Quotulatiousness

June 30, 2021

“We’re having a heat wave/A tropical heat wave …”

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

Jay Currie is apparently melting in the heat somewhere out on the left coast of Canada:

As my readers know I live on Vancouver Island right by the ocean. Normally, it is too cool to be comfortable having the evening g&t on the deck. Well, yesterday and today and very possibly tomorrow it will be way too hot.

The thing about heat waves is that they bring out the climatistas ready to ascribe weather to climate change. On #bcpoli Twitter it is a dead heat between the unscientific “I will wear a mask until there is no COVID anywhere on Earth” people and the people who insist that the present heat wave “proves” global warming. Well it doesn’t.

What we are in the grips of is a jet stream excursion. A big loop of hot air is sitting on top of us. It is practically the definition of “weather”. Three weeks ago Victoria set an all time record for coldest June day in the middle of a series of anomalously cold days. This too was “weather”.

The warmists are not deterred. “Well, over all the ‘weather’ is getting hotter because of climate change.” “The jet stream is behaving eccentrically because the Arctic is getting warmer and that’s climate change.” And then they add their policy prescription d’jour – Save Old Growth, Raise the carbon tax, Stop LNG exports and so on.

The brutal narcissism of the climate crusaders is touching. The problem and its solution are all about them. Other than the Pacific North West, the rest of the world is normal to cold. The Eastern US has been wet and cool, South America is freezing, Australia and New Zealand are experiencing an early ferociously cold winter, summer snow is falling in Scandinavia. The fact the major factor in the northern and jet stream’s preignitions is the level of solar activity is borne out by the general coolness of 2021. Guess what, the Sun is very quiet at the moment which is historically linked to cooling rather than warming.

But, for fun, let’s propose that the climate change fanatics are right and there is a direct link between CO2 and the present heat wave – not one of their favoured solutions will make the slightest difference. We could all walk to hug the trees and it would not matter.

Here’s why […]

June 23, 2021

Bad legislation rammed through in the small hours of the morning

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist on how one of the worst pieces of legislation to get extruded from the bowels of the Liberal minority government got pinched off by main force and now sits, steaming, on the docket for the Senate to … well, “rubber stamp” isn’t quite the right phrase but it’s pretty rare for our unelected senators to do anything to benefit ordinary Canadians, so we’re depending on them somehow managing to display an almost supernatural effort to slow down this shitty bill until the end of the session:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

The Liberal government strategy of multiple gag orders and a “super motion” to limit debate bore fruit last night as Bill C-10 received House of Commons approval at 1:30 am. The Parliamentary process took hours as the government passed multiple motions to cut short debate, re-inserted amendments that had been previously ruled null and void, and rejected a last-ditch attempt to restore the Section 4.1 safeguards for user generated content. The debate included obvious errors from Liberal MPs who were presumably chosen to defend the bill. For example, Julie Dabrusin, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, said that Section 2.1 in Bill C-10 “specifically excludes content uploaded by users.” Only it doesn’t as Dabrusin should know given that 2.1 covers users not content and she was the MP who introduced the amendment at committee to remove Section 4.1, which was the provision that excluded content uploaded by users.

Given the public support from the Bloc for cutting short debate, the outcome last night was never really in doubt. Perhaps the most interesting vote of the night came with a motion from Conservative MP Alain Rayes, which once again called for the re-insertion of Section 4.1. While the motion was defeated with the support of Liberal, NDP, and Bloc MPs, there were several notable exceptions. Liberal MPs Nate-Erskine Smith and Wayne Long both abstained and former Justice Minister (and now independent MP) Jody Wilson-Raybould voted in favour of the motion. The report stage was limited to one hour of debate, which meant that the 23 amendments were again subject to no real debate or discussion. Once the bill passed the report stage, it was on to third and final reading, which was limited to 15 minutes of debate per party. The vote followed just before 1:30 am with the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc once again supporting Bill C-10. Wilson-Raybould joined with the Conservatives in voting against it.

A rational government would comprehend that their pitch that the real purpose of the bill is to “make the web giants pay” is completely undermined by the obvious and deliberate attempt to introduce government censorship of what ordinary Canadians watch on the internet and share through social media. It’s all about the control, not about any imaginary financial windfall from shaking down tech companies for spare change. Why the rush to get it rammed through parliament right now, with so many other rather more pressing concerns at hand?

June 17, 2021

QotD: Declaring war on the Upper-Class Media

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

This is your new term for “mainstream media”. Being against the “mainstream media” sounds kind of conspiratorial. Instead, you’re against the upper-class media, which gains its status by systematically excluding lower-class voices, and which exists mostly as a tool of the upper classes to mock and humiliate the lower class. You are not against journalism, you’re not against being well-informed, you’re against a system that exists to marginalize people like you. Tell the upper-class media that if they want your respect, they need to stop class discrimination.

67% of US families watch the Super Bowl — what percent of New York Times editors and reporters do? 20% of Americans go to religious services weekly — how many of those work for the New York Times? How come 96% of political donations from journalists go to Democrats? Your job is to take a page from the Democratic playbook and insist there is no reason any of this could be true except systemic classism, that any other explanation is offensive, and it’s the upper-class media’s moral duty to do something about this immediately. Until they do so you are absolutely justified in ignoring them and trusting less bigoted and exclusionary sources (I hear Substack is pretty good!)

Insist that working-class people have the right to communicate with each other without interference from upper-class gatekeepers. Make sure people know every single fact about @Jack and what a completely ridiculous person he is, and point out that somehow this is the guy who decides what you’re allowed to communicate with your Twitter friends. Every time tech companies censor social media, even if they’re censoring left-wing views, call their CEOs in for long and annoying Congressional hearings where you use the words “Silicon Valley elites” a lot.

Scott Alexander, “A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word ‘Class'”, Astral Codex Ten, 2021-02-26.

June 13, 2021

Fundamentally unserious nation – “… for Canada’s leaders, all the world’s a ‘gram”

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

In the Friday wrap-up edition of The Line, a consideration of how shallow, insincere posturing, and performing became the hallmarks of Canadian government leadership:

Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”

Look, we at The Line are as tired as you are about the more, shall we say, theatrical aspects of Justin Trudeau’s approach to being prime minister. Whether it was his Day One “because it’s 2015!” smirk, his obsession with showing off his socks to foreign dignitaries, his fashion sense while vacationing in India, and countless other Trudeauvian trips of the light fantastic, the man has always seemed more interested in performance than in the substance of governing.

But that’s not quite right. Because if there is one thing we’ve come to realize over the past five years and a bit, it is that for the Trudeau Liberals, the performance is the governing. For example, we used to wonder at the amount of time and energy that Cabinet ministers spent working on their Instagram accounts, since it went far beyond what would seem to be necessary for promoting and communicating policy. But once we understood that it was the job of policy to promote the Instagram account, and not the other way around, all of this proudly vacuous behaviour started to make a lot more sense.

But while we’ve gotten more or less used to it here in Canada (or maybe the right word is “numb”), we’ve always wondered how it looks through foreign eyes. Those abstract wonderings became a little more concrete over the past few weeks. Countries are opening up, people are starting to travel, politicians are going back to their old habits of holding regular meetings to make sure the world is still ticking along. And for Canada’s leaders, all the world’s a ‘gram.

So it was that at the G7 summit in Cornwall England this week, Prime-Minister-In-All-But-Name Chrystia Freeland was the only finance minster to wear a mask in a group photo taken outdoors. Ok, we thought, maybe she’s not fully vaxxed, maybe she has reason to be extra cautious. Except in a string of photos taken just before the official photo, Freeland was captured scrambling to put on her mask, not for safety, but for show.

Freeland was just getting the crowd warmed up for her nominal boss, Justin Trudeau. At his official G7 welcome on Friday, Trudeau was the only leader to put a mask on to give Boris Johnson the chummy elbow, only to remove it a few seconds later. We get it. It’s a version of the old “what lie did I tell?” problem, but for acting. Which audience am I playing to at this exact moment? It’s hard for even an old luvvie like Trudeau to keep track.

Once he’s back in Canada, Trudeau is going to hole up in a hotel for a few days, which the Globe‘s Cam Clark aptly referred to as “symbolic penance for a symbolic policy.” We agree with Clark that there’s some good fun in seeing someone get tied up in their own moral posturing. But while Clark is unhappy at the prospect of the prime minister cooling his heels for three days, we’re less fussed about Trudeau’s prospective stay in Hotel Q. Because while Clark thinks “there are real things” for the prime minister to be doing, we doubt that very much.

June 12, 2021

Literate people who “never read books”

Filed under: Books, Business — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I recently added Kenneth Whyte’s SHuSH to my growing list of Substack blogs, and his latest entry considers people who can read but choose not to … and boast about it:

… I ran across a tweet by Neil Patel, a self-made marketing guru, explaining or, rather, bragging about how he doesn’t read books:

    The only books I read are kids’ books and that’s to my daughter. People talk about reading books. You know what? I wrote a book and I was even a New York Times best-selling author, but here’s the thing: most books that you see in a book store, they’re written a year to two years before they were actually published and they go through this really long process. A lot of the times you’re reading outdated information. Even if the book has theories and strategies that aren’t outdated, heck, you can just go on YouTube and find that info in a five-minute clip. Why would you want to read 300 pages when you can just figure it out in five minutes. So I don’t spend my time reading books. Instead, I spend three hours a day reading blogs, Instagram, YouTube and all the other places where I can consume information faster, and you should, too.

It turns out Patel’s tweet was too dumb even for Twitter. Within hours, it had 87 retweets against 1,836 quoted retweets and 764 replies, indicating an extremely high ratio of people blasting him to people sharing his pensées.

Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada had some of the best mockery: “Also do you realize that when you go in a bookstore, some of the books are so old that the authors are dead? How can you learn anything from a dead person? They can’t even tweet.”

I’ve found over the last few years that I’m spending less time reading books, although I still treasure my quiet reading time in the late evening. My tastes have changed a lot over the years, and I read almost no fiction works at all except for a few “unwoke” science fiction authors, and aside from books on hand tool woodworking almost everything else is history — and not much recently published history (for the same reason I avoid most modern SF novels … they’re far too woke for boring old fuddy duddy readers like me).

You’ve probably seen those internet ads that claim the average CEO reads a book a week. That’s bullshit marketed by Blinkist to flog fifteen-minute book summaries. There is no data to support it. The average American reads twelve books a year, and high-earners read fifteen, which is probably the best-case scenario for the average CEO.

Sure, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett read a lot of books. I’ve run across a few lesser mortals in big offices who were enthusiastic readers. I was even part of a Bay Street book club for several years (I loved it). But most businessmen, in my experience, read very little, or not at all. Trump, who also had his name on a bestseller but never reads books, is far closer to the norm than Gates.

I was once at a dinner retreat with a dozen executives, all of whom had good university educations and generous salaries. They’d been asked by a moderator to come to the dinner with an example of something they’d read, a book or a poem or an essay that really spoke to them. Only three of the twelve mentioned books (and each mentioned a business book). Several mentioned newspaper or magazine articles they’d read. The rest relied on song lyrics, with two citing the same line from “Hotel California” as a commentary on their careers: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” None of us knew whether to laugh or cry.

Another thing I learned at that retreat, which struck me as related, was that all of the executives complained of having no time to think about the big picture: they were so busy doing their work that they seldom stopped to consider if there wasn’t a better way to do it, or if it was worth doing at all. They complained at this lack of perspective, but all were senior enough to be able to delegate day-to-day chores to others, leaving themselves time to think. I don’t believe they wanted to.

Canadian “Conservatives” start listing their preferred pronouns

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

Mark Steyn surveys the “conservatives” in the UK, the US, and last-and-least, Canada:

Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill (preferred pronouns she/her).
Photo attributed to “Michelle Staff” via Wikimedia Commons.

So much for UK conservatism. What of Canada? The two most rock-ribbed “right-wingers” in the Dominion’s politics, Doug Ford of Ontario and Jason Kenney of Alberta, have taken the position that conservatism is an indulgence you can’t afford in a pandemic: Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no conservatives in lockdowns.

At the federal level, the cautious and eventually stalled incrementalism of Stephen Harper was followed by the unprincipled hollowness of Andrew Scheer and, after his predictable failure, the everything-must-go massive-storewide-clearances of Erin O’Toole. Even so, I was startled by a tweet from Michelle Rempel Garner, an Alberta MP whom I knew only as an occasionally lively thorn in the side of Justin & Co. Ms Rempel Garner was responding to the appalling killings of a Muslim family in London, Ontario, which within minutes had been seized on by the media-left alliance for the usual purposes, notwithstanding that the perp does not appear to fit the desired narrative. Nevertheless, the outbreak of vehicular “Islamophobia” was taken by Michelle Rempel Garner as the perfect opportunity for an express checkout:

    I humble myself and ask forgiveness, and seek to make things right.

    I have privilege; I am cis/straight/white. But I am also a woman who works in a system dominated by white maleness.

    But no excuses. I will do what I can.

Seeing the above at the great Kate McMillan’s website, I assumed it was a giant leg-pull by Ms Rempel Garner, as did many other of Miss McMillan’s readers. So, as she clarified, no, sorry, it’s for real. The Tory member’s Twitter account now shows her pronouns: “she/her” (at the time of writing). In 2019 it was a big deal when Kamala Harris, at the start of a Democrat debate, announced her pronouns. Less than two years later, “conservative” politicians want a piece of the pronoun action too. Already a key player in O’Toole’s shadow cabinet, the she/her move could make Michelle a shoo-in for Deputy Prime Minister.

Except, of course, that that would require the Tories to win an election.

Guys, it was a joke that modern conservatism is just progressive policies on a five-year delay … please stop taking it seriously!

June 11, 2021

QotD: Twitter

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Imagine being trapped in a room filled with strangers for a long period of time, and in that room, everyone is forced to hear all the stray thoughts from everyone else’s mind. After a time, you’d all be driven insane, yet on Twitter, we accept this as a matter of course.

Clive Mansa (@clivemansa), Twitter, 2021-03-09.

June 9, 2021

Bill C-10 – “… what occurred yesterday was far worse than a blunder. It was a betrayal.”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In another country it might be a fascinating and amusing thing to watch Steven Guilbeault faff about pretending to understand what his own bill says and how it will cause havoc for ordinary Canadians, but being in Canada the humour is lacking as Michael Geist shows:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

Several weeks after Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault introduced Bill C-10, I started a 20 part blog post series called the Broadcasting Act Blunder (podcast edition here). The series examined many of concerns with the bill, including issues such as over-broad regulation and discoverability requirements that would only garner public attention many months later. I thought about that series yesterday as I watched Guilbeault try in the House of Commons to defend the indefensible: a gag order on committee review of the bill, the first such order in two decades. While the bill is in dire need of fixing, what occurred yesterday was far worse than a blunder. It was a betrayal. A betrayal of the government’s commitment to “strengthen Parliamentary committees so that they can better scrutinize legislation.” A betrayal of the promise to do things differently from previous governments. A betrayal of Canada’s values as a Parliamentary democracy.

The 23 minute and 30 second question and comment period – the House Speaker ruled there could be no debate and that the period could not extend beyond 23 minutes and 30 seconds – notably featured NDP MP Peter Julian and Green MP Elizabeth May, two of the longer serving MPs in the House as among the first to speak. Julian was first elected in 2004, when Guilbeault was only a few years removed from activist stunts such as climbing the CN Tower. Meanwhile, May became the founding Executive Director of the Sierra Club in 1989, the same year Guilbeault started as a university student. It seemed to me that both had a message for an inexperienced cabinet minister elected less than two years ago, namely that some things are bigger than single bill. Bills come and go, but principles – or betrayal of those principles – endures.

Guilbeault clearly did not get it, wondering how the NDP could possibly reject the gag order and effectively support potential delays to his bill. Both the NDP and the Greens may ultimately vote for Bill C-10, but both understand that defending democracy and the freedom of expression of MPs (much less the freedom of expression of all Canadians) is far more important than a delay to any single bill. As May noted, the gag order will do real long term damage. One day it will be a different government on a different issue seeking to use the same procedure to cut short committee study. And the Liberals will have no credible response with no one to blame but themselves.

But we don’t need to look far into the future to see the consequences of the Guilbeault gag order. This past weekend, the Canadian government joined with other countries to criticize the Nigerian government for blocking Twitter and establishing registration requirements for social media. Yet calls for respecting freedom of expression rings hollow when you are shutting down Parliamentary debate on a bill with profound implications for freedom of expression. Indeed, Canada’s lost moral authority on Internet freedoms is an undeniable consequence of Bill C-10 and the Guilbeault gag order.

May 26, 2021

The Line refutes arguments recently posted in … The Line

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Recently the editors at The Line accepted an article from the astroturf “advocacy” group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, pushing the establishment line that all of us peons and useless idiots in the blogosphere and even a few undisciplined malcontents among the actual mainstream media are totally misunderstanding and misrepresenting what the government is trying to do with their “tax the web giants” initiative. Peter Menzies responds to the latest bullshit propaganda offensive:

[Mouthpiece for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting Daniel] Bernhard makes a great case for the regulation of tech giants, pointing to some truly dreadful things such as the New Zealand massacre streamed on Facebook, and exploitive content uploaded to Montreal’s PornHub.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the people listed above disagree with the Friends on this point. In fact, many have made the case that Bill C-10 is an unnecessary diversion from more serious online industry problems — some of which are addressed in another bill (C-11).

The big matters that need to be addressed by the government involve algorithms, data collection, privacy protection, and anti-competitive practices — not the facility of the Netflix search tool, nor whether the search term “Canadian” should pop up as a default selection.

My main point of disagreement to Bernhard’s piece is that the Internet is no more broadcasting than a cow is a caribou. Further, it’s ridiculous to think that an outmoded relic such as the 1991(!) Broadcasting Act is the proper tool to use to govern communications in the 21st Century (for those inclined, there is a complete policy paper available here that fleshes that out.)

In terms of the sections 2.1 vs 4.1 legal arguments, I’m pretty certain I will lose most of The Line readers if I delve into those details. I’m more than comfortable deferring to my fellow “militants” such as law professors Laidlaw and Geist, whose arguments have been so overwhelming that not even Attorney General David Lametti attempted to refute them in the defence of Guilbeault, who has now established himself as the most regressive Heritage Minister in the history of that ministry.

All readers really need to know is that, yes, Bill C-10 makes it legal for the CRTC to regulate your video or audio uploads if they are posted to “social media”, the definition of which will be left entirely up to the nine government-appointed CRTC commissioners. Who knows what they’ll come up with. There are no minutes of their meetings, so it’s impossible to know what they might be thinking.

I mean, if it was easy to define social media you’d think the government would have just done it, right? Similarly, if the legislation is aimed only at the bad behaviour of the “Web Giants” — the pejorative term Guilbeault has engaged — the bill ought to simply say that. But it doesn’t.

And as for the government-approved Canadian Content industry’s argument that it didn’t want to regulate/suppress the user generated content produced by the rest of us . . .

Oh Yes They Did.

May 21, 2021

Andrew Potter – “the greatest gift you can give a generation is to ignore them”

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

In The Line Andrew Potter speaks up for those forgotten folks who were born after the end of the Baby Boom but before the Millennials appeared:

Generation X Word Cloud Concept collage background
Best Motivation Blog: What Generation Is X https://fatinsl.info/?arsae=https%3A%2F%2Fbestmotivationblog.blogspot.com%2F2020%2F04%2Fwhat-generation-is-x.html

… just as a sense of futurelessness, futility and invisibility catalyzed the original Generation X mentality in the early 90s (as well as the music, art, film and writing that mentality made manifest), this atavistic indignation spurred [Generation X author Douglas] Coupland to write his wonderful screed. It’s great stuff, with quotable lines in every paragraph. (I especially liked “Immunology is not a smorgasbord. How dare you make us subsidize your cluelessness with our bodies.”)

But I want to take issue with the claim that this is a case of Gen X getting screwed yet again. As a fully paid-up member of Gen X, I’ve grown to appreciate over the decades the extent to which the greatest gift you can give a generation is to ignore them.

Let’s back up a bit. Does Generation X even exist? Does any generation exist for that matter? Sociologists and demographers argue that the concept of a “generation”, be it Boomer, Millennial, Zoomer, what have you, is just the result of confusing cohort effects with generational effects. The idea of distinct generations might be good for selling soft drinks or cars or condos or nostalgia, but there is nothing remotely predictive or explanatory about it.

But as I’ve argued before, this just misunderstands what a generation is, and the role they play in our ongoing cultural self-understanding. Whatever else it is, a generation is something that has its own tastes and moods and fashions and jargon, its own sense of what is in and what is out, what is cool and what’s square, and who belongs and who does not. In short, more than anything else a generation is a scene. It is about who and what you claim as your own, and who claims you.

A big part of what helps define a generation are the battles it chooses to fight. The Boomers spent decades obsessed with their countercultural campaign against The Man, while Millennials have spent their time and energy mining the deepest recesses of identity politics. As for Generation X, our principal preoccupation was the question of authenticity and the fear of selling out.

It is hard to underestimate the role of technology in all of this. It is commonly argued that a generation is formed by the technological ecosystem in which it grows up, and while there’s obviously something to that, what is important for Gen X is not what our technology allowed us to do, but what it protected us from.

In particular, what we were protected from was surveillance. I don’t know a single person I grew up with who doesn’t thank their lucky stars that there were no cellphones with cameras around when we were growing up, that there was no Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or TikTok. I can’t imagine what it is like to grow up under the glaring distributed panopticon of social media, knowing that all your friends, everyone at your school, and even your parents are watching your every move, judging your every utterance.

Mission creep – to “make the web giants pay”, the feds will “need” to regulate everything Canadians view or post online

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

Michael Geist explains why we can safely discount any new lies that the Heritage Minister spews about his Bill C-10 censorship bill:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has tried to deflect public concern with the regulation of user generated content under Bill C-10 by claiming the intent is to make the “web giants” pay their fair share. Yet according to an internal government memo to Guilbeault signed by former Heritage Deputy Minister Hélène Laurendeau released under the Access to Information Act, the department has for months envisioned a far broader regulatory reach. The memo identifies a wide range of targets, including podcast apps such as Stitcher and Pocket Casts, audiobook services such as Audible, home workout apps, adult websites, sports streaming services such as MLB.TV and DAZN, niche video services such as Britbox, and even news sites such as the BBC and CPAC.

The regulations would bring the full power of CRTC regulation over these sites and services. This includes requiring CRTC registration, disclosure of financial and viewership data, Canadian content discoverability requirements (yes, that could mean Canadian discoverability for pornography services), and mandated payments to support Canadian film, television, and music production. The list also notably identifies potential regulation of Youtube Music, Snapchat Originals, and other social media services whose supposed exclusion has been cited as the rationale to extend regulation to user generated content.

The document was obtained by Postmedia journalist Anja Karadeglija, who first reported it last weekend, focusing on departmental warnings about the importance of excluding user generated content from the scope of regulation in Bill C-10 and the necessity of Sections 2.1 and 4.1 (Section 4.1 was removed by the government). The memo states:

    Social media services like YouTube and Facebook greatly expand the number of individuals and other entities that can be said to be transmitting programs over the Internet. This provides an important limitation on the application of the Act by ensuring that under the Act the CRTC cannot regulate the audio or video communications of individuals (or other entities) simply because they use a social media service.

The government obviously ignored the warning and removed the limitation. The document continues by identifying a non-exhaustive list of services that “are likely to regulated under the Act.” The department acknowledges that some services may be exempted by the CRTC, though there are no specifics in the bill that identify thresholds for exemptions. Even if exempted, services may still be required to register with the CRTC and provide confidential commercial data in order to obtain an exemption. Indeed, the default approach is that all services are subject to Canadian regulation, leading to a dizzying array of regulated services identified by the department.

Emphasis mine.

May 18, 2021

In future, if you’re on TV, do not use your hands or fingers under any circumstances … OK?

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

… as a Jeopardy contestant has recently discovered, there is no hand gesture that is free from the slightest hint of an emanation of a penumbra of white supremacy:

And then they came for the integers. The small social universe surrounding the syndicated game show Jeopardy has been boiling over for the past month because of a hand gesture made by a contestant, Kelly Donahue, at the outset of the April 27 episode. Donahue, returning to the show as a three-time winner, held up three fingers in a gesture of triumph and tapped his chest with them. He had done something similar on earlier episodes, flashing a “one” after his first win and a “two” after his second.

Needless to say, he had to be immediately chastised. A small number of conspiracy theorists felt his use of three fingers to represent three of something “resembled very closely a gesture that has been co-opted by white power groups, alt right groups and an anti-government group that calls itself the Three Percenters.”

That quote is taken from an indignant open letter signed by almost 600 members of a private Facebook group for former Jeopardy contestants, in which the signers demanded to know why Donahue’s heinous Nazi code, “whether intentional or not,” hadn’t been cut from the show before broadcast.

[…]

Smith’s column doesn’t actually get around to answering the question, although with a little legwork he was able to establish that the Facebook group had actually approached the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish grandparent of all anti-hate monitoring groups, for advice. The ADL told the addled ex-contestants, “Uh, it looks to us like the guy’s just making a three,” which led some in the internet cocoon to conclude they were being “gaslit.” Smith also talked to members of the Facebook group who knew that their fellow contestants were talking twaddle and fomenting harassment of an innocent man, but who were afraid to contradict the leaders of a witch hunt, lest the purifying fire be kindled beneath their own tootsies.

Smith does identify a crucial point in what is otherwise a workaday tale of cancel culture run mad. Former Jeopardy contestants, every last three-o-phobic one of them, are people selected specifically for high intelligence and wide knowledge. This didn’t make the signers of the letter any less obtuse, or any more resistant to a complicated conspiracy theory. It was their knowledge of disaggregated facts that made them susceptible in the first place.

May 12, 2021

Critics are all conspiracy theorists says minister actively planning to regulate speech online

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

The Trudeau government has come a long, long way from those far-distant days when they were all about “openness” and “accountability” and especially about protecting free speech:

Last night, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault posted a remarkable tweet that should heighten concerns about Bill C-10, forthcoming online harms legislation, and the government’s intent with respect to free speech. In the weeks since it opened the door to treating all user generated content as a “program” subject to CRTC regulation, there has been mounting public criticism and concern about the implications for free speech. While the tech companies have remained relatively silent, Canadians have been speaking out. Those voices now include the Government of Saskatchewan, with Minister of Justice Gord Wyant writing to Guilbeault to urge the federal government to stop Bill C-10 from proceeding or amend it to ensure that “all creative Internet content generated by Canadians will be exempt from any regulatory supervision by federal government agencies.”

Given the opposition – as well as Guilbeault’s well-documented disastrous interviews on CBC and CTV – one would have thought the Minister would be seeking to assuage public concern. Instead, Guilbeault took to Twitter last night to suggest that the public anger over Bill C-10 was a matter of “public opinion being manipulated at scale through a deliberate campaign of misinformation by commercial interests that would prefer to avoid the same regulatory oversight applied to broadcast media.”

Over the past few weeks of intense Bill C-10 debate, nothing has left me angrier or more concerned than this tweet. First, the conspiracy theory amplified by Guilbeault is plainly wrong and itself quite clearly misinformation. The concerns regarding the bill have been backed by law professors, experts, Justice Ministers, former CRTC chairs, and hundreds of others. To claim this is a tech-inspired misinformation campaign lends support to the view that Guilbeault still does not understand his own bill and its implications. Moreover, not only have the tech companies remained relatively quiet, but most did not even appear before the Heritage Committee as part of its study. To suggest that having largely ignored the bill, the companies are now engaged in some grand conspiracy is lunacy.

One of the fun notions of C-10 is having some sort of popularity cut-off for regulation to kick in … the more popular your online output becomes, the closer you’ll get to having one of Justin’s CRTC apparatchiks censoring your work:

May 5, 2021

Michael Geist’s overview of the federal government’s steady retreat from their 2015 election promises on protecting Canadians’ online privacy and free speech rights

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Reposting his most recent Maclean’s article on his website, Michael Geist explains why the federal government’s blatant hypocrisy over Canadians’ rights online has finally gotten many people paying closer attention:

The government had maintained that it had no interest in regulating user generated content, but the policy reversal meant that millions of video, podcasts, and the other audiovisual content on those popular services would be treated as “programs” under Canadian law and subject to some of the same rules as those previously reserved for programming on conventional broadcast services.

The backlash undoubtedly caught the government by surprise, particularly since the policy change garnered little discussion at committee. As the public concern mounted, Guilbeault retreated to his standard talking points about how the opposition parties were unwilling to stand up to the web giants. The arguments fell flat, however, since the new rules were directly targeting users’ content, not the Internet companies. Further, the public reaction pointed to a government increasingly out-of-step with the public, which may support increased Internet regulation, but not at any cost.

The fact that the Liberal government was open to regulating millions of TikTok and Youtube videos was a reminder of how unrecognizable its digital policy approach has become in recent years. The party was elected in 2015 on a platform that promised to entrench net neutrality, prioritize innovation, focus on privacy rather than surveillance, and support freedom of expression. Most of those positions now seemingly reflect a by-gone era.

It is still anxious to demonstrate its tech bona fides, but now progressive policies appear to mean confronting the “web giants” with threats of regulation, penalties, and taxes. Cultural sovereignty has replaced innovation as the guiding principle, which has meant the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry has been replaced by the Minister of Canadian Heritage as the digital policy lead.

And so for the past 18 months, Guilbeault has been handed Canada’s digital policy keys. In Guilbeault’s eyes, seemingly everything is under threat – Canadian film and television production, a safe space for speech, the future of news – and the big technology companies are invariably to blame.

Few would dispute that an updated tech regulatory model is needed, but evidence-based policies are in short supply in the current approach. For example, the use or misuse of data lies at the heart of the power of big tech, yet privacy reforms have been curiously absent as a government priority. Indeed, Bill C-11 was promoted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last November as legislation to give Canadians greater control over their personal information, but under newly named ISI Minister François-Philippe Champagne, it has scarcely been heard from again.

The government has similarly done little to address concerns about abuse of competition, the risks associated with algorithmic decision-making, or the development of a modernized framework for artificial intelligence. Years of emphasis on the benefits of multi-lateral policy development and consensus-building were unceremoniously discarded the recent budget in order to commit to a digital services tax in 2022 that could spark billions in tariff retaliation. In fact, the US-Canada-Mexico Trade Agreement that the government trumpeted as a major success story restricts Canada’s ability to even establish a new liability regime for technology companies.

April 29, 2021

SFU professor’s analysis of Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits

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

Economist Douglas W. Allen of Simon Fraser University recently published his Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits:A Critical Assessment of the Literature where he concludes that “it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history”:

In my forty years as an academic, I’ve never seen anything like the response and reaction to Covid-19. The research response has been immense, with estimates of over 40,000 papers related to the topic produced in one year. This research covers every imaginable aspect of Covid-19, and over the course of the past year knowledge about the virus, the human reactions to it, and the consequences of these reactions has exploded. In one word, the Covid-19 information cascade has been “overwhelming.”

In contrast, the ubiquitous media, public health, and political response to the pandemic has been one-sided, incomplete, and almost unchanging over the past year. With respect to lockdown policies, many political jurisdictions have repeated the same spring 2020 programs in 2021, ignoring what has been learned in the meantime. Often public announcements were made that were inconsistent with basic Covid-19 facts that were easy to look up if you know where to look. Furthermore, when research results contrary to the official government response were shared on social media, they were often pulled from social media platforms. As a result, for average Canadians the public media and official public health news conferences have been the only source of Covid-19 information.

This review of a small segment of the literature is intended to give some guidance for those who would otherwise not have access to academic research. The focus is to only critically assess the cost/benefit studies that have been written over the past year on lockdown policies related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The report covers over 80 different academic studies and related Covid-19 datasites. I have sought out studies that i) dealt with matters of “lockdown” either directly or indirectly, and ii) were related directly or indirectly to issues relevant to the costs or benefits of lockdown.

The term “lockdown” is used to generically refer to state actions that imposed various forms of non-pharmaceutical interventions. That is, the term will be used to include mandatory state-enforced closing of non-essential business, education, recreation, and spiritual facilities; mask and social distancing orders; stay-in-place orders; and restrictions on private social gatherings.

“Lockdown” does not refer to cases of “isolation,” where a country was able to engage in an early and sufficient border closure that prevented trans-border transmission, followed by a mandated lockdown that eliminated the virus in the domestic population, which was then followed by perpetual isolation until the population is fully vaccinated. This strategy was adopted by a number of island countries like New Zealand. Here I will only consider lockdown as it took place in Canada and most of the world; that is, within a country where the virus became established.

This is a complicated report because it covers a wide range of studies, and deals with a wide range of issues. Table 1 outlines the substance of the report. Sections II: A and B, discuss four critical assumptions often made within the context of estimating benefits and costs. Understanding these assumptions explains why early studies claimed that the benefits of lockdown were so high, and also explains why the predictions of those models turned out to be false.

Section II: C, examines major cost/benefit studies completed over the first six months of the pandemic, and then focuses on what I believe to be the critical factor: distinguishing between mandated and voluntary changes in behavior. This section concludes with an interpretation of some unconditional death comparisons across countries that are typically reported in the media. Section II: D surveys the research done on the costs of lockdown. Finally, Section III. presents a simple alternative cost/benefit methodology to generate two cost/benefit ratios of lockdown.

H/T to Stephen Green for the link.

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