Quotulatiousness

February 23, 2021

The danger period is when “the coherence of the news breaks” … and it appears to be breaking before our eyes

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt remembers the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the disturbing parallels we can see today:

[Click to see full-size flowchart]

Our likelihood of coming out of this a constitutional republic is still high. Why? Well, because societies under stress become more themselves.

I remember when the USSR fell. And out of the ashes Tzar Putin emerged, who is despicable, but not particularly out of keeping with Russian monarchy.

So, yeah, the pull of our culture will be towards the reestablishment of who and what we are and were: a constitutional republic.

But on the way …

Look, I remember when the USSR fell.

The people in the USSR knew they were being treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed on crap. They knew there was truth in Pravda. But they were used to having certain information, and interpreting it.

And there is something worse than reading the news in totalitarianism. You can get used to interpreting the news, and knowing the shape of the hole of what they’re not reporting.

But once you realize it’s all nonsense, once the coherence of the news breaks — and it’s doing so now, earlier than I expected, with the Times article, with the New York Times admitting the protesters at the capitol didn’t kill the police officer — once there are holes, but they’re not consistent, or they’re consistent, but then contradicted; once the narrative changes almost by the week, to the point it can’t be ignored, that’s the dangerous period.

I know I joke that by the end of this year I’ll have to apologize to the lizard-people conspiracy theorists. But the problem is that the lizard people conspiracy theorists can acquire respectability and a strange new respect. Or something even crazier. Heck, a lot of crazier things.

To an extent the 9/11 troofer conspiracies, which yes, are crazy and also anti-scientific were our warning shot. That they flourished and that to this day a lot of people believe them means that there was already a sense that the news made no sense, that there were other things going on behind the scenes that we weren’t aware of.

It’s going to get far, far worse than that, as the actual elites, the top of various fields fall like struck trees in a thunder storm. There is a good chance that authorities you rely on for your profession, or just for your knowledge have been compromised. A lot of our research is tainted by China paying to get the results it wants, for instance. And there’s probably worse. You already know most research can’t be reproduced, and that’s not even recent.

As all this stuff comes out, the problem is that people won’t stop believing. Instead they’ll believe in all and everything.

I don’t know how much was reported here, as the USSR collapsed. but I remember what I read in European magazines and journals. All of a sudden it was all new age mysticism and spoon bending and only the good Lord knew what else.

And that’s what we’re going to head into. So, when you find yourself in the middle of an elaborate explanation that someone constructed, well …

First find the facts. Pace Heinlein: Again, and again what are the facts. Never mind if your ideology demands they be something else. Establish the facts to the extent you can. Facts and math don’t lie. (Statistics do. So be aware you can lie with them. And any metrics that involve intangibles, like intelligence or performance much less sociability or micro anything? forget about it.)

From the facts, deploy Occam’s razor. What is the simplest explanation?

Then remember that humans run at the mouth, and the more humans in the conspiracy, the more facts are likely to leak out somewhere.

And while we’ve seen a lot of Omerta among leftists, note that they’re all afflicted by evil villain syndrome. Sooner or later, they brag about how clever they were in deceiving us. So, if your conspiracy theory requires perfect silence forever, it’s probably not true.

February 3, 2021

Fatah demands that Britain return Big Ben to its original Jerusalem home

Filed under: Britain, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Daniel Greenfield unravels the historical misconceptions that informed the demand:

“Big Ben” by kev_zilla is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“The Jerusalem Clock is hidden in London today,” Fatah, the political movement behind the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, asserts in a post titled, “Jerusalem Stolen Clock”.

It goes on to claim that the British military ordered the clock tower dismantled. Then the “British moved the clock first to a new tower across from the municipality of Jerusalem, and transferred it to the British Museum in London, to become the famous British icon, ‘Big Ben’.”

How did Big Ben, which was built in 1859, become a Muslim clock tower from the 20th century?

There are some other slight differences between London’s Big Ben and the “stolen clock” such as the fact that Big Ben is 316 feet tall while the “Palestinian” clock tower was only 42 feet.

But the story of the “Palestinian clock” is also the story of the entire myth of “Palestine”.

When you believe that the Jerusalem of King David and King Solomon was originally yours, you can just as easily believe that London’s Big Ben was originally the property of “Palestine”.

The “Palestinian clock” is as real as “Palestine”. The myth of a “Palestinian” people propounded by Fatah which has spent decades killing over it is also the story of the “Palestinian clock”.

There’s no more of a “Palestinian” people who were dispossessed by the Jews than Big Ben is a “Palestinian” clock stolen and passed off as London’s Big Ben. Both are fake history built out of resentments and garbled stories whose context has been lost, but whose hatreds remain real.

There were never any Palestinians. When the clock was built the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire, the last Caliphate until ISIS. The caliphates had settled it with Arab Muslim clans who dominated Christian refugees fleeing Muslim persecution, along with groups of other minorities from escaped slaves to gypsies, along with the indigenous Jewish population.

The Ottomans had become obsessed with clock towers as a symbol of their empire. But the Ottomans hadn’t invented them, they had adopted them from Europe, and planted them in major cities of the empire to create a common sense of time and belonging for their subjects.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the last real sultan of the empire, obsessively erected clock towers to show off how modern the Ottoman Empire was. But by then the Empire was anything but modern and Hamid’s clock tower craze was powered by his German allies. Kaiser Wilhelm II gave Hamid a batch of clocks at the turn of the century which the Turks put into clock towers.

The Ottoman Empire erected some of its clock towers in Israel. These clock towers utilized the talents and funds of the indigenous Jewish and the Arab Muslim settler population. The clock tower projects in Israel began in 1901 which is also the date when Wilhelm sent Hamid a whole bunch of clocks. One of these clock towers was stuck on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate which Hamid had previously cut a hole in so that the Kaiser could enter Jerusalem in his tall plumed helmet.

H/T to Kate at SDA for the link.

December 30, 2020

This is why the word “unexpectedly” gets such a workout in media these days

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

David Warren on “unexpectedly” negative results from policies born of virtue-signalling “good intentions” by self-styled progressives:

The expression, “unintended consequences,” is a charitable dodge. It is what old-fashioned, polite, civic-minded people say about the fallout from progressive social policies. It implies that their authors have overlooked something, or made some innocent mistake. For unfortunately, the policies do the exact opposite of what was promised. Surely the “reformers” didn’t mean to force decent, reasonable people to do things that any decent, reasonable person would consider to be satanic. Yet somehow, that was the result.

By contrast, these reformers despise the tactics of the bourgeois. Rather than argue, they prefer to drown out their opponents with slogans. Rather than coherently reply, they characterize any asking questions as “fascist,” “misogynist,” “racist,” “hate criminals,” &c. Those who have exposed scandals are personally smeared, slandered, doxxed. This isn’t new. It is the way the Left has always “debated,” going back long before Lenin. Once they have the police working for them, opponents get the knock in the middle of the night.

There are, incidentally, two kinds of “reform,” corresponding to the two political persuasions. One happens without planning, and is an organic response to things no longer working properly. Try, in good faith, to make the old system work, and it will subtly change. The “problems” fix themselves, when they are allowed to. The other kind is “reform” according to a theory. A huge, mostly imaginary “problem” is created, so a “solution” may be imposed. Every tool must be applied, to get everyone onside for the task: fake news, fake science, fake history, and miscellaneous fakery. For as every godless person knows, “the end justifies the means.”

Luckier than most, raised in “liberal” environments, I was able to discern this from an early age. By chance I acquired many friends who were refugees from Communist (especially Soviet-occupied) countries. But it was not just that. Having been trained counter-culturally, by non-conformist “classically liberal” teachers, and also having learnt to read for myself, I was already fairly alert. The clincher for me was a native disposition, not only to think independently, but to resist being a putz. It was not in my nature to assume that the enemies of real liberalism (which requires honesty) had good intentions. Reason, and experiment, demonstrated that they had not.

For instance, I early realized that leftwing factions formed a Party of Privilege. Every policy they advanced favoured individuals with relatively more wealth and power, against individuals with less. Unions were a good example. They represented the better-paid. The labour laws they advocated were designed to exclude the young and the poor from labour-market competition. They secured the allegiance of thuggish union members through crassly self-interested schemes. They opposed legitimate rewards for labour; for skill and hard work. Instead they enforced universal mediocrity, and punished intelligent enterprise. Legitimate labour interests, once represented by cooperative and self-managing guilds, were replaced by the interests of (untalented) union organizers.

October 27, 2020

Conspiracy theories grow thanks to mistrust of public officials and media

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

It’s commonplace to say that such-and-such a conspiracy theory is merely an intellectual playground for the paranoid and the gullible, but conspiracy theories don’t spontaneously generate — at least not the ones that gain wide audiences. Daniel Miller looks at some of the reasons these theories become attractive and gain adherents:

QAnon alleged clues about the NYC bombing, 10 December 2017.
Wikimedia Commons.

In the wake of six months of mixed-messages and baffling government policies, following four years, if not twenty years, of mystifying imponderables, the concept of a “conspiracy theory” has recently reentered the lexicon of semi-criminalized thought.

In August The New York Times stigmatized anti-lockdown protesters in Berlin as a worrying admixture of “neo-Nazi groups, conspiracy theorists as well as Germans who said they were fed up with the restrictions” and similar language was used about the protesters in London, as social media companies began purging accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which conjectures that the world is controlled by a secret global cabal of blood-drinking sex criminals.

Believing conspiracy theories, evidently, is a Bad Thing, but any concept capacious enough to incorporate both the tens, even hundreds of millions of people skeptical about the global political response to SARS-2, and the much smaller number entertaining more involved explanations demands a careful analysis.

Really the first question is who you can trust. One answer is the official authorities, as represented by the esteemed New York Times, but the news website which welcomed the 45th US President to office with three years of spurious coverage of what turned out to be the Russiagate hoax, before pivoting to the historical phantasmagoria of the 1619 Project, no longer strikes everyone as the impeccable source which revealed the existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMD stockpile and links to Al-Qaeda before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or whose Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Duranty discounted rumours of a 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as “an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

This leaves individuals only to their own wits and devices in the face of a puzzling world in which information is everywhere, much of it questionable, not all the facts are available, and many are ultra-politicized, and meanwhile, unknown agendas are being continually carried out.

What’s really going on? As with any speculative enterprise, the problem is to construct a plausible hypothesis by using various models to interpret limited data. There is no question that, at different moments in history, individuals and groups have worked together in secrecy to launch conspiratorial exploits and there is no obvious reason for thinking this practice has now totally ceased. “People of the same trade seldom meet together,” observed Adam Smith in 1776, “even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Still, this is not in itself evidence of any specific plot happening now.

September 25, 2020

QotD: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” [“Let them eat cake!”]

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

It’s one of the most famous remarks in history — an instantly recognizable catchphrase to convey haughty indifference to the misfortune of others. And we all know who said it and why: It was Marie Antoinette (1755–1793), the queen whose life was claimed by the French Revolution, dismissing news that the peasants were starving due to the high price of bread.

In the original French, the Queen allegedly said, Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!, which doesn’t quite translate to “let them eat cake.” Brioche is sweet, eggy bread that tastes only vaguely like cake. The translated English word “cake” made Marie Antoinette seem even haughtier than in French. But it’s beside the point, since Marie Antoinette never uttered “let them eat cake” in any language. There is no historical evidence that she ever uttered that phrase. The story is pure invention. It’s a historical legend that rivals the myth of Nero “fiddling” while Rome burned. And yet this outlandish fabrication has shaped our image of Marie Antoinette for more than two centuries.

Compared to other historical falsehoods, this legend is easy to trace to its source. It was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In book six of his Confessions, written in 1767, Rousseau wrote of a “great princess” who had, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied with those words cited above, Qu’ils mangent de la brioche! Was Rousseau referring to Marie Antoinette? This is impossible. When he wrote that passage, Marie Antoinette was still a girl living at the Habsburg court in Vienna (under her original name, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna). Rousseau’s story was entirely made up, probably borrowed from another source. And while his book wasn’t published till 1782, this was still seven years before the French Revolution began. In fact, the first time someone (spuriously) put the words “let them eat cake” in Marie Antoinette’s mouth was a half-century later, in a book published by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes.

Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.

June 8, 2020

The Marines’ First SMG: 1921/28 Thompson Gun

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 Oct 2018

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The USMC had acquired a few hundred early 1921 model Thompson submachine guns in 1926, and prompted the US Navy to formally test the guns. The Navy requested a reduction in the rate of fire, in order to improve controllability and reduce ammunition consumption (20 round magazines go quickly at 900rpm!). Auto-Ordnance happily complied, and Oscar Payne returned to the company on his spare time to modify the gun. He did this by adding a substantial amount of mass to the actuator, and was able to reduce the rate of fire substantially. The Navy subsequently ordered 500 guns, designated the Model of 1928.

Since most of the original 15,000 guns made by Colt were still in inventory, Auto-Ordnance simply overstamped the “1” at the end of “1921” with an “8” and put the new heavier bolt assemblies in the guns, leading to the collector term “21/28 overstamp” for these Thompsons. The lower rate of fire would become the new standard for the Thompson.

By late 1928, only about 6,000 Thompsons had been sold, and by the end of 1938 10,300 had been sold. Of these, about 1500 total had gone to the US government, about 4100 exported, and the remainder to American police and security agencies. Times were not good for the Thompson — it was an expensive military weapon without a war that needed it. Despite the gun’s huge notoriety, it was actually not used in particularly large numbers by the motor bandits of the 20s and 30s, nor in great numbers by the police. While the FBI did purchase Thompsons, they only bought 115 in total, and not until 1935.

This is the second part in a 5-part series on the development of the Thompson…

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May 9, 2020

Lies, damned lies, and even-more-damned statistics

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

David Warren does not trust “the numbers” (and I think he’s quite right to doubt):

At some point — but it is seldom a discrete moment in space or time — the weight of the anecdotal in science, or that of the circumstantial in law, becomes overwhelming. This is the opposite of a statistical fact, in part because there are no statistical facts. I am reminded of this whenever the “scientific” control freaks of statistics lay down some law, indifferent to the Law in nature. The difference between 999,999 and one million is, in any imaginable situation, not a difference at all. Where it is made the basis for a decision, that decision is arbitrary, and not infrequently, cruel. By contrast, such differences as those between pregnant and not pregnant, dead and not dead, are unchallengeably significant. They are in the realm of meaning.

I am reminded of this hourly or better, these days, when consulting the news. All readers of the mass media (accurately described by Trump as “fake news”) are being covered, constantly, by the vomit of statistics — few with any context, and many knowingly false. They “look scientific,” which is to say, they answer to the moron’s conception of science. In “disciplines” like economics, today, and throughout the other social sciences, the participants sleepwalk. Nobel prizes are given out for numerical sludge, presented to the purpose of selling one destructive “policy” or another, that will be imposed on real, live, particular human beings. The same is true of the “mathematical biology” that has disinformed all our public health “professionals.”

The Red Chinese Batflu, now transforming our world, is a spectacular case in point. Not only the epidemiological projections, but even the counts of dead and wounded, are taken on faith — from people who are characteristically faithless. Information on prevention and cures is hostage to the work of statisticians. “Double blind tests,” which would be absolutely immoral — wicked — on human subjects facing life or death — are demanded by our medical apes.

May 2, 2020

Saigon memories

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

I had no idea that David Warren had some brief journalism experience in Vietnam before the US pulled out their military forces:

A member of the CIA helps evacuees up a ladder onto an Air America helicopter on the roof of 22 Gia Long Street on April 29, 1975, shortly before Saigon fell to advancing North Vietnamese troops.
Hubert van Es photo via Wikimedia Commons.

An article in the New York Post (here) brings one historical event back into view, with a bitterness I haven’t yet overcome. It is only an aside on an old photo-caption, which like so many others from the Vietnam War was, shall we say, inaccurate. Taken for a symbol, it has passed into our electronic folk memory, as one of innumerable lies it contains. I wasn’t there, of course, but I had visited that country, and once, too briefly, lived in Saigon. The (very consequential) deceit, dishonesty, and faithlessness of “the mainstream media” was among the lessons I took from my apprenticeship. My ludicrous ambition, to “correct it” some day, will never be fulfilled. But to the link: my praise to one writer who did his homework. Let me be grand and say, the truth has set him free.

It will soon be fifty years since I first attended the “Five O’Clock Follies” at “MAC-V,” where the best hamburgers in South-east Asia could be obtained for the price of a chocolate bar. This press conference format — bluster and counter-bluster — has not changed in all this time. Everything in that vast sprawling compound of military administration was sprayed, swept, and polished; I always entered with wide eyes. There, and in bars along Tu-Do Street (the old rue Catinat, once an exquisite ribbon from the Cathedral down lines of fragrant tamarinds), was where I first fell in with “real professional journalists,” practising their trade.

Those I met were, by and large, pathological liars, and extremely vain. They were also coarsely disrespectful, much like our journalists today: rudely cynical and sarcastic. The only serious exceptions I came to know were a couple of religious weirdos — one a Lutheran ex-pastor from West Germany, the other a reject from a Catholic seminary in southern France. They, like me, had strayed into the field, from a misplaced sense of adventure.

At all levels, and on all sides, I was witnessing a freak show — there and wherever I wandered outside the Unreal City. I owned a reliable Nikkormat camera, that would sometimes earn me much-needed cash, but was quite unsuccessful as a print journalist. My earnest despatches, sent to newspapers on spec, were routinely “spiked” — not, I think, because I was so young (they didn’t know that), but because I kept, often unknowingly, writing things that contradicted what the New York Times and CBS were reporting.

Not only was I learning that the “mainstream” was all lies, but too, that it invariably followed an agenda. The self-appointed purpose of the press was to sabotage the American war effort. (That of the life-or-death desperate Viets was, at best, ignored.)

But then, I was deceitful, too. I was pretending to be over 18 when I was still only 17, in order to get a press pass.

April 12, 2020

Minimum alcohol pricing – a policy so good you have to lie about it

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Health, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scotland has had legal minimum prices for alcoholic beverages since mid-2018. If you read a random selection of mainstream media coverage, you’d know that it’s been a huge success, with vastly improved public health results at a price to consumers measured in mere pennies. As with all propaganda efforts, if you tell the lies often enough, people may believe you:

There has been all sorts of rubbish written about minimum pricing since it was introduced in Scotland in May 2018. Nicola Sturgeon has lied about in the Scottish Parliament. The BBC has gone to extraordinary lengths to spin the policy as a success. The public have been told that alcohol-related hospital admissions have gone down when they have gone up. We have seen the media fall for blatant cherry-picking. We have been told that rates of problem drinking have gone down when we don’t have any evidence either way.

One of the few solid facts — that there were more alcohol-related deaths recorded in Scotland in 2018 than in 2017 — has been sidelined. Instead, the media have focused on a disputed, and relatively small, decline in alcohol sales as if that were an end in itself. Any port in a storm (fortified wine sales have definitely benefited from minimum pricing).

Figures from the calendar year of 2018 are of limited use because minimum pricing didn’t begin until May 1st. Today, for the first time, I can reveal the monthly mortality figures for Scotland, England and Wales. They show that there was no difference between the change in annual death rates from alcohol-related causes, regardless of whether the country had minimum pricing in place. Both England/Wales and Scotland saw a decline between May and December of seven per cent (compared to the previous year).

This graph is published in a new briefing paper I have written for the IEA. It summarises all the evidence gathered to date on deaths, hospitalisations and sales, plus exclusive new data.

Importantly, it contains estimates of the costs to consumers. Among the more outlandish claims made by the Sheffield modellers was the idea that moderate and low income consumers would be barely affected by minimum pricing. They predicted that a low income moderate drinker would only pay an extra 4p a year! This was never realistic, not least because it was based on the minimum price being set at 45p and they defined a moderate drinker as someone consuming the equivalent of just two pints of lager a week, but it worked from a PR perspective because it quelled politicians’ fears about the policy being regressive.

March 31, 2020

QotD: How the old “mainstream media” fell for fake news

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

One of the important side effects of the communications revolution is the proliferation of grifters, con men and hustlers. Things that were impossible thirty years ago, like e-mail scams, remain a constant problem. The internet has made it easy for even the crudest hustlers to reach a broad audience. As a result, the number of hustlers has increased and the types of hustles have also increased. The twitter troll, for example, is an entirely new type of hustle, made possible by the internet.

One reason for this is that the internet has turned into a big stage where anyone can try out their act on the public. In the old days, a carny bimbo would have been confined to a traveling carnival, Hollywood, New York or community theater. Maybe she would have ended up in pornography. It was not an easy way to make a living. Today, she can have a twitter account where she flashes photo-shopped pics of herself. Thirsty losers send her money through PayPal or super chats on her YouTube channel.

The low barrier to entry means every female with a desire for the carny life can get on stage from the privacy of her studio apartment. It’s not just females working the new rackets. In a prior age, Mike Cernovich would have been traveling from town to town selling his monkey mind juice to gullible townies at state fairs. Alex Jones would have been mailing people his mimeographed newsletter, where he explained how space aliens control the Federal Reserve Bank.

Most likely, it is the communications revolution that has caused the news media to commit suicide. In the old days, when the audience was fixed, the focus was on maintaining the facade of objectivity. No one was under any illusions about growing the audience, so they focused on keeping the audience. The internet promised a global market and unlimited market share. A relentless drive for eyeballs gave rise to the clickbait journalists turning the media into fake news.

The Z Man, “Carny Town”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-29.

January 17, 2020

The crying need for “regime change” … in Canadian newsrooms

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley discusses the amazingly tone-deaf “corrections” issued by CBC and CTV over their malicious misquoting of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments on the Iranian government:

Harper did not advocate military intervention in Iran, or indeed any particular intervention whatsoever. Despite describing Iran (accurately) as an “anti-Semitic state” premised on “religious fanaticism and regional imperialism” that is standing resolutely in the way of cooperation between other Middle Eastern nations, Harper didn’t even advocate “a complete change of government.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2012.
World Economic Forum photo via Wikimedia Commons.

“I do believe we need to see a change in Iran if we are going to see peace in the Middle East,” he said.

“Without a change in the nature of the government of Tehran,” he said, “the Middle East will continue to be in turmoil.”

He said he hoped the furious protests in Iran might nudge the country toward “a better trajectory.”

These are perfectly anodyne statements. Who doesn’t want the Iranian regime to alter its behaviour?

Clarification or correction? I would say this calls for something more like “colossal embarrassment necessitating deep introspection.”

The root problem, I think, is that so much of Canadian politics is purely for show. We are a sparsely populated, not very powerful nation where the differences between the two major federal parties are remarkably small — and thus so are the stakes. It requires special measures to keep people interested, as much for the media as for politicians.

[…]

That’s how the big outlets like CBC and CTV make the sausage of the day, and it’s understandable. They do great investigative work, but the beast needs feeding not just every day, but all day every day. During the campaign I would watch colleagues set up for live hits in various parking lots and back yards and sometimes even on the campaign bus, and imagine them speaking the truth: “I’m here in Delta, B.C. and there’s f–k-all to report. Back to you, Kent.” But the viewers must never know. They need drama, as weak as it might be. I can easily imagine how that principle transformed “a changed regime” into “regime change.”

The real problem with this reporting regime is when it’s applied to things that actually do matter. There are serious potential consequences to telling the world that Stephen Harper thinks, in essence, that we should declare war on Iran with an eye to bouncing the ayatollahs. Harper’s successor and his government are in the midst of an extremely delicate and frankly improbable operation to find out precisely what happened the morning of Jan. 8 in the skies above Tehran and seek justice for the victims and their families. Those families don’t deserve fake news about a warmongering former PM, and I’m sure our diplomats would prefer members of the unchanged Iranian regime didn’t come across it either.

This isn’t a Canadian federal election. It’s real life, and needs to be covered as such.

November 6, 2019

QotD: “Fake news” is nothing new

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 10, 2019

Trump as the American Commodus

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

In the New York Review of Books, Tom Holland explains that America isn’t Rome, even if the current President does rather remind him of the Emperor Commodus:

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

When Edward Gibbon embarked on his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he began his narrative with the accession of Commodus. Marcus Aurelius, the father of the new emperor, was a man who, in the noblest traditions of the Roman people, had combined the attributes of a warrior, a statesman, and a philosopher; Commodus was none of these.

“The influence of a polite age, and the labour of an attentive education,” Gibbon wrote sternly, “had never been able to infuse into his rude and brutish mind, the least tincture of learning; and he was the first of the Roman emperors totally devoid of taste for the pleasures of the understanding.” Instead, Commodus delighted in trampling on the standards by which the Roman political class had traditionally comported themselves. Most shockingly of all — as everyone who has seen Gladiator will remember — he appeared in the arena. His reward for this spectacular breach of etiquette was the cheers of the plebs and the pursed-lipped horror of the senatorial elite. To fight before the gaze of the stinking masses was regarded by all decent upholders of Roman morality as the most scandalous thing that a citizen could possibly do — but Commodus reveled in it. So it was, as Gibbon put it, that he “attained the summit of vice and infamy.”

Today, when conservatives contemplate a leader who, far from being merely an enthusiast for World Wrestling Entertainment, has long been an active and flamboyant participant in it, they may experience a similar shudder. Donald Trump, the only president of the United States ever to have been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, boasted that he had won “the highest ratings, the highest pay-per-view in the history of wrestling of any kind.” The Battle of the Billionaires — a proxy wrestling match fought in 2007 between Trump and Vince McMahon, the owner of WWE — had culminated in a victorious Trump strapping McMahon to a barber’s chair and shaving him bald. A decade later, Trump made clear just how much of an influence the theatrical violence of WWE had had on his approach to politics when he tweeted a video of himself body-slamming and repeatedly punching McMahon.

It was in a similar spirit, perhaps, that Commodus might have posed after decapitating an ostrich. Trump, smacking home his point, made sure before he tweeted the video to specify who his real target was. Clumsily superimposed over McMahon’s face was the CNN logo. “FraudNewsCNN” ran the hashtag. “The speed with which we’re recapitulating the decline and fall of Rome is impressive,” the conservative intellectual and former editor of the Weekly Standard Bill Kristol tweeted in response. “What took Rome centuries we’re achieving in months.”

The conviction that Trump is single-handedly tipping the United States into a crisis worthy of the Roman Empire at its most decadent has been a staple of jeremiads ever since his election, but fretting whether it is the fate of the United States in the twenty-first century to ape Rome by subsiding into terminal decay did not begin with his presidency. A year before Trump’s election, the distinguished Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye was already glancing nervously over his shoulder at the vanished empire of the Caesars: “Rome rotted from within when people lost confidence in their culture and institutions, elites battled for control, corruption increased and the economy failed to grow adequately.” Doom-laden prophecies such as these, of decline and fall, are the somber counterpoint to the optimism of the American Dream.

H/T to Niall Ferguson for this and the preceding Roman-related link.

July 29, 2019

Life and love aboard HMS Pacific Princess

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

Sir Humphrey is not amused at the stories in the British press about pregnant Royal Navy sailors needing to be flown back to the UK from some of Her Majesty’s deployed ships:

Life in the Royal Navy is less about preparing for war, and more like spending time on the loveboat. That seems to be the gist of quite a few stories in the media today which breathlessly relate to the news that since 2005 35 women sailors from 18 different ships have been airlifted to shore as a result of becoming pregnant and discovering this while they were at sea.

This news has been met with shock and horror by some commentators online, some of whom give the distinct impression that they are not intimately familiar with the process by which babies are made. At least one Daily Mail reader suggested that Chasity belts should form part of naval uniform for female members of the naval service (presumably in the RN kit record book it would be recorded as a “Torpedo Protection Belt”?).

Is the nation being let down by a bunch of serial shaggers in uniform or is perhaps the truth of the matter a little more complex than originally conceived?

The specific FOI that was referred to in the article, which looks like it originated in the Daily Star (alongside another story suggesting that the 2003 Iraq war occurred due to Saddam possessing “stargate” technology and the US and allies wanting to prevent various aliens attacking the Earth) asked for the total number of females aeromedically evacuated between 2005 and 2019. Confusingly though there is also some suggestion that the Sun also got the story as an exclusive – to be honest, its rather hard to tell.

To start with, a sense of context is perhaps useful. This FOI is a well worn question which seems to have been asked quite a few times over the years. Humphrey has found similar articles from 2015 and 2017 and 2018, so its not exactly breaking news that the RN has had to occasionally return sailors ashore when they find out they are pregnant.

The numbers involved sound dramatic – a whole 35 women flown at public expense due to getting pregnant. In 2015 the number was 25, so in the last four years a whole 10 additional women sailors have discovered they were pregnant while onboard a ship.

Given that the Royal Navy consists of about 3,000 women at any one time (roughly 10% of the Naval Service) and that each year roughly 3000 people join the Royal Navy (lets assume 300 women based on the above figure), then in very big handfuls between 2005 and 2019 roughly 7500 women have served in the Royal Navy at different times. The figure is likely to be even higher still, but it’s a useful, albeit very rough, “guesstimate”.

This means that of the 7500 women, a total of 35 have discovered they were pregnant while at sea during this period. That works out at, roughly, 0.5% of the total force spread over 14 years. This doesn’t sound quite as dramatic as first made out to be.

July 10, 2019

Fake news, whacky conspiracy theories, and the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein

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

In The Week, Matthew Walther uses the Epstein case to illustrate why many so-called “low information voters” tend to believe all sorts of odd things like Pizzagate:

The arrest of the apparent billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein at a New Jersey airport on Saturday on federal charges for crimes he was accused of during the Bush administration should not be surprising to anyone who has followed the news carefully. He may have escaped in 2008 with a ludicrous one-year stint in a county jail that he was allowed to leave six days a week, but his name has never quite been out of the headlines. Between 2008 and 2015 Epstein reportedly settled more than a dozen lawsuits from Jane Does alleging sexual assault; the youngest of his alleged victims was 14 years old.

Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The only question is why did it take this long? Why was the ludicrous deal that gave Epstein and his fellow conspirators immunity in exchange for a slap-on-the-wrist jail sentence ever allowed to go through in the first place?

[…]

We should keep all of this in mind the next time we feel inclined to sneer at so-called “low-information voters,” especially the kookier sort. You know the people I mean. Wackos. Gun nuts. 8channers. Conspiracy theorists in Middle America who watch InfoWars (one of the few journalistic outlets to discuss the issue of pedophilia regularly) and post about QAnon and “spirit cooking” and the lizard people. The news that a globalized cabal of billionaires and politicians and journalists and Hollywood bigwigs might be flying around the world raping teenaged girls will not surprise them in the least because it is what they have long suspected. For the rest of us it is like finding out that the Jersey Devil is real or turning on cable news and finding Anderson Cooper and his panel engaged in a matter-of-fact discussion of Elvis’s residence among the Zixls on the 19th moon of Dazotera.

Among other things, the Epstein case forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions about the real meaning of “fake” news. There is, or should be, more to being informed than fact-checking formalism. If you have spent the last few years earnestly consuming mainstream left-of-center media in this country you will be under the impression that the United States has fallen under the control of a spray-tanned Mussolini clone who is never more than five minutes away from making birth control illegal. If you watch Fox News and read conservative publications, you no doubt bemoan the fact that Ronald Reagan’s heir is being hamstrung by a bunch of avocado toast-eating feminist witches. Meanwhile, Alex Jones’s audience will tell you that America, like the rest of the world, is ruled by a depraved internationalist elite whose ultimate allegiance is not to countries or political parties or ideologies but to one another. These people believe in nothing. They will safeguard their wealth and privilege at any cost. They will never break rank. And they will commit unspeakable crimes with impunity, while anyone who dares to speculate openly is sued or hounded out of public life as a kook.

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