Tag: media

Or to the media, as both Donald Trump and Ann Coulter, among others, have repeatedly demonstrated:

Appearing with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show, Donald Trump was in the mood to tweak his own persona — to a point. “I think apologizing’s a great thing,” he said. “But you have to be wrong. I will absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.”

It’s funny because it’s true: Trump’s steadfast refusal to apologize for his controversial antics may be the most striking thing about him. A significant portion of the Republican base craves it, and a handful of pro-Trump conservative pundits does, too. None of them looms larger, perhaps, than Ann Coulter.

It makes sense. Trump has given political expression to a model of conservative discourse perfected by Coulter and subsequently emulated by Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and others: 1) Say something controversial or provocative and get a ton of attention in the process. 2) When the media and the Left inevitably demand an apology, adamantly refuse to provide one, driving your critics batty and burnishing your conservative credentials with the base. It’s been Coulter’s modus operandi for her entire, lucrative career, and now Trump has brought it to the campaign trail: A real conservative never says he’s sorry….

Coulter has made a fine living with the same mantra for decades. “Never apologize, at least not for what liberals want you to apologize for,” she advised in her 2004 book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). It’s a rule her critics know she follows all-too-well.

During the George W. Bush years, Coulter’s use of the terms “raghead” and “faggot” in speeches at CPAC generated some furious reactions but no public contrition. In 2012, the Today Show spotlighted a father who was demanding that she apologize for using the term “retarded,” and cease using it in the future. She insisted she wasn’t really referring to the mentally handicapped and said, “screw them!” when asked about her critics in a radio interview with Alan Colmes. (As recently as this May, Coulter wrote a column entitled, “Knowing What We Know Now, Would You Say Jeb Bush Is Retarded?”) Later that year, a Latino GOP group demanded she apologize for a column entitled, “America Nears el Tipping Pointo.” She declined to do so.

Coulter’s remarks have attracted the ire of bigger fish on the right, as well. A few months ago, Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren called on her to apologize for saying that South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is of Indian Sikh heritage, “is an immigrant and does not understand America’s history.” No such apology was forthcoming.

What I find remarkable is the way that despite the clear and conclusive evidence that a public apology always does more harm than good, people are STILL dumb enough to offer up public apologies. Matt Damon is only the latest to learn this very simple and obvious fact; Brad Torgersen learned the same thing when he made the mistake of apologizing to John Scalzi. As will not surprise anyone who has read SJWs Always Lie, Scalzi immediately took Brad’s apology and turned it into a weapon he used to launch an attack on the Sad Puppy leader.

Look at it this way. An apology is a confession. And what do prosecutors do with confessions? They use it to prosecute the person who gave it to them. 

If you’re ever being put under pressure to apologize for something, ask yourself this question: What are the real objectives of those who are putting pressure on me? If they happen to be your critics or political opponents, you can be confident their real objectives don’t happen to include your best interests.

Unless the SJW-infested media does it to an anti-SJW. Then it’s news.

 ‘Julia Caesar’, an anonymous right-wing blogger who has blasted Swedish journalists for writing an “epoch of lies” about the benefits of immigration, is herself a former reporter for Sweden’s biggest broadsheet, Dagens Nyheter, according to a Swedish tabloid.

The controversial writer, who has sought to keep her identity secret, has been causing a huge stir on social media since 2010. Her blog posts lay into mainstream politicians and what she describes as “the corrupt media” for promoting what she argues is an “epoch of lies” about immigration. They also praise the rise of the nationalist Sweden Democrat Party.

“It simply isn’t possible to lie about the blessings of multiculturalism or mass immigration forever when citizens clearly see with their own eyes how their country is being dismantled in front of them,” reads one of her recent posts, which has also been translated into English on a separate blog by one of her supporters.

On Wednesday, Sweden’s Expressen tabloid revealed that the blogger – who has also published three books – is herself a former journalist for Dagens Nyheter (DN), a Swedish newspaper.

The reason SJWs are always so desperate to out and doxx people is because they want to be able to exert social pressure on them, discredit them, and disemploy them. This is why the protection of anonymity is vital, and why it is always a wise idea to establish more than one online identity if you are going to stand up against SJWs in any context.

And this is also why it is very important to offer public support to those the SJWs have successfully identified and targeted. Not everyone is psychologically suited to deal with direct targeting, but as for me, I laugh every time I see my given name “revealed” again in a blog post or news article.

I always wonder how the writer justifies it in his head. Does he ever refer to Bono as Paul Hewson? Or 50 Cent as Curtis Jackson? Or Brianna Wu as John Flynt? It’s useful, though, as whenever I see my given name appear, I know the writer is an SJW who is hoping to increase the social pressure on me, as if just a little more will finally do the trick.

ESPN is “in a panic”:

• Disney Stock Tanks as Cable Revenue Disappoints – The Street
• Disney stock hit on ESPN fears – CNN
• Disney Falls as Revenue Misses, Cable Profit Outlook Darkens – Bloomberg

The table was set for this bad news in May, and internally, ESPN has been in a panic for quite some time. The cord cutting fears have gone from “potential problem” to “very real problem” faster than anyone imagined. When it became clear Keith Olbermann was leaving in early July, we explored the increasing cord cutting phenomenon, and reported how ESPN is under orders from Disney to pull a total of $350 million out of the budget in 2016 and 2017.

Mark St. Cyr explains one likely reason for the “cord cutting” at Zerohedge:

Why wouldn’t ESPN™ (or Disney™ its parent company) go to great efforts to include or push the narrative that “cord cutting” doesn’t necessarily mean “all” that cut have tuned off? In other words: why aren’t numbers from alternative viewing sources highlighted as to show they might not be viewing there – but they are over here? Unless – they aren’t.
And if they’re not – why not? After all, there’s probably no other content infringement policing company for copyright and other applicable ownership rights than Disney and all its subsidiaries. You aren’t going to see it for free or on alternative platforms unless they want or allow for it. Period.

This would also imply if they allowed it (anywhere) it would be accounted for ( i.e., click views, etc.) in some manner of form from across the internet to help take the edge off. i.e., Sure we lost millions from cable, but as you can see here, they’ve just migrated over to this service/platform as an alternative. Monetizing the alternative is a work in progress. etc., etc.

However, that seems not to be the case. The case appears – they’ve not only cut: they’ve tuned out or turned off the programming entirely. Why?

It’s hard to say. However, if I use myself as an example, I believe I know a large part of the underlying reason:

ESPN (like a few notable others such as NBC™) has seemingly transformed at near hyper-speed from sports reporting – to political sports reporting. The political edge now rampant throughout the shows, games, interviews, et al is overbearing, overburdening, and overdone.

From SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police:

The public schools can no longer educate, so people are turning to homeschooling. The universities can no longer provide liberal arts educations, so people are becoming technology-assisted autodidacts. The banks no longer loan, the state and local governments no longer provide basic public services, the military does not defend the borders, the newspapers no longer provide news, the television networks no longer entertain, and the corporations are increasingly unable to provide employment.

Even as the institutions have been invaded and coopted in the interests of social justice, they have been rendered unable to fulfill their primary functions. This is the great internal contradiction that the SJWs will never be able to positively resolve, just as the Soviet communists were never able to resolve the contradiction of socialist calculation that brought down their economy and their empire 69 years after Ludwig von Mises first pointed it out. One might call it the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence; no man can serve two masters and no institution can effectively serve two different functions. The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.

This technological innovator’s experience is far from the only one of its type, and demonstrates that the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence renders Wikipedia unfit for purpose:

My primary reasons for writing this article are to record a bit of personal history, describe programming before the personal computer, and reminisce a bit. But I have another reason — some of my regular readers know there’s an article about me on Wikipedia, but that article is likely to be deleted (update: it’s gone — see below). The stated reason for deleting it is because it doesn’t have enough references for its claims — for example, that I wrote a solar system model that was used by JPL during the Viking lander mission. Wikipedia rightly requires documentation for any claims made in its articles, and until this article, the article you’re reading, that claim wasn’t documented. It is now, by this article and by its attached correspondence. Nevertheless, once I saw that the article was being considered for removal, I added my own vote in favor of deletion. Why? Because it had become a cheap sounding board for people annoyed at my positions on controversial topics, particularly psychology and stockbrokers.

That’s the real reason the self-appointed editors over at Wikipedia moved to delete the article (remember that anyone can sign up and edit Wikipedia articles). I’ve been tracking the article since it first appeared in 2006, and there have been any number of efforts to delete or destroy the article by people of varying levels of skill. One of the cleverer tactics has been to delete the list of references, wait 24 hours, then argue for the article’s deletion on the ground that the article’s claims have no references — that’s been tried several times.

What’s behind this? Why does anyone care so much about a short article that describes my activities? Well, I’ve noticed a correlation between my publishing something about psychology (I’m a critic of psychology’s theoretical basis and practice, example: The Trouble with Psychology) and a subsequent effort to delete the Wikipedia article. Apparently some psychologists or fans of psychology think it’s an appropriate response to criticism of their field — not to debate the issues honestly in public forums — but to try to remove any references to the critic.

The single best thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. That’s also the single worst thing. It was my hope that a Wikipedia editor, one who doesn’t care that I’m a psychology critic, would add a footnote reference to this article’s documentation in the Wikipedia article, thereby removing an excuse to delete the article. That wouldn’t have solved the problem, because I plan to continue criticizing psychology, but it woiuld have made it harder to justify future attacks.

Update: Through a combination of my efforts and that of others, and since I couldn’t protect it from vandalism, the Wikipedia article has been deleted. During my research on this topic, I encountered this almost identical incident:

    Seth Finkelstein reported in an article in The Guardian on his efforts to remove his own biography page from Wikipedia, simply because it was subjected to defamation:

        “Wikipedia has a short biography of me, originally added in February 2004, mostly concerned with my internet civil liberties achievements. After discovering in May 2006 that it had been vandalised in March, possibly by a long-time opponent, and that the attack had been subsequently propagated to many other sites which (legally) repackage Wikipedia’s content, the article’s existence seemed to me overall to be harmful rather than helpful. For people who are not very prominent, Wikipedia biographies can be an “attractive nuisance”. It says, to every troll, vandal, and score-settler: “Here’s an article about a person where you can, with no accountability whatsoever, write any libel, defamation, or smear. It won’t be a marginal comment with the social status of an inconsequential rant, but rather will be made prominent about the person, and reputation-laundered with the institutional status of an encyclopedia.”

    In the same article Finkelstein recounts how he voted his own biography as “not notable enough” in order to have it removed from Wikipedia.

As explained above, once I saw how often opponents of my views on psychology tried to rewrite or delete my Wikipedia article, I took the same action for the same reason. Those who want to read a short biographical note, one not subject to controversy or vandalism, may click here.

What does this mean about Wikipedia? It means that controversial issues and people won’t be described fairly, or sometimes at all. The idea behind Wikipedia is that it’s a people’s encyclopedia, not an ivory tower production. The problem with this egalitarian ideal is that special interests can, and do, struggle to see their particular outlook become the only outlook in the pages of Wikipedia. And, since my view of psychology is quickly becoming the majority view, psychologists found themselves unable to argue against that position using reason and fair tactics. So, just as when they chose to study psychology in college, they took the low road, the easy path — they resorted to gangster tactics.

We’re going to do this, the only questions are a) when, b) how much will it cost, and c) who is with me? I’ve had much the same experience. The three most notable and significant things I have done are completely absent from Wikipedia despite my being deemed notable by the editors and those three things being documented by reliable sources. And I’m far from alone in that.