Quotulatiousness

April 25, 2022

“We live in such a degraded information environment that we can’t get to discussions of principle”

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

Chris Bray on the increasing inability or deliberate choice of most legacy media outlets to avoid presenting basic facts in favour of pitching a scenario with the preferred outcome prepackaged and largely predigested for the consumer to accept uncritically:

Over and over again, journalism doesn’t begin to accurately describe; consuming it, we don’t get to the starting line of a functioning political discourse, which is just knowing what’s happening, more or less. We’re buried in fakery, in representations of reality that have no connection to reality. […]

I wrote last week about the disappearance of basic information on the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live. We have an ongoing debate over our Woke DA’s policy choices — but the more I look at the debate, the more I’m sure it’s a debate about nothing, because the slogans used to represent the DA’s policy choices really don’t seem to begin to reflect the reality of the DA’s actual policy choices. The slogans look from here like cover words, chaff fired as a rhetorical countermeasure to cloud the air. I’ve been trying to get clear information from people in Los Angeles County government, which has been … interesting, so stay tuned on that question. But what are we debating if we’re exchanging our thoughts on the empty fakery the DA is deploying to prevent us from noticing what he’s doing?

Back in 2016, the vapid mayor of a tiny city in Los Angeles County boldly announced that she had banned Donald Trump from her community, ordering city staff to burn the witch. Journalists reported it straight: TRUMP BANNED FROM LOCAL CITY.

It was left to lawyers with a media presence to seriously examine all of the problems with the remarkable claim that a part-time small-town mayor owns a personal fiefdom and can ban people from it. A not-especially-gifted politician with ambitions for higher office made up some nonsense to get herself in the news, and it worked. But the news was about nothing, because she had no authority to do the thing she announced in the press release.

This is more than half of the news: Noise with nothing it, a press release from an idiot typed up by idiots. What debate over questions of principle can proceed on the foundation of an informational void? (“I’m for empty hole!” “Oh yeah, well I’m against empty hole!”)

We’re beginning to solve some big pieces of that problem with alternative media, which is why you’re hearing so much complaining about misinformation. “Our democracy,” that hilarious phrase that doesn’t mean what it says, relies on the screen of fakery. Nothing happens until we punch enough holes in that screen.

April 11, 2022

Ours is a fundamentally unserious culture, two examples

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

Chris Bray provides some examples of just how decayed western culture has become in our headlong flight toward total unseriousness:

In Europe this month to lead the diplomatic response to a war, the Vice-President of the United States responded to a question about refugees by giggling and cackling and babbling in typical form:

And then the “fact-checkers” at Reuters explained that she actually didn’t giggle and cackle and babble, because, okay, she did cackle and giggle and babble, but she didn’t cackle and giggle and babble specifically about the refugees, so it doesn’t count: “It is clear from viewing the longer video in context that Harris and Duda laughed at the awkwardness of not knowing who should speak first. There is no evidence that Harris was laughing at the refugees or the crisis in Ukraine.” The question was about refugees, and she laughed — she laughed a lot — right after the question, but Reuters apparently called no tagbacks before the play, so no points accrue.

So we have an awkward and ineffective playactor who occupies the position of a political leader, but lacks the stature or ability to go along with it, and we have journalists who labor to protect people in powerful political positions from the possibility that people will notice who they really are and what they really do. We have political leaders who aren’t political leaders, and journalists who aren’t journalists: the form without the substance.

Meanwhile, a recent debate on the topic of free speech at Yale Law School — the nation’s top-ranked law school, which produces presidents and Supreme Court justices — began with law students screaming abuse (“I’ll fight you, bitch”) at one of the panelists, before walking out as a group and continuing to shout and pound on the walls of the adjacent hallway.

Now: The students were angry at the panelist, the bitch they wanted to fight, because she’s an anti-trans social conservative, and couldn’t you just die? But the thing that law students are learning to do is be lawyers — advocates for a position in a formalized exchange of competing views, in controversies that play out in open court. They’re training at the profession of making an argument. The point of sitting through an argument made by a person whose views you despise is that you can learn about something you want to fight against; you can see what the enemy says, and how she says it, and so do a part of the work of preparing yourself to advance a different position. So we have law students, people training for a debate-and-exchange-centered profession, who don’t want to hear things they don’t agree with. It’s like a minor league baseball player saying he refuses to touch a baseball, because baseballs offend him, but anyway, when are you assholes sending me up to the major leagues? We have people who want to occupy the profession of the law without preparing for the substance of professional engagement with competing positions: the form without the substance.

(Doing what journalists do, now, the fact-checkers explain that none of this puts points on the anti-free-speech scoreboard: “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began.” It is precisely the point that 1.) law students 2.) walked out before the conversation began. In ten years, oral argument before the Supreme Court will be that Woke lawyers stand up and scream I’M NOT GONNA LISTEN TO THIS SHIT, YOU ASSHOLES at the justices, then storm out and descend into a long round of day-drinking while waiting for the court to rule in their favor, because oh my god they CAN’T EVEN.)

February 17, 2022

Andrew Doyle on our current age of hoaxes

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Last week in UnHerd, Andrew Doyle, the comedian behind the wonderful Twitter troll account “Titania McGrath”, explained why trolling today is so likely to succeed:

“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle

This technique is the precursor to what we now call “trolling”. The term is often misused as a synonym for malicious and bullying online behaviour but, as traditionally understood, trolling is the art of coaxing people into a reaction. Motivations vary from troll to troll. For some, it is simply a matter of revelling in the gullibility of strangers. For others, the intention is to expose the vices and shortcomings of those in power.

Jonathan Swift was an early exponent of this kind of trolling in the creation of his alter-ego Isaac Bickerstaff, who wrote pamphlets which predicted, and then announced, the death of the astrologer John Partridge. Swift resented Partridge because of his attacks on the church, and must have been immensely gratified that Bickerstaff’s announcement had been taken on trust by so many. It is said that Partridge was thereafter continually having to fend off queries about his uncanny resemblance to a dead man.

[…]

Many of those duped by [Chris] Morris [in the TV series Brass Eye, 1997] were seemingly happy to read aloud any hogwash from an autocue in return for television exposure and the impression that they were on the right side of history. Such hoaxes could potentially be even more effective in today’s climate, with so many soft-witted celebrities eager to endorse fashionable but illiberal notions they barely understand. All major political, educational, artistic and corporate bodies are seemingly in submission to a new identity-obsessed religion of “social justice” that couches its regressive ideas in progressive terminology.

But, unlike the days of Brass Eye, the jesters are now in lockstep with these establishment lines, and so the most pertinent sources for satire are generally left untapped. They are, as Morris recently put it, more interested in “doing some kind of exotic display for the court” than exposing the follies of the powerful.

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that one of the most impressive hoaxes of recent years has come from outside the comedy industry. In October 2018, it was revealed that Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose had spent a year writing and submitting bogus academic papers to various journals in order to show how certain branches of the humanities were now routinely prioritising ideological goals over the pursuit of truth and knowledge. By the time the hoax was exposed, seven of their 20 articles had been accepted for publication, and a further seven were in the process of review.

As a work of satire, this project was an undoubted success. It provided evidence of what many had long suspected, that nonsensical ideas could thrive within the academy so long as they were camouflaged in vogueish jargon. One paper purported to be a study of the sexual activity of dogs in urban parks, and used this phoney data to draw conclusions about contemporary “rape culture”. Another argued that white male students ought to be chained to the floor during lessons as a form of reparation for slavery. Most audacious of all was the article based entirely on a chapter of Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of intersectional feminist theory.

That all of these articles were accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals should have alerted academics to a troubling strain of corruption and fraudulence in their field. They should have resolved to rectify the problem, but instead chose to demonise and smear the hoaxers who had exposed it. When satirists hit on uncomfortable truths, they are rarely thanked for their efforts.

January 29, 2022

Viewing with alarm — Substack is a place where “misinformation is allowed to flourish”

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

Matt Taibbi posts, appropriately, on Substack about demands by others to force Substack to censor writers and their content:

Substack is home to tens of thousands of writers and over a million paying subscribers, quadruple last year’s total of 250,000. The sites range from newsletters for comics enthusiasts to crypto news to recipe ideas. Like the Internet as a whole, it’s basically a catalogue of everything.

Still, panic campaigns in legacy press consistently focus on handfuls of sites, and with impressive dishonesty describe them as representative. I was particularly struck by a recent Mashable article that talked about a supposed “backlash” against Substack’s “growing collection of anti-trans writers”, which seemed to refer to Jesse Singal (who is no such thing) and Graham Linehan and — that’s it. Substack is actually home to more trans writers than any other outlet, but to the Scolding Class, that’s not the point. The company’s real crime is that it refuses to submit to pressure campaigns and strike off Wrongthinkers.

Substack is designed to be difficult to censor. Because content is sent by email, it’s not easy to pressure platforms to zap offending material. It doesn’t depend on advertisers, so you can’t lean on them, either. The only real pressure points are company executives like Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best, who are now regular targets of these ham-fisted campaigns demanding they discipline writers.

The latest presents Substack as a place where, as Mashable put it, “COVID misinformation is allowed to flourish”. The objections mainly center around Joseph Mercola, Alex Berenson, and Robert Malone. There are issues with the specific critiques of each, but those aren’t the point. Every one of these campaigns revolves around the same larger problem: would-be censors misunderstanding the basic calculus of the freedom of speech.

Even in a society with fairly robust protections, as ours once was, the most dangerous misinformation is always, without exception, official.

As the old joke from the Cold War had it, never believe any rumour until it’s been officially denied.

Censors have a fantasy that if they get rid of all the Berensons and Mercolas and Malones, and rein in people like Joe Rogan, that all the holdouts will suddenly rush to get vaccinated. The opposite is true. If you wipe out critics, people will immediately default to higher levels of suspicion. They will now be sure there’s something wrong with the vaccine. If you want to convince audiences, you have to allow everyone to talk, even the ones you disagree with. You have to make a better case. The Substack people, thank God, still get this, but the censor’s disease of thinking there are shortcuts to trust is spreading.

January 20, 2022

“McLuhan came to be regarded by the Baby Boomer generation as a guru and prophet; a visionary who had discovered something profound, not merely about the media, but about life and the universe”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Graham Majin looks at the life and works of Marshall McLuhan:

Marshall McLuhan, 1945.
Library and Archives Canada reference number PA-172791 via Wikimedia Commons.

The media ecosystem of the early 21st century is marked by a collapse of trust in journalism. How did we get here? As we look back, like a detective searching for clues, one moment stands out as significant; the publication on March 1st, 1962, of The Gutenberg Galaxy, written by a then-obscure Canadian academic named Marshall McLuhan. This book set in motion a line of falling dominoes, the consequences of which continue to affect us profoundly today.

McLuhan came to be regarded by the Baby Boomer generation as a guru and prophet; a visionary who had discovered something profound, not merely about the media, but about life and the universe. During the 1960s, he became a major celebrity, especially in the US. He featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine, was frequently interviewed on TV, and made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie Annie Hall. There was even a prog rock band named in his honor. The American media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy writes that “no other figure who was not of the movement itself received so much positive notice in the alternative newspapers that served dissident youth communities.” In 1965, the celebrity journalist Tom Wolfe asked breathlessly, “Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Pavlov?” Wolfe described McLuhan as an almost Christ-like figure:

    A lot of McLuhanites have started speaking of him as a prophet. It is only partly his visions of the future. It is more his extraordinary attitude, his demeanor, his qualities of monomania, of mission. He doesn’t debate other scholars, much less TV executives. He is not competing for status; he is alone on a vast unseen terrain, the walker through walls, the X-ray eye.

Writing in 1967, John Quirk agreed that McLuhan was a “savant and prophet” and explained that, “McLuhanites hold that the new technologies will lend men the awareness and instruments necessary to solve contemporary problems and inaugurate a bright new era.” McLuhan was a master of the catchy one-liner and the original source of Timothy Leary’s famous counterculture catchphrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

McLuhan’s division of media into two types was certainly influential although that influence wasn’t particularly useful:

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan observed that the decline of Catholicism, the rise of Protestantism, and the drift towards secularism all coincided with the development of printing. He hypothesized that the invention of printing had produced the European Enlightenment and Victorian liberal democracy. It was not what was printed, but printing itself that was responsible. McLuhan classified all media into two types: “hot” and “cool”. Printed books and newspapers, he suggested, were “hot” because they were bursting with information. Pre-Renaissance forms of communication, on the other hand, like the spoken Catholic Mass, were “cool”. This was because the Mass was spoken in Latin and hence contained little or no information that ordinary people could understand. Handwritten books were also categorized as “cool”.

Baby Boomers were quite receptive to McLuhan’s message, as it told them very much the sort of thing they wanted to hear:

He had produced a Boomer-friendly, sanitized version of his thesis in which magic and fantasy replaced religion. He also took care to flatter his Boomer audience by telling them that they were uniquely in tune with a deeper reality their parents could not see or understand. “We of the TV age,” he wrote, “are cool. The waltz was a hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the industrial time in its moods of pomp and circumstance. In contrast, the Twist is a cool, involved and chatty form of improvised gesture.”

McLuhan told the Boomers that they might appear irrational to their parents, but this was simply because the old generation was raised on obsolete “hot” media. As a result, he said, they had lost touch with their emotional side and become unnaturally rational and impartial: “Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action. To act without reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of Western literate man.”

McLuhan was a key influence on the Boomers, but his ideas failed when logically analyzed:

Trying to deconstruct McLuhan’s arguments reveals glaring absurdities. For example, it is self-defeating to claim that the content of a message is unimportant. On the contrary, all messages must convey information which corresponds with, or claims to correspond with, some state of affairs in the real world if they are to be useful. A news article without news, a weather forecast that does not mention the weather, or a traffic report lacking information about traffic might all be deliciously McLuhanesque, but they are not helpful. Even the Bible, revered by McLuhan, would be meaningless if it were merely a book of random words and blank pages. As Finklestein summarized, McLuhan’s argument is “absurd, when analyzed.”

McLuhan might well be the patron saint of fake news.

January 14, 2022

Industry with 1% profit margins accused of earning “record profits”

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

Joe Lancaster on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s renewed assault on the top-hatted, monocle-wearing robber barons of the grocery business:

“Piggly Wiggly” by afiler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

… Warren could hardly have picked a worse industry to use as an example: Grocery stores consistently have among the lowest profit margins of any economic sector. According to data compiled this month by New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran, the entire retail grocery industry currently averages barely more than 1 percent in net profit. In its most recent quarter, Kroger reported a profit margin of 0.75 percent, during a time in which Warren claims that the chain was “expanding profits” due to its “market dominance.”

In actuality, for much of the last year, grocery stores have seen enormous boosts in revenue, but not increased profitability, for the simple reason that everything has been costing more: not just products, but transportation, employee compensation, and all the extra logistical steps needed to adapt to shopping during a pandemic. Couple that with persistent inflation — which Warren also recently blamed on “price gouging” — and it is no wonder that things seem a bit out of balance.

Warren has had an itchy trigger finger for antitrust laws for some time. In 2019, as part of her presidential platform, she called for using the laws to forbid retailers from selling their own products. This would affect industry leaders like Amazon and Walmart, but ironically, it would have a devastating impact on grocery stores as well: Grocers increasingly rely on their own proprietary goods to stock cheaper alternatives alongside name brands. This provides not only less expensive options for consumers, but lower costs to the stores themselves. Store brands also help fill gaps created by external supply shortages.

January 11, 2022

Mailer, cancelled. Question mark?

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

In the most recent SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte outlines the “cancellation” of the late Norman Mailer by his Random Penguin editors … maybe … but probably not really:

American writers John Updike, Norman Mailer, and E. L. Doctorow at the PEN Congress, January 1986.
Photo by Bernard Gotfryd via Wikimedia Commons.

You have to feel for Norman Mailer, the late author of some forty books and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. There he lay, resting in well-deserved peace in the winter quiet of Provincetown Cemetery after a lifetime of fighting mankind’s greatest causes — civil rights, an end to war, the Great American Novel, his urgent libido — when out of nowhere comes a report that he has been canceled by his long-time publisher, Random House.

“With slow-mo hammer-dropping predictability,” wrote Michael Wolff in the newsletter, The Ankler, “Norman Mailer’s long-time publisher has recently informed the Mailer family that it has canceled plans to publish a collection of his political writings to mark the centennial of his birth in 2023, confirms the film producer Michael Mailer, the author’s oldest son.”

The reasons for the cancelation, according to Wolff, are “a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, ‘The White Negro’, a psycho-sexual-druggie precursor and model for much of the psycho-sexual-druggie literature that became popular in the 1960s. A Random House source also cites the objections of feminist and cultural gadfly Roxane Gay.”

Wolff’s scoop was promptly picked up and carried at face value all over North America, throughout Italy by La Repubblica, England by the Daily Mail, Chile by El Periodisto, and so on. It was the biggest cultural story going for several days, never mind that questions as to its veracity were raised almost the minute it broke.

Well, before it broke, in fact. Wolff himself scarcely seems convinced of his story. Yes, his headline is unequivocal: “Michael Wolff on Random House’s Cancelation of Norman Mailer”. But he admits in the newsletter that he couldn’t get anyone at Random House to confirm the news. Also that the Mailer estate didn’t actually have a contract for a book of political non-fiction with Random House for the publisher to cancel.

Wolff further allows that his one source at Random House steered him into a ditch, claiming that in addition to the anonymous junior staffer, Roxane Gay was involved. Wolff followed up with Gay, who told him she knew nothing of the controversy and had never read Mailer.

December 10, 2021

QotD: The media and the replication crisis

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here is the iron law of medical — in fact all scientific — studies in the modern world: most do not replicate. This has always been true of studies that supposedly find some link between doing [thing we enjoy] and cancer. This of course does not stop the media from running with initial study results based on 37 study participants as “fact”. The same is true for studies of new drugs and treatments. Most don’t pan out or are not nearly as efficacious as early studies might indicate. We have seen that over and over during COVID.

Warren Meyer, “A Couple of Thoughts on Medical Studies Given Recent Experience”, Coyote Blog, 2021-08-31.

December 8, 2021

Imperial Japan – A Spy Comedy? – WW2 – Spies & Ties 11

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

World War Two
Published 7 Dec 2021

Japanese spy rings were somewhat successful up until December 1941, but after Pearl Harbor, Japanese intelligence remains only a shell of its former self.
(more…)

November 19, 2021

QotD: People who are interested in history versus “academic” historians

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

One of many reasons I never went anywhere in my career as an academic historian is that I actually like history. I find it interesting. That’s because I find people interesting, and history is, above all, the study of people and how they be.

Your average academic historian lives entirely in xzheyr own head. They hate and fear people. They have no interest in how people actually are, only in how they should be. Thus, academic history quickly devolves into the worst kind of Social Justice Mad Lib, a never-ending, ever more frantic search for ever more obscure terms to complete the equation: “Despite [barbarities], the [micro-group] were actually only doing it because they were oppressed by the Pale Penis People, because [reasons].”

For example:

This is one of those things that’s true even if it’s not true, because Clown World, but I actually looked this guy up and yeah, he’s real — he’s a “Professor of Practice in Media and Activism at Harvard University”, which is exactly what it sounds like: basically, a tenured pest, who makes very nice bank making students protest shit for class credit. The “new book” referenced in the screenshot isn’t on Amazon yet, so maybe that’s not real, but again, Clown World — even if it’s not real, it’s real, because that’s exactly the kind of thing academic historians do. You probably remember it well from your own college days, if you were in college at any time between about 1985 through 1995, the heyday of “everyone you’ve ever heard of was secretly gay!” pseudo-scholarship.

Severian, “On Boredom”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-17.

November 14, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 26, 2021

“…watching The Media spin for Brandon; it’s just so Pravda-licious”

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

Severian manages to find entertainment in the full-blown propagandization of “The Media”, especially during the course of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

Back when the Kung Flu nonsense first started, I took it quasi-seriously. Let me clarify: Like America’s greatest philosopher, I assume that everything in the newspaper is 90% bullshit, and I read it because it entertains me. Nonetheless, the bullshit operates on several levels, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you want to extract more than entertainment from it. In the case of Covid, back in the earliest days, I assumed that the bullshit was more top tier — that is, that it was mostly ignorance.

Media people are stupid. We all know that, but unless you’ve been around them (or their inbred, banjo-picking cousins, academics) recently, you probably don’t realize just how stupid they actually are. Remember Michael Crichton’s bit about “Gell-Mann Amnesia“? He said that The Media are so dumb, they routinely get important things not just wrong, but completely backwards: The headline would read the equivalent of “Wet Streets Cause Rain”.

And to be fair to The Media — I know, I know, but again, if you want anything more than a chuckle from the propaganda, you must try — it really did seem to be more ignorance than anything. I’m the kind of guy who needs to pull off a sock every time he has to count past ten, but compared to everyone in The Media I’m Euclid himself. I could see right away that the numbers they were spouting would make Kung Flu exponentially more lethal than even the Black Plague, which would, you know, tend to show up on satellite reconnaissance. And since there’s this thing called “Google Earth” …

But even though I knew right away you’d need to scale back their projections by a factor of about eleventy billion, that wasn’t the end of it, because even doing the necessary mental math to scale it down by eleventy billion — take the cosine, carry the one, divide by zero — it still looked pretty bad. But not “pretty bad” in a factual way. Rather, pretty bad in a second-level bullshit way, the mere propaganda way.

Those were the days, you might recall, when — out of the blue, on a dime — the Official Story changed from “China categorically denies there’s any such thing as germs, much less this particular strain of flu” to “OMG, the Chinese are welding apartment doors shut as people keel over in the streets.” Accompanied, in some cases — and good luck finding those video clips now — with grainy little movies of obvious actors keeling over so hammily, Al Pacino himself would tell them to tone it down. Pravda et al would never have been so crude, but those guys were pros, and as bad as the USSR was, affront-to-basic-intelligence-wise, this is Clown World.

Sure enough, the stories soon came out that China had cornered the market on PPE gear. It was an obvious short con, but remember: Clown World.

This — the CCP cornering the PPE market — soon prompted the third level of Media bullshit, the ideological level. Not content to merely take orders from their Chinese paymasters, the Media, being ideology-addled prize graduates of American “higher” “education”, started taking it upon themselves to lecture us for our own good. Masks, which were once bad, were now good, and if one mask was good, then two were even better! Thus the flood of stories like the one covered at the old RC, where the woman went on about swabbing her eyelids with disinfectant and whatnot. They got their chance to hector us for our own good, and they will never turn that down.

September 8, 2021

The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 3 … scary black fully semi-automatic assault machinegun edition

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

The folks at The Line continue their good work in pointing out some of the bullshittiest bullshit the politicians spew on the campaign trail. This week has been all about politicians promising to crack down even harder on the hunters and sport shooters who keep driving their pickup trucks (plastered with Trump bumper stickers, of course) into downtown Toronto to shoot their scary black fully semi-automatic AK-15 or AR-47 assault machineguns with chainsaw bayonets at innocent gang-bangers at 3 in the morning:

It is hard to know where to even begin picking through the bullshit that Canadians have had dumped atop their heads this week on the gun-control file. Both the Liberals and Conservatives hurled their share, but the worst offenders were by far the incumbents who claimed to ban “military-style assault weapons”.

Let’s start with this: Canadian law categorizes guns into three categories depending on their technical specifications: length, ammunition calibre, mode of operation, and the like. The categories are licensed and regulated differently. It can get pretty complicated. Despite their near-constant use, the terms “assault rifle”, “assault weapon” or the even-scarier sounding “military style assault weapon/rifle” have no specific or universally recognized meaning, including under Canadian law and firearms regulations. They aren’t part of or used by the categorization system.

This is essential to understand: because the terms have no specific and universally held meaning, these campaign-ready phrases can be appended to pretty much any type of rifle, whatever its actual legal category under our law. And that’s how we all found ourselves aspirating bullshit this week.

Most gun experts would generally classify an assault rifle/weapon as a rifle that fires medium-powered (or higher) ammunition and is capable of a “full auto” mode — that is, the weapon will continue firing as long as the trigger is held down. This results in a rapid volley of bullets at a cost of diminished accuracy (the recoil makes the firearm difficult to hold on target). These firearms typically have their ammunition kept in detachable magazines of 20 or 30 rounds each. When a magazine is emptied, it can be replaced by a practiced user in moments.

These sorts of weapons have been banned in Canada since the 1970s.

In 2020, the Liberals used an executive order — an Order in Council — to change the classification of several broad categories of until-then legal rifles, with the effect of preventing sales and further restricting most lawful uses for owners. None of these firearms were assault rifles/weapons by any reasonable standard. All are capable of semi-auto operation only, meaning one round is fired for each pull of the trigger. Under Canadian law, the magazines are limited to five rounds (there are some rare exceptions but five is the law).

Sigh. Still with us?

So the Liberals chose firearms linked to tragic events in Canada or abroad, like the AR-15, deemed these “assault weapons” and then banned them. But there was nothing meaningful or rational about this ban; it was was entirely a matter of political messaging. Numerous other rifles — firing the exact same ammunition from the exact same size of magazine at the exact same semi-automatic pace — remain legal and for sale to any licensed would-be purchaser. This isn’t an oversight. It’s just that the Liberals’ political goals were met by simply banning rifles linked to tragedies and ignoring the rest.

That’s the key thing to understand about what the Liberals did — it was always bullshit policy. But it sounds good to Canadian voters who don’t know fuck-all about guns. In that way, it’s meeting the Liberals’ needs.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole quickly abandoned his party’s pledge to revoke the Liberals’ 2020 order-in-council once someone noticed and called attention to it. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to O’Toole in the past … he’s what we used to call a “Red Tory” — really just a Liberal wearing a blue suit.

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 18, 2021

What is Maskirovka? Russian Military Deception #Military101

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

Military History Visualized
Published 5 May 2017

A short introduction into Russian Military Deception — called Maskirovka. “Maskirovka is most simply defined as a set of processes designed to mislead, confuse, and interfere with accurate data collection regarding all areas of Soviet plans, objectives, and strengths or weaknesses.” (Smith, Charles L.: “Soviet Maskirovka“, in: Airpower Journal – Spring 1988)

Military History Visualized provides a series of short narrative and visual presentations like documentaries based on academic literature or sometimes primary sources. Videos are intended as introduction to military history, but also contain a lot of details for history buffs. Since the aim is to keep the episodes short and comprehensive some details are often cut.

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Maier, Morgan: A Little Masquerade: Russia’s Evolving Employment of Maskirovka
http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/si…

Smith, Charles L.: “Soviet Maskirovko“, in: Airpower Journal – Spring 1988
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/ai…

Lindley-French, Julian: NATO: Countering Strategic Maskirovka. Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute. (2015)

Glantz: The Red Mask: The Nature and Legacy of Soviet Military Deception in the Second World War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian…

Keating, Kenneth: The Soviet System of Camouflage
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/…

Krueger, Daniel: Maskirovka – What’s in it for us?
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/…

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