Quotulatiousness

September 17, 2023

How much mis-, mal-, and dis-information do you encounter on an average day on the internet?

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

I don’t know the answer to that question … although I suspect it’s a pretty big proportion of what you’ll see, especially if you stick to legacy media sites who regularly indulge in cover-up, state propaganda, and outright lies while condemning other media as “conspiracy theorists”. Chris Bray, on the other hand, thinks there are hopeful signs that we’ve passed peak disinformation as the pandemic lockdowns get further behind us:

I’ve been trying to come up with a count: If you consume a typical amount of news media and social media product, how many individual pieces of dishonest, misleading, and calculatedly or ignorantly unreal “information” do you take on board over the course of a typical day?

Walter Kirn’s one-sentence summary of contemporary media is stuck in my head: “This is a world-concealing layer of diversionary and illogical and internally inconsistent noise, under which the world exists somewhere.” How much noise do you have to purge to merely get to zero, not at all informed but not not deeply misinformed? And if you encounter the deep thoughts of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, does the deficit merely double, or is it much worse than that?

Democracy means you must not question or oppose the head of state

I’ve been reading on The Site Formerly Known as Twitter this week that Elon Musk’s refusal to activate the privately owned Starlink network over Crimea is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which now apparently apply to corporate product, and also high treason, for which Elon Musk should be executed. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it’s like the Internet allows strangers to use your brain as a toilet. Although, as the Twitter randos always end up explaining, I just feel this way because I’M PUTIN’S NAZI BUTTBOY.

All day, every day, 24/7/365 — well, maybe with some breaks for sleep, but only if you stop looking at your phone at night — you take on garbage. Your brain is loaded with information barriers, dressed up as information. You read and hear sentences that are designed to prevent understanding.

September 8, 2023

The legacy media really value Conservative gab-fests like the current CPC convention

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Selley explains why the fringe views of obscure Conservative riding associations get so much more juice in the legacy media than equivalent brain-farts from Liberal or NDP groups:

Whatever lands in your news hole from the Conservative Party of Canada convention, which kicks off Thursday night in Quebec City, it’s a safe bet you’ll hear the result of the vote on Policy Resolution 1258. Sponsored by the North Okanagan—Shuswap riding association, it reads, in part, as follows: “A Conservative government will protect children by prohibiting life-altering medicinal or surgical interventions on minors under 18 to treat gender confusion or dysphoria”.

Needless to say this hasn’t gone down very well at the Ottawa press club, where discussion generally confines itself to two countries. “The pitch is similar to ones found across the United States, including in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in May banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth,” the increasingly breathless Canadian Press reported. “(It’s) a move many health professionals, parents and advocates of LGBTQS+ youth says places them at greater risk for suicide and depression.”

This is a distraction that leader Pierre Poilievre really doesn’t need. As I wrote last week, on the question of how schools should treat children who wish to change name or gender at school even quite reasonable policies can receive extraordinarily negative press if they are perceived to have been drafted by intolerant people. It’s as if the policies, reasonable on paper, might have some kind of cooties that could harm the children they affect. (That said, in some cases journalists and commentators don’t even seem to have read the policies in question.)

Policy Resolution 1258, like New Brunswick’s and Saskatchewan’s supposedly extreme “social transitioning” policies, isn’t at all extreme by world standards. Gender issues have enflamed the American culture wars, true enough — at last count 19 states, including Florida, had implemented new rules on “gender-affirming care” for kids (and in some cases adults). Naturally Canadian conservatives are watching, some approvingly.

So the legacy media loves intramural disputes within parties on the right, both because it gives them interesting things to report and pontificate about, and also because as a class, journalists tend to skew very heavily progressive. This leads naturally to a difference between how Conservative fringe opinions and progressive fringe opinions are treated in the media.

Especially for a neutral like myself, and especially given how much power party leaders have amassed relative to everyone else, there is a certain pleasure in making a party leader squirm. In the often hidebound and unimaginative world of Canadian politics, that can have benefits. These resolutions often serve as a sort of conscience-check for the party in question: Why aren’t the Liberals liberal enough? Why aren’t the Conservatives conservative enough? Sometimes the party even listens.

That said, I have no idea why parties inflict this on themselves. Mostly these resolutions just stir up trouble. Opposition parties and media alike use these resolutions to craft the dastardly narratives of their choice. The Conservatives in particular suffer from this, and in particular from the Ottawa media.

When the Conservatives ran advertisements claiming the Liberal government wanted to legalize hard drugs — a 2018 policy resolution brought forward by the caucus itself — CTV News declared the ads objectively “false.” The Liberals routinely chuck overboard progressive-minded proposals that come from the party’s left — on legalizing prostitution, for example, or electoral reform — and they’re never heard about again.

The Conservatives’ more right-wing policy proposals seem to get chucked into a giant narrative cauldron and fished out by reporters whenever necessary to prove that there is, in fact, a narrative that needs propagating: on abortion, on climate change, on euthanasia, on gender dysphoria, you name it, and no matter what the leader of the day — the guy everyone knows is in charge — might say.

September 1, 2023

How the term “the Deep State” morphed from left-wing to (extreme, scary, ultra-MAGA) right-wing jargon

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

Matt Taibbi wants to track the changes in political language in US usage, starting today with “Deep State”:

In July of last year David Rothkopf wrote a piece for the Daily Beast called, “You’re going to miss the Deep State when it’s gone: Trump’s terrifying plan to purge tens of thousands of career government workers and replace them with loyal stooges must be stopped in its tracks.” In the obligatory MSNBC segment hyping the article, poor Willie Geist, fast becoming the Zelig of cable’s historical lowlight reel, read off the money passage:

    During his presidency, [Donald] Trump was regularly frustrated that government employees — appointees, as well as career officials in the civil service, the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service — were an impediment to the autocratic impulses about which he often openly fantasized.

This passage portraying harmless “government employees” as the last patriotic impediment to Trumpian autocracy represented the complete turnaround of a term that less than ten years before meant, to the Beast‘s own target audience, the polar opposite. This of course needed to be lied about as well, and the Beast columnist stuck this landing, too, when Geist led Rothkopf through the eye-rolling proposition that there was “something fishy, or dark, or something going on behind the scenes” with the “deep state”.

Rothkopf replied that “career government officials” got a bad rap because “about ten years ago, Alex Jones and the InfoWars crowd started zeroing in on the deep state, as yet another of the conspiracy theories …”

The real provenance of deep state has in ten short years been fully excised from mainstream conversation, in the best and most thorough whitewash job since the Soviets wiped the photo record clean of Yezhov and Trotsky. It’s an awesome achievement.

Through the turn of the 21st century virtually no American political writers used deep state. In the mid-2000s, as laws like the PATRIOT Act passed and the Bush/Cheney government funded huge new agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the word was suddenly everywhere, inevitably deployed as left-of-center critique of the Bush-Cheney legacy.

How different was the world ten years ago? The New York Times featured a breezy Sunday opinion piece asking the late NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake — a man described as an inspiration for Edward Snowden who today would almost certainly be denounced as a traitor — what he was reading then. Drake answered he was reading Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry by Marc Ambinder, whose revelations about possible spying on “eighteen locations in the Washington D.C. area, including near the White House, Congress, and several foreign embassies”, inspired the ACLU to urge congress to begin encrypting communications.

On the eve of a series of brutal revelations about intelligence abuses, including the Snowden mess, left-leaning American commentators all over embraced “deep state” as a term perfectly descriptive of the threat they perceived from the hyper-concentrated, unelected power observed with horror in the Bush years. None other than liberal icon Bill Moyers convinced Mike Lofgren — a onetime Republican operative who flipped on his formers and became heavily critical of the GOP during this period — to compose a report called “The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight“.

August 31, 2023

Why New York Destroyed 3 Iconic Landmarks | Architectural Digest

Filed under: Architecture, History, Railways, Sports, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Architectural Digest
Published 6 Apr 2023

Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to AD, this time to look at the history and creation of three New York City landmarks that have since been demolished — but are far from forgotten. From the once (and future?) majesty of Penn Station to the New York Herald building and the original 19th-century Madison Square Garden, Michael gives expert insight into these three historic architectural landmarks, why they were laid to ruin, and what came to replace them.
(more…)

August 22, 2023

With Bill C-18 about to come into effect, there is zero sense for the “tech giants” to start negotiating

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

Michael Geist explains why there are no incentives for Google and Meta to begin any kind of negotiations with the Canadian government over the ruthlessly self-destructive Online News Act:

The rhetoric around Bill C-18 has escalated in recent days in light of the awful wildfires in NWT and British Columbia. In my view, the issues associated with these tragic events have little to do with Meta blocking news links and the attempt to bring it into the conversation is a transparent attempt to score political points (the connectivity issues with some NWT communities completely taken offline for days is somehow never mentioned). The reality is that Meta was asked about just this scenario at committee and it made it clear that it would not block any non-news outlet links. That is precisely what has been happening and the government’s legislative choices should be the starting point for understanding why compliance with the law involves blocking a very broad range of news links that extend beyond even those sources that are defined as “eligible news outlets”.

The government and supporters of Bill C-18 talking points now emphasize two things in relation to Meta blocking news links: the law has yet to take effect and there is room to address their concerns in the regulation-making process. Both of these claims are incredibly deceptive, relying on the assumption that most won’t bother to read the actual legislation. If they did, they would see that (1) the law has received royal assent and can take effect anytime and (2) the regulation making process addresses only a small subset of Bill C-18 issues with most of the core issues finalized. In other words, the time to shape the law and address many of the key concerns was before the government repeatedly cut off debate in order to ensure it that received royal assent before the summer break.

Start with when the law takes effect. As noted above, the law has been passed and received royal assent. It is the law of the land and there is no scope for changes or amendments without a new bill that must be passed by Parliament. Section 93 establishes when the provisions come into force. The law initially envisioned a staged approach whereby certain sections would be proclaimed in effect by the government in stage one, followed by four additional stages, some of which were contingent on certain regulations coming into force. Yet at the last minute the government approved a Senate amendment that basically discarded the entire approach. Section 93(6) states:

    (6) Despite subsections (1) to (5), any provision of this Act that does not come into force by order before the 180th day following the day on which this Act receives royal assent comes into force 180 days after the day on which this Act receives royal assent.

The entire law therefore takes effect no later than 180 days after royal assent, which is December 19, 2023. This change was included at the urging of the Canadian media sector (specifically Quebecor) which lobbied to have it take effect as soon as possible. Under this approach, the law can take effect at any time as the government need only issue the relevant Orders-in-Council. There is now little wiggle room. As of today’s post, the latest the law will take effect is in 120 days but it could happen well before that.

Once the law takes effect, the clock on negotiations and potential mediation and arbitration begins. The timelines are fixed in Section 19(1) of the law: 90 days to negotiate and 120 days for mediation. If there is no agreement and no request to the CRTC to extend the deadlines, the issue can go to final offer arbitration. To be clear, none of these timelines are subject to the regulation making process. They are fixed and they create obvious urgency for anyone facing compliance requirements.

The government threatened Meta and Google with mandated payment to Canadian news sources if their online services merely linked to articles or videos from those news sources. Meta and Google rationally decided that the tiny little Canadian market wasn’t worth the cost of paying CBC and other Canadian news outlets for the privilege of sending them readers and are in the process of obeying the letter of the new law and blocking such links on their respective platforms. They told the Canadian government that this is what they’d do if the law was passed in its current form, yet the government is pretending to be shocked and surprised that Meta and Google are going to obey the law.

After all, there’s no real risk that lives might be endangered because so many Canadians are used to getting their news by way of Facebook or Google, is there?

August 10, 2023

“Forget global boiling … It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about”

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

Remember when [your local TV station/newspaper] was blaring the alarming news that your [city/town/state/province] was warming at twice the rate of everything else? All the legacy media NPCs got the same patch at the same time — and it was blatant enough that most people realized it was utter bullshit. As Brendan O’Neill explains, they’re not normally quite so clumsy in their constant attempts to gaslight us all about the climate, but they’re definitely still doing it:

Picture the scene. You’re in London, the sky is menacingly grey, it’s drizzling. You zip your jacket against the elements, annoyed that Britain has just had one of its wettest Julys since records began. Then you reach for your copy of the Evening Standard as you head home from work, only to see splashed across the front page a Photoshopped image of the Earth on fire. “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”, the hysterical headline asks. The drizzle turns to rain and you fold your Standard in two to use as an impromptu umbrella, turning a mad piece of global-boiling propaganda into flimsy protection from this strange, wet summer.

This was London yesterday. It really happened. It was yet another overcast day, in keeping with the record-breaking precipitation of the past month. The UK had an average of 140.1mm of rain in July, the sixth-highest level of July rainfall since records were first kept in 1836. And yet here was the freebie London paper warning us that flames will shortly engulf our celestial home. That heat death is coming. That an inferno of our own dumb making is licking at our feet. I know we live in mad times but even I never expected to see damp commuters brushing raindrops off their shoulders while surrounded by discarded papers telling us it’s so hellishly hot we might all soon die. Rarely has the gap between MSM BS and real life felt so cavernously vast.

They’re lying to us. Forget global boiling, the crazy term invented by UN chief António Guterres a couple of weeks ago. Forget global warming, even. It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about. If gaslighting, in the words of the Oxford dictionary, is “the process of making somebody believe untrue things in order to control them”, then that lunatic Standard cover was classic gaslighting. The planet is not on fire. Earth is not burning. These are untruths. This is delirium, not journalism; fearmongering, not fact-gathering. And the aim, it seems to me, is to try to control us; to frighten us with pseudo-Biblical prophesies of hellfire and doom until we obediently bow down to the eco-ideology.

Adding insult to injury, the Standard frontpage had pics of Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Rishi Sunak next to its crackpot query, “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”. Let’s leave to one side that President Biden doesn’t seem to know what planet he’s on half the time, never mind being able to save one; and that Rishi can’t even control Britain’s borders, far less the climate of our entire mortal coil; and that Xi and Modi are surely more concerned with their pursuit of economic development than with indulging the End Times hysteria of the Notting Hill set that writes and publishes the Standard. The more pressing point is this: no one needs to stop Earth from burning because Earth isn’t burning. You can’t put out a fire that doesn’t exist. As Bjorn Lomborg said last week, the idea that the “world is ablaze” is pure bunkum.

August 3, 2023

“Tech giants” obey the law and block access to Canadian news sites to Canadian users

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

For some reason — despite a clamour of warnings from sensible observers — the Canadian government still seems shocked and surprised that the much-reviled “tech giants” have chosen to obey the new Online News Act and are actively blocking links to Canadian media outlets just as the law requires:

For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms. However, what has been readily apparent for months became reality yesterday: Meta is now actively blocking news links and sharing on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The announcement does not reference Threads, but it would not surprise if news links are ultimately blocked on that platform as well. The company says that the blocking will take several weeks to fully roll out to all users, suggesting that it has learned from the over-blocking mistakes made in Australia and is proceeding more cautiously in Canada. By the end of the month, the world’s largest social media platform will become a news desert in Canada, with links to all news – both Canadian and foreign – blocked on the platform.

It is worth revisiting that it was only a couple of months ago that some industry leaders, lobbyists, and academics were assuring the Senate that the Meta threat was just a bluff. Kevin Desjardins of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, referenced the Australian experience, and told the Senate committee studying the bill that “when legislated to do so, they will come to the table”. Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down”. Chris Pedigo of the U.S.-based Digital Context Next assured the committee “it’s important to understand what happens when these bills become law. In Australia, they moved quickly to secure deals. They have done similar work in Europe, and I expect it would happen quickly in Canada as well.” And Carleton professor Dwayne Winseck said “I am not worried. The threats they are making, they are doing this all around the world.”

Despite the assurances, the company was true to its word and blocking news links is now here. If this is a negotiation tactic, it’s a pretty strange one given that reports indicate the company is not talking to the government about potential changes to a law that has already received royal assent. Indeed, while the new Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge urged the company to participate in the regulatory process, there is nothing in the regulations that could alter the fundamental principle in the bill of mandated payments for links. At best, the government could toss aside its commitment to stay out of negotiations by using the regulations to dictate to the supposedly independent CRTC how much needs to be spent in order to avoid Bill C-18’s final offer arbitration provisions. Government negotiating total payment value and eviscerating the CRTC’s independence does not inspire confidence and Meta reasonably wants no part of it, since the time to fix Bill C-18 was before it received royal assent, not after.

Bolded section mine: I didn’t realize that it wasn’t just Canadian media links that were being blocked … it’s all news sites in the world being hidden from Canadian users. That’s an escalation from what I’d originally understood. I don’t blame the “tech giants” at all, but it will be tough on older Canadians who’ve been depending on social media to keep them up-to-date on domestic and foreign news.

August 1, 2023

Evil climate heretics deny the revealed holy truth of global BOILING!

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Notorious heretic Brendan O’Neill preaches climate denial! Where are the Green Gestapo when you need them?

And just like that we’ve entered a new epoch. “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived”, decreed UN chief António Guterres last week. It’s hard to know what’s worse: the hubris and arrogance of this globalist official who imagines he has the right to declare the start of an entire new age, or the servile compliance of the media elites who lapped up his deranged edict about the coming heat death of Earth. “Era of global boiling has arrived and it is terrifying”, said the front page of the Guardian, as if Guterres’s word was gospel, his every utterance a divine truth. We urgently need to throw the waters of reason on this delirious talk of a “boiling” planet.

Guterres issued his neo-papal bull about the boiling of our world in response to the heatwaves that have hit some countries over the past two weeks. “Climate change is here [and] it is terrifying”, he said. We see “families running from the flames [and] workers collapsing in scorching heat” and “it is just the beginning”, he said, doing his best impersonation of a 1st-century millenarian crackpot. In fact, forget “climate change”, he said. Forget “global warming”, too. What we’re witnessing is a boiling. It all brings to mind the Book of Job which warned that the serpent Leviathan would cause the seas to “boil like a cauldron”. Leviathan’s back, only we call him climate change now.

The obsequious speed with which the media turned Guterres’s commandment into frontpage news was extraordinary. They behaved less like reporters than like the slavish scribes of this secular god and his delusional visions. “World entering ‘era of global boiling'”, cried the Independent, and we “know who is responsible”. No prizes for guessing who that is. It’s you, me and the rest of our pesky species. It always is. “Planet is boiling”, one headline breezily declared, confirming that Guterres’s fearful phrase, his propagandistic line no doubt drawn up with the aid of spin doctors in some UN backroom, is already being christened as fact.

Almost instantly, media outlets started lecturing readers on how they might help to put a halt to the coming evaporation of our planet. SBS in Australia advised us to “Reduce meat intake”, “Stop driving cars” and “Cut down on flights”. In short, stop all the fun stuff; make sacrifices to appease nature’s angry gods. Even self-styled radicals made themselves mouthpieces of the UN’s medieval sermonising. Novara Media instantly embraced “global boiling” as an apt metaphor for the arsonist impact humanity has had on Earth. Scratch a Marxist these days, find a Malthusian.

“Tonight in the news: the moon is made of green chees- wait, patch downloading … not made of green cheese, and anyone who says it is is a MAGA conspiracist h8er.”

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

Sarah Hoyt on the amazing co-ordination of messaging from so many legacy media and their social media collaborators:

Many of us are amused with how fast the left acquires a sudden mission to propagate the one holy acceptable opinion. How it changes overnight, and how it comes from all of them at once, in almost the same words. And how it gets repeated ad-nauseam, in defiance of all sense, until the message changes.
This has led the least kind among us (eh. Myself, sometimes) to refer to our leftist brethren as “NPC”s who do whatever the programmers put in their heads.

The sad truth, though, is they’re not NPCs. They’re humans, like the rest of us, just — a lot of them — through cowardice or a more conformist temperament, humans who want to be “right” with the “majority” as they perceive it. They, like most primitives the world over, have no moral center, and want to back the winner and the strong horse.

Add in a dose of truly bad education, and their self-conceit as smart, and what you have is someone who reads all the accepted publications, catches on to what they’re saying, and runs to get ahead of what they think will be (and to be fair is, of their kind only) a parade.

The sequence goes something like this: Leftists, for nefarious, stupid, or money reasons (and often all three) declare that they want something utterly, inconceivably stupid to happen: ban something, force some tech, whatever.

Immediately, on command, some “scientist” (usually of the softer side) who smells grant money does studies showing this idea is brilliant and will bring about utopia. The stupid is flawed and irreproducible, but the journalists are all leftists who want to “support the current thing” and jump on it. Suddenly every possible and some imaginary publications tell us how the Current Thing is the most important thing ever, and it must be done nowwwww.

Take Joe Biden’s idea of cooling the Earth by covering the sunlight. — Okay, not his idea. Or maybe it is. Who knows how much meth they’re putting in his ice-cream? — But the idea of the group of people who form “Joe Biden.” Or the idea of those jokers at the WEF that the planet is BOILING and the only solution if for us peasants to surrender to their wisdom and eat the bugs, and give up private transportation.

July 12, 2023

“Folksy” Joe Biden has always been a nasty piece of work

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

One of the most puzzling things about how Joe Biden has been represented in the legacy media is that — despite mountains of evidence that he’s a hot-tempered bully who has always been eager to belittle and demean other people — he still gets fawning coverage of his supposed kindly personality:

Joe Biden likes to present himself as a folksy type, the kind you’d think of as a kindly old uncle or something. He tells stories about Corn Pop and virtually anything else and the press eats it up.

But it’s a veneer, a mask Biden wears so the public will like him.

We’ve seen it slip a time or two, but Axios has a story that hints that what we’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg.

    In public, President Biden likes to whisper to make a point. In private, he’s prone to yelling.

    Behind closed doors, Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast.

    The president’s admonitions include: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!” and “Get the f**k out of here!” — according to current and former Biden aides who have witnessed and been on the receiving end of such outbursts.

    …

    “There’s no question that the Biden temper is for real. It may not be as volcanic as Bill Clinton’s, but it’s definitely there,” said Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.

    Whipple’s book quotes former White House press secretary Jen Psaki as saying: “I said to [Biden] multiple times, ‘I’ll know we have a really good, trusting relationship when you yell at me the first time.'”

    Whipple notes: “Psaki wouldn’t have to wait long.”

    Zoom out: Biden’s temper comes in the form of angry interrogations rather than erratic tantrums.

    He’ll grill aides on topics until it’s clear they don’t know the answer to a question — a routine that some see as meticulous and others call “stump the chump” or “stump the dummy”.

    Being yelled at by the president has become an internal initiation ceremony in this White House, aides say — if Biden doesn’t yell at you, it could be a sign he doesn’t respect you.

Go and read the whole thing, because this is troubling, and not just because I dislike Biden.

While Axios goes out of its way to paint this as just an impassioned politician who demands much of his staff, that’s not what I’m seeing here.

Instead, I’m seeing an abusive man who is taking advantage of his powerful position to bully his subordinates.

I won’t pretend I’ve never lost my temper before. Doing so would be a lie. However, my yelling at someone has never been a sign of respect. It’s been a sign that I lost control.

And if Biden is doing it this often, there’s not much chance the man has any control over much of anything.

Of course, this is a report from Axios. Maybe it’s not really a thing. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it because I can’t stand Biden.

QotD: Media gullibility on military issues

Filed under: Media, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One reason I don’t say much about the Ukraine war, for instance, is that I’m out of my depth, and simply don’t want to put in the necessary work to get up to speed. I don’t know a thing about contemporary Russian equipment (or NATO equipment for that matter). My grasp of strategy begins and ends with “playing Risk! against drunk frat boys”. If I went out there, I’d be a babe in the woods. “What was that bang?” “Oh, that’s the Q-35 matter modulator.” “What was that bang?” “That’s the Lepage glue gun. It glues a whole formation of bombers together in midair.”

The Media, of course, does not do this. They’d be happy to write up a whole big feature story about how the Russians’ Q-35 matter modulator wasn’t nearly what Vlad Putin, that lying bastard, bragged it up to be. And with the new Lepage gun gluing all those Russian planes together, the brave Ukrainians will be in Moscow for Easter!

Are they lying? Not really. Some very serious-looking persyn in a snazzy uniform with a lot of very colorful ribbons told them that the Q-35 matter modulator isn’t all that, and why would some brave freedom fighter lie to them? And besides — this is crucial — “fact checking” the stats on the Q-35 matter modulator would entail that you’ve never heard of it before …

… which is anathema to our intrepid reporterette’s sense of xzhyrself as a hard-hitting newshound who is very very Smart. After all, she scored a 35,000 on her SATs and graduated from the Assjammer School of Journalism with a 9.98 GPA. She’s got fellowships and awards and whatnot out the yingyang, plus 1.2 million Twitter followers. And it says “war correspondent” right there on her Facebook page. If the Q-35 matter modulator weren’t actually a thing, surely she would know.

Severian, “The Becky Cycle”, Founding Questions, 2023-02-27.

July 4, 2023

It’s not “bullying” for corporations to act in their own (and their shareholders’) best interests

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

The weekly round-up from The Line editors wasn’t happy reading for fans of the Canadian mainstream media:

The Canadian government approached this as if it was “Big Tech” who were reaping all the rewards … when in fact it was the Canadian media companies getting most of the benefit from the arrangement. No wonder “Big Tech” chose to take their bat and ball and go home.

There are two major items up for consideration, and we’ll deal with each in turn. The first is a proposed merger between Postmedia and the Torstar/Metroland newspapers. The second, and most significant, news item, is that following on Meta/Facebook’s decision to stop featuring news on its feeds, Google is promising to drop the Google News Showcase feature, and to stop surfacing Canadian news links on its search feeds. All of this is in response to C-18, the Online News Act.

This law is trying to force Facebook and Google to compensate news organizations for the links that appear on their platforms; so the companies reacted in an entirely predictable way after the bill received Royal Assent last week — they announced they are going to absent themselves from the scope of the bill by no longer providing those links.

The government, its supporters, and many in the media itself reacted to this announcement with the same inane bluster that has come to dominate the conversation around this byzantine and poorly conceived bill. The Liberals promised to stand up to “Big Tech”; and the media organizations that pinned their survival on milking this new revenue stream are now accusing Google et al. of “bullying”. We at The Line don’t consider this rhetoric to be rational or in good faith. We are annoyed — we are horrified — by these companies’ decisions, but we understand them.

Both Facebook and Google made it clear that C-18 was untenable from a business point of view; they both warned that they would consider pulling news links in response. From Big Tech’s perspective, the decision-making tree is real simple here: does the revenue generated by news outweigh the potential uncapped financial liability that C-18 would present? Further, would complying with C-18 in Canada present a greater risk to the company globally if the bill were replicated in larger media markets? Or are the companies better off to withdraw from a low-priority market pour encourager les autres. We can scream about the evils of Big Tech all we want, but ultimately, these are just math conversations.

No one ought to be surprised that the math didn’t go our way. But almost everyone was. Because — and there’s no nice way to say this — this country’s media industry is both painfully parochial and embarrassingly self-important. For people whose job it is to understand and explain the world to Canadians, it often astonishes us at how incompetent we are at understanding and explaining that world to ourselves. Canadian journalists have an unshakeable faith in our vocation; we genuinely believe that our work is a vital service to democracy. Therefore the fruits of that labour — the news content — must be valuable to the digital platforms that we now depend upon to distribute it. This is why many in the industry were so unshakeably convinced that Facebook and Google were bluffing during the course of C-18. Incredibly, many seem to remain convinced that Big Tech will capitulate to their demands for capital, even now. To quote this old gem: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.

The flaw in this reasoning ought to be apparent, yet the industry lacks the digital savvy to understand the risk it is courting. “What about Bing, amiright?” Denial and self-importance are now sucking Canadian journalism straight into the maw of an existential crisis. To lose Facebook is a major set back; to lose Google is death.

The thing our colleagues and peers need to come to terms with is that Canadian journalism just isn’t that important in the global scheme of things. Facebook and Google aren’t out to get us — they are indifferent to us. Canadian news comprises a small and un-lucrative segment of even Canadian traffic flows. And Canada is a mid-tier market, at best. Optics aside, global tech oligopolies simply don’t lose very much by cutting us off. Facebook and Google are in the business of advertising, not journalism. They share neither our self regard, nor our democratic mandate; as a result, there is no internally coherent reason for them to take losses in order to save our industry. We just don’t matter to them.

On her Substack, Tasha Kheiriddin doesn’t blame Google for the impending destruction of what’s left of mainstream Canadian media:

The funeral has begun. The pyres are lit; the mourners are weeping. RIP, Canadian media industry, we hardly knew ye. Between mergers, acquisitions, closures, and layoffs, you didn’t stand a chance. And then came Bill C-18.

The legislation, passed last week, compels internet behemoths Meta and Google to compensate Canadian news outlets in exchange for featuring links to their content. Bill C-18 is modeled on an Australian law that saw the two tech giants enter into financial arrangements with media outlets in that country. Here in Canada, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates similar deals could produce annual revenues of $329 million, a juicy sum for the cash-strapped news business.

Instead, Meta and Google announced that they would no longer include Canadian news links. Rather than reap a profit, Canadian media companies now face the prospect of far fewer eyeballs on screens – and the decimation of their ad revenue. Meta also cut its funding to CN2i, the Coopérative nationale de l’information indépendante, which supports six print publications, including La Presse, further damaging media companies’ bottom line.

Cue the sound of “Taps” and political outrage. Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez had this to say:

    Big tech would rather spend money to change their platforms to block Canadians from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations … This shows how deeply irresponsible and out of touch they are, especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users.

No, this shows how deeply out of touch the government is with the business model of these companies – and with internet technology in general.

QotD: The (arguments over the) founding of America

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

You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different than saying that the ideals themselves were false. (They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition. But that would be conventional wisdom — or simply the central theme of President Barack Obama’s vision of the arc of justice in the unfolding of the United States.

No, in its ambitious and often excellent 1619 Project, the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go — and tells us this before anything else. Even though those ideals eventually led to the emancipation of slaves and the slow, uneven and incomplete attempt to realize racial equality over the succeeding centuries, they were still “false when they were written”. America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy, which was masked by highfalutin’ rhetoric about universal freedom. That’s the subtext of the entire project, and often, also, the actual text.

Hence the replacing of 1776 (or even 1620 when the pilgrims first showed up) with 1619 as the “true” founding. “True” is a strong word. 1776, the authors imply, is a smoke-screen to distract you from the overwhelming reality of white supremacy as America’s “true” identity. “We may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy,” Hannah-Jones writes. That’s a nice little displacement there: “some might argue”. In fact, Nikole Hannah-Jones is arguing it, almost every essay in the project assumes it — and the New York Times is emphatically and institutionally endorsing it.

Hence the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines! Am I exaggerating? The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed … it is finally time to tell our story truthfully”. Finally! All previous accounts of American history have essentially been white lies, the NYT tells us, literally and figuratively. All that rhetoric about liberty, progress, prosperity, toleration was a distraction in order to perpetrate those lies, and make white people feel better about themselves.

Andrew Sullivan, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism”, New York, 2019-09-13.

July 1, 2023

The Trudeau plan to eliminate Canada from the internet is going great!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Wait, you mean that wasn’t the plan? It must have been, if you judge the plan by the amazing results:

The damage caused by the government’s Bill C-18 continues to grow as Meta has started to cancel its existing agreements with Canadian publishers. The move should not as a surprise since any deals that involve facilitating access to news content would bring the company into the legislative framework and mandate payments for links. Indeed, Meta said earlier this week that its 18 existing deals “did not have much of a future“. When this is coupled with a reported “impasse” between the government and Google over its approach to Bill C-18, the risks to the Canadian media sector look increasingly dire.

This was entirely foreseeable, yet Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez never seemed to take the risks seriously. It raises the question of whether the government developed estimates of the cost of its legislation if Meta and Google chose to comply by stopping news sharing or linking. While there were estimates for the benefits of new deals that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars, did it conduct a risk assessment of the economic costs that would come from Internet companies exiting the news market in Canada?

There are obviously costs that extend far beyond the economics that include reduced access to news, increased prominence of low quality news sources, harm to the Canadian Internet, and the reputational damage to a government that handled this about as incompetently as possible. But from a pure economic perspective, the risks were always understated as they extended beyond just the value of increased traffic to publishers from the links they were themselves posting. Both Google and Meta have deals with Canadian publishers reportedly worth millions of dollars. As Meta’s step to begin cancelling deals suggests, those agreements are unlikely to survive the decision to exit news in Canada.

And of course, Google doesn’t want to set any kind of precedent by accepting a shakedown from any two-bit hoodlum country like Canada:

The worst case scenario for Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, the Canadian news sector, and the Canadian public has come to pass: Google has announced that it will block news links in Canada in response to the mandated payment for links approach established in Bill C-18. The decision, which the company says will be implemented before the law takes effect, will cover search, Google News, and Google Discover. The decision – which government seemingly tried to avoid with last minute discussions with Google executives after it became apparent that the risks of exit were real – will have lasting and enormously damaging consequences for Canadians and represents a remarkable own-goal by Rodriguez who has managed to take millions away from the news sector and left everyone in a far worse position than if he had done nothing at all.

If you’re in any way interested in Canadian government … machinations … when it comes to digital policy, you really should be following Michael Geist‘s reporting. He’s been doing a great job and deserves the support.

June 14, 2023

“‘Misogyny’ is overtaking ‘fascist’ in the ‘I Don’t Own a Dictionary’ championships”

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

Christopher Gage suspects that George Orwell lived in vain:

In his essay, “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell lamented the decline in the standards of his mother tongue.

For Orwell, all around him lay the evidence of decay. Orwell argued sloppy language came from and led to sloppy thinking:

    A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language […] It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

With his effortless knack for saying in plain English the resonant and enduring, Orwell’s dictum is obvious as soon as uttered.

Orwell wrote that back in 1946. What would the author of Animal Farm and 1984 make of today’s standards?

“Misogyny” is overtaking “fascist” in the “I Don’t Own a Dictionary” championships.

Spend five minutes online, and you’ll encounter words defined in their starkest definitions. Words like “misogyny”, “misandry”, and “narcissist”, once possessed specific meanings. Now they mean whatever the speaker claims they mean.

The beauty of the English language lies in its precision. Sadly, those who populate the land which spawned the English language wield the language with all the grace and precision of a meat hook.

According to The Guardian, the recent Finnish election was suppurated with misogyny and fascism.

In that election, the one debased in misogyny and fascism, the losing incumbent Sanna Marin, a woman, won more seats in parliament than in 2019. The three candidates with the most votes — Riikka Purra, Sanna Marin and Elina Valtonen — were all women. Women lead seven of the nine parties returned to parliament — including the “far-right” Finns Party.

The Guardian didn’t permit reality to spoil a good headline.

As Orwell had it, “Fascism” is a hollow word. In the essay mentioned above, he said: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” In modern parlance, the same applies to “misogyny”. “misandry”, “narcissism”, “gaslighting”, and just about every other buzzword shoehorned into a HuffPost headline.

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