Quotulatiousness

November 14, 2024

Germans are perfectly free to post anything to the internet as long as it doesn’t criticize politicians

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

Once again, eugyppius helpfully illustrates the broad range of freedoms German citizens enjoy in their online activities and the totally reasonable and not-at-all-insane restrictions to those rights:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It’s been a while since I last wrote about the highly advanced democratic freedoms that we enjoy in Germany. Here in the Federal Republic, the police will never fine you or harass you or raid your house for criticising the government – except, of course, when they do all of these things, because you happened not even to tweet, but merely to retweet, the wrong image.

Stefan Niehoff is a 64 year-old retiree who lives in the small town of Burgpreppach in Lower Franconia. He runs an X account with 1,200 followers, where he occasionally expresses his dissatisfaction with the present state of German politics and with the Greens in particular.

In June 2024, he retweeted this image …

… which appropriates the logo of a popular cosmetic brand to suggest that Robert Habeck, our Green Minister of Economic Affairs, might be a “professional moron”.

Habeck and his associates are notorious for pursuing internet users who share highly illegal content of this nature. They brought Niehoff’s retweet to the attention of authorities, and the Bamberg public prosecutor’s office decided that Niehoff was indeed guilty of a criminal speech offence. The Bamberg District Court then issued an order permitting the police to search Niehoff’s residence and confiscate his electronic devices.

In this order, reproduced by NiUS, the judges explained their rationale as follows:

    On the basis of the investigations to date – in particular the screenshots of the posts and the investigations into the user of the X-account “IchbinFeinet” – there exists the following suspicion of a criminal offence:

    The accused is the user of the account “IchbinFeinet” on the internet platform X with approx. 901 followers.

    At a time that cannot now be determined more precisely, in the days or weeks before 20 June 2024, the accused published an image file using his account that showed a portrait of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs with the words “professional moron” … in order to defame Robert Habeck in general and to make his work as a member of the federal government more difficult.

    The public prosecutor’s office affirms the public interest in criminal prosecution.

    This is punishable as defamation directed against persons of political life in accordance with §§ 185, 188 para. 1, 194 StGB. …

    The measures ordered are proportionate to the severity of the offence and the strength of the suspicion and are necessary for the investigation …

Armed with this document, Schweinfurt police showed up at Niehoff’s house at 6:14am yesterday morning and took his tablet. Police later told the press that the raid was one in a series of enforcement actions – part of something called “an action day against cybercrime”. By harassing a lot of cybercriminals all at once, police and prosecutors hope to send a message to the people of Germany that they cannot just retweet anything, and that they may only retweet the right things.

November 12, 2024

Canada in the news … for all the wrong reasons

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper explains why your non-Canadian friends may be finding their opinions on the dysfunctional Dominion getting more and more sour in recent years:

… within just the last few years, multiple foreign outlets have profiled Canada for the singular purpose of asking what happened to it, and worrying if Canada’s ills will soon be their own. What’s more, these articles are not limited to a single topic; so much is going sideways in Canada right now that everything from our assisted-suicide regime to our economy to our internet legislation is attracting overseas notice like never before.

Below, a cursory guide to some of them. If you’re noticing that your non-Canadian friends suddenly have a darker picture of your home country than they used to, here’s a clue as to why.

“Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream”

Ever since the 2019 federal election, The Economist‘s coverage of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has usually followed a general theme of noting that the bloom is off the rose of his photogenic ascendancy to power in 2015. But in a trio of articles published last month, the publication laid into the Canadian leader as an icon of what not to do.

Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream, published on Oct. 14. Canada’s Trudeau trap, published on Oct. 17. And then, just for good measure, Justin Trudeau is paying for solar panels in the cold, dark Arctic.

[…]

“Canada Is Disintegrating”

The Telegraph in the U.K. ran an entire series of essays last week on the topic of Canada taking it to the limit on progressive laws covering everything from drugs to national identity.

[…]

“Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech”

The June tabling of the Online Harms Act prompted a wave of foreign coverage unlike few pieces of Canadian legislation. Although virtually every non-U.S. country has legislated controls on extreme speech, the Online Harms Act went noticeably farther than its peer countries in two respects: It prescribes a life sentence for the speech crime of “advocating or promoting genocide”, and it authorizes pre-emptive custody for anyone suspected of committing hate speech in future.

November 9, 2024

QotD: George Bernard Shaw

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… Shaw is not at all the heretic his fascinated victims see him, but an orthodox Scotch Presbyterian of the most cock-sure and bilious sort. In the theory that he is Irish I take little stock. His very name is as Scotch as haggis, and the part of Ireland from which he comes is peopled almost entirely by Scots. The true Irishman is a romantic; he senses religion as a mystery, a thing of wonder, an experience of ineffable beauty; his interest centers, not in the commandments, but in the sacraments. The Scot, on the contrary, is almost devoid of that sort of religious feeling; he hasn’t imagination enough for it; all he can see in the Word of God is a sort of police regulation; his concern is not with beauty but with morals. Here Shaw runs true to type. Read his critical writings from end to end, and you will not find the slightest hint that objects of art were passing before him as he wrote. He founded, in England, the superstition that Ibsen was no more than a tin-pot evangelist — a sort of brother to General Booth, Mrs. Pankhurst, Mother Eddy and Billy Sunday. He turned Shakespeare into a prophet of evil, croaking dismally in a rain-barrel. He even injected a moral content (by dint of abominable straining) into the music dramas of Richard Wagner, surely the most colossal slaughters of all moral ideas on the altar of beauty ever seen by man. Always this ethical obsession, the hall-mark of the Scotch Puritan, is visible in him. He is forever discovering an atrocity in what has hitherto passed as no more than a human weakness; he is forever inventing new sins, and demanding their punishment; he always sees his opponent, not only as wrong, but also as a scoundrel. I have called him a good Presbyterian.

H.L. Mencken, “Shaw as Platitudinarian”, The Smart Set, 1916-08.

October 25, 2024

QotD: The treason of the music critics

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

This is what I was saying above: everything in music criticism and music culture has changed, except music poptimist perceptions of music criticism and music culture. That is what refuses to mutate. And I think it’s ugly and toxic and has left us in this bizarre place where people who write about music for large audiences think their sacred duty is to affirm the legitimacy of what the audience already likes, instead of championing something entirely new and totally different. But then, that’s what happens when you tell a lot of mostly white and mostly male taste makers that a particular set of tastes is inherently sexist and racist — they sprint in the opposite direction as fast as they can. Because aging white men are almost as afraid of being called racist and sexist as they are of being old.

Freddie deBoer, “A Few Indisputable Points About Poptimism and Then I Give Up”, Freddie deBoer, 2024-07-22.

October 14, 2024

The reviews are in for this season of The West and it’s as bad as you think

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

Spaceman Spiff has been a longstanding fan of The West, but the current season is doing much more than giving him the sadz:

The current season of The West is a disappointing mishmash of bad writing, wooden acting and implausible plot lines.

Critics have known the show has been in decline for years although have been reluctant to say openly.

But with cancellation rumours growing it is difficult to see how it can survive. If the current season is any measure they simply don’t have the writers even if the producers hadn’t lost their minds.

The plot thickens

The West has always been known for its compelling plots. Epoch-defining inventions, new technologies and globe-spanning empires. Even grand moral crusades no one else would consider such as ending slavery or elevating women to equal status.

Just some of the storylines they said would never work and yet we were glued to our screens as they unfolded.

Unfortunately, more recent seasons have shown none of the flair of the past.

The latest drama is the threat of another plague. It is difficult to know how this got the go ahead so soon after the Covid storyline.

The original pandemic idea got off to a roaring start since it was then a novel idea. But as the drama unfolded the plot became increasingly contrived. The writers became carried away and eventually struggled to get out of the hole they had dug themselves.

It ended in absurdity with obvious conflicts between the original lockdown plot and the later mask and vaccine subplots.

It was almost as if different teams of writers were competing with each other instead of cooperating on the story arc, exactly the kind of mistake audiences are increasingly complaining about.

The latest version is a species-jumping virus and is already facing criticism for lazy writing and reheating ideas from last time. Audiences are unimpressed. Time will tell if they can pull it off again.

The second plot they seem to be exploring is even more implausible, war with China.

After the last few seasons mired in the Ukraine storyline it beggars belief the writers went in this direction.

There were rumours of production overruns and expensive reshoots as the Ukraine storyline dragged on. We will never know the full extent of their production woes but tough decisions were clearly made as well as a shakeup of the production team.

Critics had warned wars were rarely popular. People like the drama of course, but audiences quickly get bored. None of this stopped the producers and the writers dutifully did as asked.

Now it is China.

Many are saying this is just a sign the producers have been there too long. It is time for another clear out.

At least war is exciting. But after numerous attempts to sell immigration storylines they are trying it again despite its unpopularity.

Previous attempts to promote immigration plots failed to resonate with audiences although it has always been popular with a small, loud minority.

Most found it too farfetched, millions of young foreign men just wandering into Western nations as if no one would stop them. The critics had a field day.

But this season they are going with climate migration. People moving around because of the weather.

This is partly to shore up their failing climate plot. It was obvious several seasons ago this long running theme, a strong favourite with the showrunners, was no longer popular.

October 11, 2024

German free speech – only applicable when used to criticize the “far right”

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

C.J. Hopkins discovers the stark contrast between actual freedom of speech and German freedom of speech:

The first rule of New Normal Germany is, you do not compare New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. If you do that, New Normal Germany will punish you. It will sic the Federal Criminal Police on you. It will report you to its domestic Intelligence agency. It will ban your books. It will censor your Tweets. It will prosecute you on fabricated “hate-crime” charges.

I know this, because that’s what happened to me. I broke the first rule of New Normal Germany. I compared New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. I did it with the cover artwork of my book.

Yes, that’s a swastika on the cover. A swastika covered by a medical mask. I tweeted that artwork in 2022. The German authorities prosecuted me for that, and convicted me for that. So, now I’m a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.

That’s the second rule of New Normal Germany. You never, ever, display a swastika. Displaying a swastika is not “in Ordnung“. Displaying swastikas is totally “verboten“.

Unless you are the Health Minister of New Normal Germany, and you’re comparing your political opponents to the Nazis. Or unless you are a popular German celebrity, and you’re comparing the Russians and their supporters to the Nazis. Or unless you are a mainstream magazine, and you’re comparing German populists to the Nazis.

In which case, displaying a swastika is fine. And is not “verboten“. And definitely not a “hate crime”.

And that’s the third rule of New Normal Germany. If you agree with the government, obey their orders, and parrot their propaganda, you are not a “hate criminal”. If you are the government, like an actual minister in the government, like the Minister of Health, you’re definitely not a “hate criminal”. And, if you are part of government’s propaganda apparatus, needless to say, you’re also not a “hate criminal”.

However, if you criticize the government, or if you compare the government to Nazi Germany, and if you do that using your book-cover art featuring a swastika behind a Covid mask, then you’re absolutely officially a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.

September 22, 2024

QotD: The work of Le Corbusier

Filed under: Architecture, Books, France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The sheer megalomania of the modernist architects, their evangelical zeal on behalf of what turned out to be, and could have been known in advance to be, an aesthetic and moral catastrophe, is here fully described. The story is more convoluted than I, not being an historian, had appreciated; Professor Curl conducts us deftly through the thickets of influences of which I, at least, had been ignorant. But the rapid rise and complete triumph of modernism throughout the world, so that an office block in Caracas should be no different from one in Bombay or Johannesburg, is to me still mysterious, considering that its progenitors were a collection of cranks and crackpots who wrote very badly and whose ideas would have disgraced an intelligent sixth-former. I do not see how anyone could read Corbusier, for example (and I have read a fair bit of him), without conceiving an immediate and complete contempt for him as a man, thinker and writer. He has two kinds of sentence, the declamatory falsehood and the peremptory order without reasons given. How anyone could have taken his bilge seriously is by far the most important enquiry that can be made about him.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.

September 18, 2024

Canucks. In. Space – “racist, exploitative, elitist, and environmentally destructive”

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper‘s First Reading on a recently commissioned report for the Canadian Armed Forces on space exploration from an intersectional feminist viewpoint:

As Canada prepares to send an astronaut on the first manned moon mission in more than 50 years, its own military has commissioned a $32,250 report on how space exploration may actually be “racist, exploitative, elitist, and environmentally destructive”.

The 48-page report, entitled Hidden Harms: Human (In)security in Outer Space, concludes that human usage of space is currently “masculine, militarized and state-based”.

The authors also bemoan a space exploration field that is beholden to colonial concepts such as “technospeak” and “expertise”, and which doesn’t give appropriate weight to “spirituality, astrology, and cosmology, the last of which views celestial bodies in space as animated beings and not mere objects”.

As such, the report concludes that space will continue to be a realm of “hidden violence” against the world’s marginalized until “gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality” can be put at “the centre” of how decisions are made in the cosmos.

“Leadership is needed to normalize inclusion of different perspectives,” reads a conclusion.

The report has very little positive to say about the current state of human space exploration or space technology.

The whole endeavour is criticized as “technology-biased” because it fails to consider “gendered effects”. It’s “geography-biased”, because it doesn’t include equal participation from poorer countries.

It “normalize(s) violence and exploitation” by using language that depicts “outer space as a hostile and desolate environment that is unpeopled/inhuman and controlled so that it can provide an extractable resource”.

The construction of launch pads, satellite receivers and other ground infrastructure causes “disproportionate harm to Indigenous communities by severing their connection to ancestral lands”.

The report is also deeply critical of the fact that space is disproportionately inhabited by able-bodied males from wealthy countries. “Existing approaches are ahistorical and thus invisibilize diverse stakeholders and voices,” it reads.

Hidden Harms contains little to no discussion of the technical aspects of space exploration or technology. The word “rocket”, for instance, appears only once in a footnote in relation to how a falling rocket stage could hurt Inuit people. The word “orbit” appears in the text just once, when referencing how states could impose extraterrestrial harm by “permanently damaging objects on orbit”.

Nevertheless, the report is clear that all of these technical considerations should become secondary to “intersectional, decolonial, and humanitarian perspectives”.

“We must make space for the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable,” it reads.

It’s hardly surprising that an “intersectional feminist” view of space exploration would be harshly negative — what is surprising is that the Canadian Armed Forces paid to have this intellectual drivel written. A bit over $30k isn’t even a rounding error for the federal government, but as an indicator of just how federal bureaucrats are spending their departmental budgets it does seem to indicate that there’s a lot of fat in those budget numbers.

September 17, 2024

Unbearable anti-humanism

Filed under: Economics, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall responds to a recent dispatch-from-dystopia from Christopher Ketcham, decrying the “Unbearable Anthropocentrism” he sees in the world:

To true miserablists, this chart is pure bad news. How will we get to the revolution this way?

No idea who Ketcham is built then he doesn’t know who I am so we’re equal there. His complaint is that Our World in Data tends to show that the world is becoming a better place. Poverty is decreasing, infant mortality rates are falling, more folk have at least a square and ever increasing numbers are getting three and so on.

This is, as the cool kids say, problematic. Because if the thing to be opposed — capitalism and markets — is making the world a better place then where will we get the revolutionary fortitude to get rid of what is making the world a better place?

Something must be wrong here, right? Well, yes, it is:

    For obvious reasons, Roser’s cheerful view of capitalist business-as-usual – and the data that would seem to support it – has made him a darling of libertarian market fundamentalists, who have lavished praise on his work.

See, this is problematic. So, what?

    Given the support that Roser enjoys from billionaire oligarchs at the pinnacle of the capitalist system, one wonders if it is a coincidence that so much of the data he headlines for public consumption happens to valorize that system.

Oooooh, no, the claim isn’t that he’s writing lies. It’s just a question that is being asked. Could it, you know, I wonder if …

To which the correct answer is that Ketcham is a tosser. For it really is true that these last 40 years of global neoliberalism have coincided — at the very least coincided with — the greatest reduction in abject poverty in the entire history of our species.

But because capitalism, markets, the ghastly little tosser has to spread shade on someone reporting — honestly reporting — this truth. Hey, sure, we can have lots of lovely arguments about causation and so on. But reporting facts is wrong if they’re politically inconvenient? Someone will only report facts if they’re being paid — bribed — to do so?

Fuck off laddie, go die in a ditch.

Like, you know, far too many of us all did before this capitalism, markets, shit.

Fuck off.

September 13, 2024

“The problem [with America] is and has always been the people and their beliefs”

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

Chris Bray puts on the old biohazard suit and goes wading into the political book section, this time looking at two recent tomes by NeverTrumpers Robert Kagan and Tom Nichols:

Robert Kagan speaking in Warsaw, 2008-04-17.
Photo by Mariusz Kubik via Wikimedia Commons.

If you want to know where we are as a country, get your hands on a copy of Robert Kagan’s new book, Rebellion. Don’t worry, you won’t even need to crack the spine and open it. Kagan, who married the Queen of Eternal War Victoria Nuland and helped found the now defunct neoconservative Project for a New American Century, has written a warning about the dangerous renascence of antiliberalism in American political life: intolerance, a rejection of minority rights, hatred of progress. America is in deep trouble, Kagan warns. We’re close to losing our democracy! You can already see the freshness and originality of his thought.

Flip it. Take the book, turn it around, and look at that back cover, which carries an excerpt from inside, getting right to the meat of the thing. The problem isn’t the media, Kagan concludes. And it isn’t government. It isn’t a problem with institutions at all: “The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs”. The thing that’s wrong with America is Americans, full stop. The country works brilliantly, except for the existence of the population. Imagine how healthy we would become if we could just get rid of them.

Should you make the mistake of opening the book, your experience will get worse in a hurry. The intellectual muddle is fatal. Here’s Kagan’s summary of the one big problem that runs through all of American history: “A straight line runs from the slaveholding South in the early to mid-nineteenth century to the post-Reconstruction South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, to the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and 1950s, to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society of the 1950s and 60s, to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today.”

All of those movements are precisely the same, you see. Ronald Reagan was a latter-day Ben Tillman, the Birchers merely a rebrand for the 1940s Southern Democrats, and Barry Goldwater was a fitting heir to Nathan Bedford Forrest. A shrewd mind is at work here. All, Kagan concludes, were figures representing “antiliberal groups”: “All have sought to ‘make America great again,’ by defending and restoring the old hierarchies and traditions that predated the Revolution.” The American Revolution, he means. The Dixiecrats and the Birchers and Reagan and Trump all want to restore Parliamentary supremacy and the landed aristocracy, or … something.

But pretend, for a moment, that Kagan has made some form of coherent statement about American history. He is arguing for the protection of the liberal order, the dignity of the common man and the premise that we’re all created equal. At the same time, he says, the biggest problem with America is … the American people themselves. How do those two claims fit together? What kind of politics can we frame around the dignity and inherent worth of the common man, who is stupid and worthless?

See also, on this theme, anything the former U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols has written in the last decade, such as his warning in Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy that “our fellow citizens are an intolerable threat to our own safety” — a claim that closely mirrors Kagan’s warning about America being plagued by Americans. Consider this framing very carefully: if a threat is intolerable, what do you have to do about it?

Kagan’s base argument sounded better in the original German.

September 12, 2024

Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon by Col. John F. Antal

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

At anarchonomicon, kulak reviews Antal’s book from the 1990s:

There are a lot of weird experimental products in the world of Military Publishing … there’s no other subject for adults where professional volumes are published in the same format as children’s picture books where every other page is a full page image so that when you hold it in your hands you always have 50% picture/50% text, and yet that’s exactly how military atlases are formatted. They’re amazing!

Likewise military identification/vehicle guides, book length manuals or ship tours, or regimental campaign histories and memorabilia … These push the limits of the publishing medium, because they have to. The subject matter is complex, technical, tactile, risky, and multifaceted enough that aside from experimental horror novels or the vanishingly rare graphic novel … Nothing pushes the limits of paper so completely … indeed there are almost certainly some military history books that rival the experimental horror novel House of Leaves in terms of sheer medium breaking complexity.

And while Colonel John F. Antal hasn’t produced the most complex example of this… He may have produced one of the most experimental.

Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon is a simultaneous Military Tactics and Leadership crash course and semi-political argument about the wrong lessons that were learned from Operation Desert Storm (it was first published in 1995) in the format of a “Choose your own Adventure” novel.

And my god does it work. Its argument is incredibly well presented, its intangible concepts and ethos is really strongly conveyed, it teaches an impressive amount of theory and application despite NOT being a textbook of theory or doctrine …

And It just has no conceivable right to work as well as it works.

It actually does push the format of the “Choose your own adventure novel” incredibly far in terms of complexity. I’ve never seen one before that included several pages of charts just to track your decisions down the matrix.

The setup is primally simple.

You are US Army 2nd Lieutenant Davis. While it isn’t your first-First day, it is nearly your first after getting to the unit, and a very unlucky one at that.

You graduated West Point, attended ranger school, and this is day 2-3 of your first command.

America’s army is in an unnamed country and temporarily outnumbered as it is invaded, however they’re just dumb Arabs … its fine. Will probably get settled at the negotiating, and beside you have air dominance and the technological marvel of the US Military behind you.

Note this map is oriented 90 degrees off. North is on the left, east at the top. The triangles are a tank ditch meant to stop armoured vehicles (like a massive dry moat)

The main force isn’t going to be attacking you.

Your lone platoon of just 38 will be defending Wadi Al Sirree, a narrow mountain pass separate and a little ahead of your main force.

You might think this is a little exposed but they’re almost certainly going to exploit the open country with their armor and proceed up the dirt road to hit the 1st armoured battalion and the rest of your company. This is the fastest way they can proceed and exploit their momentary numbers in the theater before the rest of the US military arrives. Your pass isn’t valuable much at all for a ground invasion, and besides there’s a massive tank ditch and other obstacles that will deter the enemy. Your troops are really just there as an auxiliary to the land and the ditch. Maybe spot some artillery fire.

But hey! This is a great opportunity to see what war in the late 20th/early 21st century is about up close and personal. Just keep your head down, let your NCOs who have the experience do their jobs, and you’ll get a nice combat medal on your second day on the job. Just try not to get in people’s way.

As you can guess, the job of a Infantry commander is probably a bit more complex than that …

August 30, 2024

Experts are concerned that criticism of experts will weaken their role in our political system

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

In the National Post, Geoff Russ dares to imply that the experts are not the divinely inspired superior beings with unfailing wisdom about any and all issues:

So-called “experts” have weakened Canada’s political discourse far more than Pierre Poilievre ever has. Journalist and author Stephen Maher recently penned a column in the Globe & Mail titled, “By slamming experts, Pierre Poilievre and his staff are degrading political debate”.

Maher is an even-handed journalist, and his column should not be written off as the scribblings of a Liberal partisan. What his column misses is how the term “expert” has been abused, and the degree to which “experts” have thoroughly discredited themselves in recent years.

Poilievre’s criticisms of the “experts” would not resonate if they lived up to the title bestowed upon them.

For example, the Doug Ford government’s decision to close 10 safe injection sites after implementing a ban on such facilities located near schools and child-care centres. The closures were lamented by “experts” trotted out by the CBC as putting peoples’ lives at risk.

The safe injection sites slated to be shut down are near schools and daycares, and there is demonstrable proof that crime rises near these sites wherever they are located.

Derek Finkle recently wrote that the critiques of the closures levelled by selected “experts” failed to note how community members had been threatened with rape, arson, and murder since the injection site in his Toronto neighbourhood had been opened.

These are reasonable grounds for a government to reconsider whether they should allow drug-use, supervised or not, to proliferate in neighbourhoods where families reside.

For all their alleged expertise, many “experts” seem unwilling to actually investigate what is happening on the ground, and often give plainly bad advice altogether, and this goes back decades.

The “experts” failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis, they said the risk to Canadians from the coronavirus was low in early 2020, and they failed to prevent runaway inflation after the worst of it had subsided.

Was it not the “experts” who asserted that arming and funding of Ukraine prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion in 2022 was a bad idea? After the invasion began, was it not the “experts” who confidently predicted Putin’s army would conquer the whole of Ukraine in a matter of days, and not be bogged down in a years-long conflict that would reshape global trade?

The truth is that we live in a worse-off world because of the advice and predictions of “experts”.

August 26, 2024

History Summarized: Beauty and Brutalism

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published May 10, 2024

No no no guys you just don’t GET IT, Brutalism is actually really clever and impressive and in this essay I wi–

SOURCES & Further Reading:
Architecture in Minutes: 200 key buildings and movements in an instant by Susie Hodge – an extremely useful reference for 20th century structures and famous figures outside my usual wheelhouse, and the fortuitous inspiration for this video via the entry on “Concrete” with an opposite-facing image of the Baha’i House of Worship
“Brutalism was the Greatest Architectural Movement in History. Change My Mind.” by Pat Finn, Architizer, https://architizer.com/blog/inspirati…
“Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth” by Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/20…
“The Salk Institute and the Lost Ethics of Brutalism” by James E Churchill, Docomomo, https://www.docomomo-us.org/news/the-…
“The New Brutalism” by Reyner Banham, Architectural Review, https://www.architectural-review.com/…
“Busting the Myths of Brutalism” by Stewart Hicks @stewarthicks, My Take on the Whole Brutalism Thing

Music:
“Scheming Weasel” by Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/… Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…

MERCH: https://overlysarcastic.shop/

OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com

August 18, 2024

A view of the near future – “What if calling someone stupid was illegal?”

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

Christopher Gage suspects that Lionel Shriver’s new book Mania didn’t require a lot of deep thinking about possible future trends, just a few glances at the headlines in British newspapers would provide all the inspiration necessary:

Lionel Shriver’s novel, Mania, asks “What if calling someone stupid was illegal?”

Set in an alternate timeline eerily flirtatious with our own, Mania depicts a world in which intelligence and competence, those oppressive agents of the modern bête noire — contrast — provoke outraged mobs.

The Mental Parity Movement demands a Khmer-Rouge-style Year Zero. To suggest the existence of differing abilities and competencies is to be “brain-vain”. In this final “great civil rights fight”, stupidity is euphemised as “alternative processing”. The mob cancels Frasier for brain vanity. After regulations prevent Pfizer from hiring qualified scientists, a toxic vaccine lays waste to millions.

The protagonist, a free-thinking academic named Pearson, cancels herself after she adds Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to her class syllabus. But the book is not the offending item. The word “idiot” is illegal. So too, is the “D-Word”. Pearson falls foul of social services after calling her seven-year-old daughter “dumb”. Her daughter grasses her up for this most heinous offence. For her crimes, Pearson endures a mandatory course entitled “Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity”.

Akin to our culture, mass neurosis devours that of Mania. The citizens scour the earth for evidence of the gravest offence: cognitive bigotry.

The Mental Parity Movement even renames “sage” — stripping the haughty herb of its sapiosexual swagger.

Mania imagines a world in which mediocrity is brilliance and where platitude is profundity. I suspect Shriver wasted little time on research. Turning on one’s television furnishes a commonplace book with a bottomless wealth of material.

This week, Harry and Meghan embarked on an unroyal tour of Colombia. On the agenda was a summit on misinformation and online harm. At this “responsible digital future” fandango, the former soap actress and the former royal spermatozoa relayed their fears. Essentially, hordes of toothless oiks with Wi-Fi often say nasty things online.

On stage, Harry adopted the pose of the modern soothsayer. His tieless open collar oozed Sicilian ease.

Speaking in Adverb English, Harry avoided anything as threatening or as harmful as a declarative sentence. Harry talks as if everything is a question as not to arouse predators. The Prince droned on, auditioning the Californication of his mother tongue. The same mother tongue Harry’s ancestors spread around the globe via what some may deign to be less than inclusive methods.

How can I put this in Mania-approved euphemism? Harry is minimally exceptional. Harry is to intelligent thought what lead pipes are to potable water.

August 15, 2024

“The Establishment … are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration”

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

Spaceman Spiff risks getting the full power and majesty of the British legal system arrayed against him for offering an opinion critical of the authorities and the ongoing immigration policies of this and previous British governments:

Britain is experiencing civil unrest in response to the recent murders of three young girls at the hands of an individual whose family was allowed to enter Britain from Africa and settle in Wales.

The Establishment response is similar to comparable European states like Ireland or Germany. They are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration.

Vocal rejection of multiculturalism and evidence of its failure in Britain is treated as a hate crime, a subject that cannot be discussed.

This has done nothing to quell discomfort and has done little more than show us Britain’s elites are lost in a bubble that is increasingly divorced from reality.

Mass immigration is deeply unpopular

Immigration has been an issue since the 1950s. Since the 1990s it has featured as one of the key issues in every election, often the top issue for most.

Conversely it has been summarily ignored by the educated classes who run the country. Immigration is here to stay, and Britain must change to accommodate it.

The elite section of society promoting immigration is especially indifferent to those most affected, low wage workers. There is also a strong cultural component beyond the economic arguments, an understanding the drive is to make Britain less white with very vocal attempts to champion non-natives in every area of life.

For many decades the educated classes have viewed notions of patriotism or national loyalty with suspicion. Many fancy themselves as internationalists more in tune with the educated in foreign nations than their working-class compatriots.

Now, after decades of immigration, whole communities have been displaced. Some areas of Britain have no Europeans living there. Some tourists complain parts of London do not look English.

[…]

It is the height of arrogance to believe we can somehow circumvent the wisdom accumulated throughout history. And the price being paid is by the British people who are losing their homeland.

Those behind our utopian schemes are working harder and harder to shore them up. Not just mixing cultures but expensive climate initiatives, radical feminism and fractional reserve banking to name only a few of today’s fads. None of them were ever going to work and now they are obviously failing.

The announcements represent the beginning of the end of bad ideas that were doomed from the start. A sane government would take note and begin a plan to reset Britain starting with listening to concerns about mass immigration.

Instead our ruling elite are digging in, and that will probably mean increased civil disturbance as more and more recognize they have no voice and no say.

Given who we are, who we really are under the political correctness and the good manners, this is absolute insanity on their part. Perhaps just the latest decision in a long line of bad ideas unable to accommodate reality. The distortions within their bubble are strong and they are becoming impossible to hide.

The end is nigh for the believers in Western liberalism.

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