Quotulatiousness

November 26, 2024

“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other”

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

I don’t mean to make poking fun at Twit/X alternative sites like Bluesky a regular thing, but the performative flouncing as progressives announce they’re leaving Twit/X for a more congenial — for which read “censorious” — site continues to amuse.

Bluesky welcomes former Twitter/X luminaries

I’m going to take a pop at a sub-group of flouncers, though, the ones moaning about being called hurty words. This includes a number of individuals who genuinely seem to think it’s their role in life to go looking for nasty bigoted shite, then report it to Twitter’s overlords (and now Bluesky’s overlords as well, if things like [the image on the right] are anything to go by).

“Bluesky is going to give us hours of amusement as a platform full of wannabe school prefects all report each other” seems a fair assessment.

And yes, I have to engage in a little ritual genuflection here, because I have genuinely been called a large number of nasty names in my life. And despite that, dibber-dobbers still give me hives.

If I had a quid for every use of “dyke” (and related) sent my way, I would be matching millions with sundry oil sheiks, and that’s before we get to the ire directed at any columnist with whom ordinary members of the public disagree. I am old enough to have received thousands of abusive letters (about both novels and columns), some of them written in green ink. People are allowed to dislike me and my kind, or to argue that I’ve written a load of cobblers. They’re also allowed to dislike you and your kind. It would be astonishingly easy for me to wander over to Arabic Twitter and report lots of sincere Muslims for saying bigoted things about homosexuals. I don’t engage in this behaviour because I don’t expect the world to be my friend.

Relatedly (and this is directed at ethnic minorities as well as fellow gayers), a lot of folks from “historically disadvantaged groups” have become dab hands at dishing it out over the last twenty or so years. A necessary corollary of this behaviour is “learn to take it”. Yes, that means you. People are not going to stop saying hurty words to each other. People are also going to judge you based on the behaviour of your worst activists and vote accordingly (see recent US election results).

What of the core claims being made? Is Twitter genuinely worse now, a victim of what goes by the name “social media enshittification“?

Well, yes and no. I know many people dislike what Musk has done to Twitter, but when he made “likes” private, he stopped his site being used as a vector for HR vindictiveness (something about which HR mavens have complained, by the way, at least privately). It’s also now substantially more difficult to generate a pile-on using a quote-tweet, as well as possible to read tweets (but without interaction) from people who are hot on the block button.

The latter change has allowed me to establish why Baroness Nicholson had me blocked. I’d always wondered, because she’s had me blocked for as long as I can remember, yet like me, she can legitimately be described as “sex realist” or “gender-critical”. Musk’s change meant I was able for the first time to see an entire thread underneath one of her tweets, so learned that she blocks anyone — friend and foe alike — for swearing. Women who know her socially and get on with her well “IRL” have been blocked for saying “bugger” and “shite” on Twitter.

Well, glad that’s cleared up. Good to know.

The worst change Musk has made involves deboosting external links. This first emerged in April last year, in response to Substack releasing Notes (which Musk considered so derivative of Twitter’s code as to be a “clone”). At first only direct links to Substack were affected. If you had your own domain — as I do — you were fine. However, external link deboosting is now being applied uniformly. Everyone from a local tradesman selling new driveways and conservatories to the BBC and the Spectator now has to make use of some tedious version of “link in following tweet” or “link in bio”.

If Musk doesn’t fix this, he will legitimately lose the journalists and commentators currently on the site. Those people came, originally, to share stuff from their mastheads, and this applies regardless of politics. I first gained a following thanks to professional experience — yes, it was once fine for commercial solicitors to natter on the socials about the Enterprise Investment Scheme and how it related to start-ups and spin-outs etc — and later through Speccie columns along with a couple of books. A tweet from Tim Harford praising my second novel (with a link, bless him) went “viral” and led to thousands of sales. Pieces for the magazine proved popular. Just as I enjoyed Twitter for other people’s links, other people paid me the same courtesy.

Spotted on Instapundit:

November 25, 2024

In search of bluer skies

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

In The Critic, Benedict Spence channels his inner David Attenborough to document the majestic migration of American progressives from their habitual grazing lands to friendlier territory:

What will Twitter do without its smuggest inhabitants?

And so we come to it again. It is that time of year when we put on our David Attenborough voices, and talk in low, slightly wistful tones about the great migration that is about to unfold. Everywuh you look, creatures great and small are beginning their treacherous juhneys across a vast and inhospitable wilduhness to happiuh hunting grounds and more pleasant pastures under the clear blue skies. The hullabaloo that accompanies them is impossible to miss — across the plains, the cries go up from elders to alert the rest of the herd of the imminent departure.

Though some may never return from this arduous trek, most will. Disavow yourself of the mental image of elephants and zebras crossing the African savannah — that’s not what we’re here for. This migration is metaversical in nature: it is time, once more, for people to announce they are leaving Twitter.

This year’s exodus came later than usual, prompted by Donald Trump’s bulldozer of a victory over Kamala Harris in the US presidential election, with grown men and women across the country — and its second largest airbase, the UK — deciding that Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and the Orange Man’s endorser-in-chief, was at least partly responsible for this travesty. Not the economy, you understand, oh no. Nor immigration, nor the preoccupation by Democrats with shoulder-chewingly stupid culture war issues the average voter thinks are at best mad and at worst satanic.

No, no, it is all about Musk — who is at once the world’s wealthiest evil genius and also a gibbering moron, according to people who thought Cacklin’ Kamala was a born winner. Musk, we are told, has ushered in a stream of “hate” ever since buying Twitter and rebranding it 10, warping the minds of the impressionable and irreparably damaging the future of the West by facilitating Trump’s return.

This is not Musk’s only crime, though. He has also tweaked other aspects of X’s features, including the block function, making it possible for those on the receiving end of this internal exile to see the posts of their nemeses again without being able to interact with them. This was for a fair few blockees how they were reminded of the existence of their blockers, many of whom they had long since forgotten. Often, in the same instance, it was also how they learned said blocker was off somewhere else.

Musk has also moved to erode the power of institutions and individuals who lived their lives high on the power of credentialism, and the authority this brought them. The changing of blue tick criteria and the emphasis on community notes now means many who were once feted on the site by virtue of who they were must now work harder for their dopamine. But above all else, Musk has refused to silence a swathe of right wing voices who always existed but lived their X lives in the shadows. The platform became more right wing, and for many that was just too much. Having been reliably told throughout the past year that the crude reply guys were just Russian bots and that their gal would ride over them on a wave to victory, they and their allies over here — the infamous adults back in charge of the UK — are doing the grownup thing and going off in a huff to play somewhere else.

November 14, 2024

Germans are perfectly free to post anything to the internet as long as it doesn’t criticize politicians

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

Once again, eugyppius helpfully illustrates the broad range of freedoms German citizens enjoy in their online activities and the totally reasonable and not-at-all-insane restrictions to those rights:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It’s been a while since I last wrote about the highly advanced democratic freedoms that we enjoy in Germany. Here in the Federal Republic, the police will never fine you or harass you or raid your house for criticising the government – except, of course, when they do all of these things, because you happened not even to tweet, but merely to retweet, the wrong image.

Stefan Niehoff is a 64 year-old retiree who lives in the small town of Burgpreppach in Lower Franconia. He runs an X account with 1,200 followers, where he occasionally expresses his dissatisfaction with the present state of German politics and with the Greens in particular.

In June 2024, he retweeted this image …

… which appropriates the logo of a popular cosmetic brand to suggest that Robert Habeck, our Green Minister of Economic Affairs, might be a “professional moron”.

Habeck and his associates are notorious for pursuing internet users who share highly illegal content of this nature. They brought Niehoff’s retweet to the attention of authorities, and the Bamberg public prosecutor’s office decided that Niehoff was indeed guilty of a criminal speech offence. The Bamberg District Court then issued an order permitting the police to search Niehoff’s residence and confiscate his electronic devices.

In this order, reproduced by NiUS, the judges explained their rationale as follows:

    On the basis of the investigations to date – in particular the screenshots of the posts and the investigations into the user of the X-account “IchbinFeinet” – there exists the following suspicion of a criminal offence:

    The accused is the user of the account “IchbinFeinet” on the internet platform X with approx. 901 followers.

    At a time that cannot now be determined more precisely, in the days or weeks before 20 June 2024, the accused published an image file using his account that showed a portrait of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs with the words “professional moron” … in order to defame Robert Habeck in general and to make his work as a member of the federal government more difficult.

    The public prosecutor’s office affirms the public interest in criminal prosecution.

    This is punishable as defamation directed against persons of political life in accordance with §§ 185, 188 para. 1, 194 StGB. …

    The measures ordered are proportionate to the severity of the offence and the strength of the suspicion and are necessary for the investigation …

Armed with this document, Schweinfurt police showed up at Niehoff’s house at 6:14am yesterday morning and took his tablet. Police later told the press that the raid was one in a series of enforcement actions – part of something called “an action day against cybercrime”. By harassing a lot of cybercriminals all at once, police and prosecutors hope to send a message to the people of Germany that they cannot just retweet anything, and that they may only retweet the right things.

November 13, 2024

“The term ‘Maple MAGA’ is a derogatory slur used by Canadian liberals”

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

I have to admit I was only vaguely aware of the “Maple MAGA Mafia” identified by Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Christia Freeland, so I’m glad Fortissax is here to provide some background for me:

An insignificant yet loud minority among right-wing Canadian populists on Xitter are calling themselves “Maple MAGA”, with some expressing a reasonable desire for Canada to restore itself with a “MAGA ideology”. The term “Maple MAGA” is a derogatory slur used by Canadian liberals, coined by Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister — Wicked Witch of the North — and is not intended as a term of endearment. The more extreme accounts are even calling for the outright annexation of Canada by the United States, which all Canadians should oppose if they value their dignity and self-respect. I’d invoke the memory of our Fathers of Confederation, the innovation behind the Avro Arrow (once the world’s most advanced bomber interceptor), possessing the fourth largest navy in the world after WWII, Samuel de Champlain’s great expedition and exploits, the Filles du Roi, and the Loyalist Americans who, like Aeneas leading the Trojans after the fall of Troy in the Iliad, marched north to Canada after the Revolutionary War to found a new civilization. Yet, if they already knew or identified with our glorious past, they wouldn’t be so quick to support an even greater loss of independence and sovereignty to the almighty American empire.

Make no mistake, I admire and appreciate the United States, if that wasn’t clear. There are no people more similar to the Canadian people in the world than Americans. They are Canada’s largest trading partner. Both countries were born of Albion’s Seed, sharing the North American frontier experience, and forming a family of five great Anglo nations spread on four continents, once united under a single imperial government, and now vassals of its successor. Had the United States not elected Donald J. Trump, it would have continued down a path unopposed, as bad or worse than Canada under the liberal party. There is a very real opportunity for this American Caesar to reverse much of the socioeconomic and cultural damage wrought upon it by enemies foreign and domestic. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now X, once the bias was removed quickly became a right-wing dominant forum where truths long-feared would embolden many, everywhere to speak their minds. Elon fulfilled the ancient internet prophecy that all public forums with no censorship become right wing, simply because of the objective truths.

Elon didn’t turn it right-wing, he simply removed the government censorship of the DEI cultist board, and their allied state goons in the intelligence agencies from suppressing stories and information from reaching the American public, and the world. The Counter-Elite, a loose alliance of the Paypal Mafia, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and MAGA populists, in America are a force of nominal good, a positive for right-wing dissidents around the world fighting their own existential struggles against local managerial regimes. If Trump and the cast of would-be heroes succeeds, the United States will enter an era of unprecedented recovery for the forseaable future—though it’s not a magic bullet for the civilizational decline as recently written about by fellow Substacker Dave Green, aka The Distributist.

The United States was Canada’s first, and arguably still its greatest, existential threat — ironically, mostly through no fault of its own, but rather due to its Jupiterian gravity beside little Canada. Canada may be the second-largest country on the planet after the Russian Federation, but it’s a small nation, with only an estimated 28 million ethnic Canadians, 90% of whom live within 200 kilometres of the U.S. border, as much of the country is an inhospitable wasteland of spruce bog and rock, almost impossible to settle due to permafrost. The habitable areas are extremely hot in summer, or extremely cold in winter. Canadians have often looked southward at the Titan with a sense of fatalism. Many intellectuals and journalists over the centuries have wondered when, if, how, and where Canada would meet what felt like its “inevitable” dissolution into the hands of the Yankees. Despite these fears, that dissolution never came.

Yet whispers of provinces seceding — making the “great escape” from the failing post-national economic zone Canada has become to join the booming, recovering United States — are on the lips of some Canadians. If not outright secession, than abandoning the monarchy, establishing a constitutional republic modelled off of the United States of America, copying the constitution, and pathetically copying its culture. I believe the majority of right-wing Canadians would favour constitutional reform to enshrine our own equivalent of legally protected freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. These are ancient English traditions of the “Yeoman” or Free Man, with roots visible in free speech and weapon-carrying practices across the ancient Germanic world. They are by no means exclusive to the United States. Canada and England had considerably relaxed gun laws until recent decades, and changes like these wouldn’t require us to sacrifice our sovereignty to the U.S.

October 24, 2024

It’s called “piercing the corporate veil” and it’s a terrible idea

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall explains why the EU’s latest brain fart is not just a bad idea in its own right, but a truly horrific precedent for the future:

Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.

… But now, this, now this is even more important than that. We can deal with free speech by the judicious use of lampposts. This is worse:

    The European Union has warned X that it may calculate fines against the social-media platform by including revenue from Elon Musk’s other businesses, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Neuralink Corp., an approach that would significantly increase the potential penalties for violating content moderation rules.

    Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules.

In English law that’s known as “piercing the corporate veil”. It’s also something we don’t do. Because that corporate veil is the very thing, the only thing, that makes large scale economic activity possible.

It has actually been said — and not just by me — that the invention of the limited company is the third grand invention of all time. Agriculture, the scientific method, the limited company.

Before the limited co everything was done through partnerships. Every individual involved in the ownership of something was liable for all of the debts of that thing. Which, when you’ve got 5 or 10 blokes trading isn’t that bad an incentive upon them to be honest.

Now think of large scale activity. We want a blast furnace — plenty of folk say Britain should have one after all. £3 to £5 billion these days. OK. No one’s got that much. So, we need to mobilise the savings of many thousands of people to go build it. But without limited liability that means all of those thousands are liable for all the debts — off into the future — of that blast furnace.

“Invest £500 in the new, new British Steel. And if we fuck up then in 10 years’ time they’ll come and take your house.”

Err, yes.

Large scale economic activity depends upon being able to separate the debts of one specific activity from the general economic life of all its backers. If this is not true then no one will invest in large scale economic activity. Therefore we won’t have large scale economic activity. Which would, you know, be bad.

October 7, 2024

QotD: Social media mobs

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

If you’d prefer reasoned debate, it will start with a collective realization that mobs can’t do much except make noise. They’re not actually very big, for starters — the number of people who replied to Rowling’s tweet wouldn’t fill most Texas college football stadiums, and reasonable people don’t choose their views by polling the crowd at the Aggies-Longhorns game.

More important, most mobs aren’t committed to the effort beyond flicking a thumb. Institutions that ignore the mob are often astonished at how little difference all the outrage makes to their business — and I’d bet Rowling won’t see much evidence of this controversy in her royalty statements.

The censorious power of Mrs. Grundys always depends on the cooperation of the governed, which is why their regime collapsed the moment the baby boomers shrugged off their finger-wagging. If Rowling provides an unmissable public demonstration that it is safe to ignore the current crop, we can hope others will follow her example, and the dictatorship of the proscriptariat will fall as quickly as it arose.

Megan McArdle writing in the Washington Post, quoted by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, 2020-01-02.

September 30, 2024

“This quite obviously proves that free speech is a tyrannical concept”

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

At The Critic, Titania McGrath decries the manifest horrors of letting ordinary people say whatever they want … without punishment:

“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle

The government has repeatedly pointed out that the riots in the UK were directly caused by bad words on the internet. One of those arrested was an elderly retired midwife from Devon, who had accidentally read an inflammatory Facebook post whilst browsing for cupcake recipes. Within ten minutes, she found herself punching Persian toddlers and throwing grenades at a mosque.

For all the endless whingeing of free speech extremists, Starmer appreciates that words must be controlled to ensure that his subjects behave themselves. Surely most reasonable people would rather have their liberties restricted than live in a fascist state?

The next step is to see Elon Musk extradited. It was bad enough that he renamed Twitter as “X”, which is just a swastika with a few bits chopped off. But he has also allowed users to say whatever they like. As a result, wrong opinions are being duplicated at an alarming rate.

“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” wrote Robert Reich in the Guardian. Although I don’t approve of his surname, he makes a valid case.

Back in 2013, Starmer was quoted as saying that too many Twitter prosecutions could “have a chilling effect for free speech”. These were dangerous words, and although Starmer has since changed his mind, he should probably be calling for his own prosecution.

If you don’t want to be arrested, don’t say the wrong things. It really is that simple.

August 23, 2024

The EU’s bureaucratic aristocrats agree “Spaceship Man Bad!”

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

As eugyppius explains, the “Eurocrats are having a very big sad” and Spaceship Man Bad isn’t deferring to their autocratic whims:

The Brussels Eurocrats around Emmanuel Macron are having a big sad about Twitter right now. They fear the platform fuels “the amplification of hateful content” and “disinformation”, which are multisyllabic ways of saying that there is too much unapproved and uncurated discourse on the site. You cannot just have people taking to their keyboards to type, like and retweet whatever they want. You especially cannot have that in Europe, where we suffer under the immensely liberal and democratic Digital Services Act, which mandates all manner of social media censorship to protect traditional European freedoms, like freedom of expression.

Twitter is a useful website; I use it to try out ideas and also for news-gathering purposes. As much as I’ve benefitted from the platform, however, I find the establishment derangement surrounding it to be extremely bizarre. There is little chance that Elon Musk’s relaxed moderation regime will lead to fascism, and still less chance that heavy censorship there will do anything about tHe ExtREmE RiGhT. The real reason that Twitter bothers establishment pundits and politicians, is its inherently confrontational nature. Our smug and self-satisfied oligarchs don’t like getting dragged and dunked on by the rabble. They want to tweet their lunacies without anonymous anime-themed accounts showing them up for the fools that they are, and they are very, extremely, fulminously enraged that Musk won’t do anything to improve their user experience.

One of these dissatisfied users is Thierry Breton, the Macron-appointed Commissioner for the Internal Market of the European Union. As everybody knows, on 12 August, Breton posted a letter to Musk ahead of Musk’s Twitter discussion with Donald Trump, to remind the American entrepreneur of his obligations to censor content. Breton has long been a thorn in the side of his EU colleagues, who regard him as a shallow self-promoter, and his game rapidly backfired. The next day, the EU Commission clarified that “The timing and the wording of the letter were neither co-ordinated nor agreed with the president nor with the [commissioners].” The American House Judiciary Committee then added to Breton’s humiliation by condemning his “threats” and his “attempt to intimidate individuals or entities engaged in political speech in the United States”. Musk also had some choice words for the EU Commissioner:

The Macronistes don’t care that they are wildly unpopular and that everybody hates them. They just don’t want to hear about it. They could simply delete their Twitter accounts, but people would still be saying mean things about them on the internet somewhere. They’d have to lie awake in bed at night, staring at the ceiling and stewing about it. Better by far would be to delete Twitter itself, or at least to block access to the platform across all 27 EU member states.

August 17, 2024

Twit/X – Hellsite or online Hotel California?

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

Ed West on the odd phenomenon of people loudly claiming they’ve had it with “this hellsite” and that they’re decamping to social-media-site-of-the-minute, yet in many, many cases they’re back on “this hellsite” not very long afterwards:

There was something of a trend in the late 2000s for former hell-raising journalists to start more sedate publications because they felt that society was changing, and people didn’t want to drink and party as much as they used to. It was heralded as the end of the “new lad” and the rise of a more mature outlook among men, largely by culture journalists whose job it is to invent societal trends.

And I remember reading these articles and always thinking “isn’t this just you getting old?” None of my friends go out and get pissed four times a week anymore — what does this say about British society?

I’ve long felt the same about Twitter, that while it’s immensely useful as a resource for news and information, and interacting with friends, I’ve got to the stage where it’s not fun. But that’s probably just middle age, and at a certain point people should avoid too much time joking around on social media, lest they become Facebook boomer memes. (Or, in Britain, go to jail.)

This week I was on the Spectator Americano podcast talking about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, following my recent post on how he had changed the nature of the place. (I promise this is the last time I write about every journalist’s favourite social media site for at least two weeks.)

Everyone claims to hate Twitter, I pointed out, but they never leave. I actually started writing this piece a few months back, and noted that many people have bailed out from “X”, as no one calls it, among them academic Kathleen Stock, satirist Andrew Doyle and Labour politician Dawn Butler.

I’ve had to rewrite this because I think they’re all back now. In fact almost everyone who leaves the Hellsite soon returns; it’s a running joke, because we’re all addicted. I checked in on Threads the other day and it was full of people expressing their relief about breaking their Twitter habit and finding a new home. We shall see.

Others, like Alastair Campbell, have set up accounts on Bluesky but still proclaim their intention to stay on Twitter to fight the far-Right. Okay, sure.

Stock and Doyle seemed to be leaving in part because of the toxicity of their own side, in their case gender-critical feminists, and this kind of unpleasantness can indeed feel worse than when it comes from opponents. Watching online debates about immigration, for instance, I’m often reminded of GK Chesterton’s famous quote about pity and truth:

    The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

On one side will be vaguely establishment figures repeating arguments that feel warm-hearted and kind but also untrue, and on the other, mostly anonymous users citing a wealth of studies to show that the situation is actually much worse than that, and clearly having better arguments, while often being incredibly unpleasant and personal to the journalists involved. The fact that anonymous users are often the most informed and insightful accounts adds to the Chestertonian feel.

August 14, 2024

All the news the legacy media chooses to share

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

Mark Steyn grudgingly pays a bit of attention to US politics, or more accurately, the parts of US politics that the legacy media wants Americans to know:

Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024. One spectator was killed and two others were reported to be in critical condition. The shooter was killed by Pennsylvania State Troopers, according to reports in the succeeding hours.

In one party, the presidential candidate came within maybe an eighth-of-an-inch of having his head blown off on live TV.

In the other party, the presidential candidate was more successfully dispatched — and the millions of primary votes he’d supposedly received simply nullified.

Either of these would be extraordinary events in any other country. And yet, under the smooth narrative management of the American press, they were mere spasms of momentary discombobulation before the normal somnolent service was resumed. “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, The Washington Post informs its readers every morning. In fact, under the court eunuchs of the US media, democracy dies in broad daylight.

First, the Pennsylvania assassination attempt was memory-holed — in an industrial-strength illustration of Orwell’s brilliant coinage: any day now there will be some poll showing thirty-seven per cent of registered voters are entirely unaware that a would-be killer hit Trump in the ear. And this despite the fact that every few hours there are — oh, what’s the word they use in nations with a real press? — newsworthy revelations about all that the Secret Service did to facilitate the operation, to scrub the evidence afterwards, and to lie to Congress about both.

At this stage, they might as well remake In the Line of Fire with Clint lying on the roof next to the goofball lining up his shot and helpfully suggesting, “Think you might be maybe a half-centimeter off there, sonny …” (On the other hand, if you’re looking for some guys to break into a Massachusetts hair salon to use the toilet for two hours and then leave the joint unlocked for the rest of the weekend, this is the federal agency for you.)

In the American media, a tree can fall in the forest in front of twenty million people — and it still doesn’t make a sound.

On the other hand, we have … wossname, you know, the stiff who was nose-diving off the steps to Air Force One just twenty minutes ago. In the entirety of last week the so-called “President of the United States” had only one bit of state business to perform — a Monday telephone call with the King of Jordan. Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had a heavier workload the day before she died at ninety-six. But the same people who’ve spent the last three-and-a-half years insisting that Joe Biden was the chief executive of the United States can no longer be bothered with the elaborate pretence: the show supposedly has five months to run, but they’ve struck the set and sent the crew home, and left the star sitting slack-jawed and drooling in his Chinese Barcalounger in the dark on an empty stage. Joe’s sole residual presence in the news cycle is when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV and breezily claims to be the one who had him whacked (although the party’s other “senior powerbrokers” are reported to be mildly irked by her braggadocio: they assert that, as in Murder on the Re-Orient Express, everybody did it).

So who is running the United States? If the presidency is so important it’s worth holding a two-year contest to decide who gets to occupy it, why isn’t who’s exercising those powers right now of any interest?

Well, that’s been memory-holed, too. America’s uniquely unique “peaceful transfer of power” has begun six months early, that’s all.

So, on the one side, 24/7 coverage of the candidate being indicted, sued, tried, convicted and (coming soon!) banged up in Rikers Island will continue … but it doesn’t leave any resources to investigate him getting shot in the head on live TV.

And, on the other side, a candidate with not a single primary vote to her name has been imposed on the party by who knows who … but it would be grossly disrespectful to the majesty of her office (President-Designate) to expect her to sit down for a puffball interview with George Stephanopoulos. (“Do you think all these GOP demands that you be able to answer questions on your platform and if you know where it’s being kept are because many Republican men are still uncomfortable with the idea of a strong black Montreal schoolgirl running for president?”)

But it’s not just the regime-aligned mainstream media who want to control what you get to see and hear — the European Union seems to think it can dictate to American social media companies what they’re allowed to share:

“The European Union’s digital enforcer wrote an open letter to tech mogul Elon Musk on Monday ahead of a planned interview with former United States President Donald Trump to remind him of the EU’s rules on promoting hate speech,” reports Politico.

“As the relevant content is accessible to EU users and being amplified also in our jurisdiction, we cannot exclude potential spillovers in the EU,” wrote Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton on X. “With great audience comes greater responsibility.”

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that Bruce Daisley, Twitter’s former vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has said Musk should face “personal sanctions” — which are “much more effective on executives than the risk of corporate fines” — and even, possibly, an “arrest warrant” if he “continue[s] stirring up unrest” on the platform.

“The question we are presented with is whether we’re willing to allow a billionaire oligarch to camp off the UK coastline and take potshots at our society,” says Daisley. “The idea that a boycott — whether by high-profile users or advertisers — should be our only sanction is clearly not meaningful.” (All Musk has done, for the record, is criticize British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for his handling of riots over immigration, calling him a “hypocrite” and “two-tier Keir“.)

August 10, 2024

British NPCs have all downloaded the latest patch – “Spaceship Man Bad!”

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

Elon Musk is the new Emmanuel Goldstein for British NPCs:

I always knew Britain’s liberals were secretly illiberal. That our chattering classes who genuflect at the altar of “human rights” would happily snatch away the rights of anyone who says something offensive online. That these dwellers of the leafy suburbs who weep over the jailing of dissidents in China will chortle over the sacking or blacklisting of dissidents at home, whether it’s women who think you can’t have a knob and be a lesbian or ex-Muslims whose criticisms of Islam are a tad too salty. And yet even I’ve been shocked by their frothing rage against Elon Musk in recent days. By their priestly demands that X be censured and possibly even wiped from the web. It’s one of the most batshit things I’ve seen in ages.

It’s not enough to call this a “mask-off moment”. It’s more like the phoney liberals have ripped their masks to shreds and stomped them into the dirt for good measure. Their rage is linked to the riots currently rocking the UK. Musk’s own tweets, they say, not least his chatter about Britain being on the road to “civil war”, have helped to whip up the mayhem. Worse, his “free-speech absolutism”, as one “liberal” magazine snottily refers to it, has meant that every tosser with a smartphone has been able to tweet their inflammatory views on the riots and even to spread misinformation. In essence, says a writer for the Guardian, Musk has been “leading from behind on UK thuggery and race riots”.

Got that? The reason Britain is going to shit is not because of any internal rot but because a billionaire in Texas said “civil war” on the internet. Glad we cleared that up. Even worse than the great and the good’s shameless deflection tactics – where they try to pin the blame for their own failures on a foreigner with money – is their tinpot solutions to this supposed problem. It might be time, says that sexagenarian Marxian in a leather jacket, Paul Mason, to “pull the plug” on X entirely. Yesteryear’s tyrants smashed up printing presses and chased booksellers out of town – today’s want to switch off a website on which no fewer than half a billion souls regularly share their thoughts and feelings.

They really have taken leave of their senses. Musk’s “horrific version of Twitter” is “a bit like Paris under Nazi occupation”, says Peter Jukes of Byline Times, the preferred publication of rich liberals who’ve been in a state of red mist since the plebs voted for Brexit eight years ago. Just like Paris in the 1940s, says Jukes, some are fleeing Musk’s X, while others are sticking around to “work for liberation”. The narcissism of it. Imagine thinking that keeping your X account open so you can continue spouting bollocks in your echo chamber is as brave as when Parisians stayed in Paris to resist Nazi rule.

Any mention of the Nazis is usually a reliable sign of madness. And so it is with the outburst of Muskphobia among Britain’s influencers. Musk’s antics on X led “straight to” rioting in the UK, says Will Hutton of the Observer (my italics). Do they really believe this? Do they really believe the reason that young shirtless fella looted the Greggs in Hull is because Elon Musk said “#TwoTierKeir” on X? Apparently they do. And there’s only one solution. “Pass a bill closing down Twitter in the UK”, says barrister and arch Remoaner Jessica Simor. That she said this on Twitter at least provided us with fleeting comic relief amid the elite’s lunacy. Does she know she can deactivate her account? Can someone tell her?

It’s the haughtiness of Britain’s influential haters of Musk that is most irksome. Alastair Campbell accused Musk of talking “utter shite” about Britain and its riots. That’s big talk from the undisputed king of shite, the man whose BS about Iraq helped to start a war in which tens of thousands of Arabs perished. Look, I know Musk’s words hurt liberals’ feelings, but at least they don’t hurt people’s lives and limbs.

“Elon Musk’s menace to democracy is intolerable”, pronounced Edward Luce of the Financial Times. That’s the paper that regularly made the case for overthrowing the largest democratic vote in British history. “Democracies can no longer ignore” the threat posed by Musk’s X, says Luce. I don’t like the term dogwhistle, but this is a tyranny dogwhistle, isn’t it? It’s a nod and a wink at “democracies” to clamp down on the “menace” of unfettered online speech. Lewis Goodall of The News Agents – a podcast hosted by ex-BBC staff for whom the BBC wasn’t quite wanky enough – wonders if “unmediated platforms” like Musk’s X are “beyond redemption”. “Should we stop using it?”, he wonders. Please, yes.

July 11, 2024

In Germany, flying your national flag in June is considered a “grave offence against the human dignity” of the LGBT community

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

For reasons that I hope I don’t need to go into in any depth, displays of patriotism in Germany are viewed with deep suspicion by progressives and the various state and national government agencies. Even doing something like displaying the German national flag in any context other than a football match can draw official condemnation:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Many readers may not know about the German Stolzmonat, but I promise the backstory is worth it, so please bear with me.

As all of you do know, via some opaque imperial decree, every June across the Western world has become the monstrosity known as “Pride Month”. It is an occasion for the raucous celebration of every sexual minority and deviant proclivity imaginable. There are rainbow flags, lewd street parades, bizarre political speeches and all manner of astroturfed queer activism. I’m told that the festivities were massively scaled back this year in the Anglosphere, perhaps because they are awkward for elections, but on the Continent all such trends arrive very late and we had nothing but the usual excesses.

The eager flying of the rainbow colours is especially obnoxious in Germany, where the display of one’s national flag – except perhaps in a sports context – is discouraged and politically suspect. Some Germans have therefore responded to the perennial irritation of Pride Month by declaring June to be “Stolzmonat” instead. “Stolzmonat” is merely the German translation of “Pride Month”, but our clever cultural hackers have appropriated the term to indicate not gay but national pride. Those who celebrate Stolzmonat do not conduct any lavish public events and they give no speeches. Most of them simply change their social media profile pictures to present the colours black, red and gold. Now and again they also tweet the hashtag #Stolzmonat.

It’s primarily a German act of social media protest, but anybody can participate:

Enough people observe Stolzmonat to cause the corresponding hashtag to rise to the top of Twitter trends now and again. This has given the Rainbow Brigade indigestion, and as there is precious little division between the Rainbow Brigade and the German state, the domestic intelligence services of Lower Saxony have decided it is time to issue an ex cathedra condemnation of Stolzmonat – eight days after it ended. […] Below I translate this ridiculous woman’s statement. As you read, please remember that this is not just some random trans activist, but a functionary of the Lower Saxony Office for the Protection of the Constitution – an agency endowed with considerable powers to surveil and harass ordinary Germans for their alleged intellectual offences against “democracy” and the constitution:

    Stop scrolling! We’re here to tell you all you need to know about the new right-wing campaign “Stolzmonat“. “Stolzmonat” is actually just the German translation of “Pride Month”. That’s what members of our queer community [1] say; they want to make the term “Stolzmonat” into what it should actually be – an expression of diversity, tolerance and strengthening of the rights of queer people.

    Last year, the hashtag Stolzmonat temporarily landed at number one in the X-Trends – albeit as a polemical term of the extreme right wing. This year, the New Right in particular called for participation in Stolzmonat. The LGBTQIA+ community [2] is among the archetypal enemies of the right-wing extremist scene. In addition to discrimination against queer people, nationalism – that is to say, exaggerated national pride with simultaneous devaluation of other nations and the rejection of the values of liberal democracy – are core elements of Stolzmonat. They appropriate the German flag as a symbol for this campaign and associate it with the aforementioned elements. The new right use Queer hostility to associate themselves with existing prejudices in society and to activate ideologically like-minded people to participate in Stolzmonat. This is intended to create the impression of a large counter-movement to Pride Month. They use the hashtag and the German flag instead of the rainbow flag in their profile pictures. One of their messages: queer people are not a part of Germany. Right-wing extremists are thus pursuing a metapolitical approach [3] to exert influence on the pre-political sphere [4] and thus lay the foundation for anti-democratic positions.

There are so many dumb statements floating in this verbal morass that I don’t know where to begin. So just briefly: 1) The alphabet soup community is not “among the archetypal enemies of the right-wing extremist scene”. Pride Month has, however, became a deeply ridiculous and shallow cultural celebration of a great many things that are wrong with our society and a lot of people are extremely tired of it. 2) “Nationalism” in no way entails the “devaluation of other nations”, nor does it require the “rejection of the values of liberal democracy”. Liberal democracy grew up alongside nationalism, after all, and the Stolzmonat organisers explicitly encourage non-Germans to display their own national colours during Stolzmonat. 3) It is obviously not the point of Stolzmonat to argue that “queer people are not a part of Germany”.

July 9, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 3, 2024

QotD: Mental health and social media

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

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

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

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

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

June 15, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

    We were complicit!

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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