Quotulatiousness

November 7, 2022

The only way to get a Grammy Award rescinded

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t follow the various entertainment industry awards (Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Tony, etc.), so I wasn’t aware that only one Grammy Award has ever been taken back since they started handing them out. Given how disturbing the career lowlights of celebrities can be, what level of horrifying behaviour or criminal action does it take to have the award rescinded? Ted Gioia has the details:

“Milli Vanilli Blame it on the Rain (12 inch single)” by acme401 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Milli Vanilli, a pop duo act from Munich, will never enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They were hot back in 1990, and even won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Their debut album eventually sold ten million copies. But Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, the two musicians who performed as Milli Vanilli, are remembered today as a scandal and blot of shame on the music business.

What terrible thing did they do to get blacklisted and cancelled? You may already know, and if not, I’ll tell you.

    Milli Vanilli’s Grammy was rescinded — the first and only time that has happened in the history of the award. I note that Bill Cosby still has his eight Grammy Awards. Even after Phil Spector’s murder conviction, nobody took away his prizes and honors.

But allow me to put matters in context first.

Looking back on the music stars of that era, it would be hard to create a greater scandal than, say, Michael Jackson. He was eventually arrested and charged with child molestation. Although Jackson never got convicted, the cumulative evidence is very troubling — even so, he gets plenty of airplay nowadays and is still lauded as the King of Pop. A high-profile musical celebrating his artistry opened on Broadway earlier this year.

The songs are great. I won’t deny it.

Jackson escaped a prison sentence, but many other music stars have served time for high-profile crimes without losing their fans. When R. Kelly recently got convicted of kidnapping, sexual exploitation of a child, and racketeering, his sales soared 500% in the aftermath. I’d prefer to disagree with those glib experts who claim “all publicity is good publicity” — but it’s hard to argue with those numbers.

Just a few weeks after the Milli Vanilli scandal, Rick James was charged with kidnapping and sexual assault — and then got arrested again for similar abuses three months later while out on bail. He continued to make recordings after his release from Folsom Prison, and returned to the Billboard chart. Health problems, not James’s criminal record, finally curtailed his career. And in 2020, his estate got a big payday by selling his masters and publishing rights to the Hipgnosis Song Fund.

Other music industry legends have committed murder or manslaughter. Suge Knight won’t become eligible for parole until 2034, and Phil Spector died while incarcerated for murder in 2021. The latter was widely praised in published obituaries, and his recordings remain cherished by fans.

And now let’s turn to Milli Vanilli.

Milli Vanilli haven’t fared so well. You might even say they have been wiped out of pop music history, lingering on merely as a joke or worse. But no one got raped or murdered by their antics. They didn’t even trash their hotel rooms or get arrested buying weed.

So what did they do that led to permanent cancellation?

Their crime was posing as vocalists on their recordings, when they didn’t actually sing. When they went on the road, they lip-synced on stage. And — if I can be blunt — their greatest transgression was making the people who vote on Grammy awards look foolish.

November 6, 2022

How bad do the midterm elections look for the Democrats? Even Andrew Sullivan is voting Republican this time

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

From the free-to-cheapskates excerpt of Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

The day I received my absentee ballot from the DC government, there was a story in the Washington Post about the DC Council’s imminent vote:

    The bill would eliminate most mandatory minimum sentences, allow for jury trials in almost all misdemeanor cases and reduce the maximum penalties for offenses such as burglaries, carjackings and robberies.

Over the past few years, violent crime in DC has been rising fast. Last year the murder rate was the highest since 2003, and this year the death toll is slightly higher so far. Carjackings are up 36 percent and robberies are up 57 percent. Almost all this hideous violence is inflicted on African-Americans, including many children. It permeates outward, creating a deeper public sense of insecurity and out-of-control crime. Tent cities are now all over the city. People suffering from mental illness patrol the streets. You feel the decline in law and order, the slow fraying of the city, every day.

And yet the Council has decided that now is the time to make it harder to prosecute and easier to defend violent criminals, partly in the name of “equity”. Yes, it’s part of a longstanding “modernization” of the criminal code, but they had to include these provisions and now? And this isn’t new. Just before the crime explosion took off, the DC mayor had “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street in letters so large you could read them from a plane, and allowed “Defund the Police” to remain next to it. That summer, woke mobs were allowed to harass anyone in their vicinity, yelling slogans that vilified all police — and the MSM took the side of the bullies. After the summer of 2020, the DC police force dropped to its lowest level in two decades.

So guess what? I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find next Tuesday. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.

There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.

By “we”, I mean anyone not committed to the hard-left agenda Biden has relentlessly pursued since taking office. In my view, he and his media mouthpieces have tragically enabled the far right over the past two years far more than they’ve hurt them. I hoped in 2020 that after a clear but modest win, with simultaneous gains for the GOP in the House and a fluke tie in the Senate, Biden would grasp a chance to capture the sane middle, isolating the far right. After the horror of January 6, the opportunity beckoned ever more directly.

And yet Biden instantly threw it away. In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the center — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the center?

November 5, 2022

Psyops in theory and practice

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

Theophilus Chilton on the development of psyops and some examples of their use in US civilian contexts in recent years:

I trust that most readers are familiar with the concept of a “psyop”, a psychological operation designed to sway its targets in certain desired directions. Many of the mechanics of psyops were pioneered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies during the Cold War but have now been turned against civilian populations in the USA and elsewhere in an effort by the Regime to maintain control and minimise opposition to its various agendas. However, I’d like to make the point that psyops qualitatively differ from standard, run-of-the-mill propaganda such as governments have used for millennia.

The difference is primarily that of the time preferences involved. Whether it’s designed to whip up a population against an enemy or to try to obfuscate the truth about some particular event that has occurred, propaganda tends to operate on a shorter timescale and with more limited and simple policy goals in mind. It’s not surprising that modern propaganda techniques share a lot in common with commercial advertising designed to induce an “impulse buy” response in potential customers. Propaganda generally operates the same way — create a monodirectional response to a particular stimulus.

Psyops, on the other hand, are quite a bit more complex and generally involve the building of a narrative memeplex over the course of months, years, or even decades. Psyops are, of course, also fake but theirs is a fakeness that builds upon constant, repetitious narrative-building that lays out a foundational lens through which any individual incident or act can be systematically interpreted, adding them to the overall saga being told.

With conventional propaganda, the aim is to communicate Regime diktat to the average citizen. However, it does not necessarily expect the recipients to believe the propaganda, but merely comply with the goals. The Powers That Be in such cases don’t care why Havel’s greengrocer puts the sign up in his window, but merely that he does so. The primary purpose of psyops, on the other hand, is to ensure compliance by convincing the target to self-comply, rather than it having to be done by outside force or persuasion. It’s always touch and go when you’re making someone outwardly comply but inwardly they’re dissident. When the mark can be convinced to willingly self-police, this makes the government’s job easier since they don’t have to worry about this closet dissidence. The true believer is the best believer.

In essence, propaganda aims for immediate reactive persuasion while psyops seek long-term groundlaying that gives more all-inclusive means of maintaining overarching narrative control.

Now, a lot of people out there like to think they’re immune to psyops because “hurr durr I don’t beleeb da media!!” But they’re not. Indeed, a lot of these boomercon types are just as susceptible to psyops as anyone else when the right buttons are pushed. This is because they’ve been primed for it by the systematic, society-wide preparation of the psychological battle space without their ever realising it. In many cases, the foundations for a psyop are so culturally systematic that people don’t even realise what is happening.

For example, there are a ton of people out there who would pride themselves on being independent thinkers who nevertheless believed everything that was peddled during the covid and vaccine psyops. The reason for this is because they want to think of themselves as smart, knowledgeable about science, etc. Smart People believe the Right Things, after all. That, in turn, is the result of decades of psyops that have ensconced “science” as the arbiter of morality and truth in post-Christian America. So even when the science is fake or wrong, it is still accorded a moral authority that it does not deserve.

November 4, 2022

Amnesty “literally means a pardon, i.e. the absence of punishment … for a crime committed in the past“

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

Sarah Reynolds considers the implications of what Emily Oster wrote in her Atlantic article suggesting a Covid-19 amnesty:

Now “amnesty” is a very specific word. It doesn’t mean forgiveness, it literally means a pardon, i.e. the absence of punishment … for a crime committed in the past.

It is a stark and loaded word indeed when used to refer to anything Covid-related because it establishes two parties: victims and perpetrators. Group 1: Those who committed crimes and could be in the legal sense pardoned of the criminal behavior they engaged in; and Group 2: those who will consequently not get justice.

The implication of such a dichotomy (if one were to appear) is horrifying.

The author alludes to the appeal and inevitability of forgiveness; I posit in contrast that forgiveness is a spiritual concept, one that may be inextricably linked to a religious belief for some, so she’s jumping the gun here because Forgiveness would be the stage after Justice, and only for those whose religion, faith, or spiritual practice also inspires or compels it.

Use of the word amnesty is terribly concerning to me because it insinuates that grave injustice has been committed. And if some horrible truth is coming out soon, her piece in the Atlantic serves as a way to beta test our/society’s future reaction to it — acting as the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

In other words, if we’re this outraged now knowing only what we know so far, how outraged will we be then, after this (speculated by me) coming newsflash triggers national indignation from coast to coast?

The most revealing part of the Professor’s piece in the Atlantic is this statement:

    The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

No, vacuums are complicated. All those attachments.

Tyranny is quite straight-forward, in contrast.

Years ago, I read a book that taught the reader that people are often confessing and how to detect it. If you look at and listen to their word choices, you can sometimes find what it is they did in the past, what they fear will happen in the future, and clues about whether or not they are capable of remorse. Many of you who have watched my youtube or read my blog before I got on substack know how I like to do a communication analysis, and delineate a) what’s literally being said, b) what the person really meant, and c) the third and most important/revealing part, what’s being left unsaid. And I rarely hear people say, “it’s complicated”, unless they are feeling profound regret, fear of the consequences of those “complicated choices”, and plenty of denial of the emotional origin of that particular word choice. They don’t even know why they were compelled unconsciously to use that word … but we do. The stark truth would likely be anything but complicated and possibly horrifying. (For example, what if Oster got on twitter tomorrow and tweeted out, “I don’t think I feel regret or remorse like other people. Intellectually, I get it: the Pandemic response caused human beings unbearable pain and society irrevocable damage but it doesn’t really bother me per se and sometimes I even feel gratified by it, especially when I witness overt force (mandates) replace emotional manipulation (shame).” Now I’m sure Oster is a wonderful person with a fully intact moral compass who’s 100% able to empathetically relate to others!! But … IF … on the off chance it were a true statement so she did declare it on twitter, it might seem complicated to her, but to us it would be the simplest most logical explanation for her actions. We’d go, oh! She’s a sociopath! Oh my God, now it all makes perfect sense! Hahahahaha I get it now hahahahaha because we live in hell!!)

H/T to Chris Bray for the link.

“Dreadnought” – The King of the High Seas! – Sabaton History 114 [Official]

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 2 Nov 2022

When the Dreadnought made its appearance in the early 20th century, it was the mightiest ship the world had ever seen, making all other gunships obsolete, including the rest of its own navy. It also sparked a naval arms race around the world, as many nations built such behemoths. But what were they actually like?
(more…)

November 3, 2022

Amnesty? How about “no”.

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

Tom Knighton on the recent trial balloons being sent up by certain media folks to test the willingness of us proles to “forgive and forget” their authoritarian cheerleading over the last two+ years:

Recently, a story over at The Atlantic proposed an amnesty over what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was that we just let bygones be bygones and no one holds anyone else accountable for what happened.

Lives were ruined, people died alone and miserable — and in some cases, because they were alone and miserable — but we’re supposed to ignore all of that.

At Spiked, Lauren Smith says that the nasty authoritarian tendencies of those in power during the pandemic should absolutely not be forgotten:

As the Covid-19 pandemic fades from view, some may be tempted to forget those miserable two years of lockdowns, social distancing and other restrictions on our liberties. This is certainly the view of a widely shared article in the Atlantic, which calls for a “pandemic amnesty”. American economist Emily Oster asks us to “forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid”. It quickly becomes clear why Oster would prefer us to move on.

During 2020 and 2021, Oster was very much on the side of lockdown. And she supported vaccine mandates in universities and for workers. In fairness to Oster, she did not support every Covid measure. She did, for instance, criticise how long it took for schools to re-open in the US back in the summer of 2020. Yet ultimately, she belonged to the side that was happy to criminalise meeting a friend for coffee or to separate people from their dying loved ones.

Now, with hindsight, Oster regrets some of her positions. The crux of her argument is that the people baying for more lockdowns, harsher restrictions and vaccine mandates couldn’t possibly have known any different at the time. She says that they couldn’t have known that outdoor transmission of Covid was rare, that schoolchildren were always a low-risk group and that cloth masks were virtually useless in preventing viral spread.

Many, however, did know these facts, including back in the spring of 2020. But those who said them out loud were quickly turned into pariahs.

Although Oster admits that those on the anti-lockdown side got many things right, she says this was merely a question of “luck”. But it should not have taken any great foresight to see the danger of lockdowns. They were responsible for the most significant loss of liberty in the history of the democratic world. Their impact on economic output was as profound as that of any war. Not since the days before universal education had so many kids been shut out of school. Worse still, those who did warn of these inevitable and dangerous consequences were met with derision and censorship.

This is a pretty representative viewpoint of the lockdown mindset:

Twitter’s evolution from protecting celebrities to shaping “the narrative”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Common Sense, Walter Kirn recounts his own recognition of how Twitter has changed since he first opened an account in 2009 (incidentally, the same year I did … but unlike Walter, I still have about the same number of followers there as I did in my first year):

The platform belonged to celebrities back then, who hawked their movies, albums, and TV shows in words that were their own, supposedly, fostering in fans a dubious intimacy with figures they knew only from interviews. One of these stars, an investor in the platform, was Ashton Kutcher, the prankish, grinning actor who became omnipresent for a spell and then, stupendously enriched, largely vanished from public consciousness. It seemed that Twitter had sped-up fame such that it bloomed and died in record time.

The power of the new platform struck me first in 2012. Two incidents. The first one, a small one, occurred in Indianapolis, where I’d gone to watch the Super Bowl. I attended a party the night before the game at which many Hollywood folk were present, including an actor on a cable TV show who played a roguish businessman. The actor was extremely drunk, lurching about and hitting on young women, and it happened that my wife, back home, whom I’d texted about the scene, was able to read real-time tweets about his antics from other partygoers. A few hours afterward she noticed that these tweets had disappeared. Instant reality-editing. Impressive.

I concluded that Twitter was in the business not only of promoting reputations, but of protecting them. It offered special deals for special people. Until then, I’d thought of it as a neutral broker.

[…]

My own habits on Twitter changed around that time. Observational humor had been my mainstay mode, but I realized that Twitter had become an engine of serious opinions on current affairs. On election night in 2016, while working at another journal, Harper’s, I was given control of the magazine’s Twitter feed and asked to think out loud about events while following them on cable news. I saw early that Trump was on his way to victory — or at least he was doing much better than predicted — and I offered a series of tart remarks about the crestfallen manners of various pundits who couldn’t hide their mounting disappointment.

The official election results were still unknown — Clinton retained a chance to win, in theory — but before the tale was told, my editors yanked my credentials for the account and gave them to someone else. The new person swerved from the storyline I’d set (which reflected reality) and adopted a mocking tone about Trump’s chances, even posting a picture of a campaign hat sitting glumly on a folding chair at his headquarters in New York City.

It struck me at first as pure denial. Later I decided that it was far more intentional — that my left-leaning magazine wished to preserve the illusion for its readers that the election’s outcome was unforeseeable, possibly to maintain suspense or so it could later act startled and disturbed in concert with its TV peers. Its Twitter feed, as a record of its reactions, had to align with this narrative.

I grew convinced that night that Twitter meant trouble for me. It had become an opinion-sculpting instrument, an oracle of the establishment, and I knew I would end up out of step with it, if only because I’m of a temperament which habitually goes against the flow to challenge and test the flow, to keep it honest. Mass agreement, in my experience, both as a person and a journalist, is typically achieved at a cost to reality and truth.

QotD: Why reading the news became less informative and more didactic

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the small, pervasive changes that makes news stories seem both patronizing and politicized is the increasingly common practice of inserting judgmental adjectives into otherwise descriptive sentences. Telling readers that a statement is “false” while repeating it may be justified, if intrusive, but in other cases it’s an unnecessary tic.

Gone is the assumption that readers are intelligent people who can draw their own conclusions from a compelling presentation of the facts. Journalists now seem to live in fear that their readers won’t think correctly. Take this sentence from an interesting article on the evolution of American Sign Language: “For a portion of the 20th century, many schools for the deaf were more inclined to try to teach their students spoken English, rather than ASL, based on harmful beliefs that signing was inferior to spoken language.” (Emphasis added.)

If you read the article, you are highly unlikely to come to the conclusion that signing is anything less than a full-blown language, not inferior to spoken English. But the article never gives evidence that this incorrect 20th-century belief was harmful. It doesn’t discuss the pluses and minuses of signing, or why one belief was succeeded by another. That’s a different story. In the context of this story, the adjective is unnecessary, distracting, and insulting to the reader’s intelligence.

Virginia Postrel, “Shrinkflation, Disqualiflation, and Depression and more”, Virginia’s Newsletter, 2022-07-28.

November 2, 2022

Bill C-18’s scheme to force payment for online links threatens freedom of expression

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist considers the ways that the federal government’s Bill C-18 will suppress online freedom of expression in Canada:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The study into the Online News Act continues this week as the government and Bill C-18 supporters continue to insist that the bill does not involve payment for links. These claims are deceptive and plainly wrong from even a cursory reading of the bill. Simply put, there is no bigger concern with this bill. This post explains why link payments are in, why the government knows they are in, and why the approach creates serious risks to the free flow of information online and freedom of expression in Canada.

[…]

Why is the government suspending the fair dealing rights of Internet platforms in the bill? Because it knows that the platforms don’t typically use the news in a manner that would be compensable. For example, the platforms may link to the news, feature a headline with the link or sometimes offer a one-or-two sentence summary or quote from the article. These uses are generally permitted under Canada’s fair dealing copyright law rules and do not require a licence or compensation. In other words, claiming that links might qualify for compensation requires setting aside the platforms’ copyright rights which places Canada in breach of its obligations under the Berne Convention, the international treaty that governs copyright law.

The government’s intervention into the final arbitration process is further evidence that it recognizes the weakness of the argument for payments for links. Bill C-18 mandates final offer arbitration, which encourages the parties to provide their very best final offer as part of the process since the arbitrator must select one or the other. Yet Section 39 gives the arbitration panel the right to reject an offer on several policy grounds. Why would such a provision be necessary in a final arbitration system that encourages submitting your best offer? It is only necessary if you fear one side will examine the evidence and proffer a low offer on the grounds that it does not believe that there has been a demonstration of compensable value. That is a real possibility in this case given that there should be no need to compensate for links and there is little else of value. In light of that risk, the government gives the arbitration panel the power to reject offers that do not meet the government’s policy objectives.

[…]

Aside from the obvious unfairness, the broader implications of this policy are even more troubling. Once government decides that some platforms must pay to permit their users to engage in certain expression, the same principle can be applied to other policy objectives. For example, the Canadian organization Journalists for Human Rights has argued that misinformation is akin to information pollution and that platforms should pay a fee for hosting such expression much like the Bill C-18 model. The same policies can also be expanded to other areas deemed worthy of government support. Think health information or educational materials are important and that those sectors could use some additional support? Why not require payments for those links from platforms. Indeed, once the principle is established that links may require payment, the entire foundation for sharing information online is placed at risk and the essential equality of freedom of expression compromised.

To be clear, supporting journalism is important. But Bill C-18’s dangerous approach ascribes value to links where there isn’t any, regulates which platforms must pay in order to permit expression from their users, and dictates which sources are entitled to compensation. This is an unprecedented government intervention into the media and freedom of expression. If the government believes that Facebook and Google should be paying more into Canada, tax them and use the funds for journalism support. If that isn’t enough, create a fund for participation in the news system with mandated contributions similar to the Cancon broadcast world. That may not be ideal, but it would at least keep the system arms length, remove the qualification issues, and reduce the market intervention.

I suspect the government fears that Canadians would easily recognize the risks associated with mandated payments for links and fundamental unfairness with the system envisioned by Bill C-18. It is why it has misled on the inclusion of link payments, rejected the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s estimates on who benefits, and sought to frame Facebook’s concerns as a threat, when the real threat lies in the bill itself. But despite those efforts, make no mistake: Bill C-18 is a law about forcing some platforms to pay for links. It gives the government the power to regulate who pays and which expression is worthy of payment. In doing so, it creates a threat to freedom of expression for all Canadians.

November 1, 2022

If it wasn’t for double standards, the legacy media wouldn’t have any standards at all

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill calls out the US mainstream media for their blatant double standards on political violence after the as-yet still mystery-shrouded attack on the husband of the Speaker of the House of Representatives over the weekend:

Paul and Nancy Pelosi, 16 February, 2022.
Detail of a photo by Amos Ben Gershom via Wikimedia Commons.

It was the mention of zip ties that got me thinking. Apparently the man who allegedly broke into the San Francisco home of Nancy and Paul Pelosi on Friday was carrying zip ties. A possibly crazed individual approaching the home of a powerful politician with plastic fasteners that can be used to bind a person’s hands – it was both a nightmarish prospect and a familiar one, too. Wasn’t another public figure in the US recently targeted by someone who had zip ties? And a gun, a knife, pepper spray and a crowbar? Yes. It was Brett Kavanaugh. But many don’t remember that. Because thanks to the media, certain acts of political hate get less traction than others.

People are rightly horrified by what happened to Paul Pelosi on Friday. David DePape allegedly broke into the Pelosi home and yelled “Where is Nancy?”. She wasn’t there. DePape then allegedly attacked Mr Pelosi, who is 82, with a hammer. Pelosi suffered a skull fracture and is still in hospital, though he is expected to make a full recovery. This was a horrific assault on an elderly person, as well as seeming to have been motivated by a deep political animus. Sadly, it was not a one-off. There was a creepily similar incident at the home of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh in Maryland in June.

A 26-year-old man from California travelled to Maryland allegedly with the intention of murdering Kavanaugh. That’s what he is charged with – attempted murder. He was armed with a tactical knife, a Glock 17 pistol, zip ties and other murderous paraphernalia. The difference between Kavanaugh’s alleged tormentor and the man who allegedly broke into the Pelosi home is that the former failed to gain entry. He spied two US marshals close to Kavanaugh’s home and called off his deadly mission. Kavanaugh was luckier than Paul Pelosi.

It is unquestionable that the assault on the Pelosi home has caused more waves and fury among the media elites than the mercifully thwarted attempted assassination of Kavanaugh did. The Kavanaugh incident swiftly faded from public consciousness. One observer wrote of the media’s “eerie silence” on Kavanaugh. It was pointed out that the “attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh” was being downplayed by the New York Times the very day after it happened. On the NYT‘s homepage, the Kavanaugh story was 16th in order of importance, behind stories about the new Jurassic Park movie and Kelly Clarkson’s singing skills. In that day’s paper, it was on page 20. Nate Silver said it was “crazy” that the targeting of Kavanaugh was not “treated as a bigger story”. “There’s often more bias in which stories are deemed to be salient than how they’re written about it”, he said.

That is well said. Media bias is apparent not only in the information and takes that the media publish but also in what the media decree to be important in the first place. And it would appear that the targeting of a right-wing, pro-life justice is less important – a lot less important – than the targeting of the home of a Democratic, pro-choice politician. Politics is clearly at play here. Kavanaugh’s moral outlook runs counter to that of the liberal media and coastal elites, and thus he makes for an unsympathetic character. Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand – she’s the crusading Democrat the chattering classes love. An assault on her home moves the liberal elites profoundly.

On the rapidly changing reported details of the attack on Paul Pelosi, Jim Treacher has some salient questions:

First things first: Paul Pelosi is currently in the hospital recovering from his attack, and here’s wishing him a speedy recovery. It sounds horrible and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Crime in America is spiraling out of control.

Now …

The Pelosis are worth somewhere north of $100 million. Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and second in the line of presidential succession. You’re telling me her husband Paul was alone in a house with no security or surveillance cameras? This lunatic David DePape just walked right up to the house and broke in?

I’ve got other questions. The initial report was that DePape was in his underwear when the police caught him beating Pelosi with a hammer. Now we’re told that’s not true.

Wait, what? How do you get that detail wrong? Did it come from the police? I can understand misremembering the color of his pants. But the cops couldn’t tell whether he was wearing any?

And then there’s this:

Okay, I’m just trying to picture the scene that the two responding officers saw: They entered the Pelosi home, found DePape attacking Pelosi, and stopped him.

How did they get into the house? Did they break down the door? Was it unlocked, or already open? Did DePape or Pelosi open it?

The story is that the police encountered DePape in the middle of beating Pelosi. So if DePape opened the door for them … why? Or if Pelosi opened the door for them … how?

I see a lot of people speculating that this was some sort of lovers’ quarrel, or a Grindr date gone wrong, or something along those lines. Doesn’t seem likely to me, but is it really outside the realm of possibility? Are you a homophobe? I thought we were supposed to accept all genders and preferences and whatnot. It’s 2022.

October 31, 2022

“If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news”

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

At Founding Questions, Severian offers some preliminary thoughts on the new field of “Brandonology”, specifically how to determine whether what’s in the legacy media is news or propaganda:

I’m throwing this out there now, because it’s shaping up to be a long-term project and I think we can all contribute to it as needed. But as Brandonology / FNGology is such a new discipline, it’ll help to lay in the foundations.

The first step in analyzing the “news” is determining whether or not it is, in fact, news. “News” here being defined as “an unplanned event — or catastrophic fuckup of a planned event — to which The Regime is forced to react in more or less real time”. Lot of that going around recently, such that we’re spoiled for choice. Pick pretty much any of the shenanigans in Ukraine: The botched assassination of Alexander Dugin; the Nordstream sabotage; the Ukrainian dirty bomb false flag. Those clearly fall into the “catastrophic fuckup of a planned event” category …

… or do they? Because as Z Man pointed out in great detail on his last podcast, all of that stuff seemed to catch The Regime flatfooted. Yeah, somebody planned those things, but that somebody wasn’t Brandon, or anyone close to Brandon, or anyone in position to prop up Brandon. Which is the surest tell for actual news (as defined above) right there: If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news.

The necessity of the canned narrative also allows the keen Brandonologist to anticipate the “news”. For instance, it has obviously started to dawn on The Regime that they’re going to get walloped in the midterms, so they’re trying out narratives as we speak. Z Man identified one I hadn’t seen, something about Brandon “inadvertently” saying something about the debt ceiling that’s supposed to give the Republicans all kinds of ammunition against him. I’m not so sure. I’ll have to look into it, but the fact that it squarely blames Brandon — who The Regime still insists is the very picture of mental acuity and vigor — pings my radar a bit. I think the stuff Her Nibs is rolling out is much likelier the Narrative being developed — she’s outright stating that “the Republicans” are going to engage in massive voter fraud.

Which to normal people is chutzpah beyond belief, but that’s how The Regime rolls. The 2016 election was, of course, full of Russian Hacking™. The 2020 election, by contrast, was the cleanest canvass in human history, and you’re an insurrectionist, a domestic extremist, and of course a racist if you dare to suggest the mere possibility of an American election being tampered with. But wouldn’t you know it, those dastardly Russians are going to rally here in 2022, because you can’t keep a Russian Hacker™ down. They might even hire a few prostitutes to pee on a bed for good measure; that’s how evil they are.

Further complicating the task, though, is that “botched op” thing. We’ve got Brandon et al. on record threatening Nordstream, so you know that was an American caper gone bad … but gone real, real bad, because if The Regime had been fully in the know, there’d have been a whole bunch of Tier Four Stoyak about lousy maintenance on the pipelines for months in advance.

Why aren’t you as angry and afraid as the media wants you to be?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on the unrelenting din of fear porn you get if you pay any attention to the legacy media:

It’s like a magic act where the door to the secret compartment moves slowly and has a spotlight pointed at it, and the audience sees the illusion every time, because it’s literally not an illusion, being right out there in the open, but the magician still pretends that everyone watching is shocked and baffled by the trick.

So. Via Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense, this summary of findings from a recent study of the American news media:

Today’s Standard-Issue Explanatory Line™ on Paul Pelosi being attacked in his home is that TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP, toxic far-right rhetoric!!!!! Ten minutes after the shabby break-in at the Katie Hobbs for Governor office was omfg literally Watergate before it evaporated into nothing much, a uniquely strange Berkeley nudist is a far-right puppet with an opening at the bottom for Donald Trump’s hand, steered by hateful rhetoric that incites violence:

[…]

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the news media focused on a clear description of what happened before they got to the blame and politicization?

There are a dozen obvious things to say about all of this, even if you aren’t Steve Scalise — the double standard, the depiction of ordinary political criticism as “demonization”, the discarding of contradictory evidence to make round pegs fit square holes — and I’m mostly not going to bother saying them in any detail.

But the thing that has to be said is that the people who increasingly hold the attention of their audiences with hyperemotional clickbait, with the obvious manipulation of negative emotions, are warning us about the dangerous effects of hyperemotional rhetorical manipulation in the public sphere.

Ohhhhh, we’re about to LOSE OUR VERY DEMOCRACY! We tremble on the edge of a FASCIST TAKEOVER! And also, toxic rhetoric is bad.

October 30, 2022

Andrew Sullivan on the rise of Rishi Sunak (or was it “Rashid Sanook”?)

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from his Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan contemplates the differences between how Barack Obama was seen as a historical figure to the US media and yet that same media can’t manage to see how Prime Minister Sunak is “the British Obama”:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

In his inimitable way, Joe Biden this week celebrated the rather remarkable fact the the new Conservative prime minister in Britain is the grandson of Indian immigrants:

    As recently as today, we’ve gotten news that Rashid Sanook is now the prime minister. As my brother would say, “Go figure.” And the Conservative party! … Pretty astounding. A groundbreaking milestone. And it matters! It matters!

He got the name wrong, but he’s Joe Biden. He gets names wrong. But unlike many on the left, especially the woke left, and perhaps because he is old enough to remember the after-effects of colonialism, Biden could bring himself to see what a staggering moment it is. It really is. It has gotten a bit obscured in the incredible mess of recent Tory politics. But staring us in the face is a historic shift.

It’s an Obama moment, after a fashion.

[…]

No, Sunak didn’t run an inspirational campaign like Obama. He’s not an orator even close in skill, he hasn’t won an election in his own right, and he didn’t come out of the blue. But he’s even younger than Obama when he took office — just 42, five years younger than Obama when he became president, and, unlike Obama, a slip of a thing and only 5’7″. And, for understandable reasons, Sunak seems much less worried about the cultural and political aspects of breaking the race barrier than Obama was.

Sunak is, for example, an openly practicing and proud Hindu. He lit Diwali lights around 11 Downing Street and took his oath on the Bhagavad Gita. That’s not someone running from his heritage. And he is also a Brexiteer from conviction, and, unlike Truss, a fiscal conservative who’s a realist about what can and can’t be done in a period of extraordinary economic stress for Brits and massive post-Covid debt.

All of this suggests something too many liberals have forgotten. These countries of alleged “white supremacy” have less racism than almost anywhere else in the world. It is hard to imagine a non-white president of France or Germany or Italy — let alone China or Russia or anywhere in Central Europe. It is hard to think of another empire that was deliberately unwound by its architects, and who then, within two generations, installed the grandson of former colonial subjects to its most powerful office. And Obama, of course, was twice elected with more heartland white support than Hillary Clinton.

Sunak has, moreover, been selected by the Tory party — that bastion of alleged bigotry that has already had three female prime ministers in its history, and now also a non-white man, James Cleverly, as foreign secretary, and a woman of Indian ancestry, Suella Braverman, as home secretary. Three of the top four ministers of state in Sunak’s cabinet are non-white. The new chairman of the Conservative party is Nadhim Zahawi. I’m telling you this because the US MSM — who are usually obsessed with racial representation in every single mundane situation — suddenly aren’t that interested, when some of their woke priors are rattled.

This is true of the broader American left. A faction obsessed with racial “equity” cannot take a moment to observe a historical moment of extraordinary proportions. Some, like Trevor Noah, have even completely invented a racist “backlash” against Sunak that simply hasn’t happened, apart from one call on one radio call-in show. (I was on BBC Radio this morning talking to an interviewer who was simply baffled by the projection.)

Noah has the excuse of being a comedian. But the New York Times‘ coverage has been almost as ludicrously slanted as its usual coverage of post-Brexit Britain, and it quickly ran two op-eds by British leftists trashing Sunak. Every story that refers to his ethnicity always slams his class “privilege” — i.e. that his parents were middle-class children of immigrants. This morning, the paper ran another hit-piece on Sunak’s wealth. The only benefit of his Indian ancestry appears to be that he will help the Indian diaspora in Britain itself. The incredible arc of imperial history finally coming full circle? Barely a mention.

“The Economist is the most over-rated publication in the English language”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business, History, Media, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I started reading The Economist when I was in college, and became a subscriber for nearly 20 years. Over the last few years, the tone of the articles shifted away from classical liberal toward communitarian or even full-blown socialist cheerleading, so I sadly ended my subscription and haven’t picked up a copy in at least 15 years. According to Ken Whyte in the SHuSH newsletter, things haven’t improved since I stopped paying attention:

The Economist recently said that book publishing in today’s economy resembles book publishing during the Second World War when “paper imports collapsed” and “publishers printed only sure-fire hits”.

The Economist is the most over-rated publication in the English language, especially by itself. I give it marks for its broad range of interests, ability to cover a lot of ground in relatively tight articles, and occasionally solid reporting, but if you’re going to boast incessantly about how smart you are …

… you’d better back it up. The Economist seldom does. It tends to glib, obvious, and sloppy. Most of its articles are written by anonymous b-level freelancers whose best stuff goes to outlets that afford bylines. Their work is edited to a stultifying homogeneity by a haughty grad student with a Financial Times subscription. Or so it reads.

This piece — “Books are Physically Changing Because of Inflation” — is a case in point. Paper imports to the UK were reduced during WW2 but they did not collapse. The problem for the book trade was rationing. The government restricted publishers to 60 percent of their pre-war paper volumes (later falling to 35 percent) and itself used far more tonnage for propaganda than the book industry normally required. Manpower shortages were another factor limiting the production of new titles.

Nor is it true that publishers released “only sure-fire hits”. While much of their paper allotment went to keeping hot-selling books in stock, many bets were placed on new titles and most of them paid. It was wartime and leisure activities were limited. “British publishers found that they could sell virtually any title,” writes Zoe Thomson in The Journal of Publishing Culture.

The article isn’t all bad. It reports that British book publishers are paying 70% more for paper than they were a year ago: “Supplies are erratic as well as expensive: paper mills have taken to switching off on days when electricity is too pricey. The card used in hardback covers has at times been all but unobtainable.”

To cope with the price increases, publishers are printing smaller books on cheaper paper and jamming more words onto the page. Writers are being asked to write shorter and are being held to their word limits.

That reflects the current state of the industry. It’s hardly news, though. SHuSH readers are probably sick of hearing me on rising paper and printing costs, and I’ve just been following what others have written. The cost of printing has more or less doubled since before COVID. Many smaller publishers are already releasing fewer and slimmer titles. If we are headed into a recession, the trend will continue.

October 27, 2022

Rishi Sunak becoming PM apparently – wait for it – proves that systemic racism is still a thing in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

You’d think the first non-white British PM would help dispel the constant claims that British society is still deeply racist, but as Theodore Dalrymple shows, that underestimates the political need to use “racism” as a rhetorical stick to beat the electorate with:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

The new British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is the son of Punjabi immigrants from East Africa. You might have thought that this would satisfy, or at least please, the anti-racism lobby, by demonstrating that British society is an open one, not completely sclerosed by racist prejudice: but you would be wrong.

An opposition member of parliament called Nadia Whittome, herself of Indian origin, tweeted that Sunak’s appointment to the highest political position was not a victory for Asian representation.

This follows the assertion not long ago by Rupa Huq, another Member of Parliament of Indian subcontinental origin, that Kwasi Kwarteng, former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s short-lived Chancellor of the Exchequer, was only “superficially black” because he spoke what in England is called the King’s English. She said that, listening to him on the radio, one would not even know that he was black. Instead, he spoke like the highly educated person he was, which in Huq’s opinion was incompatible with being black. Whites are not the only racists.

The remarks by these two female politicians, all the more significant because they were spontaneous rather than deeply considered, reveal something about the nature of modern identity politics: that the function of minorities (whether racial, sexual, or other) is to act as vote-fodder for political entrepreneurs of a certain stripe. It’s therefore the duty of minorities to remain the victims of prejudice against them and not to rise in the social scale by their own efforts: To do so is to betray the cause and above all their supposed leaders.

The reason that Whittome considers that Sunak’s appointment isn’t a victory for Asian representation is that, although of Asian origin, his parents (his father was a doctor) had him expensively educated and Sunak is now a multimillionaire, unlike most people of Asian origin — to say nothing of most whites.

There are, of course, other ways in which he isn’t representative of the Asian, or any other, population, the most important of which is that he’s of far above-average intelligence. (I must here point out also that while a certain level of intelligence is a necessary condition for a successful political career, it’s far from being a sufficient one.)

Representative government doesn’t mean that the representatives in the legislature or government must reflect the population demographically, such that — for example — 5 percent of them must have IQ’s of less than 70, though increasingly it may appear that they do. Nor are a person’s political or social views straightforwardly a reflection of his or her own economic position: If they were, Engels (who was a factory owner and rode to hounds) would never have been Marx’s collaborator, and Marx himself would not have written Capital, for he was no more proletarian than is King Charles.

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