Quotulatiousness

June 3, 2023

What are you going to believe? The official Narrative™ or your lyin’ eyes?

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

Jeff Goldstein rounds up just a few incidents that gained media notoriety for their racist overtones, only to be quietly dropped and ignored once the truth came out:

A screenshot from a video showing Nick Sandmann confronted by activist Nathan Phillips at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, 18 January, 2019.
Wikimedia Commons.

Covington Catholic High School’s Nick Sandmann never tried to stare down a phony Native American activist. Smugly or otherwise. And we all should have known it.

Morgan Bettinger never threatened to run over BLM protesters, nor did she make any of the supposedly racist remarks Zyahna Bryant claimed she did. Bryant — a “social justice” activist and Marxian race hustler — can perhaps be trusted to review a new Applebee’s dessert pie, but on all other subjects, the wise move would be to adopt a skeptical pose when engaging with her, if not simply dismiss out of hand anything spilling from her mouth save maybe a tasty fruit filling.

Michael Brown never said “hands up, don’t shoot!” Jacob Blake is not a hero or a civil rights icon — nor should be George Floyd or Trayvon Martin.

Christian Cooper did indeed threaten to take Amy Cooper’s dog. Justin Neely was a crazed homeless man and career criminal who absolutely threatened people on a subway train. Daniel Penny has never been a white supremacist.

Time and time again, the left creates its own mythology, then repeats it until the rest of us just kind of accept it as at least somewhat fairly described. And that’s a fatal mistake, both intellectually and practically.

Physician’s assistant Sarah Comrie, six-months pregnant and coming off of a twelve hour shift in Bellevue Hospital’s neonatal ward, never approached a group of five black teenagers, all of them males, and tried to steal a bike they’d rented — though the mental image of five black teenagers pressed ridiculously together groin to ass on a rented bike peddling down a New York City street on their way to, what? — church? A Hamilton matinée? — I have to admit amuses me enormously.

Similarly, the five male teens who laid claim to the bike never acted “admirably,” as yet another race hustler attempted to frame the interaction; in fact, during the 90-second viral video clip, the men can be seen and heard hectoring the pregnant woman, taunting her, cursing at her, putting hands on her several times, and intentionally creating a “Karen” narrative in real time. Nevertheless, we’re told that if we believe our own eyes — and identify thuggish behavior as belonging to those who act thuggishly, and with what it appears is thuggish relish — then what we’re doing is “using thug as a synonym for the n-word”.

— And yet, the person making that claim is naturally the one who is interested in drawing that connection — in a rhetorical maneuver that has become so trite and boring that I wish I could stop pointing it out: the gambit is meant to forestall any pushback on the preferred and implied racial narrative the grifters are hoping to shape and add to their civic mythologies, while also and simultaneously deterring people from honestly assessing what they’ve witnessed — however out of context and fraught that may be — for fear of being labeled “racist” and publicly scapegoated as a symbol for venal “whiteness” that is now central to the leftist’s “anti-racism” and CRT projects.

May 14, 2023

QotD: The original tabloid journalist

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

Tabloid journalism begins with W.T. Stead, who as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s brought news and scandal to the newly literate masses, transforming public culture and politics with it.

The son of a Congregationalist preacher, Stead grew up in a strict religious household in Northumberland, in a home where theatre was “the Devil’s chapel” and novels “the Devil’s Bible”. Taught to read by his father, the newsman’s nonconformism would inform his campaigns after he moved from the Northern Echo to the Gazette in London.

Stead was most of all famous for the first great newspaper investigation, in 1885, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon“, on the scandal of child prostitution. Stead had bought a girl called Eliza for £5, on the premise that she was to be taken to a brothel on the continent, using quite dubious methods that got him sent to jail for three months.

Despite this, the story succeeded – a national scandal which led to a change in the law, the age of consent raised from 13 to 16. The idea of English girls being trafficked into sex outraged and horrified the public, Stead’s story imprinted itself deeply into the public psyche, to the extent of influencing George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion — thus, Eliza Doolittle.

On the continent it helped to inspire a genre of vaguely pornographic literature about the sexual perversion rife in England, a fantasy that belied the fact that late Victorian London was not a nest of vice, relatively speaking. Most measures of squalor and child abuse had declined in the 19th century and a teenage girl by the end of the century was relatively safe, compared to a predecessor in almost any era; public moral outrage offered protection, even if it could be unforgiving for those same girls who transgressed.

Stead would become the most famous journalist of the era, so renowned that in 1912 he was invited to New York by the US President to attend a conference — and so booked a ticket on a famously unsinkable new liner. He was last seen helping women and children trying to get on to lifeboats, and, true to the chapel ethos of his parents, gave away his lifejacket. He was among the 1,500 who lost their lives on the Titanic.

Ed West, “Our Modern Babylon”, Wrong Side of History, 2023-02-11.

May 9, 2023

How to destroy an industry with one simple trick

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

Ted Gioia on the precipitous rise and calamitous decline of the clickbait journalism model:

I was going to call this story the “tragedy of American journalism”. But when you dig into the details, it’s more a farce.

Let’s start with act one of this comedy. I could almost begin anywhere, but I picked an especially ridiculous case study — just wait until you learn the reason why.

Did that catch your attention?

It was supposed to. And I learned that from a now (mostly) forgotten website called Upworthy.

Almost exactly 10 years ago, Upworthy was “the fastest growing media site of all time”, according to Fast Company. They had turned news into a science. Upworthy was the future of journalism.

“Upworthy is known for its use of data to drive growth, testing up to 16 different headlines for a single story,” enthused that bright-eyed reporter for Fast Company. The end result was headlines so irresistible, millions of people clicked on them.

Here are some examples:

You get the idea. The headline is in two parts — and it’s just a come-on. You have no idea what the article is about until you click on the link.

That was the whole point. But just wait until you learn the problem with this.

Facebook and other social media sites eventually discovered that people clicked on these links, but didn’t spent much time with the Upworthy articles — and rarely gave them likes and shares.

The stories just weren’t very good — and certainly not as interesting as the headlines. So the algorithms started to punish clickbait articles of this sort.

The Upworthy empire collapsed as quickly as it had risen.

In retrospect, the problem with this gimmicky strategy is obvious. If you trick people into clicking on garbage, your metrics are impressive for a few months. But eventually people can smell the garbage without even clicking on it.

There’s also a deeper reason for this collapse — which I’ll get to in a moment. And it helps us understand the current problems with journalism. But first we need to look at a couple more case studies.

May 7, 2023

The Line reports on “a Liberal policy convention in Fantasia”

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

It used to be said that the marketing department in any given organization was where the rubber met the sky (three drink minimum), but the Liberal convention in Barad-dûr-by-the-Rideau now owns that territory:

Once upon a time, Canada was led by a serious man named Pierre Elliot Trudeau. No matter what you think of his tenure as prime minister, there is no question that he took the job, and the country, seriously. Today his offspring, both biological and ideological, prance around the Canadian political landscape, smug and entitled and all the rest of it. But none of them has the foggiest idea of what they are doing with with the power they inherited, or why, or for what purpose.

[…]

For the evening entertainment on Friday, they brought out Jean Chrétien — another fantastically unserious person — to do his usual petit gars de Shawinigan routine. And did the old coot ever deliver, bragging yet again about keeping Canada out of Iraq, jabbing at Pierre Poilievre, and joking that he expects The Globe and Mail to call for a royal commission into Hillary Clinton showing up at the Liberal convention and interfering in Canadian elections.

Oh, our sides. They split. No matter that two days ago was World Press Freedom day. No matter that Friday also happened to be NNA night, where the Globe and Mail won nine awards. This is the Liberal convention after all, where one of the main policy proposals up for debate is a suggestion from the B.C. Liberals to essentially nationalise the news. Why not aim a few kicks at the media. The Liberals are paying for it anyway, aren’t they?

In his speech, Chrétien played to the latest Liberal idée fixe, which is that all of the party’s troubles since 2018 — from SNC Lavalin to WEgate to the egregious handling of Chinese interference — are all due to the clickbait chasing yellow journalists at the failing Globe and Mail.

For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to live through the nineties, Chrétien is the Liberal prime minister who brought you such hits as “what me worry?” about a Quebec referendum on secession; a joke about his PMO ordering the RCMP to pepper spray UBC students protesting his decision to invite a brutal dictator to dinner on their campus; and the Shawinigate and Adscam scandals, both of which are still routinely taught and referenced as case studies in ruling party greaseballery at its most unctuous.

But Liberals be Liberals. As National Post columnist Chris Selley noted: “This is deadly serious shit and this buffoon is playing it for laughs, just like [he] always played deadly serious shit.”

The “deadly serious shit” Selley had in mind is surely the river of scandal coursing through the Liberal Party in Ottawa over Chinese interference in Canadian politics, with tributaries flowing in from riding associations across the country, the Trudeau Foundation in Montreal, and numerous other parts of the Canadian political landscape. On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported on a CSIS analysis from 2021 which alleged that the family of Conservative MP Michael Chong was targeted by China’s security apparatus for unknown sanctions, in response to Chong’s sponsorship of a House of Commons motion calling China’s persecution of the Uighurs a genocide.

On Tuesday an understandably alarmed Chong was given an emergency briefing about the threat by CSIS director David Vigneault, in a meeting arranged by the prime minister.

This isn’t just about Michael Chong. Every member of parliament, every member of the government, should be up in arms over this. The Chinese diplomat in Canada involved, Zhao Wei, should have been sent home immediately, but Melanie Joly is still weighing the pros and cons.

As appalling as the targeting of Chong is in its own right, more scandalous still is the government’s response — equal parts utterly incompetent, unbelievably shady, and shamelessly partisan.

The scandal begins with the fact that Chong himself was never told about the CSIS report. Why is that? On Wednesday, the prime minister claimed it was because the threat identified in the CSIS report wasn’t deemed serious enough by the intelligence agency, so it never circulated outside of the agency. The first Trudeau had heard of this, apparently, was when he read about it in the newspaper.

But on Thursday, Michael Chong told the House of Commons that he’d been told, in a call from Trudeau’s current national security advisor Jody Thomas, that the report had actually made its way to the desk of one of her predecessors. When Trudeau was asked to explain this apparent contradiction on Friday, he said: “In terms of what I shared, I shared the best information I had at the time on Wednesday, both to Mr. Chong and to Canadians.” When asked who had given him this information, Trudeau declined to answer.

Look, we’ve seen this game before, countless times, with this government and this prime minister. Trudeau’s habit of responding to allegations of wrongdoing or incompetence or mismanagement by first denying any knowledge of the issue, then discrediting the source, and finally throwing unidentified third parties under the bus, is a well trod path for this deeply unserious man.

Given the pattern, we’re pretty skeptical of Trudeau’s claim that he’d been given incomplete information. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise us in the slightest if it turns out that he just made the whole thing up.

May 6, 2023

History Summarized: Chicago’s Tribune Tower

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 20 Jan 2023

It’s not a Dome, but it’s still pretty darn good.
(more…)

April 28, 2023

Field Marshal Slim’s secret vice – he also wrote articles and short stories under pseudonym

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, India, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s no secret that I have a very high regard for Field Marshal William Slim, so I’m quite looking forward to reading some of Slim’s pre-WW2 writings that have just been gathered together by Dr. Robert Lyman in a three-volume set:

Few people during his lifetime, and even fewer now, know that the man who was to become one of the greatest British generals of all time – and I’m not exaggerating – was in fact a secret scribbler. Now, many people know that he was the author of at least two best selling books. In 1956 he wrote his account of the Burma campaign, Defeat into Victory, described by one reviewer, quite rightly in my view, as “the best general’s book of World War II”. Then, in 1959, he published, under the title of Unofficial History, a series of articles about his military experience, some of which had been published previously as articles in Blackwood’s magazine. This was the first indication that there was an unknown literary side to Slim. The fact that he was a secret scribbler, or at least had been one once, was only publicly revealed on the publication of his biography in 1976 by Ronald Lewin – Slim, The Standard Bearer – which incidentally won the W.H. Smith Literary Award that same year. Lewin explained that Slim had written material for publication long before the war. In fact, between 1931 and 1940 he wrote a total of 44 articles, extending in length between two and eight thousand words – a total of 122,000 words in all – for a range of newspapers and magazines, including Blackwood’s Magazine, the Daily Mail, the Evening Express and the Illustrated Weekly of India. According to Lewin, he did this to supplement his earnings as an officer of the Indian Army. He didn’t do it to create a name for himself as a writer, or because he had pretensions to the artistic life, but because he needed the money. As with all other officers at the time who did not have the benefit of what was described euphemistically as “private means” he struggled to live off his army salary, especially to pay school fees for his children, John (born 1927) and Una (born 1930). Accordingly, he turned his hand to writing articles under a pseudonym, mainly of Anthony Mills (Mills being Slim spelt backwards) and, in one instance, that of Judy O’Grady.

With the war over, and senior military rank attained, he never again penned stories of this kind for publication. With it died any common remembrance of his pre-war literary activities. Copies of the articles have languished ever since amidst his papers in the Churchill Archives Centre at the University of Cambridge, from where I rescued them last year. They have been republished this week by Richard Foreman of Sharpe Books.

During the time Slim was writing these the pseudonym protected him from the gaze of those in the military who might believe that serious soldiers didn’t write fiction, and certainly not for public consumption via the newspapers. He certainly went to some lengths to ensure that his military friends and colleagues did not know of this unusual extra-curricular activity. In a letter to Mr S. Jepson, editor of the Illustrated Times of India on 26 July 1939 (he was then Commanding Officer of 2/7 Gurkha Rifles in Shillong, Assam) he warned that he needed to use an additional pseudonym to the one he normally used, because that – Anthony Mills – would then be immediately “known to several people and I do not wish them to identify me also as the writer of certain articles in Blackwood’s and Home newspapers. I am supposed to be a serious soldier and I’m afraid Anthony Mills isn’t.”

What do these 44 articles tell us of Slim? He would never have pretended that his writings represented any higher form of literary art. He certainly had no pretensions to a life as a writer. He was, first and foremost, a soldier. His writing was to supplement the family’s income. But, as readers will attest, he was very good at it. They demonstrate his supreme ability with words. As Defeat into Victory was to demonstrate, he was a master of the telling phrase every bit as much as he was a master of the battlefield. He made words work. They were used simply, sparingly, directly. Nothing was wasted; all achieved their purpose.

The articles also show Slim’s propensity for storytelling. Each story has a purpose. Some were simply to provide a picture of some of the characters in his Gurkha battalion, some to tell the story of a battle or of an incident while on military operations. Some are funny, some not. Some are of an entirely different kind, and have no military context whatsoever. These are often short adventure stories, while some can best be described as morality tales. A couple of them warned his readers not to jump to conclusions about a person’s character. Some showed a romantic tendency to his nature.

The stories can be placed into three broad categories. The first comprises seventeen stories about the Indian Army, of which the Gurkha regiments formed an important part. The second group are eleven stories about India, with no or only a passing military reference. The third, much smaller group, contains seventeen stories with no Indian or military dimension.

April 26, 2023

HMS Prince of Wales, the media’s favourite target of abuse

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

Sir Humphrey defends the Royal Navy’s handling of the unplanned repairs to HMS Prince of Wales against the British media’s constant clamour that the ship is somehow cursed and not as good as sister ship HMS Queen Elizabeth by any measure:

HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) and HMS Prince of Wales (R09) at Portsmouth in December 2019.

It’s never easy being the younger child. You don’t get anywhere near the same level of interest when key development milestones occur, people take your presence far more for granted and you often end up with your older sibling’s “hand me downs” and cast-offs. This is definitely true for warships where there is sometimes a perception that the first of class has a style and elan that other siblings lack. In the case of the QUEEN ELIZABETH class aircraft carriers it could be argued that QE has very much grabbed the headlines and glory while the PRINCE OF WALES (PWLS) has perhaps lacked as exciting an opportunity.

Following an incident which involved a propellor loss (something that befalls other navies too as the French carrier CHARLES DE GAULLE discovered), PWLS has had a challenging year in dry dock. The media are reporting it as the ship is broken, she needs a year in dock for extensive repairs and now todays Mail on Sunday story is that she has effectively become a “scrapyard” for her older sibling, providing parts and materiel as a donor vessel. It has hard to think of a less loved vessel in the eyes of the media. What is actually going on is a little more complex and perhaps boring.

In reality PWLS was sent to Scotland for an unplanned dry docking to resolve the issues with her propellor shaft. It seems to have become clear that this would take some months to resolve – which can feel a long time in a 24/7 newscycle, but realistically feels about right for repairing an extremely complex major warship and in line with historical timescales. The original plan for PWLS was that after she came back from the US last year, she’d not deploy in 2024 before undergoing a major capability upgrade anyway during the year. The purpose of this upgrade, which is standard for all newbuild warships, is to add on the new equipment and capabilities that have entered service since her build design was frozen many years ago.

Part of the challenge of building a complex warship is that at some point you need to lock the design down to enable construction to begin, rather than tinkering it to handle every new “oooh shiny” moment as new technology emerges. To solve this ships will usually enter service as per the specs agreed years before, then a period in refit is planned early in her life once the ship is working and commissioned to add on the various equipment items that have entered use. This is about bringing the ship up to the most modern standard at the time – throughout her life she will then continue to receive regular upgrades like this as new technology is developed.

In this case the plan evolved so that as she was in dry dock anyway the RN seems to have decided to merge the two pieces of work. What this means is that rather than return to sea in a meaningful way, PWLS will have spent about a year in both unplanned repairs and planned refit. Again this period of time out of service isn’t unusual for a major warship – if you look through most vessels lifespans, refits of 1-3 years are entirely common. It can though appear bad news if you interpret this data as saying that the emergency repairs will take a year.

April 25, 2023

The Grauniad now thinks sailing ships are racist

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

Henry Getley on the Guardian‘s ongoing crusade to expiate their historical links to the slave trade which now expands to denouncing the badges of the city’s two professional football teams:

But the latest chapter in this bizarre campaign is really scraping the barrel … targeting the city’s football club badges. Feature writer Simon Hattenstone has homed in on the logos of Manchester City and Manchester United, which both include an illustration of a sailing ship. And he has reached what he clearly sees as a “Gotcha!” conclusion – sailing ships were used to carry cotton, which was produced in the southern United States using slave labour. Therefore, displaying sailing ships is shameful. Both clubs must immediately delete the offending vessels from their badges.

I hold no brief for either Man City or Man United (quite the contrary). But I find it absurd and offensive that the clubs should be thus gratuitously assailed in an attempt to shore up the Guardian‘s increasingly crazed crusade.

For the record, the sailing ships are taken from the coat of arms of the Borough of Manchester. They were granted in 1842, 35 years after Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade, and are there simply to symbolise the city’s trade with the rest of the world. In fact, no large ships were seen in Manchester until the opening of the 35-mile-long Manchester Ship Canal in 1894.

Hattenstone’s argument is that the city was still using slave-produced US cotton up to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, so the symbolic use of the vessels must be denounced. Talk about clutching at straws! I wonder if he knows that in 1862 Manchester mill workers supported US President Abraham Lincoln’s call for an embargo on Confederate cotton, even though it meant destitution and starvation for them and their families. He could have read about this selfless gesture in a Guardian article ten years ago.

I’ll tell you what, Mr Hattenstone, if we’re talking about links to slavery, how about demanding that the Guardian abandons its main headline typeface, which is shamefully called “Guardian Egyptian”? After all, slavery was practised in Egypt from ancient times right until the late 19th century. Yes, it’s a ridiculous link to make, but no more ridiculous than calling for the removal of ships from football badges. Sorry, Mr Hattenstone, you may be a self-proclaimed City fan, but this is an own goal.

April 18, 2023

“People who pivot this quickly need to make sure their pants are securely buckled”

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

We’ve apparently reached the “Republicans Pounce” stage of yet another progressive crusade:

The memo has gone out, and the pivot has arrived.

Ten days ago, you may remember, the suddenly high-profile Nebraska Senator Machaela Cavanaugh went on NPR to play make-believe, expressing consternation over this weird new focus on transgender issues over on the political right: “I don’t know why, as a nation, as policymakers, there is this newfound focus on trans children… And all of the sudden, there is a decision by policymakers that we need to do something about them. It doesn’t make any sense to me.” It’s the why are you guys so obsessed with this DARVO maneuver, spun with bald-faced shamelessness by people who’ve been talking for years about the thing that they suddenly want you to know it’s creepy to talk about.

Now the New York Times explains the same thing in a similar way, writing that transgender issues have suddenly become a big deal in America because scheming right-wingers decided to cook it up as a fake wedge issue:

“The religious right went searching for an issue.” To get donors to write some checks, see. They just made it up, in a cynical act of invention. A bunch of social conservatives were sitting around the office, lamenting how no one gives them money anymore because everybody stopped hating the gays, so they decided, tactically, to pretend that transgender rights was a thing, now, so that they could trick people into giving them money again. Completely out of left field! Trans rights was just sitting there watching some Netflix with a tub of Cherry Garcia when suddenly the doorbell rang.

There’s no pouncing, but you’ve heard this descriptive maneuver before:

    Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, a group that fights discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people, said there was a direct line from the right’s focus on transgender children to other issues it has seized on in the name of “parents’ rights” — such as banning books and curriculums that teach about racism.

“Seized on”. The story also says that the issue of men participating in women’s sports “was accelerated by a few influential Republican governors who seized on the issue early”. There’s a lot of seizing on, and it’s all mysterious. Why did the seizers seize the seized thing? Dunno. They just suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, seized on the issue of women’s sports. Weird. Similarly, that paragraph about “banning books” and forbidding “curriculums that teach about racism” is presented as a given, not as a thing that requires explanation or illustration. It’s tactical murk: half-accusations as smoke and chaff, designed to leave you with the general outlines of a thing that it’s convenient to have you believe. The right-wingers are something something something, and it’s scary.

April 8, 2023

Russia’s Last Crusade – The Crimean War 1853-1856

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Media, Middle East, Military, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 7 Apr 2023

The Crimean War between the Ottoman Empire and Russia (and later the UK and France) has been called the last crusade and the first modern war at the same time.
(more…)

March 29, 2023

The Grauniad something something glass houses something something throwing stones

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

In UnHerd, Ashley Rindsberg recounts the details we know so far about the Guardian‘s embarassing historical project to find out about the newspaper’s links to the slave trade:

The Guardian prides itself on being one of the most Left-leaning and anti-racist news outlets in the English-speaking world. So imagine its embarrassment when, last month, a number of black podcast producers researching the paper’s historic ties to slavery abruptly resigned, alleging they had been victims of “institutional racism”, “editorial whiteness”, “microaggressions, colourism, bullying, passive-aggressive and obstructive management styles”. All of this might smack of progressive excess, but, in reality, it merely reflects an institution incuriously at odds with itself.

Questions about The Guardian‘s ties to slavery have been circulating since 2020, when, amid the media’s collective spasm of racial conscience following the murder of George Floyd, the Scott Trust announced it would launch an investigation into its history. “We in the UK need to begin a national debate on reparations for slavery, a crime which heralded the age of capitalism and provided the basis for racism that continues to endanger black life globally,” journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson wrote in a June 2020 Guardian opinion piece about the toppling of a statue of 17th-century British slaver Edward Colston. A month later, the Scott Trust committed to determining whether the founder of the paper, John Edward Taylor, had profited from slavery. “We have seen no evidence that Taylor was a slave owner, nor involved in any direct way in the slave trade,” the chairman of the Scott Trust, Alex Graham, told Guardian staff by email at the time. “But were such evidence to exist, we would want to be open about it.” (Notably, Graham, in using the terms “slave owner” and “direct way”, set a very specific and very high bar for what would be considered information worthy of disclosure.)

The problem is that the results of the investigation, conducted by historian Sheryllynne Haggerty, an “expert in the history of the transatlantic slave trade”, have never been made public. When contacted with questions about what happened to the promised report, Haggerty referred all inquiries to The Guardian‘s PR, which has remained silent on the matter. (The Guardian was asked for comment and we were given the stock PR response The Guardian gave following the podcaster’s letter.) But what we do know is this: according to Guardian lore, a business tycoon named John Edward Taylor was inspired to agitate for change after witnessing the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when over a dozen people were killed in Manchester by government forces as they protested for parliamentary representation. Two years later, Taylor, a young cotton merchant, with the backing of a group of local reformers known as the Little Circle, founded the paper.

“Since 1821 the mission of The Guardian has been to use clarity and imagination to build hope,” The Guardian‘s current editor, Katharine Viner, proudly proclaims on the “About us” page of the paper’s website. Part of this founding myth concerns one of the defining social and political issues of the day, slavery, which the Little Circle members, including Taylor, vigorously opposed as a moral affront. “The Guardian had always hated slavery,” Martin Kettle, an associate editor, wrote in a 2011 apologia on why during the Civil War the paper had vociferously condemned the North while equivocating on the South.

That may be true, but it also presents an incomplete picture. The Manchester Guardian, as the paper was then known, was founded by cotton merchants, including Taylor, who were able to pool the money needed to launch the paper by drawing on their respective fortunes. While none of these men, many of whom were Unitarian Christians, is likely to have engaged in slavery, they didn’t just benefit from but depended upon the global slave trade that provided virtually all of the cotton that filled their mills. As Sarah Parker Remond, an African American abolitionist, said upon visiting Manchester in 1859: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125 million worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”

February 20, 2023

“There is no way Justin Trudeau won any of the last three elections”

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

Elizabeth Nickson on recent rather alarming confirmation of many things told by various “conspiracy theorists” and purveyors of “misinformation”:

Cracks are beginning to appear in the massive election fraud strategy prosecuted against western democracies. Berlin last week reversed its city election because it had been stolen by the left, and Berliner-Zeitung revealed that a team of reporters from The Marker, Haaretz and Radio France had gone undercover for six months as clients of a company that did nothing but election theft. That company, Jorge, had “intervened in 33 national election campaigns and votes. In 27 cases, it is said to have influenced the elections in favor of its clients. In order to control the opinion on the Internet, the secret company controls over 30,000 credible fake accounts on social media platforms”.

And in Canuckistan this morning, in the organ of the bien-pensant liberal establishment, there was this nugget.

There is no way Justin Trudeau won any of the last three elections. And, honey, this little story from Canada’s most prestigious newspaper is just the beginning.

But first, a story of my own …

When I turned right I had been hired to write an op-ed column for the above Globe and Mail, and what unfurled from my fingers was pure conservatism. I’d hold up my fingers and think, What the hell? Where did that come from? But I continued, and as I did, family and friends sheered away until, except for my mother, I was left virtually friendless.

I had moved back to Canada, you see, and we are 100% captured by the left. There are a handful of conservative writers in the country, but they are soft and weak and they prevaricate because otherwise they would not eat. Luckily I had spent most of my adult life out of the country, had a broader pool to draw from, and given my new thinking, mirable dictu for every friend I lost, I made five new ones. And they were smarter, more responsible, more interesting people. I missed the clothes, restaurants and parties for a while, then I gave up on those too. Essentially, sickening. Finally corrupting.

But it continues, since we live in a hard-left community. We are isolated. Even Jamie, because he lives with me, has lost friends and family. We have his sons, his ex-wife, one of my brothers. The rest are just cold, pitiless. Cruel.

This has happened to hundreds of thousands of people. It’s called “bad-jacketing” and is part of the Fifth Generation Warfare launched against malcontents large and small (like me) up and down the social ladder. Millions. Tens of millions. The competent are targeted, isolated and bad jacketed. It is meant to drive the competent out of the culture. Why is everything breaking? Why is the economy failing? Everyone left in the system is incompetent and vicious with it. It’s why Soviet Russia failed, why the Eastern Bloc collapsed, it is why China went for a capitalist hybrid. Everywhere socialism is tried it destroys the competent and then destroys everything else.

The left is implacable and they punish. They hurt you until you give up. They will break anything you have. Thinking about helping a young neighbor last month, which would require a week or more of brutal work, I finally thought: I have not helped or befriended one single socialist — and she was an avowed socialist — who hasn’t eventually stabbed me in the back. Not one.

When I was driven out of the profession, I spent ten years studying. Was I right? Was I wrong? I should have signed up for a remote doctoral program, because I worked. I study, therefore I am. I studied therefore I was, should be written on my cremation plaque in the family plot. Not that they’ll let me in.

We are all intimidated by that level of hate and exclusion. All of us, politicians, editors, bureaucrats, charities, all of us are terrified of being taken down in our personal lives. Bad-jacketed, rejected by those you love deeply. I know how that feels and I bet you do too.

February 19, 2023

Andrew Sullivan on the legacy media’s coverage of transgender issues

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

In the free portion of his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at how the legacy media chooses to cover (or ignore) different aspects of pre-teen and teenage transgenderism:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

One more criticism of the letter. It uses the terrible history of the [New York Times] on coverage of gay men and AIDS in the 20th century as equivalent to the reporting of Bazelon, Baker, et al, today. This is unhinged. Transgender people today are fully covered under the Civil Rights Act; in the 1980s, gays had nothing. In the 1980s and 1990s, the NYT opposed using the word “gay” because it legitimized homosexuality in some way; today the NYT prints “queer” or “trans” or LGBTQ+ in almost every other article.

Today, the paper has published a mountain of empathetic coverage of trans people — over 800 stories in the past year. Since January 1, the NYT has run a moving profile about a trans man in Mexico; a celebration of “queer” life in Alabama by a trans staffer; an exploration of nonbinary fashion; a critical orgasm over “queer” theater; and a news story explaining that “the flood of [trans-related] legislation is part of a long-term campaign by national groups that see transgender rights as an issue on which they can harness voter anger”. Comparing this with A.M. Rosenthal’s reign of homophobic terror and censorship is just obscene.

One historical analogy does seem salient to me, though: the drugs they now give to gender-dysphoric teens are very closely related to the drugs they used to “cure” Alan Turing of his gayness. Every time I think of that I shudder.

And this attempt to suppress reporting on the subject comes at a very strange time. Next week, a new book will be published about the Tavistock Centre, the place responsible for the medical and psychological treatment of children with gender dysphoria in Britain. It’s written by a liberal female journalist, Hannah Barnes, of a flagship British documentary show, Newsnight.

Her book exposes a huge medical scandal, in which countless children were put on puberty blockers with almost no psychological evaluation, and with rates of autism and domestic abuse that were already through the roof. It shows what happened when the new affirmation-only puberty-blocker experiment, only begun in the late 1990s, was left to run its course, with no opposition and no dissent allowed. Check out an extract here. Here’s where I sat up straight:

    Clinicians recall multiple instances of young people who had suffered homophobic bullying at school or at home, and then identified as trans. According to the clinician Anastassis Spiliadis, “so many times” a family would say, “Thank God my child is trans and not gay or lesbian.” Girls said, “When I hear the word ‘lesbian’ I cringe”, and boys talked to doctors about their disgust at being attracted to other boys.

    When Gids [the Gender Identity Development Service] asked adolescents referred to the service in 2012 about their sexuality, more than 90 per cent of females and 80 per cent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual. Bristow came to believe that Gids was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids” and there was a bleak joke on the team that there would be “no gay people left at the rate Gids was going”.

Just think about that for a second. And remember that gay groups cheer this on; and several gay writers put their names to the letter. What a massive reckoning may be in store for them. If any of this pans out, and gay groups have endorsed it, it could easily be the greatest scandal in the history of the gay rights movement.

More than a third of the kids pushed onto the trans track had autism, sometimes severe. Others were victims of domestic abuse: “[A natal girl] who’s being abused by a male, I think a question to ask is whether there’s some relationship between identifying as male and feeling safe”, one clinician at the center said. No questions about other aspects of a child’s mental health were considered if the kid was identifying as the opposite sex. And this took place in a socialized system, with constant oversight, and no massive financial incentives to treat children. Just imagine what could be happening in the US private system where trans patients are among the most lucrative to have in your care, and are under treatment their entire life.

[…]

One obvious area for research: why have the sex ratios shifted so radically in the past decade or so — with girls now vastly outstripping boys in the young patients involved? Why the explosion in requests? It’s far more dramatic and skewed to one sex than it would be if merely a function of declining stigma. Yet for woke journalists, it’s all Principal Skinner: “Let’s have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up.”

Something is going on among teen girls more generally. The CDC just issued a frightening new report:

    Nearly 3 in 5 teen girls (57%) said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless”. That’s the highest rate in a decade. And 30% said they have seriously considered dying by suicide — a percentage that’s risen by nearly 60% over the past 10 years.

Now check out Jamie Reed’s and Tavistock’s overwhelmingly female, often deeply unhappy, clients. Is there a connection? I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s the job of the media to find out, and not to shut itself down.

The lobby groups and often well-intentioned doctors who have pioneered this massive experiment on children will naturally resist any idea they have been facilitating abuse, or concede any points — because as soon as they confess doubt, the whole house of cards can come tumbling down; and lawsuits alone could end the practice very quickly. The Democrats and the Biden administration have locked themselves to the idea that this kind of treatment is a no-brainer and never does any harm — and they just keep repeating that like a mantra and never address the recent restriction of these experimental practices in progressive Europe. The far right can use the issue to gin up homophobic tropes and cruel treatment of trans people.

February 12, 2023

QotD: The heyday of Victorian newspapers

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

A few years ago, I did some research on three early Victorian murders that caused me to read several provincial newspapers of the time. I discovered incidentally to my research that the owners or editors of about half of the British provincial newspapers also sold patent medicines; and this made perfect sense, for by far the greatest advertisers in provincial newspapers were the manufacturers of patent medicines. The owners or editors of the newspapers sold advertisements to the producers of patent medicines, then they sold the newspapers in which the advertisements appeared, and finally they sold the products themselves to the readers. It was an excellent example of rational commercial synergy. (About half of the medicines, by the way, were either to cure or to prevent syphilis — a disease, then, that was a great support to the press of the time.)

Now, the principal quality or characteristic of the sellers of patent medicine has always been effrontery, that is to say the blatant insinuation of the false. Thomas Holloway’s innovation was to insinuate such falsehood on a mass or industrial scale. There was hardly a newspaper in which he did not place a weekly advertisement; moreover, he pioneered the advertisement that masquerades as news story. He would ensure that reports of miracle cures in faraway places, supposedly wrought by his pills and ointment, and written as matter-of-factly as possible, were placed in every newspaper, reports whose veracity no one could possibly check for himself, of course.

As Napoleon once said, repetition is the only rhetorical technique that really works — besides which hope and fear render people susceptible to effrontery. In Thomas Holloway’s time, the fear of illness was often, and the hope of cure rarely, justified; at least Holloway’s preparations were unlikely to do much harm (they contained aloe, myrrh, and saffron), unlike the prescriptions of the orthodox doctors of the time. They allowed for the possibility of natural recovery, whereas orthodox medicine often hurried its consumers into their graves. Nevertheless, the claims Holloway made for his ointment and pills were preposterous, and something is not curative just because it fails to kill.

Holloway made an immense fortune by his effrontery and founded a women’s college in the University of London on the proceeds.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Way of Che”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-10-28.

February 7, 2023

Big Sky fascism, according to the New York Times

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

In The Free Press, Walter Kirn expresses dismay to discover that he’s been living in a “quasi-fascist” state for 30 years and didn’t even notice until the Grey Lady informed him about it recently:

Just a few weeks back, I sat down with my morning coffee, opened up the paper and learned that I now live in a quasi-fascist state. It said so in the paper.

The paper wasn’t a local publication but one from a couple thousand miles away, the New York Times, whose glossy Sunday magazine included a lengthy, illustrated feature with the five-alarm headline How Montana Took a Hard Right Turn Toward Christian Nationalism. To illustrate the state’s alleged swerve toward neo-fascist theocratic rule — a dire development I’d somehow missed — the story included a scary gothic photo, heavily filtered to bring out its dark tones, of a ghostly white cross on a bare hillside reflected in a passing rearview mirror. It also included, of course, a Yellowstone reference and Kevin Costner’s name — right up top, where the search engines would see them.

Since moving to small-town Montana from New York City over 30 years ago, I’d lived through at least a couple of cycles of ominous national coverage of my state. Without going into the details, let me assure you that this article was bunk, as exaggerated as the photo.

But fiction is fact where Montana is concerned, particularly on the country’s coasts, where tales are told about the country’s interior that the country’s interior lacks the clout to counter, much as our guns lack the range to bring down aircraft. Despite our legendary swagger, Montanans are largely helpless against the country’s more powerful forces. The missiles on our prairies aren’t missiles we asked for, just missiles that formidable others wished to plant here. They make us a target, but we don’t control them.

Do I sound defensive? Perhaps I am.

I live in a state with zero big-league sports teams, not a single Fortune 500 corporation, and no national media influence to speak of — unless you count made-up shows about fake ranchers slugging it out in scripted brawls. I’m one of about a million residents, all of whom, no matter their circumstances, are up against the myth-making machines of cities and states of imperial wealth and numbers. And imperial attitudes, dare I say, which emerge in their basic, perennial story about us: those folks from the steppes and mountains are growing restless, including the ones who’ve just moved there to go skiing, who appear to be worse than the ones already living there, who we’ve always found unsettling enough.

When the spy balloon floated across America, the rest of the country got a taste, perhaps, of Montana’s stoic colonial impotence. For days, we could point, but we weren’t allowed to shoot — great-power diplomacy prevented it. Americans may think we’re tough, as Montanans may think they’re tough, but it seems that we’re tough in the way that actors in westerns are: only with the permission of the director, only symbolically. Down went the balloon on Saturday to much applause, but the spectacle was pure cinema by then, like a fistfight on Yellowstone that draws fake blood.

But at least we proud Montanans kept our honor. We spied the lurking villain, we called the sheriff, we warned our neighbors, we did what we could do. I suspect we’ll continue in this role, watchful vigilantes of the skies. There’s trouble afoot – you can feel it everywhere, particularly if you dwell near nuclear missiles, particularly if you live where there’s no cover — and someone has to stand lookout on the hill.

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