Tag: media

The decline of the Grey Lady

This New York Observer article doesn’t tell us anything new. We all know the New York Times editorial page is terrible. But it does help explain why:

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times.

The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in the words of one current Times reporter….

“I think the editorials are viewed by most reporters as largely
irrelevant, and there’s not a lot of respect for the editorial page. The
editorials are dull, and that’s a cardinal sin. They aren’t getting any
less dull. As for the columnists, Friedman is the worst. He hasn’t had
an original thought in 20 years; he’s an embarrassment. He’s perceived
as an idiot who has been wrong about every major issue for 20 years,
from favoring the invasion of Iraq to the notion that green energy is
the most important topic in the world even as the financial markets were
imploding. Then there’s Maureen Dowd, who has been writing the same
column since George H. W. Bush was president.”

Yet another former Times writer concurred. “Andy [Rosenthal] is a wrecking
ball, a lot like his father but without the gravitas. What strikes me
about the editorial and op-ed pages is that they have become
relentlessly grim. With very few exceptions, there’s almost nothing
light-hearted or whimsical or sprightly about them, nothing to gladden
the soul.

Of course, it probably doesn’t help that the paper has largely converted itself into one massive editorial page. A recent study showed that only one in six front page articles could be considered proper news, the rest were all editorials cloaked in a newsy disguise.

The thing is, newspapers are absolutely allergic to permitting anyone who isn’t a doctrinaire left-liberal get any exposure, so they sentence themselves to grim and tedious left-wing dogma. It is little surprise that even liberals tend to find it less than scintillating.

The phony Dark Enlightenment

As I have previously noted, I don’t buy into this Dark Enlightenment nonsense. And these comparisons should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity that Nick Land, a British philsopher of whom I had literally never heard before, is any sort of leader, intellectual or otherwise, of a coherent movement.

Now, Alexa is very far from reliable, but the sheer scale of the differences indicates what a more accurate traffic metric would likely show. First look at the two individuals who have been mentioned by the leftists as leaders of this dangerous Dark Enlightenment.

Nick Land (xenosystems.net)
Global 658,815, USA 268,030

Moldbug
Global 882,792, USA 279,490

Pretty influential, are they not? Now let’s look at some of the others who are more or less well-regarded throughout the non-mainstream Right.

Steve Sailer
Global 161,960, USA 38,356  

Roissy/Heartiste
Global 29,405, USA 10,307

Vox Day
Global 31,286, USA 4,969  

Fred Reed
Global 313,779, USA 84,841

The so-called Dark Enlightenment is just another fantasy media “trend”, about as credible as the New York Times annual stories on junior high school sex rings.

The wrath of Kong

“Hey, it’s only the National Enquirer,” responded all of John Edwards’s supporters:

Under the headline Obama Divorce Bombshell!, the National Enquirer claims their 21-year marriage has dissolved in a string of ugly fights that were prompted by the Mandela memorial incident and — far more outrageously — Mrs Obama’s discovery that Secret Service bodyguards had been covering up infidelity on her husband’s part…. Mrs Obama, the Enquirer claims, intends to stand by her husband until his presidency is over, at which time he will move back to Hawaii, where he grew up, and she will stay in Washington with their children.

For the moment, they are allegedly sleeping in separate bedrooms after Mr Obama’s attempt to ‘mend fences’ backfired so badly on a recent Christmas getaway to Hawaii that he returned to Washington with their two daughters, leaving his wife behind.

The National Enquirer, it must be said, quoted only anonymous insiders in support of these sensational claims, and is hardly the most reliable source of hard news.

Actually, the only thing that would surprise me here is if it turned up that the infidelity involved a woman. Obama’s body language always struck me as indicative of being even less comfortable around women than Ricky Martin’s did back when he first hit the big time.

As always, the watchdogs of democracy as all over the story, just like they were with JFK’s now-notorious philandering: “Washington’s media has ignored the story. But everyone remembers how the Enquirer famously got it right when it claimed the supposedly squeaky clean Democrat presidential contender John Edwards had fathered a love child by a former campaign worker.”

Bomb-makers in Minneapolis

What used to be known as the Ghettos in the Sky are now the center of Mogadishu on the Mississippi. And the Somali population in Minneapolis has already contributed suicide bombers to Al-Shabab in Somalia as well as mall attackers to the same group in Kenya. So, the mysterious recent explosion in the heart of Somali Minneapolis should be a matter of more than a little concern to Minnesotans, as it indicates that the Somalis are likely to bring their jihad to the Mall of America or some other local target sooner or later.

A big explosion occurs next door to a mosque that has an unabashed
affection for the Muslim Brotherhood, in a Somali neighborhood where
terrorists are known to hang out — what could possibly be amiss with
that? Nothing, except possibly an Islamophobic hate crime, according to CAIR.

Zuhur Ahmed, a board member of the Minnesota chapter of
the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the group was monitoring
the situation closely. “So far we don’t have any details,” she said. “But whenever there’s
an explosion, fire or anything of that sort by a mosque, there’s a
little bit of concern if the motive is a hate crime. We’re just
concerned and watching out for that.”

But then, CAIR always believes that the best defense is a good offense. If it were a gas explosion, the normal process would be for gas to
accumulate inside the building until a chance ignition detonated it.
Under those circumstances, the walls of the building would be blown
outwards, causing a sudden, catastrophic collapse of the structure and
filling the street and surrounding lots with bricks and rubble.

Nothing of the sort occurred. The earliest photos show an intense and
rapidly-spreading fire that looks like it originated on the second
floor, immediately above the grocery. This would be consistent with the
unexpected detonation of an explosive substance — say, ammonium nitrate,
just to pick a random example — which then distributed very flammable
material within an enclosed space, creating a flash-fire.

The explosion was subsequently blamed on a gas leak, which is interesting because the Star Tribune has been caught lying about its conversation with the gas company responsible.

I contacted CenterPoint and spoke with Rebecca Virden. I’m glad I did
because as you’ll see in a moment, there’s some very bad reporting
going on with this story.

“Our distribution system after we checked it — which runs
up to the meter, which is the distribution system’s responsibility, to
the meter — has no leak on it at all. We tested that system and it holds
its test. We even took it apart and tested it to make sure because it
had no leakage. It’s fully sound. As for our system, we had no leakage, no leak history, no leak calls
into our call centers prior to the incident before, during or after.”

Throw in the fact that Homeland Security was spotted on the scene and it points to the probability that the police and media are covering up the explosion of a Somali bomb-making factory in Minneapolis.

The fading First Amendment

Even the New York Times appears to be a little concerned about the incarceration of a blogger:

For over six years, Roger Shuler has hounded figures of the state legal and political establishment on his blog, Legal Schnauzer, a hothouse of furious but often fuzzily sourced allegations of deep corruption and wide-ranging conspiracy. Some of these allegations he has tested in court, having sued his neighbor, his neighbor’s lawyer, his former employer, the Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department, the Alabama State Bar and two county circuit judges, among others. Mostly, he has lost.

But even those who longed for his muzzling, and there are many, did not see it coming like this: with Mr. Shuler sitting in jail indefinitely, and now on the list of imprisoned journalists worldwide kept by the Committee to Protect Journalists. There, in the company of jailed reporters in China, Iran and Egypt, is Mr. Shuler, the only person on the list in the Western Hemisphere.

A former sports reporter and a former employee in a university’s
publications department, Mr. Shuler, 57, was arrested in late October on
a contempt charge in connection with a defamation lawsuit filed by the
son of a former governor. The circumstances surrounding that arrest,
including a judge’s order that many legal experts described as
unconstitutional and behavior by Mr. Shuler that some of the same
experts described as self-defeating posturing, have made for an
exceptionally messy test of constitutional law….

On Nov. 14, the judge held a hearing, and Mr. Shuler, who was
representing himself, took the stand, insisting that the court had no
jurisdiction over him and calling the court a joke. The judge decided
that the hearing had “served as a trial on the merits” and made his
final ruling: Mr. Shuler was forbidden to publish anything about Mr.
Riley or Ms. Duke involving an affair, an abortion or payoffs; was to
pay them nearly $34,000 for legal fees; and was to remove the offending
posts or remain in jail.

That didn’t take long. How long ago did the Left first start banging the drums about the need to ban “hate speech”. Ten years ago? And now we’re already seeing overtly political speech being banned in America. It’s only a judge’s action rather than a legislative act, but then, as we’ve learned from the examples of California and other states, it is the courts that now make the law, not the legislatures.

As per Barack Obama, the executive branch merely decides whether the government feels like implementing it or not.

The incarceration of Roger Shuler is merely one more example showing that there is not even the pretense of the rule of law in the USA anymore. The USA has devolved into a Maughamite state. Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law, with due regard for the federal agent around the corner.

A naked atrocity

There is delusion. There is self-delusion. And then there is Lena Dunham. Now, I have never seen Girls. I have no intention of ever seeing Girls. The idea of spending even a nanosecond watching Sex In The City with ugly New York City girls who are apparently even MORE retarded than Sarah Jessica Parker and company isn’t exactly on my list of Things To Do.

“I remember looking in the mirror as a kid and it would be like for an
hour at a time, and I’d be like: ‘I’m just so beautiful. Everybody is so
lucky that they get to look at me.’ And of course that changes as you
get older, but I may have held on to that little-kid feeling that was me
alone in my bathroom.”

Yes, lucky. So lucky. That’s the first thing that springs to mind. It doesn’t even look human. It looks like something out of Lovecraft. It looks like something that should be harpooned and processed for ivory and oil. It looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy was raped by a dugong. It looks like something that most certainly should not be displayed without clothes anywhere, least of all on television. If there is a rational argument for Sharia in the United States of America, this is it. Say what you will about Wahhabism, but at least in Saudi Arabia, they’d put a misshapen creature like this in a burqah.

Some say that beauty is on the inside. But when there is beauty on the inside, some hint of it always shines through. This abomination is pure self-centered ugliness seeping out from within.

Hollywood’s favorite monster

Granted, Mia Farrow is more than a bit of a nutcase. But given his confirmed behavior, there isn’t much reason to doubt the allegations that Woody Allen is a child molester are true:

Frank and Mia stayed close, however, even when she was married to the
composer-conductor André Previn, whom she divorced in 1979, after having
three sons and adopting three at-risk Asian daughters. She also
continued to see Sinatra throughout her 13-year relationship with Woody
Allen, which suffered a jolt when she found lurid photographs taken by
Allen of Soon-Yi Previn, one of her adopted daughters, then a sophomore
in college, on the mantel in Allen’s Manhattan apartment. Only a month
earlier, in December 1991, Allen had formally adopted two of Mia’s
children, 15-year-old Moses and 7-year-old Dylan, even though he was in
therapy for inappropriate behavior toward Dylan. In August 1992, after
disappearing with Allen in Mia’s Connecticut country house and
reappearing without underpants, Dylan told her mother that Allen had
stuck his finger up her vagina and kissed her all over in the attic,
charges Allen has always vociferously denied.

Ronan Farrow adds on Twitter: “Missed the Woody Allen tribute – did they put the part where a woman
publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?”

Woody Allen isn’t funny. He’s grotesque. He’s ugly. He’s a whiny little sexually obsessed monster. His films are tedious, unimaginative, and narcissistic. And he’s a child molester. The fact that Hollywood sees in him a man worthy of receiving its tribute tells you all you need to know about that depraved Gomorrah.

Every now and then, I’m asked if I’m interested in optioning the film rights to my books, sometimes even by people with actual film credits. My answer is always no. Not merely no, but HELL NO! I want nothing to do with Hollywood. It’s not an accident or coincidence that Hollywood so often takes pure storytelling gold and turns it into filth. They are the anti-Rumplestiltskins. They love rolling in filth.

Social policies have long-term consequences

That is Dr. Helen’s primary message in Men on Strike. She was interviewed by Jerry Bowyer in Forbes.

Jerry: “It’s interesting – you mention Kay
Hymowitz’s book, which is in some ways similar to yours but in other
ways very different. Let’s not single her out in particular, but there
does tend to be a scold-y tone. Yeah, that’s really going to work with
men, right? There does tend to be a scold-y tone in a lot of the “what’s
wrong with men” vein, the “failure to launch”, “they’re not going to
college”, “they’re not participating in the economy” – a tone that seems
to (interestingly for liberals) place no obligation whatsoever or no
causal effect whatsoever on larger societal factors.”

Helen: “I definitely think there is a scolding
factor and I think people are so used to shaming men, and that’s very
prevalent in the culture. I think that we see – I mean, there are so
many messages through the commercials, through the media, that men are
just no good. And so it’s just so easy to pick up and say that, “Yeah,
men are worthless. They’re not good fathers.” We’ve got so many messages
out there and I think that’s a really negative thing to be sending to
men and particularly young boys in schools and in society. Going back to
some of these books like End of Men or Manning Up, you’re right: the
message is basically, “You know what, you’re doing this because you’re
just an immature man.”

There’s a chapter in Hymowitz’s book about Child-Man in the Promised
Land and it’s looking at how men just have so many options and this is
why they’re doing what they’re doing. My point in my book is that men
are not going to participate in a society that is not going to reward
them for that behavior. In other words: if you’re a good father, a good
husband, and you do all of the things you’re supposed to do, society
still will go after you if you step out of line in any particular way.

In the old days, it was sort of like – fifty years ago a man was head
of household, looked up to, treated with respect, and now a married man
in many ways is seen as less of a man (not more of one) and it’s doubly
so if he has kids.

Men on Strike is a very good book, not so much because it contains anything that will be new to the readers here, but because it is putting those ideas in front of a lot of people who have never considered them before. And one of those things that many people haven’t seen before is what the Forbes writer describes as “a lack of scoldiness”; Dr. Helen is one of the few female writers on intersexual relations who is actually sympathetic towards men and understands that the world is not a zero-sum game where the sexes are concerned.

The fact that something is bad for men doesn’t mean that it is good for women.

2013 and beyond

It seems some other bloggers are beginning to get into the habit of being open with their traffic numbers; it’s nice to see people gradually getting over the idea that hiding this information from people will somehow inflate their perceived importance. Here are the Google pageviews for a few other bloggers, with the Global Alexa rank given in parentheses.

Whatever: 7,519,279
Steve Sailer: 6,635,426
Rational Male: 2,543,859

Being open with our traffic is a healthy exercise, I think, because it prevents us from getting too carried away with any exaggerated sense of our own importance. The numbers are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to mainstream media sites like Fox News and the New York Times, but remember, there was a time when those media outlets were once very small too. If anyone else has a site for which they’d like to share their Google pageviews, leave the data in the comments and I’ll add it here.

It strikes me as almost criminal that such an original thinker as Steve should have only 6.6 million pageviews per year when clueless wonders such as Malcolm Gladwell are bestselling authors, but as Steve himself notes, “The reality is that web searches bring a lot of people to individual
postings I’ve written and then … it doesn’t make much impression on
them. They presumably stare blankly for awhile and then they’re on their
way. I suspect that my combination of highbrow content without highbrow
affectation is a turnoff for the vast majority of random visitors.”

They are the sort of people who gravitate to liberal blogs that invariably describe themselves as “thoughtful” while mindlessly repeating pablum straight out of the New York Times without ever evincing evidence of having had a single original thought of their own.

I don’t appear to have Steve’s problem, as the admitted reluctance of many bloggers to link here means that most of my traffic consists of regular readers rather than web searches and fly-by-nighters. Of course, it also means that the level of engagement, the average visit duration, and the quality of the discourse tends to be higher, so I see it as a net positive. This is also why, as the traffic continues to grow and the blog increasingly comes to the attention of various self-appointed activists, I’ll be cracking down harder and harder on the disruptive elements who will seek to interfere with the discourse here.

Disagreement is expected. Dissent is fine. Substantive criticism is both encouraged and appreciated. Mindless, reflexive ankle-biting is discouraged. Derailing is not permitted and trolls will be actively and aggressively pursued. Alles klar?

I’m also interested in opening up Alpha Game again to other regular contributors in 2014 as it was never intended as a single author blog. The initial batch of contributors all ran out of steam within the first month or two back in 2011, which is not terribly surprising, so this time I intend to take a different approach and begin by adding a single additional contributor who will focus on a particular aspect of Game. I want to add depth rather than breadth. This focus could be anything from Game in literature to Game and improving marital relations. However, if you’re not able to commit to four 500-word posts per week, please don’t even think of volunteering. Remember, I’ve been doing this for a while now and the fact is that the vast majority of people with the inchoate urge to write don’t really have all that much to say.

The Patriarch teaches

Phil Robertson is now America’s Patriarch:

[H]e stood in front of the small class, at White’s Ferry Road Church wearing his full camouflage suit and addressed the group for around 45 minutes.

He said: ‘I have been immoral, drunk, high. I ran with the wicked people for 28 years and I have run with the Jesus people since and the contrast is astounding.

‘I tell people, “You are a sinner, we all are. Do you want to hear my story before I give you the bottom line on your story?”

‘We murder each other and we steal from one another, sex and immorality goes ballistic. All the diseases that just so happen to follow sexual mischief… boy there are some microbes running around now.

‘Sexual sins are numerous and many, I have a few myself. So what is your safest course of action? If you’re a man, find yourself a woman, marry them and keep your sex right there.

‘You can have fun, but one thing is for sure, as long as you are both healthy in the first place, you are not going to catch some debilitating illness, there is safety there.

‘Commonsense says we are not going to procreate the human race unless we have a man and a woman. From the beginning Jesus said, “It is a man and a woman.” Adam was made and Eve was made for this reason. They left their fathers and mothers and be united to become one flesh, that’s what marriage is all about.

‘But we looked at it and said it was an outdated stereotype. When you look back at the human race, the sins have always been the same: We get high, we get drunk, we get laid, we steal and kill.

‘Has this changed at all from the time God burnt up whole cities because their every thought was evil?’

Then reading from the Bible he said, ‘The acts of the sinful nature are obvious. Sexual immorality, is number one on the list. How many ways can we sin sexually? My goodness. You open up that can of worms and people will be mad at you over it.

‘I am just reading what was written over 2000 years ago. Those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom. All I did was quote from the scriptures, but they just didn’t know it. Whether I said it, or they read it, what’s the difference? The sins are the same, humans haven’t changed.

‘If you give them the bad news, they’ll start kicking and screaming. But you love them more than you fear them, so you tell them.

‘A lot of times they don’t even wait for you to finish and say, ‘But there’s a way out, do you want to hear the rest of the story or what?

‘Jesus will take sins away, if you’re a homosexual he’ll take it away, if you’re an adulterer, if you’re a liar, what’s the difference? If you break one sin you may as well break them all.

‘If we lose our morality, we will lose our country. It will happen. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all walk around without stealing from each other and killing each other?

‘Why don’t we just love each other enough that we wouldn’t want to do these things to each other?’

Robertson – who made his fortune from inventing and manufacturing hunting equipment before finding TV stardom – went on: ‘We are a bunch of rednecks from Louisiana, but I am not uneducated, I have a degree from Louisiana Tech.

‘But this week I have been called an ignoramus. This week I have been asked, “Is this the first time you have brought up sin?” I said, “Are you kidding? I have been traveling to and fro spreading this message.”

‘Then he said, “Well do you invite yourself to go and get your Bible and tell people what you are now sharing with us?” I said, “No they are inviting me.”

‘I have made hundreds and hundreds of speeches and you can pick them apart and the center has always been Jesus Christ.

‘Do many people get up and walk out? Yeah, all the time, do I hold it against them? No. Anybody can get up and stop listening. We are all just humans on this planet.’

He added: ‘Jesus Christ was the most perfect being to ever walk this planet and he was persecuted and nailed to the cross, so please don’t be surprised when we get a little static.’

The best part, however, was how he closed in prayer: “I will not give or back off from my path because you conquered death, Father, so we are not worried about all the repercussions.”

May God grant us all similar fearlessness in Jesus Christ. That spirit of fear you sometimes feel didn’t come from Him. We can always find a reason to back down, an excuse to worry about the repercussions. Phil Robertson reminds us that as Christians, we are always going to get a little static, so we may as well grow up spiritually and accept it.