Quotulatiousness

July 22, 2023

“… no-one has a ‘right’ to a bank account …”

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

Unlike in Canada, where the extra-legal debanking of an unknown number of what Justin Trudeau described as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views” had all the bien-pensants in and out of the legacy media nodding along, British opinion is not so friendly toward the extra-legal debanking of Nigel Farage and his family and friends:

An acquaintance of mine on Facebook, a hardline capitalist (so he says) made a comment that no-one has a “right” to a bank account, as they don’t have “rights” (those inverted commas are doing a lot of work here) to healthcare, education, paid-for holidays, etc. He was, of course, writing about the Nigel Farage/Coutts saga that has seen the CEO of NatWest, Coutts’ parent firm (39% owned by the taxpayer) issue a sort-of apology to the former UKIP leader.

[…]

When a person is “debanked” today, they can have a problem opening an account anywhere else if the bank asks them why they left a bank in the past. As a result, we have almost a sort of “cartel” system operating.

In time, hopefully, competition will swing back, and some of the nonsense going on will disappear. In the meantime, while I agree with you that the idea of having a “right” to a bank account is as bogus as many of the other “rights” that people talk about today, the fact that banking is such an embedded form of life in a modern economy means this issue hits hard in a way that, say, isn’t the case if you are banned from a pizza restaurant or candy store for holding the “wrong” views. Of course, it may be that the Farage case might encourage a firm to go out of its way to court business from those who have been targeted. Let’s hope so. For example, a bank could, without incurring wrath from the “woke” or regulators, say something like “Banking is all we do. No politics. No agendas. Just finance.”

And as I have said before, the outrageous Nigel Farage case, and that of others, surely demonstrates that a central bank digital currency idea must be resisted. This would be the end of any financial autonomy at all.

As you’d expect, Brendan O’Neill isn’t a fan of this latest attempt to make certain political viewpoints effectively illegal:

So there you have it. Nigel Farage really was given the boot from the prestigious private bank Coutts because of his political views. Because he is very pro-Brexit, is fond of Donald Trump and has been critical of Black Lives Matter. Because, in the words of an extraordinary internal dossier compiled by Coutts, his views “do not align’ with the bank’s values”. For the past fortnight the chattering classes have been chortling over Farage’s claim that Coutts was persecuting him for his political beliefs. How dumb – worse, how complacent in the face of corporate tyranny – those people look now.

Last month, Farage went public about the closure of his Coutts account. I’ve been given the heave-ho for political reasons, he said. He also said that nine other banks have since rejected his custom. Now he has published a dossier that was distributed at a meeting of Coutts’ “reputational risk committee” on 17 November 2022. It is a truly chilling read. It runs to 36 pages. There is a strong case for “exiting” Farage from the bank, it says, because his publicly stated views are “at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The Stasi once compiled dossiers on dissident activists and artists whose views ran counter to those of the GDR regime. Now Coutts seems to be doing similar on customers who dare to bristle against the regime of woke.

The dossier basically finds Farage guilty of wrongthink. It highlights his renegade views not only on Brexit and Trump but also on Net Zero and even on King Charles – he has had the audacity to criticise His Majesty. Like dissidents in East Germany, his friendships are held against him, too. His links with Trump and tennis champ Novak Djokovic make him suspect, apparently. The dossier quotes the Independent‘s description of Farage’s visit to Djokovic’s trophy room in Belgrade, during which he criticised Australia’s expulsion of Djokovic for failing to get vaccinated against Covid, as “the spineless, chaotic behaviour of a chancer”.

[…]

The Farage / Coutts story is important because it highlights what a huge threat woke capitalism poses to freedom and fairness. Let’s be clear about what has happened here: a man has been economically unpersoned for having the supposedly wrong views. He’s been blacklisted for being a little too dissenting on the big issues of the day. And it’s happening to others, too – including people who do not have access to the same media platforms as Farage and thus have little leeway to protest against their expulsion from economic life by unelected, unaccountable banks and businesses. We acquiesce to this capitalist policing of thought at our peril. It is surely time for the government to act and clip the wings of banks and companies that believe they have the right to penalise citizens for the contents of their conscience. It might be Farage today, it could be you tomorrow.

Theodore Dalrymple sees it as a sign of the rise of woke totalitarianism:

It isn’t a question of whether Mr. Farage is always right or sometimes horribly wrong; when the bank says that it “uncovered” something that he said, as if he had recorded saying it by secret microphones, it makes itself ridiculous. Not even his worst enemies, or perhaps his best friends, would accuse him of hiding his light under a bushel.

The question is whether it’s the role of a bank to examine its clients’ views and deny them service if those views don’t accord with those of the chief executive, as if the latter were indisputably true and from which it were heresy to dissent. Is a bank an inquisition?

The chief executive of the parent bank, Alison Rose, said soon after her appointment that “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her work, and on the occasion of the so-called Pride month last year said that “our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is integral to our purpose of championing the potential of people, families, and businesses”. This year, the company headquarters were covered in the rainbow colors of the LGBT flag, with lettering the height of humans declaring the “Championing the power of Pride”. Under her leadership, staff may “identify” as women and men on alternate days, should they so wish.

Of course, when she said that “diversity” and “inclusion” was “integral to our purpose”, she was using these terms in a strictly technical sense to mean “everyone who thinks as I do and has a fair bit of money”. The diversity “integral” to the “purpose” of Coutts doesn’t include those persons with less than $1 million to deposit, who even in these days of currency depreciation remain a small minority. People bank with Coutts because it’s exclusive, not inclusive.

The chief executive, however, is safely within what we might call the Coutts Community, because she was paid about $5.2 million last year. The prospect of being barred from the bank will no doubt inhibit anyone who banks with her banks from suggesting in public that she’s paid too much.

July 10, 2023

“De-banking” is the financial world’s version of cancelling someone

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At the Free Life blog, Alan Bickley considers the recently reported rash of prominent (and not-so-prominent) critics of the British government being refused service by their banks and further refused permission to open new accounts with any other chartered bank. Being “cancelled” by social media companies is bad, but being “de-banked” in a modern economy is worse than being declared a “non-person” by a totalitarian regime:

In the past month, we have heard that various rich and well-connected people have had their bank accounts closed, seemingly because of their dissident political opinions. The same has happened to other people who are much poorer and without connections. Twenty years ago, the same happened to the British National Party. There is a simple libertarian response to this.

No one has the right to coerced association with anyone else. If someone comes to me and asks me to provide him with services, I have an absolute right to say yes or no. If I am uncharitable enough to dislike the colour of his face or what he does in bed, so much the worse. I may lose valuable business. But it is my time, and it is my choice. If anyone starts a whine about the horrors of discrimination, he should be ignored. We have an absolute right to discriminate against others for any reason whatever.

This being said, the position becomes less clear when state power of some kind is involved. Banks in this country require a licence from the State to operate. This protects them from open competition. It also gives them access to services and information from the State that are not given to other persons or businesses. If a bank finds itself in serious financial difficulties, it has at least a greater chance than other large businesses of being saved by the State – by a coordination of support by others or by direct financial help. The State has also made it illegal for many transactions to be made in cash. If I try to buy a car with £20,000 in cash, the car dealership is obliged to refuse my business, or to make so many enquiries that accepting my business is too much trouble. In effect, anyone who wants to spend more than a few thousand pounds in cash is obliged by various actual and shadow laws to use a bank account.

So we have privileged corporations and an effective legal obligation for people to do business with them. This entirely changes the libertarian indifference to commercial discrimination. The banks are a privileged oligopoly. The banks compete for custom among a public that is free to choose one bank rather than another, but that is compelled to choose some bank. For this reason, since the relevant laws will not be repealed, it is legitimate to demand another law to offset some of the effects of the others. Banks should be legally obliged to accept the business of any person or group of persons without question. Limitations on what services are provided must be justified on the grounds of previous financial misconduct as reasonably defined. For example, it should be permitted for a bank to refuse an overdraft to someone who is or has recently been bankrupt, or whose spending habits are obviously reckless. Perhaps it should be permitted for a bank to refuse to lend money for purposes it regards as scandalous as well as commercially unviable. Therefore, a representative of the White Persons’ Supremacy Foundation, or the Vladimir Putin Appreciation Society, should be able to walk into any bank and open an account – with no questions asked. If an account is refused, there should be a legal obligation on the bank to provide a full explanation of the refusal. If the refusal is not made on valid commercial grounds, there should be a right of appeal before a tribunal which does not award costs, and this tribunal should have the power to grant punitive damages against any bank found to be discriminating on any grounds but the validly commercial.

The refusal of banking services is only the beginning of a new and sophisticated totalitarianism. What the banks can do can also be done by supermarkets, by Internet service providers, by hotel chains, by airlines and railway companies, and by utility providers. There is indeed a good case for insisting on a law forbidding any organisation that has the privilege of limited liability from any but obviously commercial discrimination.

June 23, 2023

From Operation Barbarossa in 1941 to the disinformation and cover-up over the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus

Filed under: China, Germany, Health, History, Media, Politics, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray outlines the utterly amazing situation between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on the eve of Hitler launching Operation Barbarossa — where Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would attack Russia despite overwhelming evidence from many sources — to the parallel situation over Covid:

Several sources quite specifically reported to the Soviet government that the Germans would invade around dawn on June 22. Their reports can be found in the Soviet archives in a “folder of dubious and misleading reports”. Then, shortly before dawn on June 22, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Military leaders on the border called in reports of the invasion, and the people they talked to in Moscow declined to believe them. Soviet border troops held their fire, seeing Germans while being ordered to understand that no true invasion could possibly be underway. Stalin knew better, and contradicting Josef Stalin was known to be a fatal mistake. Achieving an entirely avoidable surprise, the Germans destroyed much of the Soviet air force on the ground, parked wingtip-to-wingtip for the convenience of the invader’s bombers.

[…]

An invasion that could have been met with brutal severity from the first moment instead achieved considerable initial success against a supine nation because the Soviet leader, and the chain of subordinates beneath him who were forced to adopt his conception of facts and truth, assumed that things they didn’t wish to believe constituted disinformation. Millions of lives were wasted for that illusion. A society that categorizes inconvenient truths in this way is committing a form of suicide, hiding from hard facts that demand acknowledgment.

Now: In 2021, the lab leak theory was a disgusting lie with “racist roots”.

In June of 2023, the, uh, first people who got sick with Covid turn out to have been, uh, scientists at the lab in Wuhan. BUT THEY PROBABLY HAD SOME BAT SOUP AT THE WET MARKET, IS WHY, or something.

Stupid conspiracy theorists, you people are such MORONS, do you actually bel— okay, that one’s true too.

We’ve somehow developed an industry of professional information barriers, dimwitted parasitical human garbage whose sole function in life is to prevent understanding by pasting “disinformation” stickers on things that you’re not supposed to know.

June 18, 2023

Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto

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

This is an extract from A Heretic’s Manifesto thanks to Spiked:

Words hurt, they say. This is the ideological underpinning to so much censorship today – the idea that words wound, as a punch might wound. The imagery of violence is deployed in almost every call for censure in the 21st-century West. Speech has been reimagined as aggression, hence “microaggressions”. People speak of feeling “assaulted” by speech. “Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude” – that’s the thesis of Words That Wound, an influential tome published in 1993. Activists claim to feel “erased” by controversial or disagreeable utterances. Trans campaigners speak darkly of “trans erasure”, as if words from the other side of the divide, the speech of gender-critical feminists, might contain that most awesome and nullifying power of genocide.

Words make us feel “unsafe”, people say. Witness the rise and rise of Safe Spaces on university campuses, designed to ensure students’ psychic security against the terrible threat of their hearing an idea they disagree with. Safe Spaces recreate the state of childhood, complete with colouring books and ice cream, speaking to how determinedly some long to retreat from the adult world of hurtful chatter and brickbats.

The United Nations wrings its hands over “hate speech and real harm” (my emphasis). The “weaponisation of public discourse for political gain” can lead to “stigmatisation, discrimination and large-scale violence”, it says. Better keep a check on those hurtful words. One US university even maintains a list of “words that hurt“. It includes the phrase “You guys”. That scandalous utterance “erases the identities of people who are in the room” and “generalise[s] a group of people to be masculine”. Shut it down. Silence that act of violence.

Both the formal and informal punishment of words rests on the belief that they can wound. Laws in Europe claim to guard people from speech that is alarming, distressing, hurtful. The overlords of social media censor speech for “the wellbeing of our community“. Everywhere the cry goes up: words injure, they can cut like a knife, they can be used as “weapons to ambush, terrorise, wound, humiliate and degrade“. And just as the law protects us from such dreadful things when they are done to our bodies with fists and kicks, surely it should also protect us from them when they are done to our minds with words and ideas. Surely our psychic wellbeing should be accorded as much respect by the powers-that-be as our physical integrity is.

The temptation of many of us who believe in freedom of speech, in the liberty of all to utter their beliefs and ideas, is to damn this claim that “words hurt” as a libel against public discourse. As a slippery untruth that is cynically designed to depict words as all-powerful, as containing so much energy, so much heat, that they can lay waste to self-esteem and even make us fret over erasure, over being wiped out entirely by that sore comment or that disturbing idea. Actually, we often say, words are just words. They’re not sticks, they’re not stones, they’re words. They won’t kill you, they won’t hurt you, you’ll be fine. They say words are a force of nature like no other, we say: “Relax. It’s just speech.”

We need to stop doing this. We need to stop countering the new censors by accusing them of exaggerating the power and the potency of words. We need to stop responding to their painting of speech as a dangerous, disorientating force by defensively pleading that words don’t wound because they’re just words. We need to stop reacting to their branding of speech as a weapon, as a tool of ambush and degradation, by effectively draining speech of its power and saying: “It’s only speech.” As if speech were a small thing, almost an insignificant thing, more likely to contain calming qualities than upsetting ones, more likely to help us overcome conflict rather than stir it up, more likely to offer a balm to your soul than to stab at it as a knife might stab at your body.

For when we do this, we play down the power of words. And that includes the power of words to wound. Words do wound. It’s true. Words hurt people, they hurt institutions, they hurt belief systems. Words make churches tremble and ideologies quake. Words inflict pain on priests and princes and ideologues. Words upend the social order. Words rip away the comforting ideas people and communities might have wrapped themselves in for decades, centuries perhaps. Words ambush the complacent and degrade the powerful. Words cause discord, angst, even conflict. Isn’t every revolution in history the offspring of words? Of ideas? Words do destabilise, they do disorientate. People are right to sometimes feel afraid of words. Words are dangerous. When they say words wound, we should say: “I agree.”

June 1, 2023

Banning Roger Waters would be playing his game

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

In Spiked, Daniel Ben-Ami explains why we should reject the arguments about banning Roger Waters, formerly the frontman for Pink Floyd, and lately a pretty out-there antisemite:

Screencapture from a YouTube video.

Pressure is mounting to ban Roger Waters from performing in Britain. The former Pink Floyd frontman and veteran anti-Israel activist stands accused of anti-Semitism. But whatever one makes of Waters’s antics, his performances should not be cancelled.

Waters is set to perform his first UK show tonight in Birmingham, with further concerts scheduled for Glasgow, London and Manchester. These are part of his controversial “This Is Not a Drill” tour, which began its European leg a few months ago. The show contains a number of controversial elements, such as Waters dressing up in a Nazi-style uniform and brandishing a gun, while Anne Frank’s name is projected above the stage. In past tours, he has floated an inflatable pig with a Star of David on it above the stage.

The Waters row came to a head earlier this month, when local authorities in Frankfurt attempted to ban his concert. The ban was successfully challenged by Waters in court and the concert went ahead, despite protests. Waters is now being investigated by the German police for wearing a Nazi-style uniform on stage at his Berlin gig (the display of Nazi symbols is illegal in Germany, except for educational or artistic purposes). According to Waters, he donned the uniform not to endorse Nazism, but in order to make a “scathing critique” of it.

Jewish community organisations in the UK have condemned Waters, with some calling for him to be censored. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has argued that his concerts are probably better described as political rallies. The National Jewish Assembly has called on the UK government to condemn Waters. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a volunteer-led charity, has not only launched a petition to stop venues hosting him – it has also written to cinema chains demanding they cancel film screenings of his concerts.

[…]

There are also more practical reasons to challenge these attempts to cancel Waters. The campaign against him, first in Germany and now in Britain, has allowed Waters to present himself as a free-speech martyr. To some, this will lend credence to his dubious claim that he is the victim of shadowy, covert forces determined to silence his advocacy for the oppressed.

Besides, banning displays of anti-Semitism does not make the problem go away. On the contrary, it only encourages anti-Semitism to take on more disguised forms. This often includes the demonisation of Israel or of Zionism, rather than Jews as such. Even those who do genuinely hate Jews will rarely admit to it openly. Instead, they typically use coded language, which is harder to challenge and confront.

By all means, protest outside Waters’s concerts and challenge his outrageous antics. But the attempts to ban his concerts are an affront to freedom. And they will do nothing to help the struggle against anti-Semitism. Roger Waters must have the right to perform.

May 30, 2023

Ban all the words!

Filed under: Books, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray reflects on the historical context of literature bans:

Before the Civil War, Southern states banned abolitionist literature. That ban meant that postmasters (illegally!) searched the mail, seized anti-slavery tracts, and burned them. And it meant that people caught with abolitionist pamphlets faced the likelihood of arrest. The District of Columbia considered a ban, then didn’t pass the thing, but Reuben Crandall was still arrested and tried for seditious libel in 1833 when he was caught with abolitionist literature. He was acquitted, then died of illness from a brutal pre-trial detention. Seizure, destruction, arrest: abolitionist literature was banned.

The Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a 1924 novel, We, depicting a world in which an all-powerful government minutely controlled every aspect of life for an enervated population, finding as an endpoint for their ideological project a surgery that destroyed the centers of the brain that allowed ordinary people to have will and imagination. The Soviet government banned Zamyatin’s work: They seized and destroyed all known copies, told editors and publishers the author was no longer to allowed to publish, and sent Zamyatin into exile, where he died without ever seeing his own country again. Seizure, destruction, exile: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s work was banned.

During World War I, the federal government banned literature that discouraged military service, including tracts that criticized conscription. Subsequently, “socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer distributed leaflets declaring that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude”. They were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Anti-conscription literature was banned: It was seized and destroyed, and people caught distributing it were sent to prison.

In 2023, the tedious midwit poet Amanda Gorman posted on Twitter that she was “gutted” — the standard emotion for tedious midwits — to discover that one of her poems had been “banned” by a school in Florida. The news media raced to proclaim that Florida schools are banning books, the leading edge of the Ron DeSantis fascist wave.

As others have already said, Gorman’s boring poem was moved from an elementary school library shelf to a middle school library shelf, without leaving the library

May 15, 2023

Paul Wells – “Unworkable and swiftly-disavowed tinpot dictatorship is, statistically, one of the least damaging forms of tinpot dictatorship”

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

Paul Wells follows up last week’s rather disturbing report that the Liberal Party’s big gathering in Ottawa extruded a resolution to get “The Government” to work toward forcing journalists (and those peasant bloggers like Paul Wells) to only publish things that the sources informing it could be “traced” by that same authority:

Last Friday I wrote about a policy resolution at the big Liberal Party of Canada national convention that was, in my opinion, bad. This was the resolution that would have the party “request the government explore options” to “hold on-line information sources accountable” by requiring that they “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.

How do you limit publication to traceable sources? I have to assume you clear the sources. “This resolution has no meaning,” wrote I, “unless it means I would be required to clear my posts through the federal government, before publication, so the ‘traceability’ of my sources could be verified.”

Some people disagreed, but I had a hard time getting them to describe what it could mean if it wasn’t what I thought. I was careful to note that party conventions aren’t binding on governments. Commenters sympathetic to the Trudeau government latched onto all the this-might-mean-nothing language, the stuff about “request” and “explore options.” At their convention, a tiny minority of registered Liberal delegates attended a “policy workshop” at which nothing was debated. Amid considerable confusion about where these resolutions were in the party’s own process — Althia Raj covered it on Twitter; go look if you like — this resolution became party policy with no discussion at all. That was on Saturday.

On Tuesday, Justin Trudeau went before reporters and said no Liberal government would ever implement this Liberal policy. Other cabinet ministers followed suit, and one MP who didn’t benefit from the counsel of the Monday-morning issues-management call had a rougher time executing the U-turn.

Look, I think the amount of self-inflicted ballistic damage to the government’s own foot here is minor. Unworkable and swiftly-disavowed tinpot dictatorship is, statistically, one of the least damaging forms of tinpot dictatorship.

But I want to let everyone in on a secret of my journalism, and indeed of most journalism: Criticism of politicians is often advice to politicians. I actually don’t spend a lot of time hoping governments and opposition parties will keep pursuing self-destructive and country-destructive choices indefinitely. I always hope a bit of mockery, especially pre-emptive mockery, will help inform their choices. If it stings when Wells writes it, it might sting worse when everyone is saying it.

Ministers of the Crown who didn’t need to wait for the Monday-morning issues-management meeting to tell them what to think could have spent the weekend thinking for themselves. They might even have invited their own staffs, riding executives, and Liberals at large to think for themselves. A dozen or so hardy souls, out of 3,500 registered delegates, might then have showed up to the policy workshop willing to debate.

“Uh, Paragraph Two looks hinky. How would a government enforce that?”

“Well, it doesn’t apply to reputable journalists.”

“Great, thanks. Remind me who decides who’s reputable? Any thought on who’ll be making those calls once we’re no longer in government?”

Maybe somebody would have added a friendly amendment. “For greater clarity, nothing in this paragraph impinges …”

I can even imagine a cabinet minister showing up for those floor debates and influencing the party’s direction single-handed. I’ve seen it happen in other parties. But I had Liberal friends over the weekend explain to me that no such thing ever happens. Fine, it’s your funeral. Basically we’re watching a party choose between two different models of public-policy deliberation:

OPTION 1: Smart people think and talk.

OPTION 2: Everybody in the party defends rickety thinking until it blows up in their faces.

I’m not kidding when I tell you most people in political communications would defend Option 2. We’re living in a time that values message over thinking. But folks can’t say I didn’t warn them.

May 13, 2023

QotD: The inherent absurdity of “Canadian content”

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

Lately some have reminded us of the inherent difficulties in defining Canadian content, especially where a work is the product of several collaborators. Is a movie Canadian by virtue of its actors? Director? Crew? Location? Theme? Even as applied to individuals: Should citizenship be the criterion? Birthplace? Residency? Subject matter?

But the real folly of CanCon is not that it is impractical, or prone to abuse, or even unnecessary, though it is all of those things. It is rather that it is nonsensical at its root, in its very purpose – again, so far as anyone can define it. Is the point, after all, artistic or political? But it cannot be artistic: there is no theory of aesthetics that prefers that Canadian artists should make Canadian art that teaches Canadians how Canadian they are.

It is, rather, a political project: the inculcation of national feeling in the public, for the purpose of creating a political community, separate and distinct from the colossus to the south. Without the Maginot Line of CanCon quotas, it is suggested, we would be overwhelmed: first the artists, then the country.

But note the assumptions built into this emotive appeal: that a separate nationality cannot be maintained without cultural difference; that our cultural differences with the Americans are both sufficient in themselves to justify our statehood and yet so fragile as to be washed away in an instant; that, left to their own choices, Canadians would unhesitatingly choose the products of an incomprehensibly alien culture over their own; and that, by virtue of this diet of foreignism, we would no longer be Who We Are as Canadians. Therefore we must not be left to our own choices.

Which is nonsense, because we would still be Who We Are, even in that hypothetical dystopian future: it might not be Who We Were, but so what? The Who We Are we are now at such pains to preserve is itself vastly different from Who We Were before.

And who, in the end are we? As the comedian Martin Short once put it: “we’re the people who watch a lot of American TV”. The wholesale ingestion of a foreign culture – albeit much of it made by expat Canadians – is an integral part of our distinct national identity, an irony that must forever elude our cultural nationalists.

Andrew Coyne, “The concept of CanCon is pure folly. That’s the problem at the heart of Bill C-11”, The Globe and Mail, 2023-02-08.

May 6, 2023

The federal Liberals want even more control over the internet

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

Paul Wells notes that a policy proposal at the Liberal conference this week indicates just how much the Liberal Party of Canada wants to control free expression on the internet:

Here on the 2023 Liberal convention’s “Open Policy Process” page are links to “Top 20 Resolutions” and “Fast-Tracked Resolutions”. The latter go straight to the plenary floor, the former go through a smaller preliminary debate and, if they pass, then on to the plenary. These things move fast because, in most cases, Liberals are paying only listless attention to the discussions. Policy is for New Democrats. Well, I mean, it used to be.

But sometimes words have meaning, so this morning I’m passing on one of the Top 20 Resolutions, from pages 12 and 13 of that book. This one comes to us from the British Columbia wing of the party.

It’s in two screenshots simply because it spreads across two pages. This is the entire resolution.

BC Liberals want “on-line information services” held “accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms” by “the Government”. The Government would, in turn, “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.

This resolution has no meaning unless it means I would be required to clear my posts through the federal government, before publication, so the “traceability” of my sources could be verified. I don’t suppose this clearance process would take too much more time than getting a passport or a response to an access-to-information request. Probably only a few months, at first. Per article.

After publication, “the Government” would hold me accountable for the veracity of my material, presumably through some new mechanism beyond existing libel law.

I’m not sure what “the Government” — I’m tickled by the way it’s capitalized, like Big Brother — would have made of this post, in which I quote an unnamed senior government official who was parked in front of reporters by “the Government” on the condition that he or she or they not be named. But by the plain meaning of this resolution, I would not have to wonder for long because that post would have been passed or cleared by the Government’s censors before publication, and I’m out of recourse if that process simply took longer than I might like.

May 5, 2023

Canada’s new internet rules have become law. What now?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 4 May 2023

Bill C-11 has passed. But there’s still time.
(more…)

May 1, 2023

“And I, for one, welcome our new CRTC internet overlords”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In this week’s Dispatch from The Line, among other maple-flavoured items is the discussion of how the newly passed Bill C-11 will impact Canadians’ everyday online experience:

We at The Line have spent a lot more time trashing Bill C-18 than its cousin, C-11; the reason for that is fairly simple, if unflattering. Both bills are unwieldy little monsters, rife with competing agendas and we only have so much time and energy to spare. Of the two, though, C-18 affects us and our business more directly as it attempts to force Big Tech companies into secret negotiations to prop up dying legacy media outlets.

C-11, which passed this week, is the Liberals’ attempt to overhaul the Broadcasting Act to bring major streaming services like YouTube and Netflix under the heel of the CRTC. This is generally a pretty bad idea — and we’ll get into that in a second. But the passing of the first major overhaul of the act since the ’90s will, we expect, be heralded by the usual suspects of CanCon leeches who see in the legislation an opportunity to siphon evil Big Tech profit while forcing major platforms to force-feed Canadians into consuming more home-grown shite.

Anyway, part of the bill, it is hoped, will force online streamers to feature more Canadian content for Canadian users, particularly content that highlights the usual progressive checkboxes. And while this does make us roll our eyes a bit — just make good stuff and let people choose what they want for themselves! — we admit that this provision is the less objectionable aspect of C-11.

After this, matters get much more dicey. The attempts to force tech companies to pay for more CanCon will almost certainly backfire in the long run: companies like YouTube have already promised that they will comply with legislation by creating pass-through fees for their creators. In other words, if the government forces YouTube to pay a percentage of its profits into a CanCon fund, YouTube will generate that revenue the only way it can — by skimming more cash from its content creators and re-directing some to the creation of Canadian shows that are then commercialized by major broadcasting networks like Rogers. Seems fair!

Where the bill goes off the rails is over years-long battle over user-generated content protections. Upon hitting the upper chamber, the senate actually advocated for amendments that would ensure that Joe Blow YouTuber wasn’t going to fall under the auspices of CRTC regulation — changes that were rejected by the House. How the CRTC defines a content generator worthy of its regulation, or uses any of its new powers, is now up for consideration by the CRTC itself.

Obviously, we at The Line are concerned about how a regulator is going to employ poorly defined and vaguely stipulated legislative powers to control how Canadians are presented which content, and by whom. We are open to the hopeful possibility that the CRTC is so completely in over their heads that all of the concerns about the bill prove fruitless and overblown. But as a rule, we don’t like to rely on the incompetence of our betters to assure our protections and freedoms.

And that brings us to the major philosophical problems with C-11; the first is that legislation should generally not generate more confusion and uncertainty. As a rule, we think that our laws should be written in such a way that an ordinarily intelligent person with a standard education should be able to understand the laws that govern them. By this measure, the Broadcasting Act — like many others — fail a very basic test. C-11 is written so poorly that even experts seem to disagree about the scope of the bill and how our media landscape will be affected by it in the years to come.

[…]

There is, arguably, no reason for the CRTC, nor for the Broadcasting Act in its current form, to exist anymore. Digital space isn’t finite. Canadians can easily find news and entertainment that is relevant to them. We don’t need the government to ensure that Canadian content is produced and funded. Or, if some government intervention is deemed necessary, it need not amount to anything more complicated than a simple tax, with revenues diverted to one of this country’s myriad granting agencies to aid production. Instead, we have a government that seems hellbent on extending the power of a regulator at the very moment in history that this regulator is most redundant.

Given that we’re being led by an increasingly insular government that equates all criticism to disingenuous misinformation, and seems to want to stamp out the evils of wrong opinions on the Internet in the coming Online Harms bill, well, let’s just say we’re increasingly concerned and perturbed.

April 29, 2023

Bad advice for Robert Kennedy Jr.

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

C.J. Hopkins proffers advice to the declared candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. is running for president. I could not possibly be more excited. So, I’m going to give Bobby some unsolicited advice, which, if he knows what’s good for him, he will not take.

I feel OK about doing this because, even if Bobby, in the wee hours of the night, when the mind is vulnerable to dangerous ideas, were to seriously consider taking my advice, I am sure he has people — i.e., PR people, campaign strategists, pollsters, and so on — that would not hesitate to take him aside and disabuse him of any inclination to do that.

OK, before I give Bobby this terrible advice, I have to do the “full disclosure” thing. I’m a pretty big fan of RFK, Jr. I don’t generally get involved in electoral politics, but, if I were a Democrat, I would definitely vote for him. Also, he was kind enough to blurb my book (which isn’t going to make his PR people happy) and invite me onto his podcast, RFK, Jr. The Defender, to talk about “New Normal” totalitarianism. So, I am fairly biased in favor of Bobby Kennedy. I think he is an admirable, honorable human being. I would love to see him in the Oval Office.

That isn’t going to happen, of course. The global-capitalist ruling classes are never going to let him near the Oval Office. They learned their lesson back in 2016. There are not going to be any more unauthorized presidents. The folks at GloboCap are done playing grab-ass, and they want us to know that they are done playing grab-ass. That’s what the last six years have been about.

As I put it in a column in January, 2021 …

    … This, basically, is what we’ve just experienced. The global capitalist ruling classes have just reminded us who is really in charge, who the US military answers to, and how quickly they can strip away the facade of democracy and the rule of law. They have reminded us of this for the last ten months, by putting us under house arrest, beating and arresting us for not following orders, for not wearing masks, for taking walks without permission, for having the audacity to protest their decrees, for challenging their official propaganda, about the virus, the election results, etc. They are reminding us currently by censoring dissent, and deplatforming anyone they deem a threat to their official narratives and ideology … GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a “field of flags” symbolizing “unity”. They even did the Nazi “Lichtdom” thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a “Mockingjay” brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.

Does that sound like the behavior of an unaccountable, supranational power apparatus that is prepared to stand by and let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., or Donald Trump, or any other unauthorized person, become the next president of the United States?

So, here’s my bad advice for Bobby.

Fuck them. They’re not going to let you win, anyway. They are going to smear you, slime you, demonize you, distort every other thing you say, and just generally lie about who you are and what you believe in and what you stand for. They are going to paint you as a bull-goose-loony, formerly smack-addled, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-vax fanatic no matter what you do. If you tone down your act and try to “heal the divide” and “end the division,” they are going to have you for lunch, and then sit around picking their teeth with your bones. You know, and I know, and the American people know, that the things you say you want to do as president — which I know you sincerely want to do as president and are crazy enough to actually try to do, i.e., “to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country” — are things … well, as Michael Corleone once put it, that they would “use all their power to keep from happening”.

So, fuck it, and fuck them. Tell the truth.

Not the ready-for-prime-time truth. Not the toned-down-for-mainstream-consumption truth. The truth. The ugly, unvarnished truth. The scary, crazy-sounding truth. The angry, divisive, uncensored truth.

Yes, there is a “divide”. A great divide. A chasm. A schism. A gulf. An abyss. A gaping, yawning, unbridgeable fissure. A Grand Canyon-sized fault in the foundation of society. A rupture in the very fabric of reality.

H/T to Robert Swanson for the link.

Of course, not everyone is as fond of RFK, Jr. — and for good reason, as Matt Welch points out:

Ever since the 69-year-old conspiratorial activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last week, a curious new category has appeared among the commentariat—libertarians and/or right-of-center journalists expressing strange new respect for a Hugo Chavez–admiring scion of the Establishment who has serially fantasized about throwing his political opponents in jail.

“I’m quite certain that I’ve never heard a more erudite speech in any political context,” enthused Brownstone Institute President Jeffrey Tucker after attending Kennedy’s announcement rally. “As [a] Democrat he must be bad on all sorts of things,” tweeted Antiwar.com’s Scott Horton, “But not the ones that matter the most.” The Libertarian Party of Colorado tweeted (and then deleted) “Bravo and godspeed hero.” Tablet, a publication not usually known for boosting overheated analogies to murderous 20th-century totalitarians, gave RFK Jr. an 18,000-word valentine with such soft-toss “questions” about his previous controversial statements (like terming the impact from childhood vaccines “a holocaust”) as: “You activated an automated outrage machine that was looking for a gotcha.”

The newly Kennedy-curious are intrigued by the rabble-rouser’s potential to disrupt an otherwise rubber-stamped Democratic primary, sure, but also by him having the right enemies — the media, the military-industrial complex, and, most of all, a political class that backed COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.

“Just as Donald Trump … retrieved political themes from the deep past of the Republican Party,” National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty mused, “so it must be that a Democrat should come along and try to revive left-leaning skepticism of government and corporate power, to denounce crony capitalism, censorship, and the CIA to boot.”

Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.

[…]

Yet in 2023, Kennedy can plausibly claim (to those with short memories) the mantle of anti-censorship, for having been on the receiving end of Big Social Media’s often government-pressured pandemic speech-policing. He was banned from Instagram in February 2021 “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, and his anti-vaccine-mandate nonprofit Children’s Health Defense was similarly booted by both Instagram and Facebook in August 2022. He published a book last year called A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals. As Tablet‘s David Samuels wrote, in one of that piece’s many eye-popping passages, “At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country’s leading ‘conspiracy theorist’ alone qualifies him to be president.”

So is the enemy of your enemy your friend? Depends on your tolerance for unlikely conspiracy theories, and your comfort level in Kennedy’s proposed punishments for alleged perpetrators. Where Jeffrey Tucker sees an orator with a “command of facts, history, and issues,” motivated both by “truth-telling in an age of nonstop lies” and a genuine urge to “heal” the political divide, I see someone whose presentation of facts — including grave accusations of criminality — have been repeatedly and persuasively found lacking.

April 27, 2023

“… the Department of Defense is rejoicing that Tucker Carlson has been driven off of Fox News”

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray on the odd phenomenon of the US military formally having opinions on who is sitting at the big desk for Fox News these days:

In 2001, I was a nominal infantryman assigned to some exceptionally tedious duty at Fort Benning, Georgia. That spring, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army decided to symbolically make the whole army feel elite by changing the uniform and putting everyone into the black beret that had been unique to the Ranger battalions. See, now you have a special hat, so morale and esprit de corps and stuff.

Because I was in the infantry, surrounded all day every day by infantrymen, I can report the absolutely rock-solid consensus in the combat arms branches with complete confidence: we wondered why we were being led by idiots.* Quietly, but not quietly enough, we said things like, “See, the lethality of a combat force is tied directly to the quality of its fashion design“. A series of impromptu briefings and formal training sessions reminded us that we were not allowed to express open contempt for our senior leaders, so shut up about the dumbassery with the berets.

In retrospect, I think history shows us that new hats really were the most pressing challenge facing the American military as we rolled into the summer of 2001, but whatever.

So Politico, the most reliably wrong publication in the history of the known universe, reports this week that the Department of Defense is rejoicing that Tucker Carlson has been driven off of Fox News.

See, Tucker Carlson was an authoritarian, a Trumpian protofascist. For example, he criticized the leadership of the military, who therefore rejoiced in his departure. Anti-authoritarianism, on the other hand, is when the leaders of the armed forces have a hand in shaping the culture and deciding who’s allowed to speak in the public sphere. Fascism is open discourse, so we need the military to say who should be on television so we can have freedom.

[…]

See, it’s good when the military “smites” civilian critics and expresses “revulsion” for them. In fascist countries, critics of the military are just allowed to speak freely. The culture has gone full Alice In Wonderland, and freedom is compliance.

    * See also the switch from BDUs and ACUs.

April 20, 2023

We strongly believe in academic freedom, except when research turns up “inconvenient” results

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Knighton on a sad situation at a London university with publicly funded research having arrived at a politically unwelcome result:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

In the UK, one academic decided to look at the “gender wars”, particularly how academics feel silenced on the whole trans issue.

It sounds to me like both an interesting subject for study and one that might be very necessary in this day and age.

It seems that while the researcher in question was approved to study it, her findings are problematic and that got her canned.

From The Telegraph:

    A university has “confiscated” the findings of an academic studying Britain’s gender wars in a row over her “dangerous” research data, The Telegraph can reveal.

    Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London.

    But it has descended into chaos, with the study’s author allegedly hounded out of the university, stripped of the findings she collected and barred from publishing them amid claims of transphobia.

    […]

    Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender studies who identified as feminists, a representative survey of social scientists with 650 responses and hundreds of documents and tweets.

    Scholars told her that they had threats of violence in the gender debate, hostility from colleagues, and others said they felt their careers “can’t survive that sort of backlash”, and that they have to have “secret conversations” to avoid reprisal and because “we are all so afraid”.

    Her final work has not been published, as it was derailed by complaints about an article for Times Higher Education in which she warned that “a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold”.

    Following this, she says, her line managers told her that the study had “become an institutionally sensitive issue” and that “City considers my data to be dangerous” and is “frightened of making it public”.

So, what Favaro was finding was accurate.

That’s the big takeaway for me here. She said that academics were concerned about being attacked or that they had been because they didn’t play along with the trans agenda, and she was attacked and basically canceled because of it.

What’s even dumber is that Favaro was lured to City University from Spain so that she could conduct this research. She received roughly £28,000 from the British government via two different governmental entities to conduct the research.

Then she was silenced because the research found inconvenient truths.

That’s not what academia is supposed to be about. That’s not what academic freedom is about.

Freedom of any kind requires one to accept things that we would rather not have to accept. If you’re not free to say or do something that doesn’t actually harm a specific person but is otherwise objectionable, you don’t really have any freedom.

April 18, 2023

“Here it is then. This is The Hill.”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Simon Evans rightfully decides that fighting the bowdlerization of P.G. Wodehouse is the hill to die on:

PG Wodehouse has become the latest author to fall victim to the “sensitivity readers”. Passages have been purged and words have been altered for the new editions of his Jeeves and Wooster novels, including Thank You, Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves. According to Penguin, the publishers, some of the racial language and themes of these 1930s novels are “outdated” and “unacceptable”. This includes the use of the n-word.

When I saw the news, my tweet sort of fell out of me before I’d consciously drafted it: “Here it is then. This is The Hill.”
There is an interesting contrast here. We live in a time when every much-loved and out-of-copyright literary artefact that is brought to the screens is being stiffened, like an old Christmas pudding recipe that clearly needs more brandy, with swearing and novel scenes of sexual deviation never imagined in the original. Just think of the BBC’s recent modernising and coarsening of Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie et al, which have rendered them all but unwatchable for millions. So it is more than a little odd that Wodehouse, the mildest, most weightless comedy of the last century, should suddenly seem deserving of the nit comb.

Yes, it is true that Wodehouse uses the n-word. And no other word is now, or arguably ever has been, quite so radioactive, so sui generis in its capacity for offence. It is not that I want to defend this word. Rather, the hill on which I will die is the pristine perfection of Wodehouse’s prose, and its right to remain so. He is – and by an extraordinary degree of consensus, in a field that is almost maddeningly subjective – the Bach of comic literature. And I’m sorry, but you just don’t tinker with Bach.

Though a fan, Christopher Hitchens, in a review of a Wodehouse biography, wrote of the tiresome habit of certain people in referring to Wodehouse as “The Master”, so I will try to avoid that unctuous, fulsome tone. But one of the very few writers of my lifetime who approached him for touch (though sadly not in output) was Douglas Adams, who often referred to Wodehouse as just that: “He’s up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness.”

The point is not that the presence of the odd unfortunate archaic usage, which might indeed jolt the casual reader into a brief awareness that they are reading something older than their grandfather, is necessarily a good thing. It is simply, who the hell do the sensitivity readers think they are, to decide what stays and what goes?

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