Quotulatiousness

December 11, 2021

Another front opens in the “War On Christmas”

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson looks at the latest offence against mainstream views of the Christmas season:

it was impossible not to get sucked into the blossoming horror of Santa Inc.

The eight-part television show made for HBO Max by comedians Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen may soon attain the record of one of the most poorly rated television series of all time. And watching but a brief trailer, it’s not hard to see why.

I mean … Jesus. If you were trying to craft a perfect example of hate-bait for the reactionary right in a lab, this is pretty much what it would look like. It’s got woke politics, feminism, hatred of white guys and a pot shot in the War on Christmas neatly tied up in a claymation bow. The fact that the show is fronted by comedians who are Jewish has dug this mess into the very ugliest, muddiest trench of the culture war.

[…]

If you want to create an outrageous, bawdy Christmas movie that features a miserable and bored Mrs. Claus giving head to Santa, or a gag with a miner’s hat filled with dildos, there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a very specific audience for “sausage party” humour — lacrosse-playing young white men, and older white men who wish they were still young white men who could play lacrosse. In other words, people who look like Seth Rogen.

And do you know what that crowd doesn’t generally enjoy?

Thinly veiled manifestos on how awful white men are; the terribleness of corporate America, and a show featuring a lot of downtrodden women complaining about health insurance and lack of maternity leave.

On the other hand, if Santa Inc. was trying to appeal to the #resistence pussy hat and rainbow tattoo crowd, certainly a woke-appropriate message is here for them. But, does this crowd need to be so lectured? Meanwhile, the juvenile humour is off-putting. Is the feminist set going to keel over laughing because one of the female reindeer characters brags about having a threesome with Donner?

Lol. Thud.

There’s no sophistication here. No clever set up or punch line. It’s just a story about an angry female elf who wants to be Santa Claus that pretends to be funny by leaning on sex jokes.

Raunchiness is fine for a cheap laugh. It relies on the taboo of shock and sex to generate an emotional reaction. But, man, one of the most popular music videos of the last few years was Wet Ass Pussy. Who even notices swearing anymore? Who is shocked by a scene in which the main character’s mother bangs the Easter bunny?

This kind of lazy humour is old hat. It’s boring.

So, no, Santa Inc. is not good.

December 10, 2021

QotD: The media and the replication crisis

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

Here is the iron law of medical — in fact all scientific — studies in the modern world: most do not replicate. This has always been true of studies that supposedly find some link between doing [thing we enjoy] and cancer. This of course does not stop the media from running with initial study results based on 37 study participants as “fact”. The same is true for studies of new drugs and treatments. Most don’t pan out or are not nearly as efficacious as early studies might indicate. We have seen that over and over during COVID.

Warren Meyer, “A Couple of Thoughts on Medical Studies Given Recent Experience”, Coyote Blog, 2021-08-31.

December 6, 2021

QotD: Modern “Canadian culture” is a vast vanity press operation funded with lots of government money

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Government, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

From a distance, it is beginning to look as if Canada does not have a specific culture. No one is buying books, no one is watching television, no one is watching or listening to the CBC. People trail through galleries sometimes, and at the top of the investment tree, people buy art. But not because they love it, they buy it because it lends them status.

CanCon is a heavy lift at the best of times, being close neighbors to that hulking great monster south of us which is the most creative culture on earth. That is why we spend billions every year to prop up our creators, our artists, who we love.

Except we don’t.

Film salaries are funded up to 50%, books, 30%, news media 60%, and yet … no one is watching, reading, or listening. It is like a giant vanity project which various foreign appointees can brandish in foreign capitals.

Last month I traced the sales of this year’s Canadian literary award winners and I suppose “best-sellers”. Their sales on Amazon, hardcover, soft cover and digital ranged from 4 books to 33 books per month, incomes hovering in the three figures. (Amazon accounts for roughly 70% of sales.) This during summer reading months where Canadians are at their lake shacks from coast to coast reading one would hope about themselves, the world they live in, and well … just curiosity.

Equally looking at the viewer and listener stats for the CBC, our national behemoth, which eats up $1.5 billion annually, and which amounts to 50% of the media dollars spent, is equally disheartening. The state spends another $600 million supporting once-successful media because “internet”.

CBC television is watched by 3.9% of Canadians and only .8% watch CBC News. Again, half of all media dollars, half. Half is spent engaging less than 4% of Canadians.

CBC radio is considered reasonably good, and is listened to despite the almost vindictive calling out of anyone who disagrees with their hard socialist stance. Despite every conceivable advantage, advertising on the CBC dropped 20% during the pandemic.

In fact, they are so disliked that CBC is hiring “close protection security” for the next two years. They are so disliked, they have turned off commenting on their various programs. They are so disliked that there is a brand of coffee called “Defund the CBC”. This isn’t passive ignoring, this is active dislike to the point of needing bodyguards.

Why?

Because our media show us Canadians as racist, stupid, sexist, stupid, stupid and more stupid. And while they are at it, shallow and violent.

That is the real reason, and the only reason CanCon is dying. They hate us.

Elizabeth Nickson, “Canadian Culture on the Ropes”, Elizabeth Nickson, 2021-09-01.

November 19, 2021

Viewing-with-alarm … from afar

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

In Spiked, Simon Evans explains why he finds British commentary on US hot-button issues like guns and race to be frequently uninformed but remarkably certain of itself:

What many Brits believe every American carries in their pickup trucks or on their persons, probably.

As a Brit, there are few things less edifying, nor more unintentionally hilarious, than an American newspaper reporting on any very English scandal. A breach of some obscure royal protocol, perhaps, or an aspect of parliamentary procedure, often involving Black Rod, which despite the capital B, the Washington Post will have to explain, is not a racial epithet, or an ill-advised tribute act.

A personal favourite is when a provincial dietary preference has caught the New York Times‘ eye, having unexpectedly “caught on” nationwide. It is an innocent enough pleasure, watching Americans trying to distinguish black pudding from haggis, or indeed gravy from “chippy sauce”. Like watching the Dutch discuss the morality of bullfighting, or Korea debate a proposed rule change in top flight Buzkashi.

Yet put the sneaker on the other foot and watch British commentators angrily contend the moral and legal thrust of a case in which an American is on trial for using lethal force with a firearm, and we suffer something very like Gell-Mann Amnesia by proxy. We forget how important a little local knowledge might be, and our seasoned, tolerant, bemused respect for tradition and culture and specialist knowledge are gone within moments. Watching the Kyle Rittenhouse case approach a verdict, British commentators are a-froth with indignation at the palpable miscarriages of justice seemingly running unchecked only five short hours away across the globe. My God, he had a gun ! What more is there to say? And – do I have this right? – he crossed state lines ! The man’s a monster.

Not since the proroguing of parliament two years ago have so many people become acquainted so quickly with something so arcane as the crossing of state lines with intent to do mischief. Putting aside the fact that the weapon itself did not cross this fabled demarcation, what is striking is the evident lack of enthusiasm for certain other state lines, such as the one somewhat further to America’s south, or indeed the one etched around the British Isles, that currently seem to get crossed on a pretty frequent basis, with who knows what intent? Drawing attention to those lines is clearly racist.

It was GB Shaw who first made the observation that GB’s shores were separated from the US’s by an ocean of incomprehension, concealed by our sharing a common language.

Rather like urban Canadians, most British readers and viewers tend to agree with the opinions expressed in US mainstream media based largely in urban coastal areas:

So, we don’t get the full spectrum argument. Instead, we gratefully share the apparent horror and shame of the coastal elite, with their tertiary education and their teeth that meet in the middle, when confronted with their inland, inbred in-laws. We deplore the multi-decade epidemic of what seems, if you read the Washington Post and the NYT, to be the largely white, Wild West assassination culture that 2A concedes. Bullets sprayed around schools. Shopping malls, synagogues and mosques running with blood. A death toll out of all control. Murder, cold-blooded and cruel – and largely in the service of a bigotry, as often as not a racial bigotry, as old as the Appalachians hills.

This is, to put it as mildly as one can without choking, not quite the whole story. Do your own due diligence, it isn’t hard. The editors of the NYT can’t stop you acquainting yourself with the FBI crime statistics, and they put some of the more notorious outbreaks of flying lead into useful perspective.

But generally, we instead swallow like sugary cough syrup (believing it good for us, no matter how delicious it also is) the narrative that guns are largely in the hands and lovingly tended racks of homicidal white supremacists, paranoid death-spiral redneck survivalists, and a police force that is barely superior in discipline, racial enlightenment or legitimacy to a rounded-up posse of ad hoc lynch-happy vigilantes.

November 14, 2021

The Media — declining to report the news and instead depleting the strategic reserve of Narrativium

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

This week’s excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish explores the many, many ways that the mainstream media have been actively abandoning any semblance of informing their audience and instead now concentrate almost exclusively on propagandizing them:

The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

You know the situation is bad when Andrew Sullivan references Donald Trump without a sneer!

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate”, even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

October 26, 2021

“…watching The Media spin for Brandon; it’s just so Pravda-licious”

Filed under: China, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Severian manages to find entertainment in the full-blown propagandization of “The Media”, especially during the course of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

Back when the Kung Flu nonsense first started, I took it quasi-seriously. Let me clarify: Like America’s greatest philosopher, I assume that everything in the newspaper is 90% bullshit, and I read it because it entertains me. Nonetheless, the bullshit operates on several levels, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you want to extract more than entertainment from it. In the case of Covid, back in the earliest days, I assumed that the bullshit was more top tier — that is, that it was mostly ignorance.

Media people are stupid. We all know that, but unless you’ve been around them (or their inbred, banjo-picking cousins, academics) recently, you probably don’t realize just how stupid they actually are. Remember Michael Crichton’s bit about “Gell-Mann Amnesia“? He said that The Media are so dumb, they routinely get important things not just wrong, but completely backwards: The headline would read the equivalent of “Wet Streets Cause Rain”.

And to be fair to The Media — I know, I know, but again, if you want anything more than a chuckle from the propaganda, you must try — it really did seem to be more ignorance than anything. I’m the kind of guy who needs to pull off a sock every time he has to count past ten, but compared to everyone in The Media I’m Euclid himself. I could see right away that the numbers they were spouting would make Kung Flu exponentially more lethal than even the Black Plague, which would, you know, tend to show up on satellite reconnaissance. And since there’s this thing called “Google Earth” …

But even though I knew right away you’d need to scale back their projections by a factor of about eleventy billion, that wasn’t the end of it, because even doing the necessary mental math to scale it down by eleventy billion — take the cosine, carry the one, divide by zero — it still looked pretty bad. But not “pretty bad” in a factual way. Rather, pretty bad in a second-level bullshit way, the mere propaganda way.

Those were the days, you might recall, when — out of the blue, on a dime — the Official Story changed from “China categorically denies there’s any such thing as germs, much less this particular strain of flu” to “OMG, the Chinese are welding apartment doors shut as people keel over in the streets.” Accompanied, in some cases — and good luck finding those video clips now — with grainy little movies of obvious actors keeling over so hammily, Al Pacino himself would tell them to tone it down. Pravda et al would never have been so crude, but those guys were pros, and as bad as the USSR was, affront-to-basic-intelligence-wise, this is Clown World.

Sure enough, the stories soon came out that China had cornered the market on PPE gear. It was an obvious short con, but remember: Clown World.

This — the CCP cornering the PPE market — soon prompted the third level of Media bullshit, the ideological level. Not content to merely take orders from their Chinese paymasters, the Media, being ideology-addled prize graduates of American “higher” “education”, started taking it upon themselves to lecture us for our own good. Masks, which were once bad, were now good, and if one mask was good, then two were even better! Thus the flood of stories like the one covered at the old RC, where the woman went on about swabbing her eyelids with disinfectant and whatnot. They got their chance to hector us for our own good, and they will never turn that down.

October 14, 2021

QotD: Americans’ perception of foreign economic threats

Filed under: China, Economics, Japan, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I am old enough to remember when almost everyone believed that the Russians were, as Khrushchev put it, going to “bury” us. Even leading economists such as Paul Samuelson were taken in by such nonsense. Of course, no such burial occurred, because just producing vast quantities of concrete, steel, and H-bombs is no evidence that anything of genuine value is being produced. Later Japan became the Godzilla that was going to eat the U.S. and European economies with its bureaucratic setup for picking and subsidizing “winners.” Before long that setup too collapsed in a heap and gave way to perpetual stagnation. Now almost everyone quakes in his boots while beholding the mighty Chinese economy. Again the hysteria has no firm foundation. An economy shaped and guided by government bureaucrats and Communist bigwigs by means of tariffs, subsidies, state-controlled credit, and state-owned industries cannot be a real growth miracle for long. This too shall pass.

And when it does Americans will learn nothing from their most recent mistake. If people really understood sound economics, they would not continue to make this same mistake again and again.

Robert Higgs, “China — Americans’ Economic Bugaboo du Jour”, The Beacon, 2018-12-19.

September 21, 2021

QotD: Canadian international virtue signalling is not a new thing

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[I]n January, after the tsunami hit, [Canadian prime minister Paul Martin] flew into Sri Lanka to pledge millions and millions and millions in aid. Not like that heartless George W. Bush back at the ranch in Texas. Why, Prime Minister Martin walked along the ravaged coast of Kalumnai and was, reported Canada’s CTV network, “visibly shaken.” President Bush might well have been shaken, but he wasn’t visible, and in the international compassion league, that’s what counts. So Martin boldly committed Canada to giving $425 million to tsunami relief. “Mr. Paul Martin Has Set A Great Example For The Rest Of The World Leaders!” raved the LankaWeb news service.

You know how much of that $425 million has been spent so far? Fifty thousand dollars — Canadian. That’s about 40 grand in U.S. dollars. The rest isn’t tied up in [Sri Lankan] bureaucracy, it’s back in Ottawa. But, unlike horrible “unilateralist” America, Canada enjoys a reputation as the perfect global citizen, renowned for its commitment to the U.N. and multilateralism. And on the beaches of Sri Lanka, that and a buck’ll get you a strawberry daiquiri. Canada’s contribution to tsunami relief is objectively useless and rhetorically fraudulent.

Mark Steyn, “Bolton’s sin is telling truth about system”, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005-05-15.

September 18, 2021

QotD: Material prosperity and happiness

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

Let me take a moment to agree with all spinmeisters and talking heads, linked in my inbox this morning. Mister Tucker’s monologue on Fox News t’other evening (which I have now “watched” in video and transcript) was a “game-changer”. That is what we (present and former hacks and pandits) call a speech that outclasses the background noise. It makes listeners wonder, however fitfully, whether their sense of current history is right. It “galvanizes” those who, though they agreed with every proposition in advance, ne’er heard them so well expressed. (Gentle reader will find the thing on the Internet soon enough.)

Gallantly, Mister Tucker has articulated the desire of the Right and Left-wavering to raise the tone of American politics to that of Bhutan. His most striking expressions called attention to the fact that material prosperity does not make people happy. Perhaps we should instruct the statisticians to replace their calculations of Gross Domestic Product, with Gross National Happiness, as they now do in Thimphu. The figure would still be meaningless, but might provide some modest, transient uplift.

In my humbly contrary view, material prosperity — i.e. getting filthy rich — does actually make people happy. Those who win the lottery do not cry from despair. But within a few months of scoring, and often within days, they have a new set of personal problems, to pile upon the old ones. Happiness, from material causes, does not last; not even for the poor. It is emotional catharsis. Something makes you happy; and then it fades away.

Only drugs can keep you happy, until you die. But the downside there is that they kill you.

David Warren, “More populist than thou”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-01-04.

September 11, 2021

Thursday’s debate was “a grand Kabuki theatre, increasingly divorced from any grounded reality about our fiscal situation, or our ability to deliver on complex programs or problems”

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson offers her observations of the debate on Thursday night among most of the federal party leaders — missing, of course, the participation of the PPC’s Maxime Bernier who was pointedly not invited:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

No one can be said to have “won” such an exercise. You “win” these “debates” not by proposing the best policies, or offering competing philosophies, or even by presenting the best rhetoric. Rather, a “winner” is determined by who comes off the best to a general public that largely doesn’t follow the minute differences of respective platforms.

By that measure, no one really won Thursday’s debate, but Trudeau especially did not win it. I imagine that one of the problems of being raised as a spectacle of wealth, privilege and popularity is that it doesn’t quite prepare you for the moment when the worm turns, when people learn to dislike you for all the right reasons; when you are no longer given the proper deference and respect you feel is owed to you.

Trudeau came off as defensive, and flustered, taking hit after hit from other party leaders on topics ranging from his record, reconciliation and, especially, his self-interested decision to call a party in the first place. That he lacks a credible answer to why we’re holding this election at all three weeks into this campaign is a deep failure, one large and deep enough to consume his prospects of forming a majority government — and his hold on the party leadership along with it.

Annamie Paul offered the best performance of the night by far, and demonstrated that the Green party as a whole is unworthy of her. Whatever private internal dramas that may be unfolding, in public that party condemns itself to obscurity by refusing to get behind a woman who is, by every measure, impressive.

Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet made himself into an idealized avatar of a whiny and aggrieved Quebec nationalism that puts Alberta to shame. It takes a real special lack of self-awareness to imagine that Quebecers have had it rougher in this country than Indigenous people. Or that Blanchet, by virtue of his French ancestry, has suffered from greater oppression than, say, Annamie Paul. One day, the rest of Canada is going to stop humouring these insulated, thin-skinned delusions — but not before Quebec’s seat count declines relative to the rest of the population’s. In the meantime, Blanchet’s ability to beam pure DGAF energy into the English debates at least made him seem like a human, albeit a delusional and unpleasant one.

By this measure, Erin O’Toole “won” the debate by not losing it. I can’t remember a single thing he actually said, and in such a setting this can only work to his favour.

I mean, what is there to say? On actual substantive policy issues, I couldn’t escape the sense of watching a grand Kabuki theatre, increasingly divorced from any grounded reality about our fiscal situation, or our ability to deliver on complex programs or problems.

September 5, 2021

Kaylee Frye: Just Put The Cute Engineer In Danger | Firefly | Stuff You Like

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jill Bearup
Published 9 Jun 2012

Kaywinnet Lee Frye: she’s irresistable. So in this episode of broken jump cuts, pointless-but-funny cameos, evening dresses and gushing, we explore the woman, the legend, the utter gorgeousness that is Kaylee. Firefly season episode 4 everyone!

August 31, 2021

QotD: “It’s not news, it’s irritainment”

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

“Did you watch the news last night?”

“Yeah, I watched [Tucker Carlson/Rachel Maddow].”

Except that’s not the news. That’s an editorial program where a person gets performatively angry about their opinion of selected bits of news so that you get angry about it along with them … righteously angry enough to sit through an hour’s worth of commercials.

It’s not news, it’s irritainment.

Tamara Keel, “It makes me so mad!”, View From The Porch, 2021-05-25.

August 26, 2021

Rigging the rules to exclude Maxime Bernier from the leaders’ debate

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

Jamie Clinton asks why Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier’s People’s Party is being excluded at the same time as the self-destructing Green Party is included by the Leaders’ Debate Commission:

However, before the commission came out with their announcement, the People’s Party had polled at or above four per cent in 13 out of 20 polls. It has only looked worse for the commission since the decision was made. The PPC has averaged five per cent in the six polls done since then. Including one poll that had them at 6.6 per cent, exactly double the floundering Green Party’s numbers.

It is very likely that if the Leaders’ Debates Commission had made their decision a few days later they would have allowed Maxime Bernier to be at the debates. Or, at least, they would have using the criteria they ultimately settled on.

For reference, in the 2008 federal election, Elizabeth May, then leader of the Green party, was allowed to participate in the debates even though her party did not have a seat. And yes, this time the rules are different. But it’s not as if MP’s voted on the debates’ rules or anything. The rules are completely arbitrary decisions that change every election cycle based on the whims of the Leaders’ Debates Commission.

In the 2019 federal election, with a different set of rules, the commission gave Bernier the benefit of the doubt and allowed him to participate in the debates. This time around, that is no longer needed.

Even if the PPC is technically under the four per cent threshold, the fact that they are outpolling both the Green party and Bloc Québécois in an increasing number of polls should be enough. Or at should at least raise the question as to whether or not the Greens and Bloc should remain in the debates.

The Bloc’s position is unique, on the basis of their geographically efficient vote. The Greens are another matter. Often, when an election rolls around, the media and Debates’ Commission go out of their way to distinguish the Green party as a major party. This has been true even when the GPC is polling at and receives under four per cent of the national vote. This happened in 2011 and 2015.

By this consideration, the People’s Party should definitely be allowed at the debates. It seems there are two different sets of rules, one concerning the Greens and the other for the PPC.

August 25, 2021

QotD: What Hamas says versus how western media reports what they said

Filed under: Humour, Media, Middle East, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“The illegitimate Zionist entity must be forced to end its occupation of all of Palestine, from Tel Aviv to Jericho.” Western Reporter: “So what you’re saying is that you support a peaceful 2-state solution.”
“We will kill the sons of pigs and apes like the great Hitler.”
Western reporter: “So what you’re saying is that you object to right-wing Israeli politicians like Netanyahu.”
“We want an Islamic state governed by sharia.”
Western reporter: “Democracy, one-person, one-vote, religious freedom for all. Got it.”
“We thank our great friends in Iran for their money, missiles, and bombs.”
Western Reporter: “Hamas insists on being a grassroots Palestinian movement not dependent on foreign support.”

David Bernstein, “It must be frustrating being a Hamas spokesman”, Instapundit, 2021-05-22.

August 23, 2021

The dying media’s strange obsession with the Green Party

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

The Green Party gets far more media attention in Canada than their vote totals or influence on goverment policy could possibly justify. Their ongoing attempts to commit media character assassination of their own leader might be the first time in living memory that the party’s antics might — might — justify it. The Line explains some of the dramedy in Greentopia:

“Annamie Paul with Green Party of Canada supporters” by Annamie Paul is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

One of us, just a couple of days ago, was standing around in our increasingly tattered casual wear and making a sandwich with the TV on in the background. A local news channel was showing Green party leader Annamie Paul speaking. So we changed the channel, because the Greens are irrelevant. But the next channel was also showing the same feed. We tried two others. It was all the same goddamned feed. And two of those networks were national. Viewers from coast to coast had a chance to hear, for an extended period, from a woman so thoroughly doomed that she’s not even pretending to run a national campaign. All she can muster is an attempt to win her seat in downtown Toronto.

Look, we don’t know who needs to hear this, but at the national level, the Greens are zeroes. Sorry, not sorry. Frankly, the Greens have long gotten too much attention in Canadian politics, which is a result of a few quirky things all aligning in their favour: Elizabeth May’s admittedly effective relentless self-promotion, the coffer-stuffing effect of the per-vote-wage subsidy, and, the politeness of Canadian media leaders who felt awkward saying no to Lizzie.

This is not to say that there are not serious Greens, nor that the Green party has not put forward some serious policy proposals. There are, and they have. The issue is that under our electoral system, the Greens don’t matter. And their strident complaining about their irrelevancy doesn’t actually make them relevant.

We glanced at recent vote tallies. The Greens generally get around five per cent or so, sometimes a point or two higher, sometimes a point or two lower. That ain’t nothing. But it is not enough to make them a meaningful electoral force in anything but a tiny handful of seats — or in really weird, bizarre vote-splitting scenarios, and those are very rare. We don’t believe there’s some magic level of popular support at which a party deserves serious consideration or not, it all depends on the context. The Bloc doesn’t get a ton of votes, either (though never less than the Greens), but since they only run candidates in Quebec, their efficient vote means they have a pretty consistently good chance of winning enough seats to matter in parliament. The Greens … don’t.

And that is in normal times. These aren’t normal times. Annamie Paul is a perfectly serious, credible person. The fact that her party is trying to back a cement truck over her in full view of 38 million witnesses simply confirms our instinct to ignore the party she leads. Most elections, you could argue that it’s a shame that the Greens don’t have an actual chance. This election, we’re thanking God for it.

Deciding how much attention to give a candidate or party is usually pretty easy. Outside Quebec, the big three — Tories, Liberals and NDP — get proper coverage, within the context of local circumstances and the dynamics of individual campaigns (ignoring a CPC also-ran in deepest Toronto isn’t going to break any hearts, nor the sacrificial Liberal in rural Alberta). The gamut of weirdo fringe parties are basically ignored. In Quebec, the Bloc warrants consideration alongside the big three.

What screws all this up, though, are the Greens and the People’s Party. They don’t warrant serious consideration, per se, but they will draw a fair number of voters. What to do with these?

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress