Quotulatiousness

February 28, 2019

ProTip – Never, ever, ever read the comments

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

Scott Alexander explains why he had to ask the moderators to shut down the r/slatestarcodex subreddit’s Culture War thread:

This post is called “RIP Culture War Thread”, so you may have already guessed things went south. What happened? The short version is: a bunch of people harassed and threatened me for my role in hosting it, I had a nervous breakdown, and I asked the moderators to get rid of it.

I’ll get to the long version eventually, but first I want to stress that this isn’t just my story. It’s the story of everyone who’s tried to host a space for political discussion on the Internet. Take the New York Times, in particular their article Why No Comments? It’s A Matter Of Resources. Translated from corporate-speak, it basically says that unmoderated comment sections had too many “trolls”, so they decided to switch to moderated comment sections only, but they don’t have enough resources to moderate any controversial articles, so commenting on controversial articles is banned.

And it’s not just the New York Times. In the past five years, CNN, NPR, The Atlantic, Vice, Bloomberg, Motherboard, and almost every other major news source has closed their comments – usually accompanied by weird corporate-speak about how “because we really value conversations, we are closing our comment section forever effective immediately”. People have written articles like The Comments Apocalypse, A Brief History Of The End Of The Comments, and Is The Era Of Reader Comments On News Websites Fading? This raises a lot of questions.

Like: I was able to find half a dozen great people to do a great job moderating the Culture War Thread 100% for free without even trying. How come some of the richest and most important news sources in the world can’t find or afford a moderator?

Or: can’t they just hide the comments behind a content warning saying “These comments are unmoderated, read at your own risk, click to expand”?

This confused me until I had my own experience with the Culture War thread.

The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did.

But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.

Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons.

Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. Each of these views has, at times, won over entire cultures so completely that disagreeing with them then was as unthinkable as agreeing with them is today. I disagree with most of them but don’t want to be too harsh on any of them. Reasoning correctly about these things is excruciatingly hard, trusting consensus opinion would have led you horrifyingly wrong throughout most of the past, and other options, if they exist, are obscure and full of pitfalls. I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas.

But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections.

The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time.

“So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!”

No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action.

Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.

I’ll allow one exception to the rule I provided in the headline: the comments at David Thompson’s blog are always worth reading, but I have to assume that David or countless unpaid minions must work very hard indeed to maintain the quality of comments that get posted. I’ve never actively encouraged commenting here at Quotulatiousness, and I don’t spend a lot of time on the various social media sites as I have a low tolerance for the kinds of “conversation” you tend to find there.

January 2, 2019

In non-breaking, non-news … politicians lie

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

Hector Dummond explains why what might seem like a shocking revelation from a former Thatcher MP isn’t even getting a raised eyebrow from the British media:

In a highly revealing article former MP Matthew Parris admits that the Conservative Party would often lie so that it could do what it wanted. And when it didn’t lie it fudged and avoided issues in order to prevent the ‘people’ having any say in the country’s governance:

    our challenge was to find ways of ducking the issue. Once I became an MP, I did so by voting for the principle and against the practice. This subversion of democracy (in Theresa May’s phrase) caused me embarrassment, but not a second’s guilt. Sod democracy: hanging was wrong …

    Among ourselves we talked cheerfully about subterfuge. The Britain of 1979 and 1983 most emphatically did not vote for a massive confrontation with the coal miners. We made sure the electorate was never asked.

These candid admissions have been completely ignored by the media. One reason they’ve been ignored is, of course, that most people have come to work this out for themselves, so Parris isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know. But surely hearing it from the horse’s mouth has great value? Why hasn’t the media splashed on this? Why haven’t Parris’s old enemies in the Labour party made hay with it?

The main reason is that most of the media, and virtually all the Labour party, is on his side over this. Even newspapers like the Guardian. You might think the Guardian would be the natural enemy of a former Tory MP, especially one who worked with Thatcher, and certainly on some issues they will regard Parris as an enemy, but the fact is that the Guardian wants government to be free of restraint by the people, because its vision of the state involves a leftist government getting into power, imposing its own ideology onto society and removing the power for the people to have a democratic say from most areas of life. So it can hardly criticise Parris for having done what it longs to do. It doesn’t want to bring about anything that might lessen the freedom government currently has to ignore the voter.

QotD: The early United States

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

I’ve been reading Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty (2009), the best one-volume history of the very early American republic in the years between the enactment of the Constitution and the end of the War of 1812. In many ways, I notice, this story has the structure of an enormous joke. The American revolution was wrought by wealthy landowners, many of whom hoped to reproduce the hierarchical, agrarian lifestyle of the English countryside in the New World. These people became the early Federalists: they largely wanted to mimic the world of old Europe, only with themselves on top as rentiers, eschewing labour and trade alike.

But they had sown the wind. The commercial and intellectual forces they set in motion created a new, chaotic, competitive, egalitarian kind of society. And one way this manifested itself was as a media crisis. The Revolution overthrew all established authority, or tended to, and created the conditions for an unfamiliar kind of unregulated, rampant press — an ecosystem full of lies, partisanship, personal abuse, and scurrility.

Even those who made sneaky use of this new system, like Thomas Jefferson, left testimonies to their overall exhaustion and confusion as literate, curious people. You get the impression that being a reader in that time and place, with rumours of wars and tales of corruption zinging around, was hard work.

Colby Cosh, “In 2017, when the shooting stops, the media warfare begins”, National Post, 2017-02-02.

December 24, 2018

Sun Yat-sen – A Kidnapping in London – Extra History – #2

Filed under: China, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Extra Credits
Published on 22 Dec 2018

Sun Yat-sen moves to a new city for safety, but it will not last long — a year after the Revive China society is destroyed and scattered, he is unwittingly kidnapped in London. He must rely on the ingenuity of his outside ally, Dr. James Cantlie…

Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon

December 4, 2018

QotD: B.H. Liddell Hart and J.F.C. Fuller

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The military commentators of the popular press can mostly be classified as pro-Russian or anti-Russian pro-blimp or anti-blimp. Such errors as believing the Maginot Line impregnable, or predicting that Russia would conquer Germany in three months, have failed to shake their reputation, because they were always saying what their own particular audience wanted to hear. The two military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teaches that the defence is stronger that the attack, and the second that the attack is stronger that the defence. This contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the same public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office.

George Orwell, footnote to “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.

November 24, 2018

It’d be an inhumanly restrained government that wouldn’t take advantage of this arrangement

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

And I don’t know of anyone who thinks that highly of our current federal government. In the Financial Post, Terence Corcoran outlines the government’s bribe offer to Canadian media organizations:

Historically, a free press has meant freedom from government intervention — from the king, the president, the prime minister, politicians, bureaucrats. The proposals outlined Wednesday by Finance Minister Bill Morneau to rescue journalists pretends to be consistent with that fundamental principle. The measures, he said, will be “arm’s-length and independent of the government.” They are not, and they represent a step backward for Canadian journalism.

Under the Morneau proposals, the arm of government is directly involved in deciding which journalists or news organizations will receive special treatment, tax breaks, charitable status. Over five years the amount of federal money moving directly into news and journalism will exceed $600 million, which obviously results in government dependence, not independence.

Morneau’s own words betray the falsity of his defence of the media-bailout plan. Decisions will be in the hands of an “independent panel of journalists (that) will be established to define and promote core journalism standards, define professional journalism, and determine eligibility.” What the heck does all that mean? Other journalists are going to set standards for what? Content? Ethics? Ideology? Adherence to the Canada Food Guide?

[…]

It is also unlikely that these measures to shape local journalism and bolster some media companies over others will be the end of government efforts to meddle in the industry. One can reasonably expect that there will be corresponding attempts to undermine the corporate entities and others that are said to be destabilizing Canadian journalism and the news and information business.

There is constant pressure on government from many sources to take action against the social media giants that are accused of stealing profits from legacy newspapers while spreading fake news. In a new commentary this week, former U.S. labour secretary Robert Reich called on Washington to break up Facebook and Google on the grounds that they dominate advertising. Anti-trust action is needed, said Reich, on the grounds that they “stifle innovation.” Canadian regulatory activists share the view that the U.S. tech and media companies need to be controlled and taxed — with the money redistributed to Canadian entities.

November 22, 2018

This is why tax cuts are always criticized for benefitting the rich

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

Rebecca Zeines and Jon Miltimore explain why newspaper headlines and TV anchors always seem to decry any tax cut as being disproportionally beneficial to the wealthy:

But crucial facts are often missing in these articles. As a recent Bloomberg piece explained, two key points tend to be overlooked in articles written by media outlets and progressive tax proponents:

  1. The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).
  2. The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes.

These numbers date back to 2016 but remain applicable in 2018.

These data show that the bottom 50 percent of US taxpayers paid just 3 percent of total income taxes in 2016, while the top 50 percent accounted for 97 percent.

Here is a wonderful visual representation of this dynamic, courtesy of Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute:

There is a clear correlation between economic freedom and prosperity, and tax climate is a key component of economic freedom.

Economist Dan Mitchell explains it best: Heavy taxation destroys entrepreneurship. The more money is taxed out of the private sector, the less is available for investment, development, and worker compensation (recall that after Trump’s tax bill was enacted, many businesses raised workers’ wages and offered bonuses).

Efforts to improve America’s tax climate are consistently and predictably derided as tax cuts for “the rich.” But, as the above diagram shows, it’s quite impossible to offer people a comparatively huge tax cut when they’re paying a comparatively tiny percentage of income taxes.

October 28, 2018

Newspapers today “are huddled amongst notional rivals in a tremulous infantry square, facing outward”

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

Colby Cosh wasn’t one of the “founders” of the National Post, but his byline showed up early in the newspaper’s history. Here is his contribution to the “how the hell have we survived the last 20 years?” issue of the paper:

On the 20th birthday of the National Post, we have assembled alumni and associates to celebrate the mistake that was its creation. In saying so, I speak of it strictly as a commercial proposition. The Post was created in a spirit of newspaper warfare — overbuilt for an imagined future that evaporated almost immediately. All newspapers, for most of the last 20 years, have seen their attention oriented to exterior non-newspaper predators. We are huddled amongst notional rivals in a tremulous infantry square, facing outward.

If you sent a time-travelling accountant back from 2018 to advise the founders of the Post on their new project, his advice could not possibly be “Yep, you guys have the right idea, do it exactly that way.” The advice might even be the one word “Don’t.” The financial story he would have to tell from the future is one of nearly continuous pain and frustration.

But, like many megaprojects gone awry, the Post has been glorious and useful, too. No intelligent reader can stand to imagine the last 20 years without the Post’s distinctive colour in the Canadian media palette. Rival outlets have recruited too many Posties to deny the value of its existence. Persons who will never set eyes on these words or touch a copy of the Post have benefited from its existence in a hundred ways. It’s a story of survival rather than triumph — of a creature born at the wrong moment, defying fate and having a worthwhile life despite everything.

When I was asked to write a column about the paper’s anniversary, I spent the next few days feeling subtly annoyed, without being sure why. Eventually I put my finger on it. I sensed that this anniversary would involve a certain quantity of National Post Day Oners telling fun stories of exotic news heroism from the early, lavishly funded months (weeks?) of the paper.

Some of us can only feel nausea at the sound of these anecdotes, having missed the grand, ultra-adventurous part of the war. I myself am a failed Day Oner. If I had managed to impress Terence Corcoran in our pre-launch job interview, I might not have retreated to Edmonton, where the cost of living is low and the competition for freelance work is less savage. It was probably fortunate that I failed the audition (as opposed to failing at the job), but failing it did leave me outside the band of Day One foxhole brethren.

Andrew Coyne (for once, not riding his electoral reform hobby horse):

With a lineup that included every prominent conservative columnist — a couple less reliably so — plus a desk full of nervy British editors who had been in a newspaper war all their lives, the Post flouted every convention of how a quality newspaper should act or look, broke every rule, and generally took hell to the Globe and Mail. I imagine pop-eyed Globe editors, sputtering incredulously: “What? They did what? They, they can’t do that — can they?”

I think we could have made a fair claim to being the best newspaper — certainly the best written — in the world. Every single day the paper was bursting with lively, mischievous pieces in a style that crossed the Daily Telegraph with the New York Observer (when that paper was still in print and still interesting). It had, someone said, the brains of a broadsheet and the loins of a tabloid, and though it took a staunchly, even rabidly conservative editorial line, it remained a guilty pleasure for many on the left. It was simply too much fun not to read.

It couldn’t last, of course, as we were informed more or less from the first day. And yet, improbably, it has. Our industry has declined into not-so-genteel poverty since then — in retrospect, the idea of launching a nationally distributed, ink-on-newsprint newspaper just as the internet was about to consume us all has an almost suicidal gallantry about it — but the Post carries on, if not surrounded by quite the same richesse then with the same culture: that bullish irreverence, that smile of amusement, that jaunty informality, relaxed and subversive at once.

Chris Selley:

The Post in a nutshell, for me, came on a Friday night in 2013 as I arrived at a friend’s cottage two-and-a-half hours north of Toronto. Looking at my phone, I found a wee joke I had made at Calgary’s expense had been widely misinterpreted as a sincere characterization of Edmontonians as “twitchy eyed, machete-wielding savages.” Half of Edmonton was calling for my head on a pike. The city’s mayor (!) was on the warpath against Postmedia. My phone rang. It was Steve Meurice, then the Post’s editor-in-chief. If I had worked for any other paper I’d have voided my bowels.

He was as baffled and amused as I was, and wished me a good weekend. He ordered me a “Twitchy-eyed, machete-wielding savages” t-shirt, which awaited me on my chair in Don Mills when I returned.

October 25, 2018

Every publication in Canada must have had lots of volunteers for this story

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

In the National Post, Marie-Danielle Smith gets high for science!

I just remembered I am supposed to be writing.

I am stoned on legal weed, which finally came into my hands this morning after six days of waiting. Thank you, government!

It is a different thing to get high alone — to get high alone for work reasons, right after question period. I’m sitting at my dining room table, drifting off every now and then to examine the patterns on my stuccoed walls or to focus, intensely, on the album I am listening to, the one that Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett collaborated on. It would be a different thing to get high with the two of them.

The first thing you notice, after opening the cardboard box, which is just a little too large for your knapsack (backpack? knapsack? backpack?) … uh, you notice how much packaging there is. Tape. Crumpled-up papers. A box with government warnings and the logo of the licensed weed producer. A plastic bottle inside with a child lock cap that reminds you of Advil.

“She’s so easy,” sing Courtney and Kurt, repeatedly. Such a good album. This song has been on forever. Time stretches out. I’ve smoked a sativa-heavy hybrid strain called “Super Sonic,” which is supposed to make you feel creative rather than sleepy. On the Ontario Cannabis Store website, it’s described as having “a strong, earthy, sweet aroma, reminiscent of Quantum Kush.” I don’t know what Quantum Kush is but maybe our prime minister can explain it? (Remember that time? Anyway.)

Of course, not everyone is impressed:

October 8, 2018

Debunking state education rankings

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

In the latest issue of Reason, Stan Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly explain why you should ignore those “authoritative” rankings published by U.S. News and World Report and others:

You probably think you know which states have the best and worst education systems in the country. If you regularly dip into rankings such as those published by U.S. News and World Report, you likely believe schools in the Northeast and Upper Midwest are thriving while schools in the Deep South lag. It’s an understandable conclusion to draw from those ubiquitous “Best Schools!” lists. It’s also wrong.

The general consensus on education, retold every few news cycles, is that fiscally conservative states are populated by cheapskates. In those necks of the woods, people are too ignorant to vote in favor of helping their illiterate and innumerate children. Intelligent people understand that high taxes and generous pensions for public school teachers are the recipe for an efficient and smoothly functioning education system. If skinflint voters would just lighten up, the story goes, they too could become erudite and sophisticated.

Paul Krugman rehashes this narrative regularly in his New York Times column, frequently bemoaning the country’s purportedly miserly education budgets. Increasingly, he perceives libertarian barbarians at the gates of state governments, brandishing axes for dreaded spending cuts. In April, he wrote that “we’re left with a nation in which teachers, the people we count on to prepare our children for the future, are starting to feel like members of the working poor.… One way to think about what’s currently happening in a number of states is that the anti-Obama backlash, combined with the growing tribalism of American politics, delivered a number of state governments into the hands of extreme right-wing ideologues. These ideologues really believed that they could usher in a low-tax, small-government, libertarian utopia.”

In Krugman’s view, which reflects the education establishment’s view as well, those attempting to keep the size of government in check are a danger to your child. To support this claim, education wonks and activists point to state rankings in U.S. News, Education Week, or WalletHub — outlets that grade states according to a few key measures, such as graduation rates, education spending, and test scores. When education is discussed in the news, these rankings are often cited to illustrate the havoc that restrained budget growth and right-to-work laws can wreak.

Indeed, such rankings do seem to show that the highest-quality state educational systems tend to be in big-spending states in the Northeast or Upper Midwest. These places apparently honor and respect teachers, while Southern states inexplicably abhor them. But the cheapskates in cheap states get their just deserts: Sophisticated northern jurisdictions grow ever smarter, while stingy conservative backwaters sink into ever-lower depths of ignorance. The solution is obvious: Pay up or your kids will suffer.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: Traditional rankings are riddled with methodological flaws.

October 3, 2018

QotD: The state of American journalism

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

Back in the day, reporters (they didn’t insist on being called “journalists” back then) were told that the way to frame their stories was to answer a series of questions which boiled down to:

  • who
  • what
  • when
  • where
  • why
  • how

The emphasis was on actual facts and objectivity. But now, with “advocacy journalism” having completely taken over the J-schools and pretty much every newsroom, the emphasis is on changing the world rather than reporting a story fairly and accurately. Especially now, when no less a paper than the New York Times announced before the election that Trump is so bad that objectivity should be thrown out. So the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions were changed into:

  • who (can we quote to damage Trump)
  • what (can we publish to damage Trump)
  • when (should we run it maximize damage to Trump)
  • where (do we get more material to damage Trump)
  • why (Donald Trump’s presidency is an existential threat to America and to the world)
  • how (can we write our stories so as to cause maximum damage to Trump)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the state of journalism, 2018.

OregonMuse, “The Morning Rant”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2018-09-12.

September 26, 2018

The New York Times on the minimum wage question

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

Jon Miltimore shares the key points of a New York Times editorial on the minimum wage:

The minimum wage is the Jason Vorhees of economics. It just won’t die.

No matter how many jobs the minimum wage destroys, no matter how many times you debunk it, it always comes back to wreak more havoc.

We’ve covered the issues at length at FEE, and quite effectively, if I do say so myself. But I have to admit that one of the greatest takedowns of the minimum wage you’ll ever find comes from an unlikely place: The New York Times.

There are many reasons people and politicians find the minimum wage attractive, of course. But the Times, in an editorial entitled “The Right Minimum Wage: 0.00,” skillfully rebuts each of these reasons in turn.

Noting that the federal minimum wage has been frozen for some six years, the Times admits that it’s no wonder that organized labor is pressuring politicians to increase the federal minimum wage to raise the standard of living for poorer working Americans.

“No wonder. But still a mistake,” the Times explains. “There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed.”

But why has the idea “passed”? Why would raising the minimum wage not help the working poor?

“Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market,” the editors explain.

But wouldn’t the minimum wage increase the purchasing power of low-income Americans? Wouldn’t a meaningful increase allow a single breadwinner to support a family of three and actually be above the official U.S. poverty line?

Ideally, yes. But there are unseen problems, as the editors point out:

    There are catches…[A higher minimum wage] would increase employers’ incentives to evade the law, expanding the underground economy. More important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.

But if that’s true, why would progressives support such a law? What’s their rationale for supporting a minimum wage if it does more harm than good? Is it sheer political opportunism?

Not necessarily. The Times explains:

    A higher minimum would undoubtedly raise the living standard of the majority of low-wage workers who could keep their jobs. That gain, it is argued, would justify the sacrifice of the minority who became unemployable.

There’s just one problem with this logic, the editors say:

    The argument isn’t convincing. Those at greatest risk from a higher minimum would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs. The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable – and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.

September 8, 2018

British tabloids try to stir up trouble with Argentina … again

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

Sir Humphrey tries to talk the tabloid press in off the ledge over some terrible reporting from the Falkland Islands:

River Class Patrol Vessel HMS Clyde is pictured exercising at sea. HMS Clyde patrols the territorial seas and monitors the airspace around the Falkland Islands whilst conducting routine visits and reassurance to the many small settlements found throughout the islands.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

This week it was revealed that an Argentine survey vessel had been reported near the Falkland Islands, and that the local patrol ship HMS Clyde had reportedly been sent to investigate. This simple story led to a barrage of negative news suggesting that the RN had ‘confronted’ the vessel which was apparently looking for oil.

One of the greatest success stories in the last few years for British foreign policy has been the way a formerly tense and difficult relationship with Argentina has so rapidly been reset to become a genuinely productive one. Under the Kirchner regime, which used foreign policy gripes as a means of distracting attention from domestic woes, the relationship between Argentina and the UK was far less productive and strong than it could, or should, have been.

[…]

It is therefore immensely depressing to see some utter rubbish being spouted in the newspapers about what may or may not have happened off the Falkland Islands. The reality is far more simple than is being reported – the vessel in question was a scientific research ship conducting operations near the Burwood bank. Extremely bad weather forced a course change, which brought the vessel closer than planned to the Falkland Islands. (Full source can be found HERE).

The UK and Argentina operate a sensible arrangement to notify each other of movements in certain areas to reduce concerns and maintain effective communications. This agreement means that both nations provide 48hrs notice when a naval vessel will be within 15nm of the others coast line (noting territorial waters usually extend out to 12nm). Usually vessel movements and operational plans are known well in advance, and it is possible to communicate this in a timely fashion. Sometimes though, this doesn’t always go to plan – for instance when a vessel is changing course unexpectedly due to the weather.

On this occasion, it appears to have been the case that the Argentine authorities notified the UK of the vessels course and presence as soon as they were aware of its situation. The vessel herself is not one that is normally covered by these notification arrangements anyway (being a civilian research vessel).

What may have happened is that the UK may have identified an unknown vessel in the local area that they were not expecting to see (noting these waters are reasonably quiet) and began the process of sending HMS Clyde to investigate. As soon as it was clear that in fact this was an entirely legitimate presence, she returned to her normal duties. It is not even clear that HMS Clyde sailed, let alone went close to the Argentine vessel. As the Argentines themselves made clear, no overflight or challenge was made, and normal business continued as the weather improved.

August 16, 2018

Mainstreaming misandry

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

Somehow the notion that it’s totally okay — even praiseworthy — to preach hatred of men has re-entered the mainstream and, worse, is being taken seriously by people who should know much, much better:

“You can’t hate all men can you? Actually I can,” writes Suzanne Moore, a British feminist, in the New Statesman in 2016. “As a class, I hate men.” Men are not a class but this doesn’t deter Moore from continuing her peroration. “I think any intelligent woman hates men,” she continues. She even comes up with a hash tag in the hope that this blanket condemnation will catch on – #yesallmen.

Meanwhile, in ‘The Cut’ section of the New York magazine, a member of the public writing in complains to the ‘agony aunt’ – the journalist Heather Havrilesky – that she “hates men” and is in danger of becoming a “cranky old bitch”. Heather suggests in reply that she simply embrace her inner bitch. “Most men are terrible,” she says. “Most men are shit.”

In addition, two articles on Medium – not quite as mainstream as New York magazine, the Washington Post, and the New Statesman, but certainly not fringe – echo the theme. Turns out, it’s not only (self-defined) man-hating women who have turned towards hate as a response to gender inequality. So have some men – like Anthony James Williams who writes in Medium that, “Women don’t have to like us, and history shows us that they have a right to hate us.”

In the charmingly titled ‘When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean And Start Over, What CAN You Do? Ijeoma Oluo – the mother of two boys, God help them – writes,

    This society is doing everything it can to create rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists. This society is broken, abusive, patriarchal (and white supremacist, ableist, hetero-cisnormative) trash. This entire patriarchal society is responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs.

If reading such hatred is exhausting, actually generating it must be even more so. I suspect hate is a young person’s game (although Danuta Walkers and Moore are not exactly spring chickens). It is tempting to shrug off this new misandry as just silly and something of a sideshow, but it’s possible that it represents a real strand of rising consciousness. If that is the case, it is not merely silly – it is dangerous. I have occasionally indulged in group hatred – ISIS in their racist, faithist, head-hacking, innocent-slaughtering prime, the Conservative Party in the 1980s, anyone involved in Prog Rock – but it’s not a very healthy principle to base your life around.

What does it mean to hate an otherwise random and unrelated group of people, as opposed to a specific individual? We can all enjoy hating, say, Nazis, pedophiles, and ISIS executioners beheading an aid worker. Hate can be reassuring, which is why it is so seductive. But when one is hating Nazis, one is hating people who subscribe to an ideology, an idea. Pedophiles and ISIS executioners are historically smaller groups, but they are also defined by a particular idea – sexual attraction to children and the cult of death. At some level, they’ve made a choice. No one is born a Nazi or an Islamist murderer, and even if Pedophilia is genetically influenced, that doesn’t absolve its perpetrators of guilt. However, hating men is not hating an idea or an abhorrent form of behaviour. It is hating half the world’s population, rich and poor, kind and cruel, black and white, gay and straight, just because they happen to have a Y chromosome.

To hate such a disparate group seems – is – demented. However, there is a prism through which it makes perfect sense, the prism constructed by the odd and contradictory fusion of neo-Marxism and post-modernism.

August 12, 2018

QotD: Journalism

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

Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.

David Burge (@iowahawkblog), Twitter, 2013-05-09.

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