Greetings from The Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise, where we are sailing from the Bahamas to Jamaica. That's Leilani Dowding, Tal Bachman and Samantha Smith on stage with me for The Mark Steyn Show.
~I mentioned on Friday that, as part of their increasing dissatisfaction with the lousy Tories'n'trivia drivel of the current GB News output, Tweeters keep dusting off old clips of the way it used to be. I'd forgotten this bit, but it's not bad:
'Something is rotten in Oldham, Telford, Rotherham, Rochdale... on and on'
Mark Steyn condemns the police forces that have issued ASBOs to individuals, after they complained about the failure of authorities to deal with grooming gangs. pic.twitter.com/8zW514QYOO
— GB News (@GBNEWS) July 27, 2022
There was nothing else like that on mainstream UK telly two years ago, and there's even less like it today. As I wrote last week:
Ofcom strictures on 'balance' aren't really relevant to the approach I took - which kind of gives the game away: Media 'regulation' is designed to create a pseudo-balance in which nothing that might discombobulate the uniparty pabulum ever gets discussed.
The pabulum peddlars want to keep it that way:
It appears that [Neil] Oliver's "freedom to express misleading or indeed outright deranged ideas trumps Ofcom's mandate to prevent harmful or offensive content", said Jane Martinson in The Guardian.
Notice that Ms Martinson assumes that it is entirely natural for a state body to have a "mandate" to "prevent" "offensive content". It's not - not in free societies. And the fact that mainstream commentators think it is is far more "deranged" than anything Mr Oliver says. More:
This "odd decision" helps to "sum up where Ofcom is failing". Despite a "constant bombardment of extreme content from GB News", lately the watchdog has "fetishised free speech above all else" – even above protecting the public from harmful content, despite its newly expanded remit as the formal regulator for online harm in the recent Online Safety Act.
Note again the assumptions: free speech is a "fetish"; the state deciding what "content" the public needs to be "protected" from is perfectly normal.
~What are the acceptable bounds of political preference in such a society? As Ross Clark notes in The Daily Telegraph:
Whoever wins the general election, the next government will be committed to decarbonising the National Grid – by 2035 in the case of the Conservatives and by 2030 in the case of Labour. That means either closing all the gas power stations or fitting them with carbon capture and storage technology – which does not yet exist on scale in Britain and whose costs are likely to be massive. At the same time every single one of our existing nuclear power stations is currently due to reach the end of its life by 2035.
So the choice for a UK voter is pretty clear: The left wants you sitting in the dark the day after tomorrow; the right wants you sitting in the dark two days after tomorrow.
~Joanne Jacobs was one of my favourite bloggers from the Golden Age of the Internet twenty years ago. I used to cite her from time to time:
JOANNE JACOBS, formerly a columnist with the San Jose Mercury News, spotted a dandy headline in her old paper last week. A Muslim mob, you'll recall, had attacked a train full of Hindus, an unfortunate development which the Mercury News reported to its readers thus: 'Religious Tensions Kill 57 In India'.
Ah, those religious tensions'll kill you every time. Is there a Preparation H for religious tension? Or an extra-strength Tylenol, in case you feel a sudden attack coming on? I haven't looked out the San Jose Mercury News for 12 September, but I'm assuming the front page read, 'Religious Tensions Kill 3,000 In New York', a particularly bad outbreak.
If I were an Islamic fundamentalist, I'd be wondering what I had to do to get a bad press. The New York Times had a picture the other day of a party of Palestinian suicide bombers looking like Klansmen, all dressed up and ready to blow. They were captioned 'Hamas activists', Take my advice and try not to be standing anywhere near an activist when he activates himself.
That's still good advice, now that "Hamas activists" are holding the entire British political class hostage.
Be that as it may, I'm delighted to discover that, unlike almost all my other ports of call from the 9/11 era, Joanne Jacobs is still out there and still blogging. Steyn Clubber Denyse O'Leary noted in our comments recently that "one of the underlying problems we face is the decline of the culture of argument and debate". Per Miss Jacobs, that doesn't seem likely to be reversing itself any time soon:
Students used to be able to handle 30 pages of reading per class session, but now "are intimidated by anything over 10 pages," he writes. He has to spend class time "establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument — skills I used to be able to take for granted..."
Students also lack reading stamina: They have trouble staying focused on a challenging text. In middle and high school, they read short passages to prepare for tests, but rarely whole novels, Kotsko writes. He links to Peter Greene's lament that students' knowledge of literature "is Cliff's Notes deep, and they may never develop the mental muscles to work their way through a long, meaty piece of literature." Learning "to follow extended narratives and arguments" is a valuable life skill, Kotsko argues. Young people who can't engage with complexity won't be prepared for the world.
I'm not sure I agree with that last line. It's pretty obvious that the world they're preparing us for is one in which "complexity" is not required. All the great questions have been answered - on climate, diversity, etc - and all you have to do is agree with the official state-approved answers: see The Guardian's Jane Martinson above. "Engaging with complexity" is just going to get in the way of all that.
Still, this was a sad line to read:
"What's happening with the current generation is not that they are simply choosing TikTok over Jane Austen," he concludes. "They are being deprived of the ability to choose."
Just so. A once great civilisation is choosing instead to self-moronise. (By the way, here at SteynOnline you're still free to choose Jane Austen.)
~Notwithstanding the verdict in the District of Columbia Superior Court, my first and second Statements of Claim against the UK media censor Ofcom have been accepted for judicial review by the High Court of England. The King's Bench Division will hear the case in June. Many readers have inquired about how to support my latest Free-Speech Lawsuit of the Month, this time over Ofcom's throttling of honest discussion of the Covid and the vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate;
c) ordering a copy of my latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell); or
d) lavishing upon your beloved a once-in-a-lifetime Mark Steyn Cruise. We're planning the next one right now!
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in latter pair, a significant chunk thereof. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
~Notwithstanding the all-night partying on The Mark Steyn Cruise, we had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's Weekend Notebook. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date opted for generational angst in The Big Chill, and on Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week looked forward to the Steyn Cruise's arrival in Mexico.
If you were too busy spending the weekend glued to that last-minute nail-biter of a South Carolina primary, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.