Quotulatiousness

February 23, 2021

The danger period is when “the coherence of the news breaks” … and it appears to be breaking before our eyes

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt remembers the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the disturbing parallels we can see today:

[Click to see full-size flowchart]

Our likelihood of coming out of this a constitutional republic is still high. Why? Well, because societies under stress become more themselves.

I remember when the USSR fell. And out of the ashes Tzar Putin emerged, who is despicable, but not particularly out of keeping with Russian monarchy.

So, yeah, the pull of our culture will be towards the reestablishment of who and what we are and were: a constitutional republic.

But on the way …

Look, I remember when the USSR fell.

The people in the USSR knew they were being treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed on crap. They knew there was truth in Pravda. But they were used to having certain information, and interpreting it.

And there is something worse than reading the news in totalitarianism. You can get used to interpreting the news, and knowing the shape of the hole of what they’re not reporting.

But once you realize it’s all nonsense, once the coherence of the news breaks — and it’s doing so now, earlier than I expected, with the Times article, with the New York Times admitting the protesters at the capitol didn’t kill the police officer — once there are holes, but they’re not consistent, or they’re consistent, but then contradicted; once the narrative changes almost by the week, to the point it can’t be ignored, that’s the dangerous period.

I know I joke that by the end of this year I’ll have to apologize to the lizard-people conspiracy theorists. But the problem is that the lizard people conspiracy theorists can acquire respectability and a strange new respect. Or something even crazier. Heck, a lot of crazier things.

To an extent the 9/11 troofer conspiracies, which yes, are crazy and also anti-scientific were our warning shot. That they flourished and that to this day a lot of people believe them means that there was already a sense that the news made no sense, that there were other things going on behind the scenes that we weren’t aware of.

It’s going to get far, far worse than that, as the actual elites, the top of various fields fall like struck trees in a thunder storm. There is a good chance that authorities you rely on for your profession, or just for your knowledge have been compromised. A lot of our research is tainted by China paying to get the results it wants, for instance. And there’s probably worse. You already know most research can’t be reproduced, and that’s not even recent.

As all this stuff comes out, the problem is that people won’t stop believing. Instead they’ll believe in all and everything.

I don’t know how much was reported here, as the USSR collapsed. but I remember what I read in European magazines and journals. All of a sudden it was all new age mysticism and spoon bending and only the good Lord knew what else.

And that’s what we’re going to head into. So, when you find yourself in the middle of an elaborate explanation that someone constructed, well …

First find the facts. Pace Heinlein: Again, and again what are the facts. Never mind if your ideology demands they be something else. Establish the facts to the extent you can. Facts and math don’t lie. (Statistics do. So be aware you can lie with them. And any metrics that involve intangibles, like intelligence or performance much less sociability or micro anything? forget about it.)

From the facts, deploy Occam’s razor. What is the simplest explanation?

Then remember that humans run at the mouth, and the more humans in the conspiracy, the more facts are likely to leak out somewhere.

And while we’ve seen a lot of Omerta among leftists, note that they’re all afflicted by evil villain syndrome. Sooner or later, they brag about how clever they were in deceiving us. So, if your conspiracy theory requires perfect silence forever, it’s probably not true.

February 17, 2021

Sarah Hoyt on why Progressives think Gina Carano’s tweet was antisemitic

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

I’m a few days behind, so I didn’t see this post by Sarah Hoyt until Tuesday morning:

My first reaction was “Oh. Actress said something, and … they cancelled her.” Which is not only “day ending in y” right now, but also has been for a long time. Part of the reason I came out of the political closet is because I’d gotten tired of watching every word I said, and every expression I made in public. Because even a slight slip would have caused my career to be completely dead. […] So, I was going “Yeah, only innocents who don’t realize what life is like in a completely taken-over industry would think this is surprising. All power to the lady, but I’m sure she knew what would hit her for stepping out of line.”

And then I came across a screen capture of what she said. And someone asking “how is this anti-semitic.”

Which is when I panicked.

[…]

The only way, remotely, no matter how much you stretch it, that what she said can be considered “anti-semitic” is this:

    The left believes the Jews were innocent. (This is correct, btw.) That what happened to them was shameful and terrible, and a dishonor on those who attacked them.

    BUT they also believe it’s an insult to compare them to the people the left hates FOR THEIR POLITICAL VIEWS.

Because they think the people they hate for their political views — us — are really that bad, and really deserve everything the left intends to do to them. Which is more or less—in rough outlines — what the Nazis did to the Jews.

I mean, they have already talked of reeducating us, taking our children away, and they do in fact do think of us as not fully human.

Mind you, they have absolutely no idea who we are and what we believe, but they know we don’t agree with them, and since their hearts are pure, and utopia is their objective, we must be the very devil, and terrible on principle.

They’ve been exquisitely propagandized to the point they think the only American president with Jewish grandchildren was “anti-semitic.” They think that black people who don’t want to careen into ruinous and deadly socialism are “white supremacists” (the poor things swallowed Gramsci without chewing); they think other races aren’t hetero-normative; they think America is the most racissss, sexissss, homophobic nation on Earth … and they will not listen to corrections of their appalling and atrocious ignorance of true history or foreign anthropology or … really anything. Because anything opposing the indoctrination has been trained into them is an attack on their psyche.

So, they’re ignorant. They live in a political/social universe where if you oppose the completely insane leftist version of the world, you must be evil and “a nazi” which is to say the devil. They are so completely saturated in utter inanity that they call Israel “fascist.”

BUT one thing they know, and they know it at gut level: everyone to the right of Lenin — or perhaps Mao — are untermensch who will have to be utterly destroyed, so that the final promised utopia that they were promised since elementary school will come to be.

So, in their eyes comparing innocent Jews to their political opponents is experienced as an insult to the Jews.

Because in leftist eyes, we are evil, cockroaches and sub-humans whom they have to eradicate from society.

And they will not look in the mirror, or admit that what they’re engaging in is exactly what the nazis did, only with political beliefs instead of race. And it’s complicated. These idiots have simply decided that the real master race are black people. And that all evil comes from white males. But to be fair, it shades to people like me who have “internalized oppression” and are therefore “male.”

February 16, 2021

QotD: Homo electronicus and the falling murder rate

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

It should be clear to even the dullest social observer that human software has well and truly outstripped our hardware. We’re not built for the world we’ve built. This has been happening for a long time, of course, but it has really taken off recently. Note how hard it is not to watch tv, for instance. Even if you don’t have one in your home, go to a bar, an airport, hell, go to the grocery store — there are blinking screens everywhere, and it takes serious effort not to watch them. Our hardware interprets bright flashing things as a threat — can’t be helped. If you’ve been away from civilization for a few days, like I was recently, you’ll experience fatigue, even nausea when you first come back into town. The low-level-but-constant effort it takes to override your hardware when surrounded by blinking screens wears you out.

If you don’t feel like going all Thoreau, you can test the effect by simply writing your comments to this post out longhand, and then waiting an hour before typing them up. I bet you’ll find it mildly annoying no matter what, but if you’ve really got some thoughts on this matter, by then end of the hour you’ll be something close to furious. You’ve been rewired, comrade. You’re homo electronicus. We all are.

This stuff is recent — really recent. There was a limit to how screen-addled even the infamous “latchkey kids” of the 1980s could be. I had “latchkey kid” buddies, and although we had everything we needed to veg out in front of the tube in the very best Gen Z style — video games, sugary snacks, cable — we couldn’t sit and play Atari all day. I don’t mean that we didn’t; we were no smarter than any other boys; we sure as hell didn’t do anything for our health. I mean we couldn’t. Playing video games gave us ants in the pants — my Mom always knew when I’d been over at Steve’s — and eventually it got to the point where we had to put the joystick down and go throw around a football or something.

These days, the inability to play Nintendo for hours on end means you’ve got ADHD. Pass the Ritalin.

Three things made homo electronicus:

  1. modern medicine
  2. instant communications
  3. permanent caloric surplus.

Ritalin is actually one of the more benign examples. Back in the days when we were allowed to notice such things, a certain kind of social critic pointed out that falling murder rates have very little to do with crime reduction. Instead, it’s almost all attributable to advances in emergency medicine. It’s much tougher for Shitavious to kill D’L’eondrae over a pair of sneakers these days. The ER docs patch the victim up, and so what would’ve been murder one is now mere ADW, which means — Soros-funded DAs being what they are — both victim and perp are soon back on the streets, ready for round two. This idiot rapper, for instance, survived being shot nine times. That’s not nine separate shootings, mind you, that’s nine slugs in one incident. Granted the slipshod motherfuckers who capped him need to work on their aim, but surviving even nine flesh wounds from modern firearms is one hell of a testimony to the power of modern medicine …

… a power that does not, I suggest, conduce to positive eugenic outcomes.

Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-28.

February 9, 2021

Tampa Bay quarterback Tom Brady – “What’s not to hate?”

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

I did watch the S*per B*wl on Sunday, although as the Canadian broadcast carefully replaces almost all of the expensive, creative, one-off ads with exactly the same ads the network showed all through the rest of the season, I watched it on my computer, and kept my mute button handy to silence the roughly 2/3rds of the broadcast that wasn’t actually football-related. (Although I’ve read many people commenting that the “special” ads aren’t as good as they used to be, I watch so little TV that I’m hardly qualified to judge personally.) In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh used the old “there’s two kinds of people” device to talk about Tom Brady:

You can easily have an opinion about Brady, and you probably do, even if you’ve never watched a whole football game. But I have no way of predicting what that opinion is. Do you see him as a cheerful, intelligent family man who has transcended his natural limitations through hard work and study? Or is he just the jammiest SOB who ever lived? There was definitely something cruel in watching the immobile Brady dismantle the Chiefs of Patrick Mahomes, a passer equipped with physical gifts whose possibility was inconceivable before he broke into the league.

That’s probably part of how Brady has driven such a fault into North American bedrock. If there were a stat representing handsomeness-to-physical-impressiveness ratio, he would dominate the NFL. When you see photos of young Brady, who famously dropped to the sixth round of the draft, you no longer wonder how he dropped so far but why he was taken at all. Did the scouts fall in love, as they are known to do, with the “good face”?

Ancient Brady is young Brady with less mobility and accuracy. Mostly, like a relief pitcher with nothing but a fastball, he just darts the ball very efficiently at nearby targets. (Trading New England’s targets for Tampa Bay’s was, obviously, shrewd to the point of genius.) He is becoming as specialized, as optimized for one function, as a punter. But in his case the function seems to be “winning Super Bowls,” and we can’t attribute one iota of that to innate gifts denied to ordinary mortals. What’s not to hate?

Speaking of the ads, I do think the Babylon Bee got it exactly right here:

As a comment at Ace of Spades H.Q. related, the S*per B*wl has lost a lot of its cultural capital over the last few years:

49 — I work at a somewhat woke company. While talking about some projects we were working on the new guy asked me “hey why isn’t anyone talking about the superbowl?” and I remembered that even last year everyone was talking about the superbowl none stop the monday after.

Well you’ve finally done it lefties you’ve killed the NFL.
Posted by: 18-1

I tuned out the halftime show, even though the performer was kinda-sorta a local boy (born in Toronto), and I was a bit nonplussed with the visuals (I had the whole thing muted, natch). James Lileks found the show to be oddly reminiscent of 70’s SciFi movies:

The halftime show had a strange 70s sci-fi aesthetic; for some reason I kept thinking of The Black Hole and Logan’s Run. The most interesting part was picking out the buildings in the New York skyline arrayed in neon. Ah, it’s the AT&T Building, Philip Johnson’s famous po-mo Chippendale tower! And that would be the Met Life tower, which is actually the base for a much-larger tower unbuilt after the Crash of ’29. Hey, everyone, let’s pause this elaborate routine and destroy its momentum so I can wax pedantic!

Then there were all those dancers in masks, looking like victims of surgery in an old movie where a gangster got plastic surgery. A way of incorporating the pandemic zeitgeist, right? Last year: EMPOWERMENT AND SEX AND SEX EMPOWERMENT! This year: faceless people moving in mass to choreographed steps, then dissolving into random panic. There was something wrong about it, like some dank gas blown up through a fissure, filling balloons that looked like the humans who populate the shadows of a nightmare.

Previous years, the Super Bowl event was pure excess — mad, crass, exuberant, American overdrive, American overkill, a mix of skill and brute force. Something about this one felt desperate and shellshocked. I suppose I’m reading too much into it. But I don’t think we need fever dreams and worried-looking buskers in empty fields, at this point. It would be nice just to have some Clydesdales again.

I saw on another site (sorry, forgotten where I noticed it) that the bandages were an in-joke for The Weeknd’s fans, who’d been teased with several social media posts about him recovering from some sort of mysterious plastic surgery procedure leading up to the performance.

February 2, 2021

Well, it is a very, very cunning plan …

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains why the progressives’ cunningest of cunning plans may not be cunning enough:

The left has a plan so cunning that if it were a person, it would be teaching cunningology at Oxford. And the ones who get the reference will also know that their plan is about to go pear shaped in all sorts of interesting ways, and at the end of it there might very well be a turnip or two involved, but not as the only item available in the shelves of the grocery store.

Look, someone pointed out in the comments the left are trying to follow the “plan” for other communist revolutions round the world.

He’s right. They’re trying to follow it to the letter. Partly because it’s worked before, and partly, because to be fair, they’re a cult, and cults don’t know the reason for the ritual, they just follow it.

… but it’s already going wrong. And it’s only going to get worse.

You see, part of the problem is that the cult of communism and the procedures for “the revolution” were set in the early twentieth century. And it’s designed for the early twentieth century. To the extent they worked in places like Venezuela, it is because the underlying structures of the society were still very much “early twentieth century.”

The US? Well, not so much. In fact we never were much like the early twentieth century in Europe, which is why they’ve had a hell of a time getting a foothold here.

The communist revolution is designed to work in a country that is mostly urban, with a vast urban underclass that can’t rise above for reasons both internal and external despite working unreasonable hours. It’s designed for a country with a firm aristocracy of the hereditary sort (even if that aristocracy is often from trade), it is designed for a country with a conscript army where the plum assignments go to the “good families” as a matter of course, it is designed to work — most of all and very importantly — in a country where they ABSOLUTELY control all the means of mass communication and do so without the vast majority of the people being aware of it.

The last time they could have pulled that off in the US was in the mid seventies. And my guess, honestly, is that they tried. I don’t know for sure, since the news of the time were all reported by biased sources, and besides I’m too lazy and too busy […] to spend my day chasing down hints. I bet they did try, though. I bet they gave it a sporting try. And I bet part of the issue back then — as now, btw — is that they were pinning their hopes on a race war, having both not realized how much of a minority people of African descent are in the US (last estimate is what? 14%? Sizeable, sure, but not a large minority and certainly not a majority. Also, and seriously, a lot of that minority is middle class and whatever they voice from the mouth-out as uninterested as the rest of us in having the apple cart overturned. Apples are tasty. Genocide not so much.) Mostly because that sh*t was so successful in Africa, and again the left doesn’t think. It ritualistically applies “what worked” without being able to account for changed conditions.

Anyway, that was the last time they could have MAYBE credibly have followed their little red map to revolution and have it work. And even then Americans were just too darn contrarian. Why everyone and their parents were telling us that Republicans were so dangerous, that they were going to start the nuclear war, that — And we went and voted Reagan in. (Well, not me. I only worked towards it. I didn’t vote. I wasn’t a citizen and I’m not a democrat.)

In fact, America could have engraved on its door lintel “authorities can go f*ck themselves.” The left keeps forgetting that. And sometimes justifiably. Take their Covid-psy-ops. It worked. And it was all run on the “experts” and how important it was.

Uh uh. So, they think their control is back! They’re golden again, baby!

January 31, 2021

Adapting Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit for the screen – “The ensuring film has all the light charm and witty élan of a documentary about slaughterhouses”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Critic, Alexander Larman is not happy with the latest attempt to translate a Coward play to the big or small screen:

Original theatrical release poster.
Wikimedia Commons.

Recently, the new film of Noël Coward’s masterly play Blithe Spirit was released on various streaming services, after its cinematic release was cancelled due to the irritating absence of open cinemas to show it. I had been looking forward to it for some time. It had a fine cast of hugely talented comic actors, led by Dan Stevens and including Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, Julian Rhind-Tutt, and, in the great role of the fraudulent medium Madame Arcati, none other than Judi Dench. It was directed by Peter Hall’s talented son Edward, and its inspiration remains one of the most uproariously entertaining plays of the twentieth century, complete with some of Coward’s finest dialogue. It would be hard to mess it up.

Alas, “messed up” is an understatement when it comes to describe what has happened to the film. A clue comes in the credit: “adapted by Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft”. The three of them were previously responsible for the mediocre sea-shanty comedy (not words one often writes) Fishermen’s Friends, and Ashworth and Moorcroft should be prosecuted at the cinematic equivalent of the Hague for their shameful bastardisation of Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s series into two terrible films that bear as much relation to Searle’s illustrations as they do to Noël Coward. So it is little surprise that they have decided to “improve” on the original play. The writers throw out most of the original dialogue, retain only the bare bones of the storyline, introduce an irrelevant and mawkish subplot for Madame Arcati (who is now bewilderingly played mostly straight) and generally commit artistic vandalism.

The ensuring film has all the light charm and witty élan of a documentary about slaughterhouses. The cast do their best with the terrible material, but as Stevens manfully tries to make lines about erectile dysfunction amusing – “Mr Peasbody’s got stage fright” – the look of deep shame that occasionally comes over their faces cannot be disguised by the over-bright lighting and incongruously jaunty music. Had it been given a cinematic release, there may well have been indignant walkouts and outraged complaints at the box office. As is, I doubt that many disappointed viewers, expecting a more enjoyable film, will bother watching this travesty to the end.

January 24, 2021

The dangers of depending on “experts”

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

David Warren considers the vastly expanded role of “experts” in our public discourse:

Having no degree in either field, I try not to write what will be contradicted by an expert. On the other hand, “expert” has become a murky concept. Once we had to distinguish only between demonstrated credible experts, and villains. Common sense could usually tell them apart. But with the growth of our “sophistication,” the category of villainy has been much expanded. We have a category of institutionally credentialled experts who aren’t exactly liars, but more like what Harry G. Frankfurt defined as “bullshitters.” They struggle to remain plausible, but are using their expertise to advance interested views. And, having such motives — in opposition to the plain pursuit of truth — they seek publicity, and angle to obtain it.

As Dr Frankfurt hinted, in his short philosophical treatise on this topic (On Bullshit, 2005), these can be, and usually are, more trouble than old-fashioned liars. For a real liar knows he is lying, and can be caught out. By comparison, the modern media expert avoids what is strictly checkable, not only to protect himself, but from indifference for truth. He is, according to me, the intellectual descendant of the mediæval Nominalists, adumbrating words, not realities. While less intelligent than his predecessors, he carries on the tradition of saying that something is true because he says so.

“Consensus science” is of this nature. In it, truth can be negotiated, or imposed. While the weather next Saturday will be known to the living, a prediction for much later in the century has no meaning. From the number of variables in play, I can tell you with certainty, that woke “climatologists” are talking bosh; and every signature on their consensus I may add to my list of persons to ignore. This is elementary stuff: and I do try to stick to what is elementary, and foreseeable.

The success rate, for elaborate predictions, remains, at this point in our history, zero-point-zero. But it is becoming so also for the present, and past. The Batflu, here, is current primary example. Owing to obvious manipulation, we cannot know much about its effects. In rough terms, we can know that they are exaggerated, because almost every expert has a vested interest in getting the numbers up, and those who disagree will be punished. The same is true for all the popular remedies, including such nonsense as mangle-wearing, and obsessive social distancing. No legitimate research lies behind either, so we must assume the purposes for various lockdown orders are not actually the Batflu.

December 22, 2020

Repost – The Monkees – “Riu Chiu”

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

Uploaded on 15 Dec 2015

The Monkees perform “Riu Chiu” from Episode 47, “The Monkees’ Christmas Show”.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

December 6, 2020

QotD: Mid-70s TV

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

What was especially unfortunate (rather insidious really) about this moment was that the broadcast model of television distribution created a situation of artificial scarcity. It was not a proper competitive environment like we enjoy today. It truly was monopolistic, even if the snake did have three heads. Only a few huge corporations could afford the infrastructure for these national networks. Airspace was limited. Thus to make room for the new, the old had to be cast aside. As I happen to love all those new shows CBS introduced, I am glad they were brought into being. But how much better it would have been if the older shows could have been retained at the same time, because I also love those. TV variety, heir to vaudeville, was effectively killed dead by this historical moment, and that’s to be regretted.

[…]

But during the second half of the decade things changed. I have a good sense of when all the good shows started going wrong, but have had a harder time on figuring out why they did. As near as I can tell in most cases, the stars of the shows became too big for their britches. They won awards, they were on the covers of all the magazines, they got huge salary increases, and then they started getting creative control over their shows. I’m still somewhat at a loss as to why the actors’ mass madness took the same form all across the board, this humorless didacticism, the need to be “dramatic.” But it could be simply that there is a very funny elephant in the room. Because when I find myself asking the question, “Is it possible that actors are egotistical? Self-indulgent? Consumed with self-importance? Megalomaniacs?” Well, there’s your answer. Those qualifiers practically form part of the textbook definition of the word “actor”. They want to be taken seriously. And so, across the board, most of the stars of these shows started either transforming their characters into Christ-like saviors, or turning their programs into pulpits.

Also perhaps to a certain extent these new situation comedies attracted a different kind of star. The new breed were not the Buddy Ebsen/Lucille Ball/Jackie Gleason/Red Skelton type vaudeville clowns. Most of the new stars were college educated, had gone to drama school, been in improv and other theatre and sketch troupes, and appeared in lots of legit theatre. They didn’t just know who Shaw and Ibsen were, they had performed in such serious drama. They scorned old school comedy as “corny”; they were much more concerned with what they called “truth”. I remember reading interviews with Alan Alda in which he complained about episodes from the first season of M*A*S*H that had more farcical plots (e.g. “Tuttle” or the one where Frank Burns gets gold fever.) Fans happen to love these episodes; Alda however tends to favor dramatic episodes from the later years, but we’ll return to that.

Trav S.D., “The Insufferables, or Sanctimony in the Seventies: How Hollywood Helped Make Liberalism Unpopular”, Travalanche, 2018-03-12.

November 21, 2020

About that “Canadian content crisis” the feds are trying to “fix” with Bill C-10

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

Michael Geist begins a series of posts on the ongoing blunder that is the federal government’s “get money from the web giants” proposed legislation:

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

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault rose in the House of Commons yesterday for the second reading of Bill C-10, his Internet regulation bill that reforms the Broadcasting Act. Guilbeault told the House that the bill would level the playing field, that it would establish a high revenue threshold before applying to Internet streamers, would not impact consumer choice, or raise consumer costs. He argued that even if you don’t believe in cultural sovereignty, you should still support his bill for the economic benefits it will bring, warning that Canadian producers will miss out on a billion dollars by 2023 if the legislation isn’t enacted. He painted a picture of Internet companies (invariably called “web giants”) that have millions of Canadian subscribers but do not contribute to the Canadian economy.

Guilbeault is wrong. He is wrong in his description of the bill (it does not contain thresholds), wrong about its impact on consumers (it is virtually certain to both decrease choice and increase costs), wrong about the contributions of Internet streamers (who have been described as the biggest contributor to Canadian production), wrong about level playing field claims (incumbent broadcasters enjoy a host of regulatory benefits not enjoyed by streamers), wrong about the economic impact of the bill (it is likely to decrease investment in the short term), and wrong about cultural sovereignty (it surrenders cultural sovereignty rather than protect it).

With the bill starting its Parliamentary review, this is the first in a new series of posts on why a careful examination of the data and the bill itself reveals multiple blunders. There are good arguments for addressing the sector, including tax reform, privacy upgrades, and competition law enforcement. There are also benefits to updating the Broadcasting Act, but in an effort to cater to a handful of vocal lobby groups over the interests of the broader Canadian public, Guilbeault’s bill will cause more harm than good. The series will run each weekday for the next month, first addressing the weak policy foundation that underlies Bill C-10, then a series a posts on the uncertainty the bill creates, a review of the trade threats it invites, and an assessment of its likely impact on consumers and the broader public.

The series begins with a post on the fictional Canadian content “crisis.” Canadians can be forgiven for thinking that the shift to digital and Internet streaming services has created a crisis on creating Canadian content. Canadian cultural lobby groups regularly claim that there is one (Artisti, CDCE) and Guilbeault tells the House of Commons that billions of dollars for the sector is at risk. Yet the reality is that spending on film and television production in Canada is at record highs. This includes both certified Canadian content and so-called foreign location and service production in which the production takes place in Canada (thereby facilitating significant economic benefits) but does not meet the narrow criteria to qualify as “Canadian.” I have written before about the need to revisit the Canadian content qualification rules which enable productions with little connection to Canada to receive certification and some that directly meet the goal of “telling Canadian stories” that fail to do so.

November 18, 2020

Trudeau’s internet policy — cash grab or power grab? Embrace the healing power of “and” (TM Instapundit)

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

The Canadian government is taking advantage of the ongoing economic and social disruption of the Wuhan Coronavirus to widen their existing regulation of both broadcasting and internet entertainment. It’s not just a bit of maple-flavoured cultural imperialism, but it’s also a blatant cash grab:

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

I see, in the Globe and Mail, that Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault want to further regulate the broadcasting services in Canada. Their goals seem to be, in part, a cash grab ~ online streaming services, like Netflix, are offering Canadians, for a price, what they want, while the CBC offers Canadians, thanks to a $1+ Billion annual subsidy from taxpayers like you and me, what we, pretty clearly, do not want to watch and the Liberals want a share of that money ~ and also an appeal to those who play identity politics.

I think we need to look at the “products” of broadcasting ~ information (news and “public affairs” and documentary programmes) and entertainment, including sports, as “consumable products,” rather like food and, say, soft drinks.

We do allow, even demand that governments exercise some important regulatory functions in regard to food and soft drinks: we want to make sure that they are safe to consume and Canadians want to know what is in the food we consume.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was, originally, conceived to solve a fairly simple problem: allocating broadcast licences. Government engineers calculated how many radio channels could be used in any given place but they didn’t want to have to decide who should get to use them. Politicians didn’t want to do it, either, because while the successful applicant was (usually) happy the more numerous unsuccessful ones were disappointed and politicians hate to disappoint people. Thus they created an arms length agency to make the tough decisions for them. Licence allocation is still an important job for the CRTC. But the CRTC’s mandate was expanded with the birth of cable TV. Companies, like Rogers, built cable systems ~ and they received both direct and indirect government support to reach more and more Canadians ~ and then “sold” access to consumers. In the normal course of events one might have thought that the government would attach some business conditions to its loans, grants and tax deductions, but there was an ever-growing demand, from the Canadian cultural community ~ based almost entirely in Montreal and Toronto ~ to regulate the fledgling cable and “pay TV” market to ensure that Canadian programmes were not shut out but, in fact, could have privileged positions in the cable lineup, which led to the government, in the 1960s, telling the CRTC to regulate how companies like Famous Players, Maclean Hunter and Rogers configured the private product they sold to individual consumers.

The initial government argument was “we regulate all kinds of things for the common good: that’s why we all drive on the right, for example, and the delivery of broadcasting by cable is like that.” “No it’s not,” the cable operators replied, “you build and maintain the roads, using taxpayers’ dollars, so you’re allowed to regulate how they’re used, plus it’s a safety issue. Cable service and ‘pay TV’ are private, commercial transactions between us, the companies who built and operate the systems, and the individual consumer who wants to subscribe to what we offer. You don’t presume to regulate, beyond the laws against libel and pornography, what people can read in MacLean’s magazine or the Globe and Mail, why is ‘pay TV’ and cable different?” It’s still a good question. But the cable operators surrendered gracefully and the CRTC has been, broadly, for the last half-century, protective of the rights of incumbents in the infotainment markets. In return the cable and internet operators have agreed to “tiers” of programming which means that if you want to watch, say, BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle or Fox News, you must also pay for CBC News Network and CTV News Channel and, no matter who you are and what your individual preferences might be, when you subscribe to a cable/internet service you must also support a number of French stations/channels; it’s the law. And now Minister Guilbault wants to ensure that you pay for the output of indigenous producers, writers, actors and so on, on both indigenous networks ~ to which you must already subscribe if you have a “basic” Canadian cable or satellite TV package ~ and, it appears to me, in programmes produced by Canadians and even by Netflix.

November 15, 2020

Mark Steyn is looking for an argument

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

I somehow missed this when it went up on Mark’s website:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

One of Mrs Thatcher’s great insights was: First you win the argument; then you win the election.

To win the argument, you have to make it. In the Westminster system, you make the argument for three or four years, then you have a six-week election campaign. That’s when the system’s functioning, which it certainly wasn’t under, say, Andrew Scheer’s Tory leadership in Ottawa.

But, even when it’s not functioning, somebody’s making an argument. Thus the fatal miscalculation of David Cameron when he decided that the Brexit referendum would be the best way to put the EU issue to bed once and for all. By then every electorally viable political party — from the Tories to Sinn Féin — was “pro-Europe”. Nigel Farage had been making the argument for twenty years, but, because he had no real political party to advance it, it didn’t get him anywhere at UK general elections. So, the minute Cameron called a referendum on Nigel’s issue in splendid isolation, it gave Farage a shot at the second half of Maggie’s great formulation: He’d won the argument; and Cameron delivered up a mechanism that allowed him to win the vote.

In the American system, it is, as the Brits say, arse over tit: As Monty Python once asked, where’s the room for an argument? There are no parliamentary debates, so you never see a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator. Even more strikingly, there are a bazillion political talk shows, none of which ever features a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator — the way that even the most despised BBC, CBC, ABC yakfests routinely feature opposing legislators debating health care or the Irish backstop or Covid response.

Instead, there is a multi-billion-dollar two-year campaign, which is all polls, fundraising, horse race piffle, telly ads for the halfwitted, plot twists of no interest to anybody normal (ooh, look, Cory Booker is up from point-three to point-four in Iowa!), all culminating in a stilted pseudo-debate tediously moderated by a pompous mediocrity asking questions all framed from the left’s point of view. You’d almost get the idea that the entire racket was designed to eliminate the very possibility that someone might make an argument.

October 27, 2020

Conspiracy theories grow thanks to mistrust of public officials and media

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

It’s commonplace to say that such-and-such a conspiracy theory is merely an intellectual playground for the paranoid and the gullible, but conspiracy theories don’t spontaneously generate — at least not the ones that gain wide audiences. Daniel Miller looks at some of the reasons these theories become attractive and gain adherents:

QAnon alleged clues about the NYC bombing, 10 December 2017.
Wikimedia Commons.

In the wake of six months of mixed-messages and baffling government policies, following four years, if not twenty years, of mystifying imponderables, the concept of a “conspiracy theory” has recently reentered the lexicon of semi-criminalized thought.

In August The New York Times stigmatized anti-lockdown protesters in Berlin as a worrying admixture of “neo-Nazi groups, conspiracy theorists as well as Germans who said they were fed up with the restrictions” and similar language was used about the protesters in London, as social media companies began purging accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which conjectures that the world is controlled by a secret global cabal of blood-drinking sex criminals.

Believing conspiracy theories, evidently, is a Bad Thing, but any concept capacious enough to incorporate both the tens, even hundreds of millions of people skeptical about the global political response to SARS-2, and the much smaller number entertaining more involved explanations demands a careful analysis.

Really the first question is who you can trust. One answer is the official authorities, as represented by the esteemed New York Times, but the news website which welcomed the 45th US President to office with three years of spurious coverage of what turned out to be the Russiagate hoax, before pivoting to the historical phantasmagoria of the 1619 Project, no longer strikes everyone as the impeccable source which revealed the existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMD stockpile and links to Al-Qaeda before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or whose Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Duranty discounted rumours of a 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as “an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

This leaves individuals only to their own wits and devices in the face of a puzzling world in which information is everywhere, much of it questionable, not all the facts are available, and many are ultra-politicized, and meanwhile, unknown agendas are being continually carried out.

What’s really going on? As with any speculative enterprise, the problem is to construct a plausible hypothesis by using various models to interpret limited data. There is no question that, at different moments in history, individuals and groups have worked together in secrecy to launch conspiratorial exploits and there is no obvious reason for thinking this practice has now totally ceased. “People of the same trade seldom meet together,” observed Adam Smith in 1776, “even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Still, this is not in itself evidence of any specific plot happening now.

October 26, 2020

Kathy Shaidle tells the story of Hamilton’s 1970s cult children’s TV show

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

I still have fond memories of CHCH TV’s Hilarious House of Frightenstein and Kathy Shaidle clearly does too:

The Hilarious House of Frightenstein was produced in 1971 by our one and only TV station, CHCH. This hour-long, 130-episode kids’ show combined the mid-century sensibility of Famous Monsters of Filmland with the then-hip look and sound of psychedelia: kaleidoscopic “special effects” plus Top 40 hits spun by “The Wolfman,” an affectionate rip-off of legendary DJ Wolfman Jack.

The show’s “plot” concerned a banished count’s attempts to revive his comatose monster, Brucie, but that was just a flimsy excuse to mount a fast-paced series of corny sketches, semi-serious “educational” segments, and — years before The Simpsons and Pixar — “over the kids’ heads” jokes aimed at adults who might find themselves awake at dawn, or earlier.

The part that always puzzled me as a kid was that a local southern Ontario low-budget TV show for kids had international movie star Vincent Price in it. Kathy explains how it happened:

Older and “uncool” (despite receiving the imprimatur of another rising Hollywood director, Roger Corman), Price was out of fashion.

At the same time, CHCH had a limited budget, but wanted and needed some star power for their single camera kid’s show.

Who better to host this “monster mash” than Vincent Price, still one of the all-time great horror-movie icons?

Frightenstein‘s producer tracked down Price, who agreed to work for $3000 a day, one quarter of his usual per-diem appearance rate.

He loved children, he explained simply. And the gig sounded like fun.

CHCH checked their tiny budget. They could only afford Price for four days, tops.

Four days it would have to be.

Everyone signed on the dotted line.

I’ve heard the story of what happened next from different sources, and it never ceases to warm my heart:

Price arrived at the modest TV studio, got into makeup and costume and was handed reams of doggerel poems about some crazy characters he’d never heard of before.

He’d read each piece once, put his head down, then look up at the camera’s red light and utter his lines perfectly in one take.

Next!

New makeup, new costume, same perfect delivery, hour after hour.

Finally, it was time for a break. The weary yet exhilarated crew turned off the cameras and lights.

Then they looked around and realized that Vincent Price had disappeared.

Oh well, they said to each other, what do you expect? He’s a big star and all. Plus he’s, like, 60 years old, so he probably went for a nap…

The studio door opened a few minutes later.

It was Vincent Price and a cab driver, hauling “two-fours” of beer from the nearby Brewer’s Retail.

He handed cold stubbies out to the cast and crew and regaled them with tales of old Hollywood, his days working with Karloff and Peter Lorre and Gene Tierney and Cecil B. DeMille and all the other greats he’d known.

QotD: Living in the modern world

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

What if … bear with me a moment … checking social media every 15 minutes keeps us in a state of constant stress & agitation without actually keeping us better informed than the old days of reading the morning paper & occasionally watching the evening news did?

Zack Stentz, Twitter, 2018-07-16.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress