Bill C-11 would enable censorship of things like YouTube videos by the CRTC. In a Senate appearance on Wednesday, the head of the CRTC agreed that such censorship is allowed under the proposed legislation:

CRTC Chair Ian Scott appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage yesterday and Bill C-11 proved to be a popular topic of discussion. The exchanges got testy at times as Scott seemingly stepped outside of his role as an independent regulatory by regularly defending government legislation, even veering into commenting on newspapers, which clearly falls outside the CRTC’s jurisdiction. With respect to Bill C-11, most newsworthy were two comments regarding the regulation of user content and the timelines for implementing the bill if it receives royal assent.

First, Scott was asked about the regulation of user content, confirming what has been obvious for months despite denials from Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez. The following exchange with Conservative MP Rachael Thomas got Scott on the record:

    Thomas: Bill C-11 does in fact leave it open to user generated content being regulated by the CRTC. I recognize that there have been arguments against this, however, Dr. Michael Geist has said “the indisputable reality is that the net result of those provisions is that user generated content is in the bill.” Jeanette Patel from Youtube Canada said “the draft law’s wording gives the broadcast regulator” โ€“ in other words you โ€“ “scope to oversee everyday videos posted for other users to watch.” Scott Benzie from Digital First Canada has also said that “while the government says the legislation will not capture digital first creators, the bill clearly does capture them.”

    So all these individuals are individual users creating content. It would appear that the bill does, or could in fact, capture them, correct?

    Scott: As constructed, there is a provision that would allow us to do it as required.

While Scott continued by arguing that the Commission already has equivalent regulatory powers and is not interested in regulating user content, the confirmation that Bill C-11 currently does cover user generated content should put an end to the government’s gaslighting that it does not.

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