Quotulatiousness

April 27, 2024

“… when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy”

Filed under: Germany, Government, Japan — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

eugyppius explains how Angela Merkel’s government reacted to the Japanese Fukushima disaster in a sane, measured, and sensible way … naw, I’m pulling your leg. They looked at all the options and then selected the dumbest possible reaction available to them:

German anti-nuclear protest in Cologne, 26 March 2011.
Photo by Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Nordrhein-Westfalen via Wikimedia Commons.

All of our countries are crazy in various ways, but when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy.

In 2011, a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. If you check a map, you’ll notice that Fukushima is in a country called Japan, which it turns out is a different country from Germany. The Fukushima disaster had zero to do with the Federal Republic, but then-Chancellor Angela Merkel felt the need to solve the problem of Fukushima by phasing out nuclear power in Germany, even though tsunamis and earthquakes are not a problem in Germany, because Germany is a country in Central Europe and not an island nation in Asia.

That is crazy enough, but it gets much crazier. Months before announcing the nuclear phase-out, Merkel’s government had passed energy transition legislation to secure Germany’s path towards a zero-emissions future. We resolved to ditch our most significant source of emissions-free power, in other words, just months after resolving an energy transition to emissions-free power. At this point you would be justified in wondering if Germany suffers from some kind of shamanistic cultural phobia of electricity in general, that is how crazy this is. These insane choices had the near-term consequence of increasing our dependence on Russian natural gas. Otherwise, they ensured that power generation in Germany would be vastly more expensive than necessary and also vastly more carbon intensive than necessary.

Now, crazy demands explanations, and observers have proposed various theories for the German climate nuclear crazy. Two of them deserve mention here:

1) The 1968 generation in Germany suffered from unusual radicalism, sharpened by moral anxiety over National Socialism, and resolved to outcompete all others in the project of self-abnegating virtue. Our culture developed a deranged anti-nuclear movement that in a fit of typical German thoroughness also came to embrace opposition to nuclear power. The Chernobyl disaster radicalised the pink-haired anti-nuclearists still further, and these cretins grew up to become news anchors, school teachers and book authors, effectively indoctrinating the next generation according to their parareligious delusions.

2) German politicians after the Cold War – especially Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel – harboured a subtle and not entirely unreasonable desire to strengthen ties with resource-rich Russia. They decided that the anti-nuclearists and the Green Party could be instrumentalised towards this end. The energy transition and the nuclear phase-out increased our dependence on Russian gas, and this was a feature more than it was a bug.

These are mutually supporting theories, but I don’t think either of them can fully account for the bizarre phenomenon before us. Germany energy crazy is a very deep problem and it will keep historians busy for many generations.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Germany under Merkel’s successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, decided along with the rest of the liberal West that Russia was bad, bad, bad and that evil Putin had to be punished with self-immolating sanctions, sanctions, sanctions. This new spasm of high-minded moralising further attenuated our energy situation, ushering in an entirely self-made energy crisis. The Greens, now in government, were determined to proceed with the last stages of the nuclear phase-out, even with our natural gas supplies in doubt. Only when they saw themselves staring into the abyss of political doom did they grudgingly agree to give our last nuclear plants a three-and-a-half month lease on life. We Germans and our energy policy had out-crazied everyone else, we had made ourselves the laughing stock of the entire world, that is how crazy we were.

April 15, 2024

Is “Big Trans” in retreat?

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

In the latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan considers just how much things have changed in recent years, especially with the publication of the Cass Report on the true medical situation for children being prescribed puberty blocking or opposite sex hormones … and it really doesn’t match the rhetoric we’ve been hearing from activists over the last few years:

Tribalization does funny things to people. If you’d told me a decade ago that within a few years, Republicans would be against Ukraine defending itself from a Russian invasion, and Democrats would be pulling the Full Churchill to counter the Kremlin, I’d have gently asked what sativa strain you were smoking.

If you’d told me the Democrats would soon be the party most protective of the CIA and the FBI, and that Republicans would regard them as part of an evil “deep state,” ditto. And who would have thought that a president accused in 2017 of having “no real ideology [but] white supremacy” would today be doubling his support with black voters, and tripling it with black men? Who would have bet the Dems would go all-in on Big Pharma when it came to Covid vaccines? And who would have thought Republicans who long carried little copies of the Constitution in their suit pockets would lead a riot to prevent the peaceful transfer of power? You live and learn.

But would anyone have predicted that the Democrats and the left in general would soon favor a vast, completely unregulated, for-profit medical industry that would conduct a vast, new experimental treatment on children with drugs that were off-label and without any clinical trials to prove their effectiveness and safety? In the 2016 presidential race, both Dem contenders railed against Big Pharma, with Bernie going as far as calling the industry “a health hazard for the American people.” Back in 2009, you saw MSM stories like this:

    The Food and Drug Administration said adults using prescription testosterone gel must be extra careful not to get any of it on children to avoid causing serious side effects. These include enlargement of the genital organs, aggressive behavior, early aging of the bones, premature growth of pubic hair, and increased sexual drive. Boys and girls are both at risk. The agency ordered its strongest warning on the products — a so-called black box.

Nowadays, it’s deemed a “genocide” if you don’t hand out these potent drugs to children almost on demand. Drugs used to castrate sex offenders and to treat adult prostate cancer have been re-purposed, off-label, to sexually reassign children before they even got through puberty. Big Pharma created lucrative “customers for life” by putting kids on irreversible drugs for a condition that could not be measured or identified by doctors and entirely self-diagnosed by … children.

And what if over 80 percent of the children subject to this experiment were of a marginalized group — gay kids? And the result of these procedures was to cure them of same-sex attraction by converting them to the opposite sex? I simply cannot imagine that any liberal or progressive would hand over gender-nonconforming children, let alone their own children, to the pharmaceutical and medical-industrial complex to be experimented on in this way.

And yet for years now, this has been the absolutely rigid left position on sex reassignments for children with gender dysphoria on the verge of puberty. And for years now, those of us who have expressed concern have been vilified, hounded, canceled and physically attacked for our advocacy. When we argued that children should get counseling and support but wait until they have matured before making irreversible, life-long medical choices they have no way of fully understanding, we were told we were bigots, transphobes and haters.

The reason we were told that children couldn’t wait and mature was that they would kill themselves if they didn’t. This is one of the most malicious lies ever told in pediatric medicine. While there is a higher chance of suicide among children with gender distress than those without, it is still extremely rare. And there is absolutely no solid evidence that treatment reduces suicide rates at all.

Don’t take this from me. The most authoritative and definitive study of the question has just been published in Britain, The Cass Report, by Hilary Cass, one of the most respected pediatricians in the country. It’s 388 pages long, crammed with references, five years in the making, based on serious research and interviews with countless doctors, parents, scientists and, most importantly, children and trans people directly affected. In the UK, its findings have been accepted by both major parties and even some of the groups who helped pioneer and enable this experiment. I urge you to read it — if only the preliminary summary.

It’s a decisive moment in this debate. After weighing all the credible evidence and data, the report concludes that puberty blockers are not reversible and not used to “take time” to consider sex reassignment, but rather irreversible precursors for a lifetime of medication. It says that gender incongruence among kids is perfectly normal and that kids should be left alone to explore their own identities; that early social transitioning is not neutral in affecting long-term outcomes; and that there is no evidence that sex reassignment for children increases or reduces suicides.

How on earth did all the American medical authorities come to support this? The report explains that as well: all the studies that purport to show positive results are plagued by profound limitations: no control group, no randomization, no double-blind studies, no subsequent follow-up with patients, or simply poor quality.

April 11, 2024

Disney: go woke, go broke?

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

spiked
Published Apr 10, 2024
The Walt Disney Company has gone from being an international treasure to an international laughing stock. Its films are flopping at the box office and fans are fuming. All because it has gone ridiculously woke, to an almost comical degree. No Disney film, franchise or TV series is now complete without clunky “progressive” messages about diversity, feminism and gender. The company has even started picking fights with anti-woke politicians. Here, Lauren Smith documents Disney’s Great Awokening – and the fan revolt against it. Watch, share and let us know what you think in the comments.

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March 29, 2024

Politics on the fringe – “Every Single Grassroots Political Movement is populated by cranks of various amounts of semi-retardation”

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

Kulak went to a political rally and came back with some thoughts on non-mainstream political gatherings of all flavours:

Kim Kelly on X: The chatter over Jake “Q Shaman” Angeli’s identity is missing a key element: his tattoos. He’s covered in Odinist symbols — Yggdrasil, Mjolnir, and, significantly, the valknut.

I attended a political event recently in my country, that a mainstream party had vaguely endorsed, but more of a general right wing-anti-tax protest. You had people from the fringe parties, and people and speakers from the fringe of the fringe parties.

We did the protests, then all ended at a large venue where there were coffee, donuts, and speeches … My god the speeches.

Some admittedly were well prepared, the representative of the mainstream party who showed up at the end was very professional befitting a former and probably future politician. But in-between you had rolling, unprepared, barely understandable speeches about chemtrails, sovereign citizenship, and UN Agenda 2030 conspiracies, all mixed with real concerns about local government taking property rights …

And I’ll admit I got damned frustrated. “This is why we lose”, I thought. Echoing a dozen different think pieces on the “Stupid Right” many from right wingers themselves. I was embarrassed that this was the state of political organization and human capital on the “far right”.

What is wrong with these people? I thought, and I’m sure many of have thought.

Well nothing. The problem is with you!

Unlike most online right wing intellectuals I’ve been involved in various type of organized politics, and I had friends who were involved in Left Wing politics who, when I was still an ideological niaf, I humored and attended their meetings.

Every Single Grassroots Political Movement is populated by cranks of various amounts of semi-retardation, and every single one spends an inordinate amount of time at best humouring them, or worse, taking them 100% seriously.

I’ve seen this in mainstream political parties when you talk to any of the volunteers. And I’ve seen this on University campuses where if you let your left wing friends drag you to one of their meetings you’ll be serenaded by barely articulate native activists, feminist extremists who want everyone to pray to Gaia, Black “we wuz” radicals, and every kind of queer identity you can possibly imagine, giving just as if not more retarded takes in even worse coherence, but seemingly actively trying to derail every attempt at meaningful policy advancement or coalition building in favour of struggle sessions and “consciousness raising”.

Say what you will about the sovereign citizen guy … He had a whole list of meaningful proposal with direct actions to take which, setting aside the theory, would actually make public employees and local councillors probably cave out of the sheer misery of dealing with it.

The queer, native, and black activists? Their proposals ranged from non-existent, to actively crippling the groups own organizational capacity in some purity/diversity spiral.

Beyond that however, this collection of right wing weirdos and concerned citizens was meeting in an ex-urban industrial building one of the organizer’s friends let them use. The left wing losers (of whom most were activists in the city, not students) were meeting in a limestone university campus with cathedral ceilings and snacks provided out of student dues and tax dollars.

The immediate organizers of the right wing protester were mechanics, the organizers of these left wing meetings were Professors, several of whom were even lest coherent or policy oriented.

What was their excuse?

Part of me thinks this is why Left wing organizers are perpetually convinced they’re the little guys fighting against a vast right-wing Koch Funded machine out to crush them … because, in spite of getting state funding for protests and stainglassed cathedral high rooms to organize from … They spend 80+% of their time listening to the losers of the losers.

So then why is it right wing intellectuals are convinced their side is stupid?

Well because left wing stupidity doesn’t count, in fact you’re racist for noticing it.

March 27, 2024

As the kids will be taught, pre-Columbian culture was feminist, egalitarian, non-violent, etc.

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Education, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The way history will be taught in future will distort historical facts to flatter modern sensibilities, especially with regard to First Nations history:

Linguistic groups of pre-contact North America.
Wikimedia Commons

In my previous missive of this series, I outlined the socio-economic problems facing Indigenous people in Canada and identified the official narrative, promoted by the federal government, Indigenous leaders, and their non-Indigenous allies. This narrative is basically that colonialism, racism, and oppression are the sole (or at least the major) causes of the long list of socio-economic difficulties so many Indigenous people are suffering from today. The narrative focuses on colonialism, oppression, as well as “intergenerational trauma” and “genocide”, neither of which claims stand up to the slightest bit of objective scrutiny and analysis. The genocide claim is particularly laughable in that the Indigenous population has increased from about 100 thousand in 1900 to nearly 2 million today, which is at least four times the pre-contact Indigenous population.

Pre-contact living conditions for Indigenous people

In order to blame all the problems on European settlers and their descendants, the narrative starts out by implying that life in pre-contact Canada was idyllic. Students are led to believe that this was a time of peace, cooperation, and prosperity based on teachings and knowledge systems that were superior to what we have now (the Western enlightenment-based ethos and the scientific method). Students are told that people lived well- sustainably, with little environmental impact, and with a respect for each other and the land, with which their relationship was one of stewardship and symbiotic coexistence.

This is presented in contrast to the purported European world view, which kids are told was, and still is, characterized by exploitation and a belief in European superiority. Europeans are described as ruthless and greedy people who just wanted to enrich themselves by maximally extracting any and all resources without regard for impacts on the environment or Indigenous people. It is presented as a case of good vs. evil.

But what was life really like for pre-contact Indigenous people? Certainly their stone age way of living combined with their small, scattered population was eco-friendly, but was their standard of living, on balance, better than that of modern Canada? Were they more moral, or wiser than modern non-Indigenous Canadians? An honest answer to these questions demands a hard look at the available evidence and a willingness to draw conclusions wherever that evidence may lead.

And that evidence shows that pre-contact indigenous people demonstrated the full range of behaviors we find in all stone age hunter gatherer/horticulturalist societies. While there is much to admire about these people, who were able to survive in a challenging environment with only the most rudimentary of wooden, stone, and bone tools, the evidence is clear that, compared to modern times

  • life expectancy was very low
  • child mortality was very high
  • warfare was endemic
  • slavery was a common practice
  • violence of all kinds was common
  • people suffered a great deal from simple health problems which would now be easily treatable with antibiotics and surgical techniques.

It should also be pointed out that while the allegation that Indigenous people were the victims of genocide at the hands of the government of Canada is ridiculous, it is a well-established (but rarely mentioned) fact that Indigenous people carried out genocides against one another on a regular basis, for example the genocide of the Hurons by the Iroquois.

March 24, 2024

QotD: Adolescence

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

Children, in my sadly limited experience, are one of nature’s conservative forces. Or, they can be. Only after puberty are they likely, in the course of nature, to embrace change. One may glimpse what nature intended by this. Even adolescence has its function. As the child transforms into woman or man, by chemical processes I’d rather not mention, his outlook also changes. He will go out in the world. He still needs protection, but is beginning to forget. He is trying new spiritual garments on for size. He is trying things on, more generally; graduating, perhaps, from mischievous child to the full glory of juvenile delinquency. Or, from obedient and thoughtful child, to discerning and responsible adult.

In the old days, of course (in every culture), adulthood came earlier, and adolescence was merely its apprentice form. Now thanks to an extended, debilitating system of “education”, bureaucratically controlled, adolescence itself, or the semblance of it, may be extended past the age of thirty; and with the further interventions of what I call Twisted Nanny State, from birth (when permitted) to death (however caused). The old notion that one must take responsibility for oneself and in one’s neighbourhood (whatever that may be) has come to be replaced by the new notion that one is the member of a demographic group, to be assigned responsibilities by one’s progressive betters.

David Warren, “Against ‘education'”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-09-06.

March 23, 2024

QotD: The SCIENCE was SETTLED in the 1970s

Filed under: Environment, Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When it comes to Leftie, it’s really hard to sort out what’s intentional from what’s merely wrong, or outdated, or stupid, or some combination of the above. So while there really does seem to be some kind of coordinated push to get us to eat grass and bugs, the red meat thing is, I think, just old misinformation that Leftie can’t admit has been overtaken by events (because, of course, Leftists can never be wrong about anything). And I’ll even kinda sorta give them a pass on that, because I know a lot of medical people who learned the “red meat is bad for you” mantra back in the days and still haven’t gotten over it …

For younger readers, back in the late 70s the nutritional Powers That Be got in bed with the corn lobby. It sounds funny, but they were and are huge, the corn lobby — why do you think we’re still getting barraged with shit about ethanol, even though it’s actually much worse for the environment than plain ol’ dinosaur juice, when you factor in all the “greenhouse emissions” from growing and harvesting it? Anyway, ethanol wasn’t a thing back then … but corn syrup was, and so suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, the PTB decided that fat was bad and carbohydrates were good.

Teh Science (TM) for this was as bogus and politicized as all the other Teh Science (TM) these days, but since we still had a high degree of social and institutional trust back then — living in a country that’s still 85% White will do that — nobody questioned it, and so suddenly everything had to be “fat free”, lest you get high blood pressure and colon cancer and every other damn thing (ever notice how, with Teh Science (TM), everything they decide is bad suddenly correlates with everything that has ever been bad? Funny, that). But since fat is what makes food taste good, they had to find a tasty substitute … and whaddya know, huge vats full of corn syrup just kinda happened to be there. Obesity rates immediately skyrocketed; who’d have thunk it?

… but again, this isn’t a deliberate thing with your average Leftie. You know how they are about Teh Science (TM), even Teh Science (TM) produced by people who thought polyester bellbottoms were a great look, which alone should tell you everything you need to know. They just learned “red meat is bad”, and so, being the helpful sorts they are, decided to boss you around about it. You know, for your own good.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-25.

March 22, 2024

QotD: Degenerative progressivism

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

There are many “progressives” who will claim to have been assaulted if someone makes a remark in their presence which troubles their conscience but who think it is a world of hilarity when an elected official, or anyone who has in fact accomplished something, is made a figure of fun at the hands of an actual assault. There is nothing surprising in this. Only another sad example of what now passes for a once noble aspiration of the left to find dignity in people’s lives no matter their station or situation.

Ghost of a Flea, “Law and order”, Ghost of a Flea, 2005-06-21.

March 21, 2024

Banksy is “a jester to the woke court, the cheeky clown of received opinion”

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

As a certified curmudgeon, I’ve never seen the attraction of Banksy’s various bits of artistic … whatever it is properly called. At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill helps put Banksy into proper perspective:

I guess it wasn’t enough that us polluting plebs are chided for our transgressions against Mother Nature every time we watch a BBC nature documentary. And by politicians of all persuasions. And by columnists who summer in Tuscany. And by aristocratic arseholes called Edred and Poppy who won’t even let us enjoy the football or the snooker without cutting through the fun with their cut-glass tones to remind us we’re hazardous to Gaia. No, we also have to be walloped with an eco-sermon as we cycle to work down the Hornsey Road.

Unsurprisingly, the elites are lapping up Banksy’s latest missive in spray paint. A Radio 4 expert on Banksy – I’m dying – raved to the BBC that his message is “clear” and it “really resonates”: “Nature’s struggling and it is up to us to help it grow back.” The founder of Haringey Tree Protectors – I’m not making this up – gushed in the Guardian about how Banksy’s “stark image” reminds us that “in the climate crisis we just can’t continue treating our tree canopy with such savagery”. Pruning leaves is barbarism now. You just know that when green-fingered Charles III saw the Banksy pic during his morning peruse of the papers he gave it a kingly nod of approval.

That’s what Banksy is, isn’t it – a jester to the woke court, the cheeky clown of received opinion? He larps as rebellious, sneaking about in the dead of night to put up his technically illegal “art”, but in truth he has not once voiced an opinion that wouldn’t win noisy murmurs of approval at a soirée in Daunt Books. Brexit is bad, Israel is insane, the paparazzi are scum, don’t vote Tory, capitalism is a rat race, Save the Planet – honestly, browsing Banksy’s back catalogue of stencilled eyesores is like being stuck in a lift with one of those craft-beer centrists who says cockwomble a lot.

His Finsbury Park fake tree captures the conformist thinking that hides in his guerrilla-art performance. It’s a public-information campaign masquerading as graffiti. “Save the trees” – Rishi Sunak could say that. He has, in fact. He recently announced a ban on felling trees without “proper consultation”. Banksy’s tree also has that whiff of hysteria that always attends dinner-party efforts to alter the behaviour of the lower orders. The idea that we’re obliterating trees with “savagery” is bullshit. London’s a forest. Literally. The UN defines a forest as anywhere that is at least 20 per cent trees – London is 21 per cent trees. The “world’s largest urban forest”, as Time Out puts it.

So relax, Banksy. Chill in the no doubt cushy pad you bought from selling your graffiti to philistine luvvies. London’s fine. If anything were to make me leave this great city, it wouldn’t be a want of trees but the oversupply of your sixth-former propaganda. Only a few months ago he put up a “STOP” sign in Peckham decorated with three drones to signal his desire for a ceasefire in Gaza. Radical.

Look, it can be irritating when artists decide to épater la bourgeoisie. That slogan, dreamt up by the decadent poets of late 19th-century France, means to take glee in scandalising the middle classes. But surely Banksy’s style of pandering to the middle classes – let’s call it servir la bourgeoisie – is worse? He is simply smuggling the received wisdom of society’s self-styled betters under the cover of edgy graffiti. From his anti-Brexit mural showing a workman sadly chipping one of the yellow stars from the EU flag to his image of Brits pledging their allegiance to the flag of Tesco – consumerism is slavery, y’all – his every utterance is chattering class to the core.

March 20, 2024

Google’s unmissable leftward biases

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

Tom Knighton on a recent New York Post article calling out Google for their strong political biases and how they inform everything that Google and its subsidiaries and affiliates do:

Once, the company was well-known for having the phrase “Don’t be evil” painted on a wall in their headquarters. It’s a noble sentiment, but apparently, it’s now more like “Don’t be evil.”

That’s pretty clear after what we learned from the New York Post:

    Google has been putting its thumb on the scale to help Democratic candidates win the presidency in the last four election cycles during which it censored Republicans, according to a right-leaning media watchdog.

    The Media Research Center published a report alleging 41 instances of “election interference” by the search engine since 2008.

    The MRC published a report accusing Google of having “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship.”

    The report comes weeks after AllSides conducted an analysis which found that news aggregator Google News skewed even more off the charts in 2023.

    Google has also come under fire after its Gemini AI image generator produced “woke”-inspired and historically inaccurate images such as black Vikings, female pope and Native Americans among the Founding Fathers.

Now, Google denies the claims and someone close to the company took issue with the methodology used to detect this supposed interference.

But the truth of the matter is that there’s absolutely no reason to believe Google on this because we’ve seen enough of it previously to know better.

For example, YouTube has a profoundly leftward bias. The site is notorious for silencing right-wing voices while allowing leftists to get away with trampling community standards willy-nilly. YouTube is owned by Google, which means they’re at least tacitly endorsing the strategy.

From there, it’s not difficult to see the mothership taking on a similar role, if not originating it. They’re just able to hide it easier.

But even there, we can see it.

I use Google’s news feed regularly, particularly for my work at Bearing Arms. It’s common for me to look up “gun rights” and the first article that shows up, unless I set it for the most recent stories, be one treating them as a negative thing.

So yeah, I have no doubt that Google is playing favorites.

The worst part is that there isn’t anything that can be done through the legal system as far as I’m aware. But that doesn’t mean someone there didn’t realize what they are doing is wrong.

Most probably didn’t, though. They believe the Holy Progressive Cause is so vital, so unerringly good, that they can and should do anything to serve it. That includes displaying a staggering degree of bias in the service of what you believe to be the greater good, your business be damned.

But they knew it would be considered wrong by a great many people, which is why they’re hiding it.

March 19, 2024

Canada’s new international role: the object lesson in failure and tyranny

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

Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the foreign impressions of Canada’s descent into the west’s object lesson in what not to do in almost every area:

In just the last week, there have been two separate columns in British newspapers framing Canada as a model of what not to do.

Both were inspired by the tabling of Bill 63, the Liberals’ Online Harms Bill. The Spectator said that it effectively engendered the founding of a Canadian “thought police”. The Telegraph cited it as evidence that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete”.

This didn’t used to happen. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian politics were famously inaccessible to the wider world. For Canada’s 2008 federal election, The Spectator covered it with a blog post that mostly mused on how nobody cared. “It’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections,” it read.

But now – on topics ranging from assisted suicide to housing affordability to internet regulation – it’s not infrequent that Canada will be cited in foreign parliaments and in foreign media as the very model of a worst-case scenario.

It was just six months ago that The Telegraph scored a viral hit with a mini-documentary framing the political situation in Canada as a “warning to the West”.

“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has sought to position itself as the global bastion of progressive politics,” reads a synopsis for the film Canada’s Woke Nightmare, which has garnered more than five million views.

The documentary notes that Canada is now at the absolute global vanguard of progressive issues including harm reduction, assisted suicide and gender ideology.

[…]

If the Online Harms Act is suddenly garnering headlines across the rest of the Anglosphere, it’s not because Canadian politics are inherently interesting to the wider world. Rather, it’s because Bill C-63 – just like any number of Trudeau policies before it – is proposing to do things that no other Western democracy has yet proposed.

While plenty of Canada’s peer countries have hate speech controls, Bill C-63 was able to raise even European eyebrows with life sentences for “advocating genocide”, and a provision for police to mandate house arrest merely on suspicion that a Canadian was likely to commit a hate crime.

The Wall Street Journal, for one, profiled the bill as a real-life example of the 2002 film Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian future in which citizens are jailed for “pre-crime”.

Or in the critical words of The Spectator, “this legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime … if that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is”.

March 18, 2024

QotD: Self-hatred (aka “false consciousness”)

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

The expectation that a commentator’s views must be in lockstep with his or her ethnic, religious, or sexual identity is always distasteful — particularly when blacks, women, gays, or Jews are labeled “self-hating” when they refuse to toe the perceived party line.

Cathy Young, “When Jews wax anti-Semitic”, Boston Globe, 2005-02-07.

March 17, 2024

Problematic art, again

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

David Thompson calls to our attention yet another outbreak of problematic racist white supremacy in … landscape paintings?

Hampstead Heath by John Constable, 1820.

Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.

The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour”. And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative”. Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white”, or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.

But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

March 15, 2024

Woke Shakespeare?

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

Andrew Doyle wonders if even the Bard can survive the incessant assaults of the ultra woke, the new Puritans:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

The puritans had it in for Shakespeare. With the exception of the plague, they were perhaps the most persistent threat to his livelihood. As far as these zealots were concerned, the theatre was a realm of “adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons”.

These were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histrio-Mastix (1633). He was eventually to get his way in 1642 when the puritan-led parliament shut the theatres down. When the ban was lifted on the accession of Charles II, older plays had to be dusted off to satisfy the public’s appetite for drama. It was Shakespeare’s work that proved to be the most popular, establishing a trend that has never waned.

Now the bard faces another breed of puritan, more censorial than the last. We are living in conformist times, and inexplicably those in the creative arts have turned out to the be most conformist of all. Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrongthink is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Virtually all productions of Shakespeare’s plays I have seen in recent years have been mangled to promote the regressive fashions of our time. Today’s audiences are seeing a vague shadow of these masterworks through a narrow and uninspiring prism.

Even so, many of us are reluctant to give up on the theatre altogether. We tolerate the gender-neutral toilets that nobody asked for, the rainbow lanyards worn by ushers, and the little sermons in the programmes by directors who think their job is to educate the masses. One friend remarked that so long as the preaching only amounts to 20% of the show’s content, he is willing to accept it. I suppose it’s like going for dinner in an especially pious household, and having to put up with a long-winded prayer before a delicious meal.

Theatregoers might have a better experience if they opt for productions of plays written many years before this new state religion took hold. Shakespeare, as a playwright who has never been bettered, is surely the safest choice. In his work we find ourselves unmolested by ideology. We know nothing of Shakespeare’s opinions on matters of politics or religion, and attempting to glean any suggestions from his works is futile. I think A. L. Rowse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare “saw through everybody equally”. Neither prince nor pauper escapes his sceptical gaze.

March 14, 2024

“The dark world of pediatric gender ‘medicine’ in Canada”

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

The release of internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) revealed just how little science went into many or most juvenile gender transitions and how much the process was being driven politically rather than scientifically. Shannon Douglas Boschy digs into how the WPATH’s methods are implemented in Canada:

An undercover investigation at a Quebec gender clinic recently documented that a fourteen-year-old girl was prescribed testosterone for the purpose of medical gender transition within ten minutes of seeing a doctor. She received no other medical or mental health assessment and no information on side-effects. This is status quo in the dark world of pediatric gender “medicine” in Canada.

On March 5th Michael Shellenberger, one of the journalists who broke the Twitter Files in 2022, along with local Ottawa journalist Mia Hughes, released shocking leaks from inside WPATH, the organization that proclaims itself the global scientific and medical authority on gender affirming care. The World Professional Association of Transgender Health is the same organization that the Quebec gender clinic, and Ottawa’s CHEO, cite as their authority for the provision of sex-change interventions for children.

These leaks expose WPATH as nothing more than a self-appointed activist body overseeing and encouraging experimental and hormonal and surgical sex-change interventions on children and vulnerable adults. Shellenberger and Hughes reveal that members fully understand that children cannot consent to loss of fertility and of sexual function, nor can they understand the lifetime risks that will result from gender-affirming medicalization, and they ignore these breaches of medical ethics.

The report reveals communication from an “Internal messaging forum, as well as a leaked internal panel discussion, demonstrat(ing) that the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care. These internal communications reveal that WPATH advocates for many arbitrary medical practices, including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults. Its approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science.”

These findings have profound implications for medical and public education policies in Canada and raise serious concerns about the practices of secret affirmations and social transitions of children in local schools.

These leaks follow on the recent publication of a British Medical Journal study (BMJ Mental Health), covering 25-years of data, dispelling the myth that without gender-affirmation that children will kill themselves. The study, comparing over 2,000 patients to a control population, found that after factoring for other mental health issues, there was no convincing evidence that children and youth who are not gender-affirmed were at higher risk of suicide than the general population.

In the last week, a second study was released, this one from the American Urology Association, showing that post-surgical transgender-identified men, who underwent vaginoplasty, have twice the rate of suicide attempts as before affirmation surgery, and showing that trans-identified women who underwent phalloplasty, showed no change in pre-operative rates of suicide and post-operative.

These and other studies are now thoroughly debunking the emotional blackmail myths promoted by WPATH, that the absence of sex-change interventions, suggest that gender-distressed children are at high risk of taking their own lives.

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