Quotulatiousness

October 10, 2026

Denouncing great art of the past as “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”

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

Not content with reading history backwards to find fault with historic figures based on the most progressive views of the modern world, the same approach is now taken with fine art:

For a discipline devoted to art, contemporary art history can seem remarkably contemptuous about the object of its study. In the 1970s “new art history” began to revolutionise a discipline that was hitherto focused on the connoisseurship of the Western canon.

It became instead a subject that used artworks as artefacts for social and political critique. John Berger, the pioneer of the new approach, questioned the very permissibility of having a “love of art”, dismissing it as “a useful concept to the European ruling classes”.

New art historians have since continued this crusade, with different “lenses”, each now well known, encompassing such topics as the “feminist turn”, the “de-colonialist turn”, the “LGBTQ+ turn”, and so on.

As critics such as Lola Salem and Pierre d’Alancaisez have argued in this magazine, this tendency now extends beyond academic fashion: the assumptions through which art is studied have migrated into museums, funding bodies and cultural institutions, where they shape what is exhibited, how it should be interpreted, and what socioeconomic purposes art is expected to serve.

The old question, “Is this good art, and what does it tell us about the civilisation that made it?” has acquired a formidable set of competitors: “What makes this work and its creator suspect, what depravity does is its supposed beauty trying to hide?”

In Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art, Daisy Dixon’s sense of contempt is made plain in the very first line: “When I was a teenager, I hated the painter Paul Gauguin.” As assistant professor of Philosophy at Cardiff, Dr Dixon has built a social media platform as an outspoken critic of historical and contemporary visual media. Not even Miriam Margolyes is spared her rancour.

In a world now dominated by AI, Dixon tackled the very real issue of deepfake pornography, where this new technology was abused by perverts to create pornographic images of victims (mostly women) without their consent. Whilst Dixon’s criticism of this sinister practice was laudable and justified, the extension of her criticism to art is misguided and regrettable.

The indignant chapter titles of her book — Obscenity, Criminality, Oppression, Malevolence, Cruelty, Iconoclasm, Reparation — read more like the call-to-arms of the culture wars than a work of fair and rigorous academic analysis. At the heart of her book lies the accusation that art with an erotic element by the likes of Titian, Velázquez or Giulio Romano should be considered “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”.

To support her argument, Dixon begins outside the confines of art with a work of literature: Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. Using the indisputable “depravity” of De Sade, she aims to justify her accusation that those paintings were motivated by the same male and depraved roots in Western culture.

Her greatest ire however is reserved for Titian’s Rape of Europa, which she considers “just a portrayal of an immoral act”. The failure to consider any alternative meaning to the picture is indicative of the reductive and misleading nature of her approach.

Titian’s The Rape of Europa, c. 1560-62.

Wikimedia Commons.

Without delving further into the many other readings of the Rape of Europa, suffice it to say that the reductive conclusions drawn by Dixon impede us from a deeper understanding that might call her assumptions into question.

Although I read Art History at one of the most renowned institutes in Britain, I can confirm that students are taught this superficial understanding and contempt. I remember a senior lecturer singling out the experience of finding a group of Oxford postgrads discussing Titian’s Diana and Actaeon as a scene worthy of ridicule. “I was shocked,” the lecturer opined, “how they were so busily discussing which translation of Ovid that Titian consulted, when they completely ignored that there was a black slave girl in the picture.”

The girl depicted was one of the handmaidens of Diana, something the lecturer would have known had she even the most elementary knowledge of the story. More distressing was the sight of a senior academic masquerading assumptions as fact.

October 9, 2026

British humour – “there is something unique about ‘taking the mickey'”

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

This post is from a few months ago, but still seems quite relevant to British society (admittedly, I’m not there and perhaps things are actually better than they appear from across the pond):

Image from Fish & Chips

Last week, the BBC announced it would be axing Live At the Apollo. Its viewing figures have halved since 2018. I turned on the TV to see what we’d be missing. It was compered by a guy whose idea of being droll was to shout. The comedians he introduced were “safe” — in the way that sticking a cork up your bottom is safe.

In order to get BBC Purity Vetting clearance, Apollo ceased to be Comedy.

Wooden jollity, enforced on us by puritans, is not the real Britain. Being sharply satirical, frivolously inane, or anywhere in between — that is who we are and what we want to watch. Rather like Baldrick, it’s all part of a cunning plan. Our humour is conduit for the House Rules of Britishness.

The self-deprecation. The puncturing of pomposity. The airing of societal concerns through a keenly observed joke. The tension-releasing giggle of the naughty-but-nice. The feel-good factor of unadulterated silliness — from Bob Mortimer right back to Saint Eric of Morecambe.

Yes, in its many forms, British humour is the window to our soul. And yet the Pigeons of Political Correctness have come and dropped their payload all over it.

What a mess they’ve made. On our screens and off, the fear of causing offence suppresses our greatest and most cohering natural instinct. In the mini survey I mentioned in Fish & Chips Portion One, we found that humour was by some distance thought to be the most quintessential British trait. Among things like chatting in the pub, walking the dog, respectfully disagreeing and helping a neighbour, “seeing the funny side” came top. It is our coping mechanism; our way of keeping calm and carrying on. It is what we are admired for. In the once noble pursuit of social justice; of balancing things up a bit – our humour police are creating a whole new imbalance. It is topsy turvy social engineering in which only the “weak” are “strong”. There must be a zany new Monty Python sketch in there somewhere.

A respondent in our survey was spot on when he said: “Sense of humour in the managerial/professional class has gone … not necessarily normal people“.

So it’s time that we “normal people” clean all that crap off the window. The pigeons won’t do it, will they? They”re too busy cooing about Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. It is up to us to make the penny drop for them. To see that what they are trying to do is unnatural. Because in Middle England, there will always be the surreal, the satirical, and the smutty innuendo.

October 6, 2026

Humour and the British Green Party

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the Daily Sceptic, Steven Tucker discusses the state of comedy in Britain today, in the light of the recent Green Party internal report on what members are supposed to deem funny or not funny. Not joking:

In the very same week these letters were publicised, the UK Green Party did actually launch its own internal in-depth report on what was and was not funny, with party activists receiving training informing them they should maintain detailed records of any jokes fellow members had told to them, “including dates, times [and] locations”, in case anyone later found them to be offensive – particularly if they touched upon sensitive issues like race, religion, sexuality or class. Even if the particular big fat black lesbian affected made a joke about themselves, this was still to be noted down and eliminated, as it nonetheless created “an environment in this space where derogatory jokes are allowed to happen”.

To prevent such jocular genocide occurring again in future, Greens were advised to perform an “audit” of their friendship groups to ensure they were diverse enough so that this simply would not happen: an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman all walk into a pub, and nobody says anything even remotely untoward whatsoever, as diversity is clearly our strength.

Official Green Party advice on what to do if you happen to hear a joke one day. Nowhere does the option “laugh” appear

For a preview of what a future Green-led Ministry of Laughter might one day look like, we should look towards a current controversy involving the quasi-state-run BBC (Bowdlerising British Comedy), which in September decided to mark 20 years since the first broadcast of award-winning sketch-show That Mitchell and Webb Look – by cutting out several sketches, and deeming the show to be “racist”. The now samizdat sketches involved scenarios like English Civil War re-enactors getting bored and deciding to black up and recreate modern-day conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a brownface Amazonian tribe found secretly living behind flower-pots in a garden centre and a woman wearing a burka being an unsuccessful participant in a TV makeover programme.

Even more primly, the BBC also wiped or butchered entire episodes of popular children’s comedy history series Horrible Histories, as they featured jokes about sensitive topics like slavery – despite the fact they pretty obviously were not of a “Let’s bring it back!”-type perspective, but attempting to satirise the practice’s brutality.

One horrified reaction came from Graham Linehan, the cancelled Anglo-Irish comedy writer who today lives in exile in America, as nobody in the UK industry will now touch his work with a bargepole. Not only does it commit the cardinal post-2010s sin of actually being funny, Linehan’s writing is also deemed to be “transphobic”; Channel 4 refuses to re-show an old episode of his sitcom the IT Crowd, as it features a joke about a cross-dresser (see my review of his 2023 autobiography).

Writing in the Telegraph, Linehan observes that most British comedians who get their back-catalogues politically ruined these days, like Mitchell and Webb, either keep silent and go along with it for an easy life, or else actively denounce themselves in classic Soviet show-trial fashion, so as to keep raking in the cash on the panel-show circuit. Because of this cowardice, he says, “somewhere out there, the next generation of comedy writers and performers, the ones who might have pushed the form further, taken bigger risks, made the joke nobody else would touch, will quietly decide it isn’t worth it, and nobody will have to ban anything ever again”. Sounds a bit like how Islam operates in such matters, too …

August 30, 2026

The unspoken dividing line between “BCE” and “CE”

Filed under: History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m not a trained historian, so I don’t know if it’s a guild requirement for modern historians to ostentatiously avoid using traditional “BC” and “AD” to denote historical dates or if it’s just another sop to the easily offended like so many other things:

An Olmec head, By Marshall Astor (Life on the Edge), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19349056

Although I work primarily as a computer programmer, my college degree is in History. Over the years, I have retained a high level of interest in history, both recent and ancient.

A few months ago I listened to a Great Courses presentation about the Olmecs — one of the lesser known Central American civilizations — given by Dr. Ed Barnhart. The course lived up to its name and taught much about the history and society, as well as the giant heads, of the Olmecs. However, one thing bothered me about Dr. Barnhart’s presentation.

Dr. Barnhart generally uses CE and BCE for dates. CE stands for “common era” and BCE stands for “before common era”. Other than that fact, CE perfectly coincides with the previous AD and BCE perfectly coincides with BC.

Perhaps Dr. Barnhart should not be singled out. He is not alone in the use of these terms. In fact, the majority of historical presentations these days employ CE and BCE. And it may be that using these terms is not a personal decision; rather, it may be that a department-wide or even university-wide convention.

However, in my view, using CE and BCE instead of AD and BC is not okay. As an (amateur) historian, I believe that it’s bad for history. And as a Christian, I find it a bit offensive. I will probably never have the opportunity to tell Dr. Barnhart why he should not use CE/BCE, but if I did, here’s what I would tell him:

1) The prime commitment of a historian should be to history. A historian should be careful that the information presented is the most accurate, the most complete, and most contextually grounded. CE/BCE fails to be most accurate because it takes an obviously true historical fact — that the currently used Julian/Gregorian calendar is based on the birth of Christ — and obscures that fact. It is not the most complete because there is no way on its own to understand that CE/BCE means to present the same system as AD/BC. To truly understand the system, the AD/BC system would need to be explained. The AD/BC system can stand on its own, but the CE/BCE can only be understood along with AD/BC.

And it lacks context because the terms “common era” and “before common era” give no indication as to what exactly is the demarcation between the two eras. Since CE/BCE gives no referent, a student could reasonably conclude that the dating system is entirely arbitrary. For these reasons, using CE/BCE leaves students or listeners knowing less than they should and perhaps even having a wrong understanding of the dating system. AD/BC preserves important historical information. CE/BCE does not. On the basis of that alone, CE/BCE should not be used by historians who want to be as accurate and complete as possible.

2) Using AD/BC does not require anyone to profess Christianity. Some might say that AD/BC unfairly burdens non-Christians, but the terms Anno Domini and Before Christ are clearly not confessional statements. There is no serious historical dispute that Jesus Christ existed in approximately the time and place given in the Scriptures, and AD/BC merely recognizes that this is the basis for the year numbering system. Anno Domini, or year of the Lord, doesn’t require the user to say “my Lord” or otherwise confess Christianity, just to recognize that the calendar was created by people who did confess Christianity. That is an important fact, not something to be hidden.

The fact is that every calendar starts dating from something, generally from an important event. Some examples are:

  • Roman dating: years counted from the traditional founding of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, conventionally placed in 753 BC.
  • Hebrew calendar: years are traditionally counted from a calculated date for the creation of the world.
  • Islamic calendar: years are counted from the Hijra, Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina in AD 622.
  • French Republican calendar: years were counted from the establishment of the French Republic in AD 1792.

To use a particular calendar says nothing about one’s religious beliefs.

June 5, 2026

Canada’s AI “strategy”

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

I’m at the point where I honestly can’t tell whether this is parody or actual Canadian government policy:

AI in Canada lost before it even got started.

They literally are trying to get AI to give a Land acknowledgement before any session.

Here are 6 statements that show how Canada already blew AI like we all knew it would.

1. “The Government of Canada commits to applying Gender-Based Analysis Plus in a meaningful way across policy design, skills development, innovation, and governance to ensure that AI reflects our values, protects those most impacted, and leads to outcomes that are safe, inclusive, and beneficial for all Canadians.”

2. “Canadian AI must support, reflect, and project Canadian culture, which includes our customs, our history, and our heritage. Canadian voices, languages, communities, and knowledge must also be represented in how AI systems are designed, built, and used.”

3. “support Indigenous self-determination over how AI is built and used in Indigenous contexts, and build domestic capacity to address the specific harms Indigenous Peoples face”.

4. “promote the world’s first AI equity-based national standard on accessible AI to drive inclusive and accessible AI and remove accessibility barriers from AI systems, and ensure Canadian AI reflects the Accessible Canada Act principles.”

5. Repeated framing around “disproportionate exposure and impacts of AI harms to equity-seeking groups” and the need to “address the systemic barriers experienced by racialized communities, persons living with disabilities, and others who too often fall on the wrong side of the digital divide”.

6. “Canada will support and amplify Indigenous-led AI initiatives that reinforce cultural expression and linguistic vitality in Canada and around the world, building on existing efforts …”

May 13, 2026

QotD: The advertising business

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

Television is the great propaganda weapon of the liberal democratic state, so it is a useful window into the thinking of the oligarchs. Movies and television shows still have to attract an audience, so they are usually the trailing edge of whatever the oligarchs are trying to impose on society, but the ads are a different matter. They are the leading edge of the latest Progressive fads. They know people will not abandon a show or movie just because the ads are offensive.

That’s what makes the ads a useful window into the black soul of our rulers. The ad makers are all from the ruling class. Look at the team photo of an ad agency and it looks like the faculty of an Ivy League college. There may be a little color in there for show, but otherwise it is all men with small hats and people who still write “Episcopalian” when asked about their religion. The advertising agencies that produce these ads are the special forces of the Judeo-Puritan ruling class.

The Z Man, “Turn Off, Tune Out and Drop Out”, The Z Blog, 2020-09-04.

March 20, 2026

QotD: The lameness and sameness of modern science fiction novels

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

I’ll confess, though: I almost didn’t read this book. Actually, for several years I didn’t. I was vaguely aware of its existence, but I’d pretty much stopped reading new speculative fiction because I finally admitted to myself that it was pure masochism that kept me beating my head against the wall of newly-published extruded genre product when I had sixty-plus years of Hugo and Nebula nominees to choose from. Sure, every novel will reflect something of its age’s concerns (there’s a lot of nuclear war in those old Hugo winners!), but it’s gotten much worse in the last ten or fifteen years: every book that gets any buzz is so deeply inflected with questions of personal liberation from oppressive structures, so little nuanced and so obsessed with identity and representation, that I find it borderline unreadable. A few books like that, done well — fine, that’s part of life, that’s certainly a kind of story you can tell. But when it’s everything, when it becomes a precondition for publication, you’re left with a tragically denuded sample of the human experience. It’s not that I don’t want to read a book where I disagree with the underlying politics, it’s that an unsubtle obsession with the “correct” politics makes a book boring and cringe. One-dimensionally “right-wing” fiction written in reaction to the contemporary mainstream is just as bad — worse, perhaps, because if done well it’s the sort of thing I would really enjoy.1

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Powers of the Earth, by Travis J.I. Corcoran”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-04-29.

  1. There’s nothing worse than poor execution of an incredible idea, because it means no one else will come along and do the incredible idea right. Austin Grossman’s Crooked, for instance, is Richard Nixon vs. Cosmic Horrors, which is a brilliant premise (yes, the Interstate Highway System is definitely an eldritch sigil designed to protect America, I will not accept any argument) but falls apart on the totally ahistorical version of our 37th President designed to justify making him the “good guy”. The real Nixon is such a fascinating and compelling figure — why not keep him as weird and twitchy and striving as he actually was and have him be the good guy anyway?

    2. Or, say, the Napoleon movie.

October 18, 2025

The corporate world is (slowly) backing away from DEI

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Andrew Doyle describes what he calls the “death rattles” of the diversity, equity, and inclusion grifters:

In 180 AD, the Roman satirist Lucian wrote an account of a man called Alexander who had founded a cult of the serpent-god Glycon. According to Lucian, Alexander was much in demand as a prophet, and would charge money to answer questions from those seeking the wisdom of the serpentine deity that he had invented. Lucian records that he “gleaned as much as seventy or eighty thousand [drachmas] a year”.

Some of our modern-day Alexanders take the form of “diversity experts” who have made a fortune from the snake-god of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). These cheerless mountebanks form part of an industry that rakes in a whopping eight billion dollars annually. According to Glassdoor, a website that provides salary estimates, a Chief Diversity Officer earns an average of $250,000 per year. Oppression is a lucrative business.

Perhaps the most egregious example is that of Robin DiAngelo, a self-proclaimed expert in “whiteness”, who charges $14,000 for every speech, and earns $728,000 every year. At one of her speeches at Coca Cola, DiAngelo’s advice to employees was to “try to be less white”. As the comedian Heydon Prowse observed: “anyone who has had the misfortune of passing a group of Eton boys at Notting Hill Carnival will know that trying to be less white is literally the whitest thing anyone can do”.

But it looks as though the gravy train might finally have been derailed. Yesterday, the This Isn’t Working podcast posted an image of a statement from Jake Graf, a regular DEI speaker who, according to his website, “works with organisations to improve LGBTQ+ representation, mental health awareness, and trans inclusion”. In his statement, posted on LinkedIn, Graf struck a sombre note:

    The pendulum of progress swings in mysterious ways. Just months ago, following the Supreme Court ruling and subsequent EHRC interim guidance, businesses rallied with open arms and vocal support for their trans team and clients. Now, that warmth has slowly given way to a worrying silence, as if someone pressed pause on the march toward inclusion.

The half-hearted poeticism barely masks the anxiety of man who fears that his racket has been exposed. The predominance of the creed of DEI, and its usurpation of meritocracy as the guiding principle in the corporate world, is a testament to the success of culture warriors. They have made plenty of know-nothings very wealthy by promoting ideology as though it were uncontested truth. But now it might well be coming to an end.

August 3, 2025

QotD: Undermining cultural taboos

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

One of the longest running debates on this side of the great divide is about how best to work through the thicket of taboos created and maintained by the ruling class. Because so much of observable reality is now off limits, it is nearly impossible to contradict the prevailing orthodoxy and maintain a position in the public square. For example, there can be nothing interesting said about crime, because no one is allowed to discuss the demographic reality of crime. The facts themselves are taboo.

One side of the debate argues that the only way to break a taboo is to break a taboo, so the only way forward to is to talk frankly about these things. In the case of crime, for example, the dissident must always interject the demographic facts about crime into the debate, even if it makes the beautiful people shriek. Since most people know the facts, the shrieking by the beautiful people actually advances the cause. This line of reasoning is extended to all taboo subjects universally.

The other side of the debate points out that the taboo breakers always end up in exile or condemned to some ghetto. In fact, their deliberate breaking of taboos ends up reinforcing the taboo, as no one wants to end up like the heretics. Instead, this camp argues the dissident must come up with clever language that subtly mocks the taboos, but narrowly adheres to the rules. The recent use of the word “jogger” is an example of complying with the taboo, while undermining it.

The taboo breakers counter that this just results in an endless search for approved language to hint at unapproved things. It is just a form of self-deception, where the clever think they are in revolt when in reality they are just asking permission. The optics guys counter this by pointing out the obvious. The taboo breakers are removed from the process, so in reality their tactic is just quitting the game. Rather than take on the system in a meaningful way, they mutter epithets in their ghetto.

The Z Man, “Strategy, Tactics & Discipline”, The Z Blog, 2020-05-19.

June 14, 2025

Mere disagreement on a political point does not rise to the level of “causing harm” … even in Canada

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

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya reports on a Canadian school board’s attempt to paint a parent’s (valid) objection to the forced speech of modern-day “land acknowledgements” as causing “harm” and not acceptable:

Late last month, a Canadian school board informed Catherine Kronas, a parent serving on her child’s local school council in Ontario, that her role was being “paused” for allegedly causing “harm” and violating board policy.

Her offense? “Respectfully” requesting during an April 9 council meeting that her objection to the land acknowledgment be recorded in the meeting minutes. Kronas argued that the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board lacks an official mandate to require land acknowledgments at school council meetings and that such statements “undermine the democratic process”, amount to “compelled speech”, and are “divisive” and “inappropriate”.

Kronas, who has served on the board for the past year and like all board members is a volunteer, has since been barred from attending upcoming meetings, including virtual ones, while the board reviews the allegations.

“They’ve ostracized me and painted me as someone who harms others,” Kronos told me, pointing to the letter she received in May.

Parents who once expressed similar concerns about land acknowledgments privately have all “slunk away” and “gone silent”, she said. She is convinced that if even one other parent had publicly backed her objection, she wouldn’t have been suspended.

“I have no support,” Kronas says.

But Kronas is far from alone in her views. A new poll shows that a majority of Canadians — 52 percent — reject the idea that they live on “stolen” indigenous land. In Kronas’s own region, Hamilton-Niagara, a suburb just outside Toronto, 50 percent said “no” to the concept.

There’s also a political shift underway that reflects this: New legislation from Ontario premier Doug Ford that is widely viewed as effectively anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) aims to roll back some of the ideological activism that has spread through school boards. The bill will, among other things, ban the renaming of schools based on the belief that historical figures are linked to “systems of oppression” and mandate the return of school resource officers, a form of law enforcement, in jurisdictions where police services provide them. In recent years, many Ontario school boards have removed police from schools on the grounds that their presence causes harm to “racialized” groups — a peculiarly Canadian euphemism for non-white people that casts them as perpetual victims in need of saving — and makes at least this brown Canadian feel like something is inherently wrong with us.

March 21, 2025

QotD: Gordon Brown and the “Gillian Duffy affair”

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

The Gillian Duffy affair, the start of this People’s Decade, was fascinating on many levels. Fundamentally, it revealed the schism in values and language that separated the elites from ordinary people. To the professional middle classes who by that point — after 13 years of New Labour government — had conquered the Labour Party, people like Mrs Duffy were virtually an alien species, and places like Rochdale were almost another planet. Indeed, one small but striking thing that happened in the Duffy / Brown fallout was a correction published in the Guardian. One of that newspaper’s initial reports on the Duffy affair had said that Rochdale was “a few hundred miles” from London. Readers wrote in to point out that it is only 170 miles from London. To the chattering classes, it was clear that Rochdale was as faraway and as foreign as Italy or Germany. More so, in fact.

The linguistic chasm between Duffy and Brown spoke volumes about Labour’s turn away from its traditional working-class base. Yes, there was the word “bigot”, but, strikingly, that wasn’t the word that most offended Mrs Duffy. No, she was most horrified by Brown’s description of her as “that woman”. “The thing that upset me was the way he said ‘that woman'”, she said. “I come from the north and when you say ‘that woman’, it’s really not very nice. Why couldn’t he have just said ‘that lady’?”

One reason Brown probably didn’t say “lady” is because in the starched, aloof, technocratic world New Labour inhabited, and helped to create, the word “lady” had all but been banned as archaic and offensive in the early 2000s. Since the millennium, various public-sector bodies had made moves to prevent people from saying lady to refer to a woman. One college advised against using the word lady, as it is “no longer appropriate in the new century”. An NHS Trust instructed its workers that “lady” is “not universally accepted” and should thus be avoided. In saying “that woman”, Brown was unquestionably being dismissive — “that piece of trash” is what he really meant — but he was also speaking in the clipped, watchful, PC tones of an elite that might have only been 170 miles from Rochdale (take note, Guardian) but which was in another world entirely in terms of values, outlook, culture and language.

“I’m not ‘that woman'”, said Duffy, and in many ways this became the rebellious cry of the People’s Decade. She was pushing back against the elite’s denigration of her. Against its denigration of her identity (as a lady), of her right to express herself publicly (“it’s just ridiculous”, as Brown said of that very public encounter), and most importantly of her concerns, in particular on the issue of immigration and its relationship to the welfare state.

The Brown-Duffy stand-off at the start of the People’s Decade exposed the colossal clash of values that existed between the new political oligarchy represented by Brown, Blair and other New Labour / New Conservative machine politicians and the working-class heartlands of the country. To Duffy and millions of other people, the relationship between welfare and nationhood was of critical importance. That is fundamentally what she collared Brown about. There are “too many people now who are not vulnerable but they can claim [welfare]”, she said, before asking about immigration. Her suggestion, her focus on the issue of health, education and welfare and the question of who has access to these things and why, was a statement about citizenship, and about the role of welfare as a benefit of citizenship. But to Brown, as to virtually the entire political class, it was just bigotry. Concern about community, nationhood and the impact of immigration is just xenophobic Little Englandism in the minds of the new elites. This was the key achievement of 13 years of New Labour’s censorious, technocratic and highly middle-class rule — the reduction of fealty to the nation to a species of bigotry.

Brendan O’Neill, “The People’s Decade”, Spiked, 2019-12-27.

June 3, 2024

The “hallucination” problem that bedevils all current AI implementations

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

Andrew Orlowski explains the one problem shared among all of the artificial intelligence engines currently available to the general public:

Gemini’s ultra-woke responses to requests quickly became a staple of social media postings.

AI Overviews hasn’t had the effect that Google hoped for, to say the least. It has certainly garnered immediate internet virality, with people sharing their favourite answers. Not because these are helpful, but because they are so laughable. For instance, when you ask AI Overviews for a list of fruits ending with “um” it returns: “Applum, Strawberrum and Coconut”. This is what, in AI parlance, is called a “hallucination”.

Despite having a market capitalisation of $2 trillion and the ability to hire the biggest brains on the planet, Google keeps stumbling over AI. Its first attempt to join the generative-AI goldrush in February last year was the ill-fated Bard chatbot, which had similar issues with spouting factual inaccuracies. On its first live demo, Bard mistakenly declared that the James Webb Space Telescope, launched only in 2021, had taken “the first pictures” ever of Earth from outside the solar system. The mistake wiped $100 billion off Google’s market value.

This February, Google had another go at AI, this time with Gemini, an image and text generator. The problem was that it had very heavy-handed diversity guardrails. When asked to produce historically accurate images, it would instead generate black Nazi soldiers, Native American Founding Fathers and a South Asian female pope.

This was “a well-meaning mistake”, pleaded The Economist. But Google wasn’t caught unawares by the problems inherent to generative AI. It will have known about its capabilities and pitfalls.

Before the current AI mania truly kicked off, analysts had already worked out that generative AI would be unlikely to improve user experience, and may well degrade it. That caution was abandoned once investors started piling in.

So why is Google’s AI putting out such rotten results? In fact, it’s working exactly as you would expect. Don’t be fooled by the “artificial intelligence” branding. Fundamentally, AI Overviews is simply trying to guess the next word it should use, according to statistical probability, but without having any mooring to reality. The algorithm cannot say “I don’t know” when asked a difficult question, because it doesn’t “know” anything. It cannot even perform simple maths, as users have demonstrated, because it has no underlying concept of numbers or of valid arithmetic operations. Hence the hallucinations and omissions.

This is less of a problem when the output doesn’t matter as much, such as when AI is processing an image and creates a minor glitch. Our phones use machine learning every day to process our photos, and we don’t notice or care much about most of the glitches. But for Google to advise us all to start eating rocks is no minor glitch.

Such errors are more or less inevitable because of the way the AI is trained. Rather than learning from a curated dataset of accurate information, AI models are trained on a huge, practically open-ended data set. Google’s AI and ChatGPT have already scraped as much of the web as they can and, needless to say, lots of what’s on the web isn’t true. Forums like Reddit teem with sarcasm and jokes, but these are treated by the AI as trustworthy, as sincere and correct explanations to problems. Programmers have long used the phrase “GIGO” to describe what is going on here: garbage in, garbage out.

AI’s hallucination problem is consistent across all fields. It pretty much precludes generative AI being practically useful in commercial and business applications, where you might expect it to save a great deal of time. A new study of generative AI in legal work finds the additional verification steps now required to ensure the AI isn’t hallucinating cancel out the time saved from deploying it in the first place.

“[Programmers] are still making the same bone-headed mistakes as before. Nobody has actually solved hallucinations with large-language models and I don’t think we can”, the cognitive scientist and veteran AI sceptic, Professor Gary Marcus, observed last week.

Another problem is now coming into view. The AI is making an already bad job worse, by generating bogus information, which then pollutes the rest of the web. “Google learns whatever junk it sees on the internet and nothing generates junk better than AI”, as one X user put it.

I was actually contacted by someone on LinkedIn the other day asking if I’d be interested in doing some AI training for US$25 per hour. I really, really need the money, but I’m unsure about being involved in AI at all …

January 11, 2024

The Canadian Armed Forces believe “that they – and the country they serve – are irredeemably racist and oppressive”

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

The official journal of the Canadian Armed Forces has a … woke … view of themselves and the nation:

… the latest edition — which was just posted online — contains little to no mention of strategy, geopolitics or the avalanche of contemporary problems facing the Canadian Armed Forces. There’s not a single reference to the recruiting crisis, which has left vacancies of up to 40 per cent in some departments. No mention of the plummeting maintenance standards that recently prompted the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy to declare that his fleet was in a “storm” with no end in sight. No discussion of why Canada is slashing its military budget even as its peer countries do the exact opposite.

Instead — in a signal of just how far the Canadian Armed Forces has embraced far-left “anti-racist” ideology — the entire issue is devoted to how the Canadian military is a racist, patriarchal den of colonialist oppression that needs to be torn down and remade from scratch.

After devoting extended paragraphs to each cultural infraction, Eichler concludes that the Canadian Armed Forces must be remade via an “anti-oppression framework” of “feminist, decolonial, critical race, queer, critical disability, and critical political economy theories”.

Eichler notes this is “not an easy task, but a necessary one if DND/CAF wants to move the yardstick on culture change.”

Another feature, by York University psychotherapist Tammy George, frames the Canadian Armed Forces as being poisoned by “institutional whiteness”.

“In order for meaningful, sustained culture change to occur, there must be a recognition by the white majority of the way in which whiteness organizes lives,” she writes.

Leigh Spanner, a feminist postdoctoral research fellow, wrote that the CAF’s system of supporting military families was anti-feminist and patriarchal.

Ash Grover, a researcher in “feminist anti-militarism”, argues that the military might have fewer instances of post-traumatic stress disorder if they paid closer attention to “anti-oppressive theory” and how “acts of ‘othering’ can result in responses typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder”.

January 8, 2024

“[A]ll philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatic, have been very inexpert about women”

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

Theodore Dalrymple on the food police and the linguistic distortions forced on traditionally technical and scientific journalism:

The world, said James Boswell, is not to be made a great hospital; but to a hammer everything is a nail, and to doctors and medical journals everything is either a medical problem or a medical solution.

Looking at the website of the Journal of the American Medical Association today, I came across a paper with the title “Effect of an Intensive Food-as-Medicine Program on Health and Health Care Use”. It was published just above “A Young Pregnant Person With Old Myocardial Infarction”.

Could that pregnant person possibly be a woman? Heaven forfend that so prejudiced a thought should occur to us! If it occurred to you, dear reader, I suggest that your brain still needs washing. The word woman is here abjured by JAMA as completely as, say, it would abjure (rightly) the word bitch with reference to a woman. In other words, the word woman is now treated as if it were in itself an insult, a rather strange result of pro-feminist indoctrination.

The paper begins, “A patient in their 30s presented to the hospital …” No doubt I am deeply reactionary, almost a dinosaur in a world of mammals, but is not their the plural possessive adjective, and is not “a patient” singular? If the authors of the paper were really not sure whether the pregnant person was a man or a woman, surely they should have written “A pregnant person in his or her 30s …”? That would have been a step too absurd (so far) even for the editors of JAMA, assuming that the paper in question was published with some kind of editorial oversight. I anticipate further linguistic absurdity in JAMA with a mixture of amusement and irritation; that there will be one is a racing certainty (a Dutch friend of mine was going to write a book about Dutch social policy titled Creative Appeasement).

The paper, by the way, gives new meaning to the first two sentences of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil: “Suppose truth to be a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatic, have been very inexpert about women?”

December 3, 2023

Doctor What-are-your-pronouns

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

I don’t watch Doctor Who although I have fond childhood memories of watching William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s respective “Doctors” and I caught one or two episodes of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker in the role. That the show is still running on British TV is a wonder … but it got headlines for a recent installment that had the Doctor being told off for “assuming” an alien creature’s pronouns:

Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.

A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, “The Star Beast”, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the Meep used male pronouns. What was he thinking?

It is this sort of banal plot line that encapsulates the shrivelling ambition of science fiction. Once the genre dared to hold up a provocative mirror to contemporary society. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, sci-fi challenged lazy assumptions. Now it revels in groupthink that feeds the collective self-righteousness of indolent teenagers and adults with teenage imaginations.

This matters, because at its best sci-fi can dazzle and even inspire us with the potential strangeness of the imagined future. A few years ago I made a series presented by William Shatner tracing the cultural and technological influence of Star Trek. In one episode, the inventor of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper, told director Julian Jones how he had been inspired by the example of Captain Kirk’s hand-held “communicator”. Will anyone invent something inspired by the new Doctor Who? A new set of guidelines for pronoun use, perhaps?

You can tell how out of touch Doctor Who has now become by the fact its enormously pompous showrunner, Russell T Davies, seemed to think that the new series would shock viewers with its “progressive” radicalism. The only shock was the alien pronoun scene’s patent stupidity.

I mean, why on Earth would the Doctor assume the gender of any alien? He has been encountering aliens with no fixed gender since the 1960s. The Doctor has effectively been asking aliens for their pronouns for nigh on 60 years.

Davies may think he’s blazing a trail with the new series of Doctor Who. But the truth is that gender-bending in science fiction is as old as the frozen hills of Gallifrey. In The War of the Worlds, published 125 years ago, HG Wells regaled us with Martian invaders who reproduced asexually. And hermaphrodites pepper sci-fi, from the work of Philip K Dick to that of Ursula K Le Guin.

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