Like most people, I gave [Twitter] a look-see when I first heard about it. I quickly concluded that it wasn’t for me. Not because it was vapid garbage, you understand — Facebook was always vapid garbage, but it had some utility for all that, as Twitter does — but because I just don’t think in discrete chunks the way Twitter requires. I just can’t process the fact that “replies” are their own distinct utterances, devoid of all other context, that can come in at random times. A Twitter “thread” is a mad babble of people shouting past each other; it’s not “communication” in any sense my brain can handle, so I dropped it …
Alas, Twitter is still a thing that exists, so even though I tried it for about five minutes and promptly forgot all about it, my students didn’t … which explains, like nothing else can, their bizarre approach to classwork. For every quiz I gave, no matter how straightforward the question, I’d have at least one barracks lawyer coming to me afterwards, trying to weasel her (always her, mentally if not biologically) way back into some points, with some elaborate rationale why her picking the wrong answer was really my fault, because in class I said “The Russians won the Battle of Stalingrad” and the question on the quiz was “Who lost the Battle of Stalingrad?” and how is she supposed to be expected to recognize that “lost” is the opposite of “won” when it comes to battles and blah blah blah (thanks, Greta!).
Or the other depressingly common thing, which was when that same kid, who went to the fucking mattresses for one point on one quiz — which amounts to something like 0.01% of her final semester grade — just didn’t turn in the term paper. This happened at all academic levels, from community college (where you often lose half a class or more by the end of a semester) all the way up through the SPLACs, which cost something in the neighborhood of $70K a year all in. I never could figure this out — I mean, how can they not know that the term paper is 30% of your final grade, while all the quizzes put together amount to 10%? — but then it hit me: Twitter.
Everything on social media has, of necessity, equal weight, in that whatever’s in your feed at the present time is the only thing that exists. So when Snowflake was in “schoolwork” mode and missed that one question on that one quiz, it was the only thing that mattered in her world. My quiz was at the top of her Twitter feed, so she had to put all her energy into battling me for it. By the end of the semester, though, she was in “sorority” mode, or “getting ready for that kickass ski vacation” mode, or “beefing with that basic bitch Becky” mode, so my term paper barely registered — if she bothered to turn anything in at all, it was copy-pasted straight from wikipedia, because who cares, when Becky is out there on Twitter, h8ing?
Severian, “Also Sprach Froggy”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-30.
March 4, 2025
February 22, 2025
QotD: Modern journalism
They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.
It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces. Here’s the typical resume of one of these hacks:
- Went to high school, and never went to parties
- Went to college, majored in journalism, and never went to parties
- Went to journalism grad school, and never went to parties
- Works in the media, and goes to Manhattan/Georgetown cocktail parties
This apparently qualifies them to explain to people like us who have actually done something in our lives how stuff is supposed to work.
Kurt Schlicter, “Our Super Smart Elite Shines During This Pandemic!”, TownHall.com, 2020-04-02.
February 21, 2025
Tech enshittification continues
Ted Gioia notes that even the world’s biggest search engine provider is doing almost everything it can to make your search experiences worse and worse:
Almost everything in the digital world is turning into its opposite.
- Social media platforms now prevent people from having a social life.
- ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with anybody.
- Relationship apps make it harder for couples to form lasting relationships.
- Health and wellness websites make it almost impossible to find reliable health advice — instead peddling products of dubious efficacy.
- Product review sites now prevent people from reading impartial reviews by actual users of the product, instead operating as pay-for-play vehicles.
- Etc. etc. etc.
You can often tell by the name. PayPal will never pay you a penny, and it’s certainly not your pal. Microsoft Teams only works if you stay away from your team. If you keep using Safari, you will never go on an actual Safari.
But the worst reversal is happening with search engines. They now prevent you from searching.
I’ve known Google up close and personal from the start. I initially found the company quirky and endearing — but those days ended long ago. The company is now clueless and creepy.
Almost every day I read some ugly news story about Google. Here are a few headlines from a typical week:
- “Google ditches promise not to develop AI weapons” (February 12)
- “Millions of Google users alarmed after discovering new AI tool they can’t turn off” (February 14)
- “Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests” (February 15)
- “Google’s new fingerprinting policy sparks privacy backlash as ads become harder to avoid” (February 17)
- “Google data centers used nearly 6 billion gallons of water in 2024” (February 11)
This company goes out of its ways to do mischief. Messing with people is in its DNA.
Meanwhile, its base business is degrading at an alarming rate. The company doesn’t seem to care.
In a strange turnaround, search engines don’t want you to search for anything. That’s because searching leads you on a journey — and Google doesn’t want you to leave their platform.
The search engine was invented as your gateway to the web. The inventors of this technology tried to index every page on the Internet — so that you could find anything and everything.
That was an exciting era. Search engines were like train stations or airports. They took you all over the world.
At Google today, the goal is the exact opposite. You never leave the station.
Techies once described the Internet as a digital highway. But we need a different metaphor nowadays. Web platforms want to trap you on their app, and keep you there forever.
So, instead of a digital highway, we have a digital roach motel. They let the roaches check in — but not check out.
February 17, 2025
A maple-flavoured DOGE? Maxime Bernier proposed this in 2020
It’s both amusing and alarming seeing the kind of things the US government has been pouring money into, as the young auditors of Elon Musk’s DOGE dig into the accounts. Some folks on social media have been asking for a Canadian version of DOGE, but they’re nearly five years behind PPC leader Maxime Bernier:
Did you know that the Canadian government is spending $143,000 to help the African country of Senegal implement a “sectorial gender strategy” in its armed forces?
Or $46,793 to improve healthcare for intersex people in the Chinese province of Shandong?
What about $4.6 million to develop programs promoting a “positive masculinity” in Cuba?
There are hundreds of such crazy programs costing Canadian taxpayers billions of dollars every year to fund the Liberals’ woke ideology in other countries.
Many people on social media just found out that these programs exist last week, after they started looking for them on the website of the Government of Canada.
They were inspired by similar crazy programs that Elon Musk has unearthed with his DOGE team in Washington.
The DOGE – or Department of Government Efficiency – was created by President Trump and has already cut tens of billions of dollars in frivolous spending after only a few weeks.
I’m being asked if I support having the equivalent of a DOGE in Canada.
Not only do I support it, but I didn’t wait for Trump and Musk to do it to propose one. I did years ago!
In 2020, I stated that a PPC government would have a Minister of Government Downsizing to examine every federal program and cut or abolish everything that is inefficient, wasteful or not essential.
And speaking of DOGE, Coyote Blog shares some thoughts about some of the reasons Democrats are critical of the organization’s efforts:
… having thought about this longer, I think this is about more than just money. It is also about class. Just listen to how the cool kids in the media talk about Musk’s group of young weirdly-nicknamed geeks. This is fairly typical:
He was speaking specifically about a Trump executive order that decrees that the Department for Government Efficiency can force federal agencies into firing four people for every new hire. “Who the hell voted for Mr. Musk?” Begala raged. “Who the hell voted for — excuse the phrase — a guy who calls himself Big Balls? A 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists. It’s, it’s appalling.”
This is moderately hilarious from a) a party who still has not told us which unelected people really were making decisions behind the curtain for a senile Joe Biden; and b) an individual (Begala) who wielded immense power and influence across all departments of the Clinton Administration. The department staffs in DC are 99.99% people who are both unelected and unconfirmed by Congress. The issue is not that they are unelected, the issue is that they are “the wrong sort”. I am reminded of the British aristocracy in the 19th century that would tolerate almost any sort of governmental incompetence or malfeasance as long as the people were “the right sort” — meaning of their class.
The mention of Victorian England reminds me of another way that class is likely involved here. In the English aristocracy the oldest son inherited the title and often all the land and income (which was entailed to the title). This left little for any additional sons, so an income had to be found somewhere for them in a profession that did not require them to sully themselves with “trade” (daughters were handled a different way, through the marriage market). Reading for the law was an acceptable profession for a son with brains, and the army or navy were outlets for many. But most families needed a way for their sons without too much brains or ability and not militarily inclined to make a living. A position in the Church was often the solution.
Modern American blue-blood parents are no different — they need a way to secure a living for their kids who won’t or can’t land a job in the modern elite career choices (law, consulting, investment banking, or a sexy startup). Unlike in Victorian times, the military or the Church are no longer preferred elite options. So what to do with your 22-year-old gender studies major? The parents need her to get an income and they need her to do it in a context that they can proudly report to their friends — Paul Begala does not want to tell his friends that his son’s job is maintaining distributor pricing lists (anyone who does not believe the latter criteria should have been at my Princeton or Harvard Business School 25th reunions).
The solution? Get them a job at a non-profit, the modern American version of going to the Church. As Arnold Kling noted once, non-profits tend to have much higher status than do for-profits. And without competition they don’t have to carry the same performance standards as for-profits. And they are incredibly susceptible to trading a position for your kid in exchange for a nice donation.
The employment rosters of non-profits and NGO’s are stuffed with the children of privilege. So much so that there are many non-profits that seem to do nothing EXCEPT employ and pay the travel expenses of 20-something kids from rich and/or influential families. I have been writing about the non-profit scam for years. As I wrote then:
From my direct experience, I would go further. There is a tranche (I don’t know how large) of non-profits that are close to outright scams, providing most of their benefits to their managers and employees rather to anyone outside the organization. These benefits include 1) a salary with few performance expectations; 2) expense-paid parties and travel; 3) myriad virtue-signalling opportunities; 4) opportunities to build personal networks. This isn’t just criticizing theoretical institutions — people I know are in such jobs in these organizations.
The spending that DOGE is going after at USAID and other departments likely threatens the income of a number of under-qualified elite kids. So I will update my meme:
January 24, 2025
When the law schools went woke
In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Ilya Shapiro’s book Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites:
As Donald Trump begins his second term as president with a mandate to undo the damage done to the country by leftist ideology, incompetence, and corruption, one of the many stables that most need cleaning up is academia – which is, of course, the source of virtually all of the most misbegotten ideas that have sent America astray.
To be sure, some parts of academia are more desperately in need of reform than others. As a rule, the elite universities, especially those in the Ivy League, are more poisoned by the new progressivism than most state schools, especially those in the heartland. Humanities and social science departments are worse off than STEM departments. And as Ilya Shapiro points out in his important new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elite, the introduction of woke thinking into law schools is singularly damaging.
Yes, writes Shapiro, it’s unfortunate enough if, say, a sociology faculty is selling ideology rather than fact, for it represents “a loss to the richness of life and the accumulation of human knowledge”. But for a law school to head down the same road is far more perilous. For these schools turn out the lawyers, politicians, and judges who will serve as “the gatekeepers of our institutions and of the rules of the game on which American prosperity, liberty, and equality sit”.
And the sad fact, alas, is that in too many American law schools today, a preponderance of students are the products of classrooms in which, as Shapiro puts it, “the classical pedagogical model of legal education” has been abandoned in favor of “the postmodern activist one” – a process that has been underway for decades but that was greatly accelerated during the Covid pandemic and in the wake of the irrational nationwide hysteria over the killing of George Floyd. Hence those students swallow such dangerous notions as critical race theory and its corollary, critical legal theory, and therefore believe that colorblind justice, due process, and freedom of speech aren’t desiderata but tools of white supremacy.
Lawless has its roots in Shapiro’s own hellish encounter with this ideological leviathan. It happened like this: on January 26, 2022, the day that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, Shapiro tweeted that the “best pick” for a replacement was Sri Srinivasan, who, if appointed by President Biden, would be the “first Asian (Indian) American” on the Court. Yet because Biden had promised to name a black woman, lamented Shapiro, “we’ll get [a] lesser black woman”. After sending off the tweet, Shapiro went to bed – and awoke in the morning to discover that his comment had caused pandemonium in the legal community, where he was being viciously attacked as a racist and a sexist. Shapiro immediately deleted the tweet and issued an apology for expressing his opinion in such an “inartful” manner.
But that wasn’t the end of it. As it happened, Shapiro, who had just left the Cato Institute, was scheduled to take up a new position at Georgetown University’s school of law in five days. And unluckily for him, the dean of the law school, William M. Treanor, was a wimp of the first order, the kind of craven academic administrator who’s quick to cave to the noisiest and most radical elements. On January 27, Treanor issued a statement in which he represented Shapiro as believing that “the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman”.
This was the height of disingenuity: it was clear that Shapiro simply meant that Biden shouldn’t limit the pool of possible nominees on the basis of sex or race – a view shared by three-quarters of the American public. But as Shapiro would soon discover, under the current dispensation at woke law schools “what matters is not the objective meaning of a given statement or even its intent but its effect – not the facts but the feelings”.
So it was that Treanor ordered an elaborate and expensive “investigation” by a top-dollar law firm into Shapiro’s tweet – yes, an investigation into a tweet. Ludicrously, it took more than four months – during which Shapiro’s new job was put on hold. In the end, the “investigators” concluded that Shapiro had indeed expressed an offensive opinion but permitted him to start work at Georgetown. Wisely, Shapiro decided that, given everything that had happened, Georgetown would not be a comfortable fit for him – at least not with Treanor at the helm – and chose instead to accept a job offer from the Manhattan Institute, where he works today.
January 20, 2025
Substack
I subscribe to a lot of other folks’ Substack blogs and I’ve been linking to a lot of posts there over the last year or so. It’s a very good site and you’re bound to find things of interest there if you like some of the things I’ve been linking to.
If you would like notifications/summaries of posts here but don’t want to check in every day, you can subscribe to my Substack at https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson as I mail out a daily update with links to all of the day’s blog posts. For example, yesterday’s summary looked like this:
January 8, 2025
QotD: “Striver” lifestyles for each generation
That’s why everything was suddenly so Xxxtreeeeem!!! in the early 90s through the Naughts. We can’t afford to fly to Gstaad for a ski weekend, but we can buy a snowboard. Dad might be on Wife 3.0 at that point, and she’s younger than us, but our girlfriends — marriage is for squares — are so much more environmentally friendly. We can’t compete with their high-end clothes, so we’ll push for “business casual” in the office, homeless-casual in our personal lives (everyone can afford thrift store flannel). And so on.
The Millennials and Gen Z, lacking the wherewithal to do even that (what with the six figure college debt and all), invented the “persona striver” as their means of intra-group social competition. For the low low price of a smartphone and a data plan, you too can pretend to be The Most Interesting Persyn in the World online. I’m told there are entire subcultures online, “cottagecore” and the like, revolving around aping the style and mannerisms of prior eras. “Anonymous” seems to think that these kids are actually, physically doing this stuff — that the “cottagecore” lesbians really are moving into little houses on the prairie to bake bread by hand — but it’s obvious that’s not necessary, as this is an entirely online thing and Photoshop exists.
Either way, it’s sufficient for our purposes to note that the cost of entry keeps dropping, while the “totalization” (for lack of a better word) of the lifestyle keeps growing. An old-fashioned, conspicuous-consumption style striver was free to be an individual. Yeah, sure, they were all “yuppies”, but there were Protestant yuppies and Catholic yuppies (and atheist yuppies and everything in between). There were Liberal yuppies and Conservative yuppies (and Libertarian yuppies and everything in between). You might find the same few standard books on all their shelves — management meatball crap; the novels of Danielle Steele and Sydney Sheldon — the same way you’d find the same basic kinds of clothes in their closets, but there was still a lot of individual variety within those broad constraints. You could predict a few broad, superficial things about a yuppie from his business card, but there were no safe bets on anything else.
The lifestyle and persona strivers, on the other hand, are much more narrow. While the yuppie might go to Molokai this summer on vacation, next summer to Italy, because why not?, the lifestyle striver was pretty much trapped in his niche — it’s trail hiking or bust. And the persona striver can’t afford to go anywhere, so xzhey have to make up elaborate justifications for it (“by staying home and baking these muffins from an original 18th century recipe, I’m being completely carbon neutral”). It’s no accident, in the Marxist sense, that marathons and Crossfit and all that shit really took off after the turn of the century, as well as the whole “animal rescue” deal — it’s both a lifestyle and a persona, and it costs next to nothing, and you can, indeed must, do it all day every day.
Severian, “Striving for Revolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-11.
December 18, 2024
Justin Trudeau at bay
However much you may dislike the man — and there’s just so much to dislike — it’s impossible to write him off no matter how bad the situation may look. In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains to non-Canadian audiences what has been going on in the Deranged Dominion lately:
Justin Trudeau’s government could be at the point of collapse. And a social media post from Donald Trump about tariffs may have set off the latest in a chain of dominoes for Canada’s prime minister.
On November 25, Trump posted on his platform Truth Social that, as one of his first executive orders, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders”. Four days later, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump for dinner. Although the content of their discussion has not been made public, Trump’s tariff threat may have landed a death blow to Trudeau’s cabinet.
On Monday morning, Trudeau’s most important ally — his number two, finance minister Chrystia Freeland — resigned in a fiery letter directed at her boss, which she posted on X.
“Our country today faces a grave challenge,” she wrote. “The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 percent tariffs. We need to take that threat extremely seriously.” She continued: “That means pushing back against ‘America First’ economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring”.
The same morning, Trudeau’s housing minister Sean Fraser also announced his departure, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. This brings the total number of cabinet members who’ve resigned under Trudeau in 2024 to nine. But a walkout from Freeland, his most trusted lieutenant, who was expected to release her fall economic statement Monday, is by far the biggest. That such a loyal servant who has worked for Trudeau since 2015 would resign so publicly shows just how deep the rot is these days. Freeland stood by the prime minister as his popularity began to tank in February 2022 when Canadian truckers protested his harsh Covid vaccine mandates. She even authorized the debanking of those protesters, freezing their bank accounts as a means of punishment [NR: with no legal authority, it must be noted].
Now, her resignation is feeding feverish speculation that the longtime progressive darling could finally be on his way out, amid his sinking popularity and the country’s economic slump. By Monday night, a prominent member of Trudeau’s Liberal Party, Anthony Housefather, went on TV to say the prime minister is “past his shelf life“.
The modern Furies
In Greek mythology, the Erinyes (the Furies) — euphemized as the Eumenides (the “Gracious ones”) were the goddesses of vengeance. You may dismiss the ancient Greeks and their beliefs, yet they often encapsulate hidden wisdom for those who know how to interpret their stories. Today, as Janice Fiamengo points out, we have no need for mythological Furies, as they’re frequently embodied in otherwise ordinary women:
The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies
Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862, in the Chrysler Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons.
Feminist uproar over Trump’s election was easy to predict, and not long in coming. Within ten days of the election, Clara Jeffery wrote in Mother Jones that “Women are furious — in a Greek mythology sort of way“. Taking examples from TikTok, Jeffery chronicled abundant “sorrow, disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage”, which many women vowed to exorcise on men: “‘If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue‘”, she quoted one.
In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.
No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.
At least one group of women gathered physically in Wisconsin to shout their angst and anger at Lake Michigan, and there have already been tentative (though apparently less enthusiastic than formerly) plans for a revival of the anti-Trump Women’s March protests, in which women with vulgar placards and pink hats exhibited their “collective rage“.
Women’s rage is all the rage.
It is not enough, it seems, for these women to say that they are disappointed by Trump’s win, and certainly inadequate for them to state strong disagreement with his policies or style. Expressing evidence-based positions is the sort of thing a rational person would do, and significant groups of women appear increasingly uninterested in rational talk or behavior. Instead, they reach for the most extreme language, tone of voice, postures and actions to express what feminist journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called the “visceral” “body horror” produced by the Trump victory, including the “profound physical revulsion” Cosslett and many of her sisters allegedly feel simply as a result of seeing one of Trump’s tweets (talk about fragility!).
Like so many feminist pundits telling us of women’s “horror” and “fury“, the emphasis is squarely on feeling and the female body, as if to bypass the intellect and the will altogether. The idea some feminists once scorned — that women are less reasonable and self-controlled than men — seems to have become a feminist axiom.
[NR: Edited to fix the broken URL.]
December 14, 2024
Matt Gurney’s final thoughts from the Halifax International Security Forum
One of the things I regret about being totally broke is that I can’t pay for a full subscription to The Line, which is one of Canada’s best sources of (relatively) unbiased commentary on current events both in Canada and around the world. This is the third instalment of Matt Gurney’s report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum (earlier parts linked here and here):
This next one is going to be very brief, since it’s really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of “The world is currently a mess”. Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can’t speak to what I didn’t see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.
A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas’s attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I’d like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims’ phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.
“I thought I had seen the worst,” the doctor told the assembled audience. “But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes.”
Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.
He also discussed his own professional path which he regrets didn’t include a lot of traditional on-the-spot reporting on tragedies and interviewing survivors, as he feels he doesn’t have a good “game face” for those times when he now finds himself doing that kind of work:
I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I’m not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine’s history, but I have absolutely no doubt who’s the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I’ve also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.
I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.
But I have concluded that they’re screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn’t have the heart to tell them that. I don’t even know how I’d begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.
During a meal in Halifax, a woman who’d flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn’t been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn’t remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they’d happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.
And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren’t even of sympathy. I wasn’t overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I’d get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain’t a war zone.
This woman doesn’t get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.
History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.
And alas, we’ll deserve it.
December 9, 2024
“… liberalism has become a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses”
Freddie deBoer patiently explains why outrageous over-the-top emoting isn’t a useful or productive way to argue for your political views:
I’ve written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. I’ve focused on it not because I necessarily think the issue itself is particularly important, but rather because it’s so emblematic of what liberalism has become: a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses, a collection of well-intentioned people who mistake the responsibility to fight discrimination for a broad, vague duty to shield certain groups of people from any criticism.
For the book I’m currently writing, I’m talking to a ton of people in the broad world of mental health — psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, policymakers, journalists, fellow patients — and I’ve brought up the TikTok DID community over and over again. Remarkably, not one person defends the phenomenon as a true expression of genuine illness, not even a few disability rights activists I’ve talked to, who usually have an ethic of never questioning a disability claim. Countless normie liberals I’ve chatter with, over the past several years, have also accepted my basic position that these young women don’t actually have dissociative identity disorder. But, also, almost no one is willing to affirmatively say anything about this dynamic themselves. Indeed, The Verge reported that many experts have decided that the costs of speaking out about that whole culture just aren’t worth it. And so you have a set of behaviors that no one defends but that no one feels comfortable criticizing, thanks to the pathologies of 21st century liberalism and online rage. That’s what I’m really here to talk to you about today.
I don’t, of course, want to be too harsh on the individual young women who have turned a debilitating and controversial disorder into an opportunity to put on vertical video fashion shows; they’re just kids and kids do stupid shit, sometimes even genuinely offensive shit. What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off“. I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious. First, despite whatever vibe shift we may be living through, it remains the case that in progressive discursive spaces, saying the wrong thing is still very fraught and can result in accusations of bigotry that are personally and professionally damaging. Second, liberals have trained themselves to avoid any position at all that might be construed as siding with the enemy, as a matter of in-group identification. Take it from me: “A lot of people in Gen Z appear to be lacking in emotional resilience, in a way that’s unhealthy for them” has become, in the internet-soaked mind, “Gen Z is a bunch of snowflakes”, and so a ton of liberals recoil at that idea. Can’t appear to make a concession to the enemy! I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.
All of this is bad, and you only have to look at how incredibly harsh certain slices of “queer fandom” can be to see what I’m talking about.
November 29, 2024
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya nominated as Director of the US National Institutes of Health
From the point of view of the establishment, the barbarians are well and truly inside the gates, as President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee as Director of the National Health Institutes.
Photo by Taleed Brown, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons.
Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists”.
Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.
As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.
Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.
“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.
Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)
November 26, 2024
“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other”
I don’t mean to make poking fun at Twit/X alternative sites like Bluesky a regular thing, but the performative flouncing as progressives announce they’re leaving Twit/X for a more congenial — for which read “censorious” — site continues to amuse.
Bluesky welcomes former Twitter/X luminaries
I’m going to take a pop at a sub-group of flouncers, though, the ones moaning about being called hurty words. This includes a number of individuals who genuinely seem to think it’s their role in life to go looking for nasty bigoted shite, then report it to Twitter’s overlords (and now Bluesky’s overlords as well, if things like [the image on the right] are anything to go by).
“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other” seems a fair assessment.
And yes, I have to engage in a little ritual genuflection here, because I have genuinely been called a large number of nasty names in my life. And despite that, dibber-dobbers still give me hives.
If I had a quid for every use of “dyke” (and related) sent my way, I would be matching millions with sundry oil sheiks, and that’s before we get to the ire directed at any columnist with whom ordinary members of the public disagree. I am old enough to have received thousands of abusive letters (about both novels and columns), some of them written in green ink. People are allowed to dislike me and my kind, or to argue that I’ve written a load of cobblers. They’re also allowed to dislike you and your kind. It would be astonishingly easy for me to wander over to Arabic Twitter and report lots of sincere Muslims for saying bigoted things about homosexuals. I don’t engage in this behaviour because I don’t expect the world to be my friend.
Relatedly (and this is directed at ethnic minorities as well as fellow gayers), a lot of folks from “historically disadvantaged groups” have become dab hands at dishing it out over the last twenty or so years. A necessary corollary of this behaviour is “learn to take it”. Yes, that means you. People are not going to stop saying hurty words to each other. People are also going to judge you based on the behaviour of your worst activists and vote accordingly (see recent US election results).
What of the core claims being made? Is Twitter genuinely worse now, a victim of what goes by the name “social media enshittification“?
Well, yes and no. I know many people dislike what Musk has done to Twitter, but when he made “likes” private, he stopped his site being used as a vector for HR vindictiveness (something about which HR mavens have complained, by the way, at least privately). It’s also now substantially more difficult to generate a pile-on using a quote-tweet, as well as possible to read tweets (but without interaction) from people who are hot on the block button.
The latter change has allowed me to establish why Baroness Nicholson had me blocked. I’d always wondered, because she’s had me blocked for as long as I can remember, yet like me, she can legitimately be described as “sex realist” or “gender-critical”. Musk’s change meant I was able for the first time to see an entire thread underneath one of her tweets, so learned that she blocks anyone — friend and foe alike — for swearing. Women who know her socially and get on with her well “IRL” have been blocked for saying “bugger” and “shite” on Twitter.
Well, glad that’s cleared up. Good to know.
The worst change Musk has made involves deboosting external links. This first emerged in April last year, in response to Substack releasing Notes (which Musk considered so derivative of Twitter’s code as to be a “clone”). At first only direct links to Substack were affected. If you had your own domain — as I do — you were fine. However, external link deboosting is now being applied uniformly. Everyone from a local tradesman selling new driveways and conservatories to the BBC and the Spectator now has to make use of some tedious version of “link in following tweet” or “link in bio”.
If Musk doesn’t fix this, he will legitimately lose the journalists and commentators currently on the site. Those people came, originally, to share stuff from their mastheads, and this applies regardless of politics. I first gained a following thanks to professional experience — yes, it was once fine for commercial solicitors to natter on the socials about the Enterprise Investment Scheme and how it related to start-ups and spin-outs etc — and later through Speccie columns along with a couple of books. A tweet from Tim Harford praising my second novel (with a link, bless him) went “viral” and led to thousands of sales. Pieces for the magazine proved popular. Just as I enjoyed Twitter for other people’s links, other people paid me the same courtesy.
Spotted on Instapundit:
November 25, 2024
In search of bluer skies
In The Critic, Benedict Spence channels his inner David Attenborough to document the majestic migration of American progressives from their habitual grazing lands to friendlier territory:
What will Twitter do without its smuggest inhabitants?
And so we come to it again. It is that time of year when we put on our David Attenborough voices, and talk in low, slightly wistful tones about the great migration that is about to unfold. Everywuh you look, creatures great and small are beginning their treacherous juhneys across a vast and inhospitable wilduhness to happiuh hunting grounds and more pleasant pastures under the clear blue skies. The hullabaloo that accompanies them is impossible to miss — across the plains, the cries go up from elders to alert the rest of the herd of the imminent departure.
Though some may never return from this arduous trek, most will. Disavow yourself of the mental image of elephants and zebras crossing the African savannah — that’s not what we’re here for. This migration is metaversical in nature: it is time, once more, for people to announce they are leaving Twitter.
This year’s exodus came later than usual, prompted by Donald Trump’s bulldozer of a victory over Kamala Harris in the US presidential election, with grown men and women across the country — and its second largest airbase, the UK — deciding that Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and the Orange Man’s endorser-in-chief, was at least partly responsible for this travesty. Not the economy, you understand, oh no. Nor immigration, nor the preoccupation by Democrats with shoulder-chewingly stupid culture war issues the average voter thinks are at best mad and at worst satanic.
No, no, it is all about Musk — who is at once the world’s wealthiest evil genius and also a gibbering moron, according to people who thought Cacklin’ Kamala was a born winner. Musk, we are told, has ushered in a stream of “hate” ever since buying Twitter and rebranding it 10, warping the minds of the impressionable and irreparably damaging the future of the West by facilitating Trump’s return.
This is not Musk’s only crime, though. He has also tweaked other aspects of X’s features, including the block function, making it possible for those on the receiving end of this internal exile to see the posts of their nemeses again without being able to interact with them. This was for a fair few blockees how they were reminded of the existence of their blockers, many of whom they had long since forgotten. Often, in the same instance, it was also how they learned said blocker was off somewhere else.
Musk has also moved to erode the power of institutions and individuals who lived their lives high on the power of credentialism, and the authority this brought them. The changing of blue tick criteria and the emphasis on community notes now means many who were once feted on the site by virtue of who they were must now work harder for their dopamine. But above all else, Musk has refused to silence a swathe of right wing voices who always existed but lived their X lives in the shadows. The platform became more right wing, and for many that was just too much. Having been reliably told throughout the past year that the crude reply guys were just Russian bots and that their gal would ride over them on a wave to victory, they and their allies over here — the infamous adults back in charge of the UK — are doing the grownup thing and going off in a huff to play somewhere else.
November 23, 2024
They just can’t stop themselves from taking the MAGA bait
Kat Rosenfield in UnHerd discusses the inability of American leftists from rising to the (obvious) trolling from pranksters on the right:
Carol Kane and Billy Crystal as Valerie and Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, 1987.
The current state of the American political discourse is best understood through the lens of the 1987 movie The Princess Bride — or more specifically, one scene therein. It’s the part where Miracle Max is decompensating over the insistence of his wife, Valerie, on saying the word, “Humperdinck”, the name of the movie’s evil prince, who is also Max’s most loathed nemesis.
“Why would you say that name!” he screams.
“What? Humperdinck!?” she shrieks back, gleefully.
One gets the sense that these two do this a lot — her Humperdincking, him screaming, which only makes her Humperdinck harder. That this problem has two obvious solutions only illuminates its intractability. Valerie could stop saying the name, but then again, Max could also choose not to react to its every utterance as if he’s been electrocuted. That neither of them are making different choices suggests that something about this dynamic serves them both.
I thought of this scene when the first “Your body, my choice” post from a male Trump voter skittered insect-like across my timeline in the wake of the election — closely followed by a handful of “My body, his choice” remixes by savvy OnlyFans models hoping to cash in on the moment. This crude riff on the feminist war cry that once defined the battle for abortion rights was akin to an inaugural shout of “Humperdinck!”, designed explicitly to trigger a meltdown among liberals. And lo: if you do an internet search for the phrase now, around 5% of the results are of people posting it and 95% are critics freaking out in response. “Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers,” The Guardian announced, while CNN warned: “Attacks on women surge on social media following election”. And The New Yorker, for whom the phrase is a harbinger of a “coming era of gender regression”, described it as “A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right”.
The phrase “irony-poisoned” in that last headline — which graces an essay by Jia Tolentino — struck me as an especially savvy bit of rhetoric. It functions as a preemptive strike against the obvious counterpoint to all this panic. Namely: “your body my choice” is a repulsive thing to say, but also the furthest thing from a legitimate threat.
The men behind these posts are not rapists-in-waiting, announcing their intent to commit sexual violence; they are trolls, gleefully trolling away in the hope of making people Mad Online. But if Tolentino knows this is bait (and she clearly does), she nevertheless cannot help taking it, hook, line, and sinker. The piece is imbued with a near-religious sense of horror at seeing the feminist catechism of “my body my choice” twisted by nonbelievers into something unfathomably malignant. This is beyond distasteful; it is heretical. And unlike the provocations in which the millennial Left once delighted, back in the days when one measly crucifix soaked in urine could trigger a weeks-long meltdown among religious conservatives, this little joke (Tolentino argues) is simply not funny.
