Tag: media

In praise of Sam Harris

In case you’re interested, I was a guest on the first podcast of Challenging Opinions Episode One – Education, Religion and Liberty. Give it a listen if you’re so inclined. A brief selection from the transcript:

Vox argues that Sam Harris is the worst Atheist debater around, but he is willing to give him a little praise:

William: You can very easily accuse people on the liberal wing, on the left, of being too tolerant of fundamentalist Islam, and Sam Harris stands up to the intellectual inconsistencies of some people on the left such as noted philosopher Ben Affleck;  that tendency does exist and he does challenge it, isn’t that true?

Vox: That’s absolutely true, and I would go even further and praise Sam Harris for biting the bullet, for addressing one of the most important flaws of the atheist secular humanist perspective, which is their discomfort with the obvious difference between “what is” and “what could be”.”

That’s what I find fascinating about Sam Harris. On the one hand, he is intellectually careless and the most intrinsically incompetent debater I have ever observed. His idea of defending his ideas is to make an assertion with obvious flaws, then attempt to deal with the straightforward criticism of those flaws by claiming that what he very clearly wrote or said isn’t what he really meant. He does this in every single debate!

On the other hand, he doesn’t hesitate to take the giant conceptual bull by the horns and wrestle with it. In The Moral Landscape, Harris recognized that the Humean distinction between “is” and “ought” is a tremendous problem for secular humanism. The fact that he utterly failed in his attempt to use science to equate the two doesn’t mean that we should not praise him for embracing the philosophical challenge and giving it his best shot.

Why we need to replace Wikipedia

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.

The media wanted a race war

It looks like they’ve got a budding one on their hands:

Authorities have charged a 30-year-old man with capital murder, after they say he ambushed a Texas county sheriff’s deputy at a suburban Houston gas station in an attack motivated by “absolute madness.”

Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman identified the man in a news conference Saturday afternoon as Shannon J. Miles, who is in police custody.

Miles — who has a criminal history that includes convictions for resisting arrest and disorderly conduct with a firearm — was arrested less than 24 hours after authorities said he ambushed Darren Goforth, a 10-year veteran of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, at a suburban Houston Chevron station.

“I am proud of the men and women that have worked swiftly to apprehend the responsible person who posed a significant threat to both law enforcement and the community at large,” Hickman told reporters Saturday. “Our deputies return to the streets tonight to hold a delicate peace that was shattered last evening.”

Hickman said the motive for the killing had not been determined but investigators would look at whether Miles, who is black, was motivated by anger over recent killings elsewhere of black men by police that have spawned the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement. Goforth was white.

Somehow, the news media doesn’t seem quite as enamored of how this race war is going as one would have expected considering all that they’ve done to bring it about. I guess they were expecting for white Republican suburbanites to be the targets rather than white reporters, white cameramen, and white cops.

A tale of two interviews

Once again, the Wall Street Journal did a much more equitable job of covering the Hugos than other media outlets as Michael Rapoport followed up his previous article on the nominations with one on the awards:

Authors and fans who have opposed the Puppy campaigns said the results show that the science fiction fans who vote on the Hugos don’t want to see the field’s most prestigious award gamed.

“Good work was rewarded and bad action was penalized,” said novelist John Scalzi. “A small group of people tried to game the awards for their own gain, and a vastly larger group of people who valued the integrity of the awards responded by choosing ‘No Award’ over nominees they felt got on the ballot by gaming the system.”

But Theodore Beale, aka “Vox Day,” the writer and editor who organized the Rabid Puppies slate, characterized the results as a “scorched earth strategy,” and said liberals in science fiction “would rather burn down a historically prestigious award” than let the awards go to Puppy-backed nominees. It “demonstrates the extent to which science fiction has been politicized and degraded by their far left politics,” he said….

“This was the most optimal outcome with what we had to deal with,”
said author Kameron Hurley, another critic of the Puppies. “Really proud
of the community for rewarding deserving work and passing on so many of
the stacked categories.”

But Sarah Hoyt, a Sad Puppies organizer, said the “fury” of the
reaction to the Puppies has proven their point. “That is the reaction of
a small clique that has engaged in log rolling or years to reward its
followers and those they approved of,” she said before the Hugo
ceremony.

The Hugo ceremony mostly steered clear of direct references to the
controversy, apart from loud applause for some of the announcements of
“No Award.” “Please, God, let there be winners,” co-host David Gerrold
joked at one point, clutching a bunch of awards envelopes yet to be
opened.

 This Wired article attempting to maintain the SJW Narrative concerning the Hugos is mildly amusing for the author’s complete inability to keep up and follow the plot. It’s an example of Vox’s First Law in action, sprinkled with a few factual inaccuracies that appear to result from the writer’s attempt to maintain the narrative. But give Amy Wallace credit for at least talking to us:

Based on his voluminous writings, it can be said that Theodore Beale—who writes fiction as a hobby while working as a game designer—openly opposes racial diversity, homosexuality, and women’s suffrage. Beale quibbles with those assertions, as he did with me when I reached him at his home in Northern Italy. For example, he says he doesn’t oppose all women’s suffrage, just women (and most men) voting in a representative democracy, like the one we have, um, in America. The reason: “Women are very, very highly inclined to value security over liberty” and thus are “very, very easy to manipulate.” (He favors direct democracy—and, obviously, men). At one point, he emailed that he would be “very disappointed” if I failed to quote the Wall Street Journal’s label for him: “the most despised man in science fiction.”

A conversation with Beale feels sort of like walking around a room designed by MC Escher. It turns in on itself in unexpected and at times dizzying ways. A sampling: When I asked him why he once called noted fantasy author NK Jemisin an “educated, but ignorant half-savage” on his blog, he said it wasn’t because she is black, then launched into an explication of what he called “new” genetic research that he says he doesn’t expect very many people to understand (but which he claims supports his use of the term “half-savage”).

When I said that he was intentionally baiting a person of color with a word that has racial overtones, he acknowledged, “I’m calling her a half-savage because I know it’s going to offend the crap out of her, because she’s going to run around screaming, ‘Racist! Racist!’ for the next 10 years.”

A beat, and then he added: “I don’t consider all black people to be half-savages. I mean, some people are. Here in Europe, for example, we have actual proper Africans, not African-Americans. This leads to problems, like people shitting on top of the closed toilets. They don’t know how to use indoor plumbing, okay? This is not civilized behavior.”

Torgersen told me something that helped me understand Beale, which is that he believes Vox Day is a character Beale plays—“Performance art, like Andy Kaufman,” Torgersen said. “He embraces this nemesis role that he inhabits. He’s the dark star circling around the outer rim of the solar system. He’s Darth Vader breathing heavily into your phone. He wants people to be enraged and flipping out and tearing their hair and completely losing their minds. And he gets that every single time.”

Beale acknowledged as much: “I love chaos,” he says. “I am generally pretty destructive.”

Given this kind of incendiary rhetoric, it’s possible that the Sad Puppies were at best naïve when they let Beale piggyback on their idea. At worst, they have been accused of providing a politely moderate front for a shit-stirring provocateur. Certainly, both Correia and Torgersen have worked hard to distinguish themselves from Beale.

“Look at it like this,” Correia blogged at one point. “I’m Churchill, Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.” But when I asked Torgersen whether he felt the Sad Puppies had been tarnished by their association with Beale, he said no. “If he went away, I don’t think it would have changed much. People would have been just as hacked off about Sad Puppies. They just would have found some other reason.”

For his part, Beale—who runs his own small publishing company, Castalia House, which got five of its writers and editors (including Beale himself) on this year’s Hugo ballot—has been outspoken about his goals. “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told me before the winners were announced. “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.” Some nerds just want to watch the world burn.

Going forward, he said, no matter how the Hugo administrators modify the nominating process to try to prevent manipulation (and there are two proposals being considered), he will still have enough supporters to control future awards. Specifically, “I have 390 sworn and numbered vile faceless minions—the hardcore shock troops—who are sworn to mindless and perfect obedience,” he said, acknowledging that his army wasn’t made up solely of sci-fi fans. On the contrary, “the people who are very anti-SJW said, ‘Okay, we want to get in on this.’” When I asked him how he might deploy those people in the future, he continued, “It’s very simple. The dark lord speaks, the minion acts.”

Corrections:

  1. I don’t favor direct democracy “and, obviously, men”, I favor direct democracy for all native-born adult citizens. Period.
  2. I did not rely upon “genetic research” to justify my use of the term “half-savage” to describe NK Jemisin, I relied upon my Hypothesis of Time to Civilization, which is a combination of history and logic that the writer somehow managed to confuse with science. 
  3. I did not acknowledge the Torgersen’s claim of “performance art” but specifically denied it. 
  4. I have 400 Vile Faceless Minions, not 390, and the number is growing daily.
  5. I am not a white male. I am a Red male. 
  6. Castalia House is not mine. I don’t own it, I’m just the lead editor. 
  7. GamerGate did not make a “political movement out of threatening with rape any woman who has the temerity to offer an opinion about a videogame.”

Notice in particular the juxtaposition between “it can be said” and “quibbles with those assertions”. Translation: she said “Isn’t it true that….” to which I responded “No.” For crying out loud, as I explained to her, ANY support for direct democracy is intrinsically far MORE democratic than playing games about the specific limits on whom is permitted to choose between the two candidates offered by the bifactional ruling party.

My favorite part of the article was this: “But even as Beale claimed victory, John Scalzi, a novelist and
three-time Hugo winner who has been among their most outspoken
opponents, said the war was over.”

SJWs always lie.

You may not like what I say one little bit, but it’s hard to argue that I don’t tell the truth. Granted, it’s only been just over two years as yet, but NK Jemisin is still running around screaming “racist, racist!” You’ll note that the writer didn’t see fit to quote Jemisin calling Robert Heinlein and “most of SF fandom” “racist as *fuck*”. And lest you think I was inventing Europe’s indoor plumbing problem, there is a reason you’ll now see these signs at the train stations when traveling through Switzerland and Germany.

Race is in the politics of the beholder

This makes for a fascinating juxstaposition. One of the nastiest SJWs at File 770 is actually dumb enough to try to play race police:

Aaron on August 19, 2015 at 5:48 pm said:
Also the comment that the Pups are led by “a latino, a white, and an indian”. They keep pushing that line of bullshit like they think it will convince anyone outside their little circle-jerk.

I have to admit, it’s a line of argument I’d never considered. If I was Aaron, I would simply explain to critics that my “half-savage” remark about N.K. Jemisin could not possibly be considered racist because she is not black.

I have asked Mike Glyer to warn Aaron about his race-policing lies because “that line of bullshit” happens to be absolutely true. I am without question an American Indian. I have the family tree, the DNA results, and the tribal connections to prove it beyond any shadow of a doubt. I am not a one-sixteenth Cherokee princess, as the New Republic’s Jeet Heer and others have suggested.

Larry Correia is Portuguese, concerning which “Brazilians, who do not speak Spanish, are Latinos, but
Portuguese who share the Iberian Peninsula with Spain may not want to be
called “Latino” or “Hispanic.” And the U.S. Department of Labor also
allows people to self-designate as a Hispanic, if they are Portuguese,
and it cannot be contested.” 


So, our racial affiliations are being denied by self-appointed race police even as another fake African-American SJW has been unmasked, this time by Milo.

International media went nuts today when Breitbart revealed evidence suggesting that prominent Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King is in fact white — and that, when challenged, King did nothing to deny the allegations that he is Caucasian.

Over a hundred media outlets from all over the world, including the Daily Mail, the Daily Beast, the New York Daily News, Salon, Sky News and the New York Post, covered our explosive scoop, which also alleged that King misled media mogul Oprah Winfrey by applying for and accepting an “Oprah scholarship” to historically black Morehouse College.

My favorite response is the ridiculous defense offered by vox.com, which is that race “isn’t derived by biology”:

A person’s race isn’t derived by biology; it is instead set by society and a person’s own identity. As Jenée Desmond-Harris previously explained for Vox, Americans embraced the concept of race to justify treating some people better than others. And since race is arbitrary, different people can genuinely disagree over who counts as white, black, brown, or any other racial identity…. Although race may have no biological basis, social perceptions of race play a huge role in people’s lives — and could impact King’s place in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Remember, SJWs not only think they’re morally superior to you, but they’re smarter and better-educated too. In fact, they’re delusional and operating in complete defiance of history, science and observable reality.

UPDATE: There goes the SJW Narrative. Again:

Shaun KingDuring a segment on #BlackLivesMatters activist Shaun King and the allegation he isn’t black at all, CNN host Don Lemon revealed that he had spoken to a family member of King’s who confirmed he was white. “A family member tells CNN that both of King’s parents are white,”Lemon said on Wednesday night’s edition of CNN 

Go ahead and talk to my family members about whether I’m Indian and Mexican. Hell, you won’t even have to talk to them. 

The entertainment apocalypse


Allum Bokhari ‏@LibertarianBlue
@Nero asked me to get him some Skittles and then refused to eat them until I did this. Send help.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
Stop enabling him.

Milo Yiannopoulos ‏@Nero
shut up woman

I have to admit, Milo probably would make for a pretty damn entertaining reality show. He already has cameras and bomb threats following him around everywhere he goes. The problem is that I have this horrible suspicion that Spacebunny’s cameos and the two of them sniping at each other would turn out to be some of the most popular parts of the show, leading to a producer give her more air time and get on my case to do something other than sit on my scarlet throne and plot the demise of my enemies.


This week on “The Fabulous”, Allum is sent out on an emergency condom run at 4 AM in the red light district of Caracas that goes hilariously awry, Spacebunny and Milo spend an afternoon drinking margaritas and making cruel comments about women who really shouldn’t be wearing bikinis on Barra da Tijuca Beach, and after running out of Ristretto capsules, the Supreme Dark Lord is forced to dip into his emergency supply… that turn out to be Vanilla! 

Speaking of entertainment, we have 150 people registered for the Rabid Puppy Hugo Party where we’ll be celebrating the Awards ceremony online in an Open Brainstorm event. If you want to join us, you can register here.

UPDATE: And speaking of Sasquan, Hugo Nominee and Riding the Red Horse contributor Ken Burnside gives his “Physics and Space Combat” talk at 8 PM on Thursday.  Strongly recommended. Ken will be hosting an informal get together after the talk that may be of interest to Puppies, Ilk, Minions et al.

How media SJWs spin the anti-GG narrative

Matt Sullivan explains Gamedropping: How Journalism Outlets Reinforce a False Narrative Without Fact:

What does GamerGate have to do with traveling to Mars, Drake’s music, and George R.R. Martin?

You’d expect the answer to be nothing, because well, it shouldn’t have anything to do with any of those things. However over the past year we have seen many organizations, some of them Pulitzer Prize winning organizations, try desperately to make the claim that they are indeed linked.

We call this GameDropping.

GameDropping is a phenomenon wherein an author of an article mentions GamerGate even though the article contains nothing even remotely related to the movement. A few examples of this are The Guardian’s article “How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism?”, Pitchfork’s “It’s Time to Break Up With Drake”, and PC Magazine’s “George R.R. Martin: The Internet Is Toxic”.

Now one may think that GameDropping is rather harmless. Yes these articles have nothing to do with GamerGate, but the problem comes from the fact that when these articles reference GamerGate, there is either no source provided to what GamerGate actually is, or the source is a heavily biased opinion piece with little to no factual content.

In fact two of the above examples don’t reference sources at all, and the third references another article from the same publication which appears to be an interview wherein the author is interviewing themselves.

Now when readers of these publications read these stories, whether they be fans of Game of Thrones, or people critical of Drake, having no idea what GamerGate is, they now associate the name with something negative, having not been provided the facts, or a balanced article on exactly what the controversy is to make up their own minds. That information is conveniently left out, but the narrative is inserted.

The SJW’s first priority is always to push the Narrative.

We’re #98

Right Wing News ranks the top 100 conservative sites:

91) Canada Free Press: 68,023
92) Human Events Online: 68,967
93) Jewish World Review: 76,215
94) GOPUSA: 71,293
95) Ricochet: 71,358
96) Day by Day: 73,755
97) Numbers USA: 76,280
98) Vox Day: 76,816
99) X Tribune: 76,417
100) City Journal: 84,176

This would probably appear to be more impressive if I hadn’t ranked 52nd with an Alexa rating of 27,594 in 2014. How is it possible that my ranking dropped 46 places when the monthly pageviews have risen more than 400,000 from one year ago? Simple. The Alexa ratings are nonsense as they are based on links rather than traffic. I bounced the blog rating last year in order to prove my case, then let it decline to its “natural” level because I don’t care about things like that.

So, don’t take any list that is based on Alexa or any similar ranking system too seriously. And also, I’m still not a conservative, but I gave up trying to fight that battle a long time ago.

“The man Canada couldn’t keep out”

The Canadian media is developing a grudging new respect for RooshV:

The man Canada couldn’t keep out: ‘Pickup artist’ unbowed despite public condemnation over lectures

For a man fuelled by controversy, the self-proclaimed “pickup artist” known as Roosh V doesn’t like talking to the media — “I’m a bit squeezed for time,” he said Tuesday, politely rebuffing requests for comment on public condemnation that his speaking engagements in Canada aroused.

“I have my own media channels. It’s not worth my time to talk to reporters,” he said in an email to the National Post. To a Toronto radio station he was more dismissive: “Bell Media can go to hell.”

Daryush Valizadeh, who goes by the name Roosh V and writes about convincing women to have sex, says he gave his lecture in Montreal to a group of 34 in a secret location, travelling in disguise, before he was spotted and chased out of a restaurant and down the street by a small, angry mob on Saturday.

In anticipation of his scheduled appearance in Toronto on Saturday, Toronto mayor John Tory denounced him and his views as a form of hate speech. “While free speech is the law in this country, promoting violence against women is wrong,” Tory tweeted. “I am calling on those hosting this tour to do the right thing — cancel this show.”

    We won. Men won. Free speech won. Here’s my Montreal victory speech:
    Roosh (@rooshv) August 09, 2015

Toronto and Montreal were the two Canadian dates on a tour his website says also includes Berlin, London, Washington D.C., and New York City. In the face of it all, the American blogger appears unbowed, lampooning his detractors in social media for being ineffective and hysterical.

This is what happens when you don’t back down and you don’t flinch in front of the media heat. Roosh is now “the man Canada couldn’t keep out”. I am now “the most hated man in science fiction”. From National Post to Newsweek, from Le Monde to a media outlet that shall remain nameless until the piece runs, the international media is no longer content to let our enemies talk about us, they are asking us to speak directly for ourselves.

That doesn’t happen when you cringe, and apologize, and recant. That doesn’t happen when you flee from criticism like a coward. You have to earn your right to be heard, because no one is going to take you seriously if you don’t stand by what you have said in the face of disapproval. It is only those without character who can expect to avoid repeated attempts to assassinate it.

Milo has some thoughts on the failed Canadian attempt to deny Roosh a platform:

No-platforming, a favourite tactic of the progressive left, denies us, the public, the ability to interrogate a speaker ourselves. It’s not only illiberal and profoundly anti-intellectual but it can create a halo of martyrdom around people who are already pushing at an open door – such as men’s rights activists, who rightly point to dozens of structural inequalities in the way men are spoken about and treated in today’s uber-progressive societies.

Of course, no-platforming is a dangerous strategy, because if the wrong sort of man is no-platformed, he will simply go off and build a new platform, one over which those who previously denied him a platform will not only lack control but even a modicum of influence.

“the American Era is over”

Jerry Pournelle pronounces the end of the American era:

Everyone must understand that the American Era is over: the United States domination of the world is ended, just as the British domination of the world (pink all over the globe) I learned in grade school ended after World War II. For some this was an objective to achieve. For others it is a disaster. For all it is a coming fact. The nuclear weapon, like the .45 Colt, is an equalizer, and it is now inevitable that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons whenever they decide to do so, given that the deal essentially gives up on inspections, and Iran has announced that under no circumstance will there be any inspection of their military installations even if there is inspection – after 24 day’s notice – of their peaceful installations. Intelligence experts say Iran is about a year from their decision to have them. My guess is that there will be a demonstration in Summer, 2017.

Meanwhile the other nations of the Middle East will rush to acquire their own; they can read the newspapers as well as I can.

It’s impossible to argue with him in light of the following, although the problem would appear to be less the loss of the country’s military dominance and more the fact that the population is now almost completely retarded:

After covering the usual local news, the show began to transition into a segment about one of the Kardashian daughters recently naming her new pet rabbit “Bruce.” (Just typing that sentence made me want to launch my fist into the computer screen where my pupils are currently fixated. Rest assured, I’m still typing, so I obviously mustered up all of the self-control in my being and refrained.) That’s when Brown interrupted the correspondent reporting the “story” in mid-sentence:

“I am having a good Friday, so I refuse to talk about the Kardashians today,” said Brown. “You are on your own, Amy. I can’t do it.”

As the program’s co-host storms off set, he can be heard off-screen shouting, “I’ve had enough Kardashians. I can’t take any more Kardashian stories on this show.”

After a replacement anchor rushes in to fill the void left on the morning show’s couch, the fed-up Brown — whose microphone stays on despite walking off set — can be heard continuing his rant away from the cameras: “I don’t care about this family. I’m sick of this family. It’s a non-story!”

I have never watched a single moment of the Kardashians doing anything, but I have to admit, the idea that the naming of a pet rabbit is a national news story does strike me as surreal.

All I can say is that no matter what happens to America as it gradually slides towards historical oblivion, one cannot possibly argue that its fate was not eminently merited.