Quotulatiousness

November 17, 2022

TikTok (aka “Digital Fentanyl”)

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

Geoffrey Cain at Common Sense on the malign influence of the massively popular Chinese social media platform on US politics and culture:

The midterm elections of 2022 were many things — a shocker for Republicans, the possible end of Donald Trump, a win for centrist Democrats. Overlooked is the fact that they were also a big turning point for TikTok, the Chinese social-media platform.

TikTok is not only the most trafficked news app for Americans under 30. It was also a major political force this year. Exhibit A: the Senate race in Pennsylvania, in which both Democrat John Fetterman and his Republican rival, Mehmet Oz, deployed TikTok, with Oz railing against the cost of vegetables in one video, and Fetterman slamming Oz for saying “crudité” in a highly effective response. Other candidates who took to TikTok this cycle include Tim Ryan, who ran for Senate in Ohio, and Val Demmings, who ran for Senate in Florida. (Both are Democrats.) The Democratic National Committee, early this year, launched its own TikTok channel.

Now, there are calls to shut it down. Just yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau has “national-security concerns” about TikTok. Last Friday, the top Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, called TikTok “China’s digital fentanyl”. The day before, Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Mike Gallagher, both Republicans, introduced legislation banning the social-media platform, noting that the data of millions of Americans is “effectively controlled” by the Chinese Communist Party. Earlier in the month, Carr also said the U.S. government should ban TikTok.

It’s about time.

Ever since TikTok began expanding into the United States, more than four years ago, we’ve known that it was a disaster waiting to happen. What’s shocking is that it’s taken this long to get serious political attention.

I know all about this. I used to be an investigative reporter in China. In December 2017, I first heard from friends on social media that a Chinese tech unicorn called ByteDance was planning on entering the American market with a new app. It was called TikTok.

Alongside its sibling app, Douyin, which operates only in China, TikTok was poised to sweep up the Gen Z audience in America, with its preference for video snippets of dancing celebrities, DIY projects, cooking demonstrations, skincare routines and other Gen Z’ers singing and dancing in their parents’ kitchens. As the fastest growing social media app ever, it rankled American competitors Facebook and YouTube, which were banned in China.

By October 2018, ByteDance was the world’s most valuable startup, with a valuation of $75 billion.

Four years later, ByteDance is worth $300 billion. TikTok is expected to reach 1.8 billion users globally by the end of the year. And a quarter of American adults under 30 get their news from the social-media app.

There’s a good reason for this success. TikTok has developed one of the most powerful machine-learning algorithms ever — one that is able to reveal people’s unknown desires to themselves.

Every day, every hour, every waking minute, TikTok is hoovering up seemingly infinite bits of information about its users — their tastes, hobbies, political views, sexual preferences, their facial structure, the sound of their voice. Ostensibly, all this is meant to provide a better product. It should also be noted that this information can be used for spying, influencing millions of users — even waging war. Every time we swipe for the next video, every time we post videos of our own, we are helping the world’s most sophisticated police state learn more about us.

November 8, 2022

QotD: Marx was right about “commodification”

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

Marx was right. Not for the right reasons, and not in the way he intended, but right for all that. Think of one of those medieval plague doctors in the bird masks. They think the plague was caused by a conjunction of the planets, and they want to give you a poultice made from sheep rectum to cure it … so, you know, they’re wrong about big important stuff. But they’re right about the critical, live-or-die thing: You’ve got the plague, and they know it better — and, crucially, faster — than anybody.

Marx was right about three critical things: Commodification, alienation, and class consciousness (again, bearing in mind that “right” in this context means “correct diagnosis”, not “correct in every particular”).

If it helps, you can swap in financialization for commodification. Briefly, it’s the ever-accelerating phenomenon we’ve all observed: burning through social capital in order to make a buck. Things that should not be subject to market forces are not only turned into commodities, but soon become the only commodities, or the only ones that matter.

Consider pretty much everything about the “laptop class”. E.g. the laptop itself. It commodifies time. Now you have the “ability” to work even when you shouldn’t. It is now virtually impossible to leave work at the office. For those of us who are independent contractors, this is a nice bonus — we can invoice every minute of our time, which means we can work as much (or as little) as we want to. For everyone else, though …

See what I mean? It’s simply understood that you’re never off the clock. Throw in the rest of the paraphernalia of laptop-class work — smartphone, social media, etc. — and nobody thinks twice about sending you stuff on a Saturday, a holiday, at your kids’ dance recital, at a funeral, whatever. People still have the residual social habit to say “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry for your loss” when you explain that you couldn’t get to that email because you were at your Mom’s funeral … but not for long, because you can already hear it in their voices: “Yeah yeah, sucks to be you, now will you please get me that TPS report!”

Same way with social media. You will be fired for expressing certain kinds of opinions, even on your “private” accounts, because the assumption is that there is no privacy. You don’t own you. You are a wholly-owned subsidiary of GloboPedo, and while we’re tempted to get outraged at the kinds of opinions for which you will get fired, that’s why those old Leftists — the ones we’re increasingly coming to resemble — would say “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The kind of opinion is epiphenomenal; it’s the principle that matters, because you are not a commodity.

Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.

November 3, 2022

Twitter’s evolution from protecting celebrities to shaping “the narrative”

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

At Common Sense, Walter Kirn recounts his own recognition of how Twitter has changed since he first opened an account in 2009 (incidentally, the same year I did … but unlike Walter, I still have about the same number of followers there as I did in my first year):

The platform belonged to celebrities back then, who hawked their movies, albums, and TV shows in words that were their own, supposedly, fostering in fans a dubious intimacy with figures they knew only from interviews. One of these stars, an investor in the platform, was Ashton Kutcher, the prankish, grinning actor who became omnipresent for a spell and then, stupendously enriched, largely vanished from public consciousness. It seemed that Twitter had sped-up fame such that it bloomed and died in record time.

The power of the new platform struck me first in 2012. Two incidents. The first one, a small one, occurred in Indianapolis, where I’d gone to watch the Super Bowl. I attended a party the night before the game at which many Hollywood folk were present, including an actor on a cable TV show who played a roguish businessman. The actor was extremely drunk, lurching about and hitting on young women, and it happened that my wife, back home, whom I’d texted about the scene, was able to read real-time tweets about his antics from other partygoers. A few hours afterward she noticed that these tweets had disappeared. Instant reality-editing. Impressive.

I concluded that Twitter was in the business not only of promoting reputations, but of protecting them. It offered special deals for special people. Until then, I’d thought of it as a neutral broker.

[…]

My own habits on Twitter changed around that time. Observational humor had been my mainstay mode, but I realized that Twitter had become an engine of serious opinions on current affairs. On election night in 2016, while working at another journal, Harper’s, I was given control of the magazine’s Twitter feed and asked to think out loud about events while following them on cable news. I saw early that Trump was on his way to victory — or at least he was doing much better than predicted — and I offered a series of tart remarks about the crestfallen manners of various pundits who couldn’t hide their mounting disappointment.

The official election results were still unknown — Clinton retained a chance to win, in theory — but before the tale was told, my editors yanked my credentials for the account and gave them to someone else. The new person swerved from the storyline I’d set (which reflected reality) and adopted a mocking tone about Trump’s chances, even posting a picture of a campaign hat sitting glumly on a folding chair at his headquarters in New York City.

It struck me at first as pure denial. Later I decided that it was far more intentional — that my left-leaning magazine wished to preserve the illusion for its readers that the election’s outcome was unforeseeable, possibly to maintain suspense or so it could later act startled and disturbed in concert with its TV peers. Its Twitter feed, as a record of its reactions, had to align with this narrative.

I grew convinced that night that Twitter meant trouble for me. It had become an opinion-sculpting instrument, an oracle of the establishment, and I knew I would end up out of step with it, if only because I’m of a temperament which habitually goes against the flow to challenge and test the flow, to keep it honest. Mass agreement, in my experience, both as a person and a journalist, is typically achieved at a cost to reality and truth.

October 19, 2022

Jonathan Kay reviews 18 Months by Shannon Thrace

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

At Quillette, a review of a new book on the breakdown of a once-happy marriage when one partner decides that mere transvestism isn’t enough any more and becomes transgendered:

The trans community is diverse, especially when it comes to attitudes toward sex. As writer Angus Fox noted in a seven-part Quillette series, When Sons Become Daughters, some biologically male trans-identified teenagers live a sexless existence; and are drawn to puberty blockers and androgynous aesthetics precisely because they seem to offer safe harbour from male sexual development. In the case of middle-aged men who abruptly adopt a trans identity later in life, on the other hand, it can be the opposite: the presentation is often hyper-sexualized.
(more…)

October 10, 2022

Janice Fiamengo on the #MGTOW affair – “In short, men who ‘go their own way’ have decided that they need women even less than the mythical fish needed its wheeled transport”

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

Recently, much impassioned wailing and howling has been directed at new Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre for his media team’s use of the notorious, misogynistic, coded-hate-speech metatag #MGTOW on postings to social media. Janice Fiamengo calls out the bold hypocrisy of most of the critics:

Remember “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle?”

Popularly credited to feminist icon Gloria Steinem, the slogan embodied the insouciance and independence claimed by Second Wave feminists. Women could get along just fine without men (though not without their tax money, as it turned out — more on this later) and lesbian feminists like Adrienne Rich (in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”) explicitly called on all women to withdraw their caring from men as an act of female solidarity.

Nice, eh?

Anyone who objected to the anti-male rhetoric was dismissed as an apologist for patriarchal oppression (“Do you have a problem with equality?”), and generations of young women were given the message that wanting to love and be loved by a man was a betrayal of the sisterhood. What else was one to make of Professor of Law Catharine MacKinnon’s claim, in her 1989 essay for the journal Ethics, that “The major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it” (p. 336-337).

For decades, feminists in Canada have been given a free pass to vilify men as a group. In 1978, women’s groups held the first “Women Reclaim the Night” march in downtown Vancouver. It was a raucous, aggressive, property-destroying affair culminating in the symbolic murder of a stuffed male “Rapist” mannequin who was “literally stomped to shreds” by woman warriors.

[…]

So it is rather rich, now, five decades into the feminist revolt, to see pundits and political commentators huffing and puffing in outrage about MGTOW, dubbed a “misogynist men’s rights movement” or a “far-right misogynistic online movement”, and calling on newly-minted Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre (who, alas, seems eager to oblige) to disavow them. MGTOW stands for Men Going Their Own Way, and it was a happy day for the mainstream feminist-left when Global News allegedly discovered that Poilievre’s team had tagged many of his videos with the acronym.

The hypocrisy is off the charts.

It’s doubtful that any of the commentators getting on their high horses knows anything about MGTOW except the hysterical nonsense feminists have cooked up. MGTOW is not an official movement, far less an “organization”, as Poilievre mistakenly called it. It has no recognized leadership, no designated spokespersons, no political program, no lobbying power, and no public presence. It is not actually interested in “men’s rights” except to point out that men don’t have any. It has no philosophical connection with incels. It is basically a loose (mainly online) affiliation of men who have decided to check out of women’s lives.

Aren’t feminists always saying that they want men to stop dominating them, subjugating them, pestering them, harassing them, controlling them, and making them uncomfortable? That’s what MGTOW are all about.

October 9, 2022

What do you call it when a military-funded organization intervenes in US domestic politics? It’s “anti-fascism“, obviously

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

Chris Bray continues digging into the activities of a Department of Defence-funded operation at the University of Maryland:

I wrote this morning about the disinformation expert Caroline Orr Bueno, a postdoctoral fellow at ARLIS — the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland (who is identified as Caroline Orr on her ARLIS profile, so that’s the name I’ve used for her). Orr aggressively and repeatedly argues against the American political right, framing conservative politics as fascist and describing Donald Trump as an authoritarian figure. She makes a political argument, and she does it often.

This is true not only of her social media posts, but also of her published work. She’s a pro-Antifa political partisan (more about this in a moment), specifically arguing against the right and against Donald Trump rather than only studying disinformation across the political spectrum.

Now: ARLIS, where Orr works, is primarily funded by the Department of Defense, and its “core sponsor” is the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. You can download the 2021 annual report from ARLIS here […] You can find a description of the laboratory’s $46 million in funding on page 26 of that report:

So a research center largely funded by the military, and specifically sponsored by and aligned with the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, is arguing against a likely candidate for President of the United States and his supporters, participating in the work of shaping a political narrative while drawing DOD funds. Orr’s national security work as a military intelligence-funded researcher is to make sure people know that Donald Trump is bad.

This scholar has military funding:

Military intelligence is paying for politics. Military-funded academic researchers have the same academic freedom every other academic researcher has, and Orr has a right to express political opinions. But she’s doing government-funded research into the academic topic of Trump is bad so don’t support him, and that’s a misuse of federal funding and military authority. I assign the failure to the institution, not to the person. (The irony of military-funded academic leftist politics is not hard to spot, but that sort of thing doesn’t seem to matter anymore.)

October 3, 2022

“Still, what about the boys?”

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

Janice Fiamengo on the far-from-impartial emphasis of concern on young people being pushed toward radical “solutions” to gender dysphoria:

Last year, conservative educational institution Prager U published “Why Girls Become Boys“, a short video by journalist Abigail Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, published in 2020. Shrier’s focus is evident from the titles: girls. Previously, Shrier had been profiled in an interview with Candace Owens when she was still working on the book. Though the interview is now three years old, its canvassing of teen transitioning — in a discussion that moves from concern about girls being “seduced” into trans, to anger at society’s failure to protect girls from boys who transition — provides a fairly accurate representation, I believe, of conservative positioning on this subject. Girls who transition are seen as victims; while boys who transition are seen (if they are seen at all) as predators.

This double emphasis is clear in the interview. Shrier and Owens describe the collusion of media influencers, the public school system, woke punditry, and medical authorities to encourage girls (but not boys, it seems) to consider their gender identity “fluid”. Feelings of discomfort are too readily interpreted as signs of a trans identity. Girls can be made to believe themselves trans very quickly, sometimes simply from viewing one or more internet videos; and schools are not required to tell parents if their daughter begins identifying as male. From age fifteen, girls can find gender clinics willing to prescribe testosterone without their parents’ consent; a girl can have her breasts amputated as early as age sixteen. The lifetime of dependency on hormones (their consequences unknown), the risky surgeries, and the tragic missed opportunities — of motherhood in particular, but even of having breasts — were emphasized by both pundits.

It’s almost impossible to imagine these two women discussing the tragedy of losing a penis, of being denied the opportunity to become a father, of being denied the joy of male sexuality.

From this point, the conversation moved seamlessly into discussing the victimhood of girls forced to share their private spaces — and of course their sporting competitions — with biological males (often called “men” as in “Men are invading girls’ sports”). These males are not discussed as vulnerable innocents duped into taking body-altering hormones or undergoing dangerous surgeries. No imaginative effort was spent on why these boys want to live as trans female. The underlying assumption seemed to be that boys’ transition, far from being an attempt to relieve real distress, is an act of appropriation of female experience. The boys were depicted as aggressors who invade girls’ locker-rooms and deny girls opportunities (or, even worse, masquerade as trans in order to prey on girls sexually). Are there boys made uncomfortable in their change rooms or other private spaces by the presence of biological girls? The question seems never to have occurred to Shrier and Owens.

Shrier and Owens agree in decrying feminism for failing to protect girls and for failing (allegedly) to affirm femininity and girlhood. “Girls aren’t being told how wonderful it is to be a girl!” Their own feminist — or at least female-centered — assumptions are clearly evident in their conviction that the trans phenomenon is about multiple harms to females, harms which must always take precedence over the legitimate needs and experiences of males. And in fact, contrary to what Shrier and Owens seem to believe, there are many feminists who vehemently denounce biological male incursions into female bodies and spaces; many of them, such as Meghan Murphy, Julie Bindel, and Sheila Jeffreys, to name only a few, advocate from an avowedly anti-male perspective.

Shrier might respond that the overwhelming majority of adolescents who believe themselves to be trans are female (as she states in her Prager U video). This may be true (a recent Psychology Today article puts the number at greater than 80% female) but does not mitigate my objection. Teen suicide is about 80% male (more on this later), but it is hard to imagine concerned pundits ignoring the troubles of girls. Many discussions of teen suicide, in fact, make much of the fact that girls attempt suicide more often than boys, downplaying the fact that boys carry out their suicides in such distinctively high numbers. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objection to a focus on girls’ difficulties in adolescence — except when it improperly ignores and even maligns boys.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the vast majority of young people seeking “gender-affirming” therapy were males hoping to become trans-females. In the last few years, that proportion has flipped completely.

September 30, 2022

“To maintain the illusion of free, all our online activities are sinking into spam, scam, and sham”

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

Ted Gioia on the insatiable growth of predatory behaviour from providers of “free” content online:

The biggest trick the Devil ever played was convincing people that online stuff is free. But the Devil always collects, sooner or later — and we are starting to learn the actual terms of this cursed deal.

Consider some recent news stories:

  • YouTube has been testing users’ willingness to watch 10 unskippable ads on a video. And the ads aren’t spaced out. They come at you, one right after the other, at the outset — because Google wants to be paid first, even if the video sucks.
  • Nobody wants ads on iPhone, but they’re coming. Executives at Apple are allegedly planning to triple the ad revenue from phones.
  • “For some Google searches literally the whole screen on Google is ads.”
  • TikTok can track a user’s every keystroke, and Beijing has “access to everything”.
  • “Scams are showing up at the top of online searches.”
  • Snapchat has been forced to pay $35 million for storing and selling users’ biometric information without permission.
  • Even if you pay for ad-free streaming, Spotify inserts ads in podcasts.
  • Ads are coming to Netflix too.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

This is what happens when “free” really isn’t free — but consumers prefer to stay in denial. Go ahead and rob me, just make sure I’m not looking when it happens.

It’s even worse than that. Web users are now hooked on free — and like all addictions, this one is far costlier than you realize at the outset.

You have more leverage when you negotiate an actual price. When I cancel a paid subscription, the corporate provider always comes back with a special offer to get me to reconsider. But how much bargaining power do I have if I refuse to click on those “terms and conditions” that always come with the free stuff?

I’ll answer that for you — none at all.

How bad will it get? YouTube described its ten unskippable ads as a “test” — but this wasn’t done in a laboratory or with volunteers. They just forced it on users, and watched them squirm. And squirm they did.

In fact, one person reported a 12-ad blitz.

This wouldn’t be so bad if it was just one business or sector of the economy that played these games. But this is the de facto business model for the entire digital economy. To maintain the illusion of free, all our online activities are sinking into spam, scam, and sham. Everything from sending an email to sharing a photo gets monitored and monetized by big tech companies — and often you’re the last person to find out what the real price is.

September 28, 2022

There are two kinds of people online talking about mental illness: those suffering with mental illness and those glorying in the attention they get for faking it

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

Freddie deBoer on the phenomenon of mental health culture online and the two primary kinds of participants (my headline over-dramatizes the case he’s actually making):

I was not, at first glance, inspired with confidence by this Washington Post piece on online mental illness culture. The piece has a header image of a “mental illness influencer” lounging in bed, taking a selfie. I’m someone who’s committed to de-glamorizing mental illness, and I’ve been begging people to stop romanticizing pathology for a long time. I suppose there’s an implied critique in that photograph, but it’s not ideal.

On substance, Tatum Hunter’s piece fails the way so many others have failed in this milieu: it studiously avoids the possibility that some people who talk about their mental illnesses online don’t really have them. I’m not specifically talking about simple fraud and lies, which I suspect are rare, but rather the weird combination of hypochondria, Munchausen’s syndrome, and social contagion that we see all around us in these spaces. Spend any time at all in these communities on Tumblr or Tik Tok and you will find many people, most of them young, who are using mental illness as a means to self-define, to differentiate themselves from the hordes of other people they see online who are just like them. I’ve written again and again about why it’s a bad idea to want to be your mental illness, and it’s even worse to want to be mentally ill, period – not just bad for other people, but bad for you. But there are people who have become influencers and garnered hundreds of thousands of followers on their apps of choice by performing mental illness. People use their disorders to chase clout. That’s just reality.

Hunter considers the problems of misdiagnosis, of self-diagnosis, of people undertaking mental health care on the advice of internet randoms rather than under the care of a doctor, but nowhere does she seriously consider the possibility that the basic problem for many people is that they believe they have mental disorders they don’t in fact have. I think doing so is seen, at this point, as a kind of identity crime, and thus unlikely to be found in the Washington Post.

But hypochondria exists. Munchausen’s syndrome exists. Psychosomatic illness exists. I can get people to admit to those realities in the abstract, now, but they stay entirely in the abstract – to suggest that any group of people is suffering under those conditions, rather than under authentic mental illness, is treated as a sin. This was my biggest disappointment with Ross Douthat’s book on his chronic illness, which I quite liked overall; Douthat never stops his narrative to ask whether any of the people who believe themselves to be sick from chronic illness actually aren’t. (Surely he himself suffered, but because of the woo and mysticism found in that space, an accounting was necessary.) And I don’t know how we confront the spiraling number of people claiming to have illnesses for which there are no objective tests without being frank about the existence of hypochondria, Munchausen’s, and psychosomatic illness – particularly when people insist on deepening the social incentives by giving the sick more and more attention.

Even for the authentically ill, online culture is fraught. The meta-problem with pieces like that in WaPo, obviously, is that by giving certain members of this community the glamour shot treatment (literally in this case), they’re creating direct incentive for people to make illness their identity -and to not get better. Young people understand the allure of being seen; they don’t yet understand the horror of being frozen in other people’s gazes. They don’t understand the costs of being defined. There have been many opportunities for me to make myself the mental illness guy, certainly including financial opportunities. Perhaps I’ve already fallen into that trap, despite my efforts to remain a generalist. But I’ve fought to avoid that because I know just how painful and limiting self-definition can become. I’m sorry to pull wizened old guy here, but young people don’t understand. They don’t understand that pinning yourself down that way can produce a kind of horror.

September 10, 2022

In a stormy and uncertain world, at least the New York Times remains consistent

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

Ed West on hearing the news that the Queen had died:

“Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II” by Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Unusually for me, being a cold-blooded Englishman whose emotional range is somewhere between Peter Cushing in Star Wars and Tywin Lannister, I found myself crying over the news yesterday evening. I cry more as I get older – presumably it’s all the testosterone draining away – and I shed tears for the Queen.

Her Majesty’s death was announced around 6.30 GMT. Soon after 9pm the New York Times pops up on Twitter, in its usual sanctimonious, scolding told, telling us that “We should not romanticize her era”, because, according to a Harvard professor “The queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.”

Our Queen has died, a deeply-loved, politically-neutral figure who many saw as being like another grandmother. She was someone we all knew throughout our lives, who felt like a protective figure, associated with the political stability that our island has enjoyed for so long.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, the voice of America’s progressive establishment thought it appropriate to immediately publish this article, with the headline “Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire”, something literally no one even considered or thought about. The British Empire may be long dead but it lives on, timeless and immortal, in the minds of New York Times editors.

Much has been written about the changing social mores of the Queen’s reign, but I think it’s still generally accepted that you wait until a person is buried before launching criticisms of their legacy; at the very least a couple of days. Yet while even the Kremlin managed to send some kind words on Queen Elizabeth’s passing, the New York Times went straight in with the yes-she-will-be-mourned-but.

As head of the Commonwealth, the Queen “put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval. As such, the queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.”

“We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name,” the historian concludes, but “xenophobia and racism have been rising, fueled by the toxic politics of Brexit. Picking up on a longstanding investment in the Commonwealth among Euroskeptics (both left and right) as a British-led alternative to European integration, Mr. Johnson’s government (with the now-Prime Minister Liz Truss as its foreign secretary) leaned into a vision of ‘Global Britain’ steeped in half-truths and imperial nostalgia.”

Andrew Sullivan found himself similarly moved at the news (after a bit of mandatory Trump-bashing to start the column):

[In the 2016 TV show The Crown] I found myself watching the life of an entirely different head of state: a young, somewhat shy woman suddenly elevated to immense responsibilities and duties in her twenties, hemmed in by protocol, rigidified by discipline. The new president could barely get through the day without some provocation, insult, threat or lie. Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human — for the rest of her life.

The immense difficulty of this is proven by the failure of almost every other member of her family — including her husband — to pull it off. We know her son King Charles III’s views on a host of different subjects, many admirable, some cringe-inducing. We know so much of the psychological struggles of Diana; the reactionary outbursts of Philip; the trauma of Harry; the depravity of Andrew; the agonies of Margaret. We still know nothing like that about the Queen. Because whatever else her life was about, it was not about her.

Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel today is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Narcissism is everywhere. Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example.

With her death, it’s hard not to fear that so much she exemplified — restraint, duty, grace, reticence, persistence — are disappearing from the world. As long as she was there, they were at the center of an idea of Britishness that helped define the culture at its best. Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained a sphinx, hard to decipher, impossible to label. She was not particularly beautiful or dashing or inspiring. She said nothing surprising. She was simply the Queen. She showed up. She got on with it. She was there. She was always there.

Whatever else happened to the other royals, she stayed the same. And whatever else happened in Britain — from the end of Empire to Brexit — she stayed the same. This is an achievement of nearly inhuman proportions, requiring discipline beyond most mortals. Think of a year, 1992, in which one son, Andrew, divorced, a daughter-in-law, Sarah Ferguson was seen cavorting nude in the tabloids, a daughter, Anne, separated, another son’s famously failed marriage, Charles’, dominated the headlines, and your house burns down. Here is how Her Majesty “vented”:

    1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an “Annus Horribilis“.

Dry, understated, with the only vivid phrase ascribed to a correspondent. Flawless.

She was an icon, but not an idol. An idol requires the vivid expression of virtues, personality, style. Diana was an idol — fusing a compelling and vulnerable temperament with Hollywood glamor. And Diana, of course, was in her time loved far more intensely than her mother-in-law; connected emotionally with ordinary people like a rockstar; only eventually to face the longterm consequences of that exposure and crumble under the murderous spotlight of it all.

Elizabeth never rode those tides of acclaim or celebrity. She never pressed the easy buttons of conventional popularity. She didn’t even become known for her caustic wit like the Queen Mother, or her compulsively social sorties like Margaret. The gays of Britain could turn both of these queens into camp divas. But not her. In private as in public, she had the kind of integrity no one can mock successfully.

September 8, 2022

Liz Truss replaces Boris Johnson

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

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill looks at some of the many, many tasks already piled on new British PM Liz Truss’s desk in the wake of Boris and the pandemic:

So it’s prime minister Truss. No big surprise there. What we need next, though, is something that would be very surprising, almost unfathomably so. We need a PM who can buck the crisis of political will and take clear, firm action to save the country from economic collapse and existential malaise. Is that Truss? I’m sceptical, but we shall see.

At first glance, Truss would seem to be singularly unsuited to the task at hand. That task is nothing less than a revolution of will, a rediscovery of the political mettle that has been glaringly absent in Britain these past few decades. We live under a political class that is cautious, bereft of daring; which is hyper short-termist, more concerned with dodging controversy in the present than laying out a plan for the future. The energy crisis is the bastard offspring of this evacuation of vision from politics.

And in Truss we seem to have a leader who is more technocratic than visionary, more given to following the political consensus than to shaking things up. As the Telegraph put it, Truss has been a “dutiful servant”. Despite being something of a Tory party outsider – considered by many insiders to be “a bit odd” – Truss has always “diligently backed the consensus within the party”. She seems overly media-oriented, too. She’s clearly had her gauche edges smoothed by media training and she devotes a lot of energy to “savvy social-media use”. A politician who prefers consensual calm to bold action, and who is more concerned with virtual likes than real-world impact, is not what crisis-ridden Britain needs.

And yet, Truss is far from alone in lacking political audacity, in seeming to prefer the small bureaucratic task of managing public life rather than overhauling it. In this, she’s fairly typical of today’s managerial elites. Also, Truss’s political clarity seemed to improve during the leadership contest. She even became a little more daring in what she said – for instance, by bristling against Net Zero policies. No, this doesn’t prove she’s the leader we need, but it is a reminder that politicians often find themselves, and their cojones, in the heat of battle. Will the pressures of the crisis similarly bring out Truss’s slightly edgier side? We should hope so.

On that crisis, let us be clear: it is incredibly serious. It is the most serious crisis Britain has faced in decades. The political and media elites seem unwilling to acknowledge just how deep and menacing the crisis is. Even their focus on households’ rising energy bills suggests they do not appreciate the enormity of what is unfolding. Yes, millions are worried about how to keep the lights on this winter, but the impact of the energy crisis on business and industry will be graver still. Numerous businesses look set to go under, precipitating economic collapse and mass unemployment. Choosing between heating and eating will be a luxurious memory in the event of the joblessness and poverty that would follow such a calamity in British capitalism.

On a somewhat lighter note, it turns out that Liz Truss isn’t the same person as @LizTruss on Twitter:

August 13, 2022

Tired – Orange Man Bad. Inspired – Orange Man Radioactive!

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

Jim Treacher isn’t a Trump fan, didn’t vote for him, and even he is being coerced into very grudging support of the man, thanks to the incredibly ham-handed things the US federal government has been doing:

Our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters are now scolding us for referring to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago as a raid. We’re not supposed to call it a raid. Which means, of course, it was definitely a raid.

We still don’t know what they were looking for during this raid. Or do we?

Oh.

Wait.

What?

Nuclear documents? What, like launch codes? Schematics? Locations? What are we talking about here?

What did they think the guy was going to do with this stuff? Is any of it even current? Don’t they change the launch codes every day? And nobody missed these documents for 18 months? What’s the danger here?

Call me a RINO cuck turncoat all you want, but I don’t trust the government, no matter who’s running it. I had to learn that the hard way when the State Department crippled me for life and then lied their asses off about it. That’s what bureaucracies do. They protect themselves at all costs, and the truth is the first thing to go by the wayside.

Sounds like that’s what’s happening here. They really screwed up this time, and now they’re panicking.

It’s been seven years since You-Know-Who rode down that escalator and threw his hat into the ring, and the Democrats have learned absolutely nothing. The more they try to hurt this guy, the more they end up helping him. Now they’re galvanizing the right behind him. Even traitors like me, who think 1/6 was bad and probably wanted Hillary to win, are incredulous that they’re abusing their power like this.

It’s already backfiring, but at least the libs can still air out their bloodthirsty fantasies:

They really do believe that’s what he did. They really do believe that’s what will happen to him. Or at least they’re willing to pander to their insane followers on social media.

August 9, 2022

“Canada’s not broken: here’s a set of totally arbitrary social media listicles to prove it, h8rs!”

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

Meant to post this on the weekend, but another lengthy Rogers internet outage got in the way. From the most recent weekly Dispatch from The Line:

We try to avoid spending too much time on Twitter nowadays, but we’ve noticed a trend emerge on the site that irks us. It’s not new, exactly, but it seems to have become a favoured rhetorical tactic among Liberals and their apologists. And as it touches on virtually all of the blurbs above, it’s worth noting.

We’ll call it Rebuttal by Listicle, and it works a little like this: rather than actually engage with critiques of the country or the government, partisans will simply post random rankings that show Canada is at the top of some subjective set of metrics like “freedom” or “quality of life”.

To wit:

And this:

Because these listicles look impressive and official, the partisans in question can treat them with the weight of proven scientific truth. Canada’s great! Look, the list proves it! Them’s the facts!

We have three major problems with this rhetorical tactic.

The first is optics: Please tell the couple priced out of the housing market in every major urban centre, the one that is now worried about the grocery bill, can’t fill the car with gas, and frets about heating costs next winter, that none of these problems really matter. That they should just be grateful and happy with this definitely not-broken country because Canada scored well in a ranking compiled by an intern at an American newspaper. Show the lists to the person suffering a lingering illness, with no family doctor, in a town where the ER is closed, and wait patiently for their enthusiastic high five.

You want to guarantee Prime Minister Poilievre, this is the way to go about it: smarmily dismissing legitimate grievances and concerns by tweeting a list and calling it a day.

And, of course that’s presuming the ranking was subject to even a moderate degree of fact checking, logic, or scientific scrutiny goes into these rankings at all.

Let’s look a little more carefully at the ones posted by former Trudeau senior aide Gerry Butts, shall we?

He has a whole thread devoted to cherry picking Canada-topping rankings compiled by something called The World Index. What is The World Index? Well, we don’t know, Bob. The Twitter bio says: “Know the world. Focus on economics, art & culture, science, technology, sports, travel, politics and military affairs.” Okay. The only website listed takes us to an Instagram account with 37 followers.

The list above, in which Canada hits #1 for Best Countries for Quality of Life, 2021, is from U.S. News & World Report, an American media company. We checked out their methodology for the 2021 survey, and this is what we found: it’s a survey of 17,000 people, run by an academic. What’s being surveyed? Glad you asked! “Participants assessed how closely they associated an attribute with a nation.” You’ll be thrilled to note that these 17,000 people around the globe gave Canada near perfect scores on being “not bureaucratic”, and having a “well developed public health system”, “well-distributed political power”, and “transparent government practices”. (Lol, *dies inside*.)

Hey, it’s great that people associate Canada with being awesome, but we hope that when Liberals talk about “evidence-based policies”, they are using actual, you know, evidence, not just rankings by survey participants.

August 2, 2022

“Is this ok? And this?” – The pitfalls of the “affirmative consent” model

Filed under: Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Blake Smith recounts how the affirmative consent model — so beloved of the always-online contingent of GenZ — attempts to codify and regulate the sexual dance:

“Is it okay if I touch you?” Half an hour after I’d started chatting with this guy on Grindr he was in my bedroom, beginning a series of questions meant to lead from touching to any number of other acts. I suppose he expected, or hoped for, an enthusiastic “yes!”, signalling what the orientation-day workshops on college campuses call “affirmative consent”. But it didn’t occur to me to answer with the eagerness of a child agreeing to dessert. Instead I tried, with a soft laugh and what I hoped was a seductive “ok”, to seem as if I needed my reticence knocked out of me.

What I got were more questions. “Is this ok? And this?” Soon I began to wonder: “Is it ok?” I’d thought it was when I’d told him to come over. But it’s one thing to want someone in an unspecified way, quite another to start itemising what it is you actually want from them. With my own desire in doubt, I started to feel the very thing this line of interrogation had been meant to avoid. Instead of making consent as simple as saying “yes”, these questions had plunged me into a deeply unsexy uncertainty.

In reading me his sexual questionnaire, my partner was showing me that he’d internalised the ethic of “consent”, which over the past decade has emerged as the dominant liberal framework for distinguishing between moral and immoral sex. At the core of this ethic is explicitness. The purpose is to make sex — and all of its constituent acts — something one can and should directly say “yes” or “no” to, a contract negotiated between individuals.

This model of consent has been roundly criticised for deflating erotic tension, leading to sometimes-cringeworthy campaigns to insist that “consent is sexy” (“If asking for consent ruins sex you’re what? A rapist who sucks at talking dirty?’, reads one viral Tumblr post). But the deeper problem with this model is that it produces, or rather reveals, exactly what it is meant to avoid, which is the ineradicable ambivalence at the heart of sex. In other words, while we can and should maintain a distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts, there is an important sense in which we are never able to say “yes” to sex. Indeed, enjoying sex seems to involve a certain suspension of our usual relationship to ourselves, one in which we are overtaken not so much by the other person as by sex itself.

The original sexual relation — prior to the one we have with any particular person — is our relation to sex itself. This relation is not consensual but something we experience as a given. We are born, we mature, and at some point in this process we discover that we our prisoners of our sexuality. Sex, after all, makes us uncomfortable. It can conjure feelings of disgust and embarrassment. It can be a distraction, an excruciating deprivation, even a source of catastrophic humiliation. We notice how attractive the “wrong” person is — a boyfriend’s brother, an ex, a colleague, a student — and feel violated by our own urges. Sex with a partner works, when and to the extent that it does, in part by letting us suspend our inhibitions and want things without having to admit to ourselves that we want them.

QotD: Basic College Girl (aka “Becky”)

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

What’s the point of being a Metalhead these days? At best, you’ll get a gold sticker and a participation trophy like everyone else. At worst, you’ll get diagnosed with some bullshit “learning disorder” and they’ll zombie you out on powerful prescription psychotropics. The only lesson this teaches is: Come to the attention of the authorities at your peril.

That’s the effect on guys, at any rate. Bad as that is, it’s far worse on girls. Guys establish social hierarchy through conflict; when they can’t compete with each other, they drop out and embrace the Ritalin Zombie lifestyle of video games and onanism. Girls compete through approval-seeking, which, since nowadays nobody’s different from anybody and everyone’s the best at everything, is easily channeled into conspicuous consumption. Hence all the items on that list.

For the Basic College Girl, then, conformism is a virtue. In fact, it’s the highest virtue — the “winner” is the one who does nothing, says nothing, thinks nothing but that which gets upvoted on social media …

… or downvoted on social media, as the case may be. Self-esteem culture has completely bypassed the normal feedback loops. Back in the days of meatspace-only communication, strong signals of disapproval from your peers were, 99 times out of 100, clear indicators that you’re doing it wrong. If the kids are making fun of your personal hygiene, then unless your name really is “Dick Smelley”, you need to take a long hard look at your showering habits. Kids can be horribly cruel, but most of the time they’re not wrong. And yes, bullying can (and often did) go overboard, but generally “stop being such a dork!” is great life advice, and the process of figuring out just what you’re doing that’s so dorky, and how to stop it, is crucial for one’s social development.

Social media changes all that. Anyone who has ever written a blog post — really, anyone who has ever made a substantive comment on a blog post — has had the experience of some drive-by troll shitting on you. As functional adults who grew up in meatspace we recognize this for what it is, and ignore it. But imagine that you hadn’t grown up in meatspace. What if you mistake this for substantive criticism? As it’s not psychologically sustainable to take it that way for long, you do what the Basic College Girl does: You call the commenter a “h8r” and, crucially, you consider having “h8rs” as confirmation that whatever you’re doing is right. After all, they couldn’t “h8” if they weren’t thinking about you.

Thus “approval-seeking”, a.k.a. chick competition, curdles into an attitude where you actively seek out “h8rs” to annoy.

This is where Normals grossly underestimate women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m personally terrified of AOC, because she is the embodiment of the Basic College Girl. Basic College Girls can’t be bargained with, they can’t be reasoned with, and the reason for both is: Both “bargaining” and “reasoning” imply that you think she’s doing something wrong, which is “h8”. And since “ur h8in”, that means you’re thinking about her more than she’s thinking about you, which means she’s validated, which means she wins. Which means she’s not only going to keep on doing what she’s doing, but will crank it up past 11, in order get more h8, to attract more h8rz.

This is our future. Since the only way to deal with a Basic College Girl is to say “no” — all the time, to everything, unconditionally — and we as a society have lost the ability to do that, we’re screwed. Get to know your new mistress. Xzhyr name is Becky, and she’s everywhere.

Severian, “The Basic College Girl”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-24.

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