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How the media work

The press is dissected in this entertaining interview by John Cleese of  Graham Johnson and John Ford, tabloid journalists. There is only one line and one story allowed. All the questions are directed to reinforce the chosen line.

“Fake news” was made identifiable by Donald Trump, says Graham Johnson. Stories are made up, and the penalty for failing to do so is to be fired. It is that simple.

 

For evident reasons, trust in British journalism is especially low. See

https://www.statista.com/statistics/683336/media-trust-worldwide/

for a comparison of the level of trust in media across countries. It proved impossible to block and copy.

 

 

Mother American Night

Once upon a time I was in Ghana for an Internet conference. A group of ten or so had gathered in the lobby in comfortable chairs and were chatting after dinner. I got on to the topic of acid and the Grateful Dead and how much I missed doing LSD, as I had not had any for years, maybe decades by that time. John Perry Barlow, as it happened, reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and tore of two Owsley tabs from a small collection, in front of everyone and with no hesitation, and I took them from him gratefully. It was some time later that I actually tripped on them. They were sublime. Thank you, John Perry Barlow.

More conventional reviews of John Perry Barlow’s autobiography can be found  hereherehere and here. Also here.

Barlow was at the centre of so much in recent American life. Do yourself a favour: if the description of Barlow in the hotel lobby in Ghana intrigues you just a bit, buy and read his book. You will not be disappointed.

If on the other hand the idea of LSD frightens you, why are you reading this blog?

Why academia is doomed, and what will follow

“The coming implosion after the diversity’s victory”, from Mark Bauerlein, in Minding the Campus

 

Which brings us to the real issue: personnel. We have sunk to an intellectual level that we might call purely managerial. Thirty years ago, we had a genuine battle over the curriculum in which ideas and values were weapons (though not the only weapons). Should there be a Western Civ requirement? Are there great women writers out there, unjustly forgotten and waiting to be rediscovered? Do minority students want to see minority authors on the syllabus, and would they become estranged if they didn’t? Should we read Ezra Pound despite his vile biases?….

Now, diversity means just that: getting more underrepresented people in place. That’s all. The campus managers don’t think about what will happen then. Diversity among the personnel—that is, more proportionate representation of all “underserved” identities—is an end in itself. If you asked a dean what diversity is for, what purpose it serves, he wouldn’t have an immediate answer. He spends so much time in a habitat of tautology (“diversity is good for . . . diversity”) that the very question stumps him until he remembers blather from the Old Times about diverse perspectives and educational benefits and repeats it like a ventriloquist’s dummy. But don’t try pressing him on it. He doesn’t want to talk about it. The self-evident good of diversity has long been established, and he clings to it like a Catholic does his rosary…..

We must change the demographic. That’s the commandment. More women and people of color in the ranks. We see little evidence that managers and bureaucrats on campus have any other thought in their heads now. Diversity doesn’t amount to anything more than that. It’s a crass ambition, but a potent one because dissenters from it have no effective argument against it. It’s very bluntness and simplicity make it incontrovertible….

After all, if diversity is just a matter of demographics, liberal professors and administrators can solve the problem. All the white males and many of the white females should leave and ask that persons of color be hired. If the educators object, “But we have bills to pay and careers to pursue,” we answer, “But aren’t you asking white job applicants to find careers elsewhere and pay their bills in another way?” If the professors say, “But there aren’t competent people out there,” we answer, “Are you saying that people of color can’t do the job you do?”

The administrators and liberal ‘go-alongs’ are in a corner, and they know it.

___________________________________

More Jordan Peterson on the same subject. He predicted  that “4,000 college and universities will go bankrupt in the next ten years and it can’t happen fast enough”.

 

Psychic interpretation of laws and “charter values”

David Cole in Taki’s Magazine draws attention to a pertinent point: when you are guilty of thoughtcrime, your actual words are of no importance to the leftist inquisitor. This is bad enough in ordinary encounters among civilians, but when the habit spreads to the Supreme Court of the United States, the psychic approach to interpreting laws can have disastrous consequences. By psychic approach I mean the habit of endowing oneself with powers of knowing that someone has bad intentions despite fair, scrupulous, neutral or lawful language expressing them.

Which brings us to the Supreme Court, and why Americans need to appreciate the bullet we dodged in November 2016. Hillary would have given us another Sotomayor to replace Scalia, and now, another one to replace Kennedy. And the peril of too many Sotomayors (or just one, frankly) was laid bare last week in the “wise Latina’s” dissent in the Trump travel-ban ruling. The facts in the case were fairly clear: The travel ban does not cover only Muslim nations, and the Muslim nations it does cover represent only a small portion of the Muslim world. There is no wording in the ban that is anti-Muslim, and the nations affected by the ban had been identified by the previous administration as high-risk for terrorism.

The ban, as Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority, is “neutral on its face.”

Sotomayor, however, writing for the minority, donned her psychic sombrero and took a different approach. Yes, the ban might be neutral as written, but Trump’s statements while on the campaign trail indicated that his intent was to craft a Muslim ban, even if he didn’t. Therefore, the ban must be ruled unconstitutional because Trump initially wanted something unconstitutional, even if what he actually did was not unconstitutional.

Call her Yogi Master Sonia, because that’s one hell of a contortion.

…..Sotomayor’s dissent relies on something known as legislative intent. Among legal scholars, there’s a long-running debate: To what extent should a court take into account the intent of a law’s author(s) when ruling on the legality of that law? The prevailing school of thought in American jurisprudence is that courts should abide by the “plain meaning rule.” In essence, that means that if a law is clear and unambiguous in its text, the court need not, or should not, try to mind-read the intent of the author(s). This was the reasoning of the majority in its decision on the travel ban. The text of the directive is plain, the directive falls within the president’s legitimate powers, and the directive has a legitimate reason for being (national security).

From the leftist perspective, thoughtcrime is the issue, not the facts or the plain statements of the law. Leftists are authorized to see thoughtcrime or heresy in any person. When dealing with a heretic, no respect for human dignity or conscience is to be given.

We suffer from a something even more pernicious in Canada, I submit. This is the view that there exists something called “charter values” which are the in the exclusive domain of the Supreme Court justices to find and apply. Sotomayor, the “wise Latina” knows you have bad intentions. The Supreme Court of Canada knows, by contrast, that its intentions are pure, so that it is free to invent stuff that is nowhere in the written language of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or the Constitution Act, 1982.

Bruce Pardy writes about the Trinity-Western decision of our own Supreme Court, which ruled that the Law Societies of British Columbia and Ontario were within their rights to refuse to recognize Trinity Western as a law school.

“It’s a vibe kind of thing”. Only they did not use such words, they called upon “charter values”, not the actual words in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. to legitimize their distaste for an explicitly Christian law school.

On June 15, the court ended Trinity Western University’s quest to open a law school. The university had challenged the refusal of the law societies of B.C. and Ontario to approve the school. The law societies did not question the quality of the legal education to be delivered but objected to Trinity’s “community covenant,” which requires its students and faculty to abstain from “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.” A majority of the court found that the law societies were entitled to violate Trinity’s religious freedom in the name of “Charter values.” While freedom of religion is guaranteed as a fundamental freedom in section 2(a) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Charter values are found nowhere in the text. They are, yes, “just the vibe of the thing,” used by the Court to trump actual Charter rights and remake the Constitution.

Trinity’s covenant, the majority said, imposed inequitable barriers on entry, especially for LGBTQ students, and held that the actions of the law societies reflected a “proportionate balancing” of the Charter protections at play. It may sound fair and reasonable but it is actually profoundly twisted. The case did not feature competing Charter protections. Trinity’s religious freedoms were not pitted against the equality rights of LGBTQ persons because no such rights existed. The Charter does not apply against anyone but the state. As a private religious institution, Trinity was not subject to the Charter or for that matter to the B.C. Human Rights Code. Trinity was the only party with Charter rights, enforceable against the law societies as agencies of the state. Calling the covenant an “inequitable barrier” is disingenuous. Religious communities consist of private persons gathering together and agreeing on a code to which they choose to adhere. They impose those standards on no one but themselves. No one is forced to join them and no one has the right to go to their law school, which is part of a private religious institution. There is nothing to “balance.” Until, of course, the court invokes Charter values. You know, the vibe of the thing.

…Turns out Charter values aren’t the vibe of the actual thing at all, but a competing set of moral judgments that exists in the Court’s imagination. The Charter was conceived and drafted as a roster of individual negative rights that protected against interference from an overbearing state. Charter values, as articulated by the court, are collectivist values of progressives: (substantive) equality, (social) justice and (group) dignity. Charter values are decidedly not the individual liberty values of classical liberals or the traditionalist virtues of conservatives.

When I say that the Supreme Court of Canada is just making shit up, I mean exactly what I say, and they are doing so on a vast and unconstitutional scale.

To borrow the language of the two dissident justices of the Supreme Court:

The majority’s continued reliance on values protected by the Charter as equivalent to rights is similarly troubling. Resorting to Charter values as a counterweight to constitutionalized and judicially defined Charter rights is a highly questionable practice. Charter values are unsourced, amorphous and, just as importantly, undefined. The majority’s preferred value of equality is, without further definition, too vague a notion on which to ground a claim to equal treatment in any and all concrete situations, such as admission to a law school. A value of equality is, therefore, a questionable notion against which to balance the exercise by the TWU community of its Charter‑protected rights.

I leave it to you to discuss which may be worse: the notion that the judiciary can declare an act illegal because its members feel that it was motivated by  thoughtcrime,  which they can discern from their insights into the state of your soul, on the one hand, or the idea that the judiciary can make up entire categories of law (Charter values) that have no statutory basis whatever.

Which makes you feel more insecure in your remaining rights and freedoms?

___________________________

PS Strangely, and welcomed, is the opinion piece in the CBC site, of all places, by Anna Su:

It is almost comedic for the Court majority to unconsciously invoke the promotion of diversity — which it did in upholding the law societies’ decision not to accredit TWU’s law school —as if it only means one thing. But as Justices Suzanne Côté and Russell Brown wrote in their dissent, tolerance and accommodation of difference, including religious difference, also serve the public interest and foster pluralism.

Remember what I said a few weeks ago: we are living in a Liberal Oceania. Ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery, and diversity is uniformity.

 

Kant versus Cant

This is the text of an opinion piece recently published by Sir Roger Scruton in the Spectator on June 13, 2018.

‘Kant vs cant: How liberals lost their way’ – Spectator Life, June 18

I recently attended an academic seminar, along with some of the most thoughtful and distinguished members of what is sometimes called the ‘liberal establishment’. The topic was ‘the crisis of liberalism’. Many of those present believed that there is such a crisis, and that it is caused by the inability of liberal ideas to prevail over the growing threat of ‘populism’. The thing called populism is amorphous and eludes every attempt to define it. However it is out there and ready to pounce, as it did with the election of Donald Trump, with the vote for Brexit, and with the recent emergence of the Italian Five Star Movement, the German AfD and the National Rally in France, formerly the Front National.

Whether or not there is such a thing as populism, there is certainly such a thing as liberalism. It is associated with the great names of Enlightenment thinking, including Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Kant and Smith, according to whom the business of government is not to gratify autocratic power, but to maintain individual liberty. Liberalism is the philosophy of limited government. It seeks to reconcile the liberty of citizens with the equal liberty of their neighbours. It has an ideal of civic patriotism, which unites us in a shared commitment to defending the government that protects us all. It leads of its own accord to democratic institutions, since it aims to make government accountable to the people.

Hence liberalism frees the law from all more visceral ties. It regards citizens as equal participants in the political process, regardless of ethnicity, religion or class. We belong together, liberalism tells us, because we ourselves create the law that governs us, with the aim of freeing and protecting us all.

That vision is shared by conservatives too. Even the movements dismissed as ‘populist’ subscribe to the liberal idea of constitutional government. In a real sense we are all liberal constitutionalists now, and the presence among us of religious fanatics prepared to murder in the service of their God has only served to confirm our commitment to the liberal inheritance.

But is that the view of liberals? Liberals, I have discovered, are suspicious of traditional loyalties. They defend alternative lifestyles and nonconformist behaviour. They are not attached to any religious institution and feel the call of patriotic duty only weakly. In the recent referendum they would have voted with the Remainers, and when confronting a Leaver they are likely to sniff out the traces of ‘racism and xenophobia’, which are the odours emitted by populists when cornered by their sophisticated critics.

As a result, when it comes to any form of traditional attachment, liberals are against it. When it comes to the big questions they are resolutely opposed to established interests. They identify with oppositional causes, even if — especially if — it is our tradition of liberal government that is the target. Two recent issues have convinced me of this.

The first is the law that makes hunting with hounds a crime. This aimed to extinguish an activity central to rural society for centuries. Of course hunting has no place on the list of liberal amusements. But either you believe in limited government or you don’t. And if you do, you must recognise, with John Stuart Mill, that the business of government is not to mend our morals but to protect our freedoms. What was most striking was that no self-described liberal spoke out against this outrageous expansion of legislative power. The aim was to extinguish a way of life that was of no interest to liberals. So why should a liberal bother?

The other example is the sexual abuse of young girls by immigrant communities. About these cases (in Rotherham, Oxford, Shrewsbury and elsewhere) nobody in authority would tell the truth until forced to do so, for fear of the ‘racist’ label. ‘Racist’ is an accusation that liberals will go through any amount of contortion to avoid, and if, in order to avoid it, you have to grant immunity to gangs of immigrant criminals, so be it.

These cases remind me that the tradition of liberal government exists because we wish to extend the protection of the law to everyone, regardless of faith, ethnicity or family connections. The fate of the Rotherham girls should have awoken the indignation of the entire liberal elite. But it was the liberals who decided that it was best to keep quiet about it, for it was they who had invented and thrived upon the ‘racism’ meme. I conclude that there is indeed a crisis of liberalism, and that the crisis is liberals.

Published in Spectator Life 13th June 2018

John Perry Barlow

Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times by [Barlow, John Perry, Greenfield, Robert]

The Insanely Eventful Life of Grateful Dead Lyricist John Perry Barlow

A posthumous memoir from a mutant genius

Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, by John Perry Barlow with Robert Greenfield, Crown Archetype, 288 pages, $27

John Perry Barlow, who died this year at age 70, was a Grateful Dead lyricist, a pioneer in the fight for online civil liberties, and possibly a mutant. As Barlow recounts in his posthumously published memoir, Mother American Night, his mother as a girl was treated for tuberculosis by a quack who administered a prolonged beam of X-rays right into her hip. Forty-five minutes of this treatment gave her radiation sickness. Her hair fell out, she suffered severe burns, and she was informed that, oops, she’d been sterilized.

The sterilization didn’t take. Two decades later, in 1947, she gave birth to John Perry Barlow. One of his X-Men superpowers seems to have been to unerringly locate centers of the American zeitgeist and discover some pivotal role he could play in them.

we are living in a liberal Oceania

Fred Reed writes:

“Affirmative action” means hiring people because they can’t do the job well. Near-synonyms are “diversity,” meaning groups that cannot do the job well, and “inclusiveness,” which means seeking people who you know cannot do the job well. These underpin American society, and have ruined education.

More here.

“Mac Donald goes on to tell of school after school accepting diversity with credentials well below those of real students, of schools dropping the GRE requirement because it makes obvious that in STEM fields women and minorities are not performing as desired. (“Minorities” always means “poorly performing minorities.” Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and so on don’t count.)”

Heather MacDonald on “How Identity Politics is Harming the Sciences”

The situation is dire because the lies are so deeply believed, the conformity required is so effectively enforced, and the penalty for thinking differently is exclusion and oblivion.

Hence we are living in a liberal Oceania

  • inclusion is exclusion

  • diversity is uniformity

  • tolerance is intolerance

Tommy Robinson and the British Disease

What can be said with absolute certainty is that Tommy Robinson has been treated with greater suspicion and a greater presumption of guilt by the United Kingdom than any Islamic extremist or mass rapist ever has been. That should be — yet is not — a national scandal. If even one mullah or sheikh had been treated with the presumption of guilt that Robinson has received, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the rest of them would be all over the U.K. authorities. But different standards apply to Robinson.

 

From the National Review, article by Douglas Murray

 

Further observations on the state of the United Kingdom from the Zman.

This is the heart of the matter. The Pax Americana, which has guaranteed peace in Europe for the last 75 years, has done more than pacify the continent. It has turned the political classes of Europe into children. They are not real leaders in any meaningful sense, because no matter what they do, Uncle Sam is there to make sure they never get a serious boo-boo. Because they are insulated from serious consequences, they have become the Eloi, playing dress-up and pretending to be big boys and girls.

Facebook, free speech and control

 

 

Matt Taibbi

One of the most important take-aways from Tim Wu’s The Master Switch is that censorship is facilitated by control of the market. Speech control follows ownership concentration. He points out how the Catholic Legion of Decency gained control of movies in the 1930s because of the vertical integration between movie theatre chains and production studios. In Wu’s phrase, a Catholic priest was controlling movies produced by Jews for a majority Protestant nation. The Legion of Decency could attach itself successfully to the movie business because the control of it was already secured by the owners of the studios.

“It is industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech.”

“The trick is that a concentrated industry need not be censorial by nature in order for its structure to produce a chilling effect on the freedom of expression….The problem is that a “speech industry” – as we might term any information industry — once centralized, becomes an easy target for external independent actors with strong reasons of their own for limiting speech. And these reasons may have nothing to do with the industry per se.” (The Master Switch at pp 121-123)

This brings us to Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone on Facebook: Can we be saved from the Social Media Giant?

The article needs to be seen as a useful changing of the subject, from Russia and Trump, to Trump and Facebook, to Facebook itself. It also signals a change in the description of the Internet, from an information cornucopia to an “informational landscape… controlled more or less entirely by a pair of advanced spying operations, Google and Facebook – and Facebook especially”.

Taibbi says that, “in many ways the [current] Facebook controversy is a canard”, meaning that the issue is media control, pure and simple, not Trump, and not Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Facbook has 2.1 billion customers today and grows by 50 to 100 million users per quarter, with revenues of $40.7 billion in 2017.

After a great deal of sanctimonious drivel from Taibbi about how everyone is becoming imprisoned in their own information ghettos – when were we not?- he gets to the real point. The “fake news” issue  is only the outer manifestation of the targetting of viewers with information, which is  a wholly legal advertizing technique. Moreover, it is “what the product was designed for.”

“Simply by growing so large that his firm ended up standing between media publishers and media consumers, constantly creating rules about who saw what, Zuckerberg and Facebook have created a thing America has never had before: an entrenched de facto media regulator”.

Obviously this is not fully accurate: see the discussion above about movie censorship, which lasted from the 1930s  until the 1960s. But Taibbi is accurate when he says that Facebook and Google can sell eyeballs to advertizers with exquisite accuracy, with the result that the two of them garner 63.1% of digital advertizing revenues

The complaint of publishers is that 1) they can never learn how the Facebook algorithm works, which determines who sees what, and 2) they receive frequently changing information on how to optimize content to reach maximum attention.

Taibbi indulges in a lot of ‘de haut en bas‘ – condescending –  talk about how the press used to work better in the days of printing presses, and how the soiled masses insist on getting their own reality manifested in their choices of media. He writes from the point of view of a Democrat contemplating the frightfulness of the lower orders insisting on their right to receive the information they want, which is part of the reason why Trump now sits in the White House.

Nevertheless, there is justice in his conclusion that “a functioning free press just can’t co-exist with an unaccountable private regulator”.

His argument ends up resembling the argument about net neutrality, which applies to underlying physical carriers of signals – or not. In net neutrality regimes, such as Canada’s, there exists a regulator that determines whether a behaviour by a carrier amounts to unjust discrimination against a particular use or a group of users. “Neutrality” is not an absolute but a sliding scale of offences and permitted actions. Most important, there is a referee.

In the case of Facebook and Google, we are not dealing with a carrier, but with a software platform, and no law governs their behaviour towards publishers seeking to reach audiences through them. No one has assimilated software platforms to common carriers, yet. No one has to my knowledge proposed common carrier obligations for Facebook and Google. Moreover the US Federal Communications Commission has just removed net neutrality obligations from the carriers. Verizon and Comcast and the like can now squeeze content and viewers as they think best.

It is evident that the forces assembling against Google and Facebook will be coming from the political Left, and not only from conservatives concerned that these companies are running political cults.

My concern remains that, if the technical structure permits it, if there are points of control, these will be used to limit free discussion.