May Bazaar
The round up of what's around
Dear friends,
As usual there’s a great deal going on out there, but hopefully this Bazaar will give you a skimmable entry point into current affairs and more. It’s a rather US-centric round up this time, so I’m going to kick off with the latest depressing Free Speech news from Europe….
Free Speech: Europe
The global battle over free expression (and thus citizen democracy, which requires free speech and a free press) continues, and Europe remains the frontline.
This is a good round-up of the issues: “Europe Really Is Jailing People for Online Speech” by Yascha Mounk
Europe’s far-reaching restrictions on free speech have already resulted in many serious miscarriages of justice. They now have a significant chilling effect on the ability to engage in robust political speech, which must include the freedom to express unpopular opinions and to satirize whether in good taste or bad the most powerful people in society. Far from helping European countries contain the extremists now knocking on the doors of power, that chilling of speech has likely turned them into martyrs and grown their public support.
Here’s a quote from The Dispatch’s piece “Free Speech Crumbles in Europe”, but I’ve removed the link since they will make you register to read it and as far as I can tell they then entirely ignore your ‘unsubscribe’ requests:
By American standards, Germany’s limits on free speech have long been shockingly restrictive. As a family friend experienced some two decades ago, even a comparatively innocuous interpersonal altercation can lead to a lengthy court trial. One day, this piano professor at the local music university, a mild-mannered lady who was then already well into her 60s, was cycling to work. When a car cut her off in a way she considered dangerous, she flipped the driver off. A few hours later, the driver was standing at the gate of her university, and demanded that she identify herself. In the end, a court found her guilty of the crime of “insult,” and required her to pay the equivalent of thousands of dollars in fines.
Meanwhile, a report from Scotland from C.J. Strachan entitled “From Enlightenment to Inquisition: The Decline of Scottish Justice in the Age of Offence”:
This case sets a dangerous precedent. By criminalising a joke—regardless of its tastefulness—the Scottish legal system signalled a willingness to suppress speech based on subjective interpretations of offence. This approach undermines the very freedoms that Scotland's legal tradition once championed.
The implications extend beyond this single case. If context and intent are no longer considered, any expression, joke, or satire could be subject to legal action if deemed offensive by someone. This creates a chilling effect, discouraging open discourse and eroding the public's confidence in a fair and impartial justice system.
And the ever vigilant Eugyppius offers this self-explanatory headline: “German prosecutors charge woman for reproducing Nazi symbols after she publishes an image of Health Minister Karl Lauterbach raising his arm at suspicious angle”. Contains strong swearing:
That aside, the message of our poster artist is clear: Covid protestors who wave at the wrong angles are charged with speech crimes, while sitting Health Ministers who do the same thing are left unmolested by prosecutors. As if to prove this point beyond all doubt, prosecutors charged the creator of this poster under the selfsame anti-Nazi statute, although her entire argument is that nobody depicted anywhere on her poster is making Nazi gestures at all, and despite the fact that nobody believes or would argue that Lauterbach was actually throwing Romans in Magdeburg. Interpreting these images otherwise, as the Schweinfurt prosecutors do, reduces the extremely simple message to incoherence.
Free Speech: USA
The situation is only slightly better in the United States, but the First Amendment has not collapsed yet, despite the best efforts of both the political parties.
I very much appreciated this rant from the excellent Matt Taibbi of Racket: “No, State Media and Democracy Don’t Go ‘Hand in Hand’. Just the Opposite”:
People who grew up reading the BBC or AFP may imagine a correlation between a state media and democracy, but a more dependable indicator of a free society is whether or not obnoxious private journalism (like the Russian Top Secret, whose editor Artyom Borovik died in a mysterious plane crash) is allowed to proliferate. As for those once-storied European networks, most have now become parodies, operating in concert with multiple official review operations like BBC Verify or the Trusted Flaggers of the EU’s Digital Services Act. This layered messaging system essentially guarantees favorable coverage of public policy and is more dangerous than asking the listeners of stations like NPR to pay for media they like.
And on the fringes of free speech issues, I’d like to share Lee Fang’s “Sugary Soda Industry's Covert Influencer Campaign Falls Apart”. The bulk of the report is behind a paywall, but just the free part is illuminating, while far from unexpected. The tremendous distortion of the agora by commercial interests has continued unabated for my entire lifetime.
Meanwhile, FIRE remain the only reliable defender of the First Amendment, since they are committed to the principle and not to a specific political package. I appreciated this piece about a weird local ordnance attempting to dictate holiday decorations reported as “Tenn. town buries unconstitutional ordinance used to punish holiday skeleton display” even if abbreviating my adoptive home state to ‘Tenn’ feels lazy (stick to ‘TN’ or ‘Tennessee’ please). I wouldn’t put up skeletons for Easter, personally (see picture above) but neither would I tell my neighbours how to decorate their homes!
Germantown’s ordinance wasn’t just an exercise in misguided micromanagement, it violated the Constitution. Under the First Amendment, Americans are free to put up holiday decorations on their property whenever they like, not just in a government-approved period of time. And by demanding the Santa-themed skeletons come down even if one has a dark sense of humor, or happens to like Tim Burton movies the city engaged in viewpoint discrimination about what constitutes an acceptable Christmas display.
Philosophy of Censorship
To anyone right-of-centre (or anyone left-of-centre who cares about freedom of speech and thought) I must draw attention to this piece by the excellent Frank Furedi entitled “Dog-Whistling Or Calling A Spade and Spade”. It dismantles the thought-terminating phrase ‘dog-whistle’ that had been bugging me for a great while:
The premise on which the concept of dog whistling is based is that there are ideas, assumptions and words that should not and ideally cannot be said in public. Its intention in to prevent certain voices from being taken seriously. In particular, the charge of dog-whistling is used to shut down discussion on matters about which the political and cultural establishment feels insecure.
…
Populist critics of the way society is run are frequently characterized as dog-whistlers. It does not much matter what populists say even a relatively innocent remark will be represented by their opponents as an expression of racism, fascism or as one of the many phobias. Their critics often examine their words for a hidden meaning. Populist speakers are often accused of dog-whistling – that is communicating a hidden message – through using euphemism and outwardly unexceptional words.
The best piece I’ve encountered on this timely topic, which is ‘permission structures’ turned into ‘prohibition structures’.
Brazil (and Canada, and the US…)
Remember how in the previous Bazaar I led off with a despicable toll road near Lima…? Matt Taibbi follows ups on this with “Who Started the Lawfare Era?”:
This week, the storied Boies Schiller law firm filed a motion alleging widespread wrongdoing on the part of Brookfield Asset Management, a private equity titan chaired by Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney until a few months ago. The motion also named former deputy to Robert Mueller and federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, a longtime foe of Donald Trump’s and a target of the new “Weaponization Working Group” in Trump’s Justice Department.
Technically, this is just a business litigation about a privatized toll road in Peru. It’s become more than that. The case is now a key proxy conflict in the increasingly heated “lawfare” arena in which courts, police, and prosecutors are turned into political weaponry.
Pakistan and India
As you probably know, these two nations have been at loggerheads ever since the British Empire played their usual game of dividing a nation into two warring states while withdrawing. A terrorist attack at the end of April in the disputed Kashmir region has led to Pakistan test firing a ballistic missile (via AP) and India bombing terrorist camps in Pakistan (via The Times of India), and it just went downhill from there Some news sources claimed Pakistan shot down five Indian planes in this attack. Yeah, right. I doubt the India Air Force even needed five planes for this operation.
Last week, a ceasefire was announced. Al Jazeera speculated as to why it was the Trump administration that announced it first, and amusingly suggested it was because Trump is the first one on social media “most days”. Having looked from a lot of angles, it rather seems to me that J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio helped broker these peace talks, but it’s hard to confirm this because (a) blue team allied media would never say anything nice about the current administration and (b) red team allied media automatically assume all good outcomes are rooted in Trump. Then there’s (c) The Times of India amusingly painting it as Pakistan blinked first. Your allegedly ‘truth-seeking’ media institutions, folks!
As ever, I am for peace, and wish these two nations could sort it out. But as long as Pakistan continues to shelter terrorist groups within its borders, expect these terrible situations to recur with depressing regularity.
Canada
You probably caught that the former Bank of England head Mark Carney tidily won the Canadian election. Trump handed him the ammunition to do it by trolling the Canucks over “the 51st State”. I found one great rant about Carney’s win, “Fear Wins, Canada Loses”, from Rozali at Growing Up Alienated, which the anarchists at Nevermore also ran:
Our country is in complete economic ruin and has been long before Trump, and yet here we have this ghoul distracting us once again from the issues that impact everyday Canadians. All the Liberals have ever done is take. They take away our freedoms. They take away our hard earned money. They take away the free press. They take away our purchasing power. They take away our ability to make decisions for ourselves. They take away our livelihoods. What will Carney take next?
However, personally I’m not despairing. While I still despair at what Trudeau got up to, his fall creates opportunities. Carney won because Trump effectively invited the Canadian Liberal party to embrace national identity - and Carney campaigned on it, quite cleverly. Citizen democracy requires this commitment to the nation, and while Carney may just be cosplaying Canadian for the political points, for now, at least, I view this as one of those instances where changes in the political winds happen despite attempts to steer affairs down other paths. While the blue team in the US remains in routed disarray, it is no bad thing to have a political counterweight over the Northern border.
South Africa
This country has been in the US news cycle owing to the acceptance of white refugees from South Africa into the United States. I am still waiting to hear from some of my contacts in South Africa about the current situation, but don’t believe all this dismissive rubbish about there not being a problem about farmers being attacked.
Case in point, the Witkruis (White Cross) White Cross Monument between Potgietersrus and Pietersburg (pictured above).
Since June 16, 2004, symbolic white-painted metal crosses have been planted on the area of about 5 hectares for each death during a South African farm attack. 925 of the approximately 3,000 white metal crosses on the slope are arranged in a striking central cross shape to emphasise the Christian nature of the monument. About 20 red crosses at the top of the monument represent local casualties. In 2020 and 2022, further monuments were placed at the foot of the cross field.
The rise of anti-white racism in South Africa chills my blood, but it is even more appalling to me that it has taken root in the United States as well. Both Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr would have been deeply ashamed of where events have led.
US: President Trump
Throughout his first term, I watched as social media and journalists took the bait every time Trump trolled them. He’s still at it. But even when he’s not, the determination to badmouth Trump is eye-rollingly tedious.
There was outrage everywhere when Trump wore blue to Pope Francis’ funeral. Except: this was, and always has been, acceptable dress at a State funeral, as The Times of India reported correctly, while US legacy news were pre-hysterical and utterly useless as usual.
Loved this piece from The Free Press offering a wide variety of opinions on Trump’s ‘first hundred days in office’ (well, it’s actually his fourth hundred days in office, but still…). By far my favourite of these was legal scholar Jed Rubenfeld’s, which I include here in full:
A modest proposal: When it comes to the law, still take Trump seriously but not literally. Many of his executive orders are deliberately drafted to maximize their unconstitutionality. His law-firm orders, for example, parade the fact that Trump is personally retaliating against handpicked firms for First Amendment protected lawyering. These orders will be, and are being, struck down in a heartbeat.
This is not a constitutional crisis. It’s political theater. The judiciary will stand firm; the administration will comply. Something similar can be said of Trump’s moves to defund universities. America’s leading universities completely lost their way. They stunningly became mono-ideological hotbeds of pro-terrorist, anti-speech, anti due process, America-hating thought.
But here, too, Trump’s “mistakenly sent” demand letter to Harvard was patently, aggressively unconstitutional. The questions to ask are not legal in nature. They are: Who is the audience for this theater? Who benefits from it? And what is the price of admission?
And apropos of Trump’s clash with Harvard, I found David Wolpe’s “Harvard Is Spraying Perfume on a Sewer” via The Free Press much more thoughtful than most discussion on the topic:
I spent a year on a campus where, despite wars across the globe and hundreds of millions of literal slaves in the world from North Korea to Mauritania to Eritrea, America’s racial divisions, gender questions, and the plight of the Palestinians were the only issues that gripped the conscience of students and faculty. Remember the days when people cared about Tibet? It seems a relic from another moral century.
And that leads us quite nicely onto the next topic…
US: The Blue Team
Still crazy, I’m afraid, and not taking their rout half as seriously as they need to. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted the Biden administration punished at the polling booths for its grotesque excesses (most especially their violations of the First Amendment). But I also believe in the importance of opposition parties. The US would be far better with two strong political parties instead of one, even better with two sane parties instead of zero, and perhaps best of all if it could get a sane and strong third party. I am not, however, holding my breath for that!
Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot had this solid informative piece: “Your 2028 Democratic Presidential Contenders: I am underwhelmed”:
Democrats are quickly forgetting that we still live in a populist age and that there is a working-class sized hole in their coalition. It’s much more fun and emotionally satisfying to think and talk about how much you hate Donald Trump and everything he stands for. There’s certainly a lot to be upset about but that does not help you win elections not just the presidency but all those Senate races in red-leaning working-class states where Democrats have been getting walloped and where, if they don’t improve, they will be a Senate minority indefinitely.
And did you catch this astonishing admission from The New York Times, which may have finally realised that the blue team that it staunchly supports is screwed if it doesn’t course correct and tone down the hysteria:
The building of this coalition should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.
I notice they couldn’t manage to write ‘January’. You’re supposed to be journalists! You can type the whole word for goodness sake!
And at the grassroots, how about Ben Kawaller’s piece at Racket entitled “I Tried to Cover a May Day Protest. Antifascists Had a Problem With That”:
What’s ironic is that socialism is a fundamentally idealistic movement. These are people who believe collective action can topple the present hierarchies and reorganize society to serve the needs of the many as opposed to the greed of the few. What does it say about such a movement if it assumes that skeptics aren’t just skeptics, but villains? What does it say about these folks’ trustworthiness if they will only speak to outlets already sympathetic to their cause? How serious are these people if they would sooner believe in the upending of the global financial system than in a journalist’s ability to operate in good faith — or in their ability to hold their own in front of a camera?
US: Demographics
Following on from the above, here are some pieces on the demography of the US I found interesting.
Alex Berenson discussed two recent US polls in “Did Covid lockdowns and school closures swing young people sharply right?”:
The stunning part is that in 2019, Harvard offered the same age breakdown. And back then, about twice as many 18 to 24-year-olds said they were Democrats as Republicans. 41 percent of respondents said they were Democrats, compared to 21 percent of Republicans. Democrats had a 20 percentage point lead among the young.
Flash forward six years, through Covid and lockdowns and insane mask and distancing rules at colleges that ruined both the 2020 and 2021 academic years at most schools. And mRNA vaccine mandates for college students and for many young people who weren t college students too.
Those 18-to-24 year olds are now 24-to-30. And they aren’t overwhelmingly Democratic anymore. They don t even lean Democratic.
They have felt the well-meaning boot of the public health authoritarians on their necks and they are suspicious of government.
While Nate Moore at The Liberal Patriot offered “The Myth of a Sorted Electorate”, which I found very insightful:
Hyperbolic punditry (to which we all fall victim, myself included) presents an American electorate easily sorted into buckets. Working-class voters here. College-educated voters over there. The reality is far more complicated and that’s a good thing. In fact, neither Harris nor Trump cleared 60 percent with most major demographic groups. No age group was separated by more than ten points. No income bracket was separated by more than eight points. White, Latino, Native American, and Middle Eastern voters were all within 15 points.
Which leads us nicely onto…
Medical Research and ‘The Nonsense’
I spent a lot of time in this sorry excuse for a rabbit hole this month, alas.
This is a landmark paper which actually reverses prior research suggesting the Moderna vaccine was worse than the Pfizer: it looks like the opposite is true. Check out “Twelve-Month All-Cause Mortality after Initial COVID-19 Vaccination with Pfizer-BioNTech or mRNA-1273 among Adults Living in Florida” by Retsef Levi, Fahad Mansuri, Melissa M. Jordan, and Joseph A. Ladapo:
Florida adults who received BNT162b2 had significantly higher risk of 12-month all-cause, cardiovascular, COVID-19, and non-COVID-19 mortality compared to matched mRNA-1273 recipients. These findings are suggestive of differential non-specific effects of the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccines, and potential concerning adverse effects on all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. They underscore the need to evaluate vaccines using clinical endpoints that extend beyond their targeted diseases.
But what does it all mean…? Well, we haven’t been able to get comparison of SARS-Cov-2 vaccine candidates against unvaccinated test subjects owing to the rather shocking book-keeping methods that have been deployed (I would go so far as to call the record-keeping methods reprehensible, actually, but that’s a sideline). Even without a well-defined control group, you can at least do an A-B between the two vaccine candidates. On the basis of this data, we can say with fair confidence that neither is a vaccine, and both result in worse all cause mortality. This remains one of the greatest medical scandals of all time, and still, the story has not broken.
And via The Disinformation Chronicle, there’s this expose from an anonymous whistleblower in NIH:
Academic scientists and NIH bureaucrats don t just collaborate professionally they often emerge from the same university laboratories, attend the same conferences, and publish together in the same journals. Instead of government oversight of academic research, we have a system that rewards allegiance and mutual advancement. This cozy relationship is cemented by lavish taxpayer-funded travel to international conferences, where federal officers and the university scientists they support fly around the world, stay together at luxury hotels, and forge alliances that prioritize career advancement over public safety. This conflict of interest is baked into the system, making genuine oversight of dangerous research nearly impossible.
…and following that, Paul D. Thacker of that site ran “Trump Administration Targets Nature Medicine's ‘Proximal Origin’ Paper Which Dismissed Possible Wuhan Lab Accident”, long known to be spurious. Unfortunately, because of the Trump connection this won’t actually lead to the true state of affairs being widely accepted, but it’s only a matter time.
The reliable Jeffery A. Tucker called foul on legacy media in “The Shabby Media’s $176M Canard” at his own Brownstone Institute:
In other words, this supposed breaking news was old news, suddenly resurrected by U.S. News as if it were new. For no apparent reason. The supposed journalists who wrote the story, Robin Foster and Stephanie Brown, are said to work at HealthDay. They have no contact information and my email to the site has not been yet answered. So far as I can tell, if such a contract did exist, it is now cancelled or on pause. What the breaking news stories did do was circulate widely in the health freedom movement, cited as an example of how RFK and Trump are betraying their base. I personally received probably half a dozen contacts from people who sent the U.S. News story to me.
...
What’s shocking is to realize that this kind of shabby journalism might not be unusual. Take it as a case in point. You cannot believe what you read in legacy media. It is just as likely to be designed to manipulate your sense of things, to goad you into thinking a certain way in order to achieve some surreptitious scheme. In this case, it is all about the goal of undermining RFK with his base, thus preventing future reforms.
Some reasonably good news: Vinay Prasad has been appointed as Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluations and Research. I have my disagreements with Dr Prasad, but I do not doubt his commitment to evidence-based medicine.
And finally two from the dilligent Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan of Trust the Evidence. First up, a new Greek analysis revisits an old topic: “Covid deaths: Due to or with?”
The lack of a consistent definition of death caused public confusion, led to misguided conclusions, and increased fear. It is troubling that only one in every three hundred deaths where COVID-19 was listed as a contributing factor was determined to be directly caused by the virus. The lack of drive to get to the truth means we may never know the actual number of COVID-19 deaths. However, the Greek analysis suggests we can roughly halve the reported COVID-19 deaths.
Plus “Scouting avian influenza vaccines” summarises their attempt to get blood out of a stone by writing to the British drugs ‘enabler’ about their strangely ill-informed purchase of vaccines ‘just for the hell of it’. Whatever the MHRA is up to, open science it surely ain’t!
C.S. Lewis
If you’re at all open to discussion of C.S. Lewis, check out David McGrogan’s “Government Under the Moon, with Saturn Descending”. Although David is (as usual) pretty downbeat in this piece, I still found it strangely uplifting! It begins thus:
Our age is under a spell that is cast by the Moon. It is an age of madness, of metaphysical breakdown, of a generalised anxiety that knows no exact cause or resolution. It is an age in which the old certainties no longer hold, and the ‘order of the soul’ has been upended - an age in which all bets are off. It is an age in which bizarre and flagrant lies are cast as truth, and in which people behave in hitherto unfathomable and uncomfortable ways; an age of apocalyptic cults and strange prophecies and moral confusion and profanity. It is an age characterised by sudden rashness and yet by overabundance of caution; it is an age of a loss of courage in convictions. It is an age of forgetfulness - and an age of denial. This makes the Moon an apt symbol for our times, because of its long association with madness and ‘lunacy’, with strangeness and discombobulation, with unpredictability and topsy-turviness.
Robots
Depressingly, Texas has gone ahead with robot trucks, as reported in “Aurora launches commercial self-driving truck service in Texas” by Rebecca Bellan via TechCrunch:
Aurora says it began running freight this week between Dallas and Houston with its launch customers Hirschbach Motor Lines and Uber Freight, and that it has completed 1,200 miles in a single self-driving truck without a driver so far. The company plans to build up to tens of self-driving trucks and expand to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025. Aurora will also continue to haul more than 100 loads of commercial freight for customers every week with a fleet of more than 30 supervised autonomous trucks, according to a company spokesperson.
There’s too much money to be made in robot trucks for anyone to stop and ask whether this is a good idea, so we’ll get them whether we want them or not. (I certainly don’t.) I’ve not forgotten the issues Evil Google had with their robot rickshaws, which was also in the news again this week:
NHTSA opened a preliminary evaluation into Waymo’s automated driving system last May after learning of seven incidents in which robotaxis had collided with “stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains” between December 2022 and April 2024. None of these resulted in injury, according to NHTSA.
These are slow-moving vehicles, which I observed closely while in San Francisco earlier this year doing incredibly stupid things that human drivers would never do (like parking between two lanes of traffic) or that human drivers don’t do quite as hilariously (like creeping forward to block pedestrian crossings). But as long as there’s big money in robots, expect little pushback on the elimination of yet another class of working class jobs.
Puppies and Kittens
Well, since most of the above stories were so ghastly, let me leave you with this palette cleansing visual fluff. And for the mental equivalent, may I recommend to you Jack Shepherd’s “5 Preposterous Words That Wordle Will Actually Accept as Valid”, which will introduce to you such inessential words as ‘fubsy’, ‘gleek’, and ‘sloom’ that you can feed to Wordle at your peril.
With unlimited love,
Chris.