Quotulatiousness

March 1, 2023

Our modern age of “squishy totalitarianism”

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

Chris Bray on the odd controlling habits of our “great and good”, our “moral and intellectual superiors” to urge us to follow their directives “for our own good” (or else):

The anarchist philosopher Crispin Sartwell describes our political culture as one of “squishy totalitarianism”, a term I like quite a bit. (See the third page of this document.) You can disagree and refuse to comply, and the secret police won’t show up at your door (with maybe a growing list of exceptions). We don’t have a gulag. We don’t have the “culture of the disappeared“. You just … maybe find yourself with fewer friends, and some family that stops talking to you, and maybe your employer lets you know that hey, you know what, this doesn’t seem to be working out.

It’s not the Great Terror, it’s just a kind of low-grade grind of social decredentialing that lets you know you’re not making the right choices. We need to rethink Thanksgiving this year, because we’re very disappointed in you. (Don’t you want to be safe?) The way Google searches are working these days is a pretty good example of squishy totalitarianism: Oh, I’m sorry, we have no results for that widely known piece of wrongthink, but here are some results that debunk the conspiracy theory you’re searching for. Wouldn’t you prefer to read a correct search result?

[…]

We can debate the origins and the motive force behind the constant parade of error that has plagued us over the last three years: useless mask mandates, aggressively harmful school closures, insanely damaging vaccine mandates, ludicrous closures of beaches and parks, the pearl clutching over all those conspiracy theories about a lab leak.

You know the terms of the debate: Is the world led by idiots who are screwing it all up, or is this a plan that they’re executing on purpose?

But whichever answer turns out to be correct, one thing that seems extremely clear to me is that this perpetual reign of error couldn’t possibly go on without the unthinking enforcement activity of a distributed commissariat, the slogan-repeating upper-middle-class-aligned cultural apparatus that endlessly lawn signs their compliance. No one has to tell journalists to scold Woody Harrelson: they already know. The moment the Woodster engaged in crimethink, the Rolling Stone writer Marlow Stern started salivating like a trained dog hearing a bell. Vast armies of professors and HR specialists and marketing executives and bureaucrats and Hollywood functionaries and school board wokescolds and on and on and on already know their roles without being assigned to them. It is not correct for you to fail to comply with Current Thing; you are spewing conspiracy theories.

    Doctor, the symptoms began shortly after I received the second dose of the Covid vaccine.

    No, that is not possible, vaccines do not cause injuries. Let us not discuss this conspiracy theory any further. Here are some pills.

We have an enforcement apparatus made up of people who volunteered for the job. In terms of social class, we have the lower class, the lower-middle-class, the middle class, the Stasi, and the upper class.

February 16, 2023

A modern irregular verb: I mis-spoke. You spread misinformation. He has been banned from social media

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

I derive my headline from the original words of Bernard Woolley: “That’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.” It was a joke in Yes, Minister, but as Jon Miltimore shows, it’s a model for how the powers-that-be want to treat how information is shared on social media:

As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data — or “spreading ‘misinformation'”.

In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.

“Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion”, NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.

Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way — at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs.

San Francisco attorney Michael Senger was permanently banned from Twitter after calling the government’s pandemic response “a giant fraud”. Prior to him, it was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson who got the boot after questioning the efficacy of vaccines in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Months earlier it was author Naomi Wolf, a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

All of these accounts were reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the company. Twitter is hardly alone, however. Facebook and YouTube also announced policies banning the spread of COVID misinformation, particularly information related to vaccines, which is what got Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone ostracized and banned.

Some may argue these policies are vital, since they protect readers from false information. However, there is nothing that says Big Tech can only ban information that is false. On the contrary, in court proceedings Twitter has claimed it has “the right to ban any user any time for any reason” and can discriminate “on the basis of religion, or gender, or sexual preference, or physical disability, or mental disability”.

Facebook, meanwhile, has argued in court that the army of fact-checkers they employ to protect readers from false information are merely sharing “opinions”, and are therefore exempt from defamation claims.

[…]

What Big Tech is doing is concerning, but the fact that this censorship is taking place in coordination with the federal government makes it doubly so.

In July, in arguably the most anti-free speech pronouncement made at the White House in modern history, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted the White House is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook”.

“We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team”, Psaki explained. (Today we know that these companies are staffed with dozens of former CIA and FBI officials.)

All of this is being done in the name of science, but let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship.

February 12, 2023

QotD: The heyday of Victorian newspapers

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A few years ago, I did some research on three early Victorian murders that caused me to read several provincial newspapers of the time. I discovered incidentally to my research that the owners or editors of about half of the British provincial newspapers also sold patent medicines; and this made perfect sense, for by far the greatest advertisers in provincial newspapers were the manufacturers of patent medicines. The owners or editors of the newspapers sold advertisements to the producers of patent medicines, then they sold the newspapers in which the advertisements appeared, and finally they sold the products themselves to the readers. It was an excellent example of rational commercial synergy. (About half of the medicines, by the way, were either to cure or to prevent syphilis — a disease, then, that was a great support to the press of the time.)

Now, the principal quality or characteristic of the sellers of patent medicine has always been effrontery, that is to say the blatant insinuation of the false. Thomas Holloway’s innovation was to insinuate such falsehood on a mass or industrial scale. There was hardly a newspaper in which he did not place a weekly advertisement; moreover, he pioneered the advertisement that masquerades as news story. He would ensure that reports of miracle cures in faraway places, supposedly wrought by his pills and ointment, and written as matter-of-factly as possible, were placed in every newspaper, reports whose veracity no one could possibly check for himself, of course.

As Napoleon once said, repetition is the only rhetorical technique that really works — besides which hope and fear render people susceptible to effrontery. In Thomas Holloway’s time, the fear of illness was often, and the hope of cure rarely, justified; at least Holloway’s preparations were unlikely to do much harm (they contained aloe, myrrh, and saffron), unlike the prescriptions of the orthodox doctors of the time. They allowed for the possibility of natural recovery, whereas orthodox medicine often hurried its consumers into their graves. Nevertheless, the claims Holloway made for his ointment and pills were preposterous, and something is not curative just because it fails to kill.

Holloway made an immense fortune by his effrontery and founded a women’s college in the University of London on the proceeds.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Way of Che”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-10-28.

January 22, 2023

One year later

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

Last year, the Freedom Convoy 2022 from all parts of Canada began to assemble and move toward Mordor, er, I mean Ottawa. Patrick Carroll remembers:

It’s hard to believe, but the one-year anniversary of the Canadian Freedom Convoy is upon us. It was January 22, 2022 when the convoy began to form across the country. Over the following week, thousands of trucks made their way to Ottawa, and on January 29 they arrived in the nation’s capital, loud and determined as ever.

The following month was one of the most tumultuous times in modern Canadian history. Downtown Ottawa was completely gridlocked, bridges were blocked, and politicians along with the media took every opportunity to smear the protesters.

Four weeks later, it ended quite a bit faster than most people expected. Armed with special powers from the never-before-invoked Emergencies Act, the government successfully dismantled the protest in a matter of days.

In hindsight, the practical effect of the protest on legislation is difficult to detect. Some Covid policies were probably relaxed a few months earlier than they otherwise would have been, but for the Convoy organizers, this was far from a decisive victory.

A debate has been raging in Canada ever since: were the protestors within their rights to do what they did? Those who support the convoy argue that they were, since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly. Those who oppose the convoy largely agree with these freedoms, but argue that such freedoms should be subject to certain reasonable restrictions. Major obstructions to traffic, and especially obstructions to critical infrastructure such as bridges, are simply going too far in their view. Is the government supposed to stand by and let a group of hooligans bring the country to its knees?

That’s certainly the line the governments (city, provincial, and federal) generally chose to take and the media were almost chanting the governments’ line in unison. Of course, the governments were not all that well synchronized, which led to some blatant examples of deliberate misinformation/disinformation/gaslighting from one or another level, as Donna Laframboise points out:

During the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, witnesses talked about misinformation as if it were a problem confined to contrarians on social media. But the Closing Submission of former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly shows that government officials are, themselves, a fertile source of misinformation.

If someone in our federal government had demonstrated genuine leadership by going out and talking to the truckers, the protesters would likely have dispersed after the first weekend. Instead, a government that meets with professional lobbyists on 24,000 occasions a year refused to have a single meeting with working people who’d driven thousands of miles to the nation’s capital. Rather than being a grownup, the Prime Minister called them names. Rather than negotiating with the protesters, he told police to get rid of them.

According to Chief Sloly, the Ottawa force was understaffed at the best of times. Even after cancelling vacations and days off, there still weren’t enough personnel to deal with a significant, extended protest on top of normal duties.

From the beginning, the media failed to behave responsibly. It whipped up hysteria. It smeared and sneered. It sowed suspicion and fear of small town Canada, of those who see the world differently, of people who’d reached their breaking point. Big surprise a portion of the public did, in fact, become hysterical. As the protest dragged on, the pressure became intense. In lieu of pursuing a political resolution to what were clearly political grievances, slimy politicians pointed fingers at the Ottawa police. While simultaneously hamstringing them behind the scenes.

Page 43 of Chief Sloly’s Closing Submission says federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino falsely told the world — on February 3rd — that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had provided all the resources the Ottawa police had asked for. Four days later — on February 7th — he insisted 250 RCMP officers had been dispatched to Ottawa.

But the reality was quite different. Until mid-February, say his lawyers, the maximum number of RCMP officers available to the Ottawa force on any given day was 60 — far less than the number required.

It was the same story with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). On February 6th, Ontario’s Solicitor General Sylvia Jones falsely stated in an official document that “more than 1,500” OPP personnel had already been sent to Ottawa. In the words of Chief Sloly’s lawyers, this was “grossly inaccurate” (pages 80, 107).

Government ministers at both the provincial and federal level, they insist, made misleading statements about the degree of assistance Ottawa police had received. Statements that were “clearly incorrect” (page 53).

Which means Cabinet ministers were spreading misinformation. Misinformation that just happened to deflect blame away from themselves. That just happened to make the Ottawa Police Service look incompetent while turning the chief into a scapegoat. Ottawa’s first black police chief, a Jamaican immigrant, got thrown under the bus.

January 2, 2023

How much of the media coverage of the Bosnian War was fake news?

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

Kate at Small Dead Animals linked to this rather disturbing collection of intelligence cables from the Canadian peacekeeping force in Bosnia to NDHQ in Ottawa during the conflict, which contradicts the media narrative of the time:

Map of deployment of National Battalions in UN Forces in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina – Early 1993 (Balkan Battlegrounds Map I)
Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990-1995 author credit: Central Intelligence Agency.

A trove of intelligence files sent by Canadian peacekeepers expose CIA black ops, illegal weapon shipments, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags, and stage-managed atrocities.

The established mythos of the Bosnian War is that Serb separatists, encouraged and directed by Slobodan Milošević and his acolytes in Belgrade, sought to forcibly seize Croat and Bosniak territory in service of creating an irredentist “Greater Serbia”. Every step of the way, they purged indigenous Muslims in a concerted, deliberate genocide, while refusing to engage in constructive peace talks.

This narrative was aggressively perpetuated by the mainstream media at the time, and further legitimized by the UN-created International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) once the conflict ended. It has become axiomatic and unquestionable in Western consciousness ever since, enforcing the sense that negotiation invariably amounts to appeasement, a mentality that has enabled NATO war hawks to justify multiple military interventions over subsequent years.

However, a vast trove of intelligence cables sent by Canadian peacekeeping troops in Bosnia to Ottawa’s National Defence Headquarters, first published by Canada Declassified at the start of 2022, exposes this narrative as cynical farce.

The documents offer an unparalleled, first-hand, real-time view of the war as it developed, with the prospect of peace rapidly degrading into grinding bloodshed that ultimately caused the painful death of the multi-faith, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.

The Canadian soldiers were part of a wider UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) dispatched to former Yugoslavia in 1992, in the vain hope tensions wouldn’t escalate to all-out-war, and an amicable settlement could be reached by all sides. They stayed until the bitter end, long past the point their mission was reduced to miserable, life-threatening failure.

The peacekeepers’ increasingly bleak analysis of the reality on the ground provides a candid perspective of the war’s history that has been largely concealed from the public. It is a story of CIA black ops, literally explosive provocations, illegal weapon shipments, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags, and stage-managed atrocities.

Read the complete Canadian UNPROFOR cables here.

See key excerpts of the files referred to in this article here.

December 30, 2022

The continued relevance of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”

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

In Quillette, George Case praises Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (which was one of the first essays that convinced me that Orwell was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century), and shows how it still has relevance today:

George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential essays ever written. First published in Britain’s Horizon in 1946, it has since been widely anthologized and is always included in any collection of the writer’s essential nonfiction. In the decades since its appearance, the article has been quoted by many commentators who invoke Orwell’s literary and moral stature in support of its continued relevance. But perhaps the language of today’s politics warrants some fresh criticisms that even the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm could not have conceived.

“Politics and the English Language” addressed the jargon, double-talk, and what we would now call “spin” that had already distorted the discourse of the mid-20th century. “In our time,” Orwell argued, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. … Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Those are the sentences most cited whenever a modern leader or talking head hides behind terms like “restructuring” (for layoffs), “visiting a site” (for bombing), or “alternative facts” (for falsehoods). In his essay, Orwell also cut through the careless, mechanical prose of academics and journalists who fall back on clichés — “all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally”.

These objections still hold up almost 80 years later, but historic changes in taste and technology mean that they apply to a new set of unexamined truisms and slogans regularly invoked less in oratory or print than through televised soundbites, online memes, and social media: the errors of reason and rhetoric identified in “Politics and the English Language” can be seen in familiar examples of empty platitudes, stretched metaphors, and meaningless cant which few who post, share, like, and retweet have seriously parsed. Consider how the following lexicon from 2023 is distinguished by the same question-begging, humbug, and sheer cloudy vagueness exposed by George Orwell in 1946.

[…]

Climate, [mis- and dis-]information, popular knowledge, genocide, land claims, sexual assault, and racism are all serious topics, but politicizing them with hyperbole turns them into trite catchphrases. The language cited here is largely employed as a stylistic template by the outlets who relay it — in the same way that individual publications will adhere to uniform guidelines of punctuation and capitalization, so too must they now follow directives to always write rape culture, stolen land, misinformation, or climate emergency in place of anything more neutral or accurate. Sometimes, as with cultural genocide or systemic racism, the purpose appears to be in how the diction of a few extra syllables imparts gravity to the premise being conveyed, as if a gigantic whale is a bigger animal than a whale, or a horrific murder is a worse crime than a murder.

Elsewhere, the words strive to alter the parameters of an issue so that its actual or perceived significance is amplified a little longer. “Drunk driving” will always be a danger if the legal limits of motorists’ alcohol levels are periodically lowered; likewise, relations between the sexes and a chaotic range of public opinion will always be problematic if they can be recast as rape culture, hate, or disinformation. This lingo typifies the parroted lines and reflexive responses of political communication in the 21st century.

In “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell’s concluding lesson was not just that parroted lines and reflexive responses were aesthetically bad, or that they revealed professional incompetence in whoever crafted them, but that they served to suppress thinking. “The invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases … can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain”, he wrote. He is still right: glib, shallow expression reflects, and will only perpetuate, glib, shallow thought, achieving no more than to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

November 16, 2022

“Angertainment is unlikely the sole cause of US political polarisation, but it certainly hasn’t helped”

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

At Quillette, Claire Lehmann rounds up the rising distrust/disgust among the American public in their views of the legacy media:

In October, a study published in PLOS One provided some fresh insight into how and why American media has become so dysfunctional. Over the past 20 years, the study reported, headlines that convey anger, fear, sadness, and disgust have been increasing, while headlines conveying neutrality or joy have been in decline. These trends have coincided with a massive drop in trust in news journalism, particularly in the US.

According to Gallop polling, seven percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” of trust in the media, while 38 percent say they have none at all. As angertainment has increased, trust has decreased. As one political tribe provides angertainment for its loyal readers and viewers, the other becomes increasingly alarmed and disgusted. Angertainment may be profitable for journalism in the short-term but over the long-term it trashes the integrity of the profession.

Angertainment is unlikely the sole cause of US political polarisation, but it certainly hasn’t helped. Just as mad cow disease was caused by feeding bovine-meal to cows, angertainment feeds on polarisation which in turn feeds on angertainment. It’s a cannibalistic cycle.

[…]

The incentives for journalism are broken. This is not always the fault of individual journalists, although some strive for truth and accuracy with more sincerity than others. Nor is it solely the fault of media companies, although many of them prioritise profit and engagement over rigour and fairness. It is not even the fault of “Big Tech”, even though social media companies have built the machine on which these broken incentives run.

It’s the fault of all of us. We are the ones who devour angertainment and get high on watching our enemies suffer. We are the ones who want to see various idiots eviscerated and dismembered by the bayonets of Twitter. We are the ones who clamour after content which makes us feel virtuous, complacent, and like we belong. The 20-year incline in headlines denoting fear, anger, disgust, and sadness in American media would not have occurred if audiences had not been rewarding it. In a competitive eco-system, media organisations must adapt to their audiences, feed them what they want, or die. But like the cows feeding on the meat-and-bone meal of other cows, this feedback loop creates the cultural equivalent of a neurodegenerative disease.

I have been just as guilty of this as any other publisher, consumer, or creator of media. But in recent months I’ve largely stepped back from social media, stood outside this machine, and have watched it whir and whizz from the sidelines. It is possible to disengage and reconsider the machine from a safe distance, starving it of fuel. And every day at Quillette I am reminded by my writers and readers and subscribers that it is possible to publish and create journalism that is appreciated for its analytical and aesthetic value, rather than for the artillery it provides in a never-ending culture war. It’s a war in which facts and reputations exist merely as cannon fodder, and where truth is less important than tribe. The media’s incentives may be broken, but we as individuals do not have to be.

October 31, 2022

“If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news”

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

At Founding Questions, Severian offers some preliminary thoughts on the new field of “Brandonology”, specifically how to determine whether what’s in the legacy media is news or propaganda:

I’m throwing this out there now, because it’s shaping up to be a long-term project and I think we can all contribute to it as needed. But as Brandonology / FNGology is such a new discipline, it’ll help to lay in the foundations.

The first step in analyzing the “news” is determining whether or not it is, in fact, news. “News” here being defined as “an unplanned event — or catastrophic fuckup of a planned event — to which The Regime is forced to react in more or less real time”. Lot of that going around recently, such that we’re spoiled for choice. Pick pretty much any of the shenanigans in Ukraine: The botched assassination of Alexander Dugin; the Nordstream sabotage; the Ukrainian dirty bomb false flag. Those clearly fall into the “catastrophic fuckup of a planned event” category …

… or do they? Because as Z Man pointed out in great detail on his last podcast, all of that stuff seemed to catch The Regime flatfooted. Yeah, somebody planned those things, but that somebody wasn’t Brandon, or anyone close to Brandon, or anyone in position to prop up Brandon. Which is the surest tell for actual news (as defined above) right there: If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news.

The necessity of the canned narrative also allows the keen Brandonologist to anticipate the “news”. For instance, it has obviously started to dawn on The Regime that they’re going to get walloped in the midterms, so they’re trying out narratives as we speak. Z Man identified one I hadn’t seen, something about Brandon “inadvertently” saying something about the debt ceiling that’s supposed to give the Republicans all kinds of ammunition against him. I’m not so sure. I’ll have to look into it, but the fact that it squarely blames Brandon — who The Regime still insists is the very picture of mental acuity and vigor — pings my radar a bit. I think the stuff Her Nibs is rolling out is much likelier the Narrative being developed — she’s outright stating that “the Republicans” are going to engage in massive voter fraud.

Which to normal people is chutzpah beyond belief, but that’s how The Regime rolls. The 2016 election was, of course, full of Russian Hacking™. The 2020 election, by contrast, was the cleanest canvass in human history, and you’re an insurrectionist, a domestic extremist, and of course a racist if you dare to suggest the mere possibility of an American election being tampered with. But wouldn’t you know it, those dastardly Russians are going to rally here in 2022, because you can’t keep a Russian Hacker™ down. They might even hire a few prostitutes to pee on a bed for good measure; that’s how evil they are.

Further complicating the task, though, is that “botched op” thing. We’ve got Brandon et al. on record threatening Nordstream, so you know that was an American caper gone bad … but gone real, real bad, because if The Regime had been fully in the know, there’d have been a whole bunch of Tier Four Stoyak about lousy maintenance on the pipelines for months in advance.

September 29, 2022

Nostradamus

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

In the latest post at Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander considers prophecy “From Nostradamus to Fukuyama”. Here’s the section on Nostradamus (because I don’t have a lot of time for Fukuyama, you’ll have to read the rest at ACX):

“House of Nostradamus in Salon, France. Now a museum.” by photographymontreal is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 .

Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future.

(never trust doctors who dabble in futurology, that’s my advice)

His method was: read books of other people’s prophecies and calculate some astrological charts, until he felt like he had a pretty good idea what would happen in the future. Then write it down in the form of obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish, to placate religious authorities (who apparently hated prophecies, but loved prophecies phrased as obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish).

In 1559, he got his big break. During a jousting match, a count killed King Henry II of France with a lance through the visor of his helmet. Years earlier, Nostradamus had written:

    The young lion will overcome the older one,
    On the field of combat in a single battle;
    He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
    Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death

The nobleman was a bit younger than the king, supposedly they both had lions on their shield (false), maybe King Henry was wearing a golden helmet (I can’t find evidence for this, but as a consolation prize please accept this picture of his amazing parade armor), and his slow agonizing death over ten days from his wounds was pretty cruel. Seems like a match, sort of. Anyway, for the next five hundred years lots of people were really into Nostradamus and spent goodness knows how many brain cycles trying to interpret his incomprehensible quatrains.

The basic Nostradamic method was:

    Write 942 vague and incomprehensible quatrains, out of order and without any dates.

    Whenever something happens, say “that sounds a lot like quatrain #143!” or “quatrain #558 predicted that”

    Prophet

For example, prophecy 106:

    Near the gates and within two cities
    There will be two scourges the like of which was never seen,
    Famine within plague, people put out by steel,
    Crying to the great immortal God for relief

This is an okay match for the atomic bombs, in the sense that there were two cities where something really bad happened. But read on to prophecy 107:

    Amongst several transported to the isles,
    One to be born with two teeth in his mouth
    They will die of famine the trees stripped,
    For them a new King issues a new edict.

… and it starts to sound like he’s just kind of saying random stuff and some of it’s sticking by sheer luck.

A few prophecies sound more impressive than this, eg:

    The lost thing is discovered, hidden for many centuries.
    Pasteur will be celebrated almost as a god-like figure.
    This is when the moon completes her great cycle,
    but by other rumours he shall be dishonoured

This seems to name Pasteur, who was indeed a celebrated discoverer of things. And Nostradamus scholars note that a historian accused Pasteur of plagiarism in 1995, which is a kind of dishonorable rumor. But the work here is being done by the translator: Pasteur is just French for “pastor”, and an honest translation would have just said “the pastor will be celebrated …”, which is in tune with all his other vague allusions to things happening.

    The blood of the just will be demanded of London
    Burnt by fire in the year ’66
    The ancient Lady will fall from her high place
    And many of the same sect will be killed.

Seems like a match for the London fire of 1666. But again checking the original French and the commentators, the second line is more properly “burnt by fire in 23 the 6”, which a fanciful translator rounded off to 20 * 3 + 6 = 66 and then assumed was a year. The experts say that this is really a coded reference to 23 Protestants being burned, in groups of six, during Nostradamus’ lifetime (many of his quatrains are references to past or present events, for some reason). This sounds more compatible with the “many of the same sect will be killed” ending.

I had a weird experience writing the end of this first part of the post. When I was a kid, reading through my parents’ old books, I came across an weird almanac from the 70s that had a section on Nostradamus. It listed some of his most famous prophecies, including the ones above, but also (reconstructing from memory and probably getting some things wrong, sorry):

    The way of life according to Thomas More
    Will give way to another more sweet and seductive
    In the land of cold winds that first gave it birth
    Without strife, without a war it will fall

… and the 70s almanac interpreted this as meaning Soviet communism would fall peacefully. Reading this in 1995 or whenever it was I read it, a few years after Soviet communism did fall peacefully, I was really impressed: this is the only example I know where someone used a Nostradamus quatrain to predict something before it happened.

But I searched for the exact text so I could include the correct version in this essay, and I didn’t find it — this is none of Nostradamus’ 942 prophecies! The almanac authors must have made it up, or unwittingly copied it from someone else who did.

But I remember this very clearly — the almanac was from 1970-something. So how did the faker know Russian communism would collapse?

The moral of the story is: just because Nostradamus wasn’t a real prophet, doesn’t mean nobody else is.

September 26, 2022

Canada, a confessed “ongoing” genocidal state, has no moral grounds to criticize China, Russia, or Iran

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay expresses his frustration as Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s performative moral posturing and virtue signalling for his globalist comrades comes back to bite him in the ass … again:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

… [Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi] also threw in an attack on Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, declaring that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school.”

The issue of supposed unmarked Indigenous child graves dominated the Canadian media in the latter half of 2021. But as I reported in Quillette several months ago, no “mass graves” were ever found. In fact, even the Indigenous groups that initially reported ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey results consistent with the possible presence of unmarked burial sites weren’t talking about “mass graves”. Rather, the invented mass-graves claim was popularized by a badly botched New York Times May 28th, 2021, story written by reporter Ian Austen. (For a definitive debunking, see Terry Glavin’s account in Canada’s National Post).

In the 16 months that have passed since the unmarked-graves story broke in late May 2021, not a single body has been found, nor any human remains. And so even the less sensational allegation that 215 individual unmarked child graves lie buried under the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, now seems doubtful. Nor have bodies or human remains been recovered at any of the other former residential-school properties where GPR surveys were conducted.

Yet that didn’t prevent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from lowering flags on Canadian public buildings for more than five months, nor from speaking publicly as if bodies were already being dug up. And aside from the National Post, not a single major Canadian media outlet has admitted its role in feeding the unmarked-graves social panic that exploded last year, and which often included lurid speculation that the supposed grave sites not only contained the remains of Indigenous children, but that these children had been murdered through methods worthy of a horror-movie plot.

Given this, what can Canadian public figures say to Raisi now that he’s throwing spurious moral equivalences into our faces? Nothing. In making the false claim that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school”, the man is merely reading our own officially sourced misinformation back to us.

This isn’t the first time that Trudeau has managed to maneuver Canada into this kind of mortifying position vis-à-vis the world’s tyrants. Last year, when Canadian lawmakers voted to denounce China’s treatment of Uighurs in western Xinjiang as a form of genocide, Trudeau and his Cabinet abstained. The suspected reasons for that move were complex. But they included the fact that Canada was, by its own description, morally compromised on the genocide file: Back in 2019, Trudeau had explicitly acceded to the (absurd) claim that Canada, too, was guilty of “genocide” — this one against Indigenous women. Indeed, according to the official report that precipitated Trudeau’s mea culpa, this supposed Canadian genocide remains ongoing.

September 17, 2022

Is it still a conspiracy theory if more than 50% of Canadians believe it?

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

Chris Selley posted a link to this rather eye-opening Abacus Data poll summary by Bruce Anderson and David Coletto:

We recently completed nationwide surveying among 1500 Canadians. The focus was on the levels of trust people have in institutional sources of information, and belief in conspiracy theories. This is the first in a series called “Trust & Facts: What Canadians Believe”

44% THINK MUCH OF THE INFORMATION FROM NEWS ORGANIZATIONS IS FALSE

Almost half of those interviewed found themselves agreeing with the statement “much of the information we receive from news organizations is false”.

While this means a majority of Canadians have some trust in news organizations, more than 13 million adults (extrapolating 44% to an adult population of 29.5 million) don’t.

Those with no post-secondary education, Alberta residents and those on the right show greater mistrust. But by far the biggest differences are visible when we look at party affinity. The vast majority of People’s Party supporters don’t trust news organizations and a (smaller) majority – 59% – of Conservative voters feel the same way.

Among those who think Pierre Poilievre is the Conservative leadership candidate who best reflects their views, 55% don’t trust media information, while among those who identify with Jean Charest the proportion is much lower, at 27%.

52% THINK OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTS OF EVENTS CAN’T BE TRUSTED

More than half of those interviewed found themselves agreeing with the statement “official government accounts of events can’t be trusted”

As with trust in news organizations, those with no post-secondary education, Alberta residents and those on the right showed markedly higher levels of mistrust in government.

Majorities of People’s Party, Conservative and Green Party voters indicate mistrust. Those on the left and Liberal voters show higher levels of trust.

August 20, 2022

Yes, you will end up owing your conspiracy theorist friend an apology at this rate …

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

Chris Bray re-enacts a few of the minor erasures, walk-backs, and out-and-out lies coming from organizations who’ve spent the last two-plus years spreading a line of medical “truth” that, day-by-day, appears a bit less “truth-y” all the time:

I can’t get this attack on Dr. Ryan Cole out of my head:

What’s becoming very clear is that the narrative is going to shift by inches, eventually ending up at the place where mRNA dissenters started, but. Let’s get through the first part, and I’ll get to that but in just a moment. Look at, for example, the recent stealth-edit on the CDC website that quietly removed the assurance about the spike protein from mRNA injection leaving your body in a hurry. So on Monday it’s disinformation to falsely claim that the spike protein lingers in your body, and you’re a dangerous extremist if you say it; on Tuesday, the simple fact of lingering spike protein was always known and never contested. That’s DISINFORMA— hold on, I’ve just been handed a new memo.

This is going to keep happening, in little pieces that move toward reality. There are ZERO mRNA deaths, you lying idiots, and you need to stop spreading disin— uh, hold on, it says here that, uh …

In a year, or in five years, the things that Ryan Cole and Clare Craig and Peter McCullough and Tracy Beth Hoeg and Robert Malone and all the other MONSTERS have been saying will be validated and acknowledged. We’ll know that the mRNA injections caused heart damage and a cancer spike, and we’ll know that mRNA-injected people get sick more often than the dirty unvaccinated. Look at the matter-of-factness with which Deborah Birx says that oh yeah, I always knew these vaccines — vaccines! — weren’t going to prevent infection. A year before she shrugged and said she’d always known that, you would have lost your social media accounts for saying exactly what she just said. Yesterday’s idiotic conspiracy theory disinformation nonsense is today’s “yeah, we always knew that”.

Now, here’s my big but: The narrative is going to turn, in a long series of tiny and unacknowledged shifts, until it matches what the heretics have always been saying — but my bet is that the heretics will not be rehabilitated. Ryan Cole, to stick with the opening example, will be proven correct, but he will not be vindicated. The YOU CAN’T SAY THAT, IT’S DISINFORMATION oh wait it’s totally true maneuver doesn’t rehabilitate the crimethinkers. You can think X when it’s time to think X; if you think X too early, you remain a thought criminal.

The truthtellers in medicine will be proved correct, but they’ll still be resented and excluded.

July 20, 2022

Apparently “Crisis-Pregnancy Centers” prey exclusively on young people who menstruate!

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

Chris Bray reveals some of the shocking information a new investigation has turned up about so-called “Crisis-Pregnancy Centers” in the United States:

A quick illustration of the Red-Blue Chasm, the immensity of which can now only be estimated using theories borrowed from astrophysics.

An email message this morning from The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a deep investigative dive into an obscure topic — in a message that barely fit on my screen, so the screenshot is cut off a bit at the top:

Figured that out, did they? Coming soon: “Pizza shops orbit college campuses. Scholars have determined that they offer a bread-like disc strewn with red liquid and white-colored molten coverings”.

The investigation of pregnancy centers proceeds on the kind of dark foreboding that a television show conveys with poor lighting and a low vibration on the soundtrack. Since the reporter didn’t manage to get a single pregnancy center advocate or volunteer on the record, despite sending some email messages, the whole investigation takes all criticism entirely at face value, uncontested and unexamined. That leads to framing like this:

    Some centers target college students. Andrea Swartzendruber, an epidemiologist at the University of Georgia, analyzed the centers’ locations in Georgia and found that they were disproportionately clustered around the state’s colleges and high schools when compared with other health clinics. Swartzendruber and her colleague Danielle Lambert have mapped the locations of more than 2,500 crisis-pregnancy centers across the United States.

Yes, friends, I’m afraid this is the actual dark truth: Pregnancy centers target young women. They don’t target eight year-old boys or the elderly at all! nOw Do YoU SeE tHe hIddEn aGenDa!?!?!?!? THERE’S NOT A SINGLE CRISIS-PREGNANCY CENTER INSIDE A SINGLE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY!!!!!

Anyway, scholars were able to determine this, using sophisticated geospatial analysis.

The story also includes shock-quotes from an actual college student, Hana, who went to a crisis pregnancy center, like this one: “She kept referring to my pregnancy as a baby.”

And then, presumably, they invaded Poland.

July 1, 2022

Trying to reconcile the highly mediagenic “Residential School mass graves” stories with facts-on-the-ground

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

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — never one to miss opportunities to preen before the camera and shed a performative tear or two — quickly ordered Canadian flags to half-staff when the stories about unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools spread across the world. Claims and accusations flew, based on ground-penetrating radar scans that didn’t actually prove that the surveyed land contained lost graves. Once the narrative was established, it provided many opportunities for First Nations organizations, activists, and Canadian and foreign politicians to moralize, condemn, and demand investigations, restitution, and apologies from the Catholic church (which ran over 40% of the residential schools), and the provincial and federal governments.

So, more than a year later … what has been investigated? Not much, it turns out:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

Sixty-eight Christian churches, mostly Roman Catholic, were vandalised or even burned to the ground. Many of these were historical church buildings still used and revered by native people. The pretext for arson and vandalism was that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by a Catholic religious order, as had 43% of all residential schools. Imagine the outrage if 68 synagogues or mosques had been vandalised and burned. Yet the attacks on 68 Catholic churches passed with only mild criticism.

An article in the New York Times was typical of media commentary about the unmarked graves. It was first published under the headline “Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada” on 28 May and updated on 5 October under the same title. It asserted that: “For decades, most Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all.”

Because the corporate press take their cue from the New York Times, its perspective echoed widely. The discovery of the so-called unmarked graves was chosen by Canadian newspaper editors as the “news story of the year”. And the World Press Photo of the Year award went to “a haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada”.

But the award this news report should have won is for fake news of the year. All the major elements of the story are either false or highly exaggerated.

First, no unmarked graves have been discovered at Kamloops or elsewhere. GPR has located hundreds of soil disturbances, but none of these has been excavated, so it is not known whether they are burial sites, let alone children’s graves. At her original press conference, the Chief of the Kamloops Indian Band called these findings unmarked graves, and the media, politicians, and even Pope Francis ran with the story without waiting for proof.

Similar claims from the chiefs of other Indian reserves ran into grave difficulty (no pun intended) because the GPR research was conducted in whole or in part on community cemeteries located near the sites of residential schools. It would hardly be surprising to find burial sites in a cemetery! But again, since no excavations have been conducted, it is not known whether these unmarked graves contain the bodies of children.

North American Indians did not conduct burials; they usually exposed the bodies of the dead to be worn away by predators and the elements. Christian missionaries introduced the practice of burial. But Indian graves were usually marked by simple wooden crosses that could not long withstand the rigours of Canadian weather. Thus Indian reserves today contain probably tens of thousands of forgotten unmarked graves of both adults and children. To “discover” these with ground-penetrating radar proves nothing without excavation.

Second, there are no “missing children”. This concept was invented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose members spoke at various times of 2,800 or 4,200 Indian children who were sent to residential schools but never returned to their parents. Indeed, some children died at residential schools of diseases such as tuberculosis, just as they did in their home communities. But the legend of missing students arose from a failure of TRC researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them.

June 11, 2022

As federal minister of public safety, it’s Marco Mendicino’s job to lie to Canadians

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

At least, the headline is my interpretation of Matt Gurney‘s somewhat more cautious and measured assessment of the minister’s recent performance:

To celebrate World Press Freedom Day last month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said some wonderful things about the importance of truth.

“In the age of disinformation and misinformation,” the statement read, “independent, fact-based reporting is vital. We must all come together to support the work of journalists and double down in the fight against disinformation.”

Stirring stuff. But does the prime minister, his government and the Liberals’ many supporters think any of that actually applies to them?

Marco Mendicino is the federal minister of public safety — a tough job in challenging times. But I’ve come to the unsettling conclusion that Minister Mendicino is not being honest with Canadians.

On the issue of gun control, I’m sorry to say he’s simply lying.

Last week here at The Line, I analyzed the Liberals’ proposed Bill C-21, a package of gun-control measures. My views on this file differ sharply from the government’s. But I’d have hoped that we could at least agree that honesty should be central to the government’s proposals and publicity.

No dice. Last weekend, on CTV’s Question Period, the minister said this: “Bill C-21 doesn’t target law-abiding gun owners, it targets handgun violence, it targets organized crime … I have enormous respect for law-abiding gun owners …”

Well, let’s just go have a gander at the minister’s own webpage, eh? The Public Safety Ministry summarized the proposed legal and regulatory changes. There are 13 specific proposed changes to the Firearms Act. Two are “internal” to the government itself and don’t directly bear on gun owners, law-abiding or otherwise. One targets firearms-related marketing, another is exemptions for “elite sports shooters”. The remaining nine are entirely aimed at the “law-abiding gun owners” the minister insists aren’t being targeted. The page also notes that the government will also be changing regulations (separately from the proposed bill) relating to the safe storage of firearms and ammunition magazine limits … again, aimed entirely and solely at law-abiding gun owners. Indeed, along with some entirely process-focused Criminal Code proposals, there’s only one — one — proposed change that actually focuses on gun smuggling, which is widely believed by law enforcement to be the primary driver of firearms homicides in Canada. (Other planned changes are too vague to be properly analyzed in this context, but could plausibly be aimed at smuggling or blackmarket sales.)

But do the math. One clear mention of smuggling, at least 11 that only affect licensed owners. Denying this is dishonest, full stop.

Let’s be clear: the minister is entirely within his rights to argue that the proposed measures targeting lawful owners are necessary, appropriate and reasonable. These are legitimate debates. What is not up for debate is that the majority of these proposals exclusively target and/or affect law-abiding gun owners. There’s no ambiguity here. The meaning and purpose of C-21 is clear.

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