What is the point of a First Ministers Conference?
There is no actual necessity for them, you understand. The federal and provincial governments are quite able to function within their respective jurisdictions without their leaders dashing off across the country at regular intervals to quiver their jowls at each other. The first such meeting was not held until 1906. Just 10 more “dominion-provincial conferences” occurred over the next 40 years. Not until the 1950s did they become the semi-annual affairs we know today. That this was also when the TV cameras arrived is possibly not coincidental.
If there were actual business to transact, it could just as easily be arranged by subordinates, or over the phone, or via video-conference. Or if an issue were so thorny that it genuinely required a fleshly first-ministerial encounter, the prime minister could always meet bilaterally with the premier or premiers involved, as Stephen Harper did.
But a full-on, capital-F First Ministers Conference, official cars, flag-backed lecterns and all? There is invariably but one purpose to these: for the 10 premiers to corner and harass the prime minister, using the imbalance in their numbers to depict the feds as the outlier. Sometimes this is in furtherance of the premiers’ perennial campaign for more federal cash. Sometimes, as in the current exercise, the point seems to be conflict for conflict’s sake. But always — always — it is theatre.
Only it is theatre of a peculiar kind: with the curtains drawn and the sound down, the audience being instead entertained by periodic reports from agents for each of the actors about who said what. Thus the breathless dispatches from reporters orbiting the conference — they are kept well away from the actual meeting room — every line of it originating from sources, federal or provincial, with a professional interest in puffing one leader or the other.
Andrew Coyne, “A semi-annual opportunity for premiers to strut and preen and accomplish nothing”, National Post, 2018-12-07.
August 20, 2021
QotD: First Ministers Conferences
July 27, 2021
Kurt Schlicter on the gimps of the White House press corps
At TownHall, Kurt Schlicter expresses his disregard for the media who are supposed to be covering the White House and are voluntarily muzzling themselves and acting more like the ministry of propaganda than the free press. At least in Canada, they have the excuse that they’re paid prostitutes for whatever their federal pimps want them to say … in the United States that’s not (yet) the case:
You gotta love the lib reporters meekly accepting the delicious iron discipline of black-clad Mistress Psaki as she demands “Why do you need to have that information?” when asked about the number of infectos in the petri dish that is the * White House. The only way that kink-fest could have been more on the nose with regard to who our esteemed journalismers actually are is if her severe black outfit was vinyl. Apparently, getting flogged by the Democrat dominatrix turns their collective crank because they just took it. They always just take it. And our Fourth Estate will eagerly beg for more.
Now, it’s not even the gross double standard at play here that’s significant – imagine the fussy fury of the lib-simps if one of Trump’s vanilla spokespeople publicly abused them like that. We’ve learned that the lib-press is immune to shame, at least the kind that comes from having their rank hypocrisy exposed by conservatives. No, it’s that when their Dem domme cracks the whip, they just take it, meekly, obediently, like the groveling submissives they are.
Someday, someone will look back on this pathetic abdication of the media’s dignity and write a history of how the ink-stained wretches of the past became the craven conformists of today, and how now they revel in their own subjugation. Call it 50 Shades of the Gray Lady; when you read the hot scene in the forbidden White House press playroom at page 247, you’ll want to draw a warm bubble bath, light a lavender-scented candle, and pour yourself a goblet of Trader Joe’s screw-top chardonnay. Grrrrrrrr.
Imagine being these people. You can’t? Okay, then take a shot of Dickel Rye and try again to imagine being these people. They all grew up wanting to be the crusading Woodward and/or Bernstein – who themselves were less ace reporters than eager conduits for a disgruntled bureaucrat hack who exploited the callow correspondents to settle his personal scores – and instead they grew up to be the Gimp in the less interesting version of Pulp Fiction that is the DC milieu.
They aren’t breaking stories. They aren’t uncovering wrongdoing. They certainly are not comforting the afflicted or afflicting the comfortable. They are the ruling caste’s janitors. They are drones, thralls to their elite masters, marching in grim conformity in step to the official narrative, never complaining, never questioning, never dissenting. These are licensed, registered, regime journalists.
July 25, 2021
QotD: The Two Rules of Modern Journalism
RULE # 2: Rule # 1 only applies to Republicans.
(And to anybody leaning conservative.)
For Democrats and leftists, the typical query is more along the lines of “pray enlighten us to your glorious plans for fundamentally transforming the United States of America (we will be quiet now).” (Close second: “kindly tell us how much people have suffered, and are still suffering, in this dreadful country of ours.”)
Erik, “The Two Rules of Modern Journalism”, ¡No Pasarán!, 2021-04-16.
July 16, 2021
Do US intelligence agencies only work on domestic surveillance these days?
Matt Taibbi discusses the (recent?) US intelligence agencies’ apparent concentration on domestic “enemies” like Republicans, Jewish organizations, conservative broadcasters, and US Presidents and their appointed officials:
The scene was perfectly representative of what the erstwhile “liberal” press has become: collections of current and former enforcement types, masquerading as journalists, engaged in patriotic denunciations of critics and rote recitals of quasi-official statements.
Not that it matters to [Fox TV host Tucker] Carlson’s critics, but odds favor the NSA scandal being true. An extraordinarily rich recent history of illegal, politically-directed leaks has gone mostly uncovered, in another glaring recent press failure that itself is part of this story.
It’s admitted. Go back to December, 2015, and you’ll find a Wall Street Journal story by Adam Entous and Danny Yadron quoting senior government officials copping to the fact that the Obama White House reviewed intercepts of conversations between “U.S lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”
The White House in that case was anxious to know what congressional opponents to Obama’s Iran deal were thinking, and peeked in the electronic cookie jar to get an advance preview at such “incidentally” collected info. This prompted what one official called an “Oh, shit” moment, when they realized that what they’d done might result in “the executive branch being accused of spying.”
After Obama left office, illegal leaks of classified intercepts became commonplace. Many, including the famed January, 2017 leak of conversations between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, were key elements of major, news-cycle-dominating bombshells. Others, like “Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin,” or news that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials in foreign intercepts, were openly violative of the prohibition against disclosing the existence of such surveillance, let alone the contents.
These leaks tended to go to the same small coterie of reporters at outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN, and not one prompted blowback. This was a major forgotten element of the Reality Winner story. Winner, a relatively low-level contractor acting on her own, was caught, charged, and jailed with extraordinary speed after leaking an NSA document about Russian interference to the Intercept. But these dozens of similar violations by senior intelligence officials, mainly in leaks about Trump, went not just unpunished but un-investigated. As Winner’s lawyer, Titus Nichols, told me years ago, his client’s case was “about low-hanging fruit.”
July 13, 2021
QotD: Girls and witchcraft
Witchcraft fascinated me. When girls reach that liminal time between child and woman, our bodies transform — and, with them, our sense of control. It’s a strange thing to go from being cosseted and encouraged to desired and despised. It feels a little like dark magic — though not the kind one can control. Unless, of course, you are a witch.
Like the magical artifacts Harry Potter is always stumbling upon, witchcraft offers power. It promises a way to re-shape the world to a girl’s advantage, to gain freedom from parents, to toy with boys’ hearts while numbing one’s own. Male magic fantasies tend to be centred around power and combat — with lightning perpetually emanating from wands and fingertips into the chests of adversaries blown backwards. However, the sort of witchcraft that interests me is more subtle, and sometimes passes unseen. (In real life, such powers originate in sex — but it takes time for a girl to learn that.) It’s no coincidence that the world of witchcraft becomes a dark mirror of our society, reflecting the dispositions and paranoias of our times. When times are good, the witch is portrayed as a benign, bubbly figure; when they are not, the witch becomes malevolent and dark, in line with medieval lore.
Jen Gerson, “Sabrina the Woke Witch is a Disgrace to Baphomet”, Quillette, 2018-11-26.
June 17, 2021
QotD: Declaring war on the Upper-Class Media
67% of US families watch the Super Bowl — what percent of New York Times editors and reporters do? 20% of Americans go to religious services weekly — how many of those work for the New York Times? How come 96% of political donations from journalists go to Democrats? Your job is to take a page from the Democratic playbook and insist there is no reason any of this could be true except systemic classism, that any other explanation is offensive, and it’s the upper-class media’s moral duty to do something about this immediately. Until they do so you are absolutely justified in ignoring them and trusting less bigoted and exclusionary sources (I hear Substack is pretty good!)
Insist that working-class people have the right to communicate with each other without interference from upper-class gatekeepers. Make sure people know every single fact about @Jack and what a completely ridiculous person he is, and point out that somehow this is the guy who decides what you’re allowed to communicate with your Twitter friends. Every time tech companies censor social media, even if they’re censoring left-wing views, call their CEOs in for long and annoying Congressional hearings where you use the words “Silicon Valley elites” a lot.
Scott Alexander, “A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word ‘Class'”, Astral Codex Ten, 2021-02-26.
June 6, 2021
Decoding NPR’s revised approach to reporting in a social justice age
At Ace of Spades H.Q., K.T. listens to some NPR broadcasts (so you don’t have to) including an insight into how NPR and probably other media organizations are changing how they report the news:
We Hold These Truths: How Newsroom Leaders Wrestled With Covering A Tumultuous Year
This was sort of a panel discussion (light on the “discussion”), with commentary on things like how social media pressured newsrooms, for example, to say that “police murdered George Floyd” rather than “George Floyd died”.
But I kind of homed in on an academic phrase that bothers me. Sara Just from PBS:
Yeah, I think that you’re absolutely right. There’s been a deeper understanding and deeper conversation about how much our lived experiences play into the reporting that we do. And there’s no question that it does for each and every one of us in different ways. And I think that lived experience we especially highlight now is valuable, whether it’s race or gender or the challenges. I don’t think people with those lived experiences have to carry the burden, though, of being the only ones to report on it by any means. And so that’s something that we are always balancing. (emphases mine)
So, are they balancing whether or not people without “lived experiences” can report on issues involving “lived experiences”? Like Lori Lightfoot deciding she would only do one-on-one interviews with journalists of color? Will white people be allowed to report on stories involving black people? Will men be allowed to report on stories involving women?
This is partly about local sources, but it is largely about people thought of as being in “oppressed groups”. This panel is informing us that news reporting will now be filtered through the language and perspective of Critical Social Justice, whether we realize it or not.
The indispensable Translations from the Woke at New Discourses provides the following information on Lived Experience:
In the Theory of Critical Social Justice, for what turn out to be surprisingly deep and philosophically (almost) sophisticated reasons, lived experience is the overwhelmingly primary way in which knowledge can be obtained. This should not be mistaken to mean one’s firsthand experience, which most of us already recognize to provide a rather weak claim upon knowledge, though it is both implied and claimed that this is what “lived experience” refers to in Critical Social Justice. Lived experience, as Critical Social Justice uses the term, refers more specifically to one’s life experiences in allegedly systemic power dynamics of dominance and oppression that shape society structurally as understood with a critical consciousness and interpreted through Theory. That is, one’s “lived experience” refers to the interpretation that Critical Social Justice Theory gives for the anecdotal accounts of experiences one has had.
Because “lived experience” refers to an interpretation through Theory, it is only the “lived experience of oppression,” as Theory will have it, that counts …
It appears that you can’t really understand the reporting on PBS, and probably NPR, now unless you have studied Critical Social Justice.
Certainly, the claimed “lived experience” of members of dominant groups cannot be in any way used to challenge or dispute the assertions of Theory or those claiming to speak from it …
This restriction extends to members of “minoritized” groups who disagree with Theory as well — Theory cannot be authentically disagreed with. One might think that the lived experience of a member of oppressed groups would be admissible as a valid challenge to the claims of Theory, but this not so. They may be talking about their own experiences in life, but they aren’t appealing to lived experience, which must comport with Theory …
This is all very confusing and appears to be exactly what it is — a form of manipulating knowledge and epistemology as a means of asserting power and rigging the system such that those assertions of power cannot be challenged. Nevertheless, it isn’t merely an application of power and has a rather interesting and deep philosophical explanation that must be understood to understand why “lived experience” holds the status that it does and why it must comport with Theory to be granted veridical status and epistemic weight. This has everything to do with the fact that the roots of Critical Social Justice are in critical theories and, especially, postmodern philosophy.
There is much more, but it is way too deep to include here.
The NPR panel goes on to discuss new understandings of “balance” and “objectivity”. They do not intend to be objective. “Balance” will mean something different than what it has meant in the past in the news business.
Many people have found the way that TV news shows report on events since 2016 to be rather different than what they’d been used to before that. Some changes are subtle and others are quite blatant and hard to ignore unless you already agree with the viewpoint of the presenter. TV news used to at least pretend to present the news objectively but from the start of the Trump presidency most media outlets abruptly changed from a pseudo-objective (but leaning progressive) to an outright full-on progressive stance from start to finish with little or no attempt to provide other points of view for balance.
June 2, 2021
Media Fearmongering
Laura Dodsworth on how the BBC and other British media outlets turned all the dials to 11 to ramp up fear over the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus:
The media have served us a cornucopia of frightening articles and news items about Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. While writing my new book, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I encountered a panoply of doom-mongering headlines. These were an indication of the significant role the media have played in creating our state of fear.
Of course, news media should not shy away from reporting frightening news during a pandemic. They should make us aware of the numbers of deaths, the policies being implemented to tackle the pandemic and the latest scientific developments. But during Covid, the media went beyond reporting on the pandemic. Instead, they appeared beholden to the old commercial imperatives, “If it scares, it airs”, and “If it bleeds, it leads”. It seems fear does sell.
The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to create has been suffocating. Death tolls were constantly brandished without the context of how many people die every day in the UK, and hospital admissions were reported while recoveries were not. As a result, Covid often appeared as a death sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a mild illness for the majority of people.
Given the wall-to-wall doom, it is therefore no surprise that the British were one of the most frightened populations in the world. Various studies showed that we were more concerned than other countries about the spread of Covid and less confident in the ability of our government to deal with it. One survey in July 2020 showed that the British public thought between six and seven per cent of the population had died from Covid – which was around 100 times the actual death rate at the time. Indeed, if six or seven per cent of Brits had died from Covid, that would have amounted to about 4,500,000 bodies – we’d have noticed, don’t you think?
While researching A State of Fear, I interviewed members of the general public about how they were impacted by the “campaign of fear” during the epidemic. Many talked of how the media had elevated their alarm.
“There wasn’t much to do”, Darren told me, “so we’d watch TV and we saw programmes about disinfecting your shopping when it arrives, and having a safezone in the kitchen. The nightly bulletins on the TV about death tolls, the big graphs with huge spikes on them, came at us ‘boom, boom, boom!’. It was a constant barrage of doom and gloom. My fear of the virus went through the roof.”
Sarah told me she had to stop watching the BBC. As her daughter put it, “If you just watched or listened to the BBC every day, what hope would you have had?”. Jane, meanwhile, described the “gruesome headlines” that came at her “thick and fast”.
The fearmongering about Covid began even before the pandemic hit the UK. We were primed by videos from Wuhan in China, which were then widely circulated by UK-based media outlets. These painted an apocalyptic picture, featuring collapsed citizens, medics in Hazmat suits, concerned bystanders and a city grinding to a halt. In one memorable video, which went viral, so to speak, a woman fell, stiff as a board, flat on her face, on a pavement. The split second where she falters is a giveaway – this was a set-up. If the rest of the world had Covid, China had “Stunt Covid”.
June 1, 2021
The Avengers – Must See TV
Billy Rees
Published 19 Aug 2015ITV programme from 2005 presented by Joan Collins.
May 30, 2021
New frontiers in cultural appropriation
John McWhorter considers the notion that white people shouldn’t be allowed to use “black” words and phrases because it’s a form of cultural appropriation and therefore another aspect of white supremacy:
Screencap from NBC’s Saturday Night Live highlights for “Gen-Z Hospital” skit.
A little while ago, a Saturday Night Live skit depicted a multiracial group of teens communicating in what was depicted as “Gen Z slang”, with the doctor they were talking with having to “translate” his thoughts into it to communicate with them.
A lot of people didn’t like it, because the slang in question was mostly of Black English origin. The complaint is that the skit was denying the black roots of these terms, and instead ascribing them to Americans in general – i.e. (shudder) white persons. As in, yes – the problem was cultural appropriation.
As I write, there are still people grousing on social media in the wake of that skit about whites “stealing” black language, with a leitmotif being that we should apply our N-word taboo more widely. To wit, many propose that whites should not be allowed to use Black English terms because they are “ours”. Many who haven’t outright proposed this give the notion Likes, which suggests that a considerable group of people – and from what I can see, quite a few of them are white – concur with this line of reasoning.
Let’s break this down. To do so we must understand the sorts of terms in question. The SNL skit included, among others, yo, bestie, vibes, feels for feelings, salty for irritated, bro / bruh and no cap for “I’m not kidding” (as in, these are actual whole gold teeth, not golden caps on teeth).
Is there a case that you should only use these terms if you’re black, or that if you use them as a white person you should “do the work” of thinking hard about whether or not it is problematic (blasphemous)?
May 26, 2021
The Line refutes arguments recently posted in … The Line
Recently the editors at The Line accepted an article from the astroturf “advocacy” group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, pushing the establishment line that all of us peons and useless idiots in the blogosphere and even a few undisciplined malcontents among the actual mainstream media are totally misunderstanding and misrepresenting what the government is trying to do with their “tax the web giants” initiative. Peter Menzies responds to the latest bullshit propaganda offensive:
[Mouthpiece for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting Daniel] Bernhard makes a great case for the regulation of tech giants, pointing to some truly dreadful things such as the New Zealand massacre streamed on Facebook, and exploitive content uploaded to Montreal’s PornHub.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the people listed above disagree with the Friends on this point. In fact, many have made the case that Bill C-10 is an unnecessary diversion from more serious online industry problems — some of which are addressed in another bill (C-11).
The big matters that need to be addressed by the government involve algorithms, data collection, privacy protection, and anti-competitive practices — not the facility of the Netflix search tool, nor whether the search term “Canadian” should pop up as a default selection.
My main point of disagreement to Bernhard’s piece is that the Internet is no more broadcasting than a cow is a caribou. Further, it’s ridiculous to think that an outmoded relic such as the 1991(!) Broadcasting Act is the proper tool to use to govern communications in the 21st Century (for those inclined, there is a complete policy paper available here that fleshes that out.)
In terms of the sections 2.1 vs 4.1 legal arguments, I’m pretty certain I will lose most of The Line readers if I delve into those details. I’m more than comfortable deferring to my fellow “militants” such as law professors Laidlaw and Geist, whose arguments have been so overwhelming that not even Attorney General David Lametti attempted to refute them in the defence of Guilbeault, who has now established himself as the most regressive Heritage Minister in the history of that ministry.
All readers really need to know is that, yes, Bill C-10 makes it legal for the CRTC to regulate your video or audio uploads if they are posted to “social media”, the definition of which will be left entirely up to the nine government-appointed CRTC commissioners. Who knows what they’ll come up with. There are no minutes of their meetings, so it’s impossible to know what they might be thinking.
I mean, if it was easy to define social media you’d think the government would have just done it, right? Similarly, if the legislation is aimed only at the bad behaviour of the “Web Giants” — the pejorative term Guilbeault has engaged — the bill ought to simply say that. But it doesn’t.
And as for the government-approved Canadian Content industry’s argument that it didn’t want to regulate/suppress the user generated content produced by the rest of us . . .
Oh Yes They Did.
May 18, 2021
In future, if you’re on TV, do not use your hands or fingers under any circumstances … OK?
… as a Jeopardy contestant has recently discovered, there is no hand gesture that is free from the slightest hint of an emanation of a penumbra of white supremacy:
And then they came for the integers. The small social universe surrounding the syndicated game show Jeopardy has been boiling over for the past month because of a hand gesture made by a contestant, Kelly Donahue, at the outset of the April 27 episode. Donahue, returning to the show as a three-time winner, held up three fingers in a gesture of triumph and tapped his chest with them. He had done something similar on earlier episodes, flashing a “one” after his first win and a “two” after his second.
Needless to say, he had to be immediately chastised. A small number of conspiracy theorists felt his use of three fingers to represent three of something “resembled very closely a gesture that has been co-opted by white power groups, alt right groups and an anti-government group that calls itself the Three Percenters.”
That quote is taken from an indignant open letter signed by almost 600 members of a private Facebook group for former Jeopardy contestants, in which the signers demanded to know why Donahue’s heinous Nazi code, “whether intentional or not,” hadn’t been cut from the show before broadcast.
[…]
Smith’s column doesn’t actually get around to answering the question, although with a little legwork he was able to establish that the Facebook group had actually approached the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish grandparent of all anti-hate monitoring groups, for advice. The ADL told the addled ex-contestants, “Uh, it looks to us like the guy’s just making a three,” which led some in the internet cocoon to conclude they were being “gaslit.” Smith also talked to members of the Facebook group who knew that their fellow contestants were talking twaddle and fomenting harassment of an innocent man, but who were afraid to contradict the leaders of a witch hunt, lest the purifying fire be kindled beneath their own tootsies.
Smith does identify a crucial point in what is otherwise a workaday tale of cancel culture run mad. Former Jeopardy contestants, every last three-o-phobic one of them, are people selected specifically for high intelligence and wide knowledge. This didn’t make the signers of the letter any less obtuse, or any more resistant to a complicated conspiracy theory. It was their knowledge of disaggregated facts that made them susceptible in the first place.
May 17, 2021
An older BBC dramatization on the slave trade that seems to have gone down the memory hole
At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin wondered why the BBC hadn’t gotten around to showing a 1970s historical series through the year-and-more of the pandemic lockdowns. He doesn’t mention the name of the series, and an unusually unhelpful BBC site search didn’t turn up a name but IMDB suggests it was 1975 and the series was called The Fight Against Slavery:
Fifty years ago, the BBC screened a dramatised documentary series about the fight to abolish the slave trade. Even a year of the virus limiting new series, at a time of great BBC eagerness to talk about racism, has not made them screen it again.
– I see one reason why they have not: the series displayed sleazy white slave traders and abusive white slave owners prominently, but it also showed white people eager to end the slave trade and (much worse) black people eager to continue it. It included the king of Dahomey’s threat: “if you do not allow me to sell you my slaves, their fate will be a great deal worse” (a very brief scene of the Dahomey murder spectacle lent meaning to his remark). After abolition was voted, it showed a white slave trader assuring the Dahomans, as a drug dealer might his suppliers, “It is one thing for parliament to pass a law …”, hinting at the Royal Navy’s long and hard campaign to enforce it.
– Only recently did I spot another reason why they would not want to show it again – the scene in which a corrupt old white slave trader warns his young colleague that “it’s more than your life’s worth” to doubt the ability of their slave-selling hosts to count very accurately the quantity of trade goods being handed over in exchange, and to assess their quality knowledgeably. The traders well knew that Africans counted two plus two as four, just as they did. Any trader who imagined that black ability to add diverged enough from white to enable an attempt to short-change them had learned otherwise long before the 1780s.
– The southern Confederacy thought the same. Until its death throes, it forbade enlisting a southern black as a Confederate soldier because, as one Confederate senator put it, “If blacks can make good soldiers then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” (Perhaps also because even southern white Democrats realised that southern black desire to fight against blacks being freed was likely to be a very minority taste.) But there was one exception. Every regiment had its regimental band, which played to set the pace at the start and end of marches, used trumpets to signal commands in battle – and fought when other duties did not supervene. From its start to its end, Confederate law said any black could enlist as bandsman, with the same pay and perquisites as a white – a very rare example of formal legal equality. (Playing music requires the ability to count time. For the woke, “dismantling the legacy of the Confederacy” apparently includes dismantling its realisation – shared by the Victorian composer Dvorak – that blacks often excelled in music so much as to overcome prejudice against black ability. Today, it’s “racist” to value instrumental skill.)
“Politically correct” has meant “actually wrong” ever since the first commissar explained to the first party comrade that it was neither socialist nor prudent to notice a factual error in the party line. “Structurally racist” is PC’s modern companion. No longer are the woke content merely to imply (“mathematics is racist”, “punctuality is racist”, “politeness is racist”) that blacks can’t count, can’t tell the time and can only behave crudely. They’re starting to say it in words of fewer syllables.
If I’d scrolled down to the comments, I’d have discovered that Natalie Solent had also dug up the name of the series:
Natalie Solent (Essex)
May 10, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Outstanding post, Niall. Was the BBC series you mentioned “The Fight Against Slavery“, written and narrated by Evan Jones? I have not seen it – given that I was ten or eleven in 1975 my parents probably thought I was too young too see it.However someone called “InternetPilgrim” has put up three videos of the series on YouTube. There is a link to Part I here, Part II here and Part III here, so I will try to remedy that lack soon.
May 11, 2021
QotD: The (disappointing) sex lives of the rich and famous
Severian, “Junkies”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-18.
May 2, 2021
QotD: The “I don’t watch sports” bore is even more rare than the Libertarian bore
Only about 7 percent of American adults don’t watch sports at all. That means that non-sports-watchers are, by some counts, even rarer than libertarians. What I’m trying to say is, I’m fun at parties.
Peter Suderman, “Call of Duty Is the Best Sporting Event in the World”, Reason, 2018-10-19.
