Quotulatiousness

November 14, 2021

The Media — declining to report the news and instead depleting the strategic reserve of Narrativium

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This week’s excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish explores the many, many ways that the mainstream media have been actively abandoning any semblance of informing their audience and instead now concentrate almost exclusively on propagandizing them:

The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

You know the situation is bad when Andrew Sullivan references Donald Trump without a sneer!

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate”, even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

Axis and Allies Both Invade France – WW2 – 168 – November 13, 1942

World War Two
Published 13 Nov 2021

Operation Torch goes off this week, the Allied invasion of French Northwest Africa, but this prompts the Germans to invade Vichy France. This is the Allies’ first combined major offensive in the Western Hemisphere. The Germans launch another offensive of their own this week, though — Operation Hubertus in Stalingrad. And in the South Pacific, a major naval battle begins off Guadalcanal.
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Literary corner – the life and work of the great American author, Bort Juggs

Filed under: Books, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I hang my head in shame for having to admit that until Saturday, I had never encountered the legendary Bort Juggs. Fortunately the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter from Kenneth Whyte helped open my eyes:

Twitter has less and less to recommend it these days but still has its moments, especially in its literary corners. One of my favorite follows is @TheEsteemedFox who a couple of weeks ago posted this:

And then the fun started:

The thread continues, so go RTWT if you know what’s good for you.

“Jungle Carbine” – the Lee Enfield No5 MkI Rifle

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Aug 2021

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Today I am concluding our series on the standard-issue Lee Enfield system with the No5 MkI — the “jungle carbine”. Developed in 1943 as a shorter and handier pattern of rifle than the No4, the carbine went into production in 1944 and saw use during World War Two. It featured a number of lightening cuts, as well as a shortened barrel, conical flash hider, side-mounted sling, 800-yard sights, and rubber buttpad. Unfortunately, the No5 was beset by a problem of “wandering zero”. A significant number of the rifles failed to properly hold zero when they were widely issued. The problem was never fully resolved, but appears to have been the result of receiver flex due to the lightening cuts. Efforts to fix it were essentially abandoned, as it was recognized that a new self-loading rifle was going to be adopted soon, and it would be a waste of time and money to continue development of the Lee Enfield by that point.

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QotD: Traffic in India

Filed under: Humour, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A buddy of mine once joked that the traffic signals, lane markers, etc. in India are the world’s biggest public art installation, since they have exactly the same effect on motorists’ behavior as those butt-ugly steel-and-concrete things your city council keeps insisting on sticking out in front of city hall. Long after I returned from my sojourn in the Raj, friends remarked on my newfound sangfroid. It’s no mystery, I explained to them. Delhi’s a big place, so usually took several autorickshaw rides a day — each and every one of them, by necessity, a dance with the Grim Reaper. As P.J. O’Rourke once quipped back when he was funny, on the Subcontinent it doesn’t even count as a car crash unless there’s probable loss of life involved. Death come for us all, I told my buddies; when my time’s up, my ticket’s gonna get punched regardless.

Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.

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