Quotulatiousness

April 4, 2020

The media’s grasp of modern logistics

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

Kurt Schlicter — who, spoiler, isn’t a fan of our news media in general — on the demands by newsbeings for the impossible to be done immediately:

We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant to boot.

[…]

Another hitherto unknown skill that the media believes it possesses is logistics. “Why hasn’t Trump commanded a million ventilators to appear?!” the reporters demand. It’s pretty easy to see where they might have gotten the idea that the moment one articulates a desire to possess something that it magically appears. Capitalism has pretty much made that a reality. If you want something, you can go to a store and get it 24/7, or you can go on Amazon and it’ll be at your Manhattan apartment in 48 hours. Since they have never built anything or transported anything or distributed anything, only benefited from the labor of the unhip people who do those things, it’s only natural that the delayed adolescents who make up our media class imagine that material goods can be simply wished into being. After all, for all practical purposes during normal times, because of the efforts of Americans they look down upon, material goods pretty much can be simply wished into being. But prosperity takes work, not that the media would know.

[…]

Apparently, the media class thinks there are giant warehouses with an endless supply of goods just sitting there, somewhere, waiting. They have no idea about how logistics work, how goods flow quickly from producer to market and how expected resupply levels need a few days to adjust from a 10 percent daily turnover to a 30 percent daily turnover. They have zero appreciation for inventory management because no one they know does unglamorous stuff like that.

It’s all much easier in a socialist command economy. You get nothing and like it. Or don’t like it. Whatever. Here’s your weekly bean allowance. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but access to toothpaste and toilet paper.

The best part is when the media – the same media that was collectively soiling its Dockers because that mean old Trump was barring direct flights from China because of racism and stuff – demands to know why, back in December, Trump was not commanding a zillion Wuhan Flu tests, a zillion masks, and a zillion ventilators be created, while locking down all of America. Leaving aside the whole lack of an enumerated power to do that thing, in what world would have Trump have convinced anyone – least of all the media that was slobbering over his bogus impeachment at the time – that some bat soup-derived pathogen in BumFoo, China, was going to black swan all over America’s economy? The lack of seriousness by the people who presume to be reporting the news to us is more breathtaking than the damn ChiCom grippe.

March 23, 2020

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers – a place of horrible, unintentional microaggressions

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

David Thompson takes us on a scary trip to the heart of the woke crossword world:

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers — because that’s a thing that exists — is one in which enthusiasts, via social media, grumble about white men, bemoan the insufficient prominence of “queer or POC colloquialisms,” share “off-colour jokes about hypothetical titles for a Melania Trump memoir,” and fret about the exact ratio of male and female names used as clues. Because a lack of “gender parity” in crossword puzzle clues constitutes one of “the systemic forces that threaten women.”

Crossword puzzles can do that, apparently.

The list of possible crossword-puzzle wrongdoings is, of course, extensive, ever-growing and not entirely straightforward.

Transgressions include clues for ILLEGAL (“One caught by border patrol”); MEN (“Exasperated comment from a feminist”); and HOOD (“Place with homies”).

I’ll give you a moment to steady yourselves, to recover from all that gasping.

A New York Times puzzle triggered agitation with the clue “Pitch to the head, informally,” the solution to which was “beaner.” Given sufficient effort, said word could also, it seems, be construed as a mild and antiquated racial slur, albeit one that had escaped me and which I had to look up. Inevitably, apologies and public prostration ensued, despite both the puzzler-writer and editor confessing their own ignorance and intending no harm. Needless to say, the apology immediately resulted in further hissing and rending of garments by people whose Twitter bios include preferred pronouns and the words liberal and feminist.

Unlike almost every other site on the web, I do encourage you to read the comments at David’s blog … he has a great group of regular commenters (commentators? commentistas? Whatevs…)

March 18, 2020

What is really driving the Wuhan Coronavirus panic

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

… besides the wall-to-wall hysteria in the mainstream media, I mean. Severian discusses the insights of “perverted old cokehead” Sigmund Freud on anxiety and its effects, then segues to our current, shared, plight:

Photographic portrait of Sigmund Freud, signed by the sitter (“Prof. Sigmund Freud”) by Max Halberstadt (c. 1921)
Wikimedia Commons

Everyone who has thought about it for five minutes knows that something’s not right. […] As y’all have noted, actual hard information on the coronavirus is hard to come by. Is it fully air-transmissible? What are the infection rates? Hell, what are the death totals? And speaking of the death totals, even if you trust China’s figures (which no reasonable person can possibly do), they seem … low. Like, really low. I actually trust Italy’s government to deliver some vague approximation of the truth, and even there, where they’re in full-blown freakout mode, it seems to kill off old folks with compromised immune systems and lung problems at a fractionally higher rate than your garden-variety flu.

So, you know … it’s the flu. Not great by any means, and more infectious (possibly) than some other flus in our recent past, but for all that just the flu. The ongoing sky-is-falling global freakout has next to nothing to do with the actual bug. We live in a deeply anxious age, and that anxiety has to discharge somehow. It’s global hysteria — classic hysteria, Freudian hysteria, an excess of stress that must be discharged by “converting” it into behavior.

The people who are freaking out about it aren’t worried about dying from it. No, really, they’re not. Nor should they be — no reasonably healthy person under age 70 has any reason to be worried about that. Instead, what they’re worried about is powerlessness. We’ve all long suspected that we’re ruled by idiots and grifters. We’ve all long sensed that our “leaders” hold us in deep contempt. And we’ve long known that none of our problems are worth anything to the global pirate capitalist class. The only reason those bastards care if we all drop dead from the plague is that they can’t sell enough iCrap to each other to keep the company stock price up.

We know this. But we can’t say it, and we can’t act on it, because doing so goes against our self-image. Our media, our education system, our “culture” (such as it is) has spent the last half-century telling us what special and unique snowflakes we all are, even as it’s forcing us into ever-greater conformity. We’ve broken all the taboos, transgressed all the boundaries, liberated all the oppressed. If there ever were to be such a thing as “social justice,” then truly we’ve achieved it, here in this best of all possible worlds where you can lose your job for not addressing your co-worker as a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin and 6’2″ dudes with beards down to their collarbones can go wee-wee in the little girls’ room …

… and yet. And yet. And yet feminists (just to stick with a theme), despite running everything for the last 30 years, still can’t get that lousy 25 cent raise. Seven out of every five college girls are sexually assaulted the minute they step on campus, despite boys being as rare as sasquatches on most campuses (and despite the ever-growing clamor for free college for everyone). You’re free to — hell, you’re practically required to — make up your own pronouns, but you’re not allowed to ask just how a degree in “gender studies” could be worth even one dollar in student loan debt, let alone one hundred thousand dollars. We keep agitating for change, keep voting for it, keep tweeting about it … and nothing happens.

That profound sense of powerlessness is exactly, and I do mean exactly, what screwed up Anna O. She hated her father for not allowing her any personal agency. In her heart of hearts she wanted him dead. And yet she knew herself to be a loving daughter, so that overwhelming sense of relief — indeed, of joy — she felt when he kicked the bucket sent her around the bend.

March 11, 2020

QotD: Orthorexia

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

The American media and our popular culture both celebrate a fear of safe, nutritious food if it is not labeled “organic.” To be consistent then, why don’t we also celebrate anti-vaxxers’ fear of safe vaccines, which are also not “organic?” To be clear, I am not an anti-vaxxer. I am strongly pro-vaccine. Everyone in my house is vaccinated, and I am appalled at the outbreaks of contagious diseases due to anti-vaxxers. But let’s be clear, a Venn diagram of those who obsess about organic food and anti-vaxxers will reveal a major overlap. If you know an anti-vaxxer, he is most likely committed to an organic diet.

Our culture accepts as a scientific fact that organic food is healthier than non-organic food. You can watch TV, read popular magazines, or listen to healthy-living gurus, and overwhelmingly you will be told that organic food is healthier than non-organic food. Recipes tend to call for organic produce and ingredients. And it goes beyond organic foods. Genetically-modified foods are slandered as “frankenfoods” concocted by mad scientists in a laboratory. Further, we are admonished to avoid anything that is not “natural.”

OK then. Vaccines are genetically modified, lab-made, and certainly not natural. Being anti-vax seems a logical extension of the natural, organic lifestyle.

I know several people — including family members — who have so completely bought into the natural-organic hype that they genuinely believe GMO and non-organic foods are poisonous. They would rather starve themselves and their children to death than ingest a gram of non-organic food. They look at the shelves of a regular grocery store and see rows and rows of poison. There is a medical term for this fear of safe healthy food — it’s called “orthorexia.” I am not shocked that some of these individuals are anti-vaxxers. Instead, I am shocked (and relieved) that some of the orthorexics I know actually do vaccinate themselves and their children.

Buck Throckmorton, “Organic Food & Anti-Vaxxers – Does The Fear of Safe Food Lead to Fear of Safe Vaccines”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2019-12-08.

March 6, 2020

Some of the early influences on Terry Pratchett’s writing

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

That is, the books that made him love reading and how he incorporated those early works into his own style. This is from a very late interview with Tom Chivers published after his death in 2015:

“I wasn’t particularly interested in books,” he says. “And my mum, God bless her, she rolled up her sleeves and gave me a penny per page, and it worked beautifully. I think she only gave me about thruppence, because the third book was The Wind in the Willows.” He was so enthused after this, she no longer needed to pay him. Indeed, Pratchett got a job in Beaconsfield library. “You’re talking to a man who thinks, mostly, that his school days assisted him not at all, but the library did, in spades.” He looks at me sharply. “You, when you were young, read lots of books, didn’t you? A –” he pauses, and chooses his next word carefully – “a —-load, I believe?” I did, I reassure him. “A library boy. I recognise the kind. I was the same.” He had an indifferent time at school – he grumbles about the “death or glory” nature of the 11-plus (he passed easily), and about old teachers who had a grudge against him at the High Wycombe Technical High School (“sort of half a grammar school. A big woodwork place”). But the fire kindled by Kenneth Grahame, and Ratty, Mole and Badger, grew, and blazed.

The cover of Discworld Imaginarium by Terry Pratchett’s “artist of choice”, Paul Kidby.

Pratchett’s own sense of humour, a sort of gentle, English, observational thing, stems from this period. “Wodehouse, obviously, but also I tore my way through the Just William books. Richmal Crompton was a very good writer. I think it was from her that I learnt irony. It took me a while to work it out.” Do you think you could define irony, I ask him. “Sort of like iron.” I deserved that, I acknowledge. “When you get hit on the head with it, you know it.”

He also fell in love with RJ Yeatman and WC Sellar, authors of 1066 and All That (“in the Thirties, when the middle classes were getting richer, the two of them really got as much fun out of that as you could. The Thirties were an awful lot of fun. Or at least until the end. Bad ending, the decade, admittedly”) and fell out with his headmaster for “bringing in a copy of Mad magazine. How horrible! And a copy of Private Eye. Seditious.” But it was the now defunct satirical magazine Punch which really formed the comic voice in which he now speaks. “I read my way through all the bound Punches. It was the best way to read history; you got it without granny looking over your shoulder, and it was just astonishing.

“And just about any writer of distinction, anywhere in the English language, worked for Punch. Mark Twain. Jerome K Jerome. And they spoke with the same voice, which opened the door for me – the same kind of slightly satirical, people-are-rather-silly-but-they’re-not-that-bad voice, friendly about humanity, fond of its foibles.” Apart from the books, the other influences of his youth are clear in his own writing – especially the later Ankh-set works, in which he frequently extols the virtues of the poor-but-respectable people living in tiny, tidy terraced houses, and of the self-made men and women. “There used to be a sort of dignity in labour,” he says. “I don’t think there is now.”

He has spoken, often, of how his time on local newspapers made him. He started at 16, in high dudgeon at his headmaster: “On my last day at the school, I left all my stuff behind and phoned up the editor of a local newspaper. He actually used some cliché like, ‘I like the cut of your jib, young man’, or something.” It is the stuff of legend that he saw his first dead body the next day, “work experience really meaning something in those days”, as he put it in his author’s bio in his books.

“Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do,” he says, “the library and journalism, those things made me who I am. Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism. London journalism can p— in someone’s face and they can’t do anything about it. Try that in local journalism, and someone’s down to complain. Everyone should have one local journalism job in their lives, especially if they’re a nosy parker.” He talks of local journalists in the same way he does his parents, with a sense of quiet heroism. “I interviewed an elderly journalist who’d worked in a small town for a very, very long time. I asked: is it boring? And he said: over there, that’s where a couple pushed their daughter into the attic because she’d had a black baby. And over there, that’s where a man was caught in flagrante delicto with a barnyard fowl. And he’d said to the magistrates, ‘Well, it was my fowl’. Even those small moments, they make you realise the world is not as you thought.”

February 23, 2020

QotD: Go eat bugs, plebs!

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

What is this creepy obsession with the elite telling us to eat bugs? Every few weeks, some mainstream media outlet has one of its gooey writers go off on how delicious and nutritious insects supposedly are, and it’s downright bizarre. The latest piece of pro-pillbug propaganda is from the formerly prestigious Economist, “Why Eating Bugs Is So Popular In Congo,” where the author assures us that “The creepy superfood is rich in protein and magnesium.” Thanks, but I think I’ll get my protein and magnesium in a manner that does not involve gobbling grubs.

What is with these people?

This bug bingeing is a running theme in the mainstream media. The New York Times, taking a break from passively aggressively correcting its garbage takes, asks “Why Aren’t We Eating More Insects?” The answer is, of course, “Because they are insects, you weirdos.”

CNN goes on about “Bugs: The Food That Can Feed, And Maybe Save, The Planet,” as if Brian “Tater” Stelter is going to give up stuffing Cheetos in his talk-hole in exchange for caterpillars.

And National Geographic manages to do the impossible and make us hate the United Nations even more by informing us that the “U.N. Urges Eating Insects,” and offering us “8 Popular Bugs to Try.” Popular with whom?

The Economist is talking about people munching millipedes in Congo, and you have to wonder why we would take Congo’s lead in anything. It’s the Congo – you should carefully examine what the Congo does, then do the opposite. That goes for other strange countries too. Frankly, foreign countries are generally terrible and there is not a lot that other countries have to teach us – I lived on two other continents and this bizarre notion liberal Americans have about other countries being better than us is grossly misplaced. Other countries are mostly terrible.

Exhibit A: They eat bugs.

Do you think the people of Congo are saying, “Beef? Pass. Hand me that plate of maggots!” You don’t eat grasshoppers because you have other options. No one’s first choice is fruit flies.

Kurt Schlicter, “Tell The Nags To Go Pound Sand”, Townhall.com, 2019-11-19.

February 12, 2020

QotD: Experienced political operators after an unexpected paradigm shift

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

I think this is causing some confusion, blindness and otherwise inexplicably stupid behavior in people who never seemed stupid before. This is what I call The Years the Masks Fell off.

Look, take a just-now thing: the DNC says that all precincts in Iowa WERE counted. The app recorded every vote, they say. They just need to tally them.

Turns out that’s probably not precisely true.

As a friend noticed, that’s not precisely a lie, that’s just “making sh*t up.”

We’re seeing that a lot from the other side of the aisle suddenly. Unbelievably stupid behavior like the sham wow impeachment.

They keep telling us “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” and being shocked and appalled when we choose our lying eyes.

[…]

And then they’re shocked, nay astonished, when these tactics don’t work. While we who are standing outside this look at them and go “Who would think that would work? Some two year old?”

I mean half of the bizarre behavior of our government and its agencies falls under that heading too. “Who could think that would work/wouldn’t be found out/made any sense?”

But the thing you have to understand is that you’re not dealing with stupid people. Not by half. You’re dealing with people who were very competent and comfortable in — for lack of a better term — the previous paradigm of politics, or publishing or whatever.

The more comfortable they were; the easier it was for them, the harder it is to accept that it’s gone and it’s not coming back

For instance, the dems could trust the media would cover for them absolutely and completely, and that their pettiness, idiocy or outright corruption would never be revealed.

They got used to it, they got comfortable. They got to believing it was their natural right. It was just the way things were. They were the good people. Their hearts were pure. No one would ever look into their behavior outside the limelight.

If some psychological tests are correct, they grew to believe they were entitled to corruption and unethical behavior for all the “good” they did, such as Clinton thinking he was entitled to all the women he wanted for “fighting for women’s rights” (Which for men like him always mean abortion, but never mind.)

They can’t adapt. They can’t believe things have changed.

Sarah Hoyt, “How Things Have Always Been”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2020-02-09.

January 22, 2020

Australian tourism, RIP

Filed under: Australia, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As we’ve all been inundated with the shocking images of almost the entire inhabited area of the Australian mainland burning, like this one, for example, claimed on social media to be a “satellite image”:

… it’s not surprising that anecdotal evidence of the decline in bookings from foreign tourists implies that there will be few visitors to the burned-out wasteland that used to be a thriving first-world nation. This, on top of the widely reported “death” of the Great Barrier Reef, means the few dozen dazed survivors will be reduced to cannibalism shortly. Or, as Arthur Chrenkoff suggests, we’ve been sold another bill of goods and things are not quite as desolate and post-apocalyptic as all that:

Just like many other people I know, I have been inundated by messages from family and friends overseas, inquiring about my safety, having been terrified by the media reports of what seemed like an environmental armageddon engulfing the entire country. I had to explain time after time that while the fires have been savage and extensive, they have largely burned through relatively sparsely populated areas (if it all, considering the vast extent of our national parks). No significant town has been threatened and destruction and loss of life, while tragic, have been pretty small in proportion to the area affected.

Yet, watching the hysterical and over-sensationalised coverage overseas has convinced many that the very existence of the nation is at stake. And the social media, if anything, has been even worse, with a number of completely misleading maps and photos exaggerating the extent of the affected areas by two-figure factors. As I pointed out, indeed the area the size of the state of Kentucky has been burned out, but unlike most other places on Earth, certainly in the developed world, Australia fits in nearly eighty Kentuckys, most of them pretty empty of human presence and activity.

Media sensationalises at the best of times in a never-ending quest for more eyeballs (“if it bleeds it leads”, or, in this case, “if it’s on fire, we’re on fire”) but the intersection of a large scale natural disaster with the “climate crisis” activism has generated a truly terrifying inferno of human passions where news becomes propaganda and the narrative trumps the objectivity. A significant proportion of the population — and the majority in the media — want to see the fires as Gaia’s wrath, with the disaster turning into green porn to terrify, titillate and agitate. Tourism has now become one of the casualties of this rhetorical excess, a collateral damage to the pursuit of a political agenda. This crisis is very much man-made and the economic pain unnecessarily inflicted on a whole industry because you wanted to make as terrible a point as possible will hang around your necks like a charred albatross, dear green activists on the streets and those masquerading as journalists.

The Green Wattle Creek bushfire moves towards the Southern Highlands township of Yanderra as police evacuate residents from Yanderra Road, 21 December, 2019.
Photo by Helitak430 via Wikimedia Commons

January 10, 2020

QotD: Deciding what is “newsworthy”

Filed under: History, India, Media, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[…] the ripples of battle in their formal sense are guided by the presence of historians, and that means originally Westerners, and more recently in large part Europeans and Americans. And such distortions do not always play out in bias toward Westerners, especially in the present age. In April 2002 the Israeli Defence Forces entered the West Bank community of Jenin to hunt out suspected suicide-murderers, whose co-members had blown up hundreds of Israeli civilians over the prior year. Although fewer than sixty Palestinians were killed in Jenin — the great majority of them combatants — the world media seized upon the street fighting, dubbing it “Jeningrad” as if they were somehow the moral equivalent of one million Germans and Russians lost at Stalingrad. Yet just days after the Israeli withdrawal from Jenin, Pakistan squared off against India. The stakes were surely far higher: One-fifth of the world’s population was involved. Both sides were nuclear powers and issued threats to use their arsenals. In the prior year alone nearly four times more Indians and Pakistanis were killed than Palestinians and Israelis. By any calculation of numbers, the specter of the dead, the geopolitical consequences, or the long-term environmental health of the planet, the world should know all the major cities in Kashmir rather than a few street names in Jenin. And if the world sought to chronicle destruction and death in an Islamic city, then by any fair measure it should have turned its attention to Grozny, where an entire society of Muslim Chechnyans was quite literally obliterated by the Russian army.

The idiosyncracies of historical remembrance of battle do not hinge alone on the presence of a Socrates or Teddy Roosevelt in the ranks. Sometimes there are wild cards of culture and politics as well. In this case and at this time, the fact that Israelis fit the stereotype of affluent and proud Westerners abroad while the Palestinians were constructed as impoverished and oppressed colonial subjects brought to the equation the sympathies of influential Americans and Europeans in the media, universities, and government — the prominent and sometimes worrisome elites who determined to send their reporters, scholars, and diplomats to Jenin rather than to Islamabad or Grozny.

Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle, 2004.

December 31, 2019

QotD: Canadian journalism

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

… a Canadian Journalist’s main job is to smooth over any rough spots and shush away worries as the Liberal government plunders the public purse to pay for technocratic solutions to problems we didn’t know we had while adopting a laissez-faire attitude to the problems we do have. If the Opposition has a point, it falls to a Canadian Journalist to correct the record and say that, well, actually, no they don’t.

Josh Lieblein, “Hack or Flack: Aaron Wherry Edition”, Raving Canuck, 2017-11-29.

December 15, 2019

Every time the “wrong” side wins an election…

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

… we get all the media talking about how the winner needs to tack to the left:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Every single time. Whenever the left is slapped by voters like a bony Antifa moll at a street riot, “expert” analysts rush to the scene of democracy, cordon it off with police tape and announce through a bullhorn that there’s nothing to see here. Move along. They then propose that the winner is morally obliged to sideline the constituency that just elected him and heed the boutique preoccupations of the vanquished instead. Successful right-of-centre candidates must govern for All of Us. Successful leftists, on the other hand, are encouraged to give leftism to the enemy good and hard for the next few-to-several years. Possibly the first man to pull out his ‘horn following Boris Johnson’s emphatic victory is Philip Williams.

The sullen acceptance that Brexit will happen but will unleash crises that – alas – must be solved by a buffoon: check. Schools and hospitals: check. The problem of “an economy excised from Europe”: check. Williams’ piece is the Tate of tropes. But no: Johnson won’t faulter by being true to the shy nationalists who elected him but he might antagonise them by pivoting left to usher Hugh Grant’s coterie into a broader Boris marquee. Given his track record, that is very likely. Let’s not get carried away: Johnson did his Conservative duty regarding Brexit, nothing more. The question is whether or not he has the panache to hold on to his base while trying to expand it. The media will be a huge asset. They are certain to make daily sport of Johnson’s “gaffes,” eccentricities and less than squared away private life. This will endear him to everyman even more.

On the other hand, when the “correct” side wins an election, we’re assured that “elections have consequences”, the’ve been “keeping score”, and that the losers must strap in tight and hold on for dear life because we’re going further left than we ever were promised during the campaign.

Update: Related.

December 1, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard versus the Democratic establishment

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

At Spiked, Tim Black calls the establishment’s anger and rage at the Democratic presidential candidate “Gabbard Derangement Syndrome”:

Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the “People’s Rally” in Washington DC on 17 November, 2016.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.

… the Democratic establishment and its media cheerleaders seem to have become fixated on her. She annoys them. She riles them. And it’s not just because of her ambivalence towards identity politics and the other aspects of her Sanders-style progressivism – indeed, she endorsed Sanders in 2016, much to the chagrin of the Democratic establishment at the time. No, it’s also because of her uncompromising opposition to the “counterproductive regime-change wars” pursued with such ignorant zeal by the likes of Democratic grandee Hillary Clinton. It’s because of her willingness to question the narratives that have justified Western intervention in Syria, including a secret fact-finding mission to Damascus, and a meeting with Bashar al-Assad in 2017. And it’s because she does all this not as a woolly pacifist, but as a war vet.

So where her small but growing band of supporters see a principled 38-year-old, armed with a progressive policy platform, and, above all, a strong commitment to anti-interventionism, her powerful opponents are determined to present her as something altogether more sinister. They talk of her being a poster girl for white supremacists and the alt-right, of her being a Republican stooge in Democratic clothing, and of her being some sort of Russian asset.

It’s genuinely crazy stuff. Last week, the New York Times even laid into her for wearing a white pantsuit for a TV debate, claiming it was somehow cult-like. But that is as nothing compared to the constant innuendo and sometimes outright claims that Gabbard is being backed by Russia and Putin, the seeming power behind all world disorder.

Gabbard’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination are slim, but her recent online spat with Hillary Clinton probably won her a lot of fans outside the establishment:

Then, of course, there’s Hillary Clinton herself, a woman who, since losing to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, is no longer able to go near a bed without spotting reds under it. Gabbard, unsurprisingly, does not escape Clinton’s conspiracist gaze. “I’m not making any predictions but I think [the Russians have] got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary, and they’re grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians”, Clinton continued. “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

That’s right. Clinton thinks Gabbard is a Russian plant. She thinks Gabbard is “being groomed” by the Kremlin. She thinks she is being manoeuvred, by Putin and Co, out of the Democratic Party and into a third-party position, so as to split the Democratic vote in 2020. And she thinks that will hand victory once again to Russia’s Manchurian Candidate, Donald Trump, just as she thinks that Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, was also a Russian asset, used to split the vote three years ago and deprive Hillary of the election victory she still believes should be hers. The entitlement underwriting her deranged conspiracy theory is breathtaking.

November 29, 2019

QotD: The progressive belief in the mind-controlling power of the press (and Facebook)

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

There’s a piece of graffiti that sums up the woke left’s view of ordinary people. It says: “When the British working class stop reading right-wing news, we will see progressive change.” There it is. In black and white. Scrawled on a wall somewhere but frequently shared on social media by supposed progressives. One sentence that captures why so many modern left-wingers, and in particular the Corbynistas, are so obsessed with the press – because they think it has hypnotised the fickle masses and polluted the plebs’ brains with horrible right-wing ideas. Make no mistake: when the left rages against the media, it is really raging against the masses.

Media-bashing has resurfaced with a vengeance over the past couple of weeks. It isn’t hard to see why. The polls don’t look good for Labour. Some are predicting a wipeout, especially in Labour’s traditional working-class strongholds. And as has been the case for a good 30 years now, when political events don’t go the left’s way – or rather, when the dim public lets the left down – the knives come out for the media.

Corbynista commentators are railing against the “billionaire media”. “Billionaires control the media, and it’s undermining democracy”, say the middle-class left-wingers of Novara Media. How? Because these billionaires are “tell[ing] you what to think”. You, the gullible, ill-educated throng, that is; not us, the well-educated, PhD-owning media leftists at Novara who can see through the lies peddled by evil billionaires.

Brendan O’Neill, “The woke elitism behind the left’s media-bashing”, Spiked, 2019-11-25.

November 9, 2019

The Milk Dud and “sin”

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

Chris Selley believes that introducing the notion of “sin” as an appropriate thing to discuss with a politician will be a very bad idea for Canadian politics:

Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.

At a Wednesday press conference in Ottawa, a Globe and Mail reporter asked Andrew Scheer if he believes homosexuality is a “sin.” He didn’t answer, as has become his trademark on this file; instead he pledged, for the umpteenth time, simply to stand up for gay rights in all their forms.

It has been maddening to watch: Despite literally dozens of opportunities, he could never bring himself to explicitly support equal marriage. Bringing “sin” into the question is a novelty, though, and it’s one of which we need to be exceedingly leery.

[…]

The question of “sin” takes us into new and dangerous territory, however. There is what politicians do, and then there is what they think, and then — buried way down under many layers of irrelevance — there is their personal relationship, if any, with higher powers and their associated scriptures; there is the question of what they think that higher power would make of other people’s behaviour; there is what they believe will happen to those people’s immortal souls.

These are not topics the secular media should be concerning themselves with, and nor should the average voter. No one would approve of someone they like being put through such an inquisition. Liberals would be aghast if their avowedly Catholic leader were asked if his faith played a role in his government not eliminating restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood, for example. Liberals often speak glowingly of the days when politicians set aside religion and pursued the greater good — politicians like Pierre Trudeau, a devout Catholic who famously said “what goes on in private between two consulting adults is their own private business,” but who somewhat less famously spoke of “separating the idea of sin and the idea of crime.”

Trudeau Sr. was absolutely right that the state should have no dominion over sin, in any sense of the word. That should go for politics, too. Politicians of known faiths and devoutness have advanced many of progressive Canadians’ most cherished causes — public health care, most notably — and politicians of unknown faiths and devoutness have taken us down dark alleys. And vice versa. There is nothing we can do with information about a politician’s personal metaphysical views except raise new barriers to entry into a politics that needs fewer.

November 6, 2019

QotD: “Fake news” is nothing new

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

… the basic ideas of “alternative facts” and “fake news” — our updated, revved-up forms of disinformation — were not foreign to Orwell. Working at the BBC as a news producer — a fancy term for war propagandist — he heard some of the Axis powers’ propaganda as well as that of his own side (even if he kept his own hands fairly clean). He justifiably feared that the very concept of objective truth was fading from the modern world. Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite or “rectify” history, so that it follows the current party line, whatever it may be at that moment.

Orwell himself saw all this happen when he read Catalan newspapers as well as British ones during the Spanish Civil War, several years before joining the BBC. Condemning press distortions, above all how several English newspapers reported the war, he wrote: “I saw great battles where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.'” Given the gridlock in American politics, and the never-ending verbal warfare between news outlets on the Right such as Fox News and on the Left such as MSNBC, Orwell appears all too accurate in his “predictions.”

One of the features of the world of Oceania reflecting Orwell’s prescience is its official language, Newspeak, an argot resembling a kind of Morse code that satirizes advertising norms, political jargon, and government bureaucratese. The purpose of Newspeak is to limit thought, on the view that “you can’t think what you lack the words for.” Ultimately, this impoverished language seeks to narrow and control human thought. (Does Twitter represent a step in that direction?) Purged of all nuance and subtlety, denuded of variety, and reduced to a few hundred simple words, Newspeak ultimately promises to render all independent thought (or “thoughtcrime”) impossible. If it cannot be expressed in language, it cannot be thought. And anything can fill the vacuum, such as 2 + 2 = 5. That is the equation — a perfect example of “doublethink” — which O’Brien indoctrinates Winston to accept in Room 101 and which marks the final step of the latter’s brainwashing. As the Party defines it, “doublethink” consists in holding “two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” In 2018, Trump’s lead lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, declared in a TV interview: “Truth isn’t truth.” A few months later, a talking head defended a critical news report on the grounds that, just because it is “not accurate doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

It testifies both to the brilliance of Orwell’s vision and to the bane of our times that Nineteen Eighty-Four retains so much relevance.

John Rodden and John Rossi, “George Orwell Warned Us, But Was Anyone Listening?”, The American Conservative, 2019-10-02.

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