Quotulatiousness

March 23, 2022

The New York Times and the “world’s dullest editorial”

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

Matt Taibbi explains why a milquetoast New York Times editorial got such immense blowback from other legacy media outlets:

The New York Times ran a tepid house editorial in favor of free speech last week. A sober reaction:

One might think running botched WMD reports that got us into the Iraq war or getting a Pulitzer for lauding Stalin’s liquidation of five million kulaks might have constituted worse days — who knew? Pundits, academics, and politicians across the cultural mainstream seemed to agree with Watson, plunging into a days-long freakout over a meh editorial that shows little sign of abating.

“Appalling,” barked J-school professor Jeff Jarvis. “By the time the Times finally realizes what side it’s on, it may be too late,” screeched Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch. “The board should retract and resign,” said journalist and former Planet Money of NPR fame founder Adam Davidson. “Toxic, brain-deadening bothsidesism,” railed Dan Froomkin of Press Watch, who went on to demand a retraction and a “mass resignation”. The aforementioned Watson agreed, saying “the NYT should retract this insanity, and replace the entire editorial board.” Not terribly relevant, but amusing still, was the reaction of actor George Takei, who said, “It’s like Bill Maher is now on the New York Times Editorial board.”

The main objection of most of the pilers-on involved the lede of the Times piece, which really was a maladroit piece of writing:

    For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

There’s obviously no legal right in America to voice an opinion without being criticized, so this line is indeed an error and an embarrassing one, for a labored-over first line of a major New York Times editorial. On the other hand, a lot of great liberal thinkers decried shaming tactics as utterly opposite to the spirit of free speech, with John Stuart Mill’s warning of a “social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression” being just one example. So, while the Times technically screwed up, cheering shaming and shunning as normal and healthy elements of life in free societies is a pretty weird gotcha. In any case, this bollocksed lede introduced a piece that had been in the works for a while, and came complete with a poll the paper commissioned in conjunction with Siena College.

[…]

This Times editorial is watered down almost the level of a public service announcement written for the Cartoon Network, or maybe a fortune cookie (“Free speech is a process, not a destination. Winning numbers 4, 9, 11, 32, 46 …”). It made the Harper’s letter read like a bin Laden fatwa, but it’s somehow arousing a bigger panic. Its critics view the mention of Republican legislative bans in conjunction with canceling as a monstrous affront, a felony case of both-sidesism. Obviously any implication that there’s any moral comparison between Republicans banning speech by law and Democrats doing it by way of informal backroom deals with unaccountable tech monopolies is unacceptable. Beyond that now, much of the commentariat seems to believe the op-ed page has outlived its usefulness unless it’s engaged in fulsome denunciations of correct targets

January 16, 2022

Is the narrative about the Trans Movement about to change?

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

In the latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan marks a perhaps significant change in how mainstream media outlets are discussing the Trans Movement:

An unusual thing happened in the conversation about transgender identity in America this week. The New York Times conceded that there is, indeed, a debate among medical professionals, transgender people, gays and lesbians and others about medical intervention for pre-pubescent minors who have gender dysphoria. The story pulled some factual punches, but any mildly-fair airing of this debate in the US MSM is a breakthrough of a kind.

Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: “Clinicians are divided” over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just ‘sloppy’, sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” Oof.

The NYT piece also concedes another key fact: that puberty blockers are neither harmless nor totally reversible. Money quote:

    Some of the drug regimens bring long-term risks, such as irreversible fertility loss. And in some cases, thought to be quite rare, transgender people later “detransition” to the gender they were assigned at birth. Given these risks, as well as the increasing number of adolescents seeking these treatments, some clinicians say that teens need more psychological assessment than adults do.

I would think that, just as a general rule, minors making permanent, life-changing decisions should receive more psychological treatment than adults. How on earth is this not the default? In what other field of medicine do patients diagnose themselves, and that alone is justification for dramatic, irreversible medication?

The NYT doesn’t give you the data for the “increasing number” of transitions because it’s hard to find in the US. In the UK, however, the data show a 3,200 percent rise in adolescents seeking transition over a decade — 70 percent of whom are girls seeking to become boys, a break from historical norms where boys/men were much more likely to seek transition. Nor does the NYT give any data for “detransitioners”. But any brief look online suggests they are not exactly “quite rare”. They are, in fact, becoming a small but recognizable and tenacious part of the trans landscape. And among the risks of puberty blockers that the NYT does not mention are neurological damage, bone-density loss, and a permanent inability to experience sexual pleasure. And in almost every case (98 percent in one report), puberty blockers are never reversed.

January 2, 2022

Eat the bugs, peasants! Leave the meat for your betters!

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Europe, Food, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Orlowski on the self-imagined elite attitudes to the environment and — as a direct result — the growing chorus of journalists pushing the idea of substituting plant-based synthetics and/or insects in place of meat for us proles:

In recent years, media messaging has been emphatically bossy about what we should eat. State micromanagement of taste has increased, too. After government intervention, British staples ranging from sticky-toffee pudding to Sugar Puffs have been reformulated beyond recognition. But the anti-meat crusade demands that something far more radical should happen – it seeks to stigmatise something central to many of our lives, and demands a shift in how we regard nature. As part of this, our media now seek to normalise lab-grown Frankenmeats, and strangest of all, adopt entomophagy – the practice of eating insects.

So what’s behind the war on meat? The apparent justification is the political elite’s great preoccupation of our time – climate change. We’re told that rearing livestock for meat is bad for the environment, and that cows are the worst offenders of all. That’s the assumption behind hit YouTube videos like Mark Rober’s “Feeding Bill Gates a fake burger (to save the world)”, a promotional video for Gates’ synthetic-meat investments, which has racked up nearly 46million views.

But the environmental argument doesn’t look so robust on closer examination. Agricultural CO2 emissions are small – so small that if the United States turned entirely vegan this decade, it would lower US emissions by just 2.6 per cent. In reality, a cow is a highly efficient protein-conversion system, turning protein that we can’t eat into protein that we love to eat. Three quarters of livestock, on balance, improve the environment, enhancing the yield of the land through fertiliser, which would otherwise need to be made synthetically. For example, one of the crimes regularly levelled against beef is water consumption. But the cow loses most of this water the same day – it’s returned to nature. So with environmental claims so weak, there must be some other rationale for the war on meat.

Much of today’s war on meat appears to be driven by venture capitalists, and their client journalists in the media. Ever eager for the next dot-com boom, Silicon Valley has made a bet on lab-grown, synthetic meat. This requires an industrial bioreactor – an expensive chemical process. But lab-grown meat doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Business Insider recently reported that scepticism about the sector is growing, as costs remain higher than those for real meat – and this is before one single laboratory-meat formula has received regulatory approval, let alone passed the consumer test.

Another factor driving the war on meat is the academic blob. For example, Professor Peter Smith, an environmental scientist at Aberdeen University and a leading contributor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), likes to insist that “we’re not telling people to stop eating meat”, before adding that “it’s obvious that in the West we’re eating far too much”. Have a guess who defines what is “too much”. It’s Smith and his colleagues, not you or me making informed consumer choices.

But the oddest spectacle of all is the relentless promotion of entomophagy at the posh end of the media. The posher the paper, the keener they are on normalising bug-eating.

This is a campaign that has a high hurdle to overcome in most markets, where insects are associated with disease. “Deeply embedded in the Western psyche is a view of insects as dirty, disgusting and dangerous”, a group of academics found in 2014. Many bugs, such as cockroaches, carry disease. Flies like shit, as the saying goes. “Individuals vary in their sensitivity to disgust”, another academic paper acknowledges. “This sensitivity extends to three dimensions of disgust: core, animal reminder and contamination.” Only seven per cent of the US population would countenance the idea of eating insects, even in powdered form, according to one academic study in 2018. Processing insects also raises practical problems, with e-coli and salmonella. “Spore-forming bacteria and enterobacteriaceae have been reported in mealworms and crickets, with higher levels found in insects that had been crushed – likely due to the release of bacteria from the gut”, another study found. It’s easier to clean a cow’s stomach than a cockroach’s.

It should be no surprise, then, that the edible-insect movement has hit a few snags. Blythman recalls the startup, Eat Grub (geddit?), providing the snacks for an insect pop-up in London’s hipster East End. On the menu were “Thai-inspired” creations such as spicy cricket rice cakes and buffalo worms wrapped in betel leaf. “It tasted disgusting, and so I swallowed it whole. Then the legs stuck in my throat”, she recalls. The pop-up hasn’t returned. The following year, Sainsbury’s tapped Eat Grub for its first range of insect products – barbeque-flavoured crickets. Today, the only crickets you can buy at Sainsbury’s are cigarette lighters.

December 21, 2021

QotD: The Royal Victimhood Olympics

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

It’s funny to think that, when I was a child, the Queen’s Christmas speech was the cue for the nation to fall into a collective postprandial slumber. For the past few years, her nearest and dearest have seen to it that her life has outdone any Bond film when it comes to anticipation of what fresh hell awaits our battle-sore yet unbowed hero(ine) around the next corner. Is she going to ignore her favourite son’s alleged association with a dead paedophile? Her grandson’s allegation that her family contains a racist?

It’s certainly been a bumpy old ride of a year, making Her Majesty’s annus horribilis look like a teddy bears’ picnic. But though I’m not a royalist, I’m counting on this most stiff-upper-lipped of ladies not to mention those two little words which were inescapable this year: “mental health”, or the Mental Elf, as I’ve come to think of him.

Remember our old friends Elf and Safety? They’ve been replaced by Mental Elf, and he’s even more annoying, a nasty little imp intent on making every single member of this once-stoic island race confess to hidden sorrows.

The Royal Victimhood Olympics are now an open-season event, like tennis. The Prince of Wails had a head start, moaning about being sent to boarding school by his “distant” mother who – shame on her! – was a young woman doing her very best in a role she had neither wanted nor expected. Meghan Markle famously fled Frogmore Cottage with the Mental Elf in hot pursuit. Prince William, who appeared to be the sensible one, revealed this week he felt as if “the whole world was dying” after he helped save the life of a child while working as a helicopter pilot for the air-ambulance service.

And of course Sarah Ferguson has referred to herself as “the most persecuted woman in the history of the royal family”. All we need now is for Duchess Kate to weigh in with a detailed account of, say, her PMS problems and we’ve collected the full set of Unhappy Royal Families!

Yes, I know Princess Diana started it. But neurosis was just a part of her emotional repertoire. She realised that one of the best guarantees of good mental health is helping others rather than contemplating one’s navel. Or in the case of the wretched Fergie, one’s novel. The writing of Her Heart for a Compass was reportedly “therapeutic” and boosted her “self-esteem”. Is the world big enough for a more self-loving Fergie?

Julie Burchill, “The Queen is the last sane royal standing”, Spiked, 2021-12-09.

December 14, 2021

The Omicron variant of the Wuhan Coronavirus

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

Jim Treacher gets to the essential question about the dreaded and fast-spreading Omicron variant that the media somehow always forgets to ask:

We’ve seen a lot of headlines about the Omicron variant, which is the latest thing we’re all supposed to panic about. That’s how it works: You must be driven into a perpetual state of hysteria. You must never be allowed a moment to stop and catch your breath and think about what’s happening, because you might fall into badthink. The latest name for that is Omicron.

Omicron! OMG!! Run around like a headless chicken!!!

But here’s a question that none of our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press are asking, because they have no incentive to ask: How many people have died of Omicron?

Like, in the entire world. It doesn’t need to be a precise number. A rough estimate is fine. You can round up to the nearest 10.

Anybody? Hello?

I’m not sure how trustworthy Snopes is, but they say the number so far is … zero.

Zip.

Zilch.

Goose egg.

1 – 1.

None.

So please excuse me if I don’t freak the hell out every time somebody gets Omicron. Every story about it lists the number of cases but glosses over minor little details. Like what happens to the people who get it.

Do they get sick?

If so, how sick do they get?

If not, what’s the problem?

The media is just selling fear, as usual. Yes, COVID-19 is real, and a lot of people have died. No, nobody is dying from this Omicron variant. That’s good news, which is why the “news” isn’t interested.

Of course, on the weekend British PM Boris Johnson announced the death of someone in Britain who had contracted the Omicron variant … but it’s not clear if the person’s death was a direct result of that infection. So, we know at least one person has died with the Omicron variant, but we don’t know if it was from it.

December 10, 2021

QotD: The media and the replication crisis

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

Here is the iron law of medical — in fact all scientific — studies in the modern world: most do not replicate. This has always been true of studies that supposedly find some link between doing [thing we enjoy] and cancer. This of course does not stop the media from running with initial study results based on 37 study participants as “fact”. The same is true for studies of new drugs and treatments. Most don’t pan out or are not nearly as efficacious as early studies might indicate. We have seen that over and over during COVID.

Warren Meyer, “A Couple of Thoughts on Medical Studies Given Recent Experience”, Coyote Blog, 2021-08-31.

November 19, 2021

Viewing-with-alarm … from afar

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

In Spiked, Simon Evans explains why he finds British commentary on US hot-button issues like guns and race to be frequently uninformed but remarkably certain of itself:

What many Brits believe every American carries in their pickup trucks or on their persons, probably.

As a Brit, there are few things less edifying, nor more unintentionally hilarious, than an American newspaper reporting on any very English scandal. A breach of some obscure royal protocol, perhaps, or an aspect of parliamentary procedure, often involving Black Rod, which despite the capital B, the Washington Post will have to explain, is not a racial epithet, or an ill-advised tribute act.

A personal favourite is when a provincial dietary preference has caught the New York Times‘ eye, having unexpectedly “caught on” nationwide. It is an innocent enough pleasure, watching Americans trying to distinguish black pudding from haggis, or indeed gravy from “chippy sauce”. Like watching the Dutch discuss the morality of bullfighting, or Korea debate a proposed rule change in top flight Buzkashi.

Yet put the sneaker on the other foot and watch British commentators angrily contend the moral and legal thrust of a case in which an American is on trial for using lethal force with a firearm, and we suffer something very like Gell-Mann Amnesia by proxy. We forget how important a little local knowledge might be, and our seasoned, tolerant, bemused respect for tradition and culture and specialist knowledge are gone within moments. Watching the Kyle Rittenhouse case approach a verdict, British commentators are a-froth with indignation at the palpable miscarriages of justice seemingly running unchecked only five short hours away across the globe. My God, he had a gun ! What more is there to say? And – do I have this right? – he crossed state lines ! The man’s a monster.

Not since the proroguing of parliament two years ago have so many people become acquainted so quickly with something so arcane as the crossing of state lines with intent to do mischief. Putting aside the fact that the weapon itself did not cross this fabled demarcation, what is striking is the evident lack of enthusiasm for certain other state lines, such as the one somewhat further to America’s south, or indeed the one etched around the British Isles, that currently seem to get crossed on a pretty frequent basis, with who knows what intent? Drawing attention to those lines is clearly racist.

It was GB Shaw who first made the observation that GB’s shores were separated from the US’s by an ocean of incomprehension, concealed by our sharing a common language.

Rather like urban Canadians, most British readers and viewers tend to agree with the opinions expressed in US mainstream media based largely in urban coastal areas:

So, we don’t get the full spectrum argument. Instead, we gratefully share the apparent horror and shame of the coastal elite, with their tertiary education and their teeth that meet in the middle, when confronted with their inland, inbred in-laws. We deplore the multi-decade epidemic of what seems, if you read the Washington Post and the NYT, to be the largely white, Wild West assassination culture that 2A concedes. Bullets sprayed around schools. Shopping malls, synagogues and mosques running with blood. A death toll out of all control. Murder, cold-blooded and cruel – and largely in the service of a bigotry, as often as not a racial bigotry, as old as the Appalachians hills.

This is, to put it as mildly as one can without choking, not quite the whole story. Do your own due diligence, it isn’t hard. The editors of the NYT can’t stop you acquainting yourself with the FBI crime statistics, and they put some of the more notorious outbreaks of flying lead into useful perspective.

But generally, we instead swallow like sugary cough syrup (believing it good for us, no matter how delicious it also is) the narrative that guns are largely in the hands and lovingly tended racks of homicidal white supremacists, paranoid death-spiral redneck survivalists, and a police force that is barely superior in discipline, racial enlightenment or legitimacy to a rounded-up posse of ad hoc lynch-happy vigilantes.

November 15, 2021

QotD: Britain at war

Filed under: Britain, France, Government, History, Media, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals into exile or the concentration camp. At this moment, after a year of war, newspapers and pamphlets abusing the Government, praising the enemy and clamouring for surrender are being sold on the streets, almost without interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom of speech than from a simple perception that these things don’t matter. It is safe to let a paper like Peace News be sold, because it is certain that ninety-five per cent of the population will never want to read it. The nation is bound together by an invisible chain. At any normal time the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck; but let popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for them not to respond. The left-wing writers who denounce the whole of the ruling class as “pro-Fascist” are grossly over-simplifying. Even among the inner clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass, it is doubtful whether there were any conscious traitors. The corruption that happens in England is seldom of that kind. Nearly always it is more in the nature of self-deception, of the right hand not knowing what the left hand doeth. And being unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at its most obvious in the English Press. Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese. Public life in England has never been openly scandalous. It has not reached the pitch of disintegration at which humbug can be dropped.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

November 14, 2021

The Media — declining to report the news and instead depleting the strategic reserve of Narrativium

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

This week’s excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish explores the many, many ways that the mainstream media have been actively abandoning any semblance of informing their audience and instead now concentrate almost exclusively on propagandizing them:

The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

You know the situation is bad when Andrew Sullivan references Donald Trump without a sneer!

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate”, even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

November 12, 2021

One Pretendian’s “cultural Munchausen syndrome”

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

In Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh updates us on the story of Carrie Bourassa, who had effortlessly surfed to high profile, well-remunerated positions at the University of Saskatchewan and with the federal government largely on the basis of her claimed First Nations background:

Carrie Bourassa with media.
Lead photo in Geoff Leo’s article for the CBC – https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/carrie-bourassa-indigenous

Newspapers have a slightly nasty characteristic: it’s easy for them to get pre-emptively mad when institutions are a little slow to do the right thing, and it’s also easy for them to forget to give credit when those institutions get around to it.

So let’s acknowledge that the federal government and the University of Saskatchewan are dealing — as best they can, almost certainly — with their shared Carrie Bourassa problem.

Two weeks ago, CBC News investigative reporter Geoff Leo published an astonishing tour de force. His feature article established, beyond almost any doubt, that Bourassa, a high-profile Indigenous scholar who told and published countless stories of racist treatment and childhood adversity, is actually a fabulist from a wealthy white family. The Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health soon put Bourassa, its scientific director, on unpaid leave. The U of S suspended her with pay, probably having no better immediate alternative.

[…]

Since Prof. Bourassa was put on ice in her lucrative Aboriginal-health jobs, Indigenous folk have been labouring to explain in the press what was wrong with her concoction and aggressive peddling of a fake Métis upbringing on the mean streets of Regina. Drew Hayden Taylor’s Globe and Mail op-ed about Bourassa’s “cultural Munchausen syndrome” is instructive and funny, but we hope it is all right to tell Aboriginal-Canadians that no white settler with a lick of sense would consider Bourassa’s tapestry of falsehoods to be harmless “fibs”. This may be a self-serving observation, but her confabulations about her personal history wouldn’t be consistent with the standards of a newspaper, let alone those of a university.

About a year ago, the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation gave Bourassa an award (not her first) and published a capsule summary of her career. If you read it, you will notice how she was, from time to time, offered career advancement out of the blue by Indigenous supporters who had been taken in by her stories. Even a white grad student living on ramen in a basement apartment might be a little ticked about this. The University of Saskatchewan’s original claim that Prof. Bourassa hadn’t benefited from claiming Aboriginal ancestry is pathetic hokum: Bourassa tellingly accused her own sister of “looking for … a way to make some money” by accepting Indigenous scholarship funds during her PhD studies.

And it probably occurred to the USask brass sometime between the two press releases that an investigative reporter like Leo, in taking on a topic, always looks a couple articles ahead. Bourassa, for example, claims to have suffered from tuberculosis in her late 20s — a useful credential, unfortunately, for someone studying the field of Indigenous health. It’s useful because the disease has been nearly eliminated among non-Indigenous Canadians: the incidence rate for First Nations is 40 times higher, and the cases tend to be concentrated in remote northern Indigenous communities. Even if we overlook Bourassa’s propensity for creative autobiography … well, if she contracted TB, she was certainly very unlucky.

November 2, 2021

QotD: The foreign journalist’s best local source, the cabbie

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

It was often said that a journalist writing about a foreign country ought to stay either three days or three years: the former for strength of impression, or that latter for depth of knowledge.

I was a three-day man in that period of my life when newspapers would occasionally ask me to report on some revolution, civil war, social upheaval or other unusual event (I once went on a daytrip to India from Europe).

Given the circumstances, I gathered much of my information from the taxi-driver from the airport to the hotel where all the other journalists were staying. They did likewise, and in many an article, even in serious publications, a journalist has acted as a mere amanuensis for a taxi-driver.

I am far from decrying this genre of journalism: in my experience, taxi-drivers are exceptionally sensible and level-headed men, intelligent and well-informed but not educated, or rather not indoctrinated into believing the most obvious nonsense by having attended western-type establishments of supposedly higher learning.

Knowing that a journalist is a bird of passage, they did not fear, even in dictatorships, to speak the truth as they saw it: and generally they had seen a lot. With the advent of the mobile phone that hears everything and erases nothing, they may since have become more cautious. I don’t know: no one sends me anywhere these days.

Theodore Dalrymple, “On Taxi Cab Drivers, Barbers, and Learning the Truth”, The Iconoclast, 2021-06-21.

October 26, 2021

“…watching The Media spin for Brandon; it’s just so Pravda-licious”

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

Severian manages to find entertainment in the full-blown propagandization of “The Media”, especially during the course of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

Back when the Kung Flu nonsense first started, I took it quasi-seriously. Let me clarify: Like America’s greatest philosopher, I assume that everything in the newspaper is 90% bullshit, and I read it because it entertains me. Nonetheless, the bullshit operates on several levels, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you want to extract more than entertainment from it. In the case of Covid, back in the earliest days, I assumed that the bullshit was more top tier — that is, that it was mostly ignorance.

Media people are stupid. We all know that, but unless you’ve been around them (or their inbred, banjo-picking cousins, academics) recently, you probably don’t realize just how stupid they actually are. Remember Michael Crichton’s bit about “Gell-Mann Amnesia“? He said that The Media are so dumb, they routinely get important things not just wrong, but completely backwards: The headline would read the equivalent of “Wet Streets Cause Rain”.

And to be fair to The Media — I know, I know, but again, if you want anything more than a chuckle from the propaganda, you must try — it really did seem to be more ignorance than anything. I’m the kind of guy who needs to pull off a sock every time he has to count past ten, but compared to everyone in The Media I’m Euclid himself. I could see right away that the numbers they were spouting would make Kung Flu exponentially more lethal than even the Black Plague, which would, you know, tend to show up on satellite reconnaissance. And since there’s this thing called “Google Earth” …

But even though I knew right away you’d need to scale back their projections by a factor of about eleventy billion, that wasn’t the end of it, because even doing the necessary mental math to scale it down by eleventy billion — take the cosine, carry the one, divide by zero — it still looked pretty bad. But not “pretty bad” in a factual way. Rather, pretty bad in a second-level bullshit way, the mere propaganda way.

Those were the days, you might recall, when — out of the blue, on a dime — the Official Story changed from “China categorically denies there’s any such thing as germs, much less this particular strain of flu” to “OMG, the Chinese are welding apartment doors shut as people keel over in the streets.” Accompanied, in some cases — and good luck finding those video clips now — with grainy little movies of obvious actors keeling over so hammily, Al Pacino himself would tell them to tone it down. Pravda et al would never have been so crude, but those guys were pros, and as bad as the USSR was, affront-to-basic-intelligence-wise, this is Clown World.

Sure enough, the stories soon came out that China had cornered the market on PPE gear. It was an obvious short con, but remember: Clown World.

This — the CCP cornering the PPE market — soon prompted the third level of Media bullshit, the ideological level. Not content to merely take orders from their Chinese paymasters, the Media, being ideology-addled prize graduates of American “higher” “education”, started taking it upon themselves to lecture us for our own good. Masks, which were once bad, were now good, and if one mask was good, then two were even better! Thus the flood of stories like the one covered at the old RC, where the woman went on about swabbing her eyelids with disinfectant and whatnot. They got their chance to hector us for our own good, and they will never turn that down.

October 14, 2021

QotD: Americans’ perception of foreign economic threats

Filed under: China, Economics, Japan, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I am old enough to remember when almost everyone believed that the Russians were, as Khrushchev put it, going to “bury” us. Even leading economists such as Paul Samuelson were taken in by such nonsense. Of course, no such burial occurred, because just producing vast quantities of concrete, steel, and H-bombs is no evidence that anything of genuine value is being produced. Later Japan became the Godzilla that was going to eat the U.S. and European economies with its bureaucratic setup for picking and subsidizing “winners.” Before long that setup too collapsed in a heap and gave way to perpetual stagnation. Now almost everyone quakes in his boots while beholding the mighty Chinese economy. Again the hysteria has no firm foundation. An economy shaped and guided by government bureaucrats and Communist bigwigs by means of tariffs, subsidies, state-controlled credit, and state-owned industries cannot be a real growth miracle for long. This too shall pass.

And when it does Americans will learn nothing from their most recent mistake. If people really understood sound economics, they would not continue to make this same mistake again and again.

Robert Higgs, “China — Americans’ Economic Bugaboo du Jour”, The Beacon, 2018-12-19.

September 1, 2021

Larry Elder’s campaign for governor hit with accusations of “white supremacism”

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

In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald looks at the recent hysterical attacks on gubernatorial hopeful Larry Elder based on the notion that he is somehow a kind of stalking horse for white supremacists:

Larry Elder at Camp Pendleton for the ceremony presenting the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to his father, Staff Sergeant Randolph Elder, U.S.M.C., 16 August, 2013.
US Government photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.

The media have focused particularly on Elder’s views about crime and policing. The self-described “Sage from South-Central” maintains that criminals, not the police, are the biggest threat in the black community. According to Elder, the false narrative about lethal police racism has only led to more black homicide deaths. “When you reduce the possibility of a bad guy getting caught, getting convicted and getting incarcerated, guess what? Crime goes up,” he said recently at a campaign event in Orange County.

Elder also rejects the charge that white civilians are gunning down blacks, as LeBron James maintained in a tweet during the George Floyd riots: “We are literally hunted everyday, every time we step outside the comfort of our homes.” Elder has a different take. If a “young black man is eight times more likely to be killed by another young black man than [by] a young white man,” Elder told the Orange County Republicans, then “systemic racism is not the problem.”

Such statements are anathema to the establishment Left, deeply invested as it is in the idea that blacks have little agency in the face of ubiquitous white racism. Few subjects are more taboo in elite discourse than the elevated rate of crime among blacks, as it suggests cultural pathologies that — at the very least — complicate the victim narrative. To the Left, black crime is little more than a racist fiction. Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero claims that the crime statistics Elder has cited “over the decades to support his views and policy proposals are misleading, if not outright false, casting Black people as unusually crime-prone.” Black people are not “more inclined toward violent crimes,” nor do blacks “disproportionately victimize whites,” Guerrero wrote, citing Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan and other criminal experts. (Fagan was the plaintiff’s expert in a trilogy of lawsuits against the New York Police Department in the 2010s.) Fellow Times columnist Erika Smith sneered that Elder “keeps trotting out statistics that purport to show that Black people are particularly prone to murdering one another.”

Unfortunately for Elder’s critics, the statistics showing vastly disproportionate rates of black crime and victimization come from some of the Left’s favorite sources. CDC data show that in 2015, for example, the homicide victimization rate for blacks aged 10–34 (37.5 per 100,000) was 13 times the rate for whites (2.9 per 100,000). That disparity is undoubtedly much greater now, given the record-breaking increase in homicides since the George Floyd riots — an increase disproportionately affecting blacks.

Those black victims of homicide are not being killed by cops or whites. They are being killed by other blacks. In Los Angeles, blacks this year have committed 46 percent of homicides whose offender is known, even though they are just 9 percent of the Los Angeles population. Whites make up 28 percent of the Los Angeles population but have committed 4 percent of homicides, mostly involving domestic violence. These data, reported by the Los Angeles Times, mean that a black Angeleno is 35 times more likely to commit a homicide than a white Angeleno. Homicide data are the gold standard for crime statistics. Alas for Jeffrey Fagan and the Los Angeles Times‘s other experts, the statistical conclusion that blacks are “more inclined toward violent crimes” is indisputable.

August 25, 2021

QotD: What Hamas says versus how western media reports what they said

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

“The illegitimate Zionist entity must be forced to end its occupation of all of Palestine, from Tel Aviv to Jericho.” Western Reporter: “So what you’re saying is that you support a peaceful 2-state solution.”
“We will kill the sons of pigs and apes like the great Hitler.”
Western reporter: “So what you’re saying is that you object to right-wing Israeli politicians like Netanyahu.”
“We want an Islamic state governed by sharia.”
Western reporter: “Democracy, one-person, one-vote, religious freedom for all. Got it.”
“We thank our great friends in Iran for their money, missiles, and bombs.”
Western Reporter: “Hamas insists on being a grassroots Palestinian movement not dependent on foreign support.”

David Bernstein, “It must be frustrating being a Hamas spokesman”, Instapundit, 2021-05-22.

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