Quotulatiousness

December 18, 2024

Justin Trudeau at bay

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

However much you may dislike the man — and there’s just so much to dislike — it’s impossible to write him off no matter how bad the situation may look. In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains to non-Canadian audiences what has been going on in the Deranged Dominion lately:

Justin Trudeau’s government could be at the point of collapse. And a social media post from Donald Trump about tariffs may have set off the latest in a chain of dominoes for Canada’s prime minister.

On November 25, Trump posted on his platform Truth Social that, as one of his first executive orders, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders”. Four days later, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump for dinner. Although the content of their discussion has not been made public, Trump’s tariff threat may have landed a death blow to Trudeau’s cabinet.

On Monday morning, Trudeau’s most important ally — his number two, finance minister Chrystia Freeland — resigned in a fiery letter directed at her boss, which she posted on X.

“Our country today faces a grave challenge,” she wrote. “The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 percent tariffs. We need to take that threat extremely seriously.” She continued: “That means pushing back against ‘America First’ economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring”.

The same morning, Trudeau’s housing minister Sean Fraser also announced his departure, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. This brings the total number of cabinet members who’ve resigned under Trudeau in 2024 to nine. But a walkout from Freeland, his most trusted lieutenant, who was expected to release her fall economic statement Monday, is by far the biggest. That such a loyal servant who has worked for Trudeau since 2015 would resign so publicly shows just how deep the rot is these days. Freeland stood by the prime minister as his popularity began to tank in February 2022 when Canadian truckers protested his harsh Covid vaccine mandates. She even authorized the debanking of those protesters, freezing their bank accounts as a means of punishment [NR: with no legal authority, it must be noted].

Now, her resignation is feeding feverish speculation that the longtime progressive darling could finally be on his way out, amid his sinking popularity and the country’s economic slump. By Monday night, a prominent member of Trudeau’s Liberal Party, Anthony Housefather, went on TV to say the prime minister is “past his shelf life“.

The modern Furies

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Greek mythology, the Erinyes (the Furies) — euphemized as the Eumenides (the “Gracious ones”) were the goddesses of vengeance. You may dismiss the ancient Greeks and their beliefs, yet they often encapsulate hidden wisdom for those who know how to interpret their stories. Today, as Janice Fiamengo points out, we have no need for mythological Furies, as they’re frequently embodied in otherwise ordinary women:

The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies
Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862, in the Chrysler Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Feminist uproar over Trump’s election was easy to predict, and not long in coming. Within ten days of the election, Clara Jeffery wrote in Mother Jones that “Women are furious — in a Greek mythology sort of way“. Taking examples from TikTok, Jeffery chronicled abundant “sorrow, disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage”, which many women vowed to exorcise on men: “‘If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue‘”, she quoted one.

In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.

No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.

At least one group of women gathered physically in Wisconsin to shout their angst and anger at Lake Michigan, and there have already been tentative (though apparently less enthusiastic than formerly) plans for a revival of the anti-Trump Women’s March protests, in which women with vulgar placards and pink hats exhibited their “collective rage“.

Women’s rage is all the rage.

It is not enough, it seems, for these women to say that they are disappointed by Trump’s win, and certainly inadequate for them to state strong disagreement with his policies or style. Expressing evidence-based positions is the sort of thing a rational person would do, and significant groups of women appear increasingly uninterested in rational talk or behavior. Instead, they reach for the most extreme language, tone of voice, postures and actions to express what feminist journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called the “visceral” “body horror” produced by the Trump victory, including the “profound physical revulsion” Cosslett and many of her sisters allegedly feel simply as a result of seeing one of Trump’s tweets (talk about fragility!).

Like so many feminist pundits telling us of women’s “horror” and “fury“, the emphasis is squarely on feeling and the female body, as if to bypass the intellect and the will altogether. The idea some feminists once scorned — that women are less reasonable and self-controlled than men — seems to have become a feminist axiom.

December 14, 2024

Matt Gurney’s final thoughts from the Halifax International Security Forum

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the things I regret about being totally broke is that I can’t pay for a full subscription to The Line, which is one of Canada’s best sources of (relatively) unbiased commentary on current events both in Canada and around the world. This is the third instalment of Matt Gurney’s report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum (earlier parts linked here and here):

This next one is going to be very brief, since it’s really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of “The world is currently a mess”. Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can’t speak to what I didn’t see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.

A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas’s attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I’d like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims’ phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.

“I thought I had seen the worst,” the doctor told the assembled audience. “But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes.”

Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.

He also discussed his own professional path which he regrets didn’t include a lot of traditional on-the-spot reporting on tragedies and interviewing survivors, as he feels he doesn’t have a good “game face” for those times when he now finds himself doing that kind of work:

I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I’m not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine’s history, but I have absolutely no doubt who’s the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I’ve also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.

I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.

But I have concluded that they’re screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn’t have the heart to tell them that. I don’t even know how I’d begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.

During a meal in Halifax, a woman who’d flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn’t been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn’t remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they’d happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.

And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren’t even of sympathy. I wasn’t overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I’d get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain’t a war zone.

This woman doesn’t get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.

History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.

And alas, we’ll deserve it.

December 9, 2024

“… liberalism has become a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses”

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

Freddie deBoer patiently explains why outrageous over-the-top emoting isn’t a useful or productive way to argue for your political views:

I’ve written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. I’ve focused on it not because I necessarily think the issue itself is particularly important, but rather because it’s so emblematic of what liberalism has become: a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses, a collection of well-intentioned people who mistake the responsibility to fight discrimination for a broad, vague duty to shield certain groups of people from any criticism.

For the book I’m currently writing, I’m talking to a ton of people in the broad world of mental health — psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, policymakers, journalists, fellow patients — and I’ve brought up the TikTok DID community over and over again. Remarkably, not one person defends the phenomenon as a true expression of genuine illness, not even a few disability rights activists I’ve talked to, who usually have an ethic of never questioning a disability claim. Countless normie liberals I’ve chatter with, over the past several years, have also accepted my basic position that these young women don’t actually have dissociative identity disorder. But, also, almost no one is willing to affirmatively say anything about this dynamic themselves. Indeed, The Verge reported that many experts have decided that the costs of speaking out about that whole culture just aren’t worth it. And so you have a set of behaviors that no one defends but that no one feels comfortable criticizing, thanks to the pathologies of 21st century liberalism and online rage. That’s what I’m really here to talk to you about today.

I don’t, of course, want to be too harsh on the individual young women who have turned a debilitating and controversial disorder into an opportunity to put on vertical video fashion shows; they’re just kids and kids do stupid shit, sometimes even genuinely offensive shit. What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off“. I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious. First, despite whatever vibe shift we may be living through, it remains the case that in progressive discursive spaces, saying the wrong thing is still very fraught and can result in accusations of bigotry that are personally and professionally damaging. Second, liberals have trained themselves to avoid any position at all that might be construed as siding with the enemy, as a matter of in-group identification. Take it from me: “A lot of people in Gen Z appear to be lacking in emotional resilience, in a way that’s unhealthy for them” has become, in the internet-soaked mind, “Gen Z is a bunch of snowflakes”, and so a ton of liberals recoil at that idea. Can’t appear to make a concession to the enemy! I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.

All of this is bad, and you only have to look at how incredibly harsh certain slices of “queer fandom” can be to see what I’m talking about.

November 29, 2024

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya nominated as Director of the US National Institutes of Health

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

From the point of view of the establishment, the barbarians are well and truly inside the gates, as President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee as Director of the National Health Institutes.
Photo by Taleed Brown, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons.

Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists”.

Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.

As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.

Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.

“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.

Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)

November 26, 2024

“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other”

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

I don’t mean to make poking fun at Twit/X alternative sites like Bluesky a regular thing, but the performative flouncing as progressives announce they’re leaving Twit/X for a more congenial — for which read “censorious” — site continues to amuse.

Bluesky welcomes former Twitter/X luminaries

I’m going to take a pop at a sub-group of flouncers, though, the ones moaning about being called hurty words. This includes a number of individuals who genuinely seem to think it’s their role in life to go looking for nasty bigoted shite, then report it to Twitter’s overlords (and now Bluesky’s overlords as well, if things like [the image on the right] are anything to go by).

“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other” seems a fair assessment.

And yes, I have to engage in a little ritual genuflection here, because I have genuinely been called a large number of nasty names in my life. And despite that, dibber-dobbers still give me hives.

If I had a quid for every use of “dyke” (and related) sent my way, I would be matching millions with sundry oil sheiks, and that’s before we get to the ire directed at any columnist with whom ordinary members of the public disagree. I am old enough to have received thousands of abusive letters (about both novels and columns), some of them written in green ink. People are allowed to dislike me and my kind, or to argue that I’ve written a load of cobblers. They’re also allowed to dislike you and your kind. It would be astonishingly easy for me to wander over to Arabic Twitter and report lots of sincere Muslims for saying bigoted things about homosexuals. I don’t engage in this behaviour because I don’t expect the world to be my friend.

Relatedly (and this is directed at ethnic minorities as well as fellow gayers), a lot of folks from “historically disadvantaged groups” have become dab hands at dishing it out over the last twenty or so years. A necessary corollary of this behaviour is “learn to take it”. Yes, that means you. People are not going to stop saying hurty words to each other. People are also going to judge you based on the behaviour of your worst activists and vote accordingly (see recent US election results).

What of the core claims being made? Is Twitter genuinely worse now, a victim of what goes by the name “social media enshittification“?

Well, yes and no. I know many people dislike what Musk has done to Twitter, but when he made “likes” private, he stopped his site being used as a vector for HR vindictiveness (something about which HR mavens have complained, by the way, at least privately). It’s also now substantially more difficult to generate a pile-on using a quote-tweet, as well as possible to read tweets (but without interaction) from people who are hot on the block button.

The latter change has allowed me to establish why Baroness Nicholson had me blocked. I’d always wondered, because she’s had me blocked for as long as I can remember, yet like me, she can legitimately be described as “sex realist” or “gender-critical”. Musk’s change meant I was able for the first time to see an entire thread underneath one of her tweets, so learned that she blocks anyone — friend and foe alike — for swearing. Women who know her socially and get on with her well “IRL” have been blocked for saying “bugger” and “shite” on Twitter.

Well, glad that’s cleared up. Good to know.

The worst change Musk has made involves deboosting external links. This first emerged in April last year, in response to Substack releasing Notes (which Musk considered so derivative of Twitter’s code as to be a “clone”). At first only direct links to Substack were affected. If you had your own domain — as I do — you were fine. However, external link deboosting is now being applied uniformly. Everyone from a local tradesman selling new driveways and conservatories to the BBC and the Spectator now has to make use of some tedious version of “link in following tweet” or “link in bio”.

If Musk doesn’t fix this, he will legitimately lose the journalists and commentators currently on the site. Those people came, originally, to share stuff from their mastheads, and this applies regardless of politics. I first gained a following thanks to professional experience — yes, it was once fine for commercial solicitors to natter on the socials about the Enterprise Investment Scheme and how it related to start-ups and spin-outs etc — and later through Speccie columns along with a couple of books. A tweet from Tim Harford praising my second novel (with a link, bless him) went “viral” and led to thousands of sales. Pieces for the magazine proved popular. Just as I enjoyed Twitter for other people’s links, other people paid me the same courtesy.

Spotted on Instapundit:

November 25, 2024

In search of bluer skies

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

In The Critic, Benedict Spence channels his inner David Attenborough to document the majestic migration of American progressives from their habitual grazing lands to friendlier territory:

What will Twitter do without its smuggest inhabitants?

And so we come to it again. It is that time of year when we put on our David Attenborough voices, and talk in low, slightly wistful tones about the great migration that is about to unfold. Everywuh you look, creatures great and small are beginning their treacherous juhneys across a vast and inhospitable wilduhness to happiuh hunting grounds and more pleasant pastures under the clear blue skies. The hullabaloo that accompanies them is impossible to miss — across the plains, the cries go up from elders to alert the rest of the herd of the imminent departure.

Though some may never return from this arduous trek, most will. Disavow yourself of the mental image of elephants and zebras crossing the African savannah — that’s not what we’re here for. This migration is metaversical in nature: it is time, once more, for people to announce they are leaving Twitter.

This year’s exodus came later than usual, prompted by Donald Trump’s bulldozer of a victory over Kamala Harris in the US presidential election, with grown men and women across the country — and its second largest airbase, the UK — deciding that Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and the Orange Man’s endorser-in-chief, was at least partly responsible for this travesty. Not the economy, you understand, oh no. Nor immigration, nor the preoccupation by Democrats with shoulder-chewingly stupid culture war issues the average voter thinks are at best mad and at worst satanic.

No, no, it is all about Musk — who is at once the world’s wealthiest evil genius and also a gibbering moron, according to people who thought Cacklin’ Kamala was a born winner. Musk, we are told, has ushered in a stream of “hate” ever since buying Twitter and rebranding it 10, warping the minds of the impressionable and irreparably damaging the future of the West by facilitating Trump’s return.

This is not Musk’s only crime, though. He has also tweaked other aspects of X’s features, including the block function, making it possible for those on the receiving end of this internal exile to see the posts of their nemeses again without being able to interact with them. This was for a fair few blockees how they were reminded of the existence of their blockers, many of whom they had long since forgotten. Often, in the same instance, it was also how they learned said blocker was off somewhere else.

Musk has also moved to erode the power of institutions and individuals who lived their lives high on the power of credentialism, and the authority this brought them. The changing of blue tick criteria and the emphasis on community notes now means many who were once feted on the site by virtue of who they were must now work harder for their dopamine. But above all else, Musk has refused to silence a swathe of right wing voices who always existed but lived their X lives in the shadows. The platform became more right wing, and for many that was just too much. Having been reliably told throughout the past year that the crude reply guys were just Russian bots and that their gal would ride over them on a wave to victory, they and their allies over here — the infamous adults back in charge of the UK — are doing the grownup thing and going off in a huff to play somewhere else.

November 23, 2024

They just can’t stop themselves from taking the MAGA bait

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

Kat Rosenfield in UnHerd discusses the inability of American leftists from rising to the (obvious) trolling from pranksters on the right:

Carol Kane and Billy Crystal as Valerie and Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, 1987.

The current state of the American political discourse is best understood through the lens of the 1987 movie The Princess Bride — or more specifically, one scene therein. It’s the part where Miracle Max is decompensating over the insistence of his wife, Valerie, on saying the word, “Humperdinck”, the name of the movie’s evil prince, who is also Max’s most loathed nemesis.

“Why would you say that name!” he screams.

“What? Humperdinck!?” she shrieks back, gleefully.

One gets the sense that these two do this a lot — her Humperdincking, him screaming, which only makes her Humperdinck harder. That this problem has two obvious solutions only illuminates its intractability. Valerie could stop saying the name, but then again, Max could also choose not to react to its every utterance as if he’s been electrocuted. That neither of them are making different choices suggests that something about this dynamic serves them both.

I thought of this scene when the first “Your body, my choice” post from a male Trump voter skittered insect-like across my timeline in the wake of the election — closely followed by a handful of “My body, his choice” remixes by savvy OnlyFans models hoping to cash in on the moment. This crude riff on the feminist war cry that once defined the battle for abortion rights was akin to an inaugural shout of “Humperdinck!”, designed explicitly to trigger a meltdown among liberals. And lo: if you do an internet search for the phrase now, around 5% of the results are of people posting it and 95% are critics freaking out in response. “Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers,” The Guardian announced, while CNN warned: “Attacks on women surge on social media following election”. And The New Yorker, for whom the phrase is a harbinger of a “coming era of gender regression”, described it as “A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right”.

The phrase “irony-poisoned” in that last headline — which graces an essay by Jia Tolentino — struck me as an especially savvy bit of rhetoric. It functions as a preemptive strike against the obvious counterpoint to all this panic. Namely: “your body my choice” is a repulsive thing to say, but also the furthest thing from a legitimate threat.

The men behind these posts are not rapists-in-waiting, announcing their intent to commit sexual violence; they are trolls, gleefully trolling away in the hope of making people Mad Online. But if Tolentino knows this is bait (and she clearly does), she nevertheless cannot help taking it, hook, line, and sinker. The piece is imbued with a near-religious sense of horror at seeing the feminist catechism of “my body my choice” twisted by nonbelievers into something unfathomably malignant. This is beyond distasteful; it is heretical. And unlike the provocations in which the millennial Left once delighted, back in the days when one measly crucifix soaked in urine could trigger a weeks-long meltdown among religious conservatives, this little joke (Tolentino argues) is simply not funny.

November 15, 2024

“OK, you’re here to accuse me of causing offence but I’m not allowed to know what it is. Nor can I be told whom I’m being accused by? How am I supposed to defend myself, then?”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the current rate, future generations will have to be persuaded that Franz Kafka wasn’t actually and Englishman:

Franz Kafka’s The Trial opens with the novel’s protagonist, Josef K., being arrested early in the morning by two officers of the law. When he asks them to explain their reasons, one of the men tells him: “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time.” He never finds out, of course. Even after the story’s abrupt and chilling end, the reader is none the wiser as to why any of this has occurred.

And so it is hardly surprising that Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson described it as “Kafkaesque” that she was visited by two police officers on the morning of Remembrance Sunday. She was informed that she had been accused of “stirring up racial hatred” by means of an unspecified social media post from a year ago. Anyone who is familiar with Allison’s writing will understand just how improbable this is. Her account of the discussion that followed could have been lifted directly from The Trial itself:

    “What did this post I wrote that offended someone say?” I asked. The constable said he wasn’t allowed to tell me that.

    “So what’s the name of the person who made the complaint against me?”

    He wasn’t allowed to tell me that either, he said.

    “You can’t give me my accuser’s name?”

    “It’s not ‘the accuser’,” the PC said, looking down at his notes. “They’re called ‘the victim’.”

    Ah, right. “OK, you’re here to accuse me of causing offence but I’m not allowed to know what it is. Nor can I be told whom I’m being accused by? How am I supposed to defend myself, then?”

The term “Kafkaesque”, like “Orwellian”, has become something of a cliché, precisely the kind of writing that Orwell continually urged us to avoid. But what else are we to call it? I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens’s account of his visit to Prague in 1988 to report on the Communist regime. He had decided in advance that he would be “the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka”. As it transpired, this resolution was impossible to fulfil. During one of Václav Havel’s “Charter 77” committee meetings, police burst into the building, threw Hitchens against a wall, and arrested him. When he asked for the details of the charge, he was told that he “had no need to know the reason”. How else could he describe this other than “Kafkaesque”? As he was later to say at a lecture at the University of Western Ontario: “They make you do it”.

This is all very well for the Státní bezpečnost, but I’m not sure even Hitchens could have imagined that such behaviour would become routine in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century. I have written previously on my Substack about the phenomenon of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), but it’s worth repeating here the key points. Estimates suggest that the police in England and Wales have recorded over a quarter of a million NCHIs since the practice began in 2014. Those who are so branded are often not informed, and these can show up on DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks, thereby impeding their employment prospects. According to the Times, three thousand people are arrested each year in the UK for offensive comments posted online, even in cases where a joke had clearly been intended. This is because Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 criminalises online speech that can be deemed “grossly offensive”. Whatever that means.

November 14, 2024

Germans are perfectly free to post anything to the internet as long as it doesn’t criticize politicians

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

Once again, eugyppius helpfully illustrates the broad range of freedoms German citizens enjoy in their online activities and the totally reasonable and not-at-all-insane restrictions to those rights:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It’s been a while since I last wrote about the highly advanced democratic freedoms that we enjoy in Germany. Here in the Federal Republic, the police will never fine you or harass you or raid your house for criticising the government – except, of course, when they do all of these things, because you happened not even to tweet, but merely to retweet, the wrong image.

Stefan Niehoff is a 64 year-old retiree who lives in the small town of Burgpreppach in Lower Franconia. He runs an X account with 1,200 followers, where he occasionally expresses his dissatisfaction with the present state of German politics and with the Greens in particular.

In June 2024, he retweeted this image …

… which appropriates the logo of a popular cosmetic brand to suggest that Robert Habeck, our Green Minister of Economic Affairs, might be a “professional moron”.

Habeck and his associates are notorious for pursuing internet users who share highly illegal content of this nature. They brought Niehoff’s retweet to the attention of authorities, and the Bamberg public prosecutor’s office decided that Niehoff was indeed guilty of a criminal speech offence. The Bamberg District Court then issued an order permitting the police to search Niehoff’s residence and confiscate his electronic devices.

In this order, reproduced by NiUS, the judges explained their rationale as follows:

    On the basis of the investigations to date – in particular the screenshots of the posts and the investigations into the user of the X-account “IchbinFeinet” – there exists the following suspicion of a criminal offence:

    The accused is the user of the account “IchbinFeinet” on the internet platform X with approx. 901 followers.

    At a time that cannot now be determined more precisely, in the days or weeks before 20 June 2024, the accused published an image file using his account that showed a portrait of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs with the words “professional moron” … in order to defame Robert Habeck in general and to make his work as a member of the federal government more difficult.

    The public prosecutor’s office affirms the public interest in criminal prosecution.

    This is punishable as defamation directed against persons of political life in accordance with §§ 185, 188 para. 1, 194 StGB. …

    The measures ordered are proportionate to the severity of the offence and the strength of the suspicion and are necessary for the investigation …

Armed with this document, Schweinfurt police showed up at Niehoff’s house at 6:14am yesterday morning and took his tablet. Police later told the press that the raid was one in a series of enforcement actions – part of something called “an action day against cybercrime”. By harassing a lot of cybercriminals all at once, police and prosecutors hope to send a message to the people of Germany that they cannot just retweet anything, and that they may only retweet the right things.

November 13, 2024

“The term ‘Maple MAGA’ is a derogatory slur used by Canadian liberals”

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

I have to admit I was only vaguely aware of the “Maple MAGA Mafia” identified by Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Christia Freeland, so I’m glad Fortissax is here to provide some background for me:

An insignificant yet loud minority among right-wing Canadian populists on Xitter are calling themselves “Maple MAGA”, with some expressing a reasonable desire for Canada to restore itself with a “MAGA ideology”. The term “Maple MAGA” is a derogatory slur used by Canadian liberals, coined by Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister — Wicked Witch of the North — and is not intended as a term of endearment. The more extreme accounts are even calling for the outright annexation of Canada by the United States, which all Canadians should oppose if they value their dignity and self-respect. I’d invoke the memory of our Fathers of Confederation, the innovation behind the Avro Arrow (once the world’s most advanced bomber interceptor), possessing the fourth largest navy in the world after WWII, Samuel de Champlain’s great expedition and exploits, the Filles du Roi, and the Loyalist Americans who, like Aeneas leading the Trojans after the fall of Troy in the Iliad, marched north to Canada after the Revolutionary War to found a new civilization. Yet, if they already knew or identified with our glorious past, they wouldn’t be so quick to support an even greater loss of independence and sovereignty to the almighty American empire.

Make no mistake, I admire and appreciate the United States, if that wasn’t clear. There are no people more similar to the Canadian people in the world than Americans. They are Canada’s largest trading partner. Both countries were born of Albion’s Seed, sharing the North American frontier experience, and forming a family of five great Anglo nations spread on four continents, once united under a single imperial government, and now vassals of its successor. Had the United States not elected Donald J. Trump, it would have continued down a path unopposed, as bad or worse than Canada under the liberal party. There is a very real opportunity for this American Caesar to reverse much of the socioeconomic and cultural damage wrought upon it by enemies foreign and domestic. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now X, once the bias was removed quickly became a right-wing dominant forum where truths long-feared would embolden many, everywhere to speak their minds. Elon fulfilled the ancient internet prophecy that all public forums with no censorship become right wing, simply because of the objective truths.

Elon didn’t turn it right-wing, he simply removed the government censorship of the DEI cultist board, and their allied state goons in the intelligence agencies from suppressing stories and information from reaching the American public, and the world. The Counter-Elite, a loose alliance of the Paypal Mafia, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and MAGA populists, in America are a force of nominal good, a positive for right-wing dissidents around the world fighting their own existential struggles against local managerial regimes. If Trump and the cast of would-be heroes succeeds, the United States will enter an era of unprecedented recovery for the forseaable future—though it’s not a magic bullet for the civilizational decline as recently written about by fellow Substacker Dave Green, aka The Distributist.

The United States was Canada’s first, and arguably still its greatest, existential threat — ironically, mostly through no fault of its own, but rather due to its Jupiterian gravity beside little Canada. Canada may be the second-largest country on the planet after the Russian Federation, but it’s a small nation, with only an estimated 28 million ethnic Canadians, 90% of whom live within 200 kilometres of the U.S. border, as much of the country is an inhospitable wasteland of spruce bog and rock, almost impossible to settle due to permafrost. The habitable areas are extremely hot in summer, or extremely cold in winter. Canadians have often looked southward at the Titan with a sense of fatalism. Many intellectuals and journalists over the centuries have wondered when, if, how, and where Canada would meet what felt like its “inevitable” dissolution into the hands of the Yankees. Despite these fears, that dissolution never came.

Yet whispers of provinces seceding — making the “great escape” from the failing post-national economic zone Canada has become to join the booming, recovering United States — are on the lips of some Canadians. If not outright secession, than abandoning the monarchy, establishing a constitutional republic modelled off of the United States of America, copying the constitution, and pathetically copying its culture. I believe the majority of right-wing Canadians would favour constitutional reform to enshrine our own equivalent of legally protected freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. These are ancient English traditions of the “Yeoman” or Free Man, with roots visible in free speech and weapon-carrying practices across the ancient Germanic world. They are by no means exclusive to the United States. Canada and England had considerably relaxed gun laws until recent decades, and changes like these wouldn’t require us to sacrifice our sovereignty to the U.S.

November 5, 2024

It’s not really about Peanut and Fred

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

Tom Knighton explains that the online furor isn’t really about poor Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon … but they’ve become a trigger for a lot of simmering anger over the abuse of power and the unequal application of justice:

By now, you’ve probably already heard about Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon. If you haven’t, then your blood pressure is probably thankful.

The short version is a man from New York rescued a baby squirrel, named him Peanut, and raised him. The squirrel became an Instagram star, apparently, thanks to cute pictures of him wearing cowboy hats and so on.

A woman from Texas, apparently, reported the man for having Peanut and a raccoon named Fred. Anonymously, at the time.

As a result, state officials stormed the house, took Peanut and Fred from their home, interrogated the man and his wife as if they were terrorists, tossed the house like officials were raiding a drug kingpin’s house, questioned the wife’s immigrant status (she’s from Germany), then euthanized both animals, supposedly to test for rabies.

And as a result, a lot of people are pissed.

I’m pissed.

Now, I’m someone who has put meat in the freezer by my own hand. I have no delusions about where meat comes from and I’m not some crazed animal rights activist that thinks animal lives are the same as human lives.

But that doesn’t matter because none of the outrage is really about the squirrel.

No, it’s about justice.

See, the issue with Peanut here is the uneven application of the law.

For Peanut, the letter of the law had to be applied. An animal raised inside of a home with other animals raised inside of the same home, none of which showed even an inkling of being diseased were taken from their loving owners because of some BS regulation that shouldn’t have applied in this case.

This after four years of more uneven application of the law.

For example, we’ve seen George Soros-backed district attorneys vow not to prosecute people for some crimes. Some of those are victimless crimes, which doesn’t bother me, but it also includes things like shoplifting, which is anything but victimless. As a result, shoplifting got so bad and brazen in some places that many chains just shuttered locations because they couldn’t make a profit.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we were locked in our homes and told we couldn’t go to church, to school, to visit our dying family in the hospital, to do anything except for approved activities, and even then, there were rules we were forced to follow.

All of that went out the window when a career criminal died at the hands of a police officer and mobs throughout the nation set fire to entire neighborhoods. At that point, the deadly virus that was akin to ebola and the Black Death really wasn’t that bad and people should totally be fine with rioters destroying communities.

Very few of them were arrested and even fewer were convicted over their actions during those riots.

[…]

See, on every level, our nation of laws has been corrupted so that only some people get a pass while others don’t. Peanut and Fred didn’t have to be seized like they were. While the law is the law, anyone could see that there was no threat to people or the animals. There was absolutely no reason for any of it, but the law was suddenly the law whereas New York is notorious for giving certain parties a pass when it comes to the law.

Then we have them questioning the wife’s immigration status, whereas they turn illegal immigrants back out onto the streets after committing actual crimes. It’s rank hypocrisy at best.

But the truth is that while the law itself provides equal protection, the application of that law is anything but equal. There, some animals are more equal than others, and so Peanut and Fred were murdered by the state.

We love our pets. We cherish them. We understand the sense of loss when people lose a pet.

October 23, 2024

More on “Millennial Snot” from Freddie deBoer

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

The conversational tone of the perpetually online cohort — called “Millennial Snot” by Dudley Newright in a guest post at The Upheaval — has Freddie deBoer nodding in agreement:

This piece at The Upheaval is useful. Though I think the turn towards explicit partisan politics at the end goes badly wrong, it’s very perceptive and correct when it comes to its object of interest, “Millennial snot”, an important concept and appropriate term. Though there are many examples offered in the piece, you already know what Millennial snot is. It’s some overeducated shithead with an email job saying “Uh, I’ve unpacked the privilege knapsack in intersectional space, OK sweetie? Get on my level.” “Whoa, did you just say ‘handicapped’? That’s a big yikes, chief.” It’s a form of engagement, quintessentially Millennial, that’s defined by a combination of self-righteous liberal politics, out-of-date internet lingo, terms from university humanities departments that have become mimetic in the past decade, and a performative, shit-eating quality of being perpetually amused with oneself. Anyone who was on Twitter between 2012 and 2022 or so knows Millennial snot. It’s fake courage as meme, a rehearsed facsimile of self-confidence deployed by people who’ll never know the real thing.

Writer Dudley Newright invokes Tom Scocca’s famous “On Smarm” essay, which is a useful reference. Scocca is far too sharp and well-spoken to engage in Millennial snot, but his essay helped contribute to a permission structure for congenitally not-witty people to engage in what they thought was wit. Scocca’s essay counterposed smarm against snark, presumably because Gawker was constantly accused of popularizing the latter; he defended the value of blank meanness and universal sarcasm as the antidote to false, sunny positivity that exists to foreclose on criticism. Scocca’s piece was a sensation among his Twitterati peers, which is unsurprising given that it was ultimately an essay in defense of being deliberately unhappy and they were all unhappy people. The whole debate looks rather funny to me, in hindsight, a battle royale between a couple of meaningless abstractions that provoked a lot of trivial people to man the imaginary battlements. The week that Gawker published Scocca’s essay, they had been running post after post about “Batkid“, a charming little fellow with cancer who was given a Make a Wish-style experience that Nick Denton’s crew lustily wrung some clicks out of — that is, textbook smarm. Commerce!

Anyway, part of the basic confusion of that little cultural moment was to suppose that snark (reflexive, dismissive negativity) and smarm (treacly positivity in which power might hide) were antonyms. But Millennial snot demonstrates that they were always kissing cousins, easily integrated, two complementary spices begging to be added to the same chowder. Millennial snot is smarmy in that it depends on the speaker’s certainty that they are the good, righteous being in every exchange, and it is snarky in that it operates under a logic of being limitlessly disaffected, an asserted perpetual superiority that’s always believed to be apparent to everyone. It’s a simulation of being witty and cutting the way people are in movies, impressed with the self and literally nothing else, like asking ChatGPT to make you into the cool kid at the back of the class that you’ve always longed to be. Millennial snot so easily integrates two supposedly opposed approaches to communicative integrity because it’s the vocabulary of people who have no particular interest in integrity. They simply want to feel powerful, if however briefly, if only in insincere and meaningless online exchanges.

    “Imagine not knowing that I’m a tenure-track professor in Problematic Studies. Not a good look. Read some bell hooks and get on my level.”

The purveyors of Millennial snot attempt to fool themselves and the world about their level of self-belief with two primary tools: one, through embracing the preening sanctimony of contemporary left politics, acting as though they simply are the campaigns against racism or injustice or need, themselves, expressed of course in an obfuscatory academic vocabulary; two, through the language of droll disdain that has become the default idiom of the 21st century as insecurity has become the universal marinade of American elite life. It’s the fusion of modern progressivism’s self-celebratory nature, the discourse norms of our most overeducated age cohort, and the reflexive retreat into triviality as a self-defense strategy. It’s an inescapable style of online engagement even though the heyday of this way of talking is now firmly in the past, just like the heyday of the Millennials who popularized it. It’s the idiom of a failed generation, the unconvincing puffery of millions of unhappy front-of-class kids who have spent their adulthoods expecting the pure beauty of their creative souls to someday be rewarded with fame and riches, somehow, just like Orson Welles giving Kermit and the rest of the Muppets the standard rich and famous contract. It floats the ineradicable belief that success is just around the corner, exactly the way it seemed to be when they wore jumpsuits to warehouse parties in 2005.

I’m not a fan.

October 11, 2024

German free speech – only applicable when used to criticize the “far right”

Filed under: Books, Germany, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

C.J. Hopkins discovers the stark contrast between actual freedom of speech and German freedom of speech:

The first rule of New Normal Germany is, you do not compare New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. If you do that, New Normal Germany will punish you. It will sic the Federal Criminal Police on you. It will report you to its domestic Intelligence agency. It will ban your books. It will censor your Tweets. It will prosecute you on fabricated “hate-crime” charges.

I know this, because that’s what happened to me. I broke the first rule of New Normal Germany. I compared New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. I did it with the cover artwork of my book.

Yes, that’s a swastika on the cover. A swastika covered by a medical mask. I tweeted that artwork in 2022. The German authorities prosecuted me for that, and convicted me for that. So, now I’m a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.

That’s the second rule of New Normal Germany. You never, ever, display a swastika. Displaying a swastika is not “in Ordnung“. Displaying swastikas is totally “verboten“.

Unless you are the Health Minister of New Normal Germany, and you’re comparing your political opponents to the Nazis. Or unless you are a popular German celebrity, and you’re comparing the Russians and their supporters to the Nazis. Or unless you are a mainstream magazine, and you’re comparing German populists to the Nazis.

In which case, displaying a swastika is fine. And is not “verboten“. And definitely not a “hate crime”.

And that’s the third rule of New Normal Germany. If you agree with the government, obey their orders, and parrot their propaganda, you are not a “hate criminal”. If you are the government, like an actual minister in the government, like the Minister of Health, you’re definitely not a “hate criminal”. And, if you are part of government’s propaganda apparatus, needless to say, you’re also not a “hate criminal”.

However, if you criticize the government, or if you compare the government to Nazi Germany, and if you do that using your book-cover art featuring a swastika behind a Covid mask, then you’re absolutely officially a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.

October 10, 2024

The malignant persistence of snotty Millennial slang into adult life

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

At The Upheaval, a guest post by Dudley Newright tries to decipher what the hell all of the permanently online Millennial snots are saying:

Back in May, a black studies professor – an academic of the type who writes dissertations about the semiotics of Beyonce – “clapped back” at one of her peers, a white man who had dared complain that all the jobs in his corner of academia had been given to minorities. Their grating exchange went viral, and the poor schmuck certainly won’t be finding work now.

Setting aside the content of the argument, I was struck by how these people spoke to one another:

    “I mean, I’m sorry –“

    “Let’s be *very* clear here”

    “So true 🙄”

    “You’re so right 🙄”

    “This is an *extremely* bad look for you”

    “Umm, frankly…”

These are middle-aged PhDs with prestigious careers, talking like snotty teenagers or sassy black drag queens. Note the overuse of sarcasm, emphasizing asterisks, exclamation points, and pregnant pause ellipses to denote how “over it” they are. They all speak in the dramatic tone of the mean girl.

    “History PhD here, and uh, this thread is…a lot!”

You see this language, and these people, everywhere today. You know them by the “fluent in sarcasm” in bio. The PhDs, the columnists, the policy wonks and Wonkettes, the assorted professional quippers and clappers back – public intellectuals did not talk this way twenty years ago. Lionel Trilling did not call things “brat”. This is new. Yet this bumptious patois is how our ascendant elites talk now.

I call it “Millennial Snot”.

It’s the defining feature of our degraded public discourse, and the apotheosis of secular enlightenment liberalism. The last 20 years of economic decline and consolidation of blue America into fake laptop work culminated in tweets like this:

What is Millennial Snot? Where did it come from? How did it become the prevailing liberal voice? What exactly is the matter with these people? And are we going to have to suffer this obnoxious style forever?
The nerds who never got over high school

Liberals who have time to goof around on social media all day are probably nerds with more-or-less fake laptop jobs. They aren’t working class, otherwise they’d be working all day, but they aren’t terribly successful either, otherwise they’d have better things to do. The Bluesky-American sits awkwardly in the middle, and this feeds his resentment. He got good grades. He’s credentialed, and believes he’s smarter than his boss. He should be running things. If only society weren’t so dumb. If only society were fair, like when he was in school, when a kind teacher rewarded his intelligence and punished ne’erdowells.

Pity the “front row kid”, the wordcel who grinds his youth away for straight A’s only to find that the spoils of the market go to the back row goober who inherits his dad’s used car lot. If only there was some way to turn society upside down, so the front row kid could be on top. If only society could be more like grade school …

That would be a start, but the nerd doesn’t just want to be recognized for his intelligence. He also desperately wants to be cool. He wants to prove to the world that he won’t be shoved into a locker any more. He’s with it now, he uses the latest teen slang, he “understands the assignment”. This is how you get balding hetero professors saying stuff like “she ate and left no crumbs”, and “big mad” and other phrases that will sound embarrassingly dated in a few weeks.

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