Quotulatiousness

August 24, 2021

Tracking the bullshit in the ongoing “she-lection”

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

Ever watchful of opportunities, the folks at The Line quickly realized that there was a critical tracking metric going un-reported in the 2021 federal election and They. Are. On. It.

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

At The Line, we’ll be continuing to send out our weekly dispatches for the duration of the campaign. Columnist Jen Gerson will also be doing a weekly recap of major events. We’ll be running articles by other contributors as they come in — not all will be about the election, but many will. And we’re happy to do this. But we felt that something — something we couldn’t quite put our finger on — was missing from our plan. We felt there was more that we could do.

It was our friend over at The Hub, a new media startup, that set us on the right course. The Hub is going to be doing “Policy Pulse”, which they describe as “tracking all the policy announcements from the major parties, with instant analysis from our crew of experts.” Great idea! But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that, you know, that doesn’t quite catch it all. There’s something else that needs to be carefully tracked and analyzed. So we at The Line are proud to bring you our first Bullshit Bulletin, where we’ll note and mock all the incredibly dumb stuff that crops up along the way. This will be an evolving process, and we don’t pretend to see everything, so if you want to send us suggestions, tweet us at @the_lineca, and add #bullshitbulletin, or drop us a note at lineeditor@protonmail.com, with Bullshit Bulletin in the subject field.

And to be clear, all you smart asses out there, no, don’t just tag the entire campaign or every statement made by every member of a party you’re not voting for and write it off as bullshit. There’s degrees of wiggle room and salesmanship and base-mobilizing in every election. We’re not going to worry about that. We’re looking for the egregious examples, and the really weird stuff that comes tumbling out of the partisan mind.

On that note, let’s get started.

Note that although they’re careful to exclude bullshit reports on comments “made by every member of a party you’re not voting for” — which is fair and sensible — they are (one assumes) open to bullshit reports on comments made by members of the party you are planning to vote for … because if it’s enough to set off your partisan-biased bullshit meter when it comes from your “side”, then it’s got to be prime quality bullshit.

August 23, 2021

The dying media’s strange obsession with the Green Party

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

The Green Party gets far more media attention in Canada than their vote totals or influence on goverment policy could possibly justify. Their ongoing attempts to commit media character assassination of their own leader might be the first time in living memory that the party’s antics might — might — justify it. The Line explains some of the dramedy in Greentopia:

“Annamie Paul with Green Party of Canada supporters” by Annamie Paul is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

One of us, just a couple of days ago, was standing around in our increasingly tattered casual wear and making a sandwich with the TV on in the background. A local news channel was showing Green party leader Annamie Paul speaking. So we changed the channel, because the Greens are irrelevant. But the next channel was also showing the same feed. We tried two others. It was all the same goddamned feed. And two of those networks were national. Viewers from coast to coast had a chance to hear, for an extended period, from a woman so thoroughly doomed that she’s not even pretending to run a national campaign. All she can muster is an attempt to win her seat in downtown Toronto.

Look, we don’t know who needs to hear this, but at the national level, the Greens are zeroes. Sorry, not sorry. Frankly, the Greens have long gotten too much attention in Canadian politics, which is a result of a few quirky things all aligning in their favour: Elizabeth May’s admittedly effective relentless self-promotion, the coffer-stuffing effect of the per-vote-wage subsidy, and, the politeness of Canadian media leaders who felt awkward saying no to Lizzie.

This is not to say that there are not serious Greens, nor that the Green party has not put forward some serious policy proposals. There are, and they have. The issue is that under our electoral system, the Greens don’t matter. And their strident complaining about their irrelevancy doesn’t actually make them relevant.

We glanced at recent vote tallies. The Greens generally get around five per cent or so, sometimes a point or two higher, sometimes a point or two lower. That ain’t nothing. But it is not enough to make them a meaningful electoral force in anything but a tiny handful of seats — or in really weird, bizarre vote-splitting scenarios, and those are very rare. We don’t believe there’s some magic level of popular support at which a party deserves serious consideration or not, it all depends on the context. The Bloc doesn’t get a ton of votes, either (though never less than the Greens), but since they only run candidates in Quebec, their efficient vote means they have a pretty consistently good chance of winning enough seats to matter in parliament. The Greens … don’t.

And that is in normal times. These aren’t normal times. Annamie Paul is a perfectly serious, credible person. The fact that her party is trying to back a cement truck over her in full view of 38 million witnesses simply confirms our instinct to ignore the party she leads. Most elections, you could argue that it’s a shame that the Greens don’t have an actual chance. This election, we’re thanking God for it.

Deciding how much attention to give a candidate or party is usually pretty easy. Outside Quebec, the big three — Tories, Liberals and NDP — get proper coverage, within the context of local circumstances and the dynamics of individual campaigns (ignoring a CPC also-ran in deepest Toronto isn’t going to break any hearts, nor the sacrificial Liberal in rural Alberta). The gamut of weirdo fringe parties are basically ignored. In Quebec, the Bloc warrants consideration alongside the big three.

What screws all this up, though, are the Greens and the People’s Party. They don’t warrant serious consideration, per se, but they will draw a fair number of voters. What to do with these?

August 20, 2021

QotD: First Ministers Conferences

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

What is the point of a First Ministers Conference?

There is no actual necessity for them, you understand. The federal and provincial governments are quite able to function within their respective jurisdictions without their leaders dashing off across the country at regular intervals to quiver their jowls at each other. The first such meeting was not held until 1906. Just 10 more “dominion-provincial conferences” occurred over the next 40 years. Not until the 1950s did they become the semi-annual affairs we know today. That this was also when the TV cameras arrived is possibly not coincidental.

If there were actual business to transact, it could just as easily be arranged by subordinates, or over the phone, or via video-conference. Or if an issue were so thorny that it genuinely required a fleshly first-ministerial encounter, the prime minister could always meet bilaterally with the premier or premiers involved, as Stephen Harper did.

But a full-on, capital-F First Ministers Conference, official cars, flag-backed lecterns and all? There is invariably but one purpose to these: for the 10 premiers to corner and harass the prime minister, using the imbalance in their numbers to depict the feds as the outlier. Sometimes this is in furtherance of the premiers’ perennial campaign for more federal cash. Sometimes, as in the current exercise, the point seems to be conflict for conflict’s sake. But always — always — it is theatre.

Only it is theatre of a peculiar kind: with the curtains drawn and the sound down, the audience being instead entertained by periodic reports from agents for each of the actors about who said what. Thus the breathless dispatches from reporters orbiting the conference — they are kept well away from the actual meeting room — every line of it originating from sources, federal or provincial, with a professional interest in puffing one leader or the other.

Andrew Coyne, “A semi-annual opportunity for premiers to strut and preen and accomplish nothing”, National Post, 2018-12-07.

August 18, 2021

Historically, empires have fallen over decades or centuries …

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

… today, however, everything seems to move much faster than it used to:

The War on Terror began with men plunging to their deaths from the highest floors of skyscrapers hit by airplanes; it ended with men plunging to their deaths from the undercarriage of a US airplane taking off from what’s left of “Hamid Karzai International Airport” (the signs will be coming down even as you read this).

America is a global laughingstock right now, but that’s no reason not to give Chairman Xi and Putin and every up-country village headman in Helmand a few more yuks. Step forward, State Department spokeswanker Ned Price:

    State Department calls for Taliban to include women in its government

The United States is dead as a global power because of this kind of indestructible stupidity. You’ve lost, you blew it, it’s over: The goatherds just decapitated you; could you at least have the self-respect not to run around like a headless chicken too stupid to know it’s nogginless? Or like a broken doll lying on its back with its mechanism jammed on the same simpleton phrases: “Diversity is our strength… diversity is our strength…”

Contrast the Washington presser with that in Kabul:

    Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid says ‘We have defeated a great power.’

Hmm. Ned Price vs Zabiullah Mujahid: tough call. The mountain of non-existent dollar bills that the bloated husk of federal government blows through every minute surely should buy sufficient self-awareness to know that, whatever else it may be, this is not a day for wankery as usual. Even CNN has a more proximate relationship to reality. Here is their Kabul correspondent, Clarissa Ward, reporting on Sunday:

And here is the same Miss Ward reporting on Monday:

Gee, did anyone back at the anchor desk ask her what’s with the wardrobe switcheroo?

Just for the record, the Kingdom of Afghanistan introduced votes for women in 1964 – whereas Switzerland did not get even a very limited female franchise until 1971, and full suffrage not until the Nineties.

Yet, oddly, every Pushtun warlord prefers to keep his retirement account in Zurich.

Maybe, after taking twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser, you State Department arses might have enough humility to recognize that that that big messy world is subtler than your one-size-fits-all clichés.

August 17, 2021

Mark Steyn – “The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it”

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The collapse of western — specifically American — control in Afghanistan got put on fast forward and the US dying media can’t be bothered to give it much attention. Mark Steyn didn’t explicitly predict this particular high-speed collapse, but he’s been warning about the Afghan situation for over a decade:

A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com

To reprise a line from a decade-old column of mine:

    Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you’re Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you’re Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.

That’s the point to remember: if you’re an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it’s the fall of America. Even by their usual wretched standards, the world’s most somnolent media are struggling to stay up to speed on the story. Here’s the scoop from USA Today:

    Taliban’s Afghanistan Advance Tests Biden’s ‘America Is Back’ Foreign Policy Promise

You don’t say! Did he misread the prompter, or mishear the guy in his ear? “America is on its back”, surely?

But don’t worry, the world’s most lavishly over-funded “intelligence community” is on the case:

    Kabul Could Fall To The Taliban Within 90 Days, U.S. Intelligence Warns

Thank you, geniuses. That was Thursday. So it turned out to be well within ninety hours — which is close enough for US intelligence work.

Was this the same “seventeen intelligence agencies” who all agreed Russia had meddled in the 2016 election — and with whose collective intelligence only a fool would disagree?

Or perhaps it was only one intelligence agency — most likely the crack agents of the highly specialized Federal Unitary Central Kabul Western Intelligence Tracking Service.

To modify Hillary Clinton, what difference at this point would it make if the US government simply laid off its entire “intelligence community”?

Indeed, what difference would it make if it closed down its military? Obviously, it would present a few mid-life challenges for its corrupt Pentagon bureaucracy, since that many generals on the market for defense lobbyist gigs and board directorships all at once would likely depress the going rate. But, other than that, a military that accounts for 40 per cent of the planet’s military spending can’t perform either of the functions for which one has an army: it can’t defeat overseas enemies, and it’s not permitted to defend the country, as we see on the Rio Grande.

So what’s the point?

Oh, oh, but, if a nation doesn’t have an army to defend it, a quarter-of-a-million foreign invaders could just walk into the country with impunity every month!

The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network — the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese — is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians … as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).

On the leftie side, of course, the court eunuchs have risen as one to protect the Dementia Kid, and are working as hurriedly as the Kabul document-shredders in an effort to figure out a way to blame it all on Trump.

Of course, retreating from Kabul is kind of a western military tradition:

Remnants of an Army (1879) by Elizabeth Butler portraying William Brydon arriving at the gates of Jalalabad as the only survivor of a 16,500 strong evacuation from Kabul in January 1842.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

The remnants of an army, Jellalabad (sic), January 13, 1842, better known as Remnants of an Army, is an 1879 oil-on-canvas painting by Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler. It depicts William Brydon, assistant surgeon in the Bengal Army, arriving at the gates of Jalalabad in January 1842. The walls of Jalalabad loom over a desolate plain and riders from the garrison gallop from the gate to reach the solitary figure bringing the first word of the fate of the “Army of Afghanistan”.

Supposedly Brydon was the last survivor of the approximately 16,000 soldiers and camp followers from the 1842 retreat from Kabul in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and is shown toiling the last few miles to safety on an exhausted and dying horse. In fact a few other stragglers from the Army eventually arrived, and larger numbers were eventually released or rescued after spending time as captives of Afghan forces.

August 13, 2021

Millennial maternalism

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

In The Critic, Kittie Helmick considers the Millennial generation and their pronounced maternalistic worldview:

“Millennials” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The popular conception of millennials paints the generation as immature, living an extended adolescence: late to marry, late to have children, late to buy houses. Even the retort — that society hasn’t delivered on its promises; that an unfavourable job market has prevented them from living the lives expected of adults — reads as a refusal to accept responsibility.

The response to Simone Biles’s withdrawal from the Olympics demonstrates that the opposite is true. Millennials are not behaving like teenagers — they are responding like mothers. The breakdown in family life combined with quantum leaps in telecommunication technology has sent the 90s generation to their computer screens for meaningful connections. Instead of growing out of video games and chat rooms, millennials have grown with them. Online communities have not stunted young people’s growth, but absorbed it.

Millennials — now aged in their late 20s and early 30s, some with families of their own — have directed all the maternal instincts of adulthood towards online media. Rather than collect family albums, they amass Instagram and Tumblr accounts with thousands of images of their favourite characters and celebrities. Notifications act as little appeals for attention akin to the tug of a child’s hand. This otherwise unrealised yearning to nurture underpins much of the affective response to news stories about the latest victim of injustice.

There are many strands entangled in the knot of American leftism, but the maternalism of millennials manifests in the self-righteous defensiveness of Biles’s supporters and the emotional outrage they direct at anyone who criticizes the gymnast. Stripped of patriotic sentiments and religious traditions, millennials have nowhere to direct their human instincts of loyalty and affection but at the figures (fictional or fabled) who occupy so many of their hours.

The language of critical theory cloaks these sentiments in intellectual rigor, lending some dignity not only to the mouthpieces of these ideas, but also to the intended objects of their affections. Millennials don’t have to worry about infantilising Biles if they call her an “exceptional Black woman”, even while they simultaneously invoke the moral standards of a kindergarten classroom in asking, “How do we make it our responsibility to love and protect each other?”

Witness these impulses play out in the more thinly veiled account of a father who wonders if he has turned “soft” because his parental cares now eclipse his admiration of Kerri Strug’s feat during the 1996 Olympics: performing a “one-legged vault” on an injured ankle. The father implies that only a monster could cheer when a teenage girl sacrifices her health for victory. He makes no secret of the reason behind his change of heart: “Now that I have two young daughters in gymnastics, I expect their safety to be the coach’s number one priority.”

There is nothing amiss in his love for his daughters, or the extension of that concern to other children, but this father has lost sight of other principles that might compete for priority in the spotlit, split second decisions of athletes and trainers in Olympic competitions. Loyalty to something greater than oneself — to Strug’s teammates, to the country she represented — has fallen out of the picture, leaving behind only the petty incentive of winning. This perspective permits no higher motive to the coach responsible for urging Strug on, than greed for a gold medal.

Millennial parents run to the opposite extreme of the Spartan mother: instead of inculcating self-sacrifice for the good of the community, they insist, “Not my child.” They see their role as shielding children from the dangers of the outside world, rather than preparing them to face it.

August 10, 2021

Elections not for changing things but merely for “sending messages”?

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

Jay Currie on the election that Justin Trudeau clearly itches to call at any moment:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Apparently Justin Trudeau thinks that the best use of the nation’s time as we head into a Delta driven 4th wave of COVID is to have an election. Okay, I never thought he had any judgement and an election call at the moment would confirm that but here we are.

There are huge issues facing Canada. Unfettered immigration, useless but expensive carbon taxes, deficits to 2070, price inflation, real estate markets which have put housing in the luxury goods category, a stalled First Nations reconciliation process, the collapse of any number of energy projects, increased homelessness, opioid deaths, a health care system which seems incapable of dealing with even a fairly mild pandemic, senior care in a shambles where our elderly died in droves as much from neglect as COVID and on and on.

Judging from the Liberals activities in the run up to the election, while those issues get the occasional nod, the strategy seems to be to spend lots of money in seats the Libs either hold or would like to win. As to substance, the Libs seem very committed to “doing something” about climate change, keeping immigration levels up over 400,000 per year and not being racist. Unfortunately, this is also pretty much the substantive position of the Conservative Party. The CPC’s big selling point is getting rid of Justin and his gender balanced Cabinet of flakes.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole (who also happens to be my local MP) seems to believe the only way he’s going to topple Trudeau and the liberals is by offering exactly the same policies but wrapped in false Tory blue instead of Liberal red. As far as I can tell, he’s the reddest of Red Tories to lead the party in decades (disclaimer: I’ve met O’Toole a few times and chatted about non-political topics … he seems a decent sort and he’s probably a good neighbour and an upstanding citizen in his private life). He’s certainly no Stephen Harper — and I wasn’t much of a Harper fan, but I’d strongly prefer Harper to O’Toole as Tory leader. I certainly don’t plan on voting for him, and unless the Libertarians scare up a candidate in my riding I’ll be voting PPC this time around:

You will notice I do not mention Max Bernier or the Peoples’ Party. I don’t because the PPC plays outside the consensus. The PPC and its supporters think that significant change is absolutely required and that issues like the deficit, immigration, economic development, First Nations policy, housing and health care need new thinking. […] In terms of seats and outcomes, while I would be delighted to see the PPC win a few seats, the real target for the PPC is the national and regional popular vote. Yes, I do know that does not matter electorally. After all, the CPC won the popular vote in the last federal election. (My own sense is that the Maverick Party has some chance of winning seats in Alberta and Saskatchewan which will be discussed in that subsequent post.)

Max and the PPC need to crack the 5% barrier this time out. If they can do that and Max can win in Beauce, they will have sent a huge message to the CPC. That message is important. Now, if Max and the PPC manage to cut through and beat the Greens – not an unrealistic goal – the message that there are real problems which need real solutions will go mainstream whether the gatekeepers like it or not.

There are really two elections coming up: the Tweedledum and Tweedledee, paid for media, horse race and a vote on whether Canada is a serious country.

Art Deco in the 1920s

Filed under: Architecture, France, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The1920sChannel
Published 1 Nov 2019

The aesthetic of the 1920s was certainly unique and instantly recognizable. For those of us (me included) who don’t know much about art, it’s difficult to pinpoint the characteristics. The most important art movement of the ’20 was Art Deco. So here’s a closer, though unprofessional, look at 1920s aesthetic.

August 6, 2021

Shostakovich: Stalin’s Composer? – WW2 Biography Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 5 Aug 2021

Leningrad’s Dmitri Shostakovich has risen from a child prodigy to be one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated composers, having rescued his career from Stalin’s interference along the way. Desperate to defend Russia after the German invasion, he fights back, not with a rifle, but with music.
(more…)

August 1, 2021

Gresham’s Law, as applied to photography

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

In economics, Gresham’s Law states that “bad money drives out good”, that may need to be reformulated as it applies to modern standards of photography in a formulation something like: “bad photos drive out good photos“:

“Art is like a joke, either you get it or you don’t.” So it was explained to me in the late 1970s by photographer Randy Eriksen, whose cheeky observation about the importance of context to one’s appreciation of either comedy or art could have been a parenthetical second subtitle for author and educator Kim Beil’s Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography (Stanford University Press, 2020).

Beil’s episodic and highly readable book identifies 50 photographic trends — illustrated by hundreds of vintage and contemporary photographs — that have guided the aesthetics of photography since 1851, when a group of American daguerreotypes made a splash at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Back in 1851, context mostly equaled 1851, as the latest photo technology of the day played a major role in how Victorians decided that one picture was good and another was not.

[…]

Beil’s own context began in Albany, New York, where she grew up. “My mom was into photography,” Beil tells me over the phone. “She was the one who took the pictures in my family. When my parents got me my first camera, a Nikon FE, they made me attend a class offered by the camera store. I remember it was held in this dark ballroom at an Albany hotel. It was me and a bunch of middle-aged men. That’s where I learned about 35mm cameras, f-stops, and shutter speeds.”

“How To Make Good Pictures” (Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak Co., 1943).
Source: Collection of the Prelinger Library, via Collectors Weekly.

Beil also learned from various “How to Make Good Pictures” manuals published by Kodak, which also hailed from upstate New York. “I’m pretty sure I internalized the advice I read in ‘How to Make Good Pictures’,” Beil says of her early aesthetic indoctrination, “things like avoiding centering your subject in the frame, the rule of thirds, shooting during ‘golden hour’, all that conventional wisdom.”

[…]

“Intention is central to the way I think about art, and maybe even how we define it,” Beil agrees. “Take lens flare: I think the power of lens flare comes from its initial unintentional use by people who were just taking casual pictures without any premeditation, without much intention.” In these sorts of photographs, Beil says, lens flare was an amateur mistake that conferred “a kind of authenticity to an image.” That’s why advertisers find lens flare so appealing. “Because we still associate it with authenticity,” Beil says, “it makes an advertising photo seem more real, maybe even spontaneous.”

Today, lens flare is so widely used, so intentional, that billions of smartphone cameras offer multiple variations of this former failing in the form of filters, which can be activated with a click or a swipe. “Everything can be achieved and there are no more accidents,” Beil says of photography in the 2020s, “so photographers look to things that happened before to reinsert some kind of authenticity into their pictures.” Thanks to technology, photographers can now pretend to take pictures as if they lacked the tools to make their pictures, well, good.

The problem, of course, is that technology is intrusive, inserting itself into aesthetics and even cultural paradigms without being invited to do so. “We have a situation today,” Beil says, “in which our smartphone cameras are producing pictures according to the criteria of software designers, who have made a lot of egregious assumptions about the tonality of skin color.” According the Beil, because the sample sets used by software designers have historically included more pictures of light skin tones than dark skin tones, the colors captured by our smartphone cameras do a better job of reproducing the lighter skin tones. “People with darker skin aren’t represented in the way that they want to be,” she says, “or even in the way that’s accurate. Google has promised that the Pixel 6 camera coming out in October 2021 is going to deal with that problem,” she adds, but Beil doesn’t sound like she’s expecting much more than an incremental improvement.

July 29, 2021

Buster Keaton, British Imperialism, and the Era of Spectacle | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.23 Spring 1924

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

TimeGhost History
Published 28 Jul 2021

There’s no business like show business and in the spring of 1924, you can see why. Buster Keaton and Hollywood as a whole are producing some iconic films, the British Empire is putting on a massive exhibition, and there is even talk of a death ray.
(more…)

QotD: An opera called Margaret

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Margaret Thatcher had a great deal of time for Andrew Lloyd Webber. In August 1978, while she was still Leader of the Opposition, her speechwriter Ronnie Millar took her to see Evita. “It was a strangely wondrous evening yesterday leaving so much to think about,” she wrote to Millar the next day. “I still find myself rather disturbed by it. But if they [the Peronists] can do that without any ideals, then if we apply the same perfection and creativeness to our message, we should provide quite good historic material for an opera called Margaret in thirty years’ time!”

Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, 2015.

July 27, 2021

Kurt Schlicter on the gimps of the White House press corps

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

At TownHall, Kurt Schlicter expresses his disregard for the media who are supposed to be covering the White House and are voluntarily muzzling themselves and acting more like the ministry of propaganda than the free press. At least in Canada, they have the excuse that they’re paid prostitutes for whatever their federal pimps want them to say … in the United States that’s not (yet) the case:

You gotta love the lib reporters meekly accepting the delicious iron discipline of black-clad Mistress Psaki as she demands “Why do you need to have that information?” when asked about the number of infectos in the petri dish that is the * White House. The only way that kink-fest could have been more on the nose with regard to who our esteemed journalismers actually are is if her severe black outfit was vinyl. Apparently, getting flogged by the Democrat dominatrix turns their collective crank because they just took it. They always just take it. And our Fourth Estate will eagerly beg for more.

Now, it’s not even the gross double standard at play here that’s significant – imagine the fussy fury of the lib-simps if one of Trump’s vanilla spokespeople publicly abused them like that. We’ve learned that the lib-press is immune to shame, at least the kind that comes from having their rank hypocrisy exposed by conservatives. No, it’s that when their Dem domme cracks the whip, they just take it, meekly, obediently, like the groveling submissives they are.

Someday, someone will look back on this pathetic abdication of the media’s dignity and write a history of how the ink-stained wretches of the past became the craven conformists of today, and how now they revel in their own subjugation. Call it 50 Shades of the Gray Lady; when you read the hot scene in the forbidden White House press playroom at page 247, you’ll want to draw a warm bubble bath, light a lavender-scented candle, and pour yourself a goblet of Trader Joe’s screw-top chardonnay. Grrrrrrrr.

Imagine being these people. You can’t? Okay, then take a shot of Dickel Rye and try again to imagine being these people. They all grew up wanting to be the crusading Woodward and/or Bernstein – who themselves were less ace reporters than eager conduits for a disgruntled bureaucrat hack who exploited the callow correspondents to settle his personal scores – and instead they grew up to be the Gimp in the less interesting version of Pulp Fiction that is the DC milieu.

They aren’t breaking stories. They aren’t uncovering wrongdoing. They certainly are not comforting the afflicted or afflicting the comfortable. They are the ruling caste’s janitors. They are drones, thralls to their elite masters, marching in grim conformity in step to the official narrative, never complaining, never questioning, never dissenting. These are licensed, registered, regime journalists.

QotD: Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer

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

Walter Duranty was possibly the worst foreign correspondent in the history of the Western press. Reporting on Russia for the New York Times during the 1920s and 30s, he not only lied through his teeth about the death of millions during the Ukrainian famine, but conspired, with some success, to prevent anyone else from telling the truth about it.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his reporting, but ever since 1990, when a biography of him was published that emphasized the extent of his mendacity, there have been efforts to have the prize symbolically rescinded (Duranty died in 1957).

A man may be honestly mistaken, but Duranty had knowingly and persistently lied about matters of world importance. At the very least he deserved the sack rather than a prestigious award, but was never called to account during his lifetime; and the Pulitzer committee has twice decided that the award should not be withdrawn.

I can see the argument for rescinding the prize because Duranty’s conduct was truly despicable, and the prize had been for what, morally, was a great crime.

But there is also an argument for not rescinding it, for the posthumous withdrawal of an award can look like an attempt to rewrite the history of the awarding authority by an act of auto-absolution. An admission that the Pulitzer committee had made a terrible error of judgment might have been sufficient.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Richard Dawkins Punished for Inviting Us to Think”, The Iconoclast, 2021-04-24.

July 25, 2021

QotD: The Two Rules of Modern Journalism

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

RULE # 1: Because journalists are required to be open-minded, exercise independence of spirit, and display a healthy amount of skepticism, the words and deeds of politicians, leaders, and the powerful — as well as those of regular citizens being interviewed — must constantly be questioned, second-guessed, doubted, fact-checked, challenged, and, more often than not, interrupted (more or less politely).

RULE # 2: Rule # 1 only applies to Republicans.

(And to anybody leaning conservative.)

For Democrats and leftists, the typical query is more along the lines of “pray enlighten us to your glorious plans for fundamentally transforming the United States of America (we will be quiet now).” (Close second: “kindly tell us how much people have suffered, and are still suffering, in this dreadful country of ours.”)

Erik, “The Two Rules of Modern Journalism”, ¡No Pasarán!, 2021-04-16.

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