This is a column by Morgan Campbell, who writes opinion for CBC Sports.For more information aboutCBC's Opinion section, please see theFAQ.

What can you do in one one-thousandth of a second?

Voluntarily, I mean.

Hang up on a robocall?

Block a forex/crypto grifter's follow request on Instagram?

Hit "don't recommend channel" when YouTube's algorithm serves up a Joe Rogan/Jordan Peterson collaboration?

Many of us could make many of those decisions in a flash, but not in .001 seconds. In the real world, thousandths of a second barely exist. Anything we can measure that closely is a matter of reflex or luck.

But in the alternate dimension known as the World Athletics Championships, one one-thousandth of a second can determine the difference between a great start and an illegal one;a keen competitor and a cheater.

WATCH | Making the case to abolish the false start rule in track and field:

Witness Devon Allen, the future Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver and the third-fastest 110-metre hurdler in history, looking to win a medal in Eugene, Ore., where he competed as a collegian at the University of Oregon. He registered a reaction time of .101 seconds in his semifinal on Sunday. A fast, but legal, result, according to the World Athletics rulebook, in line with the governing body's ideas about the fastest possible reaction to a starter's pistol.

In the final, Allen reacted in .099 seconds a negligible difference everywhere but in World Athletics' guidelines, which state that any figure faster than .10 seconds is a false start, and the result of an athlete anticipating the gun. Common sense says that Allen could not possibly have decided to react one or two thousandths of a second faster in the final, but World Athletics' zero-tolerance rules said he had to go. He offered a mild protest, but officials hustled him away from the start line, and the TVbroadcast maintained its brisk pace.

Allen was the third athlete Sunday night to earn a false-start disqualification. Julien Alfred (reaction time: .095) and TyNia Gaither (.093) were both bounced from their 100msemis for reacting after the gun, but before the rule book says they should have.

Veteran track coach P.J. Vazel tallied every reaction time in every men's 100mdash and 110mhurdles race at every world championships since 2011. All those rounds produced 30 reaction times faster than .115 seconds but 25 of them came this week. Most years, that number is zero.

WATCH |American hurdler Devon Allen speaks on false start at worlds:

Is this a new trend?

The track and field equivalent of a crime wave?

Do those numbers show us that sprinters are getting tripped up trying to game the false-start system, or is something else happening?

I'm not a gambler, but if I was, I would bet on "something else."

The huge year-to-year jump in almost-illegal reaction times is a strong hint that the new equipment is more sensitive.

We know something is happening with the starting blocks in Eugene.

They slipped out from under Canadian Aaron Brown's feet during the 200mprelims a fairly common mishap at high school meets, but nearly unheard-of at the world level.

After his own first-round race, American Noah Lyles described how these blocks differed from the ones at virtually every other high-level meet. The foot pads are articulated, the lower segment fixed in place, while the upper part can crane up or down.

"These are completely different blocks," he told reporters after his prelim. "That lip in the front really throws off everything. I was adjusting my blocks way longer than normal."

The stat doesn't measure a runner's exit from the blocks; just the pressure sprinters exert with their feet prior to taking their first step. If the equipment is more sensitive, it'll register that pressure sooner, and likely shave a few thousandths off a lot of people's reaction times, even if athletes are reacting the same way they always have.

So what looks like an increase in the number of sprinters trying to jump the gun is probably just a more accurate picture of their hair-trigger reflexes in action.

WATCH | Breaking down Devon Allen's historic 110m hurdle time:

It's not like fixing a camera on an intersection to record people running red lights. Think instead of football prospects moving from hand-timed 40-yard dashes to electronically-measured sprints. The switch turns 4.1s into 4.3s instantly, and sticker shock hits prospects hard. Doesn't mean they got slower. They just have more precise information.

None of it is an issue if World Athletics revised its reaction-time guidelines. But its one-and-done false start rule, already co-existing uneasily with the razor's-edge nature of high-level sprinting, isn't compatible with hyper-sensitive equipment. In his post-disqualification comments Allen hinted at the only logical, yet completely nonsensical compromise.

"I'll make sure I kind of react not as fast next time," he told reporters on Sunday.

Sometimes we see that type of discretion among officials at fairly high-level meets. A blatant false start still triggers a DQ, but an inadvertent one often prompts officials to reset the field and start again. As we've discussed elsewhere, spectators don't fill seats to watch marshalls marshall.

But at the Olympics and the World Championships, an involuntary twitch in the starting blocks could get a sprinter tossed from a final, and a fast reaction to the gun could trigger a rule that negates an entire season of hard work for a medal contender as Allen, Alfred, Gaither, and even Usain Bolt can attest.

World Athletics itself suspects the situation is untenable, or at at least unfair. Scientists the governing body commissioned in 2009 to study reaction times suggested lowering the red line to .08 seconds to account for extremely, but feasibly, fast reactions to the starting gun.

Thirteen years is more than a career for any sprinter not named Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, yet in all that time World Athletics hasn't budged on its reaction time standard. So we're stuck with a rule that has existed since the 1960s, even as training, technology and athletes advance.

Every person in every sprint race is subject to that rule, so in that sense the playing field is level.

But the numbers tell you it's a long way from fair.

Read more:

Time has come for World Athletics to budge from its outmoded policy on false starts - CBC Sports

On the internet, youll find extreme dieters of all types, and many of them will swear to you that theirs is the only healthy way for a human to eat. At one end of the spectrum, theres Jordan Peterson with his carnivore diet, consisting of nothing but beef, salt and water. At the other, frugivore diets pushed by YouTubers and their ilk are not just vegan and raw but almost entirely made up of fresh fruit. And then, of course, we have the classic and unapologetically restrictive weight loss programs like the cabbage soup diet, the Master Cleanse (aka the lemonade diet), and the currently trendy Mono Diet, where you eat only one food.

Advocates for highly restrictive diets like these tend to massively overemphasize the benefits of their approved food while seriously exaggerating the drawbacks of all other foods. But these are only the most extreme examples of a supposed wellness culture that makes huge generalizations and routinely manipulates or straight-up ignores scientific evidence. Unfortunately, this approach ends up polluting even those conversations that do have some legitimate basisfor instance, veganism.

There are plenty of health benefits to a plant-based diet, and unlike the above examples, its not even necessarily a particularly restrictive dieteven nonvegans and nonvegetarians who eat primarily plant-based can reap the benefits. But the unfortunate truth is that like most things on the internet, a grain of truth gets stretched far beyond the bounds of what science can actually prove.

Its not hard to imagine why some voices for veganism might exaggerate or even fabricate health-related claims. The animal agriculture industry enacts gruesome violence against animals, as well as many of its laborers and, of course, the health of the planet. So if health is what will compel people to change their diets in a way thats beneficial for animals and the environment, its easy to see why some activists and influencers would push nutritional facts as the most effective avenue to help end the industry.

But ultimately, misinformation is only going to harm the movements credibility. Veganism is a more widespread idea in our society now than ever beforewe cant afford to risk causing folks to dismiss the whole thing as bunk. And all of this misinformation, exaggeration, and cherry-picking is a shame, because it obscures the actual strong evidence of the benefits of eating less meat, eggs, or dairy: lower risk of heart disease, stroke, and several types of cancer, to name just a few.

Regrettably, conversations around veganism tend to be rife with pseudoscience. Its not hard to find vegan influencers who spout unproven theories as though they were fact, utilize confusing and misguided logic, or say things that are plainly falselike that a vegan diet can change your eye color. Even actual medical doctors have been known to make dramatic and shaky claims, such as that a single meal high in animal fat can cripple a persons arteries, citing one single, decades-old study that featured just 10 subjects and no control group.

Youll hear people saying that nothing less than a 100% plant-based diet can be considered optimally healthy, when the reality is, we just dont have the data to back that up. Sure, there are plenty of studies that do support the general idea that plant-based eating is healthy in one way or another, and plenty of them are recent and use reliable methodologies. But even good data can be woefully misinterpreted. Correlation often gets mistaken for causation, and its difficultif not impossibleto isolate very specific inputs and outcomes (like, does cheese cause cancer?) because human biology and lifestyles are complicated.

Heres an example: James Beard Award-winning Washington Post columnist Tamar Haspel points to this Bloomberg article, the headline of which boldly claims, One Avocado a Week Cuts Risk of Heart Disease by 20%. Which sounds huge! But a closer look reveals that the study only demonstrates an association between avocados and heart disease, not a causal relationship. Do avocados cut the risk of heart disease, or do people who make overall heart-healthy lifestyle choices just eat a lot of avocados? Based on this study alone, we cant say. Any conclusion is, at best, a loose interpretation of the facts.

And the issues with nutritional science as we know it today go even deeper. For one thing, many of these studies (including the avocado one) rely on self-reported information from study participants. Thats putting a lot of faith in regular people to accurately and honestly measure their own eating habits, which human beings are famously bad at. When the input data is already in question, its hard to trust any conclusions drawn from it.

Even putting that aside, observational studies dont allow scientists to randomize their study subjects. If were just noting what real people are actually doing, we cant separate the elements we want to examinefor instance, meat consumptionfrom other factors like income, education, gender, smoking and drinking behavior, and what else they eat. As a result, the kind of information we get from these studies is imprecise;and unless the results include very dramatic, statistically significant trends, its risky to extrapolate much from them.

But getting the kind of data we could reliably work with is more or less impossible. To truly control a study, researchers would have to literally control everything eaten by hundreds of participants (or more) over a period of years, in order to eliminate all (or even most) potential confounding factors. Real human lives are just too complicated to regiment the way a true lab study requires.

Furthermore, the biological world is just more complicated than wed like to think. Different people have different nutritional needs. For people with certain gastrointestinal conditions, eating fully vegan just isnt feasible. But even barring that, human bodies are unique and one person may not process a particular food in the exact way another person would. With that in mind, one-size-fits-all health advice of any kind should probably be subject to some heavy skepticism. Given all of this, its no wonder that doctors, nutritionists, researchers, and other credentialed expertsnot to mention third party interpreters of research, like journalists and other media figurestend to give diverse, often contradictory advice.

Meanwhile, an alarming portion of the population, and even of the scientific community, are apparently indifferent to nutritional science altogether. Fewer than 20% of medical schools in the U.S. have a single required course on nutrition, and the majority of medical schools teach less than 25 hours of nutrition education in the four years it takes to complete an MD program. All this, despite the fact that diet-related diseasemuch as heart disease and type 2 diabetesare among the leading causes of death in the U.S. today.

Our diet-obsessed culture is constantly searching for a magic bullet to fix all the diet-related problems we face. We try complicated, often punishing, and sometimes even dangerous methods to, ostensibly, get healthy (often a euphemism for lose weight), based on so-called empirical evidence thats shaky at best. The fact is, nutritional science just isnt at a point where we can confidently dole out sweeping directives on how people should eat. Sure, there are some points that the medical community has reached some degree of consensus on: The American Heart Association tells us that eating a lot of meat is not a healthy way to lose weight, especially for folks who have or are at risk for heart disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says to avoid processed food and sugary drinks in order to lower our risk of heart disease and stroke. And the American Cancer Society tells us to eat a variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

Eat your veggies and avoid soda are probably not groundbreaking bits of advice for most people, and theyre certainly not going to sell any flashy new diet books. Anyone whos spouting granular advice on exactly what and what not to eat is probably operating more on faith than facts. Perhaps a 100% vegan diet is the healthiest way for humans to eat, after allbut we just dont know for sure. Its past time vegan influencers and activists embrace that scientific reality. The credibility of veganism, and the future of a more sustainable and compassionate world, depend on it.

See the original post:

Vegans need to stop exaggerating the health benefits of a plant-based diet - Fast Company

We are called to be completely faithful.

That line stood out to me in Cardinal Thomas Collins homily on June 26. These words inspired me to step back and reflect on what total commitment to our Catholic faith looks like in a society tempting us to compromise on our Christian values.

Various ideologies are all over the airwaves. There are consequences if you dont fall in line with the prevailing social doctrine.

Collins, continuing his homily, said as believers we are called to expect rejection, in which in some cases means death; in our part of the world it means marginalization and laughter, and maybe being fired if you hold clear to your Christian principles in the face of woke attitude if thats a word I dont know if thats a word, but its a reality.

In short, its difficult. Being true and uncompromising presents a huge drawback, tainting the individual in the eyes of the society. The pressure and allure to conform can cause you to betray your beliefs and moral standing just so that you will not fall into this despair. You will be the black sheep and outlaw. Very few feel comfortable inviting such characters into their world.

In a recent podcast, Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube personality Jordan Peterson interviewed Rod Dreher about his new book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. The conversation begins with Dreher explaining his inspiration for the book named after the famous words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist who equates lies with ideology, the illusion that human nature and society can be reshaped to predetermined specifications.

Solzhenitsyn wrote these words in an essay for his followers, stating they cant say what they think in totalitarian Russia. What we can do is refuse to say what we do not think. Its the power that we have: to refuse to speak lies, to refuse to assent to lies when they are spoken around us.

Dreher spoke to Soviet and Czechoslovakian migrants tabout the similarities of todays American political atmosphere with the communist leadership from which they fled. One migrant was a former prisoner tortured for four years before release simply because she refused to stop going to church.The mother spoke of the things that she had left behind and what she sees now.

Dreher recalled her testimony to Peterson: It is the fact that people are terrified to say what they really think. She was talking about that people could lose their businesses, could lose their jobs simplify for having the wrong opinion.

These all seem to be part of a totalitarianism mindset.

Dreher observed it wasnt quite the totalitarianism described in the likes of George Orwells 1984.

I have come to understand that this is a softer form, a different form. Its a totalitarianism built on comfort, and status, and well-being. We cant really see it because we are looking to the past to tell us what totalitarianism is.

We are living in a new world now. A world that advocates for freedom of ideologies and speech, but only if it adheres and advances a particular societal vision.

Collins urged us to counteract this prevailing force with complete intentional discipleship and to be ardent though gentle servants of The Lord.

Embrace this wisdom my fellow believers. We must speak the truth as hard and difficult as it may be. There are all kinds of agendas designed to make living openly Christian difficult and uncomfortable. So, we must learn and study Gods Holy Word to arm and defend ourselves.

Its no longer just a matter of believing, its being purposeful. In our world of confusion and lies, the least that we can do is know the truth, understand the truth and stand by the truth.

(Ducepec, 23, is a recent Bachelor of Science graduate from the University of Toronto)

Originally posted here:

Stand by and for the truth - The Catholic Register

Last Monday, the roof of the House of Commons chamber contrived to leak. This adds to the long list of hazards asbestos, sewage leaks, crumbling masonry, fire risk that I described in the Observer two weeks ago, along with the mind-bending 7bn-13bn estimate for putting them right. The daunting scale of the problem prompts in many an understandable reaction, that it would be better to relocate parliament to an entirely new building. The palace, though, as a globally famous monument, will still have to be restored, whether or not MPs and lords continue to work there.

An alternative way to reduce cost would be to think the unthinkable about heritage. For a feature of the building is the sheer expanse of intricate interior detail, much of which is never seen by the public. It is like a big fat Victorian novel that doesnt know when to stop. Is it essential to the buildings beauty and significance that absolutely all this detail be retained and reconstructed? Does world heritage truly need mile after mile of Victorian double-flock wallpaper and linenfold oak panelling? The answer, from parliamentarians, would probably be a scandalised yes, we do need to keep it all. In which case, subject to robust scrutiny of the costings, the bill will have to be paid.

I hesitate to spend time and space on Jordan Peterson, the Socrates of toxic masculinity, the Abraham for incels, whose attention-seeking statements are the intellectual equivalent of a small boy making farting noises. But, given that he is still treated respectfully by leading newspapers, it feels useful to point out how repulsive are some of his views.

He argues in a recent video that Putins war on Ukraine is sort-of justified. Russians think, he claims, that those westerners are so out of their mind, that a devastated but neutral Ukraine is preferable to a functional bordering state aligned with the US and Europe. Russians believe they have a moral duty to oppose the degenerate ideas of the west, he concludes. Theres something about that that is not wrong.

Peterson bases his argument on a refusal by the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to define the word woman, even though her own womanhood, given that Biden had promised to appoint someone female and black to the court, was a factor in her nomination.

This refusal, says Peterson, breached the principle of non-contradiction, which means that anyone who goes along with it has become insane. Thus, somehow, the bombing of maternity hospitals and shopping malls, the murder, torture and rape of civilians, the obliteration of cities are almost reasonable, not to mention Putins well-known perversions of truth and logic. I am sorry, but who is the degenerate here?

A 285-metre tower has been proposed for 55 Bishopsgate in the City of London, potentially the third tallest in the country. Its your usual big glassy thing, except for a pattern of curving lines on its exterior. The developer Schroders Capital says it resembles the shape of a leaf, echoing its meaningful connections to natural elements.

This puts it in the same category of supertall plant metaphors as the thankfully cancelled plan to build a giant tulip in the City. There is only one possible response: no, its not a leaf. Its nothing like a leaf. It doesnt function like a leaf. It is 74,000 square metres of office space and it is banal to call it something else.

Rowan Moore is the Observers architecture correspondent

Here is the original post:

The Palace of Westminster must be saved, but not the vast expanse of interior detail - The Guardian

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

When people say the Secret Services job is to protect the president, they usually mean it in a physical waynot a political one.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The motto of the U.S. Secret Service is Worthy of trust and confidence, but recently the agency has put that to the test.

This week, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, which houses the Secret Service, informed Congress that the agency had deleted text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021the day before and day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that sought to disrupt the certification of Joe Bidens victory in the 2020 presidential electioneven though the inspector generals office had requested that they be preserved as part of an investigation. (The IG is an in-house watchdog, whose powers are furnished by Congress.) The agency claimed that the messages were lost because of a device-replacement program, according to the inspector generals letter, which was first reported by The Intercept.

A spokesperson angrily contested the insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request, claiming it had independently begun resetting devices in January 2021 and saying that no texts were actually lost. (In a dark twist, the inspector generals office is itself under investigation for undisclosed alleged misconduct.) The chair of the House committee investigating Donald Trumps attempt to overturn the election said his panel would try to reconstruct the messages.

Well see where this story leads, but the Secret Service has long since forfeited the benefit of the doubt. Agencies try to flout their watchdogs all the time, and their excuses are frequently flimsy. But deleting records like this is pretty brazen, and if youre willing to take the Secret Services excuse at face value, Ive got some counterfeit $20 bills very real legal tender Id like to offer you at a very reasonable price.

The disappearance of the texts fits with the agencys recent pattern of behavior. As the Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, the foremost chronicler of the contemporary Secret Service, has written, The Secret Services claim of being politically independent was tested by Trumps tenure in the White House. In one major example, a high-ranking Secret Service official, Tony Ornato, made a deeply unusual move from a civil-service job to being deputy White House chief of staff. New agents were assigned to Bidens protective detail when he took office, reportedly because of concerns that the old agents were too politically close to Trump.

Mystery shrouds the agencys work on January 6especially with records missing. During his speech at the infamous rally on January 6, Trump told attendees to march on the Capitol, and reportedly wanted to go himself. Secret Service agents refused to allow him, citing security concerns. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the House committee investigating January 6 that Ornato recounted to her what happened next: Trump supposedly lunged at the steering wheel of a presidential SUV and tried to force an agent to drive him to the Capitol. Through a spokesperson, the Secret Service denied the story, and neither Ornato nor the agent have spoken about it publicly. But CNN reports that similar stories were circulating within the Secret Service for months, and a D.C. police officer reportedly corroborated the account as well.

Agents were involved in another strange episode a little later on January 6. As the Trump-incited mob breached the Capitol, Vice President Mike Pence was whisked to safety, and his security detail reportedly sought to get him into his armored limousine. But Pence refused, reportedly fearing that the agents would remove him from the building, which might have further disrupted the certification of Bidens win.

The agencys independence isnt the only thing that looks shaky: so does the other pillar of its reputation, competence. This week, an employee staffing Bidens trip to Israel was sent home after a reported physical altercation with a woman there. (This isnt the first time an employee has been shipped back to the States for bad behavior.) In April, the FBI alleged that two men impersonating federal agents had fooled the Secret Service. And earlier this month, Biden announced that the agencys chief was leaving to join the social-media company Snap (where at least he wont have to worry about preserving his messages).

These incidents are just part of a string of snafus dating back more than a decade. During the Obama administration, the Secret Service allowed people to fire shots at the White House, permitted an armed guard to ride an elevator with the president, got into trouble overseas, and had car accidents after drinking. Officials were repeatedly sackedincluding one who was investigating agents visiting sex workers overseas, until he himself was arrested in a prostitution investigation.

This sort of haplessness is entertaining when its the Keystone Kops doing it on celluloid. But when the issues involved are as serious as the life of the president or attempts to subvert an election, laughter doesnt come so easily.

Related:

Seriously, Whats Making All These Mysterious Space Signals?

By Marina Koren

Astronomy can be, in some ways, a bit like the classic board game Clue. Scientists explore a sprawling but ultimately contained world, collecting pieces of information and testing out theories about a big mystery. You cant cover every corner, but with the right combination of strategy and luck, you can gather enough clues to make a reasonable guess at the tidy answerwho, where, and howenclosed in a little yellow envelope at the center of it all.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Read. Ingrid Rojas Contrerass new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, explores the legacy of her grandfather, a community healer who was said to have magical gifts.

Or spend your weekend with something else from our list of 21 books to match your mood.

Watch. The new FX/Hulu series The Bear is a study of masculinity in crisis, and it captures a toxic workplace like no other show has.

Looking for a movie? Here are 25 feel-good options youll want to watch again and again.

And theres always Netflixs adaptation of Jane Austens Persuasion, which our writer Helen Lewis found enjoyable despite the bizarreness of its modernization.

Play our daily crossword.

Thanks for reading this week. Its been a privilege to helm this ship for a few nautical miles, and I appreciate your eyeballs and emails. When Im not writing this newsletter or chronicling the every move of Donald J. Trump or reporting on criminal justice and voting rights, I moonlight as a jazz writer here. Im going to send you off to the weekend with a track from one of the best records in the genre this year, Immanuel Wilkinss The 7th Hand. Wilkins is a 24-year-old alto saxophonist from Philadelphia who already seems to be one of his generations defining jazz musicians. As my friend Gio Russonello has noted, Wilkinss music seamlessly traverses straight-ahead jazz, gospel, the avant-garde, and even contemporary R&B. The outwardly tranquil, subtly intense (home in on Kweku Sumbrys drums) track Fugitive Ritual, Selah is a good ramp into the weekend.

David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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The Shame of the Secret Service - The Atlantic

Kindness, what a novel idea

Dear Editor:

I was out walking my dog on Argyle Street at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning.

Someone from a nearby apartment building, yelled for me to turn around only to discover a large deer coming toward me.

I scooped up my dog and yelled toward the animal but it kept coming; at one point it charged at me.

I dodged between parked cars yelling at the deer, looking for rocks to throw.

However, my dog was getting heavy and I was afraid to look away from the deer to grab a rock from the ground.

I was in trouble.

A white car was passing by and realized what was going on.

This very kind gentleman used his car (going round and round in circles) to come between myself and this deer (who seemed to be getting more agitated and coming at me with more speed and aggression.)

The deer wasnt giving up so this gentleman allowed me to get in his car and he drove me up the road further away from that block.

I am so sorry that I didnt get his name, but I want to thank him, whoever he is, for being aware of what was going on and taking the time to help me.

Kindness, wow! What a novel idea.

Thank you so much.

Fiona Nicholson

Penticton

Let the Germans police themselves

Dear Editor:

MP Dan Albas asked if Canada should allow components for the Nordstream gas pipeline to be returned to Germany so that the flow of natural gas from Russia to Germany can continue in spite of economic sanctions. I say yes.

Let the Germans police themselves on consumption of Russian energy. The Germans painted themselves into this corner with their green politics and their addiction to Russian gas and oil. They can figure their own way out and offer whatever alibis they want to Ukraine.

We helped police the Germans twice in the last century; and both times they went back to acting on their own interests and making choices with the resulting consequences. On the plus side, theyve lost their appetite for marching on Paris and Warsaw.

On the downside, theyve disarmed and become vulnerable by slaving themselves to Russian gas supplies. Angela Merkel, a product of the East German Communist youth movement, may prove to be the most effective Soviet mole, ever.

German Greens declared that nuclear and coal were verboten and that wind and solar were the way of the future. Too bad it didnt work out for them. Theyre now frantically re-activating coal fired electrical plants and are planning to supplant gas from Russia with gas from Azerbaijan.

Thats not necessarily a certain solution as those pipelines pass through Turkey, and the Turks are also a conduit for Russian gas and oil. The Turks will extract their pound of flesh in return; perhaps a short cut to EU membership which theyve been after for some time.

Theres no immediate solution for the EUs dependence on Russian energy. Theyre exactly where they put themselves, and are financing Putins aggression in Ukraine to the tune of 1 billion Euros daily.

Its a sure bet that Putin will tweak the gas valves this winter to remind the Europeans of their vulnerabilities. EU countries are already making contingency plans for electricity and gas rationing and designation of public warming spaces. The threat of gas disruption will become a major political issue, and may cause the Germans and others to suck back on their economic sanctions and arms supplies to the detriment of Ukraine.

The Germans are re-learning the lessons of Bismarck- style realpolitik the hard way; only this time Putin is the teacher. Canada is mostly a spectator, but hopefully were drawing the right conclusions from this mess.

John Thompson

Kaleden

Todays Conservatives seem a lot like Trump

Dear Editor:

I dont support Jordan Peterson in any way, but I must admit that he has a cult-like following much like Trump 45. I recall a Telegraph interview when he was asked Are you a prophet? and after some hesitation his response was Id have to think about that. Really?

Since that time he has completed his journey back to God and it is apparent that he wants to be viewed as a prophet and possible leader of the Conservative party.

He has a great comradery with his fellow thesaurus-toting supporter Rex Murphy, and as well enjoys much idolization by Pierre Poilievre the potential leader of the Conservatives. What really concerns me is Pierre Poilievres support of many of Petersons principles:

Freedom. From vaccinations, from taxes to support the less-fortunate, from social safety nets, for the right to protest no matter the cost to society. Individual rights supersede societal rights. In other words, there is no common good concept. The wealthy again benefit.

Gatekeepers. Immigrants must be free to practice their profession. It matters not if they can or cannot pass the professional standards required by Canadian law.

Finances. Although his education is in foreign relationships, he is now a financial expert and would fire anyone who disagrees with him. Inflation is not a global problem caused by a pandemic which reduced the amount of goods being produced, greatly damaged supply chains, and caused global problems. No, its Justin Trudeaus fault.

Poilievre cannot understand that investors are leery of the fossil-fuel industry, and therefore oil companies are not drilling, but rather hoarding the profits.

Both Peterson and Poilievre are now experts on everything. They kind of remind me of someone south of our border (T45). The consolation I have is the knowledge that a great number of Conservatives do not share Poilievres values and certainly most Canadians do not. He may win the Conservative leadership race, but he will never be prime minister.

Patrick MacDonald

Kelowna

Kingdom of poverty is to be defeated

Dear Editor:

It goes without saying too much that the letter of Joy Lang (Herald, July 12) did not favour a particularly friendly view of Catholics. It may astonish some to know that in the church we have to suffer as much from institution members as we do from the world around us.

I agree with Joy that the kingdom of poverty is to be defeated by all means possible; aiming, I add, to enrich, awaken and honour the souls of those plunged into hell on earth. This is missing in our modern world vision of what it is to assist a human being.

Pope Francis has said, So many programs for assistance, but few for true existence.

I meet my share of street people and what I now find is an enhanced sense of entitlement to relief. No one is confessing, that the worst day of my life was when I opted for the kingdom of illicit drugs. Today there are so many people enjoying victimhood that it is difficult for them to exit this disastrous world of despair. All kinds of failed services are offered to them, from government money; even abortion services.

Confession is good for the soul and conversions are one by one. One of the Italian priests was telling us that after the 2nd world was a man in his parish kept up a constant lament for his life: when I was prisoner of war. One day he astonished the priest by saying, I want to confess myself. He had discovered that there was so much to be grateful for and that really life does ultimately offer a fair deal. In Church life, beyond all the shadows, he had found the riches hidden in Jesus.

Pope Francis has broken through into a whole other emphasis regard the role of the Church. People are looking for meaning, enrichment, conversion and hope. John the Baptist aroused in people a deep dissatisfaction about their lives, especially those who had given up hoping. He gave them a new zest for life. They were given a new determination in their souls to abandoned the kingdom where self pity rules.

Fr. Harry Clarke

Penticton

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Letters to the Editor: Thursday, July 21, 2022 | Opinion | pentictonherald.ca - pentictonherald.ca

I was lined up in a mall outside a jungle gym, braving the closed-circuit plumes of COVID to tire out my kids on a glorified cat scratch tower, when I heard the child behind us ask, Daddy, why do those kids have masks? Do I need one?

The child was talking about my kids.

Oh, no sweetie, the father said, masks dont do anything, some people just wear them to feel good about themselves.

He pointed the dickish remark at my back, at my tatty leggings, my halo of unfoiled roots, but also at my children, running in circles, the only victims of the Liberal Mask Agenda in the whole place.

Adrienne Rich, among others, impelled me to turn around. The man wore his toddler about his shoulders like a pelt, the spoils of war. Also cargo shorts.

Whats your problem with masks, man? I asked as calmly as I could in my mask.

I dont have a problem, youre the ones making it a thing, he replied.

You brought it up, buddy. Im just standing in line for a jungle gym.

Here, the mass paused, gripping the shins of the child on his shoulders, then shouted, You dont have permission to talk to me! He turned toward his wife, who was holding the shopping bags, and fixed his gaze over her head, waiting for me to turn back around.

As I fumed and prepared to drop $50 on entry and specialized socks, I listened to him jostling his son behind me. I can do what I want with you, youre mine, he said in a kind of joking tone, certain once again that he was king of the place at the mall with the giant bumblebee mascot.

So often in literature, parenthood appears on the male as a kind of pelt thrown over like a prize. Something has been given to the fathersome knowledge or form of powerbut he has trouble decoding it, except maybe as an author.

Paul, the divorced intellectual Park Slope dad at the center of Teddy Waynes The Great Man Theory, has long wanted to teach his daughter something. When Mabel was small, he read to her: Often she fell asleep as he read, and the moment she succumbed, curled up on him like a shrimp, had always made him feel most like a parent. She has clearly come into her own, but he continues to see her as an extension of his own ego: Mabel is his little baby girl whose vulnerability had given him a sense of mission beyond himself.

Paul is an academic, if one demoted from staff to adjunct in the opening pages of the novel, and his daughter, now a tween, has begun to distance herself from her clueless dad who is soon living with his own mother in the Bronx. Paul tries to muscle through the disconnect with his powers of analysis, casting back to her birth: When Mabel was delivered and thrust into his unpracticed arms, he supposed he felt something, thought it was more an acknowledgement of the moments historical import rather than overwhelming love for this wizened homunculus of a stranger who was about to upend his heretofore streamlined life. You can see how great Paul might have been to have around in the difficult early days of parenting.

Ten years later, his ex-wife Jane has a new partner (she has also betrayed their values by getting Botox), and his daughter spends weekends with Paul, for whom the raw magic of her existence hadnt faded. Parenthood had opened up his frigid soul, creating a Mabel-sized space in his heart, an unexpected warm spot in an ice-cold lake. And she continued to give him a reason, in his newly destitute adjunct state, to make something of himself, so he redoubles his efforts on his book, The Luddite Manifesto; something that will disrupt the status quo in ailing Americait will rail against anti-intellectual cable pap, against Trump, and against the dumbing down of children by social mediaand something, like 99 percent of manifestos, that no one wants to read. It will be published by a university press.

Wayne specializes in this kind of alienated, troubling man. In Loner, his unreliable narrator, a smart, awkward Harvard undergraduate, took just a few chapters to go from social miscues to incel predation (Loner came out the year before Cat Person). The Love Song of Johnny Valentine followed an over-managed Bieberesque child star doomed by his industry and was published the year before Biebers entitlement culminated in his being hoisted up the Great Wall of China on his bodygurds shoulders.

The Great Man Theory leaps ahead of the parenting discourse, lets call it, to ask what dads are bringing to the table, and to explore the undercurrent of panic about the End of Men. Paul is smart enough to know men are a problem, and sensate enough to get a whiff of toxic masculinity, but convinced that he, center of the universe, is the only person who can fix it: He is a man writing to ward off global and personal crises; he needed to prove to his family that he had the stability and gravity of a sun.

The psychology professor Jordan Shapiro observed in his book Father Figure: How To Be A Feminist Dad that men are brought up to see themselves as the dominant narrative in a household; protagonists on a heros journey, as in popular man-texts like Robert Blys Iron John: A Book About Men and the work of Jordan Peterson.

As parables attempting to explain our existence go, Iron John is cuckoo bananas. The base story (Im paraphrasing) is that all men have in them a child who must steal a golden key from under his mothers pillow, unlock a cage containing a wild, hairy man to retrieve a golden ball, then journey out into the jungle where he can become a warrior and awaken his inner Wild Manthe missing piece of himself that will trigger healing from the absent father and give him Zeus energy. Think men howling around campfires in the mid-90s.

Bly, part of the mythopoetic movementthe New Age but just for menbelieved that separation from the mother is a key rite of passage for boys, though something moms get in the way of under our current societal structure: A clean break from the mother is crucial, but its simply not happening. Bly warns of female tripod rage and of the she-wolves a boy may encounter in the woods, and takes some strange turns in issuing warnings about the mother-child relationship:

A mans moustache may stand for his pubic hair. A friend once grew a moustache when he was around thirty. The next time he visited his mother, she looked into the corners of the room as she talked to him, and would not look at his face, no matter what they talked about. Hair, then, can represent sexual energy.

Still, Blys ideas were a stepping stone from the patriarchal alpha prototype to something better, and a response to Feminism; he believed that men had female and male energy inside of them, and made a case for the expressive mens movement. Had Paul been a Park Slope dad in the 90s, you could see Iron John appealing to his intellectual sensibilities.

From the distance of an additional quarter century, though, a new kind of fragility runs through manhood: a fear of cancel culture, to extinguish the men who mess things up. And Paul is quite far from unleashing his Wild Manhis 80-something mother is having more sex than he, and Paul finds himself mopping someone elses semen out of the backseat of her car that he uses for his work as a rideshare driver. The key is back under the mothers pillow.

Paul is painted as an Encino Man dug up from an earlier age when mens ideas were deemed important and their place in society unshakeable. You do feel a bit bad for him, just barely grasping the most rudimentary shapes of a typical parents existential awakening: His baby. Strange that after thirty-five years of independent selfhood, with relatives reaching backward in fixed history, he was now permanently linked with a human hurtling toward an undefined future.

Needless to say, mothers are light years ahead in charting this territory. I have created a death, chimes Samantha Hunt, whose ghost story and journey through the woods Mr. Splitfoot is profoundly successful where Iron John is mostly confusing. How can I become a god? the hero of Rachel Yoders Nightbitch asks, skipping to the heart of the matter. For Nightbitch, birth and motherhood bring a terrifying and complicated shift in power: She had that freedom when she gave birth, had screamed and shat and sworn and would have killed had she needed to.

How can men compete with that?

Just before The Great Man Theory came Raising Raffi, Keith Gessens memoir of early parenthood. There were quite a few moments that leapt out at me, including this recollection of his wifes (the writer Emily Gould) home birth: At one point, when Emily was on the bed, just before the babys head started coming out, a geyser of blood shot out from her vagina.

In this, I do indeed see a case for men as witnesses to birth, with access to an angle women cant see, unless, I regret, with a hand mirror. Gessen has written an examination of the fatherhood condition, plumbing his own aggression and impotence, revising coarser Jungian ideas about the father-child situation as he goes:

Raffi did not want to kill me and marry Emily. It was more complicated and difficult than that. What he wanted was all her attention even as he also wanted to be his own person. He wanted to re-create the relationship theyd once had, when he was smaller, but in a way that it could no longer be re-created.

It is a proper reckoning. Understanding that the breastfeeding dyad can be hard for a dad to crack, he works to occupy a larger and more positive role as Raffi reaches toddlerdom, and grapples with his own eventual uselessness: I think now that there is no tragedy like the tragedy of parenthood, writes Gessen. There is no other thing you do in life only so that the person you do it for can leave you. Here, he hits on what I understand as key themes of writing about motherhood: the figurative death that takes place, the invisible work of care, the confrontation with your own shadow in your childs personality, the knowledge that you arent writing the story in the end. Gessen is welcome at my witchy mom bonfire anytime.

When I otherwise think of the literature of good fathers, it often concerns surrogate fathers (Goodnight Mr. Tom, Heidi, The Box Car Children), or grief for a lost father (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the wonderful H Is For Hawk). All of Shakespeares dads are terrible, likewise those of Steinbeck and Woolf. I guess we have Doctor Manette and Atticus Finch, proto-Brooklyn dad (whose outsized presence covered for the absence of Harper Lees abusive mother), Jaysons Greenes Once More We Saw Stars, and the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard and for good and wrenching and complicated dad thoughts. There are also a slew of dad manifestosBetween The World and Me, Dreams From My Fatherwhich nevertheless get us back to dad as author.

If Paul doesnt, in fact, have anything particularly worthwhile to say as an academic, or as a dad granted a cosmic glimpse of himself as a speck in the wider universe of humanity, you have to ask yourself what the point of him is. How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didnt know what to do with theirs? asked Rachel Yoder. How easyhow wrong but easy nonethelessit would be to walk away from it all, thinks the hero of Lydia Kieslings Golden State, who is trying to help her Turkish partner gain access to the U.S., but otherwise spends the novel with their child Honey, traversing the state of motherhood:

a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkap, something like the Alhambra on a winter morning, some well-trod but magnificent place youre allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out and youll never remember every individual jewel of a room but if youre lucky you go through another and another and another and another until they turn out the lights.

The sadness of Pauls irrelevance comes late in the book when he, touchingly, delivers the terrarium he has built and tended with Mabel to Mabels stepdad Steve, a seemingly great dad, the kind you or I might know:

Contained in his arms was the small world theyd created over the years: new bugs, new worms, new soil, but the same pebbles that theyd first collected together in the park when Mabel was a little girl.

Its better off with you, he told Steve, and handed over the tank.

Lauren, the cable news producer he is seeing, informs him that she will be having a child by donor, but is happy to date in the meantime. By this point he has been fully cut loose from the university, after a female student reported him for being a creep.

After he carries out his last bad idea, his ex-wife and daughter will find it quite easyif wrongto walk away from him, and thats the real tragedy, one he might not even understand.

See more here:

A Great Man Is Hard to Find: On the Literature of Contemporary Fatherhood - Literary Hub

from the not-to-be-dogmatic... dept

Antonio Garca Martnez recently invited me on his podcast, The Pull Request. I was thrilled. Antonio is witty, charming, and intimidatingly brilliant (he was a PhD student in physics at Berkeley, and it shows). We did the episode, and we had a great time. But we never got to an important topicAntonios take on free speech and the Internet.

In April, Antonio released a piece on his Substack, Freeze peach and the Internet, in which he asserts the existence of a content moderation regime that is utterly re-defining speech in liberal societies. That regime wants, Antonio contends, to arbitrate truth and regulate online behavior for the sake of some supposed greater good. It is opposed by those who still support freedom of speech. Antonio believes that the regime and its opponents are locked in an epic battle, and that we all must pick a side.

Im not sure what to make of some of Antonios claims. Were told, for instance, that freedom of reach is freedom of speechwhich sounds like a nod to the New Lefts call, in the 1960s and 70s, to seize the means of communication. But then were told that Twitter isnt obligated to give you reach if user interest in your speech is low. So Antonio is not demanding reach equality. Its simply not the case, he says, that freedom of speech is some legal binary switched between an abstract allow/not-allow state. Maybe, then, the point is that we must think about the effects of algorithmic amplification. Who is ignoring or attacking that point, I do not know.

At any rate, a general critique of Antonios article this post is not.

In 1951 Willard Van Orman Quine, one of the great analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, wrote a short paper called Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Quine put to the torch two key assumptions made by the logical positivists, a philosophical school popular in the first half of the century. Antonio, in his piece, promotes two key assumptions commonly made by those who fear Big Tech censorship. If Mike Masnick can riff on Arrows impossibility theorem to explain why content moderation is so difficult, I figure I can riff on Quines dogmas paper to explore two ways in which the fears of online censorship by private platforms are overblown. As were about to see, in fact, Quines work can teach us something valuable about content moderation.

Antonios first dogma is the belief that either youre for free speech, or youre notyoure for the censors and the would-be arbiters of truth. His second is the belief that Twitter is the public square, and that the state of the restrictions there is the proper gauge of the state of free speech in our nation as a whole. With apologies to H.L. Mencken, these dogmas are clear, simple, and wrong.

Dogma #1: Free Speech: With Us or Against Us

AGM insists that the debate about content moderation boils down to a single overriding divide. The real issue, he saysthe issue the consensus pro-censorship crowd will never directly addressis this:

Do you think freedom of speech includes the right to say and believe obnoxious stupid shit thats almost certainly false, or do you feel platforms have the responsibility to arbitrate truth and regulate online behavior for the sake of some supposed greater good?

Thats it. If you think that dumb and even offensive speech is protected speech, youre on the Elon [Musk] side of this debate. Otherwise, you think that platforms should be putting their fingers on the scales, and youre therefore on the anti-Elon side. As if to add an exclamation point, Antonio declares: Some countries have real free speech, and some countries have monarchs on their coins. (Ive seen it said, in a similar vein, that all anyone really cares about is political censorship, and that thats the key issue the consensus pro-censorship crowd wont grapple with.)

Antonio presents a nice, neat dividing line. Theres the stuff no one likesAntonio points to dick pics, beheading videos, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech that incites violenceand then theres peoples opinions. All the talk of content moderation is just obfuscationan elaborate effort to hide this clear line. Quibbling over the precise content policy in the pro-content moderation view, Antonio warns, is just haggling over implementation details, and essentially ceding the field to that side of the debate.

The logical positivists, too, wanted some nice, neat lines. Bear with me.

Like most philosophers, the LPs wanted to know what we can know. One reason arguments often go in circles, or bog down in confusion, is that humans make a lot of statements that arent so much wrong as simply meaningless. Many sentences dont connect to anything in the real world over which a productive argument can be had. (Extreme example: the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress.) The LPs wanted to separate the wheat (statements of knowledge) from the chaff (metaphysical gobbledygook, empty emotive utterances, tribal call signs, etc.). To that end, they came up with something called the verification principle.

In 1936 a brash young thinker named A.J. Ayerthe AGM of early twentieth century philosophypublished a crisp and majestic but (as Ayer himself later admitted) often mistaken book, Language, Truth & Logic, in which he set forth the verification principle in its most succinct form. Can observation of the world convince us of the likely truth or falsity of a statement? If so, the statement can be verified. And a sentence, Ayer argued, says nothing unless it is empirically verifiable. Thats it.

Problem: mathematics and formal logic seem to reveal usefulindeed, surprisingthings about the world, but without adhering to the verification principle. In the LPs view, though, this was just a wrinkle. They postulated a distinction between good, juicy synthetic statements that can be verified, and drab old analytic statements that, according to (young) Ayer, are just games we play with definitions. (A being whose intellect was infinitely powerful would take no interest in logic and mathematics. For he would be able to see at a glance everything that his definitions implied[.])

So the LPs had two dogmas: that a sentence either does or does not refer to immediate experience, and that a sentence can be analytic or synthetic. But as Quine explained in his paper, these pat categories are rubbish. He addressed the latter dogma first, raising a number of problems with it that arent worth getting into here. (For one thing, definitions are set by human convention; their correct use is open to empirical debate.) He then took aim at the verification principleor, as he put it, the dogma of reductionismitself.

The logical positivists went wrong, Quine observed, in supposing that each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation. Its misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement, he explained, because statements face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body. There arent two piles of statementsthose that can be verified and those that cant. Rather, the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even pure mathematics and logic, is a continuous man-made fabric. As we learn new things, truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others. Our knowledge is not a barrel of apples that we go through, apple-by-apple, keeping the ripe ones and tossing the rotten. It is, in the words of philosopher Simon Blackburn, a jelly of belief, the whole of which quiver[s] in reaction to recalcitrant or surprising experience.

See how this ties into content moderation? Steve Bannon was booted from Twitter because he said: Id put [Anthony Faucis and Christopher Wrays] heads on pikes. Right. Id put them at the two corners of the White House. As a warning to federal bureaucrats: Either get with the program or youre gone. Is this just an outlandish opinionsome obnoxious stupid shit thats almost certainly falseor is it an incitement to violence? Why is this statement different from, say, Id put Gentles and Funshines heads on pikes . . . as a warning to the other Care Bears?

When Donald Trump told the January 6 rioters, We love you. Youre very special, was that political speech? Or was it sedition? As with heads on pikes, the statement itself wont answer that question for you. The same problem arises when Senate candidate Eric Greitens invites you to go RINO hunting, or when a rightwing pundit announces that the Consitution is null and void. And who says we must look at each piece of content in isolation? Say the Oath Keepers are prevalent on your platform. Theyre not planning an insurrection right now; theyre just riling each other up and getting their message out and recruiting. Is this just (dumb) political speech? Or is it more like a slowly developing beheading video? (If a platform says, Dont care where you go, guys, but you cant stay here, is it time to put monarchs on our coins?)

Similar issues arise with harassment. Doxxing, deadnaming, coordinated pile-ons, racist code words, Pepe memesall present line-drawing issues that cant be resolved with appeals to a simple divide between bad opinions and bad behavior. In each instance, we have no choice but to quibbl[e] over the precise content policy. Disagreement will reign, moreover, because each of us will enter the debate with a distinct set of political, cultural, contextual, and experiential priors. To some people, Jordan Peterson deadnaming Elliot Page is obviously harassment. To others (including, I confess, myself), his doing so pretty clearly falls within the rough-and-tumble of public debate. But that disagreement is not, at bottom, about that individual piece of content; its about the entire panoply of clashing priors.

Its great that we have acerbic polemicists like Antonio. Im glad that hes out there pushing his conception of freedom and decrying safety-ism. (Hes on his strongest footing, I suppose, when he complains about the labeling, fact-checking, and blocking of Covid claims.) I hope that he and his swashbuckling ilk never stop defending our American birthright of constant and cantankerous rebellion against the status quo. But its just not true that theres a free speech crowd and a pro-censorship crowd and nothing in between. Content moderation is complicated and difficult, and peoples views about it sit on a continuum.

Dogma #2: The Public Square, Website-by-Website

Antonios other dogma is the viewheld by manythat Twitter is in some meaningful sense the public square. Antonio has some pointed criticisms for those who believe that Twitter isnt the public forum, and as such shouldnt be treated with the sacrosanct respect we typically imbue anything First Amendment-related.

As the second part of that sentence suggests, AGM gets to his destination by an idiosyncratic route. He seems to think that, in other peoples minds, the public square is where solemn and civilized discussion of public issues occurs. But as Antonio points out, theres never been such a place. Were Americans; weve always hashed things out by shouting at each other. Today, one of the places where we shout at each other is on Twitter. Ergo, in Antonios mind, Twitter is the public square.

I dont get it. Everyone invoking some fusty idea of debate or even a healthy marketplace of ideas, Antonio writes, is citing bygone utopias that never were, and never will be. Who is this everyone? Anyway, just because theres a place where debate occurs does not mean that that place is the public square. In 2019 Antonio was saying that we should break up Facebook because it has a stranglehold on attention. So why isnt it the public square? Perhaps its both Twitter and Facebook? But then what about Substackwhere AGM published his piece? What about the many podcast platforms that carry his conversations? What about Rumble and TikTok? Heck, what about Techdirt? The public squareif we really must go about trying to precisely define such a thingis not Twitter but the Internet.

Antonio appeals to the conditions our democracy was born in. The vicious, ribald, scabrous, offensive, and often violent tumult of the Founders era, he notes, makes modern Twitter look like a Mormon picnic by comparison. This begs the question. Look at what Americans are saying on the Internet as a whole; its as vicious, ribald, scabrous, offensive, and violent as you please. If what matters is that our discourse resemble that of the founding era, we can rest easy. Ben Franklins brother used his publication, The New-England Courant, to rail against smallpox inoculation; modern anti-vaxxers use Gab to similar effect. James Callender used newspapers and pamphlets to viciously (but often accurately) attack Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson; Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald use newsletters and podcasts to viciously (but at times accurately) attack Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. In his Porcupines Gazette, William Cobbett cried, Professions of impartiality I shall make none; the website American Greatness boasts about being called a hotbed of far-right Trumpist nationalism. Plus a change . . .

Antonio says that we need unfettered debate in a public square that we shar[e] with our despised political enemies. Surveying the Internet, Id say we have exactly that.

Now, I dont deny that theres a swarm of activists, researchers, academics, columnists, politicians, and government officialsnot to mention the tech companies themselvesthat make up what journalist Joe Bernstein calls Big Disinfo. Not surprisingly, the old gatekeepers of information, along with those who once benefited from greater information gatekeeping, are upset that social media allows information to bypass gates. That the most prestigious liberal institutions of the pre-digital age are the most invested in fighting disinformation, Bernstein submits, reveals a lot about what they stand to lose, or hope to regain. Indeed.

But so what? Theres a certain irony here. The people most convinced that our elite institutions are inept and crumbling are also the ones most concerned that those institutions will take over the Internet, throttle speech, and (toughest of all) reshape opinionall, presumably, without violating the First Amendment. Are the forces of Big Disinfo really that competent? Please.

Antonio and I are both fans of Martin Gurri, whose 2014 book The Revolt of the Public is basically a long meditation on why Antonios content-moderation regime cant succeed. A curious thing happens to sources of information under conditions of scarcity, Gurri proposes. They become authoritative. Thanks to the Internet, however, we are living through an unprecedented information explosion. When theres information abundance, no claim is authoritative. Many claims must compete with each other. All claims (but especially elite claims) are questioned, challenged, and ridiculed. (In this telling, our current tumult is more vicious, ribald, etc., than that of the founding era.) Unable to shut down competing claims, elites cant speak with authority. Unable to speak with authority, they cant shut down competing claims.

Short of an asteroid strike, World War III, the rise of a thoroughgoing despotism, or some kind of Butlerian jihad, the flow of information cant be stopped.

Filed Under: antonio garcia martinez, content moderation, free reach, free speech, public square

Read the rest here:

Two Dogmas Of The Free Speech Panic - Techdirt

A Greek butcher shop selling offal. Photo via Getty Images.

There are many curious things about Evie Magazine, which brands itself as a conservative alternative to mainstream womens magazines. There are, of course, its many weird and wrong claims about COVID vaccines and COVID more generally, which seem aimed at laundering a certain brand of disease denialism to a young, female audience. The magazine also trots out a variety of other essays about feminism (bad), classical femininity (good), and so on. But amidst its many odd little wares, nothing is weirder, or more amusing, than Evies obsession with meatmore specifically, with organ meats. And, as it turns out, the organ meat lifestyleconsuming liver, kidneys, intestines, hearts, testicles, and other edible animal organsis a passion thats now uniting the anti-vaccine world, Joe Rogans audience, the so-called alt-right, conservative outlets like Evie, and, overall, a new and presumably somewhat constipated brand of meatfluencer.

Evie has run many articles extolling the virtues of meat and denouncing vegan alternatives. Nearly all of them link back to a 2021 blog about incorporating offal like hearts and liver into ones diet. The insistent meat takes, and promotion of organ meat specifically, also dovetail with Evies larger project: rejecting whatever smacks of liberalismBeyond Burgers, acknowledging the existence of trans peopleand embracing a traditional or classic lifestyle, in this case the classic lifestyle of a gout-addled medieval king.

As with many things Evie does, its also the result of a strange effect in which much larger cultural forces trickle down. The carnivore dietor, more specifically, an organ meat-centric onehas proved to be a meeting place for a variety of extremely online and highly bizarre people, all intent on showing you how to live, and many promoting one regressive worldview or another in the process.

As VICE wrote in 2017, the paleo dietmeat-heavy, but with nuts and some vegetableshad begun to emerge then as the preferred diet of right- and libertarian-leaning public figures like billionaire vampire Peter Thiel. Soon after, Mikhaila Peterson, the daughter of clinical psychologist and extremely odd manosphere personality Jordan Peterson, began promoting the so-called Lion Diet, which is far more extreme, consisting solely of ruminant meat, salt, and water. (Eating a gazelle would be fine, but an apple would not.) Both Peterson and Fuller have claimed that this diet cured them of many autoimmune issues; objective assessments of the diet tend to point out that its both nutritionally unbalanced and profoundly unsustainable. (The family has made other extreme medical claims: In 2020, Jordan Peterson also spent eight days in a medically-induced coma, an unorthodox detox treatment for what Peterson and his daughter said was an addiction to benzodiazepines. Experts that VICE interviewed at the time questioned some of the details of Mikhailas claims about the care hed received in Canada prior to going to Russia and said such an extreme method of weaning off an addictive medication is rarely used, to reduce the likelihood of relapse.)

The carnivore diet, which is now in vogue online, goes a step further than paleo and is more complicated than the lion diet, often cutting out most food groups besides meat, fruit, and honey. It is, as Dazed Digital recently pointed out, still awash in far-right associations, equating meat with both traditional masculinity and red-pilling, although there are any number of female carnivore diet influencers.

The Carnivore Diet is the red pill that wakes you up to reality, wrote one meatfluencer on Twitter, who goes by Carnivore Aurelius. It's hard at first. Your eyes have been closed for so long, so the light is blinding. But it exposes you to the fact that society is structured around lies. It all starts with diet. This movement is unstoppable. More recently, he celebrated, Everybody is waking up to seed oils, birth control and tap water poisoning them. Grand global awakening happening right now. Beautiful to watch. (Seed oilswhich include nearly all vegetable oilsare another recent target of the extremely online.)

There are a variety of carnivore diet influencers on Instagram and TikTok, all insistently energetic, very red, and constantly in the gym or doing something strenuous in the great outdoors; their feeds are a wash of red plates, bulging muscles, and proclamations about the distant time they last ate a vegetable. One is the Liver King, aka Brian Johnson, an intensely muscled man from Texas who dines on a variety of raw liver, testicles, and an incredibly specific brand of hype, declaring himself CEO OF THE ANCESTRAL LIFESTYLE. (As he told Buzzfeed, speaking in the exuberant third person, You know what Liver King says? Start with liver, get some really good sleep, move like Liver King, eat like Liver King, shield like Liver King. Live like the ancestral man, and youll have the hormone profile thats double or triple of the manicured modern man.)

Perhaps no one in the meat space is more influential than Paul Saladino, the self-proclaimed Carnivore MD. (Saladinos credentials are that he is, his Facebook bio says, Trained in medicine at the University of Arizona and the University of Washington. Board-certified as a Physician Nutrition Specialist and in psychiatry. Licensure records in California, where Saladino lives, though, show that his license to practice is currently listed as delinquent for a failure to pay fees, and that no practice is permitted, according to the California state medical board.)

On his extremely active TikTok and Instagram pages both banned once, accordin to Saladino he makes a variety of claimsfor instance, that spinach and beans are essentially toxic, that hygiene products like soap and toothpaste and shampoo are unnecessary, and above all, that organ meats are crucial. They include everything your body needs to thrive: vitamins, minerals, peptides, proteins, and growth factors, proclaims the website for Saladinos supplement company, Heart and Soil. Thats why our ancestors were strong, virile, and vital! Thats how they thrived generation after generation in the worlds harshest environments. Should you not be able to access beef heart, for instance, on a daily basis, the company sells bottles of encapsulated organ meat-based supplement products, ranging from $28 to $52 a bottle.

Two notable things happened in Saladinos world in the past few years: First, he went on Joe Rogan, back in 2020, rocketing him to a new level of audience and fame. (Rogan himself went on a carnivore diet soon after, prompting a round of explosive diarrhea, as he detailed on a subsequent episode of the show, elaborating, with regular diarrhea I would compare it to a fire you see coming a block or two away and you have the time to make an escape, whereas this carnivore diet is like out of nowhere the fire is coming through the cracks, your doorknob is red hot, and all hope is lost. Just like our ancestors, presumably, shortly before many of them died of dysentery.)

As the pandemic has progressed, Saladino has also used his new, Rogan-inspired reach to become increasingly dismissive of the efficacy of vaccines. Hes not explicitly anti-vaccine, tweeting in August 2021 that they may help avoid some severe Covid complications, for instance. But hes repeatedly suggested, too, that metabolic health is more important in preventing severe COVID outcomes, and claimed that natural immunity is better than the kind created by vaccines. (The claim that natural immunity is superior to vaccination is a common anti-vaccine talking point.) In other words, of course, that a hunk of liver, or a supplement in a bottle, will do more to fight Covid, a claim many health cranks have made throughout the pandemic, in one form or another.

Unsurprisingly, the carnivore diet has also become the purview of the body-hacking crowd, seeking to optimize themselves by engaging in extreme diets. One of the best known is Dave Asprey, the inventor of Bulletproof Coffee, who was ushered into the diet by Saladino. Asprey has become more overtly anti-vaccine, declaring on Facebook, Show me an mRNA vaccine that will stop cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or cancer, with a clean safety record, and I am all in. Willing to wait until then! Hes also approvingly shared posts from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s anti-vax organization Childrens Health Defense, in particular a post praising fringe medical group Americas Frontline Doctorin all a sort of pseudoscience turducken.

Above all, the insistently carnivorous and very online crowd exists both to eat meat and to create buzz and attention for themselves by posting about it (which explains why former Hills star and mid-2000s tabloid staple Heidi Montag, another Saladino devotee, was recently seen out and about munching on a raw bison heart in a sandwich bag for the paparazzi, which she claimed to be eating for fertility).

The meat world is broad and full of self-styled iconoclasts, and their commitment to intense and common sense-bending diets is as strong as their commitment to broadcasting every move they make, every morsel they eat, and every resulting bowel movement online.

Today, then, the anti-vaxxers, the Instagram doctors, the podcasters, and the anti-feminists find themselves at a long table, urging each other to swallow the toughest morsels, the weirdest cuts. Their commitment to not wasting edible food is admirable, and, as a metaphor, well, the whole thing couldnt be more fitting.

Read more here:

Why Are the Weirdest People Online Obsessed With Organ Meats? - VICE

Even with the titanic marketing force of Disney and buzz (no pun intended) around featuring a lesbian couple kissing, Lightyear proved to be a flop. Although it was expected to top the charts and bring in $70 million in its first weekend (a modest goal, all things considered), the movie made $51 million, second behind the newest Jurassic Park installment. For context, Top Gun: Maverick made more than $100 million in its opening weekend.

While its fair to see this as yet another instance of the truism, go woke, go broke, its worth asking why Disney keeps doing this. They have a whole slew of perfectly profitable franchises to tap, and they can churn out blockbusters from any of them without breaking a sweat. Why do they feel the need to shoehorn a scene of lesbians kissing that no asked for? Why did they double-down against their own audience?

Probably the first and foremost reason that Disney executives do this is because they can. They believe they have a monopoly over young audiences and can start treating them like a captive audience. Daniel Greenfield makes a convincing case in Frontpage Mag that this is exactly what Disney is thinking: Disney may have started out feeding the imaginations of children, but now its business model is acquiring intellectual properties with active fandoms and milking the adult fans for every cent. Rest assured, Disney will keep issuing more sequels and spinoffs ad nauseam, knowing full well that their cult-like fandoms will continue to watch them.

When entertaining people becomes secondary, its only natural to propagate a message. These days, that message is diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE, as Jordan Peterson puts it), which has become the standard in all popular entertainment. For example, it was clear Frozen II would make a lot of money just because it was Frozen II, so its creators decided to turn the movie into a convoluted propaganda piece that spoke on the environment, the treatment of indigenous people, and female empowerment. No one seemed to mind that the movie was terrible, and theres little doubt that Disney will make another sequel when the time is right.

However, what really seems to lie at the heart of this decision to promote lesbianism in a kids movie is something much more profound and personal than anyone cares to admit. Disney filmmakers and most of the creative class in Hollywood have become boring. They arent all that interesting, and nothing really interests them. Action, drama, romance, and all the magic of moviemaking doesnt excite them anymore.

Rather, like bored teenagers addicted to TikTok, Disney executives are more interested in identity politics and social justice, and they believe that everyone else is interested in this too. Sure, people may watch the new show about Obi-wan Kenobi because they know and love the character, but whats really going to hook them is the black female antagonist because shes (wait for it) black and female. And, if they dont like her, theyre haters and Disney will delight in taking a quixotic stand against these anonymous bigots.

Wokeness has become a vicious cycle for privileged creators: success makes them bored, so they go woke, but this bores them again, so they double-down on their wokeness, which soon becomes boring, etc. This cycle is then reinforced by social media, which affirms these peoples narcissism and casts their dissatisfied fans as ignorant bigots.

Seen from a healthy distance, this phenomenon of bored filmmakers injecting wokeness in Lightyear makes little sense. How can anyone be bored by a story about a space ranger fighting for his friends on a distant planet? Why would they feel the need to spice this up with wokeness? Was depicting acts of valor against space aliens not enough?

And yet, this is how a woke person sees the world. Discussing a theologians bold (and nonsensical) claim that Jesus was actually a transgender person, Catholic writer Michael Warren Davis notes how narrow this view is: The Bible is the most profound and influential book in the whole history of the world. It contains the philosophy of Jesus Christ, the most important philosopher and mystic in world history Now, imagine if all you could find in those pages was a parable for transvestic fetishism. What a boring little place your head must be.

For most people, this is the real problem with the woke agenda: its boring and predictable. Perhaps a few people were outraged when they heard of the lesbian kiss in Lightyear, but the majority people likely rolled their eyes and muttered, Oh okay. Ill pass then.

Not surprisingly, these peoples suspicions were confirmed. The movie was indeed dull: the characters were flat, the story was dumb, and the themes resonate more with adults suffering from a midlife crisis than with actual kids. Clearly, the creators of the movie were more worried about indulging themselves and crafting woke propaganda than in entertaining audiences. Its the work of bored people putting out a boring product for an increasingly bored audience thats burned out on the wokeness.

Hopefully, filmmakers at Disney can learn from this mistake and break the cycle. The world is so much more than peoples skin color and sexual orientation, and the possibilities for storytelling are endless. These people need to get over their boredom, stop obsessing over diversity and representation, and return to making fun movies that transcend all that and really go to infinity and beyond. Itd be a win-win: Fans would be happy, filmmakers would find purpose again, and the modern entertainment in general would be slightly less mediocre.

Excerpt from:

Dull 'Lightyear' Is Another Victim Of Bored, Woke Filmmakers - The Federalist