I bring this up because we seem to have entered one of those moments, not infrequent in American history, when the keepers of our culture have decided sex should be taboo. The word itself is now indecent and unmentionable: We’re supposed to say “gender”. But gender pertains to linguistics, not biology. In Spanish, for example, the moon is feminine in gender: la luna. The sun is masculine: el sol. This sets up all kinds of interesting possibilities during sunrise and sunset, but that’s not the point here. The point is that some moralistic souls think you can somehow detach the sex act from sexuality. But why?
Apparently, many in the zoomer generation find sex scary. I get that. When I was 13 and contemplated the mechanics of the thing, I pretty much became reconciled to a life of despondent celibacy. But at what point was our culture handed over to clueless 13-year-old kids? The zoomers mate later, less and with fewer reproductive consequences than their parents and grandparents. They get triggered by 50 Shades of Grey and suffer a permanent headache from climate change. I mean, can anyone conjure up a romantic vision of Greta Thunberg?
There’s also the idea that sex is fluid — that one can be born into a biological “gender” then pick among dozens of other flavors, like scoops at the gelato store. But weren’t we told, not so long ago, that being gay was a matter of genetic destiny? Evidently, everyone else is free to choose. You can be transgender, of course, and cisgender, which I think is what I am. But there are 70 more buckets to pick from, such as abimegender, aerogender, cassgender — even cloudgender, which means one’s gender “cannot be comprehended or understood due to depersonalization and derealization disorder”.
If you believe there are 72 sexes, you’re overthinking. You’re also likely to be online 22 hours a day and paddling toward a digitally reinforced narcissism. “You may say you’re cassgender. Fine. Big deal. But I am cloudgender and can’t be fully comprehended or understood!” That’s the stuff of social media. It feels like millions are listening to your magnificently baroque sexual identity, even if you’re only talking to yourself.
Martin Gurri, “Get the Kids Out of the Room — We’re Going To Talk About Sex”, Discourse, 2022-04-25.
July 27, 2022
July 25, 2022
Political memes: threat or menace?
In Quillette, Christopher J. Ferguson considers the social dangers of sharing political memes:
Modern politics has always been replete with issues about which people feel passionate, sometimes aggressively so. But the culture wars currently raging in the US, Canada, and across much of the industrialized West seem to be particularly fraught. In my 50-plus years, I have never seen so much anger and hostility among citizens of otherwise stable countries. Some of these people will participate in protests or engage in civil disobedience, but many more will employ the political meme to express their discontent. Given how widespread the phenomenon has become, it’s worth asking whether political memes actually advance advocacy goals and our knowledge of important issues, or if they simply feed an unconstructive cycle of anger, misinformation, and polarization.
The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, who used it to describe units of culture, socially transmitted and imitated across generations in ways synonymous with genes — adaptive ideas survive, while maladaptive ideas perish. But in the social media age, the word usually refers to “an image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users often with slight variations”. The subset of memes that focus on politics are generally designed to boil complex issues down to a digestible combination of emotive image and sloganeering text that flatters those who agree with its message and provokes those who do not.
Most academics who study memes agree that they are poisonous to healthy public discourse (“toxic” is a word that crops up a lot, even in the scholarly literature). One scholar bluntly called them “one of the main vehicles for misinformation”, and they tend to distort reality in several ways. By their very nature, they leave no room for nuance or complexity, and so they are frequently misleading; they tend to lean heavily on scornful condescension and moral sanctimony (usually, the intended takeaway is that anyone who agrees with the point of view being — inaccurately — mocked is an imbecile); they make copious use of ad hominem attacks, straw man fallacies, and motte-and-bailey arguments; they intentionally catastrophize, generalize, personalize, and encourage dichotomous thinking; and they are aggressive and sometimes dehumanizing. They are, in other words, methods of Internet communication that display all the symptoms of a borderline personality type of mental disorder. Of course, it’s possible to construct a meme that is short yet still thoughtful and sophisticated, but these are few and far between.
The best evidence we have today is incomplete and limited, but it suggests that political memes have a net negative effect on society. If the idea is to persuade or advance practical advocacy goals, then there is little evidence that they work. To the contrary, they may be counterproductive — the evidence we do have suggests that they contribute to political polarization, distort issues in the name of political expediency, and provoke indignation, hatred, and intolerance (on both sides of the political spectrum). Yes, the available evidence is fragmentary and would certainly benefit from better and more open science designs. However, it accords with larger observations about social media and political polarization. Perhaps new and better research will reveal that alarm about the negative effects of memes is simply another moral panic comparable to those that arose around video games or smoking in movies. But since memes add almost nothing to public discourse that would offset the risks, it’s probably worth hesitating before sharing them.
I save the odd meme that wanders through my various social media sites that I find amusing or (occasionally) effective, and memes as described in this article certainly do seem to be far more common than they were even a few years ago. A few selections below the fold, just because:
June 22, 2022
Puberty, “white guilt”, and social contagion helps drive huge numbers of teen girls to think they are transgender
Until a few years ago — a blink of the eye in social terms — most individuals who wanted to transition to the other gender were born male. That is no longer the situation in North America, as vast numbers of young teens have been hammered with accusations of “privilege” for being white, while already undergoing the stresses and social disruption of puberty, seem to be deciding in groups that they must have been “assigned the wrong gender” at birth. In City Journal, Leor Sapir tells some of their stories:
Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) — that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.
I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege”, how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color”. Plagued by guilt, the children — almost all of them girls — rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.
The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.
The wages of whiteness for teenagers are, however, only half of the story. Decades of gay rights activism have taught us that being gay or lesbian is not something one chooses. The mainstream narrative of transgenderism — promoted aggressively in the context of civil rights policymaking — holds that even being transgender is something people have little control over. Gender identity, experts have argued in Title IX lawsuits, is innate, immutable, and “primarily dictated by messages from the brain”. Thus, membership in the “LGBTQ+ community” would seem to be nonvoluntary. One is either “born that way” or not.
[…]
Several of the parents I spoke to told me that their daughters’ friends all identify as non-heterosexual, despite none having ever kissed another teenager or been in a romantic relationship. LGBT identity is, for them, not related to sexual attraction or behavior. As Kate Julian has written in The Atlantic, America is going through a “sex recession”. Whereas in 1991, most teenagers would have had at least one sexual encounter by the time they graduated high school, by 2017 most had had none. The vacuum left by the hollowing out of courting and relationships has been filled, so it would seem, by a new, inward form of “sexuality” in which the sexual side of our nature is purely a private experience. The 1960s sexual-liberation movement has somehow bred asexual atomism.
Riding the tiger almost always ends badly for the rider
Christian Watson considers the plight of so many consciously progressive organizations as they discover that there are no limits to wokeness:
Leftists created wokeism. They claimed it was about justice, inclusion for all, diversity, equity and more, much much more. However, this ill-defined “theology” has become a self-destructive nihilism.
Now, leftist organizations are being eaten from within over the no-bounds, no-rules wokeism.
Wokeism essentially empowers any person – except straight white males – to claim grievances. There are no limits as to what can be called a “microaggression” or upon which one can claim to be harmed. With wokeism, “my truth” matters — even if it is not at all based in reality.
A recent report from The Intercept outlined the many ways leftist organizations are imploding due to this open-ended invitation for people to claim grievances. Leftist organizations found themselves mired in “Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.”
Some executives claim they spend “90 to 95 percent” of their time addressing office drama. They’re being forced to address issues that have nothing to do with the organization’s mission or the donors’ wishes.
Executives at the Guttmacher Institute, the American Civil Liberties Union, Sierra Club, and elsewhere are now the targets of their own employees for failing to meet their woke expectations.
Many executives have quit, leaving behind prominent positions because they simply cannot stand their employees. As one executive put it, “This is out of control. No one can be a leader in this culture. It’s not sustainable. We’re constantly being called out from the bottom.”
“I also see a pattern of … people who are not competent in their orgs getting ahead of the game by declaring that others have engaged in some kind of -ism, thereby triggering a process that protects them in that job while there’s an investigation or turmoil over it,” a separate executive stated.
That process leads to internal divisions as employees take sides. And when the woke rules are violated, no apology is ever good enough.
June 18, 2022
QotD: Celebrities “came up out of the lagoon and helped themselves to all the culture they could find. They just ate everything.”
Well, actually, I’m asking.
Are celebrities one of the reasons our culture is now so chaotic and unstable?
There is a strong case for “yes”.
For starters, celebrities have many flaws.
They can be self centered, as when Madonna was asked to celebrate Aretha Franklin. She referenced herself more than 50 times, and Ms. Franklin 4 times.
They can be naive, as when Gal Gadot lead a sing-along with fellow celebrities from the comfort and protection of their beautiful homes. She now agrees this was “in poor taste”.
Celebrities are not durable. That’s our our fault. We raise them up and we strike them down. And because we have the attention span of a French monarch, their moment in the spot light is fleeting. But it means our relationship with them is often fleeting.
Celebrities are vulnerable. Being a celebrity is incredibly perilous. Living in the very thin air up there, no mortal should wish for this. So celebrities suffer. They have break downs. They slide into drug dependency and bad relationships. At this point it is hard for them to be exemplars. Unless of course we are struggling too.
But here’s the key reason to treat celebrities as a culture problem.
In the course of the 20th century, celebrities ate their way through Western society, consuming or discrediting any and every elite that dared compete with them.
In this period, people still cared about scientists and other experts. They saw editors, publishers, judges, and professors as figures of authority. They admired and sought to emulate people of exalted social standing. They looked to religious leaders to address the big issues of the day. Artists, a few of them, were consulted. Designers, some of them, were gods.
This is mostly gone. Celebrities brought them low. It’s not clear that they meant to. It’s more likely that the simply won the popularity contest of contemporary culture.
We could choose between (nearly) dead white males, cranky, pipe smoking, vest wearing, utterly pompous creatures who would occasionally stoop to correct us. Or we could go with the effortlessly charismatic, blindingly beautiful, funny, endearing, eager-to-please people. I mean just look at the people in the “selfie” above. You can’t help but be wowed. Game, set and match to the movie star.
Celebrities remind me of the Rem Koolhaas library in Seattle.
This never fails to make me think of a mechanical monster that’s just crawled out of Seattle’s Elliot Bay and climbed the hill looking for lunch.
That’s what celebrities did. They came up out of the lagoon and helped themselves to all the culture they could find. They just ate everything.
It started with children’s books. They had to write em. Then it was lines of perfume and clothing. They had to design em. Then of course it was politics. How could we possibly do without em? Most of the people running for office in the US are now strikingly attractive. Some of them could actually be part-time models. This is the celebrity effect.
But here’s the other reason that the celebrity influence might be a cause of our instability. It is that they have colonized our young. There are lots of ways of making this argument, but I think “exhibit A” is probably TikTok. This platform matters because it mints celebrity. And that matters because a fifteen year old typically believes he or she matters in exact proportion to his or her fame.
Grant McCracken, “Culture Problem: celebrities”, Future Watch: an anthropological pov, 2022-03-17.
June 17, 2022
The dark side of Tim Berners-Lee’s statement “When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination”
In The Critic, Tom Farr wonders about the wider meaning of the Eugenia Cooney story:
Eugenia Cooney in 2016.
Photo by Lilg54g – CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Journalist and author Mandy Stadtmiller shared a new article last week on her excellent Substack series Rabbitholed entitled: “Why is Jeff Bezos Allowing Millions of Teenage Girls to Watch the Severely Anorexic Influencer Eugenia Cooney Slowly Kill Herself On Stream?”
The article itself received widespread attention for its harrowing coverage of the story of Eugenia Cooney, a 20-something Twitch streamer and YouTuber, who has built a global fanbase off vlogs featuring her cosplaying, and giving makeup and beauty tips amongst other things, as well as her distinctive early 2000s emo aesthetic.
Cooney is also severely anorexic. As Stadtmiller’s article succinctly explains:
Cooney’s horrific skeletal appearance is documented lavishly by her sick and enabling mother, Debra Cooney, who is seemingly keeping her daughter trapped and isolated at home with almost no contact with the outside world outside of the online predatory men who pay her daughter tips to spin around, crawl around on the floor, act like a cat and show how weak she is when trying to lift things.
Whilst Cooney’s story warrants attention, that isn’t the purpose of this article. In order to understand fully the social apparatus that allows and encourages Cooney’s mother to disturbingly parade her young daughter around for tens of thousands of digital voyeurs, no better explanation can be found than the one that actually answers Stadtmiller’s original question: Just why is Jeff Bezos allowing millions of teenage girls to watch Eugenia Cooney slowly kill herself on stream?
Whilst Jeff Bezos could and should be skewered for his role in amassing grotesque, Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth at the expense of anyone with the temerity to want to use the toilet during their working hours, in this instance he is merely a symptom of a deeper rot that has taken hold of our society, aided in part by the explosion of the internet in the late 90s.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, once said: “When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.” Berners-Lee was not wrong, but it would be unfair to stick him with the responsibility for what the depraved depths of some individuals’ “imagination” have conjured up in the subsequent decades since the web’s mass adoption.
Those of us who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s — ostensibly the first generation to be exposed from an early age to the internet in its more rudimentary form – will surely remember the sporadic emergence of individual “shock videos”: from the fairly benign (“Meatspin”, anyone?) to videos of murder (“Three Guys One Hammer”), the internet was a developing digital territory that its early adopters were still testing the limits of. These videos were occasionally linked to entire websites that would host videos depicting varying degrees of degeneracy, but they operated mainly in the darker corners of the web, reliant on people sending links to each other on MSN with a description that would lull the recipient into a false sense of security in order to get them to click on it.
Such content ran, if not explicitly then certainly conceptually, parallel to another early-2000s meme: Rule 34. In short, Rule 34 stated: “Rule #34 There is porn of it. No exceptions.” It doesn’t really require Einstein’s intellect to parse what was meant by this aphorism: as the porn industry was finding its footing in the new digital age, the type of pornographic content that was readily available was also breaking new ground. Initially, those shock videos existed in a slightly separate orbit to that of more mainstream pornography, but their intersection was by no means a rarity, even in those early days. This somewhat grimly operates as the perfect example of Berners-Lee’s observation that the creativity fostered by the internet is only constrained by our collective imaginations.
June 4, 2022
Bill C-18 might as well be called the “Keep legacy media alive at all costs, even if nobody wants it anymore” act
The Line‘s Jen Gerson lays out the case against the federal government’s plans for permanent corporate welfare for the big Canadian legacy media organizations:
How Jen Gerson might visualize Torstar and Postmedia during the lobbying effort for Bill C-18.
“Zombie nuns” by Michael Cavén is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 
This week, The Line signed on to a campaign put together by a coalition of independent media publishers calling for amendments to the panda trash fodder piece of legislation known as C-18. To be fair, I mostly signed on; my co-founder Matt Gurney had some reservations, and I figured it would be best to hash them out in full here.
The bill is a hot mess created by a clearly well-intentioned government that appears to have been bamboozled by a group of media industry lobbyists helmed by organizations like Postmedia and Torstar — companies that despite extraordinary history and resources have largely failed to sustainably transition to a digital media environment. These large outlets are now using the last of their dying power and influence to champion legislation that will force big technology companies like Facebook and Google to compensate them for linking to their content.
This is a straightforward case of regulatory capture, the very thing we would condemn in any other industry; big media companies are using their credibility and political power to pressure the government into forcing “Big Tech” to sustain their dying business models — the very “Big Tech” that they’ve spent years deriding and defaming in their very own newspapers and outlets.
This whole process is corrupt. I don’t say that lightly. Perhaps inevitably, I’ve grown totally disillusioned with the industry to which I have devoted all of my adult life. We used to consider journalism a calling or a vocation — manipulative terms that justified the low pay, harassment, and sometimes abusive management. How can the church of journalism and its holy mandate to preserve democracy continue to take itself seriously when the very catechism of the craft are nowhere present in its own self-created lobbying arm, New Media Canada?
I think the leaders of this initiative have convinced themselves that the business model they enjoyed in the ’80s and ’90s is so totally central to the survival of democracy and liberal values that they’ve committed to keeping it afloat by any means necessary regardless of the ethical and philosophical cost. In doing so, I believe that they’re only ensuring their own failure.
By driving legislation in this way, they are not proving their worth to the broader public. Rather, they are conceding that what they produce has so little value that they need to evolve into parasites of the state. It demonstrates that commitment to democracy and accountability is secondary to their primary functions; running a business. They have stockholders to please and interest on loans to pay. Big loans.
Meanwhile, the legacy media they have managed is little more than a zombie in nun’s drag. It is in a state of terminal decline, and keeping it alive poisons the earth for the generations to come after.
June 3, 2022
Proof of how far public trust in legacy media has fallen
At The Last Ditch, Tom finds the social media coverage of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial unimpressive, but notes that many people are consciously choosing to get their “news” this way rather than depend on the offerings of the legacy media:
Celebrity gossip is not my thing. This case has been particularly unedifying. In a rational world, people would now pay less attention to the opinions of play actors, having seen what shallow, narcissistic souls (and I speak as a devoted theatre person who admires their professional skills) they often are.
What has been interesting about the trial is the MSM vs Social Media aspect of it. Wounded journos bemoan the fact that people have followed the trial – not through the lens of their analysis and opinion – but via such odd channels as TikTok. I understand their point of view. They are professionals and would like people to trust them. However, they just don’t seem to understand the role they played in losing that trust. They would do better to work hard to win it back, rather than insult the customers they’ve so clearly lost. The intense social media interest in a defamation trial shows the demand for coverage is there. Perhaps they should begin to think about how best to meet it? No-one (as the Remain campaign has still not learned) was ever insulted or abused into agreement. It’s just bad advocacy.
I have watched a couple of the videos of which they complain out of curiosity. They consisted of people I had never heard of pointing fingers and raising eyebrows in the corner of a screen showing video from the court. Every so often they’d point downwards to a “subscribe” button. Having practised law myself, I was just as unimpressed as the journalists with this approach to court reporting. Unlike the journalists, I recognised that their customers’ preference for it is a profound critique of the MSM. Just how much trust have you lost, dear journalists, that people trust these clowns more?
May 29, 2022
QotD: Was Biden’s Afghan evacuation driven by Twitter “optics”?
But the Apparat didn’t do that, and the reason was: Twitter.
All the Blue Checkmarks on Twatter agreed that “letting” Bad Orange Man pull out of Afghanistan would be “handing him a win”. After all, he said he was going to do it! And if he somehow got out before the 20th anniversary, that’d be an even bigger win. Obviously, then, they had to “let” Biden do it, because that’s a “win”. And of course he had to do it in August, so that he could “spike the football” on 9/11/2021.
So the withdrawal had to be pushed into 2021, and it had to be slapdash. Indeed, it had to be the exact opposite of whatever Bad Orange Man was planning to do, so that there was no possible way Bad Orange Man could claim a “win”. It had to be all Biden …
… and so it was. With results that anyone smarter than a concussed goldfish — which of course excludes everyone with a Blue Checkmark — could’ve predicted.
If the Blue Checkmark Borg on Twatter, then, decides that Brandon needs to look tough by nuking Moscow, then it’s go time. And since the social dynamic on Twitter is ever-spiraling lunacy — the only way to “win” Twitter is by being more screechingly insane about everything than everyone else — then whoever gets there fustest with the mostest is going to drive the “decision”.
Severian, “Ukraine”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
May 21, 2022
Despite government denials, CRTC will have the power to censor YouTube videos confirms CRTC Chair
It’s long since got to the point that you never can take a Liberal cabinet minister’s word without verifying it for yourself. Today’s example is the constant denial from the government that their Bill C-11 would enable censorship of things like YouTube videos by the CRTC. In a Senate appearance on Wednesday, the head of the CRTC agreed that such censorship is allowed under the proposed legislation:
CRTC Chair Ian Scott appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage yesterday and Bill C-11 proved to be a popular topic of discussion. The exchanges got testy at times as Scott seemingly stepped outside of his role as an independent regulatory by regularly defending government legislation, even veering into commenting on newspapers, which clearly falls outside the CRTC’s jurisdiction. With respect to Bill C-11, most newsworthy were two comments regarding the regulation of user content and the timelines for implementing the bill if it receives royal assent.
First, Scott was asked about the regulation of user content, confirming what has been obvious for months despite denials from Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez. The following exchange with Conservative MP Rachael Thomas got Scott on the record:
Thomas: Bill C-11 does in fact leave it open to user generated content being regulated by the CRTC. I recognize that there have been arguments against this, however, Dr. Michael Geist has said “the indisputable reality is that the net result of those provisions is that user generated content is in the bill.” Jeanette Patel from Youtube Canada said “the draft law’s wording gives the broadcast regulator” – in other words you – “scope to oversee everyday videos posted for other users to watch.” Scott Benzie from Digital First Canada has also said that “while the government says the legislation will not capture digital first creators, the bill clearly does capture them.”
So all these individuals are individual users creating content. It would appear that the bill does, or could in fact, capture them, correct?
Scott: As constructed, there is a provision that would allow us to do it as required.
While Scott continued by arguing that the Commission already has equivalent regulatory powers and is not interested in regulating user content, the confirmation that Bill C-11 currently does cover user generated content should put an end to the government’s gaslighting that it does not.
QotD: People on social media
Amanda (Pandamoanimum) on Twitter, 2015-09-13.
May 19, 2022
Alas, poor MiniTru … sent off to the knacker’s yard so soon
Apparently the Biden administration is reconsidering the decision to set up a “Ministry of Truth” — at least for the time being — and as Chris Bray shows, the media wants to talk about the evil, Nazi trolls who brought it down:
Labeling instead of describing; a narrative frame instead of factual discussion. Be grateful for Taylor Lorenz, because her cartoon journalism makes the game so gloriously obvious.
Cartoon Lady sort of “reports”, this morning, on the apparent demise of another cultural cartoon: Nina Jankowicz is on her way out at DHS, which is probably disbanding the Disinformation Governance Board. Here, via Revolver, is a non-paywalled copy of the story:
The story is an assemblage of right-out-of-the-gate assumptions, all relentlessly untested. Jankowicz is a “victim”, all disagreement with the decision to start the Disinformation Governance Board was part of a campaign of “coordinated online attacks”, the work of the board was good, disagreement with its creation was bad. None of that is established or explained — it merely is. Here’s the Big Frame, the here’s-what-it-all-means:
Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.
The federal government created a new organization, and people discussed its existence. Criticism and questions necessarily centered on, wait for it, the person identified as the executive director of the new board, the only person publicly identified as a staff member at the organization. The far-right monsters used the tactic of attempting to “identify a target” by … talking about the person chosen, and publicly identified by government, as the leader and public face of a government operation. See how cleverly the extremists choose their targets!?!?!? I mean, who else would you talk about if you wanted to discuss the Disinformation Governance Board? She ran it.
Then, known demon Jack Posobiec tweeted stuff, the monster, and his “early tweets shaped the narrative and Jankowicz was positioned as the primary target.” Again, the person positioned as the primary target of criticism of a government board was the director of the board — after the building burned down, cruel extremists maliciously singled out the fire chief as their target — but Cartoon Lady presents it as a dark and ominous maneuver:
Just hours after Jankowicz tweeted about her new job, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted a tweets accusing the Biden administration of creating a “Ministry of Truth”. Posobiec’s 1.7 million followers quickly sprung into action. By the end of the day, there were at least 53,235 posts on Twitter mentioning “Disinformation Governance Board”, many referencing Jankowicz by name, according to a report by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public-interest research. In the days following, that number skyrocketed.
My goodness, people referenced her by name! They referenced the executive director of the board while discussing the creation of the board! nOw dO YoU SeE HOw thE DaRK ArTs oF thE NaZI tRolLs WoRk!?!?!?
May 8, 2022
“… a majority of ‘pro-lifers’ are women, not men. So [Kamala] Harris is effectively saying: how dare women be allowed a voice in this debate?”
Andrew Sullivan comments on the leak of a draft US Supreme Court decision that would strike down Roe vs. Wade and the over-the-top reactions on social media from progressives:
Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.
To say that a leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling prompted an elite meltdown would be a gross understatement. This was a culture war 9/11. “I have typed and deleted a great many comments,” Roxane Gay tweeted. “What do you say when nine people can dictate what happens to your body? It’s ridiculous and hateful.” The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer, always the subtle one, announced that the court had abolished the entire 20th century. Yep: no more suffrage for women! Jim Crow now!
Taking the arguments of abortion opponents seriously was never an option: “Stripping women of their humanity and rights isn’t a consequence of the ‘pro-life’ agenda, it’s the entire point,” declared Jessica Valenti. Rebecca Traister confessed: “My teeth have been chattering uncontrollably for an hour. Bodies/minds are so weird. Like, not euphemistically — actually chattering. Audibly. And full shaking body. Though otherwise wholly, rationally, well and truly expecting it.”
Going further, freshly-minted critical gender theorist, Jennifer Rubin, argued that any restriction on abortion rights is a violation of secularism: “The right-wing justices and their supporters appear ready to reject one of the Founders’ core principles: that religion shall not be imposed by government edict.” Kurt Andersen went old school and worried about a papist cabal: “It really is kind of remarkable that only one in five Americans call themselves Catholic, but of the Supreme Court majority apparently about to permit abortion to be outlawed, all but one are Catholic and that one was raised Catholic.” Then there’s Vox‘s Ian Millhiser: “Seriously, shout out to whoever the hero was within the Supreme Court who said ‘fuck it! Let’s burn this place down.'” Fuck it! I’ll do it live!
Kamala Harris also found her voice:
Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women. Well we say, “How dare they?” How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?
The premise here is that all women support abortion rights. But there is no serious gender gap on this question. In fact, a majority of “pro-lifers” are women, not men. So Harris is effectively saying: how dare women be allowed a voice in this debate?
Within minutes of the SCOTUS leak, moreover, we were told it means that before long, interracial marriages will be banned … in a country where 94 percent support them! Imagine Clarence Thomas divorcing himself by jurisprudence. Here’s Traister again: “Voting rights were gutted in 2013. Marriage equality. Griswold. Loving. Don’t ever listen to anyone who tells you such fears are silly or overblown.” Actually, listen to them — if you can hear them over Traister’s permanent rage-tantrum.
What strikes me about all of this is not the emotive hyperbole — that’s par for the course in a country where every discourse is now dialed to eleven. What strikes me most in these takes is the underlying contempt for and suspicion of the democratic process — from many of the same people who insist they want to save it. How dare voters have a say on abortion rights! The issue — which divides the country today as much as it has for decades — is one that apparently cannot ever be put up for a vote. On this question, Democrats really do seem to believe that seven men alone should make that decision — once, in 1973. Women today, including one on SCOTUS? Not so much.
May 3, 2022
Is all of social media just a “giant domestic surveillance operation”?
Severian posted this last week, but I’m only just getting caught up now:
I was wrong about Musk buying Twitter. Lot of that going around — the Z Man got a whole podcast on “avoiding error” from his misread of the situation. It’s well worth a listen. I, too, had a “hot take” on Musk’s offer — not that it was particularly hot, as most folks on this side were saying it, but I too thought it was a stunt. After all, Musk, like Bezos and all the other “new commerce” billionaires, don’t exist without massive government support. I figured his “offer” was stoyak — he’s got something in the works in the Imperial Capital and needed to play hardball with somebody.
But I was also working off my longstanding assumption that Twitter, Faceborg, and all the rest are essentially CIA / NSA fronts. When I first heard about Facebook, my first thought was “Wait, don’t we already have Friendster? What does this bring to the table?” My second thought was the first one I’d had about Friendster: “That’s clever, I guess, but how on earth is this going to make money? Even if they saturate it with ads, to the point where it’s unusable — which will happen in about two weeks — they can’t monetize your personal data any farther. People are pretty set in their habits — once the algorithm figures out you’re the kind of guy who likes anime and New Wave music, any further data is useless.”
Being a much more naive, trusting sort back then, I figured it was just stupidity. You know, Pets.com level stupidity. The VC boys were trying to get another dotcom bubble inflated, because if the first one proved anything, it’s that people are dumb and will keep falling for the same obvious scam over and over. I could hear them in the board rooms: “This time, instead of sticking ‘cyber’ in front of everything, we’ll call it ‘Web 2.0.’ Cha-ching!”
Obviously that didn’t happen. So I went with the common explanation that was floating around in those days, that “social media” sites made their money by selling your data to advertisers. But that doesn’t pass the smell test either. For one thing, as I said above, your habits don’t change very much. For another, as anyone who has any experience with them knows, those algorithms really suck. The other day, for instance, I was listening to some old music one of the streaming music sites. And I mean really old. Nothing I’d played the whole morning had been composed after the 17th century, but the service’s algorithm was convinced that what I’d really like to listen to next was some rapper.
Indeed, the whole point of the ads on Pandora, Spotify, whatever seems to be: To annoy you to the point where you pay for their premium service. Pandora, for instance, either really really really believes I want a Surface Pro 8 and some Taco Bell, or they’re just playing those ads every two songs to annoy me into buying the premium service (which is every ad that isn’t Surface Pro or Taco Bell). Which is just bizarre, because I haven’t had Taco Bell since college — which was 30 years ago, and I paid cash — and this essay right here is the first time I have ever even typed the words “Surface Pro 8”, much less looked at the product.
I really wouldn’t be surprised that the “algorithm” is reading itself. Hey, this guy sure has seen a lot of ads for Taco Bell and Surface Pro! He must really want some!
But the algorithm for companies whose entire business model is e-commerce is no better. Amazon seems to have gone to a “push” model — they must be selling their suppliers on the idea that they can push you stuff, which is why they always pimp the same four or five items in the “Amazon’s Choice” recommendations, no matter what you’re searching for. And these again are laughably wrong — the only things I get off Amazon are used history and philosophy books, and stuff for my dog. Based on this, they have concluded that what I’m really looking for are chick lit and beach gear.
Given all that, I came to the conclusion that “social media” (and Amazon too, probably) really only have one customer, who really does have a use for your data, and that customer’s initials are CIA. It’s a giant domestic surveillance operation.
And why wouldn’t it be? The Regime has had a legitimacy problem for a long time, and a “feedback loop” problem for longer than that. Even if we assume no ulterior motives whatsoever — fat chance, but let’s stipulate — the fact remains that public opinion polling, however you want to define it, has a similar problem as psychological studies. Since the vast majority of study participants are college undergrads, what you get is WEIRD — that’s Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, and also in a very narrow age range. Psych studies that purport to be universal are, at their very best, snapshots inside the head of the BCG.
If you haven’t encountered the Basic College Girl, he provided a thumbnail sketch here.
QotD: Every social media platform
Mme D does not do social media. Never has; never will.
This is a little tiresome because she needs to have an active social media presence to promote awareness of her brand new local business. Oh yes, social media is an absolute necessity. All the influencers say so, and we should always do what influencers tell us to otherwise they won’t be influencers any more. And, well, that would be a disaster, wouldn’t it?
I once tried to impress on her the importance of UGC. For weeks afterwards she looked at me in a funny way until we eventually cleared the air by establishing that UGC does not stand for Universal Genital Castration. Given that 25 per cent of user-generated content comprises dick pix, this was a misunderstanding too far.
“Social media is a time-wasting pit of crazies, pornographers, criminals, and perpetually angry nobodies flinging insults at each other,” she replied.
For someone who doesn’t do social media, she has a remarkably strong insight into it.
Alistair Dabbs, “How to get banned from social media without posting a thing”, The Register, 2022-01-28.
