Quotulatiousness

July 31, 2024

“You really can’t hate them enough”

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

Elizabeth Nickson links to a short excerpt from Michael Walsh’s introduction to his upcoming Against the Corporate Media:

Today’s journalists now openly celebrate the death of objectivity, arguing that reporters have biases like everybody else, so why pretend that they don’t? In clear violation of their own — and now very much outmoded — Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, they happily ignore such tenets as:

  • Identify sources clearly.
  • Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity.
  • Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
  • Expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations.

Thus, after nearly a century’s consensus about journalistic best practices, we have come full circle to the days of naked partisanship that marked the earliest American newspapers. Gossip has become news, journalistic crusades are fabricated out of whole cloth and attributed to anonymous sources as justification. It’s noteworthy that the word “objectivity” nowhere appears in the current SPJ code, which was revised in 2014. Why would it? Objectivity has become the mortal enemy of the current vogue for “explanatory” or “advocacy” journalism — otherwise generally known as propaganda.

The transformation of journalism from rank advocacy to lukewarm “objectivity” and back to even ranker political propaganda (nearly all news stories today are couched in political terms, including those about pop music and sports) is one of the principal subjects of this book. Accordingly we have assembled a corps of forty-two journalists — some grizzled veterans, some newcomers, some of whose primary occupations lie in the wider fields of book publishing, fiction, non-fiction, television, and even Hollywood — to analyze the startling changes that have come over the profession in our lifetimes.

You really can’t hate them enough.

Even greater than the abandonment of “objectivity” as a pernicious influence on journalism is the internet, the great destroyer of printed periodicals, which has laid waste to the newspaper and magazine industry and has fallen under the control of the social-media giants, such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, and is now subject to favoritism and even censorship by near-monopolies like Google, a search engine that also now controls visual media via its ownership of YouTube. Whether the patrician Walter Lippmann would have admired his wishful handiwork now that it is a reality is open to question, but surely he would celebrate the intrusion of the American federal government, along with governments around the world, into both de facto and de jure informational control of cyberspace. In many countries around the world, the press and attendant broadcast media are now directly and unabashedly controlled by government entities which, in many cases, openly fund and censor them.

Even in a work of this length, it is of course impossible to touch upon every aspect of the current state of the media. From the point of view of one who has labored in it, off and on, for more than half a century, it is parlous and getting worse. Ask someone with less than ten years’ experience in the field and you may well — very likely will — get a different answer: that it’s liberated, responsive, unfettered. Still, my work as a historian has convinced me of the truth of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s famous axiom, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The Paris-born Karr, who lived from 1808 to 1890, was, of course, a journalist himself, in addition to being a critic, novelist, and flora-culturalist. But that was back in the day when “journalists” were men of accomplishment in other fields.) That is to say, the fundamental things apply in all walks of human endeavor, and among these things is mankind’s innate desire to convince others of the rightness of his position on any given subject. The question always has been: What’s the best way to go about it?

July 26, 2024

Getting meta on “cancelling the cancellers”

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

Nearly a week ago, I posted an excerpt from John Carter’s essay at Postcards From Barsoom called “Right Wing Cancel Squads“. As sometimes happens, this particular essay caught the attention of a lot of folks online and triggered much discussion pro and con. John did his best to summarize and respond here, and (as I post links to Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten now and again), I thought John’s response to Scott’s criticism was worth highlighting:

Somehow, Scott Alexander took interest in my essay, and addressed it at length. I’m not deeply familiar with Alexander, aside from a vague awareness that he’s a big deal in the rationalist community, to say nothing of being a much bigger deal than I am, and that he’s dealt with lying journalists and hysterical wokoids enough himself to have a healthy distaste for them. Alexander is characteristically calm and thorough, starting with a selection of screenshotted posts on Notes from various writers and commenters who take the pro-fight-the-enemy side, before presenting an extensive set of excerpts from my own essay.

Scott sidesteps the ethical question, to focus instead on the practical considerations, on the grounds of which he comes down (as expected, given his ideological niche) on the don’t-cancel side. He enumerates a series of objections, which can be approximately summarized as1:

    1) cancellation will not, in fact, teach anyone anything – after all, just look at how eager the right is to cancel;

    2) this has been going on forever, e.g. the Red Scare, so one more whirl ‘bout the merry-go-round isn’t likely to stop the wheel a turnin’;

    3) If you act like the woke, you are the woke;

    4) Most cancellations have been of liberals, by liberals, so if the right starts doing this it is likely to turn on itself;

    5) cancellation destroys competence, because avoiding cancellation takes on a higher salience to people than doing their damn jobs;

    6) embracing cancel culture has ruined the left’s name, which is why it is struggling despite holding all of the institutional power;

    7) going mad with power before you actually have power is probably stupid;

And finally

    8) there are better options.

The better options Alexander describes are mostly at the policy and tech level, such as better moderation tools that take the personal politics of platform moderators out of the equation, or dismantling those aspects of the regulatory state, such as the sillier and more self-contradictory elements of Civil Rights law, which nourish cancel culture in the first place. Alexander’s policy proposals are all great, and I completely agree that the most effective long-term solution is to tear the legal basis of cancel culture up by the roots, set those roots on fire, and salt the earth in which they were planted.

Regarding power, and the simple fact that the right does not have it in any formal sense, Charles Haywood and Bennett’s Phylactery made the same very cogent point. I don’t think any sane person could disagree.

I’m not convinced by some of Alexander’s other points. For instance, the right is an extremely contentious place, with the modal rightist being pretty low in agreeableness, which probably makes it hard for circular firing squads to be terribly effective. That isn’t to say that rightists don’t have strong beliefs – there are fanatics all over the place – but those beliefs are so contradictory between the various factions that the ideology of the right is infamously difficult to describe. Just look at the perennial holy war between Christians and pagans/Nietzscheans/vitalists.

As to the Red Scare, it’s probably worth pointing out that McCarthy was actually right: there really were communists trying to infiltrate the Western social order; tragically for us, the communists succeeded, which is a large part of the reason why we are where we are now.

As to the unpopularity of the left, I do not think this is only because of their po-faced censoriousness, although there is no question that that contributes. It probably also has something to do with their vicious racial and sexual hatred, their contemptuous hostility towards Western civilization, and their propensity to emotionally abuse children to the point that those children demand that they be allowed to mutilate their genitalia, amongst a great number of other horrors.

Finally, as to Alexander’s first point, that cancellation does not teach anyone anything. Au contraire. Look around at how society has changed in just the last decade. Sure, if you’re an autistic rationalist, a contrarian ideologue, or a Bohemian free spirit, cancel culture has only made you hate the left more. But this is a fairly small fraction of the population. What about the normies? In a remarkably short period of time, they went from opposing gay marriage, to supporting it. Why? Because examples were made of a few people who opposed it, and the rest got into line. Most people are basically NPCs: they don’t follow a praxis emerging from carefully thought out philosophical systems, but simply go along with whatever they perceive the prevailing morality to be. They are not rational, nor are they principled. They simply respond to incentives, which is to say, to rewards and to punishments. Put a few heads on pikes to demarcate new social boundaries, and the normies will in general respect them.2

There are limits to the ability to enact social change via incentive structure manipulation, because if the social boundaries you establish don’t map to the eternal verities of human nature, the resulting social order will generate a lot of friction and consequently destabilize … as our society observably is. However, the social boundaries the right intends to enforce do, in fact, map to human nature. The left has been figuratively beheading the people who object to the surgical genital mutilation and chemical sterilization of children; the right intends to metaphorically behead the people who have been advocating and carrying out that child abuse in the first place. There’s a profound moral asymmetry there, but I think there’s also a practical asymmetry, because the right isn’t demanding that everyone publicly agree sadomasochistic psychosis is healthy.

    1. I skipped one in the middle because it looked redundant.

    2. [NR] Sarah Hoyt is one of the folks most likely to describe herself as being on Team Heads-On-Pikes, and I suspect she has a non-trivial following who share in that inclination.

July 23, 2024

The next phase of the campaign to replace “Orwellian” with “Trudeaupian”

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

On the Fraser Institute blog, Jake Fuss and Alex Whalen outline the Trudeau government’s latest attempt to drive the word “Orwellian” out of common usage by making “Trudeaupian” the more authoritarian descriptor:

A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 (and it’s been 40 years since the actual year 1984). In the novel, Orwell explains the dangers of totalitarianism by exploring what happens when government exercises extreme levels of control over citizens including censoring and controlling language. While Canada is a relatively free country in 2024, there are aspects of Orwell’s world reflected in government policy today.

The Human Freedom Index, published annually by the Fraser Institute and Cato Institute, defines freedom as a social concept that recognizes the dignity of individuals by the absence of coercive constraint. In a free society, citizens are free to do, say or think almost anything they want, provided it does not infringe on the right of others to do the same.

Canada currently fares relatively well compared to other countries on the Human Freedom Index, placing 13th out of 165 countries. However, our score has dropped six spots on the index since 2008 when Canada recorded its highest ever rank.

This is not surprising given the Trudeau government’s recent efforts to control and manage the free exchange of ideas. The recent Online Streaming Act imposes various content rules on major streaming services such as Netflix, and requirements to extract funds to be redirected toward favoured groups. The Act seemingly seeks to bring the entire Internet under the regulation of a government body.

In another piece of recent legislation, the Online News Act, the government attempted to force certain social media platforms to pay other legacy news outlets for carrying content. In response, the social media platforms chose simply not to allow content from those news providers on their platforms, resulting in a dramatic reduction of Canadians’ access to news.

Now, a new piece of federal legislation — Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act — seeks to control language and grant government power to punish citizens for what the government deems to be unfavourable speech.

The government has sold Bill C-63 as a way to promote the online safety of Canadians, reduce harms, and ensure the operators of social media services are held accountable. In reality, however, the bill is Orwell’s Big Brother concept brought to life, where government controls information and limits free exchange. The legislation seeks to punish citizens not just for what the governments deems as “hate speech” but also grants the state power to bring Canadians before tribunals on suspicion that they might say something hateful in the future. Not surprisingly, many have raised concerns about the constitutionality of the Bill, which will surely be tested in court.

July 20, 2024

Begun, the Cancellation Wars have!

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

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses how the cancellation wars have gone over the last decade:

The left’s reaction to the missed shot heard around the world has been exactly as calm and measured as we have grown to expect. Sensing that America is teetering on the edge of the abyss of civil violence and realizing that they need to deescalate the situation, liberals have thrown open their arms with a message of conciliation and unity, as embodied by popular slogans such as “Make Aiming Great Again”. You can really feel the love.

Recently Xitter’s Libs of TikTok, neé Chaya Raichik, got a Home Depot employee fired from her job. The woman herself isn’t important – just another obese, frumpy hicklib convinced that Trump is Antichrist McHitler because her opinion box on her living room wall has spent the last eight years lying to her about Russia. The details aren’t all that interesting: the woman made an ill-considered comment on Facebook to the effect that she wished the would-be assassin hadn’t missed, which Raichik shared with her audience of ragebait junkies, which led to an angry veteran confronting the woman at her place of work, the video of which Raichik also shared, which led to Home Depot canning the unpleasant sow.

The result has been an immediate moral split on the right, between those who are appalled, and those who applaud. The former consider it a basic civic principle that people should not lose their jobs for getting mad on the Internet, no matter how objectionable or offensive their words. Isn’t free speech what we’ve been fighting for all these years? If the right starts using the power of the cancel mob, do we not become no different from the left?

[…]

The first incident in that series, the cancellation of space scientist Dr. Matt Taylor, was my personal emotional breaking point with the left. Before that I considered myself to be broadly aligned with the left, mainly due to disgust over the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, and disillusionment with the then-ongoing, pointless, costly horror of the perpetual terror war. What happened to Matt Taylor shook me out of it. Here was a guy who had just landed a robot on a comet, reduced to a mass of blubbering jello because shrieking women didn’t like the way the sexy Barbarella prints on his Hawaiian shirt objectified women i.e. made the ugly ones feel bad. At the time, that hersterical1 mob included many I counted as friends. I tried reasoning with them, pointing out that his shirt had been designed by a friend of his, an independent female artist, and that by wearing the shirt at the press conference at the apex of his career, with many more millions of eyes focused upon him than had ever looked his way before or would ever glance his way again, he was helping that friend, who is a woman herself, to expand her business. It didn’t matter, of course. Caught up in the digital maenad frenzy, there was no reasoning with them.

Over the decade subsequent to Dr. Taylor’s defenestration, we have seen people get cancelled for refusing to use the right pronouns, for refusing to genuflect before the rainbow, for wearing red hats in public, for donating to the wrong political causes, for getting into arguments with black people, for being related to someone who used a racial slur, for voicing words in Chinese that sound like racial slurs, and on and on without rhyme, reason, or limiting principle.

The left has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in its pursuit of total monolithic discursive purity.

This is not merely an Internet phenomenon, with consequences limited to those who draw the terrible gaze of the beast with a million eyes. You have almost certainly felt this in your personal life, the subtle, steady pressure to bite your tongue in every social and professional situation, the knowledge that if you say too much, if you cross one of the myriad invisible, ever-shifting red lines in the left’s mutable cat’s cradle of taboos, you risk total social and professional death.

All the more galling has been that leftists themselves feel absolutely no shame about voicing their demented gibberish at every opportunity, no matter how professionally or socially inappropriate. Again, most of you will have experienced this. Maybe there’s that Thanksgiving dinner, at which you did your best to avoid anything divisively political, only to endure sermons from your liberal aunt, who felt it her moral duty to correct her wayward relations, who are ignorant and need to educate themselves, on the urgency of climate change or the ethical imperative of confronting whiteness wherever it may be glimpsed. Maybe you’ve had to grit your teeth at an office meeting, the purpose of which was ostensibly to discuss the new sales tracking software, at which Debby from accounting inserted an egregious dig at the Bad Orange Russian Agent under the mistaken impression that this would meet with universal approval.

All it takes is one of these people to ruin a workplace for everyone. The moment one of them sees or hears anything that triggers them, no matter how innocuous, they run to HR, and your job is on the line. They are active in this, spontaneously discovering new ways to be offended, such that no one can predict what will send them off into a tantrum next. Everyone knows this, with the result that everyone is constantly walking on eggshells, aware that the walls have ears, as do the blue-haired women built like walls. For all the hand-wringing over the Home Depot lady’s firing, I suspect a lot of her coworkers sighed with relief when they got the news that they would no longer have to dance around her tender sensibilities in the lunch room.

July 18, 2024

For some people (especially on social media) even contradictory evidence proves your beliefs are correct

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

Chris Bray once again puts on the virtual hazmat suit and wades into the putrid mess that is most of social media after the Trump assassination attempt:

First, a remarkable number of people — see Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s social media feed, if you feel the need to stare into the abyss — conclude under all circumstances that all evidence shows how bad [folk devil figure] is.

1.) Donald Trump took a bullet through the side of the head.

2.) NOW DO YOU SEE HOW DANGEROUS DONALD TRUMP IS?!?!?!?

That son-of-a-bitch is going around absorbing bullets with his stupid Nazi ear, the bastard. You know who else got a bullet in the head, THINK ABOUT IT.

These people could stand in Trump’s presence, watching someone beat the man with a lead pipe, and shake their heads over the outrageousness of Donald Trump’s behavior. Stop assaulting that lead pipe with your face, Adolf!

A sizable percentage of the American population has no path to a rational, fact-facing evaluation of reality, and their psychosis is transportable. It can be carried through Trump and to another symbol-figure instantly. Again, go see the social media accounts of people like Bill Kristol or Liz Cheney if you feel the need to test this theory. Donald Trump is the worst person who has ever lived, far more dangerous than Adolf Hitler … and, update has finished downloading, JD Vance is far more horribler and Hitlerian than Donald Trump. Remember that Ron DeSantis was also far more dangerous than Trump for about ten minutes this year. They will do this and do this and do this, forever, for whichever figure the media points them at. [Name here] is more dangerous than Hitler. They’re actually programmed. The name can be swapped into the same software.

Second, social media is a currently a sewage bucket overflowing with programmed idiots expressing public sorrow that the shooter missed, and a bunch of people are losing their dismal jobs over the expression of that sentiment. See this pathetic example, if you feel the need.

July 9, 2024

QotD: “No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook”

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

Straight off, we know one thing they wouldn’t do — create a Reich Culture Chamber or Department of Enlightenment. To be fair to the Commies and Nazis, they probably didn’t have much of a choice in their home countries — totalitarianism being what it is, and Europeans being what they are — but the Soviets, at least, soon saw the error of their ways, and let the free market handle it overseas. 99% of the USSR’s propaganda effort was done pro bono by Western “intellectuals”, and that’s how it’s done — convince cripplingly insecure dorks that they’re oh so smart for parroting your party line, and they’ll do all your dirty work for free.

Our overlords figured that out, give credit where it’s due. No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook. But that’s a problem, too, as we’re starting to see. The problem with freelance propaganda is the free market problem of marginal utility.

Facebook and Twitter are SJW cesspools. Everyone knows this. Even your sweet old granny, who is only on Facebook to exchange pie recipes and knitting ideas, knows this, because the #WokeStapo came for knitting years back. When the “trust and safety council” goes so far as to ban the sitting President of the United States, even hermits living in remote Himalayan caves got the message — toe the Party line on social media, or else.

This reduces the value of ALL information on social media to, effectively, zero. Sure, it might be true — and propaganda, as we know, works better the closer to the truth it steers — but given that they’ve even gone after knitting, for pete’s sake, means that any even halfway sorta quasi rational person assumes everything on social media is nothing but propaganda.

Severian, “If They Were Clever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-08.

July 3, 2024

QotD: Mental health and social media

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

I question the idea that modern life has increased the total amount of lunacy in the world. Thanks to the Internet in general, and social media in particular, the volume of the world’s lunatic population has been amped well past 11 … but I think this is less a case of “Twitter creating lunatics” than “online anonymity letting people fly their freak flags openly”. Deliberately avoiding sex and politics, an example: On a road trip recently, I started flipping channels in my hotel room, and I came across a show called Dr. Pimple Popper. I swear, this is absolutely a real thing that exists. Here’s this woman, a dermatologist I guess, rooting around in cysts and boils and tumors and whatnot for the cameras, and … that’s it.

Not only is there an audience for this — which I never would’ve believed — there’s enough of an audience for it that it’s on basic cable. See what I mean? Somehow, the marketing guys determined that yes, there are enough people out there who want to see cysts being cauterized that we can make an entire show out of it. How could they figure it out? Beats me, but unless some suits at TLC had a contest to see what’s the silliest, grossest thing they could actually get broadcast, I’m betting that there was a group of Internet weirdos out there discussing it, and the marketing boys just ran with it.

Applying that to the topic at hand, my guess is that, since it’s so easy for people to be Massively Online these days, the kind of folks with that particular type of mental problem pretty much live on Twitter, where — as anyone who has waded into that cesspit for more than five minutes knows — the Twitterati absolutely cannot distinguish “talking about doing something” from “actually doing something”.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-04.

June 28, 2024

QotD: “The personal is political”

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

The idea of the personal being the political is not new. The phrase comes from an essay by feminist Carol Hanisch in the 1960’s. The idea is that personal experience is intertwined with larger social and political structures. One’s personal choices reveal one’s politics. Consequently, one should make personal choices that are consistent with one’s politics. The political person should live the life they advocate, so that means not doing business or associating with the wrong people.

Today, this has moved from simply not buying stuff from a business owned by a bad thinker to committing one’s life to destroying the bad thinker and anyone foolish enough to not share the same hatred. The whole woke movement is a blood lust, an effort to cause real harm to people by denying them the ability to live. Climate activism, as expressed in that essay, is about destruction. Everything the writer sees as keeping him from reaching personal fulfillment must be destroyed.

It is not a politics of self-interest, as the so-called conservative would imagine. The modern leftist is like a bear protecting her cubs. Any perceived threat is met with overwhelming aggression. You see it in the language. They conflate ideas and statements with actions. Holding a contrary opinion makes them feel unsafe, as that opinion is viewed as violence. They need safe spaces, by which they mean the removal of anything and anyone that contradicts their sense of self.

This is the real cause of what is behind the social media purges. From the perspective of a radical, everything in their space is theirs and an extension of their self. When a contrary opinion, or even an oblique reference to one, shows up in their twitter timeline, it feels like a home invasion to them. Those women posting about how they are literally shaking or sobbing because their favorite cable show had a bad person as a guest are not exaggerating. They were physically effected by the experience.

It’s an important thing the alt-right got wrong about their on-line activities. They still assume the reason they get thrown off these platforms is because their ideas are so powerful. In reality, their ideas are meaningless. The reason they are removed from the platforms is the same reason one would kill a snake. It’s not that the snake poses a threat to the ecosystem. It is that the snake is a personal threat. The person kills the snake because they can’t feel safe until they know it is dead.

The Z Man, “It’s Personal”, The Z Blog, 2019-11-12.

June 24, 2024

Justin Trudeau’s Ominous Online Harms Act: Minority Report Comes to Canada: Conor Friedersdorf

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

Quillette
Published Jun 19, 2024

Jonathan Kay talks to Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf about a censorious government bill that would allow officials to investigate Canadians for things they haven’t done yet.

https://quillette.com/2024/06/19/just…

——

Quillette is an Australian-based online magazine that focuses on long-form analysis and cultural commentary. It is politically non-partisan, but relies on reason, science, and humanism as its guiding values.

Quillette was founded in 2015 by Australian writer Claire Lehmann. It is a platform for free thought and a space for open discussion and debate on a wide range of topics, including politics, culture, science, and technology.

Quillette has gained attention for publishing articles and essays that challenge modern heterodoxy on a variety of topics, including gender and sexuality, race and identity politics, and free speech and censorship.
(more…)

June 21, 2024

Fractal dissidence

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

Fortissax notes some historic parallels between the many, many factions in Spain leading up to the catastrophe of the Spanish Civil War and the many, many factions of the dissident right in the Anglosphere and the rest of the diminishing western world today:

The Spanish Civil War, approximate Nationalist (pink) and Republican (blue) areas of control in September, 1936.
Map by NordNordWest with modifications by “Sting” via Wikimedia Commons.

We have serious issues on our hands. We must each contribute through our respective projects and instigate real-world change by pen, sword, or ploughshare. We don’t have time to split, fracture, insult, belittle, destroy each other’s reputations, or engage in character assassination. I liken the factionalism of the (terminally) online right to that of the factions in the Spanish Civil War. The online right is important because the internet is the new “public square”. As influential or more, as mass-action in living, breathing cities. The influence of discourse, media, and content on the internet is insurmountable. While small locally, the impact of each content maker, producer, writer, poet, and videographer is huge. We are part of a civilizational, some would even say global, culture, yet not of it. I will provide examples of some similarities I notice while reading through Peter Kemp’s “Mine Were of Trouble”.

In the buildup to the Spanish Civil War, you had conservative patriots (populists, anti-woke patriot-normies), traditionalist Christian monarchists (who parallel Christ-Is-King people), and the Falangist (who parallel the Vitalists, secular-right). This roughly, parallels the groupings of the Dissident Right today. I believe this is a good case study. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. All of them had a lot more in common than they opposed. For example, consider the following points:

  • Anti-Communism: Both the Falangists and the Requetés were strongly anti-communist and opposed the Spanish Republic, which they associated with communism, liberalism, and anarchism. They viewed the leftist factions as threats to Spanish traditions, religion, and social order. Today, the Managerial Elite of every single western country has weaponized the New-Left of decades past to use as shock troops against the good people of each nation. We all agree the mass psychosis of capital backed DEI civic cult, their nihilistic, suicidal anti-life acolytes are the most destructive group the human species has ever seen.
  • Support for Strong Leaders: Both groups eventually supported General Francisco Franco’s leadership, despite some initial differences in ideology and goals. Franco’s ability to unify the Nationalist forces was crucial to their eventual victory. In many Western countries today, people are rallying behind Trump, Bardella, Farage, Bernier to name a few. They are not perfect, but they are increasingly influenced by Dissident Right ideas, and culture.
  • Nationalism: The Falangists and the Requetés were deeply nationalist, believing in the unity and greatness of Spain. They were committed to preserving Spain as a single, undivided nation-state. Today, Dissidents of all stripes support nationalism an civilizational cooperation against outside threats like China, the emerging Republic of India, and the Islamic world, who seek to make excursions in Europe.
  • Militarism: Both factions believed in the application of force when necessary to achieve their goals and restore order in Spain. They were heavily involved in the Nationalist military efforts during the civil war. Both the religious right, and the secular Vitalists ostensibly believe a strong body, mind and soul are necessary to enact change. Both hold excellence as a core value, although perhaps one more than the other.
  • Benevolent Authoritarianism: Both the Falangists and the Requetés supported authoritarian forms of government. While the Falangists leaned towards a Nietzsche inspired model, the Requetés, rooted in traditional Christian monarchism, were also supportive of strong, centralized authority to maintain order and uphold traditional values.
  • Natural Social Order: Both groups believed in a natural social order or organic hierarchy. This concept held that society should be structured according to natural, hierarchical lines, which they saw as inherent and beneficial for maintaining stability and harmony. Do the religious right, and the Vitalists not believe this? That the strong, the beautiful, healthy, are fit to lead? That the most capable should be given the opportunity to advance socially?
  • Community Over Individual: While recognizing and respecting the Western man’s innate streak of liberty and individualism, both groups prioritized the needs and values of the community over the individual. They believed that individuals found their true purpose and identity within the larger community and that communal values should guide social and political life. When everyone is doing their part, all prosper.

June 15, 2024

In Germany, it can be dangerous to “participat[e] in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembl[e] one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources”

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

German government control over what people can say online seems like something Justin Trudeau would love to have (and, in fact, is working toward) here in Canada:

Almost two years ago, on 26 July 2022, a German Twitter user known only as MicLiberal posted a thread that culminated in his criminal trial this week. His is but the latest in a long line of such prosecutions – the tactic our rulers increasingly favour to intimidate and harass those who use their freedom of expression in inconvenient ways.

MicLiberal committed his alleged offence as Germany was still awakening from months of hypervaccination insanity. Science authorities and politicians had spent the winter decrying the “tyranny of the unvaccinated“, demanding that “we have to take care of the unvaccinated, and … make vaccination compulsory“, firing people who protested institutional vaccine mandates on social media and denouncing the unvaccinated for ongoing virus restrictions and Covid deaths. Our neighbour, Austria, even went so far as to impose a specific lockdown on those who refused the Covid vaccines. Culturally and politically, those were the darkest months I have ever lived through; they changed my life forever and I will never forget them.

MicLiberal’s thread aimed only to memorialise some of the crazy things the vaccinators had said. It opened with this tweet:

    We were complicit!

    We marginalised, defamed, discredited, insulted and cancelled people. On behalf of science!

    By popular demand, this brief thread with statements that should not be forgotten:

There ensued nothing but a series of citations, most of them wholly typical samples of vintage 2021/22 vaccinator rhetoric, much of it not even that remarkable. For example, MicLiberal included this statement from Andreas Berholz, deputy editor-in-chief of the widely read blog Der Volksverpetzer:

    Fact-check: The unvaccinated remain the main drivers of the pandemic.

[…]

You might be wondering what crime MicLiberal can possibly have committed by drawing attention to these already-public statements. The most honest answer is that his thread achieved millions of views in a matter of days, and at a very awkward moment – precisely when everyone was beginning to regret all the illiberal and wildly intemperate things they had said in the depths of the virus craze. He had embarrassed some very vain and powerful people with their own incredibly stupid words, and today many are of the opinion that that ought to be a crime in and of itself.

Alas, things have not yet deteriorated that far. Thus the police and prosecutors were left to scour our dense thicket of laws for a more plausible offence. They decided that their best chance lay with a novel provision of the German Criminal Code (Paragraph 126a). This provision makes it a crime to “disseminate the personal data of another person in a matter that is … intended to expose this person … to the risk of a criminal offence directed against them“. On 28 July, two days after MicLiberal posted his 25 tweets, Cologne police filed a criminal complaint against him, and afterwards the Cologne prosecutor’s office brought charges, arguing that MicLiberal had suggested that the people he cited were “perpetrators” and therefore associated them with “fascism”. The district court declined to approve the charges, but the prosecutors appealed to the regional court, where the judges saw things differently. They believed that a prosecution was warranted because of the “heated social debate” surrounding Covid measures, and because MicLiberal’s audience was composed of “homogeneous” like-minded people, who (in the summary of the Berliner Zeitung) “could either form groups or encourage individual members to commit acts of violence”. MicLiberal had furthermore assembled his citations from a website that the judges deemed guilty of an “anti-government orientation”.

We must take a moment to ponder this truly amazing argumentation, which would seem to criminalise such things as participating in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembling one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources. In each of these cases, of course, it is the prosecutors and the judges eager to apply Paragraph 126a to their political opponents who get to decide what is “wrong”.

The good news in all of this is that the court acquitted him of these creative charges, but the prosecution has given notice that they intend to appeal.

May 29, 2024

“The more they rant, scream and lecture, the more cool singing ‘Ausländer raus‘ and ‘Deutschland den Deutschen‘ will become”

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

Our deep undercover secret informant in Deutschland, eugyppius, recounts the latest scary outbreak of deadly neofascist singing in the beleaguered country:

The latest threat to German democracy including “one of the men in the video can be seen offering a slack, distinctly metrosexual Roman salute and giving himself a two-fingered Hitler moustache”

“Fascism”, as popularly understood, is both very bad and also very ill-defined, being a negative political vice characterised primarily in opposition to that equally ill-defined political virtue known as “democracy”. This “democracy”, whatever it may be, is distinguished above all by its fuzzy associations with a wide array of other virtues, like diversity, inclusiveness, equity and transsexuality. Fascism is mostly the opposite of all of these things, which sounds bad enough, but it gets much worse: Because democracy is a very fragile virtue, forever requiring vigilant defence and social fertiliser, fascism has become the most ineradicable and indestructible of weeds.

Or perhaps it is better, in our post-pandemic era, to say that fascism is like a virus. It is always spreading, despite (or because of?) our best efforts to kill it off. We vaccinate children against the fascist virus with years of indoctrination about the evils of National Socialism in school, but to judge from the present state of our political discourse, this programme has worked about as well as the mRNA jabs worked against Covid. Never have we preached so stridently against fascism, and never has it been so omnipresent.

Another curious property of fascism, is that it does not merely infect human brains. It can also taint cultural artefacts, like phrases. All of the very best people can use a specific phrase, but that does not matter at all should the fascists get ahold of it. Once they have run the benign words through their evil fascist mouths, anyone who utters them afterwards – whatever his intentions – may well be guilty of fascism. If only democracy were that effective and powerful.

As we’ve learned from the events of the past week, the Germ Theory of Fascism applies also to songs, even vacuous pop music. All of the most democratic people in Germany have worked themselves up into a collective outrage against an unremarkable 1999 Italodance tune called “L’amour toujours” (“Love always”) by Gigi D’Agostino, because some very bad fascists have been caught singing some very naughty lyrics to its indifferent melody. The fascists themselves have been cancelled of course, and the song is on its way to its own separate cancellation as well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

[…]

The SPD only deepened their performative self-parody by posting this graphic to Instagram:

The Sylt revellers had chanted “Germany for the Germans”, but in this image the SPD proposed an improvement: “Germany for those Germans who defend our democracy”. Checkmate fascists! Except, “Germany for the Germans” is a slogan most closely identified with Der Heimat (formerly the NPD), an “ultranationalist” and “neo-Nazi” party. Realising that they had unwittingly reproduced the forbidden Nazi incantation, and were therefore guilty of spreading this horror virus, our crack SPD social media team swiftly deleted their post and threw up a hasty apology:

    We just published a post condemning in the strongest possible terms what we all saw in a video from Sylt. We did not manage to strike a tone that would resonate with everyone. We would like to sincerely apologise for this. Our aim is to make it clear that we do not want to leave this country to the far right and hate preachers. We want to defend our democracy and our freedom. Let’s continue this fight together in solidarity!

This is one of those missteps that really leaves you scratching your head. After hours of foaming at the mouth about “neo-Nazi slogans”, our virtue-mongering social democrats posted their own version of those very same tainted words to Instagram, in apparent ignorance of their origins and deeper significance. We are left to ask what they imagined they were angry about in the first place.

It’s hard not to agree with eugyppius’ conclusion:

I have my own theory about all of this.

Once upon a time, teenagers sustained a vibrant countercultural leftism, which was all about telling the establishment to go fuck itself, ingesting inadvisable quantities of drugs and engaging in a lot of inadvisable sex. All of that was very transgressive and exciting, directed as it was against a much more conservative and straight-laced German society. They shocked people, and that was the point. In the decades since, all of those hippies have grown old, and the most ideologically committed of them have become that which they used to hate, namely a lot of insufferable shrivelled scolds. As is the way with scolds everywhere, they’ve unwittingly inspired a new countercultural movement on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The more they rant, scream and lecture, the more cool singing “Ausländer raus” and “Deutschland den Deutschen” will become. Maybe, if they don’t like these words, they should try chilling out and finally shutting the fuck up about fascism. God knows there are more important things to screech about.

In the meantime, our new fascist anthem L’amour toujours has hit the top of the German charts.

May 24, 2024

QotD: Our modern Puritans

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

Lots of revolutionaries have been obsessed with the state of their own souls, but only the Puritans have been worried about it. Skim Walzer1, then compare with Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, a book I recommend without reservation. The Brethren of the Free Spirit were obsessed with the condition of their souls, too, but, crucially, they were certain that they were the Elect. All pre-Puritan millennial movements were essentially Gnostic — they, the Elect, knew the Truth, and they were the Elect because they knew the Truth. Their job was simply to tell everyone the Truth (and, inevitably, kill everyone who disagreed), and that great truth-telling / cleansing of the sinners would basically force Jesus to come back, thus ending the world.

The Puritans were something new. Translate their elaborate, Latinate prose into the parlance of our times, and they sound exactly like SJWs — at once unbearably self-righteous and cripplingly insecure. They were almost certain that they, personally, were among the Elect … but since the only infallible sign of being Saved was “an irresistible attraction to Puritanism”, they were caught in exactly the same vicious purity spiral as our modern SJWs. Who, truly, can say xzhey are #woke, when there’s always the possibility of someone, somewhere, being #woker? If you want a slightly easier passport to their heads, try Perry Miller’s The New England Mind. It was written in the 1930s, so be prepared — surprisingly little untranslated Latin, since the Puritans wrote mostly for themselves, but still fairly ornate prose.

Put it this way: The Wiki summary of Miller’s life quotes a colleague: “Perry Miller was a great historian of Puritanism but the dark conflicts of the Puritan mind eroded his own mental stability”. He died of alcoholism.

The Puritans’ saving grace, if they had one, is that they were men of the world. They had to be. Guys like Max Weber would say that those two things had a dialectical relationship — Puritanism IS “the Protestant work ethic” IS “capitalism” — but that’s not necessary for present purposes. My point is simply that the Early Modern world could only support a tiny number of professional intellectuals, and the “managerial class” was all but nonexistent. Through Cromwell and his mini-me’s in Salem gave it the old college try, it’s simply impossible to run an Early Modern government Puritan-style.

That’s obviously not the case now. We have a huge (and ever-growing) managerial class, all of whom are the most fervent Puritans. Unlike Cromwell and the boys, though, they can — and, of course, DO — live in perfect isolation from the affairs of the world they’re supposedly managing. Put simply, but not really unfairly, they live on Twitter — their carefully curated list of social media “friends” is, in a very real way, their entire world. Imagine Oliver Cromwell, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, and Cotton Mather tweeting at each other, all day every day.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag: Civilization, the Video Game”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-21.

    1. Severian may be referring to Michael Walzer’s first book The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (1965) or perhaps Regicide and Revolution (1974). Unfortunately when I saved this, I didn’t note which of Walzer’s works had been referenced earlier in the post and the original is no longer available online. Quotulatiousness regrets the omission.

May 20, 2024

The first post-privacy generation in human history

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

You may have mixed feelings about the Zoomers — even if you happen to be a Zoomer — but it’s beyond argument that they are the first generation who have grown up in a zero-privacy world:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Zoomers are the first post-privacy generation in human existence. They will never know a world in which they can try to lose themselves without somehow being tracked. Roughly three years ago, I was speaking with the CEO and founder of a commercial digital advertising company from NYC. He told me that their technology was so powerful that they were able to figure out when people were getting up from their couches to go into another room simply via their own digital advertising software.

It’s very tough to wrap our heads around the complete loss of privacy. For me, I have trouble remembering how it was to be out of instantaneous reach via mobile phone. Pre-mass adoption of cell phones, people would effectively be out of reach i.e. disappear for hours at a time, as the only way to contact them was to call them at home (inb4 beepers, as I never had one). We are constantly tracked and monitored, and our personal data is sold by data brokers all over the globe. One customer of personal ad tracking data is the CIA, as Matthew Petti explains:

    For years, the U.S. government has bought information on private citizens from commercial data brokers. Now, for the first time ever, American spymasters are admitting that this data is sensitive—but they’re leaving it up to the spy agencies on how to use it.

    Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a “Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information.” Her office oversees 18 agencies in the “intelligence community“, including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all military intelligence branches.

    In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data from phone companies. (During the case, the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief against warrantless snooping.) As a workaround, the feds instead started buying data from third-party brokers.

    Haines’ new framework claims that “additional clarity” on the government’s policies will help protect Americans’ privacy. Yet the document is vague about the specific limits. It orders the agencies themselves to come up with “safeguards that are tailored to the sensitivity of the information” and write an annual report on how they use this data.

more:

    As national security journalist Spencer Ackerman points out in his Forever Wars newsletter, the framework doesn’t require the feds to delete old purchased data. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) called on the NSA to purge all data that it bought without a warrant and without following the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy policies.

    “The framework’s absence of clear rules about what commercially available information can and cannot be purchased by the intelligence community reinforces the need for Congress to pass legislation protecting the rights of Americans,” Wyden tells Reason. “The DNI’s framework is nonetheless an important step forward in starting to bring the intelligence community under a set of principles and policies, and in documenting all the various programs so that they can be overseen.”

Case in point:

    Wyden has been aggressively pushing for transparency on data purchases over the past few years. In 2021, he uncovered that the Defense Intelligence Agency was buying Americans’ smartphone location data. That same year, he sent a letter to Haines and CIA Director Bill Burns complaining about a secretive CIA data collection program. (In an Orwellian turn, the letter itself was classified until 2022.) This year, Wyden revealed more details on NSA data purchases.

    Some of this data is collected and sold directly by the apps. For example, an intelligence company called X-Mode once paid MuslimPro, an app that offers a daily prayer calendar and a compass pointing towards Mecca, to include a few lines of location tracking code. X-Mode then sold the data to U.S. government agencies. MuslimPro claims that it did not intend to sell the data to the government and ended the arrangement after the story broke.

So, yeah … app maker will sell your personal data to a buyer like the CIA.

    In other cases, the data is siphoned from advertising markets. Every time a user opens a website with paid advertisements, their location and attributes appear on a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange, a virtual auction where companies buy ad space. Data brokers posing as advertisers scrape the listings for information on users.

    “Any government with a halfway decent cyber intelligence program is participating in these RTB exchanges, because it’s such an immensely valuable source of data,” says Byron Tau, author of Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State.

    As a demonstration of how powerful RTB data is, an intelligence contractor used data from the dating app Grindr to track gay government employees from their offices to their homes, Tau reported in his book.

The IRS is in on it too:

    Lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service, on the other hand, have argued that users voluntarily handed over the information, so the government is free to use it. Tau points out that users don’t really know how their data is being resold, and even the RTB exchanges themselves aren’t supposed to be used for data scraping.

    “A lot of these companies that are collecting data from the global population don’t have a real consumer relationship” with the people they’re spying on, Tau says. “Unless you know how to decompile software and you’re technically savvy, you can’t even make informed choices.”

In an increasingly digitized world, the right to privacy becomes wholly unworkable. Think digital payments by way of credit and debit cards vs. cash.

May 18, 2024

Antisemitism is far from a new problem

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle on some of the historical relics of antisemitism in European history down to today’s revived fascism of the left:

In his memoir Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens considered “why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring”. Many of us in the west have grown complacent, assuming that the horrors of the Holocaust would prevent this ancient prejudice from re-emerging. But as the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalates, few of us can be in any doubt that antisemitism has once again goose-stepped into the spotlight.

Of course, criticism of the Israeli government and its military strategy is entirely legitimate. So too is our profound concern for the innocents of Gaza and the many thousands of non-combatants who are losing their lives. But there is no denying the explicit anti-Jewish hatred that has accompanied these discussions in certain quarters. Criticise Israel all you like, but don’t try to tell me that Monday night’s daubing of the Shoah memorial in Paris with handprints of red paint was anything other than antisemitic.

Social media has opened our eyes to the prevalence of such sentiments. The other day I posted a link to my Substack piece about the Eurovision Song Contest on that hellsite now known as X. My focus in the article was on the narcissism of the “non-binary” performers, but one feminist activist decided to make it all about Israel. Underneath my post, she added an image of Eden Golan, the Israeli entry to the competition, with bloodstains photoshopped onto her dress. She went on to dismiss the victims of the October 7 pogrom as “silly ravers” and to blame the massacre on the IDF. Whatever else one might say about such views, it is clearly evidence of a complete absence of basic humanity.

This is sadly not uncommon. Recently we have seen protesters openly supporting Hamas, or even praising its acts of barbarism. A new poll has found that 63% of students currently protesting at US universities have at least some sympathy for Hamas. There have been overtly antisemitic statements, and Jews have been harassed on campus. It has been reported that at Columbia University, one protester cried out “We are Hamas” while another shouted at a group of Jewish students: “The 7 October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?” These are the very people who have spent the last few years calling anyone who dissents even slightly from their worldview a “fascist”, and yet they are blind to actual fascism when it emerges within their own ranks.

All of this has taken me by surprise, which perhaps reveals the extent of my naivety. Antisemitism is nothing new, and has assumed myriad and outlandish forms over the centuries. Our own country has not been immune; Jews were deported from England in 1290, only to be readmitted in 1656. Before then, only those who had converted to Christianity were allowed to remain; specially, they were able to reside at the Domus Conversorum in London, established by Henry III in 1232. Anti-Jewish sentiments were reignited by a plot to poison Elizabeth I in 1594, which was blamed on her physician Roderigo Lopes, a Portuguese man of Jewish ancestry who was executed for treason. This is the context in which the forced conversion of Shylock at the end of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice ought to be understood.

Unpleasant myths about Jews have abounded throughout history, some of which still linger in Islamic regimes and the darker crannies of the internet where neo-Nazis gather to wallow in their bile. The poisoning of wells by Jews was thought to have initiated the Black Death epidemic in 1348. This notion was still pervasive by the time Christopher Marlowe wrote his play The Jew of Malta in 1589 (consider Barabas’s mass extermination of an entire convent of nuns by means of “a precious powder”, or his boastful claim: “Sometimes I go about and poison wells”).

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