XKCD fixed: free speech
Tag: media
It’s a start
Interesting to see the New York Times run an opinion piece written by the leader of France’s Front National, Marine LePen:
These mistakes must also be called by their names. I will mention only three, but they are of crucial importance.
First, the dogma of the free movement of peoples and goods is so firmly entrenched among the leaders of the European Union that the very idea of border checks is deemed to be heretical. And yet, every year tons of weapons from the Balkans enter French territory unhindered and hundreds of jihadists move freely around Europe. Small surprise then that Amedy Coulibaly’s machine gun came through Belgium, as the Walloon media have reported, or that his partner Hayat Boumeddiene fled to Syria under the nose of law enforcement.
Second, the massive waves of immigration, both legal and clandestine, our country has experienced for decades have prevented the implementation of a proper assimilation policy. As Hugues Lagrange, a sociologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.), has argued, culture has a major influence on the way immigrants relate to French society and its values, on issues such as the status of women and the separation of state and religious authority.
Without a policy restricting immigration, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fight against communalism and the rise of ways of life at odds with laïcité, France’s distinctive form of secularism, and other laws and values of the French Republic. An additional burden is mass unemployment, which is itself exacerbated by immigration.
Third, French foreign policy has wandered between Scylla and Charybdis in the last few years. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s intervention in Libya, President François Hollande’s support for some Syrian fundamentalists, alliances formed with rentier states that finance jihadist fighters, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia — all are mistakes that have plunged France into serious geopolitical incoherence from which it is struggling to extricate itself. Incidentally, Gerd Müller, Germany’s federal minister of economic cooperation and development, deserves praise for having the clear-sightedness, like the Front National, of accusing Qatar of supporting jihadists in Iraq.
It would appear that events in Paris have so frightened the editors of the New York Times that they’re actually willing to countenance the discussion of immigration and Islamization. What LePen is suggesting is far from sufficient, obviously, but it is a start.
However, the fact that both the French and German governments have banned anti-Mahometan marches this week tends to indicate that some sort of democratic upheaval will be required before any serious action is taken.
An apt metaphor
For the charade of globalist “leadership”:
Once again the mainstream media peddled the spoon-fed propaganda that world leaders “led the march” to honor the victims of the Paris shootings last week. Glorious photo-ops of Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, David Cameron (oh, and not Barack Obama) were smeared across front pages hailing the “unity in outrage.” However, as appears to be the case in so many ‘events’ in the new normal managed thinking in which we live, The Independent reports, French TV has exposed the reality of the ‘photo-op’ seen-around-the-world: the ‘dignitaries’ were not in fact “at” the Paris rallies but had the photo taken on an empty guarded side street.
We are living in a Potemkin world. Take nothing reported by the media at face value.
Maybe they’re just not very good
In which we are supposed to be very concerned that there are insufficient numbers of people of color nominated for awards given in Hollywood:
For only the second time in nearly two decades, the 20 Academy Awards acting nominations went to a group made up entirely of white actors and actresses. Among the notable snubs was David Oyelowo, who received praise for his turn as the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.
In 2011, the 20 nominees also were entirely white. Before that, one has to go back to 1998 for an all-white acting group.
The all-white nominees list comes at a time when Hollywood is fielding criticism for not doing enough to promote diversity in filmmaking. And just last month, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin were apologizing for leaked emails that appeared to be racially insensitive. Rudin was nominated this morning for producing best picture nominee The Grand Budapest Hotel.
What I find amusing about this is that while we’re informed that if right-wing writers aren’t nominated for awards, this is an indication of their lack of talent, but if Africans or women aren’t nominated for awards, this is an indication of racism and sexism.
Meanwhile, none of the science fiction SJWs celebrated the fact that a Hispanic man and a Indian were nominated for Hugo Awards last year. In fact, some of them are still openly decrying those nominations. The racists.
Another thing that is modestly amusing is the way in which the SJWs don’t understand the way in which a relative nonentity being given an affirmative action award when very young, then winning nothing afterwards, will be used as evidence against their accomplishments in the future. See the Sports Guy’s dissection of Wes Unsfeld’s MVP award in his rookie year, followed by a subsequent lack of honors, in The Book of Basketball for details.
NYT covering for Islam
The mainstream media in the USA and Europe are absolutely desperate to maintain the myth of the “Islamic radical” and hide the fact that it is the jihadists who are the Islamic reformers, not the so-called moderates:
Here’s the latest example of the New York Times censoring itself to avoid offending Muslims after an act of Islamic terror. This morning, BenK at Ace of Spades quoted an NYT story by Liz Alderman titled “Survivors Retrace a Scene of Horror at Charlie Hebdo.” Take note of these two paragraphs from that story:
Sigolène Vinson, a freelancer who had decided to come in that morning to take part in the meeting, thought she would be killed when one of the men approached her.
Instead, she told French news media, the man said, “I’m not going to kill you because you’re a woman, we don’t kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself,” she recalled.
I was intrigued by this quote, and it seemed worth exploring, so I went to the NYT story to quote it. But guess what?
Here’s what it says now:
Sigolène Vinson, a freelance journalist who had come in that morning to take part in the meeting, said that when the shooting started, she thought she would be killed.
Ms. Vinson said in an interview that she dropped to the floor and crawled down the hall to hide behind a partition, but one of the gunmen spotted her and grabbed her by the arm, pointing his gun at her head. Instead of pulling the trigger, though, he told her she would not be killed because she was a woman.
“Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you,” the gunman told her in a steady voice, with a calm look in his eyes, she recalled. “You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right.”
Nothing about telling her to convert to Islam. Nothing about telling her to read the Quran. Nothing about telling her to cover her face.
Nothing about the very reason these animals did this.
It sounds like the New York Times might have downright substituted their own words for those that Ms Vinson reported as well. Trust NOTHING that comes out of the mainstream press at face value. If they could get away with it, you know they’d blame the Charlie Hebdo attack on right-wing Christian militias.
Remember, as long ago as 2006, FORTY PERCENT of British Muslims were calling for the establishment of Sharia in the UK. There can be no compromise between Islam and the West, because one is either part of the Dar al-Islam or the Dar al-Harb.
Unfortunately, the idiots on the Left have learned nothing. On Slashdot, various leftists are pointing to the Crusades, to the 30 Years War, falsely claiming that the atheist Anders Breivik was a Christian, and in short, doing everything they can to keep their heads planted firmly in the Sand of Religious Equivalence.
Western civilization vs SJW media
That’s what #GamerGate boils down to according to Allen Quatermain on Reaxxion:
The long range objectives of #gamergate has been summarized as less outside interference, more responsibility in the gaming media and greater accountability of game publishers and so of course we have collided with cultural Marxists, for these purposes bring us immediately into conflict with the SJW’s on two levels.
On the Ideological plain, the SJW’s seek always and everywhere to bring about more interference, less individual responsibility and an amoral way of doing things. On the plain of action, until the SJW’s can be stopped from their subjugation of all western society, there will be no opportunity for us to move forward at all. We have undertaken therefore to play a leading role in slowing down, stopping and eventually routing the SJW interlopers.
We realise that the one thing that the SJW’s cannot withstand is the light of day on their activities. What cultural Marxists fear is exposure. For this reason we do all that we can to bring to our fellow people more knowledge and a better understanding of the methods, the progress. and the menace of the SJW machine. In this undertaking we have become a new form of opposition to the SJW’s which they have never faced before in any of the vast areas they have already taken over.
The SJW’s, grasping this fact very early on, set out destroy us as a movement. The western mainstream media help the SJW’s by laying down the line for the faithful. There has not been one mainstream media publication which has not been used to attack #gamergate.
I’m not sure the Wall Street Journal has bothered to attack #GamerGate, but it was a little startling to see First Things come out and pronounce us dead for the Nteenth time, albeit in a nominally sympathetic manner.
The media has been entirely coopted and cannot be trusted in any way, shape, or form. Even the nominally conservative media readily falls in line under social pressure from more extreme SJWs. But as I noted on Alpha Game today, media reality is not synonymous with objective reality; it portrays the world as they believe it should be, not as it actually is.
This is why blogs like this one will continue to grow in popularity, as the mainstream media ratings consistently fall no matter the medium. The reason the media keeps declaring #GamerGate dead is because they need it to be dead, as the longer it persists, the more obviously doomed they are.
How the media manipulates science fiction
I discovered an interesting site called Chaos Horizon yesterday. The author has developed a model to predict future Best Novel Hugo Award nominations on the basis of media coverage and past awards, and it worked pretty well last year. But what I found even more interesting and informative was his review round-ups, in which he tracks the media coverage of the various books he expects to be nominated.
Two of the listed favorites for 2015 are LOCK-IN by John Scalzi and MONSTER HUNTER NEMESIS by Larry Correia.
Mainstream Reviews:
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
NPR
A.V. ClubWordPress Blogger Reviews:
Ristea’s Reads (4 out of 5)
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
Bibliotropic (5 out of 5)
Alison McCarty (9 out of 10)
As the Plot Things (9 out of 10)
The BiblioSanctum (4.5 out of 5)
Infinite Free Time
Lucy Moo’s Book Reviews
Books, Bones, & Buffy (4 out of 5)
For Winter NightsAs you can see, that’s already a lot of reviews, and they’ve been pretty uniformly positive, averaging out to a solid 4.5 out of 5. The number of reviews is a testament to Scalzi built-in fanbase; the high scores speak to the book being well-liked.
Amazon Reviews:
(299) 4.2 out of 5 starsMainstream Reviews:
None? For each of these Review Round-Ups, I check the same places: Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, NPR, NYTimes, the Guardian, and Entertainment Weekly. These are some of the most popular and widely distributed reviewing venues, and they give us a good idea if the book is reaching beyond the core SFF audience. The fact that Correia received no discernible support from these outlets certainly says something. The lack of reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus is surprising, as they do short capsule reviews of tons of texts. For most authors, this lack of mainstream coverage would hurt them; for an author like Correia, this lack of coverage re-enforces his outsider or maverick status.
WordPress Blog Reviewers:
AdVerb Creative
Koeur’s Book Review
Bookstoge’s Reviews on the Road (4.5 out of 5)
Attack of the Books!
Alternative Worlds IINot the biggest group of reviews, but all are fairly positive. It’s interesting that Monster Hunter Nemesis doesn’t show up as strongly in these places. Goodreads has 1700+ ratings for Monster Hunter Nemesis, which does indicate it’s selling copies. People just don’t seem to blog about Correia’s book with the same intensity as they do other texts.
Amazon Reviews:
(283) 4.8 out of 5 stars
It’s somewhat amusing to see that even though Chaos Horizons is aware of the Hugo controversy, he’s still genuinely surprised that there are zero mainstream reviews for Nemesis. What’s happening here is a microcosm of what happens in the gaming world. The pinkshirt media puffs up Pink SF and attempts to make it look better and more popular than it is, while ignoring better and equally popular non-Pink SF in an attempt to pretend it is not merely irrelevant, but doesn’t exist.
It’s even more obvious if you actually read the reviews for LOCK-IN. Most of them are more about the author than the book itself, because the content of the book is largely irrelevant, the object of the review is to signal that the book reviewed is the product of an ideologically-approved author and therefore should be supported.
I note that the Goodreads data is different than the Amazon data, but I tend to discount the Goodreads data as a proxy for comparative purposes because its readership has such a strong SJW bias. That being said, it’s probably an excellent proxy for the WorldCon membership and a Hugo-predictive model for precisely that reason.
Gun control by any other name
Would still stink of totalitarianism. Don’t fall for the rebranding of gun control as “gun safety”:
The gun control movement, blocked in Congress and facing mounting losses in federal elections, is tweaking its name, refining its goals and using the same-sex marriage movement as a model to take the fight to voters on the state level.
After a victory in November on a Washington State ballot measure that will require broader background checks on gun buyers, groups that promote gun regulations have turned away from Washington and the political races that have been largely futile. Instead, they are turning their attention — and their growing wallets — to other states that allow ballot measures.
An initiative seeking stricter background checks for certain purchasers has already qualified for the 2016 ballot in Nevada, where such a law was passed last year by the Legislature then vetoed by the governor. Advocates of gun safety — the term many now use instead of “gun control” — are seeking lines on ballots in Arizona, Maine and Oregon as well.
It’s always pure deceitful rhetoric with the fucking rabbits. Always. The fact that they’ve been roundly defeated for two decades just means that they’ll rebrand, lie, and try again.
And observe that giving their inch only encourages them to immediately go after the mile.
In Washington, those who pushed the ballot measure through say they will begin a campaign to get the State Legislature to pass measures to keep guns from those with mental illnesses, children and people with a record of domestic violence.
Never give them an inch. Never compromise. Never moderate. And always punch back twice as hard.
They’re not entirely wrong
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.
The cowardice of Hollywood
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.