Barrel Strength

Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Barrel Strength - Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Category Archives: Politics

Television price increases irrelevant, says producers association

In the immortal words of Arnie Schwarzenegger, “I like you, I kill you last”.

Once more the Canadian production community is at it, seeking rents and subsidies,  and regardless of the tone, much of what Mr. Hennessy says below  is accurate.

GATINEAU – That broadcast distributors would increase the price of basic packages if the CRTC licensed new 9(1)(h) services is a red herring, according the Canadian Media Production Association (CPMA) told commissioners on Tuesday.  “We believe that the impact of 9(1)(h) services on affordability’ is a red herring that threatens to overshadow the achievement of more significant objectives under the [Broadcasting] Act”, Michael Hennessy, president and CEO of the CMPA, said during his opening remarks.

The association acknowledges that licensing additional services with mandatory carriage orders may trigger basic package rate increases, but it says this isn’t the sole reason broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs) raise rates,
which have been climbing steadily for years, regardless. It would be a stretch to blame consumer dissatisfaction with the price of their BDU service on your rare decisions to add new, exceptional Canadian services to basic, said Hennessy.
That may be the spin, but the reality is that the cost of basic is already heavily inflated by inclusion of the BDUs’ own services, including their high-cost sports services.”

All true. But take a look at Figure 3.1.7 below  from the CRTC’s own annual statistical report. You will see that cable television costs have risen faster than the consumer price index, the price of telecommunications other than the Internet, and the price of voice telecommunications. Here it is:

Figure 3.1.7 Price indices [TPI1, BDU2 (cable and satellite, including pay television), Internet access services, and CPI]

This line chart shows the following price indices from 2002 to 2011 Consumer price index (CPI): 100, 102.8, 104.7, 107, 109.1, 111.5, 114.1, 114.4, 116.5 and 119.9; Telephone price index (TPI): 100, 100.2, 100.6, 101, 100.9, 101.6, 105.9, 106.5, 111.2 and 112.3; Cablevision and satellite services (including pay television) index: 100, 104.8, 108.8, 112.5, 116.8. 122.7, 128.7, 135.8, 143.4 and 151.4; Internet access services index: 100, 99.1, 99, 97.1, 96.7, 97.5, 95.8, 94.8, 95.8 and 100.9.

Please note that the more the industry is exposed to competitive pressures, the less the increase of price. The broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs, that is, cable companies acting as distributors of “broadcast” programming) show the highest price increases across the sector most regulated as to conditions of supply (Canadian content obligations and others). Internet access is a pure play of telecommunications using IP technologies, with neither legacy circuit-switching, nor public service obligations, and exposed to the operations of Moore’s Law more completely than any other sector. Voice telecommunications is largely what is covered in the line marked “TPI”. It is imperfectly competitive, but most of its prices have been deregulated.

Back to Mr. Hennessy, the television producers’ lobbyist, and a fine one indeed. He is in effect saying, don’t blame mandatory carriage of new services for your cable price increases: we are only one of a number of villains, sorry, causative agents.

I agree. The Broadcasting Act itself is the problem. It is directed to produce mediocre productions, and country houses for clever men who milk the system, at staggering costs to the Canadian consumer. We pay the approximate costs of two or three  modern naval destroyers per year, every year, to sustain this regulated system. Personally I would prefer a stronger navy. We are paying for a naval expansion program already in broadcasting and film subsidies.

 

 

Statistical note:

  1. The TPI reflects the price changes experienced by a household for a basket of telephone services. The basket of telephone services reflects a weighted-average of consumer expenditures on basic local service, other local services (such as options and features), and long distance, installation, and repair services. However, the TPI does not include wireless or Internet service expenditures.
  2. The BDU price index reflects the price changes experienced by a household for a basket of cable television services. The basket includes both ‘Basic’ and ‘Extended’ cable services. Basic cable service is the minimum service to which all customers must subscribe. Extended cable service is the most popular package of additional channels. The index does not account for ‘bundling discounts.’

Source: Statistics Canada

The enemies of discourse

The enemies of honest discourse are those who believe that sensitivities trump truth. Since, in their view, there is no truth, truth has no claim to trump sensitivity. Indeed it has no claim at all. Those of us who believe, roughly but simply, that the truth is out there, that it is discovered, that a process of reasoning and discourse uncovers the layers of not-quite-fully-true from the more-fully-true, are in for trouble when we come across the legions of Untruth. The modern nihilists- for that is what they are – claim sensitivity and victimhood as their badges of  honour, their passport to not be questioned. Those who question and attack are motivated by “hate”, and need thought correction.

I got the following long citation from Kevin Westhues. He based himself on several academic mobbing incidents where professors were turfed for discussing something in honest terms.

Modern discourse

Following are ten key characteristics of modern discourse, what many professors and students even now consider the normal or standard way to think, study and argue in the academy:
• “personal detachment from the issues under discussion,” the separation of participants’ personal identities from subjects of inquiry and topics of debate;
• values on “confidence, originality, agonism, independence of thought, creativity, assertiveness, the mastery of one’s feelings, a thick skin and high tolerance for your own and others’ discomfort”;
• suited to a heterotopic space like a university class, scholarly journal, or session of a learned society conference, a place apart much like a playing field for sports events, where competitors engage in ritual combat before returning with a handshake to the realm of friendly, personal interaction;
• illustrated by debate in the British House of Commons;
• epitomized by the debates a century ago between socialist G. B. Shaw and distributist G. K. Chesterton;
• playfulness is legitimate: one can play devil’s advocate, speak tongue in cheek, overstate and use hyperbole, the object being not to capture the truth in a single, balanced monologue, but to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions;
• “scathing satire and sharp criticism” are also legitimate;
• the best ideas are thought to emerge from mutual, merciless probing and attacking of arguments, with resultant exposure of blindspots in vision, cracks in theories, inconsistencies in logic;
• participants are forced again and again to return to the drawing board and produce better arguments;
• the truth is understood not to be located in any single voice, but to emerge from the conversation as a whole.

Postmodern discourse

Over the past half century, a competing mode of discourse, the one I call postmodern, has become steadily more entrenched in academe. Following are ten of its hallmarks, as Roberts and Sailer describe on their blogs:
• “persons and positions are ordinarily closely related,” with little insistence on keeping personal identity separate from the questions or issues under discussion;
• “sensitivity, inclusivity, and inoffensiveness are key values”;
• priority on “cooperation, collaboration, quietness, sedentariness, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, conformity, a communal focus”;
• “seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge,” in the eyes of proponents of modern discourse;
• tends to perceive the satire and criticism of modern discourse as “vicious and personal attack, driven by a hateful animus”;
• is oriented to ” the standard measures of grades, tests, and a closely defined curriculum”;
• lacking “means by which to negotiate or accommodate such intractable differences within its mode of conversation,” it will “typically resort to the most fiercely antagonistic, demonizing, and personal attacks upon the opposition”;
• “will typically try, not to answer opponents with better arguments, but to silence them completely as ‘hateful’, ‘intolerant’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘homophobic’, etc.”;
• has a more feminine flavour, as opposed to the more masculine flavour of modern discourse;
• results in “stale monologues” and contexts that “seldom produce strong thought, but rather tend to become echo chambers.”

Westhues was basing himself on two pieces: one by the incomparable Steve Sailer, and the other by Andrew Roberts, a student at a northern British university, who writes a decent blog.

Roberts:

As Western society has become progressively more sensitized to victims, the unempowered, and the disenfranchised, and has desired to give a voice to them, we have tended to truncate or limit public discourse in various ways to ensure that such groups don’t feel threatened. While well-meaning, this reformation of public discourse has come at considerable cost. It has rendered the taking of offence or the playing of the victim or underdog card incredibly powerful ploys within debate. In many cases these ploys overwhelm the debate, making challenging debate next to impossible.

Read more here.

Faced with an opposing position that will not compromise in the face of its calls for sensitivity and its cries of offence, such a mode of discourse lacks the strength of argument to parry challenges. Nor does it have any means by which to negotiate or accommodate such intractable differences within its mode of conversation. Consequently, it will typically resort to the most fiercely antagonistic, demonizing, and personal attacks upon the opposition. While firm differences can be comfortably negotiated within the contrasting form of discourse, a mode of discourse governed by sensitivities and ‘tolerance’ cannot tolerate uncompromising difference. Without a bounded and rule-governed realm for negotiating differences, antagonism becomes absolute and opposition total. Supporters of this ‘sensitive’ mode of discourse will typically try, not to answer opponents with better arguments, but to silence them completely as ‘hateful’, ‘intolerant’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘homophobic’, etc.

Had it not been for my re-immersion in university life a few years ago, I might have thought such views as caricatures, exaggerations. They are not.

The people who resort to this style of debate fall into two camps: the truly inept, and the wholly cynical. The wholly cynical exploiters of the sensitivity-trumps-truth mode were quite surprized to hear me call them fascists. They objected that they were pure souls of moral enlightenment. I replied one did not need to put on an armband in the morning to be a fascist: all that one has to do is believe power trumps truth, and the sensitivity discourse is their path to power. I met these people in the 1960s and 70s. They were marxists then. The cover has changed since but the shit inside is still the same.

The world turned upside down

You know the world has changed when the English-language edition of Pravda runs an article by a Xavier Lerma that calls Obama a Communist, and praises Putin for his recent speech vowing to get state finances in better order and not to interfere in the market. Xavier Lerma is one of those slightly cracked bloggers who post stuff to the Internet in the hope of propagating the truth, rather like, uh… me. Yet it is entertaining to read a fellow who believes Putin is on the right path.

The Al Smith dinner

The Al Smith dinner video is an entertaining white-tie affair where America’s corporate and political elites get together to give amusing speeches. This year’s gathering is particularly good: Obama and Romney flanked a New York cardinal. Each candidate spoke amusingly at his own expense. It is well worth watching.

It did not appeal to one of the more interesting, if fanatic, conservative bloggers, Lawrence Auster.

The disgrace of the Al Smith dinner

Several readers, cheered by its wittiness, have sent the video of Romney’s speech at the Alfred E. Smith dinner last night. I agree he had good and funny lines. But I’m not cheered by it. When we have a president as dishonest, radical, and anti-American as Obama, to get together with him and make the traditional hale-fellow-well-met mutual jokes at each other’s expense creates the illusion that we are still living in an America where politicians of different parties had disagreements but shared fundamental principles and loyalties—an America that no longer exists. In reality, the Obama administration and the elite of today’s Democratic Party are a vile clique of lying leftists out to weaken and tyrannize America and empower and liberate our enemies. Romney, by joking amiably with Obama, helps sustain the false belief, so helpful to the left, that Obama and his party are part of a recognizable, historical America, and thus helps legitimize them. As I said recently, where would the Democrats be, without the Republicans?

Auster puzzles me. He is right about so many issues, when so many are wrong, and yet personally intolerable: humourless, arrogant, hostile, even, to all friendly discourse that might explore what is important to be conserved.

Among the values that a conservative should support, I believe, is moderation in behaviour, civility, and good manners. I do not see how you can be an effective conservative while shouting, raging, and shutting down the conversation. I sin against these virtues constantly; I am not holding myself as an exemplar of polite manners in all occasions. I can do a Hitchens at the dinner table as well as the next well-educated drunken intellectual. Certain people have got under my skin at parties, and when they do, I lose the argument.

Nevertheless, conservatism is not just about being right about history, or other external issues. It is to a great degree about maintaining the habits of social cohesion, even in the face of provocation. It has to do with the possibility of a civilized life, and that includes not just correct ideas, but tolerance and forbearance in social situations when you might just as well feel like throttling the bastards.

A decent regard for the opinions of mankind is not dhimmitude to evil. The fanatics will never understand that being right is not enough. Tolstoy said that all he ever learned, he learned through love. Politeness, forbearance, civility are less than love, but they maintain the conditions in which people might learn.

There is too much error in mankind to spend your life raging at it, and them.