Quotulatiousness

June 6, 2021

Decoding NPR’s revised approach to reporting in a social justice age

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

At Ace of Spades H.Q., K.T. listens to some NPR broadcasts (so you don’t have to) including an insight into how NPR and probably other media organizations are changing how they report the news:

We Hold These Truths: How Newsroom Leaders Wrestled With Covering A Tumultuous Year

This was sort of a panel discussion (light on the “discussion”), with commentary on things like how social media pressured newsrooms, for example, to say that “police murdered George Floyd” rather than “George Floyd died”.

But I kind of homed in on an academic phrase that bothers me. Sara Just from PBS:

    Yeah, I think that you’re absolutely right. There’s been a deeper understanding and deeper conversation about how much our lived experiences play into the reporting that we do. And there’s no question that it does for each and every one of us in different ways. And I think that lived experience we especially highlight now is valuable, whether it’s race or gender or the challenges. I don’t think people with those lived experiences have to carry the burden, though, of being the only ones to report on it by any means. And so that’s something that we are always balancing. (emphases mine)

So, are they balancing whether or not people without “lived experiences” can report on issues involving “lived experiences”? Like Lori Lightfoot deciding she would only do one-on-one interviews with journalists of color? Will white people be allowed to report on stories involving black people? Will men be allowed to report on stories involving women?

This is partly about local sources, but it is largely about people thought of as being in “oppressed groups”. This panel is informing us that news reporting will now be filtered through the language and perspective of Critical Social Justice, whether we realize it or not.

The indispensable Translations from the Woke at New Discourses provides the following information on Lived Experience:

    In the Theory of Critical Social Justice, for what turn out to be surprisingly deep and philosophically (almost) sophisticated reasons, lived experience is the overwhelmingly primary way in which knowledge can be obtained. This should not be mistaken to mean one’s firsthand experience, which most of us already recognize to provide a rather weak claim upon knowledge, though it is both implied and claimed that this is what “lived experience” refers to in Critical Social Justice. Lived experience, as Critical Social Justice uses the term, refers more specifically to one’s life experiences in allegedly systemic power dynamics of dominance and oppression that shape society structurally as understood with a critical consciousness and interpreted through Theory. That is, one’s “lived experience” refers to the interpretation that Critical Social Justice Theory gives for the anecdotal accounts of experiences one has had.

    Because “lived experience” refers to an interpretation through Theory, it is only the “lived experience of oppression,” as Theory will have it, that counts …

It appears that you can’t really understand the reporting on PBS, and probably NPR, now unless you have studied Critical Social Justice.

    Certainly, the claimed “lived experience” of members of dominant groups cannot be in any way used to challenge or dispute the assertions of Theory or those claiming to speak from it …

    This restriction extends to members of “minoritized” groups who disagree with Theory as well — Theory cannot be authentically disagreed with. One might think that the lived experience of a member of oppressed groups would be admissible as a valid challenge to the claims of Theory, but this not so. They may be talking about their own experiences in life, but they aren’t appealing to lived experience, which must comport with Theory …

    This is all very confusing and appears to be exactly what it is — a form of manipulating knowledge and epistemology as a means of asserting power and rigging the system such that those assertions of power cannot be challenged. Nevertheless, it isn’t merely an application of power and has a rather interesting and deep philosophical explanation that must be understood to understand why “lived experience” holds the status that it does and why it must comport with Theory to be granted veridical status and epistemic weight. This has everything to do with the fact that the roots of Critical Social Justice are in critical theories and, especially, postmodern philosophy.

There is much more, but it is way too deep to include here.

The NPR panel goes on to discuss new understandings of “balance” and “objectivity”. They do not intend to be objective. “Balance” will mean something different than what it has meant in the past in the news business.

Many people have found the way that TV news shows report on events since 2016 to be rather different than what they’d been used to before that. Some changes are subtle and others are quite blatant and hard to ignore unless you already agree with the viewpoint of the presenter. TV news used to at least pretend to present the news objectively but from the start of the Trump presidency most media outlets abruptly changed from a pseudo-objective (but leaning progressive) to an outright full-on progressive stance from start to finish with little or no attempt to provide other points of view for balance.

QotD: The Soviet Union in the Cold War, China today

Filed under: China, History, Media, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in the days of the Cold War, much was said about the titanic power of the Soviet Union. The USSR, we were told, was a superpower the equal of the United States, possibly even superior. This meme was spread by lefties who wanted the USSR to win, by sincere pacifists hoping to stop war before it could begin, and by an enormous cohort of liberals who repeated it because they heard it from the first two. (Much liberalism can be explained this way. It’s the ultimate “I heard it from somebody” ideology.)

Needless to say, it was gibbering nonsense. The late ’80s Soviet collapse revealed that the USSR was never any kind of power at all – an economy that didn’t produce, weapons that didn’t work, a populace addicted to drink and overwhelmed with despair. “Bulgaria with nukes” is how someone characterized it, and truer words were never spoken. That remains the case today, despite Vlad Putin’s chest-beating, and it’s likely to remain the case as far ahead as anyone can see.

The same trope is being repeated regarding China. China, we are told, is the coming nation. The second largest economy on Earth, soon to be the first. A billion and a half people, each more educated than any American; a military power second to none, with advanced weapons of a nature that we can only gape at. A country exercising its power over vast reaches of the Pacific and moving into the Indian Ocean, Africa, and the Mideast with no one to oppose it.

We hear this from the likes of Thomas Friedman, who has spent much of his career looking for his personal Mussolini. It’s repeated by deeper figures across the political spectrum. In fact, it can be said without exaggeration to have become received wisdom.

There’s no point in asking how true this is. The proper question to ask is whether it embodies any truth at all.

J.R. Dunn, “The Myth of China as Superpower”, American Thinker, 2019-01-09.

June 4, 2021

QotD: Handguns in the “Wild West”

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

For starters, dispel the myth of the Old West being someplace where people walked around all the time with spurs a-jingle-jangle-jinglin’ and the big iron on their hip. While it wasn’t the network of strict gun control laws that revisionists try to paint it, nor either was it the open-carry paradise of Hollywood myth.

In mid-late 19th Century America, walking around a town or city setting with a full-size horse pistol stuffed in your belt would be seen as eccentric as it would in similar surroundings today. Perhaps more so, since 19th Century Americans didn’t grow up watching old John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies on cable. On the other hand, guns were everywhere.

“But wait, Tam!” you say, “I thought you just said people mostly didn’t walk around with the big iron on their hip!”

Well, generally they didn’t. First, a Colt’s M1873, the Peacemaker of Hollywood lore, went for around twenty bucks over most of the time period of the Old West. They made about 175,000 of them, including military contract guns, over that period. (Smith & Wesson, by comparison, made almost twice that many of the big No.3 top-breaks, for what it’s worth.)

Twenty bucks was a lot of dough, relatively speaking. About a tenth the cost of a good saddle horse and the equivalent of a pretty nice AR-15 these days. Since cowboys and miners around the various cowtowns and mining boomtowns were overwhelmingly young, single men with fairly low-overhead lifestyles, it wouldn’t be amiss to think of the Colt Peacemaker and well-saddled Quarter Horse in 1870s Dodge City as the equivalent of a Daniel Defense carbine and Ford Raptor in 2010s Midland-Odessa. I have no idea what the 19th Century equivalent of truck nuts was, and considering that male working horses are almost uniformly geldings, I’m not sure I want to.

Meanwhile, there were literal millions of .22, .32, .38, and .41 pocket guns, rimfires and centerfires, sold over the same period. Human nature hasn’t changed much over the years, and I didn’t see no metal detectors at that saloon in Tombstone. Most every person had a gun for pocket, purse, or nightstand and, probably like most gun owners today, carried it if they felt like they were “going someplace they might need it.”

Tamara Keel, “Mouseguns, Then and Now”, View From The Porch, 2021-02-21.

June 3, 2021

The Supernatural Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle | B2W:ZEITGEIST! I E.19 Spring – 1923

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 2 Jun 2021

Being the creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes has made Arthur Conan Doyle famous for his scientific rationality. But Doyle also has a deeply held belief in the existence of the spirit universe. In a world still reeling from the shock of the Great War, he is not alone.
(more…)

June 2, 2021

Media Fearmongering

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Laura Dodsworth on how the BBC and other British media outlets turned all the dials to 11 to ramp up fear over the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

The media have served us a cornucopia of frightening articles and news items about Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. While writing my new book, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I encountered a panoply of doom-mongering headlines. These were an indication of the significant role the media have played in creating our state of fear.

Of course, news media should not shy away from reporting frightening news during a pandemic. They should make us aware of the numbers of deaths, the policies being implemented to tackle the pandemic and the latest scientific developments. But during Covid, the media went beyond reporting on the pandemic. Instead, they appeared beholden to the old commercial imperatives, “If it scares, it airs”, and “If it bleeds, it leads”. It seems fear does sell.

The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to create has been suffocating. Death tolls were constantly brandished without the context of how many people die every day in the UK, and hospital admissions were reported while recoveries were not. As a result, Covid often appeared as a death sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a mild illness for the majority of people.

Given the wall-to-wall doom, it is therefore no surprise that the British were one of the most frightened populations in the world. Various studies showed that we were more concerned than other countries about the spread of Covid and less confident in the ability of our government to deal with it. One survey in July 2020 showed that the British public thought between six and seven per cent of the population had died from Covid – which was around 100 times the actual death rate at the time. Indeed, if six or seven per cent of Brits had died from Covid, that would have amounted to about 4,500,000 bodies – we’d have noticed, don’t you think?

While researching A State of Fear, I interviewed members of the general public about how they were impacted by the “campaign of fear” during the epidemic. Many talked of how the media had elevated their alarm.

“There wasn’t much to do”, Darren told me, “so we’d watch TV and we saw programmes about disinfecting your shopping when it arrives, and having a safezone in the kitchen. The nightly bulletins on the TV about death tolls, the big graphs with huge spikes on them, came at us ‘boom, boom, boom!’. It was a constant barrage of doom and gloom. My fear of the virus went through the roof.”

Sarah told me she had to stop watching the BBC. As her daughter put it, “If you just watched or listened to the BBC every day, what hope would you have had?”. Jane, meanwhile, described the “gruesome headlines” that came at her “thick and fast”.

The fearmongering about Covid began even before the pandemic hit the UK. We were primed by videos from Wuhan in China, which were then widely circulated by UK-based media outlets. These painted an apocalyptic picture, featuring collapsed citizens, medics in Hazmat suits, concerned bystanders and a city grinding to a halt. In one memorable video, which went viral, so to speak, a woman fell, stiff as a board, flat on her face, on a pavement. The split second where she falters is a giveaway – this was a set-up. If the rest of the world had Covid, China had “Stunt Covid”.

June 1, 2021

The Avengers – Must See TV

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Billy Rees
Published 19 Aug 2015

ITV programme from 2005 presented by Joan Collins.

May 30, 2021

The Stanford Prison “Experiment”

Filed under: Books, Health, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In another of the anonymous book reviews at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten, a look at the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment:

The second most famous psychology experiment in history is the Stanford Prison experiment. Philip Zimbardo split a group of undergrads at random into prisoners and guards. The guards were left free to choose how they would manage the prisoners, and within days the whole thing had to be called off as it had descended into a sadistic torture camp. At least that’s how Zimbardo has described it for the last 50 years. In fact, everything I just said is completely false. The undergrads were not split at random — the scheme had actually been dreamt up by an undergrad called David Jaffe who had run a previous experiment himself on abusing prisoners in a fake jail. He was carefully placed into the guards group. Nor were the guards left to choose their methods, instead they were briefed by Zimbardo and Jaffe that the purpose of the experiment (for which they were being well renumerated) was to see how people cracked under pressure. The experiment would be a failure unless they could put the prisoners under terrible stress. Even Douglas Korpi’s prisoner breakdown on day two, which, captured on camera, became the cinematic face of the experiment, was a fake he put on after discovering he wouldn’t be able to spend the time in jail revising, and being told he would only be allowed to quit if he suffered some sort of serious mental or physical breakdown.

Despite the pressure from Zimbardo and Jaffe, two thirds of the guards refused to take part in sadistic games, and much to their frustration a third continued to treat the prisoners with kindness. Nonetheless when Zimbardo came to write up the experiment about the effects on the prisoners, he realised it would be a much more compelling story if he turned it on its head, and made it about the guards instead. The truth of guards carefully drilled to be sadistic was swept away with a lie of ordinary people spontaneously becoming cruel when dressed in a uniform and given a position of power.

For years no one replicated the experiment — given the results first time round it was thought unethical, but in 2001 the BBC in search of new reality television commissioned a repeat (turns out reality television runs to different ethics than the average psychology department). Now unlike normal reality TV they didn’t bother manipulating the participants to be at each other’s throats — there was no need, in days it was going to be a bloodbath.

The result is the four most boring hours of television ever recorded. Nothing happens. The guards sit around chatting. When tensions arise with the prisoners, they defuse them by talking to them nicely. On day 6 some prisoners escaped. They headed over to the guards’ canteen and all had a smoke together. On day 7 they voted in favour of turning the whole thing into a commune.

QotD: Pornography

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The more important effect of home video — and, even more so, of the Internet — has been to create a wide and wild array of market segments, a diversity so dizzying it defies the very idea of a mainstream. A couple decades ago, feminists could argue plausibly that porn was partly responsible for the unrealistic body images they blame for bulimia and anorexia. Today, every conceivable body type has an online community of masturbators devoted to it.

Jesse Walker, “Guess Who’s Coming: Progress at the cineplex”, Reason, 2005-03-28.

May 29, 2021

History Buffs: Midway Part Two

Filed under: History, Japan, Media, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

History Buffs
Published 28 May 2021

As promised here is Part Two of my Midway review. Hope you guys enjoy it 🙂

You can join Nebula today and get Curiosity Stream at 26% off for a year! Click on the link below

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May 28, 2021

The essential — and largely non-replenishable — trust in government

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

Last week, Tom posted a then-recent discussion he overheard at The Last Ditch:

[Click to see full-size flowchart]

Two svelte American ladies of a certain age were having coffee today at my West London health club. They were in the next “pod” to me outdoors as I had a post-swim coffee before heading home. Perhaps it’s those wide-open prairies but Americans, bless them, always speak a little more loudly than us so I didn’t really have a choice but to listen to their conversation.

The topic was their mothers. Both moms back in the States are apparently unsure of the wisdom of being vaccinated. One cost of parenthood no-one tells you about beforehand is that one day you will be judged and found wanting by humans you could not love more; your children for whom you would cheerfully die. I confess their mothers immediately had my sympathy, regardless of the correctness of their views.

There was a good deal of sneering about conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. I found it surprising that both errant moms believed 5G was involved, but having listened quietly for another few minutes discovered that neither had ever said so. Their daughters were simply assuming that if they doubted government advice on vaccines, they believed all the other stuff too. One of the mothers is apparently a 9/11 “truther” and her daughter’s observation that no government is capable of keeping such a dark secret struck me as fair.

[…]

There are available facts and facts that will only become available in the future. People must make their choices based on their own risk assessment today. That useless truism is not the point of this post. The truly significant thing I overheard was this. Having sneered at her mother’s belief that “we can’t trust government”, one of the ladies said;

    I thought to myself – Mom, I don’t want to believe what you believe because if it’s true I can’t have any of the things I believe in.

There, I thought, was a moment of insight; a moment (almost) of self-awareness. If government can’t be trusted, then the societal change she wants isn’t possible. Therefore, whatever the evidence, government must be trusted. That pretty much sums up the statist mindset.

I don’t know whether these mothers or daughters are right about this issue. I do know that one of the daughters (and her companion seemed to agree) is allowing her desires to displace her reason. In consequence, sadly, her mind will only ever be changed by a catastrophe I would never wish upon her.

I suspect many such earnest, well-meaning souls as Goneril and Regan (as I christened them) felt they needed to believe the state could be trusted at key points in the deadly history of the 20th Century. If the brave new world of Communism was to happen, for example, government had to be trusted with enormous power to make immense change.

Many Gonerils and Regans must have ruefully reflected on that in the Gulag.

May 27, 2021

“Are you an ally of an all-powerful white supremacist, colonialist apartheid regime led by baby-killing oppressors, the likes of whose evil the world has never seen?”

Filed under: History, Media, Middle East, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Why, yes. Yes I am, Barbara Kay. And you should be too:

Nobody with eyes to see can press on with the myth that this is a political conflict. The anti-Semitism that lurks behind obsessive Israel-bashing can no longer be credibly passed off as “criticism of Israel”. It’s not about Israel and never was. It’s about those maddening Jews. Wherever they are, they make trouble. What is it with their stubborn insistence on their right to live and flourish in their homeland, when they know they are not wanted there?

Never mind the historical facts surrounding Jews’ indigenous rights, or the painstaking legal journey to national sovereignty (along with other newly minted Middle Eastern countries like Iraq and Syria, both of which have appalling human rights records, but never have their right to exist questioned). Treaties and international law are too dull, nuanced and complex. They take time and effort to understand. It’s very taxing for the brain. Narrative, though, takes no time at all to absorb. Stories of good and evil are simple, unnuanced and satisfyingly emotive.

If you attend to the myth-mongering on social media, it seems your choice is stark. Are you an ally of an all-powerful white supremacist, colonialist apartheid regime led by baby-killing oppressors, the likes of whose evil the world has never seen? Or are you a decent, compassionate human being, committed to social justice and ready to lend your support to those infamous Zionist monsters’ powerless, oppressed, racialized victims, who are languishing in their open-air prisons?

It’s a tough choice for progressive Jews. Before 1967, living with oneself as a Jew was easy. Socialist Israel was little David then and the massed hostile Arab states were Goliath. Even Bernie Sanders enjoyed his time on a kibbutz in 1963. (Mind you, that particular kibbutz, Sha’ar Ha’amakim, was so far left, one of its members was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.)

Then those upstart Jews dared to win a war against incredible odds and had the chutzpah to take back territory that had been stolen from them in the 1948 War of Independence. The pivot from victim to victor, from powerlessness to power, was the kiss of death for their support from the left.

May 26, 2021

POV you just turned on the History Channel for the first time in 15 years

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Joel Haver
Published 16 Feb 2021

Do not try what you’re about to see at home.

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May 25, 2021

John McWhorter’s new book announced

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

Following on to his Nine Nasty Words, which just became a New York Times best-seller (somewhat to his surprise), John McWhorter’s next book will be Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America from Random Penguin:

That manuscript will be released as a book by Portfolio (also a Penguin Random House imprint) in October. It will be published under a new title: Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

I should mention that the often sharp and insightful subscriber comments, as well as the brilliant editorial counsel of Bria Sandford at Portfolio, have already made Woke Racism significantly different from the The Elect excerpts. Woke Racism will express what the Substack excerpts did and then some. It will still analyze Third-Wave Antiracism as a religion. It will still make legions of black people see me as a race traitor. It will still make legions of white people see me as a tragically deluded white supremacist with brown skin who merits dismissal and ostracization.

And amidst all of that, it will still represent what I consider the most pro-black book I have ever written.

But this does mean that from now on, my Substack “newsletter” will be exactly that. I am glad many of you have enjoyed my posts here beyond the The Elect excepts, and they will continue, at the rate of once or twice (and I hope, more often, twice) a week. I have loved communicating to you as well as the feedback I get. Let’s keep this going.

Only: get “The Elect” as a real book, Woke Racism, around Halloween. Here, get my take on things as they happen, unfiltered.

May 24, 2021

History Buffs: Midway Part One

Filed under: China, History, Japan, Media, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

History Buffs
Published 21 May 2021

Thank you guys so much for your patience. Quarantine has made somethings difficult and I know its been a while but it’s finally here! I hope you enjoy it!

You can join Nebula today and get Curiosity Stream at 26% off for a year! Click on the link below

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The hard core of “mostly peaceful protest” activists

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

In the most recent Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains why the same people seem to show up at “mostly peaceful” riots protests in so many different cities and even in the rare cases they’re arrested, are quickly bailed out again:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

One of the advantages of the collectivists is that they organize like nobody’s business, while we liberty minded … Well — pats heads all around — well, you guys are adorable, but the individualists failed to organize, okay.

Now, while many of you translate this to a paramilitary clash and panic, don’t. Most of their supporters aren’t nor will they commit violence, unless the can do it when no one is looking, sneakily, and against someone old, disabled, frail or very young.

Most of their supporters are in fact the “go alongs to get along” who just want to be “nice people” by siding with lunatics who want to put a boot on their necks. Oh, they also want to be smart because their college professors told them every “very smart” person believes in Marxism. This is why at the back of their brains every single one of the infantile “activists” thinks he or she will be in charge and not one of the lumpenpoletariat. No, they have never looked at actual communist countries, and if they did, as their panic at the Xi-flu proved, they don’t get statistics or numbers at all.

So, yeah, the people they are using and weaponized-and-paid psychopaths, whom they bus from city to city. They’re armed and well organized partly because they do this all time and are given weapons and training. They’re very fearsome FOR ONE CITY AT A TIME.

In other words they are a Potemkin army, raging across the country to intimidate the citizens. Which is why they have to punish Kyle Rittenhouse, because he pierced the paper silhouette. And why blue states refuse to arrest the rioters. They have very few of them. They’re the precious.

It does work on corporations and — apparently — Supreme Court Judges who, being in a highly social profession just buy what the news tell them and don’t investigate anything for themselves.

Look, I don’t think this bullshit will hold. And it’s part of the reason I think we’re going to have a brief, intense, localized clash.

This is not the seventies. They really had a majority of the indoctrinated youth then, and the youth then were a majority. With the attendant side effect that the youth then hadn’t been raised as little emperors, because they were the all-too-precious single offspring.

Those were the real Marxist riots. This is the Memorex. And like Chinese troops clashing with Indian troops, their rank and file are more likely to cry for their mommies, if they meet real opposition.

They have the psychos they train and bus around and which have a rap sheet long as their arm, and then they have the daft survivals of the sixties, at protests with their oxygen bottles and walkers.

And they have the get alongs. Who are useless in battle, but quite good at coordinated action on other fronts.

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