Tag: media

Sure, it’s a little ironic at the moment, given that more blacks have hunted down police officers than whites of late. But one can hardly say that TIME Magazine is wrong to say that right wing groups pose a serious hypothetical threat to the police of the USA. Or rather, to the police who don’t already belong to or sympathize with them.

Time Magazine warned of a growing threat to cops nationwide in September 2010. The nationally renowned publication argued that sinister individuals would launch targeted attacks against police officers and even ambush them in their patrol cars.

Time alerted readers that these groups and individuals have a disturbing hatred of cops and that there was a real threat of “lone-wolf” attacks.

Who are these groups that present such a threat to police? Right-wing militias, according to Time.

In a lengthy six-page article entitled “The Secret World of Extremist Militias,” then-Time Contributing Editor-at-Large Barton Gellman made the case that America should be deeply worried about private citizens forming militias.

“Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities. Readier for bloodshed than at any time since at least the confrontations in the 1990s in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the radical right has raised the threat level against the President and other government targets,” the article says.

Of course, this is hardly news. I’d be more impressed with TIME’s analysis if they had mentioned any actual numbers or focused on the threat being posed by those within the police ranks. After all, as we’ve learned everywhere from India to Afghanistan and Iraq, penetrating the police and the federal agencies has been found to be the most effective tactic for 4GW forces.

Instead, I find it morbidly amusing that in the middle of a global economic downturn, with the world gearing up for a whole series of shooting wars and Americans openly arming to defend themselves against a corrupt federal government, the left-liberals at TIME concluded that the time was just right to score some rhetorical points against the right wing.

This is how to how to make a corporation kneel, submit, and behave, everyone:

With theater chains defecting en masse, Sony Pictures Entertainment has pulled the planned Christmas Day release of “The Interview.” U.S. officials have reportedly linked a massive cyber attack against Sony to North Korea, which is at the center of the Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy.

“We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees, and the American public,” Sony said in a statement. “We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome.”

In announcing the decision to cancel the holiday debut, Sony also hit back at the hackers who threatened movie theaters and moviegoers and who have terrorized the studio and its employees for weeks.

“Those who attacked us stole our intellectual property, private emails and sensitive and proprietary material, and sought to destroy our spirit and our morale – all apparently to thwart the release of a movie they did not like,” the statement reads.

A few hours after making the announcent, a studio spokesman said that Sony had “no further plans” to release the comedy, either on VOD or DVD.

Christians aren’t comfortable killing people who insult their faith and their Lord and Savior. That’s one reason most anti-religionists are so much more inclined to attack Christians rather than Muslims. But no one was actually harmed in the cyber attack on Sony; all that happened was some information that the studio would rather have kept under wraps has been distributed to the public.

Perhaps entertainment corporations would be more inclined to show civility and respect to Christians again if some of us applied the lesson we’ve learned from the supposed North Korean example.

It is, of course, vastly amusing to see a Hollywood entity complaining about someone else seeking to destroy their spirit and morale. Isn’t that exactly what Hollywood has been relentlessly doing to Western civilization since the 1960s?

It’s not easy to make the North Koreans look good, but Sony somehow managed it. They’re typical SJWs, paper tigers, able only to apply the heat but never to bear it themselves. No wonder people in Hollywood are always giving each other “courage” awards and talking about how brave they are. They are cowards and they know it.

If Sony had any balls at all, if they were truly convinced of their own rectitude, they would have released the film even if every theatre in America refused to show it. And the fact that they backed down after several sets of information were released makes one wonder what it is they are still trying to hide. From now on, we know that North Korea has an effective veto over Sony, if not the rest of Hollywood.

What a pity they didn’t decide to target The Hobbit(ses) for the desecration and war crime that Peter Jackson let his wife commit on Tolkien’s text. As with the Star Wars prequels, I saw the first one, and as a result, will not watch the second two.

Filmmaker Judd Apatow called it a “sad day for creative expression” and said, “When we cave to threats, it trains people to threaten us.”

As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ll take Hollywood’s tears over the impact this will have on “creative expression” seriously on the day it releases a movie that sympathetically portrays Nazis rounding up Jews or presents a powerful emotional defense of KKK members defending their families and community from the depredations of black Americans. Until then, their tears are best seen as nothing more than a complaint that a new party has forcibly insisted on claiming the same sort of veto power that Hollywood’s other interest groups possess.

That must be one of the things they learn in journalism school. Despite being a three-times nationally syndicated columnist with Chronicle Features and Universal Press Syndicate, I am unfamiliar with the term:

Kathryn Hendley, Alex Stock and Ryan Duffin—the three friends of Jackie’s who Sabrina Rubin Erdely falsely claimed discouraged from her calling the authorities—now tell the AP that they have all been contacted by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who is “re-reporting” her original story.

This is a bizarre idea for a number of reasons.

First, Rubin Erdely herself continues to refuse to talk to the press—or, as she said of the UVa administration, she is “stonewalling.” So she is a hypocrite.

And second—why on earth would anyone talk to her? (The AP story does not disclose whether the three friends agreed to be re-interviewed interviewed.) She revealed her profound political bias in her first article, as well as a fatal lack of professionalism. She might improve on the second part, but she’s unlikely to change the first. In fact, she might be even more invested in proving the point that, whatever happened to Jackie, there is a larger “rape culture” at the University of Virginia.

Question: how does this woman still have a job at Rolling Stone? How is it possible that they haven’t fired her yet?

In what Ross Douthat laments, I see cause for celebration:

“The eulogy that needs to be written,” Klein argued, is actually for an entire kind of publication — the “ambitious policy magazine,” whether on the left or right, that once set the terms of Washington’s debates.

With the emergence of the Internet, those magazines lost their monopolies, and the debate “spilled online, beyond their pages, outside their borders,” with both new competitors and specific voices (Klein kindly cites my own) becoming more important than before.

As Klein correctly implies, this shift has produced a deeper policy conversation than print journalism ever sustained. Indeed, the oceans of space online, the easy availability of studies and reports, the ability to go endless rounds on topics — plus the willingness of many experts to blog and bicker for the sheer fun of it! — has made the Internet era a golden age for technocratic argument and data-driven debate.

But there is a price to be paid as well. That price, Klein suggests, is the loss of the older magazines’ ability to be idiosyncratic and nonpandering and just tell their readers what they should care about…. The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a “policy magazine.” It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art.

It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, in other words; it was a liberal-arts magazine.

In other words, a small group of people will no longer enjoy the stranglehold they once possessed over politics, literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, and fine art, to “set the terms of Washington’s debates” and tell readers “what they should care about”.

This is supposed to be a bad thing? Are you kidding me?

The New Republic is gone. It would be a good thing for the American Right if National Review followed suit.

The displacement of liberal New York Jews by liberal Silicon Valley gays is probably a positive sign if it truly indicates that the post-WWII left-wing Jewish establishment is on the decline.

The majority of The New Republic’s masthead resigned en masse on Friday following the owner’s decision to force out the editorial leadership, move the magazine to New York, and rebrand the venerable, century-old publication as a “digital media company.”

Nine of the magazine’s twelve senior editors submitted letters of resignation to owner Chris Hughes and chief executive Guy Vidra, as did two executive editors, the digital media editor, the legislative affairs editor, and two arts editors. At least twenty of the magazine’s contributing editors also requested that their names be removed from the magazine’s masthead.

The mass departure came one day after a shakeup that saw the resignation of top editor Franklin Foer and veteran literary editor Leon Wieseltier, both of whom resigned due to differences of vision with Hughes, a 31-year-old Facebook co-founder who bought the magazine in 2012. Foer announced his resignation on Thursday after discovering that Hughes had already hired his replacement, Gabriel Snyder, a Bloomberg Media editor who formerly ran The Atlantic Wire blog….

Those who resigned are senior editors Jonathan Cohn, Isaac Chotiner, Julia Ioffe, John Judis, Adam Kirsch, Alec MacGillis, Noam Scheiber, Judith Shulevitz and Jason Zengerle; executive editors Rachel Morris and Greg Veis; digital media editor Hillary Kelly (who resigned from her honeymoon in Africa); legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen; and poetry editor Henri Cole and dance editor Jennifer Homans. Contributing editors Anne Applebaum, Paul Berman, Christopher Benfey, Jonathan Chait, William Deresiewicz, Justin Driver, TA Frank, Ruth Franklin, Jack Goldsmith, Anthony Grafton, David Grann, David Greenberg, Robert Kagan, Enrique Krauze, Damon Linker, Ryan Lizza, John McWhorter, Sacha Z. Scoblic, Cass Sunstein, Alan Taylor, Helen Vendler and Sean Wilentz.

Many of those who resigned on Friday believe that Hughes and Vidra now intend to turn TNR into a click-focused digital media company, at the expense of the magazine’s strong editorial traditions and venerable brand, according to sources who attended the gathering at Foer’s house.

Whatever will Americans do without this landmark of the neocon establishment telling them what to think and which wars to wage? And wherever will we go for our poetry and dance criticism? It’s good to see some of these old propaganda centers being disrupted and demolished; it’s absolutely ridiculous how much political influence The New Republic had considering that it only had 50,000 subscribers.

The antiwar site Mondoweiss notes: “This is a landmark in the era of the Jewish establishment. It’s petering out in an elite generation of far greater diversity.” Given that Holocaustianity and Hollywood are much more influential in the USA than in Europe, my guess is that it will take at least one more generation before America’s Jews begin following the lead of French Jewry, of whom more than one percent of the total population are expected to have moved to Israel by the end of 2014. What is interesting is the way these developmens indicate that six decades of diligent work to break down European and American homogenuity has gone somewhat agley; it appears that a constant power struggle of all against all may not actually be safer than a single well-disposed majority ruling over diverse minorities with benign disregard.

Having recently read Martin van Creveld’s The Land of Blood and Honey, I suspect there will be some fairly serious cultural clashes in the future between American Jews, who believe they are the center of the Jewish world, and the Israelis, who understandably feel very differently. Those who see “Israeli” and “Jew” as being entirely synonymous really don’t know what they’re talking about; the amusing thing is that Israelis tend to speak more dismissively of American Jews than most Americans would dare.

One important difference that I see is that Israelis are heading rapidly towards a homogenous ethno-cultural state, while American Jews are terrified of Israeli people’s “heartbreaking” embrace of nationalism because they know they are no more a part of the American ethno-cultural state than Israel’s Arab citizens are part of Israel’s, and they have no more desire to move to Israel than the average Israeli Arab has in moving to Egypt or Syria. But their “national homogeneity for me, but not for thee” argument is unlikely to hold water with anyone.