Quotulatiousness

December 15, 2019

Every time the “wrong” side wins an election…

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

… we get all the media talking about how the winner needs to tack to the left:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Every single time. Whenever the left is slapped by voters like a bony Antifa moll at a street riot, “expert” analysts rush to the scene of democracy, cordon it off with police tape and announce through a bullhorn that there’s nothing to see here. Move along. They then propose that the winner is morally obliged to sideline the constituency that just elected him and heed the boutique preoccupations of the vanquished instead. Successful right-of-centre candidates must govern for All of Us. Successful leftists, on the other hand, are encouraged to give leftism to the enemy good and hard for the next few-to-several years. Possibly the first man to pull out his ‘horn following Boris Johnson’s emphatic victory is Philip Williams.

The sullen acceptance that Brexit will happen but will unleash crises that – alas – must be solved by a buffoon: check. Schools and hospitals: check. The problem of “an economy excised from Europe”: check. Williams’ piece is the Tate of tropes. But no: Johnson won’t faulter by being true to the shy nationalists who elected him but he might antagonise them by pivoting left to usher Hugh Grant’s coterie into a broader Boris marquee. Given his track record, that is very likely. Let’s not get carried away: Johnson did his Conservative duty regarding Brexit, nothing more. The question is whether or not he has the panache to hold on to his base while trying to expand it. The media will be a huge asset. They are certain to make daily sport of Johnson’s “gaffes,” eccentricities and less than squared away private life. This will endear him to everyman even more.

On the other hand, when the “correct” side wins an election, we’re assured that “elections have consequences”, the’ve been “keeping score”, and that the losers must strap in tight and hold on for dear life because we’re going further left than we ever were promised during the campaign.

Update: Related.

December 1, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard versus the Democratic establishment

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

At Spiked, Tim Black calls the establishment’s anger and rage at the Democratic presidential candidate “Gabbard Derangement Syndrome”:

Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the “People’s Rally” in Washington DC on 17 November, 2016.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.

… the Democratic establishment and its media cheerleaders seem to have become fixated on her. She annoys them. She riles them. And it’s not just because of her ambivalence towards identity politics and the other aspects of her Sanders-style progressivism – indeed, she endorsed Sanders in 2016, much to the chagrin of the Democratic establishment at the time. No, it’s also because of her uncompromising opposition to the “counterproductive regime-change wars” pursued with such ignorant zeal by the likes of Democratic grandee Hillary Clinton. It’s because of her willingness to question the narratives that have justified Western intervention in Syria, including a secret fact-finding mission to Damascus, and a meeting with Bashar al-Assad in 2017. And it’s because she does all this not as a woolly pacifist, but as a war vet.

So where her small but growing band of supporters see a principled 38-year-old, armed with a progressive policy platform, and, above all, a strong commitment to anti-interventionism, her powerful opponents are determined to present her as something altogether more sinister. They talk of her being a poster girl for white supremacists and the alt-right, of her being a Republican stooge in Democratic clothing, and of her being some sort of Russian asset.

It’s genuinely crazy stuff. Last week, the New York Times even laid into her for wearing a white pantsuit for a TV debate, claiming it was somehow cult-like. But that is as nothing compared to the constant innuendo and sometimes outright claims that Gabbard is being backed by Russia and Putin, the seeming power behind all world disorder.

Gabbard’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination are slim, but her recent online spat with Hillary Clinton probably won her a lot of fans outside the establishment:

Then, of course, there’s Hillary Clinton herself, a woman who, since losing to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, is no longer able to go near a bed without spotting reds under it. Gabbard, unsurprisingly, does not escape Clinton’s conspiracist gaze. “I’m not making any predictions but I think [the Russians have] got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary, and they’re grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians”, Clinton continued. “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

That’s right. Clinton thinks Gabbard is a Russian plant. She thinks Gabbard is “being groomed” by the Kremlin. She thinks she is being manoeuvred, by Putin and Co, out of the Democratic Party and into a third-party position, so as to split the Democratic vote in 2020. And she thinks that will hand victory once again to Russia’s Manchurian Candidate, Donald Trump, just as she thinks that Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, was also a Russian asset, used to split the vote three years ago and deprive Hillary of the election victory she still believes should be hers. The entitlement underwriting her deranged conspiracy theory is breathtaking.

November 29, 2019

QotD: The progressive belief in the mind-controlling power of the press (and Facebook)

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

There’s a piece of graffiti that sums up the woke left’s view of ordinary people. It says: “When the British working class stop reading right-wing news, we will see progressive change.” There it is. In black and white. Scrawled on a wall somewhere but frequently shared on social media by supposed progressives. One sentence that captures why so many modern left-wingers, and in particular the Corbynistas, are so obsessed with the press – because they think it has hypnotised the fickle masses and polluted the plebs’ brains with horrible right-wing ideas. Make no mistake: when the left rages against the media, it is really raging against the masses.

Media-bashing has resurfaced with a vengeance over the past couple of weeks. It isn’t hard to see why. The polls don’t look good for Labour. Some are predicting a wipeout, especially in Labour’s traditional working-class strongholds. And as has been the case for a good 30 years now, when political events don’t go the left’s way – or rather, when the dim public lets the left down – the knives come out for the media.

Corbynista commentators are railing against the “billionaire media”. “Billionaires control the media, and it’s undermining democracy”, say the middle-class left-wingers of Novara Media. How? Because these billionaires are “tell[ing] you what to think”. You, the gullible, ill-educated throng, that is; not us, the well-educated, PhD-owning media leftists at Novara who can see through the lies peddled by evil billionaires.

Brendan O’Neill, “The woke elitism behind the left’s media-bashing”, Spiked, 2019-11-25.

November 9, 2019

The Milk Dud and “sin”

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

Chris Selley believes that introducing the notion of “sin” as an appropriate thing to discuss with a politician will be a very bad idea for Canadian politics:

Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.

At a Wednesday press conference in Ottawa, a Globe and Mail reporter asked Andrew Scheer if he believes homosexuality is a “sin.” He didn’t answer, as has become his trademark on this file; instead he pledged, for the umpteenth time, simply to stand up for gay rights in all their forms.

It has been maddening to watch: Despite literally dozens of opportunities, he could never bring himself to explicitly support equal marriage. Bringing “sin” into the question is a novelty, though, and it’s one of which we need to be exceedingly leery.

[…]

The question of “sin” takes us into new and dangerous territory, however. There is what politicians do, and then there is what they think, and then — buried way down under many layers of irrelevance — there is their personal relationship, if any, with higher powers and their associated scriptures; there is the question of what they think that higher power would make of other people’s behaviour; there is what they believe will happen to those people’s immortal souls.

These are not topics the secular media should be concerning themselves with, and nor should the average voter. No one would approve of someone they like being put through such an inquisition. Liberals would be aghast if their avowedly Catholic leader were asked if his faith played a role in his government not eliminating restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood, for example. Liberals often speak glowingly of the days when politicians set aside religion and pursued the greater good — politicians like Pierre Trudeau, a devout Catholic who famously said “what goes on in private between two consulting adults is their own private business,” but who somewhat less famously spoke of “separating the idea of sin and the idea of crime.”

Trudeau Sr. was absolutely right that the state should have no dominion over sin, in any sense of the word. That should go for politics, too. Politicians of known faiths and devoutness have advanced many of progressive Canadians’ most cherished causes — public health care, most notably — and politicians of unknown faiths and devoutness have taken us down dark alleys. And vice versa. There is nothing we can do with information about a politician’s personal metaphysical views except raise new barriers to entry into a politics that needs fewer.

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.

November 1, 2019

QotD: The much-ballyhoo’d open office benefits are a lie

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

As urban rents crept up and the economy reached full employment over the last decade, American offices got more and more stuffed. On average, workers now get about 194 square feet of office space per person, down about 8 percent since 2009, according to a report by the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. WeWork has been accelerating the trend. At its newest offices, the company can more than double the density of most other offices, giving each worker less than 50 square feet of space.

As a socially anxious introvert with a lot of bespoke workplace rituals (I can’t write without aromatherapy), I used to think I was simply a weirdo for finding modern offices insufferable. I’ve been working from my cozy home office for more than a decade, and now, when I go to the Times‘ headquarters in New York — where, for financial reasons, desks were recently converted from cubicles into open office benches — I cannot for the life of me get anything done.

But after chatting with colleagues, I realized it’s not just me, and not just the Times: Modern offices aren’t designed for deep work. […]

The scourge of open offices is not a new subject for ranting. Open offices were sold to workers as a boon to collaboration — liberated from barriers, stuffed in like sardines, people would chat more and, supposedly, come up with lots of brilliant new ideas. Yet study after study has shown open offices to foster seclusion more than innovation; in order to combat noise, the loss of privacy and the sense of being watched, people in an open office put on headphones, talk less, and feel terrible.

Farhad Manjoo, “Open Offices Are a Capitalist Dead End”, New York Times, 2019-09-25.

October 27, 2019

Freedom of speech under threat (again)

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

In The Atlantic, Ken White strongly urges pro-free-speech advocates to avoid using some arguments that have been bandied around recently:

What speech should be protected by the First Amendment is open to debate. Americans can, and should, argue about what the law ought to be. That’s what free people do. But while we’re all entitled to our own opinions, we’re not entitled to our own facts, even in 2019. In fact, the First Amendment is broad, robust, aggressively and consistently protected by the Supreme Court, and not subject to the many exceptions and qualifications that commentators seek to graft upon it. The majority of contemptible, bigoted speech is protected.

If you’ve read op-eds about free speech in America, or listened to talking heads on the news, you’ve almost certainly encountered empty, misleading, or simply false tropes about the First Amendment. Those tired tropes are barriers to serious discussions about free speech. Any useful discussion of what the law should be must be informed by an accurate view of what the law is.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Photo by Harris & Ewing via Wikimedia Commons.


[…]

“This speech isn’t protected, because you can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.”

This line, though ubiquitous, is just another way to convey that “not all speech is protected by the First Amendment.” As an argument, it is just as useless.

But the phrase is not just empty. It’s also a historically ignorant way to convey the point. It dates back to a 1919 Supreme Court decision allowing the imprisonment of Charles Schenck for urging resistance to the draft in World War I. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that the “most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” This decision led to a series of cases broadly endorsing the government’s ability to suppress speech that questioned official policy. But for more than half a century Schenck has unequivocally and universally been acknowledged as bad law.

Holmes himself repented of the decision — though he continued to indulge his taste for pithy phrases with lines like “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” to justify forcible government sterilization of the handicapped.

So when you smugly drop “You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” in a First Amendment debate, you’re misquoting an empty rhetorical device uttered by a career totalitarian in a long-overturned case about jailing draft protesters. This is not persuasive or helpful.

October 19, 2019

QotD: Writing to length

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

Having spent a good deal of my life writing short pieces on serious subjects for newspapers and magazines, I’ve learned from experience to write organically short – that is, to write a five-hundred-word draft of a five-hundred-word piece instead of writing a thousand-word draft and cutting it in half. Not only does this reduce waste motion, but the finished product is almost always better. When you write a long piece and chop it down to size, it tends to read … well, choppily.

So why do inexperienced authors write long? I suspect it’s because they assume that they’ll get only one chance to impress the editor, which causes them to empty their bag of tricks every time they write a piece. (This reminds me of another of my critical commandments: Don’t tell everything you know.) Flashiness is a sin of youth. The older and more self-assured a writer is, the more likely he is to appreciate the virtues of simplicity and economy.

I don’t know whether it’s possible to teach this lesson to young writers. The older I get, the more I wonder whether anything can be taught to anyone. Still, I did my best to get it across to my students, and I like to think that at least some of them were paying attention.

Terry Teachout, “To the point”, About Last Night, 2007-06-01.

October 13, 2019

Modern journalism encompasses “activism,” “advocacy,” “partisanship,” “satire,” “hoaxing,” “unbearable self-promotional bluster,” “pranks,” “torquing of facts,” “invective,” “demagoguery” and “stunts”

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

I’ve always been pretty cynical about the media, so it was no surprise to me when the federal government decided to start explicitly subsidising the rest of the media (they already fund the CBC), and part of the fun was deciding who qualifies for those juicy subsidies. I mean, “journalism” today is a pretty broad category that covers a lot more than the traditional TV, radio, magazine, and newspaper formats. I’m sure everyone is shocked — Shocked! — to discover that the government is playing favourites among the many media outlets over not just who gets subsidies, but even who gets accredited to cover political events.

Jack Layton, leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada, on January 2, 2006 in a media scrum outside a campaign rally at the Kent Street legion in Ottawa, Canada.
Photo by Thorfinn Stainforth via Wikimedia Commons.

As we’re in the late stages of a federal election campaign, the question of who is considered to be a “journalist” merits closer attention, as Colby Cosh explains:

Two media outlets of a right-wing character, Rebel Media and the True North Centre for Public Policy, have been denied accreditation for post-debate press appearances at the last minute. The Parliamentary Press Gallery, acting on behalf of the federal Leaders’ Debates Commission, has somehow decided that their delegates are advocates rather than journalists. Oh-ho.

Here, an agent of the state seems to have pushed the “So who’s a journalist?” question really to the forefront, and introduced a distinction between journalism and activism that may not be tenable. The history and practice of journalism, even at the highest levels of public and professional esteem, includes entities and activities that fall into all of the following categories: “activism,” “advocacy,” “partisanship,” “satire,” “hoaxing,” “unbearable self-promotional bluster,” “pranks,” “torquing of facts,” “invective,” “demagoguery” and “stunts.”

If we must march toward state licensing of journalism in double-quick time, and this seems to be happening whether I like it or not, arguments about the definition of journalism will have to recognize these realities. But, of course, the word “journalism” as used from day to day is mostly just a status marker (really, a label concocted for academic use). “Journalism” will resist any historically aware attempt to bound it with a list of scientific-type taxonomic criteria.

This, of course, does not rule out an ignorant or fanciful attempt to set criteria. But most of the concepts in the list I made above, a list of things some people would like to exclude from journalism, are themselves ideas founded on fuzzy judgments of value, or of mere taste.

The media outlaws who found the debate gates shut in their faces got together and sought an injunction requiring the commission to allow them to appear in the magic chamber of questions after the debate. No one had really explained the decision to exclude them; no one could point to a solid pre-existing definition of journalism that they did not meet (surprise!), or to a relevant formal policy of the commission. It really gets the attention of a judge when the state behaves in an arbitrary way, and this proved to be the case, foreseeably, at the oral hearing for the injunction. Which was granted.

But an injunction is a temporary emergency remedy that does not require a full hearing of the facts — only the possibility of immediate incorrigible harm. The question haunting the Dominion — the question of who is a journalist — remains athwart our path.

October 3, 2019

QotD: Media coverage of Liberal and Conservative scandals, respectively

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

In the Canadian election, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has unveiled the centrepiece of its platform:

    A re-elected Liberal government [will] expand the Learn To Camp program.

Under the Learn To Camp program, every Canadian will be provided with a tub of boot polish, a novelty turban, a jewel to stick in your belly button, and genie slippers with curly toes, and trained how to swish across a Vancouver ballroom while asking other guests to tally your banana.

Oh, wait, sorry, that was last week’s Justin story. In America a ten-minute phone call to some fellow in Kiev is all the pretext you need for two years of multi-million-dollar investigation. But in Canada the news that the Prime Minister has spent half his adult life as the world’s wokest mammy singer is just a blip in the day’s news cycle, soon to be supplanted by a genuinely eye-catching scandal such as whether or not the Tory leader had a valid license from the Insurance Councils of Saskatchewan or the Canadian Association of Insurance Brokers back in 1997, or 1978, or whenever. You can understand why the Canadian media would rather stampede after the Andrew Scheer scandal: what journalist with a nose for a great red-meat story wouldn’t prefer chasing down the officially approved accreditation from the Department of Paperwork’s archives than, say, the fruiterer who supplies the Prime Minstrel with his trouser bananas. Was Justin accredited by the Minstrelsy Council of Quebec or the Canadian Association of Burnt Cork Fetishists? Would that make the story more interesting for the CBC et al?

The Toronto Star, like all good government-subsidized Canadian media, has been doing its best to neutralize the mammy songs. The most potentially damaging of the three (so far) blackface incidents is the middle one – a grainy video from the 1990s showing Boy Justin capering about like an ape. So the Star set its crack investigators on the story and tracked down a much better version of the video, and conclusively proved that Tories were misleading the public when they claimed that the Prime Ministrel in blackface, blackarms, blacklegs and blackwhatever-other-appendage was wearing a T-shirt with a banana on it. After all, the banana would imply Justin is a racist who likens black people to monkeys. Whereas prancing around in full-body blackface waving your arms and sticking your tongue out implies no such monkey-like slur.

So the Star‘s new HD minstrel video is of sufficient quality to show that the banana on the T-shirt is, in fact, the beak of a toucan. Unfortunately, the new video is also of sufficient quality to show that the banana is instead stuffed down Justin’s trousers. That risks suggesting the Prime Minstrel is exploiting old white neuroses about the black man’s sexual prowess. But don’t worry – The Toronto Star is only a day or two away from a full-page exclusive asserting that the Negro, impressive though his endowments be, pales in comparison to the average Quebec high-school drama teacher: When Rastus makes the mistake of appearing on stage next to Justin, he’s the one who needs the banana. Not for nothing is Quebec’s provincial dialect called joual, derived from cheval, as in horse.

Mark Steyn, “Blackface Narcissus”, Steyn Online, 2019-09-30.

September 13, 2019

QotD: Orwell’s campaign against the jackboot

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

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

In spite of my campaign against the jackboot — in which I am not operating single-handed — I notice that jackboots are as common as ever in the columns of the newspapers. Even in the leading articles in the Evening Standard, I have come upon several of them lately. But I am still without any clear information as to what a jackboot is. It is a kind of boot that you put on when you want to behave tyrannically: that is as much as anyone seems to know.

Others besides myself have noted that war, when it gets into the leading articles, is apt to be waged with remarkably old-fashioned weapons. Planes and tanks do make occasional appearances, but as soon as an heroic attitude has to be struck, the only armaments mentioned are the sword (“We shall not sheathe the sword until”, etc., etc.), the spear, the shield, the buckler, the trident, the chariot and the clarion. All of these are hopelessly out of date (the chariot, for instance, has not been in effective use since about A.D. 50), and even the purpose of some of them has been forgotten. What is a buckler, for instance? One school of thought holds that it is a small round shield, but another school believes it to be a kind of belt. A clarion, I believe, is a trumpet, but most people imagine that a “clarion call” merely means a loud noise. One of the early Mass Observation reports, dealing with the coronation of George VI, pointed out that what are called “national occasions” always seem to cause a lapse into archaic language. The “ship of state”, for instance, when it makes one of its official appearances, has a prow and a helm instead of having a bow and a wheel, like modern ships. So far as it is applied to war, the motive for using this kind of language is probably a desire for euphemism. “We will not sheathe the sword” sounds a lot more gentlemanly than “We will keep on dropping block-busters”, though in effect it means the same.

One argument for Basic English is that by existing side by side with Standard English it can act as a sort of corrective to the oratory of statesmen and publicists. High-sounding phrases, when translated into Basic, are often deflated in a surprising way. For example, I presented to a Basic expert the sentence, “He little knew the fate that lay in store for him” — to be told that in Basic this would become “He was far from certain what was going to happen”. It sounds decidedly less impressive, but it means the same. In Basic, I am told, you cannot make a meaningless statement without its being apparent that it is meaningless — which is quite enough to explain why so many schoolmasters, editors, politicians and literary critics object to it.

George Orwell, “As I Please” Tribune, 1944-08-04.

September 5, 2019

Phony Trudeaumania has bitten the dust

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

Nico Johnson discusses the dangers of family dynasties in democratic countries:

When future political historians look back at the 21st century, Justin Trudeau’s election as a Liberal leader may be regarded as a bland footnote. Despite all the hope Trudeau brought Canadians in his once seemingly eternal, post-election honeymoon, his leadership inevitably toppled into a swamp of sticky scandals and hurried apologies.

Justin Trudeau may still be re-elected. However, the Conservatives can rest easy in the knowledge that Trudeaumania, at least for this current Trudeau, is well and truly dead.

What is noteworthy, however, is the atmosphere of surprise and confusion that has clouded commentators’ judgements surrounding the downfall of Trudeau. In the corridors of Ottawa’s broadcasters, it may have appeared absurd that natural political decline should apply to their darling Prime Minister; the leader of the “woke world.”

Trudeau’s appearance of invincibility, which still makes these commentators swoon (note the SNC-Lavalin coverage) was first created in those blue-skied months following his leadership election in 2013.

Perhaps Justin, with his charisma and handsomeness, seemed like a breath of fresh air to Canadian progressives. Gone were those days of Ignatieff, the drooling philosopher, who rather spectacularly (considering his semi-illiterate predecessor) lost 43 seats forcing the Liberals into third-party status.

With Trudeau’s leadership, the Liberal party would have a candidate who seemed so perfect for Canadian political life that even a eugenicist would struggle to replicate it. With his status as an Anglophone-Quebecois, which managed to pacify the sensibilities of English Canada, whilst having his Quebecois heritage to maintain seat-rich Quebec—Trudeau must have seemed like a divine gift.

Yet even in those early days, Trudeau lacked noticeably in the fundamental requirements that statesmanship should necessitate. He had no political experience after being almost casually elected to the House of Commons. Nor did he possess any working experience, and had been entirely unknown to the Canadian public until the eulogy at his father’s funeral. To put it quite simply, Justin Trudeau would have never become Prime Minister of Canada if his father, Pierre, had not been one too.

September 1, 2019

QotD: Wonks inside the Beltway

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

There are few words that stir the blood of a Beltway wonk like “the Commission has issued its report.” That means that those in the government must now react, importantly, and those in the media must now react as well — dissect, digest, explain to the benighted groundlings what it means, and issue Important Recommendations by way of reasoned editorials aimed at the corridors of power, but more likely received by a schoolteacher in Iowa who photocopies it off and puts it on the bulletin board in the staff lounge with yellow highlight-lines through the better parts.

The commission has issued its report! Mo better, the commission has issued recommendations! And the Washington press corps open their beaks, spindly necks trembling, waiting for the savory worm to be dropped from the blue-ribbon mother bird.

Unless you’ve spent some time in DC you can’t imagine the tremendous self-importance that possesses the people who feed off the government. They’re like people who live in the same town where NASA has a tracking station, and think that it makes them all astronauts.

James Lileks, Bleat, 2004-07-23.

August 12, 2019

News consumption in Canada according to a new report from the Digital Democracy Project

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

Ali Taghva summarizes some of the more interesting findings from a new study of how Canadians get their news in the internet age:

Earlier this month, the Digital Democracy Project (DDP), a joint initiative led by the Public Policy Forum and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University, published their first report in a series aimed at studying the Canadian media ecosystem in the lead up to the 2019 election.

The results are reaffirming for anyone who believes the nation’s media do not require ethically worrying government funds to continue operation.

In less than two years, The Post Millennial has become one of the largest media organizations in the country. According to DDP’s survey results, roughly 12% of respondents viewed our content in the last week.

The above chart indicates that our digital viewership equates roughly to one-fourth of the reach held by CBC.

While the CBC and others continue to spend hundreds of millions to compete, we continue to grow and remain cash-flow positive on a budget less than 1/100th the size of our mainstream competitors.

Another interesting graphic from the PDF research memo is this representation of the distribution of online link sharing by candidates of the major parties:

The following directed network graph shows the relative frequency of linked news sites among the six main parties. Each media outlet is represented by a circle, the size of which reflects the frequency at which candidates link to the site. A large circle thus indicates multiple parties frequently sharing content from that outlet. The width of the lines that the parties to the outlets is based on how often candidates from that party share content from that outlet.

August 4, 2019

A sure-fire way to reduce monarchist sentiments – Royal celebrity slacktivism

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

Chris Selley offers some friendly advice to His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle visit Titanic Belfast in March 2018.
Photo from the Northern Ireland Office via Wikimedia Commons.

Despite what some scandalized British headlines have suggested, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, has not claimed to be helping to save the world from climate change by only planning to get his 37-year-old wife pregnant one more time. “Two, maximum!” he tells primatologist Jane Goodall in an interview-cum-rambling discussion in the current edition of British Vogue, which was guest-edited by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. It was in the context of some store-bought Harry musings about the perils facing planet Earth and its future inhabitants — “this place is borrowed,” etc. — but it was presented more as a half-joke than as an earnest plan to help out the biosphere.

Good thing, too, because not long after those headlines landed we learned Harry was off to Sicily for a massive Google-sponsored climate change celebrity gabfest. Needless to say, he didn’t row there. Italian media reported more than 100 private jets and several superyachts had delivered the actors, singers, supermodels and tech magnates. All reportedly had to sign non-disclosure agreements about what went on, which is a brilliant new innovation in climate-change slacktivism: “Our climate change discussions were not only important enough to justify heroic eruptions of carbon dioxide, but so important that we can’t tell you anything about them.”

Some think it’s petty to criticize climate activists for their own emissions. I was recently taken to task by myriad correspondents, many of whom were not Liberal partisans, for suggesting that a family long weekend surfing on Vancouver Island was a strange look for a prime minister trying to sell Canadians on a carbon tax with the very future of the planet, he argues, hanging in the balance. Honestly it baffles me. Is the idea that celebrity advocacy for decarbonized lifestyles will inspire so many other people to adopt them that we should forgive the celebrities’ own excesses? If people actually take their environmental cues from the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Harry Styles, Naomi Campbell and Orlando Bloom — all were reportedly in Sicily — then surely they would be far more inspired if the celebrities actually made half a personal effort.

But there will always be films, and they will always need actors, and there will always be pop music, and it will always need singers, and fame being what it is, a lot of the actors and singers will always end up being insufferable flakes. The monarchy Harry’s dad and brother are front of the line to lead isn’t nearly so immutable. No other Western royal family has managed to maintain such a conspicuously opulent lifestyle while maintaining head-of-state status and widespread affection not just on its home soil — where class remains a dominant social divider — but in many very different realms all over the world.

Whatever you think of the Royals, it’s quite an accomplishment. And a significant part of the recipe has been eschewing intellectualism and the unfortunate flights of fancy that can come with it. Prince Charles will be Britain’s (and Canada’s) first university-graduate monarch. In contrast, by some accounts, 10-year-old Elizabeth Windsor was home-schooled to the tune of just seven-and-a-half hours a week. As Ben Pimlott explains in his landmark biography of her, the goal was first and foremost to prevent her emerging as a “blue stocking” — i.e., as a female intellectual.

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