Quotulatiousness

May 6, 2020

What’s on your bookshelf?

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

The self-appointed censors of righteousness demand to know!

Plenty of people like to be filmed against the backdrop of their bookshelves to convey the message or at least create the impression that they are smart. This has become even more common during the current extraordinary conditions of self-isolation, where virtually all the media interviews are conducted from home rather than in studio. Ditto for all the Zoom and other teleconferences. This, in turn, has given some people the opportunity to nose around and check out just what exactly others have on their shelves – presumably having read it and not just for decoration. It should be a fun exercise, but these days of perpetual outrage no fun goes unpunished.

By contrast, the picture of a bookshelf belonging to a Tory minister Michael Gove and his wife Sarah Vine was unsolicited, which probably adds to the regret right about now.

[…]

Books, like other human artifacts, are historical records and documents of our past. You might not like the course that the history took, but it’s important to know it and remember it.

And hypocrisy, because of the double standards.

Sure, Nazis, Nazi sympathisers, Holocaust deniers and assorted other apologists are mad, bad and dangerous to know. But what about communists? How many of those having a go at Gove and his wife for owning an Irving book have on their own shelves works by Marx, if not Lenin, Mao, Che and numerous related others? Those who have been inspired by and followed Marx’s idea (whether you think correctly or not) have been responsible for some 100 million premature deaths in the 20th century and other untold misery and devastation. Mao, the author of the little Red Book, accounts for up to 60 million of those (I happen to have a copy; does that make me a Maoist and a genocide fan?). But socialism is cool and you can’t blame Marx because to do so would be to delegitimise the whole socialist project. And of course the socialist ideals are all beautiful – equality! solidarity! community! dignity! – and, in any case, everyone has had good intentions. So all good, guys.

Read and own whatever the damn you like – and don’t let the fascists of any kind dictate your bookshelf. Except for 50 Shades of Grey. We’ll all judge you for that.

The main picture: some of my shelves – feel free to judge me.

I thought to take a picture of my own shelves, but Arthur Chrenkoff appears to have a broadly similar selection of books (more heavily weighted to British politics than mine), so I just nicked his photo to save the effort. (Thanks, Arthur! Hope you don’t mind!)

April 29, 2020

“The war on ultraviolet radiation because it might help Trump is an educational moment”

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

Arthur Chrenkoff on the sudden decision that the World Health Organization is the ultimate arbiter of what we’re allowed to say on social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube:

There is of course no evidence that the video represents any disinformation. It relates to legitimate scientific research by a medical company conducted in association with a respected hospital to develop a novel treatment of possibly crucial importance in the current conditions and into the future. The only problem with the video is that is indirectly supports Trump’s flight of fancy speculation about using light and chemicals to “disinfect” the body. Ergo, according to a NYT journalist it represents a problem and YouTube agrees. YouTube now has a standing policy of removing COVID information that goes against the World Health Organisation’s guidelines. Putting aside the question of the WHO’s credibility in the wake of the pandemic, we are not talking here about some guy in a tinfoil hat talking about 5G towers spreading the virus; this is a video relating to ongoing, respectable scientific research. Will it work? Probably not. But perhaps neither will any of the 150 or so COVID-19 vaccines being currently developed around the world. We won’t know until we know. But in the meantime, scientific news should not be censored, period.

[…]

Goldsmith and Woods are correct in pointing out not only the greater role that governments have been playing in regulating speech but more importantly how much of that effort has been embraced and driven by the big tech — and by the private individuals enabled and encouraged by the big tech — what I have previously called the “democratised censorship”. The difference is that people like Goldsmith and Woods think that’s a good thing.

The dirty little secret is that a great number of leftists, progressives and even centrist technocrats and activists look at China, with its authoritarian government, social credit score system, ubiquitous surveillance, and the ability to “get things done” and done quickly and supposedly efficiently (in China, bullet trains run on time, I hear), and pine for such a system to be applied in their own countries — as long as, of course, they are the ones in power and decide what is right, important and valuable. The left’s objections are rarely against authoritarianism and its means and methods per se, just with the possibility that someone else — like Trump — is the one behind the wheel, implementing their, not the left’s, agenda.

The war on ultraviolet radiation because it might help Trump is an educational moment. One could say, first they came for crazy conspiracy theorists and I said nothing because I’m not an anti-vaxxer or anti-5G activist — and so on. The problem with censorship is that it keeps creeping up on everyone else. And those who do the censoring — who decide what the ignorant masses should and shouldn’t be allowed to read — are not some detached and impartial spiritual beings but people with political agendas. People who think that ideas and beliefs of one half of the society are harmful and offensive. People who will censor news that doesn’t fit the agenda and support the narrative.

And then they came for ultraviolet radiation… You have been warned.

March 30, 2020

QotD: Free speech is the safety valve we must not eliminate

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[W]hen you’re a peddler of Utopia, you can’t admit you’re wrong or that your methods are crazy. After all, your cult of Marx (a college-professor friend recently shocked his students by pointing out Marx is a 19th century western idea — born of the mechanical age and the idea you can make everything just so — and that imposing this interpretation on non-Western systems is colonialist) promises eventual paradise and world domination. You can’t be wrong. It would mean your whole life has been in vain, and everything you’ve been taught is a lie.

The system might have moved the downtrodden from those “exploited” by the industrial revolution, to “minorities” “third world people” and people with interesting colorations — mostly because the “exploited” workers kept rising up in the world and spitting in the eye of Marx, the ungrateful bastages — but it’s totally still true and the way of the future. Even if it requires conceptualizing a future where no one works and everything is free, since they’ve now tossed the “workers” out of their ideal society. (Again, ungrateful bastages who don’t know how “good” the intellectuals are for them.) But it is totally the future!

So all those people who say that it’s still spinach and to hell with it? They’re just trying to destroy the train of happiness leading to the station of utopia.

Which means they must be silenced. If they’re just silenced, then the system will work fine, and everyone will be happy and joyful.

So the latest attack is on free speech. Because free speech can be hurty and say things the left doesn’t want to hear. Bad bad free speech must be stopped.

They already have laws against “hate speech” or “harassment”, which according to a comment here is “saying something I don’t like more than once” in most of the world.

The US is holding fast in our unreasonable devotion to the first amendment which irks the left as much as our devotion to the second. Don’t we understand that bad speech hurts people? And leads to bad think?

In any institution they control, from companies code of conduct to deplatforming people on twitter, to Google strangling hits to dissenting blogs, etc, they are already silencing that nasty, evil feedback.

Because if only they don’t hear the whistles of rising steam, the engine will never explode.

Cotton stuffed in their ears, they keep feeding more coal to the engine of public opinion and stopping up the steam vents.

The end of this is what happened to Ceausescu and his repulsive wife: “Beloved leader of the morning, pile of cooling, bullet riddled meat in the afternoon.”

But they don’t see it. They’re convinced if they just stop the feedback, the machine will work fine.

And they’re going to take all of us into the explosion. Mind you, in the end we win, they lose, but it’s going to get very rough there for a while.

Unfortunately when dealing with true believers, there’s nothing you can do but let them utterly prove their system wrong, before sane people can build again.

Sarah Hoyt, “Breaking the Gears”, According to Hoyt, 2018-01-03.

March 18, 2020

A classic “dirty book” of the late Middle Ages

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

I’m not well read in the classics, being much more of a history reader myself, so I didn’t know anything about The Decameron. Arthur Chrenkoff provides a helpful thumbnail of the book:

“A Tale from the Decameron” by John William Waterhouse (1916).
Image from the Lady Lever Art Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

Giovanni Boccaccio had written The Decameron in the aftermath of the Black Death pandemic of 1348, which carried away somewhere around one third of the European population. The book is set in a monastery, where seven young women and three young men, the Millennials of the day, self-quarantine themselves for ten days to avoid the plague and while away their days (there was no internet in those days, you see) telling each other stories, ten each day, all based around a chosen theme, such as love that ends happily or the tricks that women play on men. Many of the stories are a bit dirty, which is why The Decameron was put on the Catholic Church’s index of prohibited books; more interestingly, it was also banned in Australia until 1973, on pretty similar grounds.

March 14, 2020

“The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all”

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

In Quillette, Matt Johnson remembers the great anti-identitarian writer and speaker, Christopher Hitchens:

Christopher Hitchens speaking at The Amaz!ng Meeting held at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada on 20 January 2007.
Photo detail by ensceptico via Wikimedia Commons.

Hitchens thought fearlessly. As Martin Amis put it, he liked “the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite.” This is why he told the publisher of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything to organize a book tour that ran through the pulpits of the American South instead of remaining confined to the coasts. It’s why he relished every opportunity to lambaste Bill and Hillary Clinton in front of liberal audiences. It’s why he went after Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. He was an inveterate iconoclast — if there was a bloated reputation to puncture or a cherished dogma to deflate, he saw it as a duty and a pleasure to do so.

It’s no surprise that this oppositional inclination, coupled with blistering rhetorical ability, made Hitchens a deadly debater. After his death in December 2011, countless tributes and articles about Hitchens emphasized what a force he was in the studio and on the debate stage — his erudition and wit, his fluency, his seemingly superhuman memory. Hitchens is unforgettable for all these reasons, but people don’t miss him because he could turn a phrase or win an argument on CNN — they miss him because he thought for himself and refused to apologize for it. He didn’t want to write and speak as the representative of a community: “My own opinion is enough for me,” he told the audience at a debate on free speech in 2007, “and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority.”

“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” Orwell wrote in his original introduction to Animal Farm (which was, ironically, suppressed). He continued: “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” While there was far more official censorship in Orwell’s time, we’re living through an era of pervasive self-censorship, and as Packer explains, this type of silencing is “more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind.”

[…]

Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was — cliché is arguably forgivable here — very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:

    People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.

It’s easy to imagine what Hitchens would have thought about a recent New York Times headline that declared “The Next President Should Not Be a Man” or a prominent writer and activist who announced that she “will not support white male candidates in the Dem primary.” The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all. You don’t have to bother defending candidates’ principles and positions when gender and race are the only relevant variables.

February 27, 2020

Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU)

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

Brendan O’Neill explains why Toby Young’s FSU is so important right now:

The beautiful thing about the mad reaction to Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU) is that it proves why the union is so necessary. No sooner had Young unveiled his censorship-busting union than the illiberal liberals were out in force to mock it and ridicule it and to insist that, actually, there is no free-speech crisis in the UK. It’s a right-wing myth, they claim. There is no widespread censorship. People aren’t being shipped off to gulags for expressing an opinion. Apparently, the free-speech “grift” – God, I hate the word “grift” – is just a bunch of pale, male and stale blokes pissed off that they can no longer say the N-word or talk openly about women’s boobs. Freedom of speech is not under threat, the Young-bashers claim, and anyone who says it is is probably just an Islamophobe, transphobe or some other breed of phobe itching to spout bile with “no consequences”.

This rank denialism, this blinkered insistence that free speech is not in danger in 21st-century Britain, is exactly why we need the FSU and as broad a discussion as possible about the importance of the liberty to express oneself. Because the fact that so many inhabitants of the chattering-class bubble can’t even see that free speech is dying right now confirms how naturalised and uncontroversial the new censorship has become. They don’t even see it as censorship. They see it as perfectly normal, and good, in fact, that certain views cannot be expressed in public life or on social media. That’s how cavalier the new war on heretical opinion has become. At least in the past, from Torquemada to the McCarthyites, authoritarians were honest about being censors. Today’s self-elected moral guardians of correct opinion are so hubristic, so taken with their own mortal rectitude, that they don’t even see themselves as enemies of freedom, but rather as decent, unimpeachable maintainers of a natural intellectual order.

Things have come to such a pass that these people will literally seek to censor you in one breath and then express alarm at being called censors in the next breath. Hence the Guardian could publish a piece last week claiming that the idea that there is a culture of censorship in British universities is a “right-wing myth” while simultaneously defending censorship on campus. In an act of extraordinary moral contortionism, Evan Smith mocked the “idea that there is a free-speech crisis at British universities” and then, without missing a beat, he defended the policy of No Platform and the creation of safe spaces because “the university cannot be a place where racism and fascism – as well as sexism, homophobia and transphobia – are allowed to be expressed”. The Orwellianism is staggering. “There is no censorship on campus. Except the censorship I approve of. Which is not really censorship.” That is what is being said here. The intellectual dishonesty is almost impressive.

This Orwellian denialism of the existence of censorship by people who actually support and enact censorship cuts to the heart of the free-speech crisis in the UK. The reason the illiberal liberals and woke McCarthyites and Twittermobs don’t consider themselves to be censors – even as they gleefully agitate for the censorship of feminists, secularists worried about Islamist extremism, and right-wing people opposed to mass immigration – is because they have convinced themselves that certain forms of speech are not free speech. That certain beliefs should not be afforded the liberty of expression. You hear it in their telling, baleful mantra that “Hate speech is not free speech”. And if “hate speech” is not free speech, but rather some kind of toxin, a pox on public life, then crushing it is not censorship. It is more like an act of public health: cleansing the public realm of diseased thoughts that are liable to harm certain groups. These people see themselves not as censors, but as public-health activists delousing the community of germs spread by evil men and women.

February 5, 2020

Free speech and social media

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

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says that even people who say racist things should not be censored on social media:

Katie Hopkins is a racist. Anyone who hadn’t already gleaned that from her dalliances with the vile race-baiters of Generation Identity types or her use of the word “cockroaches” in a column about immigrants will surely see it now following the speech she made at a phoney awards ceremony in Prague. Internet pranksters invited Hopkins to accept the Campaign to Unite the Nation Trophy (CUNT), during which Hopkins made a speech filled with racist epithets. She mocked Pakistani speech patterns. She compared Asians to epileptics. She described Muslims as retards who rape their mothers. She said that if you shout “Mohammed” in a British playground, thousands of “fucking” kids will come running, and “you don’t want any of them”. Vile, hateful stuff.

And yet Hopkins should not be banned. She should not be thrown off social media. Censorship is not the right solution to any problem, including prejudicial or hateful commentary. Last week, Hopkins, to the delight of the illiberal liberals who make up the commentariat and cultural elite in the UK, had her Twitter account suspended. Reportedly at the behest of Countdown host and campaigner against anti-Semitism Rachel Riley, and the chief exec of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Imran Ahmed, Twitter erased all of Hopkins’ tweets and prevented her from accessing her account. People are celebrating this as a victory of decency over hatred; in truth, it is a victory of corporate power over freedom of speech.

[…]

That’s the thing: once you empower Twitter and other capitalist-founded platforms to decree who may speak and who may not, you are green-lighting a sweeping, global system of censorship. Both right-wing libertarians and left-wing radicals, ironically, say the same thing in response to this concern. They say, “Well, Twitter and the rest are private companies, so surely they have the right to say who can and cannot use their services”. It is predictable that the myopic libertarian right would so cavalierly elevate powerful corporations’ property rights over the free-speech rights of individuals – but to hear leftists do that is alarming. Clearly, their woke intolerance, their urge to censor everyone they disagree with, has now gone so far that they will happily empower unaccountable capitalists over ordinary people and give a nod of approval to the corporate control of public discussion.

And then there is the more difficult part of this discussion. Even if Hopkins had said genuinely racist things on Twitter – as she did in her Prague speech and has also done elsewhere – still she should not be censored. One of the many great things about freedom of speech is that it allows us to see what people really think. And that is empowering. It means that the rest of us – the potential audience to an individual’s speech – can use our intelligence and our principle to counter that speech, to criticise it, to ridicule it, to prove it wrong. Freedom of speech doesn’t only empower the speaker. It also empowers the audience. It allows us to exercise our moral judgement. Censorship, in contrast – whether it’s state censorship or corporate censorship – is fundamentally infantilising. It insults us and demeans us by blocking words and images on our behalf, as if we were children. It weakens our moral muscles and intellectual savvy by discouraging us from ever thinking for ourselves. Well, why should we, when wise people in government or Silicon Valley will think for us?

Katie Hopkins should be reinstated on Twitter. Not because she has anything of value to say, but for these three reasons. 1) Everyone, even objectionable people, must have the right to express themselves. That is the entire nature of freedom of speech. If we limit free speech, for any reason whatsoever, then it isn’t free speech at all. It is licensed speech, something gifted to us by officialdom or capitalism so long as we say things they find acceptable. 2) We, the audience, must have the right to hear all ideas and to decide for ourselves if they are good or bad. Anything else is just pure, foul paternalism that turns us from thinking citizens into overgrown children who must be protected from difficult ideas. 3) Corporate censorship is as bad as state censorship. Calling on powerful people or rich people to police the parameters of acceptable thought, and to expel anyone who says something bad, is a catastrophically erroneous thing to do. Trust people, not power; prefer freedom over control.

“On this issue, Canada’s two solitudes could hardly be more starkly apparent”

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

Chris Selley on the vastly different reaction from Quebec media to the Trudeau government’s notion to turn the country’s news organizations into a modern version of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda apparatus, pumping out approved-by-the-Liberals story lines:

On Sunday, when CTV’s Evan Solomon pushed Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault on the issue of issuing journalism licences to foreign media outlets, Guilbeault eventually just shrugged: “I’m not sure I see what the big deal is.”

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

The minister tried to walk it back on Monday, but the fact is many of his fellow Quebecers will also struggle to discern a big deal. There is simply much more tolerance of this sort of cultural gatekeeping among francophone Quebecers than in the Rest of Canada, and the tolerance extends well into the realm of journalism.

“In reading the (report’s) 260 pages and 97 recommendations, one word comes to mind” Sunday’s editorial in La Presse gushed: “Finally!”

Opposition to government regulation of journalism is firmly entrenched not just in anglophone Canada, but across the anglosphere. When the 2011 Leveson Inquiry proposed the British government create a powerful new press regulator, nearly every major outlet rejected the idea. Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, famously vowed the magazine “will not attend its meetings, pay its fines nor heed its menaces.”

The same year, Laval University professor Dominique Payette’s report into Quebec’s struggling news media recommended the government legislate a “professional journalist” designation. The province’s largest journalists’ trade organization and the Quebec Press Council happily sat down with the government to bash out a power-sharing agreement on deciding who’s a proper journalist and who isn’t.

The English-language Montreal Gazette was dead-set against the idea, but Le Devoir called it a “logical outcome.” (The power-sharing discussions eventually fell apart, and the idea died a merciful death.)

February 4, 2020

CRTC regulating the internet – “Nobody elsewhere is proposing anything like it, and for good reason: because it’s insane”

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

Ted Campbell suggests that the Canadian government most recent brainfart is a “Tea Party moment” for Canadians:

One commentator on social media dubbed this […] the moment when Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault said that the Trudeau regime plans to license news websites as a “Boston Tea Pary moment.”

N. Currier. Destruction of tea at Boston Harbor, 1846. [New York: N. Currier]
Retrieved from the Library of Congress – https://www.loc.gov/item/91795889/

She was referring to the protest, in December of 1773, when angry American colonists (many dressed as Native Americans to try and hide their true identities) dumped several hundred chests of tea, imported by the East India Company, into Boston harbour to protest the taxes, on almost everything, that had been imposed, by Westminster to pay for the Seven Years War. Westminster felt it was only fair to tax the colonists equally, along with the people of the British Isles, because much of the war, called the French-Indian War, now, by Americans, was fought to protect them and their vital commercial interests. The American colonists disagreed, many on the principle that they should not be taxed without being represented in parliament. We know where it all ended.

It’s a good question. Most commentators seem to agree with me that the Trudeau regime has seriously overreached in supporting the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel’s recommendations that, somehow, the distribution of “news” should be regulated by the government. That is a far, far greater intrusion into the liberty of free Canadian citizens than a tax on staples was to Americans in 1773.

Andrew Coyne, writing in the Globe and Mail, opines that “The whole thing is just breathtaking – a regulatory power grab without precedent, either in Canada or the democratic world. Nobody elsewhere is proposing anything like it, and for good reason: because it’s insane. This kind of bureaucratic micromanagement, with its obsession with ‘cultural sovereignty’ and ‘telling ourselves our own stories,’ would have been hopelessly outdated in 1990. In 2020, it’s just embarrassing.” He’s right to use the word “insane,” ~ the proposal is quite possibly unconstitutional, just for a start, it is, certainly based on a deeply mistaken idea of what the internet actually is ~ and he’s equally right to say that every Canadian who doesn’t, actively, protest against this must be embarrassed because each is, for no good reason at all that I can see, supporting a proposal that makes Canada less, far less, of a liberal democracy and more like Ethiopia and Senegal (both with scores below 6.0, the threshold for a Flawed Democracy in the well regarded Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest democracy index) where he will visit this week … perhaps to learn from the leaders of authoritarian regimes what his next steps should be to embarrass Canada further.

Michael Geist on the jaw-dropping performance of Trudeau’s Canadian Heritage Minister last weekend:

In June 2017, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage committee recommended implementing tax on Internet services in a report on media. Within minutes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the proposal at a press conference in Montreal. Trudeau’s answer – which literally came as committee chair Hedy Fry was holding a press conference on the report – was unequivocal: No. The government was not going to raise costs of Internet services with an ISP tax. The committee recommendation was minutes old and the government wasted absolutely no time in killing the proposal.

Last week, the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel proposed a far broader regulatory vision for the Internet. Indeed, it is difficult to give the full breadth of this plan its due. I will be posting this week on some of the most harmful aspects of the plan, including regulating media organizations around the world with penalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for failing to obtain licences, regulating streaming companies despite their massive investment in Canada, regulating everything from app stores to operating systems, creating liability for harmful content that violates Canada’s commitments in the USMCA, undermining net neutrality, and increasing the costs of Internet-based services for Canadian consumers.

Over the weekend, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault was asked about the proposal. In particular, he was asked about the proposal to licence foreign news sites (the example used was Breitbart but it could just as easily have been the New York Times, BBC, CNN, Fox or MSNBC). The answer should have been easy: no.

Instead of “no”, Minister Guilbeault’s response was that it was “no big deal.”

On Monday morning, the minister appears to have reconsidered being quite so blatant in indulging his inner authoritarian control freak:

Guilbeault walked back the comments on Monday, stating that the government had “no intention to impose licensing requirements on news organizations,” nor will the government “regulate news content.”

“… Our focus will be and always has been that Canadians have diversity to high-quality news sources,” said Guilbeault to reporters in Ottawa.

This announcement comes after deep criticism of a previous announcement by the Liberal government, where they said they would force news organizations to apply for a licence.

Guilbeault’s announcement faced intense scrutiny from across the political spectrum with some commentators suggesting that it would be a dangerous attack on the freedom of the press.

January 21, 2020

QotD: “Safe spaces” do not produce strong people

Filed under: Education, History, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What, after all, is the effect of shielding people from contrary opinions by designating and maintaining, under color of law or regulation, “safe spaces” for this or that minority? Does it make them stronger? Better able to deal with a harsh world? Does it change that objective world to something less harsh? No and no and no; it does none of that. Do you gain grit in a safe space? Ha. Do you learn endurance in a safe space? Oh, please.

No, It merely makes of them mollycoddles, weaklings, and in some important ways barely or not even human. That’s the effect of a safe space, to render those who hide in them weak and ignorant.

There are things worse than the safe space, though. That only weakens your brain by making sure you never have to reason about or argue in defense of your beliefs. And, at least, this moral weakening and brain-deadening thing is voluntary. Much worse is the movement to restrict free speech and to manipulate speech for political ends. This does what the safe space does, of course, but a simple saunter down memory lane shows it does so much more. Want to starve ten or twenty or fifty million of your own people to death? Want to gas a few million members of a despised minority? Want to hack to death half a million countrymen? Job one is attack speech.

Don’t you find it odd that your teachers have led you away from any history that would tend to show you that destruction and perversion of free speech is generally followed by massive murder? Don’t you find it a little odd that they place offending someone as worse somehow than starving, gassing, or shooting them to death?

Tom Kratman, “It’s Up to You, Millennials. Deflect or Be Doomed”, Milo, 2017-12-06.

December 16, 2019

“The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States”

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

Jason Morgan reviews Michael Rectenwald’s new book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom:

The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States. The monoculture of virtue signaling and high- and heavy-handed woke corporate leftism at places like Google, Twitter, and Facebook was once a source of chagrin for those who found themselves shut out of various internet sites for deviating from the orthodoxies of the Palo Alto elites. After the 2016 presidential election, however, it became obvious that the digitalistas were doing a lot more than just making examples of a few handpicked “extremists.” From the shadow banning of non-leftist sites and views to full-complement political propagandizing, Bay Area leftists have been so aggressive in bending the national psyche to their will that there is talk in the papers and on the cable “news” channels of “existential threats to our democracy.”

It is tempting to see this as a function of political correctness. Americans, and others around the world, who have found themselves on the “wrong side of history” (as determined by the cultural elite in an endless cycle of epistemological door closing) have long been shut out of conversations, their views deemed beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in enlightened modern societies. Google, Facebook, Twitter — are these corporations, and their uber-woke CEOs, just cranking the PC up to eleven and imposing their schoolmarmish proclivities on the billions of people who want to scrawl messages on their electronic chalkboards?

Not so, says reformed leftist — and current PC target — Michael Rectenwald. The truth of Stanford and Harvard alumni’s death grip on global discourse is much more complicated than just PC run amok. It is not that the Silicon Valley giants are agents of mass surveillance and censorship (although mass surveillance and censorship are precisely the business they’re in). It’s that the very system they have designed is, structurally, the same as the systems of oppression that blanketed and smothered free expression in so much of the world during the previous century. In his latest book, Google Archipelago, Rectenwald outlines how this system works, why leftism is synonymous with oppression, and how the Google Archipelago’s regime of “simulated reality” “must be countered, not only with real knowledge, but with a metaphysics of truth.”

Google Archipelago is divided into eight chapters and is rooted in both Rectenwald’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science and corporate control of culture, as well as in his own experiences. Before retiring, Rectenwald had been a professor at New York University, where he was thoroughly entrenched in the PC episteme that squelches real thought at universities across North America and beyond. Gradually, Rectenwald began to realize that PC was not a philosophy, but the enemy of open inquiry. For this reason, and because Rectenwald is an expert in the so-called digital humanities and the long history of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) thinking that feeds into it, Google Archipelago is not just a dry monograph about a social issue. By turns memoir, Kafkaesque dream sequence, trenchant rebuke of leftist censorship, and intellectual history of woke corporate political correctness, Google Archipelago is a welcoming window into a mind working happily in overdrive.

December 3, 2019

QotD: Defending freedom of speech

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

H.L. Mencken.

November 15, 2019

Murder and Fascism – Rise of the Ustaše | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1934 Part 3 of 4

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 14 Nov 2019

King Aleksandar has been working to forge a single Yugoslav identity in his troubled Balkan state. But ethnic nationalism still runs strong, and a shadowy fascist movement fiercely committed to destroying Yugoslavia is emerging.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel & Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations: Klimbim/Olga Shirnina: https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com

Oleg M, Dememorabilia, Julius Jääskeläinen, Adrien Fillon.

Image sources: FORTEPAN / Gyöngyi, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, TH-Bibliothek Zürich: Wehrli, Leo.

Icons from the Noun Project: jail by Strongicon, Police by IconTrack, Hand by Fahmi, coin stacks by emilegraphics, Government by Adrien Coquet, president by bezier master, dots by Alexander Skowalsky, List by Gregor Cresnar, Protest by Juan Pablo Bravo, crack by Dilon Choudhury, thunder by Phonlaphat Thongsriphong, Music by sanjivini, Death by Icon Island, curtains by Bartama Graphic.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
There is a lot going on in this episode. Extreme nationalism, fascism, authoritarianism, terrorism, and so on so forth. These things are controversial enough, but they’re also taking place in one of history’s biggest minefields: the Balkans. We’ve done absolutely everything we can to stick to the facts and stay objective. It’s a tough one to research but we have used credible academic texts and know we’ve done a good job.

If you think we’ve got something wrong, then feel free to (politely!) point it out in the comments. But remember that just because you don’t like how a particular group or person has acted, it doesn’t mean that the facts are wrong. Also, try to refrain from drawing any parallels with the modern-day to support your agenda. The fact that Yugoslavia struggled with ethnic tension has nothing to do with present-day debates on immigration and multiculturalism. Let’s stick to history, not myth.

Cheers,
Francis

November 6, 2019

QotD: “Fake news” is nothing new

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

… the basic ideas of “alternative facts” and “fake news” — our updated, revved-up forms of disinformation — were not foreign to Orwell. Working at the BBC as a news producer — a fancy term for war propagandist — he heard some of the Axis powers’ propaganda as well as that of his own side (even if he kept his own hands fairly clean). He justifiably feared that the very concept of objective truth was fading from the modern world. Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite or “rectify” history, so that it follows the current party line, whatever it may be at that moment.

Orwell himself saw all this happen when he read Catalan newspapers as well as British ones during the Spanish Civil War, several years before joining the BBC. Condemning press distortions, above all how several English newspapers reported the war, he wrote: “I saw great battles where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.'” Given the gridlock in American politics, and the never-ending verbal warfare between news outlets on the Right such as Fox News and on the Left such as MSNBC, Orwell appears all too accurate in his “predictions.”

One of the features of the world of Oceania reflecting Orwell’s prescience is its official language, Newspeak, an argot resembling a kind of Morse code that satirizes advertising norms, political jargon, and government bureaucratese. The purpose of Newspeak is to limit thought, on the view that “you can’t think what you lack the words for.” Ultimately, this impoverished language seeks to narrow and control human thought. (Does Twitter represent a step in that direction?) Purged of all nuance and subtlety, denuded of variety, and reduced to a few hundred simple words, Newspeak ultimately promises to render all independent thought (or “thoughtcrime”) impossible. If it cannot be expressed in language, it cannot be thought. And anything can fill the vacuum, such as 2 + 2 = 5. That is the equation — a perfect example of “doublethink” — which O’Brien indoctrinates Winston to accept in Room 101 and which marks the final step of the latter’s brainwashing. As the Party defines it, “doublethink” consists in holding “two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” In 2018, Trump’s lead lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, declared in a TV interview: “Truth isn’t truth.” A few months later, a talking head defended a critical news report on the grounds that, just because it is “not accurate doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

It testifies both to the brilliance of Orwell’s vision and to the bane of our times that Nineteen Eighty-Four retains so much relevance.

John Rodden and John Rossi, “George Orwell Warned Us, But Was Anyone Listening?”, The American Conservative, 2019-10-02.

November 1, 2019

Why All Germans Were Nazis – How Hitler Created the Third Reich | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1934 Part 1 of 4

Filed under: Germany, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 31 Oct 2019

After Hitler seized power in Germany in January 1933, he rapidly transformed the Democratic Weimar Republic into a repressive, totalitarian and racist state. In 1934, Germany became Nazi Germany.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Subscribe to our World War Two series: https://www.youtube.com/c/worldwartwo…

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Francis van Berkel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Image sources: Bundesarchiv, Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-15282A / Georg Pahl, Heinz Bergschicker Deutsche Chronik 1933-1945 – Ein Zeitbild der faschistischen Diktatur

Icons from the Noun Project: Police by IconTrack, soldier by Simon Child, police man by Gregor Cresnar, hello by Universal Icons.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

Spartacus Olsson
2 hours ago
Now, this episode explains the measures that the Nazis used to gain control over the German people. It is not an attempt to justify, or be apologetic of the responsibility for the horrors committed during the Nazi regime. But it is also not a blanket condemnation of Germans. What happened in Germany starting in 1933 should serve us all as a warning to what can happen when you let loose authoritarian power, normalize lies as an acceptable part of political discourse, and make mainstream the disregard of basic human values. We should all think of that although the Nazis were especially efficient in their implementation of an authoritarian system, they are by far not the only ones that have succeeded in seducing whole a nation into blind hatred and acceptance of the suffering and death of others to forward an ideology. We should remember that freedom and democracy is essential, but also that words matters. The beginning of oppression starts with an endless stream of lies that confuse public discourse to the point that facts don’t matter anymore and truth becomes fiction. This video shows us what can happen next. Our mantra as a channel is to focus on the facts, not our opinions, not our ‘truth’ — just the facts m’am — and that is what we have presented here, for better or worse.

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