Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2024

“So, as the pundits say, everywhere is warming faster than everywhere else”

Terry Etam on the totalitarian controls being imposed on citizens in Canada where under yet another censorship bill being pushed out to ensure that nobody says anything that contravenes some yet-to-be-determined “internationally recognized methodology”:

And then, as a final but impressive gasp of inept state control, witness Canada’s frantic flailing to control the situation by …

Send in the goons: Canada cracks down on any speech it doesn’t like, with sweeping rules measured against undefined regulations, and enters the historical pantheon of legendarily badly run states

We’ve all heard about bill C-59 by now, the government of Canada’s crackdown on any comments related to emissions reduction mitigation efforts that do not adhere to “internationally recognized methodology”. It’s a Soviet-style attempt to crack down on any talk about what companies are doing to reduce emissions, or anything they do that is an attempt to reduce “the environmental, social and ecological causes or effects of climate change”.

The apes in charge, and their sycophants, say hey, it’s not censorship at all, you can talk about emissions reduction all day long, so long as it meets some undefined international standard, and the onus of proof is on anyone making the statement to show that they are not violating some “internationally recognized methodology” that does not exist.

This whole fiasco is of course a one way street; the freedom to say anything that cements the climate emergency narrative remains gloriously unchecked. For example, energy commentator David Blackmon recently catalogued on LinkedIn the number of countries/regions that claim to be warming faster than the global average: Canada, Mexico, Latin America and Caribbean, Arctic, Asia, Africa, the US, Europe, Russia, Australia, China, and Finland all claim to be warming faster than the global average. The high priest of modern politicized science, Scientific American, says that oceans are also warming 40 percent faster than expected, and that oceans absorb up to 90 percent of the warming caused by human carbon emissions, and SA also notes that the South Pole is warming “three times faster than the global average”. So, as the pundits say, everywhere is warming faster than everywhere else.

Extrapolating from this, in keeping with necessary mathematical precedents such as how averages work, then the few remaining regions not mentioned must be plummeting in temperature, because that’s how averages work. And I mean plummeting, if it alone is offsetting the above-average gains in the rest of the world. Strange indeed how not a single headline can be found to that effect.

The speech police have no problem with such math crimes, because the asinine claims are put forth under the banner of “science”. It must be concluded then that math is not one of the “internationally recognized methodologies”.

No matter. The point is, as always, to silence discussions and ram through whatever ideological junk they can while still clinging to power like a bee holding onto an accelerating windshield.

Welcome to Canada, where if global embarrassment were an Olympic sport we’d be wearing perma-gold. Joke’s on us though; we elected these people. We should now clearly understand why Canada’s status as an investment haven is plummeting like a shot duck. (Do not point me towards legendary genius Warren Buffett who says he is comfortable investing in Canada; Buffett buys existing businesses, with moats, and the government of Canada is working to build those moats as fast as it can. Remember this investing rule for the foreseeable future: existing infrastructure is getting more valuable, because building anything gets harder by the day.)

It is probably unfair to single out Canada for such withering criticism when other western countries are on similar energy suicide missions. Australia, England, Germany … all under the spell of radicals that will accept nothing other than total nihilistic energy “victory”, a crown that seems to mean de-industrialization and subjugation of citizens in autos they don’t want, doing things they don’t want to, and not being permitted to say what they want to. (New Zealand was in that club as well, but has recently repealed a ban on oil & gas exploration when it dawned on them that fields decline, and do not produce at flat levels in perpetuity without investment. Yes, western governments really have enacted such legislation while simultaneously holding an astonishing ignorance about how energy really works.)

As far as Canada’s hydrocarbon sector goes, the most important thing to do at this stage is to keep our heads [down] and carry on providing the energy the world desperately needs. And that means every single person, right down to Guilbeault’s Greenpeace and the soup throwing fools of Just Stop Oil. If the feds are going to outlaw emissions talk, let them … the rotten foundations of their world can’t stand for much longer.

No one should stand taller than one that provides reliable and affordable energy for the globe’s citizens. Go back to work, and patiently wait until the inevitable happens, the day when governments are no longer able to pretend they can’t see reality. It’s going to be epic.

June 24, 2024

Justin Trudeau’s Ominous Online Harms Act: Minority Report Comes to Canada: Conor Friedersdorf

Quillette
Published Jun 19, 2024

Jonathan Kay talks to Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf about a censorious government bill that would allow officials to investigate Canadians for things they haven’t done yet.

https://quillette.com/2024/06/19/just…

——

Quillette is an Australian-based online magazine that focuses on long-form analysis and cultural commentary. It is politically non-partisan, but relies on reason, science, and humanism as its guiding values.

Quillette was founded in 2015 by Australian writer Claire Lehmann. It is a platform for free thought and a space for open discussion and debate on a wide range of topics, including politics, culture, science, and technology.

Quillette has gained attention for publishing articles and essays that challenge modern heterodoxy on a variety of topics, including gender and sexuality, race and identity politics, and free speech and censorship.
(more…)

June 23, 2024

The amazing range of things Britain’s Ofcom gets its tentacles into

Earlier this week, Mark Steyn discussed the British government’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) and the way it rigs regulates who can say what during British election campaigns:

Why do I think the UK state censor Ofcom should be put out of business? Because there are very few areas of British life that this strange, secretive body does not “regulate”. Take, for example, this current UK election campaign, which the media are keen to keep as a torpid Potemkin struggle between TweedleLeft and TweedleRight. So, on Thursday night, BBC bigshot Fiona Bruce will host a debate between the four party leaders – that’s to say, the head honchos of the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

Wait a minute: what about Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform party? Since the beginning of the year, Reform has been third-placed in the polls, ahead of the LibDems and Greens, and last week they rose to second place ahead of the unlovely Tories.

So why wouldn’t the second-place party get a spot in the leaders’ telly debate?

Ah, well, you’re looking at it all wrong, you hick. Here’s how the Beeb explain it:

    The Ofcom guidance gives “greater weight on the actual performance of a political party in elections over opinion poll data” taking into account the “greater uncertainty associated with support in opinion polls”.

The “actual performance of a political party” refers to their results in the two previous elections — 2019 and 2015 — when Reform didn’t exist. A lot of other things didn’t exist in 2015: Brexit, Covid, lockdown, the Ukraine war, legions of vaccine victims, the massed ranks of Albanian males occupying English country-house hotels …

But, per “Ofcom guidance”, Campaign 2024 has to be conducted on the basis of how things stood a decade ago.
You know who would also be ineligible to participate under Ofcom’s rules? Everyone’s favourite Lana Turner sweater-girl in Kiev, Volodymyr Zelenskyyyyy. He only formed his Servant of the People party in late 2017, so no election debates for you, sweater-girl. And don’t try blaming it on Putin, because it’s “Ofcom guidance” so we all know it’s on the up-and-up.

Because, as their barrister assured the High Court, Ofcom are “expert regulators”. Lord Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes probably did a module in regulation at Rotherham Polytechnic or whatever.

I can see why the likes of Naomi Wolf’s creepy stalker-boy Matthew Sweet like this system: it’s a club and they get to decide who’s admitted. It’s less obvious why the generality of the citizenry put up with it. At any rate, get set for another thrilling BBC election debate in which all four “opponents” agree on Covid, climate, Ukraine, the joys of mass Muslim immigration and the inviolability of the NHS … but ever more furiously denounce each other for not tossing enough money that doesn’t exist into the sinkhole.

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like that pixie Green leader who describes herself as a “pansexual vegan”, and I certainly don’t have the personal baggage with her that I have with Nige. But under what rational conception of media “regulation” does the six per cent basement-dweller get guaranteed a seat at the table but not Reform?

And you wonder why nothing changes?

May 6, 2024

Kulak on banned fantasy novels hated by Feminists

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

There are books that get banned for all sorts of reasons — histories that tell the “wrong” facts, books beloved by terrorists, political tracts by wild-eyed fanatics, etc. — but they’re not the ones Kulak is talking about here:

… the fiction books that are banned are usually fictionalized versions of those, works like Camp of the Saints, or The Turner Diaries, despite their ability to move people emotionally are not banned for their emotional content but for their political content (and in the case of The Turner Diaries its accurate instructions on bomb making)

HOWEVER! There is one series that was driven from bookstores, and by the late 90s was almost totally disappeared based purely on the … “feelings” … it generated in its readers. A fantasy series set entirely on another world with more or less nothing to say about politics back on earth, awakened … stirrings … in its readers so disturbing to the powers that be it had to be stopped.

The Chronicles of GOR by John Norman (Pen-name of Philosophy Professor John Lange)

Begun in 1966 and continuing to … today (he’s 92), the 38 book series is a Pulp Science Fantasy series in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Barsoom” series (shout out to John Carter of Postcards From Barsoom)

It has a lot of neat fantasy/historical/military hypotheticals to get the young male mind going “what if Vikings raided Japanese samurai cities with flying monsters?” but the thing that outraged the feminists and what they’d never admit enraged them, was its effect on female readers.

Norman has a lot of theories about sex … theories which his millions of books sold suggest are very true. Theories which recent DNA discoveries have confirmed.

At SEVERAL points in the genetic record you and nearly everyone on earth, have approximately 17 female ancestors for every 1 male ancestor.

This was of course the result of patriarchal warfare, polygamy, and sexual slavery … The kind familiar to any readers of the Iliad.

Indeed Norman cites Homer, Freud, and Nietzsche as the primary influences on his philosophy.

But whereas this produced the ancient and then modern warfighting man boys and young men idolize from the Iliad, through Rome, to the Mongols, to the adventures and conquests of early modern Europe. And whose feuds and daring consume half the plot of Norman’s stories …

The real controversy is what it produced of the women.

Women are natural slaves Norman tells and in the later books shows (the books greatly improved over time: don’t read them in order)

While these periods of slaving warfare between peoples and tribes produced modern technical, competent, highly coordinated and cooperative man … In women it produced natural slaves. Women who’d long for the chain, women who’d desire nothing so much as to be owned and to submit to a powerful violent man not of their choosing … women who’d never feel so “””empowered””” as when they obey, and surrender the spirits, bodies, and wombs which they cannot defend. Who’d never feel so loved and wanted as when they are abused and disdained.

This is the world and theory of mind Norman paints with a philosopher’s attention to completeness … 38 books deconstructing and undoing not only modern feminist ideas of equality, but Christian ideas of the equality of the soul and nobility of the feminine spirit. By any standard maybe the most sexist misogynistic books ever written, not out of ignorance or resentment but a philosopher’s indifference to any social or ethical preening that might impede the truth …

And women freaking loved it.

I encountered Captive of Gor at a mainstream book store in Mississauga in about 1975, and I was amazed that it was available for sale in still-pretty-conservative Ontario. I read several of the other books in the series, but I had no idea the author was still adding new volumes down to the present day. I can’t remember the last time I saw one for sale, but I guess the fans can still get their hands on them even if ordinary book stores no longer carry them.

May 2, 2024

Gad Saad’s latest “affront to human dignity” kerfuffle

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

Gad Saad managed to do more than just ruffle the feathers of the Québécois last year by calling the Quebec accent “an affront to human dignity”:

In my 30-year career as a professor and public intellectual, I have never shied away from tackling sacred cows. As a free speech absolutist, I firmly believe that short of the usual caveats (e.g., direct incitement to violence, defamation), free speech is a deontological principle that is inviolable. As a Jewish person, I support arguably the most offensive speech possible, namely the denial of the Holocaust. Such is the price that we must pay to live in a truly free society.

As I explain in my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, the operative zeitgeist in the West is that one’s speech should be tempered in order to minimize the prospect of hurt feelings. This is a terrible reflex in that it forces people to engage in arguably the most pervasive form of censorship, self-censorship. The reality though is that truth must be anti-fragile to mockery, derision, satire, criticism and scrutiny. If it cannot withstand such stressors, it is undoubtedly false. Or as the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk remarked in Critique of Cynical Reason (p. 288): “How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false.”

This brings me to a bewildering episode that I faced last summer. The cancel mob came for me albeit in a truly unexpected manner. On July 25, I appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast for the ninth time to promote the release on that day of my latest book, titled The Saad Truth About Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life (paperback edition to be released on May 14, 2024). My conversations with Joe are always fun, informative and far-ranging. At one point during our chat, we were jocularly discussing various accents that I found to be auditorily unappealing. I remarked that my family and I had just returned from Portugal, and accordingly I had found the Portuguese accent to be less than attractive. I then qualified Hebrew as “violently ugly”. But it was the third accent that unleashed the tsunami of rage, insults, threats and calls to have me fired from my 30-year professorship. I jokingly said that the French-Canadian accent was an “affront to human dignity”. The sentence in question has become a trademark hyperbolic humorous phrase that I use when expressing an over-the-top esthetic opinion. It is a running gag that has appeared on numerous occasions on my X (formerly Twitter) feed. I have referred to The Beatles, musicals, Lionel Messi haters, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo, and the song “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette as an affront to human dignity/decency. If my wife burns our dinner, I might joke with her that the dish is an affront to human dignity.

In the past, I have triggered the ire of many ideological groups including Islamists, trans activists and vegans. But nothing compared to the unbridled hate that I received from some of my fellow Quebecers, which was largely set off by an article written by Marc Cassivi in La Presse regarding my apparent “linguistic genocide”. My stellar 30-year record as an academic and international bestselling author had never managed to capture the attention of French-Canadian society but once I dared to joke about the local accent, I had committed a linguistic capital crime. And it was time for me to pay!

April 24, 2024

Australia cribs from Trudeau’s notes and tries to censor the internet outside their borders

Filed under: Australia, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains to the Australian federal government why their attempt to force Elon Musk to obey Australian diktats on Twit-, er, I mean “X” outside Australia is extreme over-reach and should be firmly rejected:

It’s entirely true that Elon Musk is a centibillionaire currently telling the Australian Government that they can fuck off. It’s also true that if Elon Musk were of my level of wealth — or perhaps above it and into positive territory — he should be telling the Australian Government to fuck off.

This also applies to the European Union and that idiocy called the right to be forgotten which they’ve been plaguing Google with. Also to any other such attempts at extraterritoriality. Governments do indeed get to govern the places they’re governments of. They do not get to rule everyone else — the correct response to attempts to do so is fuck off.

So, Musk is right here:

What this is about doesn’t really matter. But, v quickly, that attack on the Armenian Church bishop is online. It’s also, obviously, highly violent stuff. You’re not allowed to show highly violent stuff in Oz, so the Oz government insist it be taken down. Fair enough – they’re the government of that place. But they are then demanding further:

    On Monday evening in an urgent last-minute federal court hearing, the court ordered a two-day injunction against X to hide posts globally….

Oz is demanding that the imagery be scrubbed from the world, not just that part of it subject to the government of Oz. Leading to:

    Australia’s prime minister has labelled X’s owner, Elon Musk, an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law”

And

    Anthony Albanese on Tuesday said Musk was “a bloke who’s chosen ego and showing violence over common sense”.

    “Australians will shake their head when they think that this billionaire is prepared to go to court fighting for the right to sow division and to show violent videos,” he told Sky News. “He is in social media, but he has a social responsibility in order to have that social licence.”

To which the correct response is that “Fuck off”.

For example, I am a British citizen (and would also be an Irish one if that country ever managed to get up to speed on processing foreign birth certificates) and live within the EU. Australian law has no power over me — great great granny emigrated from Oz having experienced the place after all. It’s entirely sensible that I be governed by whatever fraction of EU law I submit to, there are aspects of British law I am subject to as well (not that I have any intention of shagging young birds — or likelihood — these days but how young they can be is determined not just by the local age of consent but also by British law, even obeying the local age where I am could still be an offence in British law). But Australian law? Well, you know, fu.. … .

“What is to be done?” – N.S. Lyons at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels

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

I suspect the recent National Conservatism Conference in Brussels would have been a mere blip in the media if it hadn’t been for the dedicated and persistent efforts of local Belgian politicians and activists to prevent it from happening at all, using almost every tool at their disposal. By chasing the event from venue to venue, intimidating the businesses who had contracted to provide services to the event and then finally sending in a massive police presence to physically prevent the conference from going forward, it became a nine-day wonder. One of the people invited to speak at the event was N.S. Lyons:

“What is to be done?” That seems to be the question on everyone’s lips these days. Answering it is I think in fact the real purpose of this conference on National Conservatism here in Brussels.

By now most of us are well aware of the scope of the problems we face. Our societies are controlled by a transnational class of managerial elites increasingly isolated from the people they rule, and from reality. These elites, and the many institutions they control, have been captured by a revolutionary ideology that seeks to remake the world, and everyone in it, from the top down.

The vast machinery of modern managerial technocracy has been turned against us, its bulging bureaucracies seeking to impose on us a totalizing project of internal colonization. Our systems of self-governance, the cultural fabric of our national ways of life, even our very human nature are being intentionally suppressed and replaced with the stifling conformity of a rigid system of ideological and technological control. All remaining semblances of democratic accountability are today being cast aside in favor of governance via mass manipulation and open coercion. Increasingly, any dissent is treated as a threat to the security of the state – and is punished as such.

As has been so amply demonstrated by the police outside our very doors, dispatched to shut down this conference, for conservatives and other dissidents this state of affairs means escalating exclusion and persecution. The reality is that any “liberal neutrality” or “rule of law” once maintained by the state no longer exists – such restraint was an artifact of the old order.

Meanwhile, managerialism’s progressive project has produced a deliberate inversion of moral values, a degradation of competence, and an implosion of social trust. This has begun to induce collapse in the basic systems upholding civilization. The result is a proliferation of crime, addiction, social atomization, and general despair, dysfunction, disorder, and decay. So now we suffer under a state of simultaneous anarcho-tyranny.

What is to be done? First of all, it should be clear by now that old guard conservatism will be of no use to us whatsoever. For decades, such a conservatism has failed to conserve much of anything at all. Even when successfully elected to political office with a strong mandate, conservatives of this mode are soon either coopted by the oligarchic establishment or find themselves isolated and helpless before the vast unelected managerial “deep state”.

They have proven themselves unable to combat either the relentless march of progressive cultural hegemony, or the growing technocratic tyranny that openly advertises its intent to ultimately destroy them. Over and over again, they are fast reduced to blustering uselessly at Congressional hearings, whining on talk shows, or settling in to merely grift whatever they can, while they can. So, unfortunately, just “voting harder” will not be enough to get us out of our present mess.

April 7, 2024

QotD: Censorship works, but not the way the censors think it does

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

Preference Falsification — If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech — whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship — is ultimately a request to be deceived.

Gurwinder Bhogal, “33 concepts to survive the year”, UnHerd, 2024-01-01.

April 5, 2024

“[T]oo many charlatans of this species have already been allowed to make vast fortunes at the expense of a gullible public”

Colby Cosh on his “emerging love-Haidt relationship” as Jonathan Haidt’s new book is generating a lot of buzz:

If Haidt has special expertise that wouldn’t pertain to any well-educated person, I wonder a little in what precise realm it lies. Read the second sentence of this article again: he’s a psychologist … who teaches ethics … at a business school? Note that he seems to have abandoned a prior career as an evolutionary biology pedlar, and the COVID pandemic wasn’t kind to his influential ideas about political conservatives being specially motivated by disgust and purity. Much of The Anxious Generation is instead devoted to trendy findings from “neuroscience” that it might be too kind to describe as “speculative”. (I’ll say it again until it’s conventional wisdom: a “neuroscientist” is somebody in a newly invented pseudofield who couldn’t get three inches into the previously established “-ology” for “neuro-“.)

These are my overwhelming prejudices against Haidt; and, in spite of all of them, I suspect somebody had to do what he is now doing, which is to make the strongest available case for social media as a historical impactor on social arrangements and child development. Today the economist/podcaster Tyler Cowen has published a delightfully adversarial interview with Haidt that provides a relatively fast way of boning up on the Haidt Crusade. Cowen belongs to my pro-innovation, techno-optimist, libertarian tribe: we both feel positive panic at the prospect of conservative-flavoured state restrictions on media, which are at the heart of the Haidt agenda.

But reading the interview makes me somewhat more pro-Haidt than I would otherwise be (i.e., not one tiny little bit). On a basic level, Cowen doesn’t, by any means, win the impromptu debate by a knockout — even though he is one of the most formidable debaters alive. Haidt has four key reforms he would like to see implemented politically: “No smartphones before high school; no social media before age 16; phone-free schools; far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.”

This is a fairly limited, gentle agenda for school design and other policies, and although I believe Haidt’s talk of “rewiring brains” is mostly ignorable BS, none of his age-limitation rules are incompatible with a free society, and none bear on adults, except in their capacity as teachers and parents.

The “rewiring” talk isn’t BS because it’s necessarily untrue, mind you. Haidt, like Jordan Peterson, is another latter-day Marshall McLuhan — a boundary-defying celebrity intellectual who strategically turns speculation into assertion, and forces us, for better or worse, to re-examine our beliefs. McLuhan preached that new forms of media like movable type or radio do drive neurological change, that they cause genuine warp-speed human evolution — but his attitude, unlike Haidt’s, was that these changes are certain to happen, and that arguing against them was like arguing with the clouds in favour of a sunny day. The children who seem “addicted” to social media are implicitly preparing to live in a world that has social media. They are natives of the future, and we adults are just observers of it.

April 1, 2024

“The loss of capacity for memory or real experience is what makes people susceptible to the work of cartoon pseudo-intellectuals”

Matt Taibbi strongly encourages his readers to exercise their brains, get out of the social media scroll-scroll-scroll trap, and stay sane:

After a self-inflicted wound led to Twitter/X stepping on my personal account, I started to worry over what looked like the removal of multiple lanes from the Information Superhighway. Wikipedia rules tightened. Google search results seemed like the digital equivalent of a magician forcing cards on consumers. In my case, content would often not even reach people who’d registered as social media followers just to receive those alerts.

I was convinced the issue was political. There was clear evidence of damage to the left and right independents from companies like NewsGuard, or the ideologically-driven algorithms behind Google or Amazon ad programs, to deduce the game was rigged to give unearned market advantages to corporate players. The story I couldn’t shake involved video shooter Jon Farina, whose footage was on seemingly every cable channel after J6, but which he himself was barred from monetizing.

Now I think differently. After spending months talking to people in tech, I realize the problem is broader and more unnerving. On top of the political chicanery, sites like Twitter and TikTok don’t want you leaving. They want you scrolling endlessly, so you’ll see ads, ads, and more ads. The scariest speech I heard came from a tech developer describing how TikTok reduced the online experience to a binary mental state: you’re either watching or deciding, Next. That’s it: your brain is just a switch. Forget following links or connecting with other users. Four seconds of cat attacking vet, next, five ticks on Taylor Ferber’s boobs, next, fifteen on the guy who called two Chinese restaurants at once and held the phones up to each other, next, etc.

Generations ago it wasn’t uncommon for educated people to memorize chunks of The Iliad, building up their minds by forcing them to do all the rewarding work associated with real reading: assembling images, keeping track of plot and character structure, juggling themes and challenging ideas even as you carried the story along. Then came mass media. Newspapers shortened attention span, movies arrived and did visual assembly for you, TV mastered mental junk food, MTV replaced story with montages of interesting nonsensical images, then finally the Internet came and made it possible to endlessly follow your own random impulses instead of anyone else’s schedule or plot.

I’m not a believer in “eat your vegetables” media. People who want to reform the press often feel the solution involves convincing people that [they] just should read 6,000-word ProPublica investigations about farm prices instead of visiting porn sites or watching awesome YouTube compilations of crane crashes. It can’t work. The only way is to compete with spirit: make articles interesting or funny enough that audiences will swallow the “important” parts, although even that’s the wrong motive. Rolling Stone taught me that the lad-mag geniuses that company brought in in the nineties, who were convinced Americans wouldn’t read anything longer than 400 words in big type, were wrong. In fact, if you treat people like grownups, they tend to like a challenge, especially if the writer conveys his or her own excitement at discovery. The world is a great and hilarious mystery and if you don’t have confidence you can make the story of it fun, you shouldn’t be in media. But there is one problem.

Inventions like TikTok, which I’m on record saying shouldn’t be banned, are designed to create mentally helpless users, like H addicts. If you stand there scrolling and thinking Next! enough, your head will sooner or later be fully hollowed out. You’ll lose the ability to remember, focus, and decide for yourself. There’s a political benefit in this for leaders, but more importantly there’s a huge commercial boon. The mental jellyfish is more susceptible to advertising (which of course allows firms to charge more) and will show less and less will over time to walk out of the Internet’s various brain-eating chambers.

A cross of Jimmy Page and Akira Kurosawa probably couldn’t invent long-form content to lure away the boobs-and-cat-video addicts these sites are making. The loss of capacity for memory or real experience is what makes people susceptible to the work of cartoon pseudo-intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari, who seem really to think nothing good or interesting happened until last week. The profound negativity of these WEF-style technocrats about all human experience until now reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, whose dystopian characters feared books because “They show the pores of the face of life”.

March 29, 2024

QotD: Pay no attention to the empty suit behind the social media curtain!

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

These days, there’s no discernible relationship between “content” and “revenue”, because Facebook doesn’t have “revenue”. All it has is a ticker symbol. Much like Enron, whatever physical product Facebook might once have theoretically produced — all those cat pictures — has been totally subsumed into share price fuckery. Yeah yeah, theoretically their “revenue” comes from ads, but as is well known, a) there is not, and never has been, in any industry, a discernible causal relationship between ads and revenue, and b) Facebook lies through its teeth about it anyway. How many times have they been caught now, including in sworn testimony to Congress?

Given all that, why not censor? Why not let your freak flag fly? Just as being innovative actually counts against you in the music biz these days — sure, sure, y’all might be the next Beatles, but we know Taylor Swift’s lab-grown replacement will move fifty million units — so there are considerable drawbacks, in the social media moguls’ minds, to letting just any old schmoe post anything he wants up on their platforms. What if Faceborg’s ad-generation algorithm decides to put a #woke company’s ad on a badthinker’s page? Faceborg’s entire business model rests on getting #woke companies to keep buying ads, since those ad buys are the only thing that keep the stock price up. And since those #woke corporations have made it abundantly clear that they don’t want those people’s business …

Swing it back to the top. Faceborg et al have figured out a surefire way to “make money” by manipulating their stock price. They don’t need a physical product to do it, but what they absolutely must have, the one thing from which all others flow, is “clicks”. Eyeballs. Whatever you want to call it, the whole house of cards is built on the premise that there are actual users out there — real, physical people, who exist in meatspace — who might theoretically buy the advertisers’ products. But … what if there aren’t?

Zuck et al have been pretty good at faking it so far, but as everyone knows, they are faking. For one thing, they keep getting caught. For another, even academics — the dumbest critters in captivity, Commodore 64-level NPCs who can be counted on to swallow the SJW narrative hook line and sinker — keep publishing studies showing that some huge number of all social media accounts, on all platforms, are bogus.

Indeed, you can test it for yourself. I know, I know, FED!!!!, but hear me out: Get a VPN. Sign up for a burner email. Rejigger the VPN, then use the burner email to sign up for Faceborg, Twitter, whatever. Don’t actually post anything; just sign up. It’s 1000 to 1 that even with no activity whatsoever, you’ll still be deluged with friend requests. The algorithms will take care of that, because as we’ve noted, they have to push the illusion that people are using these platforms, that eyeballs are landing on pages, that fingers are clicking on ads. You’ll get a whole list of “suggestions” of which accounts to follow, all of which — surprise surprise — are never more than a click away from some big advertiser.

Severian, “Own Goals”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-21.

March 22, 2024

Four years later

Kulak hits the highlights of the last four years in government overstretch, civil liberties shrinkage, the rise of tyrants local and national, and the palpably still-growing anger of the victims:

4 years ago, at this exact moment, we were in the “two weeks” that were supposed to flatten the Curve of Covid.

4 years ago you were still a “conspiracy theorist” if you thought it would be anything more than a minor inconvenience that would last less than a month.

Of course if you predicted that this would not last 2 weeks, but over 2 years; that within 2 months anti-lockdown protests would end in storming of state houses and false-flag FBI manufactured kidnapping attempts of Governors; that within 3 riots would burn a dozens of American cities; that the election would be inconclusive; that matters would go before the US Supreme Court, again; that a riot/mass entrapment would take place within the halls of congress … And then that this was just the Beginning …

That Big-Pharma would rush a vaccine which may well have been more dangerous that the virus; that Australia and various countries would build concentration camps for unvaccinated; that nearly all employers would be pressured or mandated to FORCE this vaccine on their employees; that vaccine passports would be implemented to track your biological status; that Canada and several other countries would implement travel restrictions on the unvaccinated and collude with their neighbors to prevent their population escaping; and then that, nearly 2 years from 2weeks to slow the spread, Canadians!? would mount one of the most logistically complex protests in human history, in the dead of winter, besieging Ottawa and blockading the US border to all trade in an apocalyptic showdown to break free of lockdowns …

Well … not even Alex Jones predicted all of that, though he got a remarkable amount of it.

Indeed the reverence with which Jones is now treated, a Cassandra-like oracle who predicts the future with seemingly (and memeably) 100% clairvoyance only to doomed to disbelief. That alone would have been unpredictable, or unbelievable in those waning days of the long 2019, those first 2-3 months when you could imagine 2020 would MERELY be an Trumpianly heated election cycle like 2016, and not a moment Fukuyama’s veil threatened to tear and History pour back into the world.

Oh, and also the bloodiest European war since the death of Stalin broke out.

March 20, 2024

Google’s unmissable leftward biases

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

Tom Knighton on a recent New York Post article calling out Google for their strong political biases and how they inform everything that Google and its subsidiaries and affiliates do:

Once, the company was well-known for having the phrase “Don’t be evil” painted on a wall in their headquarters. It’s a noble sentiment, but apparently, it’s now more like “Don’t be evil.”

That’s pretty clear after what we learned from the New York Post:

    Google has been putting its thumb on the scale to help Democratic candidates win the presidency in the last four election cycles during which it censored Republicans, according to a right-leaning media watchdog.

    The Media Research Center published a report alleging 41 instances of “election interference” by the search engine since 2008.

    The MRC published a report accusing Google of having “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship.”

    The report comes weeks after AllSides conducted an analysis which found that news aggregator Google News skewed even more off the charts in 2023.

    Google has also come under fire after its Gemini AI image generator produced “woke”-inspired and historically inaccurate images such as black Vikings, female pope and Native Americans among the Founding Fathers.

Now, Google denies the claims and someone close to the company took issue with the methodology used to detect this supposed interference.

But the truth of the matter is that there’s absolutely no reason to believe Google on this because we’ve seen enough of it previously to know better.

For example, YouTube has a profoundly leftward bias. The site is notorious for silencing right-wing voices while allowing leftists to get away with trampling community standards willy-nilly. YouTube is owned by Google, which means they’re at least tacitly endorsing the strategy.

From there, it’s not difficult to see the mothership taking on a similar role, if not originating it. They’re just able to hide it easier.

But even there, we can see it.

I use Google’s news feed regularly, particularly for my work at Bearing Arms. It’s common for me to look up “gun rights” and the first article that shows up, unless I set it for the most recent stories, be one treating them as a negative thing.

So yeah, I have no doubt that Google is playing favorites.

The worst part is that there isn’t anything that can be done through the legal system as far as I’m aware. But that doesn’t mean someone there didn’t realize what they are doing is wrong.

Most probably didn’t, though. They believe the Holy Progressive Cause is so vital, so unerringly good, that they can and should do anything to serve it. That includes displaying a staggering degree of bias in the service of what you believe to be the greater good, your business be damned.

But they knew it would be considered wrong by a great many people, which is why they’re hiding it.

March 19, 2024

Canada’s new international role: the object lesson in failure and tyranny

Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the foreign impressions of Canada’s descent into the west’s object lesson in what not to do in almost every area:

In just the last week, there have been two separate columns in British newspapers framing Canada as a model of what not to do.

Both were inspired by the tabling of Bill 63, the Liberals’ Online Harms Bill. The Spectator said that it effectively engendered the founding of a Canadian “thought police”. The Telegraph cited it as evidence that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete”.

This didn’t used to happen. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian politics were famously inaccessible to the wider world. For Canada’s 2008 federal election, The Spectator covered it with a blog post that mostly mused on how nobody cared. “It’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections,” it read.

But now – on topics ranging from assisted suicide to housing affordability to internet regulation – it’s not infrequent that Canada will be cited in foreign parliaments and in foreign media as the very model of a worst-case scenario.

It was just six months ago that The Telegraph scored a viral hit with a mini-documentary framing the political situation in Canada as a “warning to the West”.

“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has sought to position itself as the global bastion of progressive politics,” reads a synopsis for the film Canada’s Woke Nightmare, which has garnered more than five million views.

The documentary notes that Canada is now at the absolute global vanguard of progressive issues including harm reduction, assisted suicide and gender ideology.

[…]

If the Online Harms Act is suddenly garnering headlines across the rest of the Anglosphere, it’s not because Canadian politics are inherently interesting to the wider world. Rather, it’s because Bill C-63 – just like any number of Trudeau policies before it – is proposing to do things that no other Western democracy has yet proposed.

While plenty of Canada’s peer countries have hate speech controls, Bill C-63 was able to raise even European eyebrows with life sentences for “advocating genocide”, and a provision for police to mandate house arrest merely on suspicion that a Canadian was likely to commit a hate crime.

The Wall Street Journal, for one, profiled the bill as a real-life example of the 2002 film Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian future in which citizens are jailed for “pre-crime”.

Or in the critical words of The Spectator, “this legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime … if that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is”.

March 16, 2024

The “TikTok ban” isn’t really about banning TikTok

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Matt Taibbi explains why the movement to ban TikTok is so dangerous to Americans’ civil liberties:

As discussed on the new America This Week, passage of the TikTok ban represents a perfect storm of unpleasant political developments, putting congress back fully in line with the national security establishment on speech. After years of public championing of the First Amendment, congressional Republicans have suddenly and dramatically been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile Democrats, who stand to lose a lot from the bill politically — it’s opposed by 73% of TikTok users, precisely the young voters whose defections since October put Joe Biden’s campaign into a tailspin — are spinning passage of the legislation to its base by suggesting it’s not really happening.

“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok, it’s an attempt to make TikTok better,” is how Nancy Pelosi put it. Congress, the theory goes, will force TikTok to divest, some kindly Wall Street consortium will gobble it up (“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Steve Mnuchin told CNBC), and life will go on. All good, right?

Not exactly. The bill passed in the House that’s likely to win the Senate and be swiftly signed into law by the White House’s dynamic Biden hologram is at best tangentially about TikTok.

You’ll find the real issue in the fine print. There, the “technical assistance” the drafters of the bill reportedly received from the White House shines through, Look particularly at the first highlighted portion, and sections (i) and (ii) of (3)B:

As written, any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States” is covered.

[…]

As Newsweek reported, the bill was fast-tracked after a secret “intelligence community briefing” of Congress led by the FBI, Department of Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The magazine noted that if everything goes as planned, the bill will give Biden the authority to shut down an app used by 150 million Americans just in time for the November elections.

Say you’re a Democrat, however, and that scenario doesn’t worry you. As America This Week co-host Walter Kirn notes, the bill would give a potential future President Donald Trump “unprecedented powers to censor and control the internet“. If that still doesn’t bother you, you’re either not worried about the election, or you’ve been overstating your fear of “dictatorial” Trump.

We have two decades of data showing how national security measures in the 9-11 era evolve. In 2004 the George W. Bush administration defined “enemy combatant” as “an individual who was part of or supporting Taliban or al Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States”. Yet in oral arguments of Rosul et al v Bush later that year, the government conceded an enemy combatant could be a “little old lady in Switzerland” who “wrote a check” to what she thought was an orphanage.

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