Tag: media

National Review sharpens the blade

The sans-culottes at National Review are getting the guillotine ready again. As predicted by many, it appears Mark Steyn will be the next to follow in the footsteps of the John Birch Society, Joe Sobran, Ann Coulter, and John Derbyshire?  Jason Lee Steorts, an editor at National Review, writes:

I can’t agree with Mark that anything of value is lost when derogatory epithets go out of bounds in polite society. They tend to be bad even for humor, substituting stereotype and cliché for originality. People who used them in different times need not be regarded as monstrous, nor must the canon be censored; we could instead feel good about having awoken to a greater civility and make generous allowances for human fallibility. By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

To which Steyn responded:

I’m not inclined to euphemize intimidation and bullying as a lively exchange of ideas – “the use of speech to criticize other speech”, as Mr Steorts absurdly dignifies it. So do excuse me if I skip to the men’s room during his patronizing disquisition on the distinction between “state coercion” and “cultural coercion”. I’m well aware of that, thank you. In the early days of my free-speech battles in Canada, my friend Ezra Levant used a particular word to me: “de-normalize”. Our enemies didn’t particularly care whether they won in court. Whatever the verdict, they’d succeed in “de-normalizing” us – that’s to say, putting us beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture. “De-normalizing” is the business GLAAD and the other enforcers are in. You’ll recall Paula Deen’s accuser eventually lost in court – but the verdict came too late for Ms Deen’s book deal, and TV show, and endorsement contracts.

Up north, Ezra and I decided that, if they were going to “de-normalize” us, we’d “de-normalize” them. So we pushed back, and got the entire racket discredited and, eventually, the law repealed. It’s rough stuff, and exhausting, but the alternative is to let the control-freaks shrivel the bounds of public discourse remorselessly so that soon enough you lack even the words to mount an opposing argument. As this commenter to Mr Steorts noted, the point about unearthing two “derogatory” “puerile” yet weirdly prescient gags is that, pace Marx, these days comedy repeats as tragedy.

I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point – that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal. As to his kind but belated and conditional pledge to join me on the barricades, I had enough of that level of passionate support up in Canada to know that, when the call to arms comes, there will always be some “derogatory” or “puerile” expression that it will be more important to tut over. So thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you’d be much use, would you?

National Review doesn’t realize that its genteel world of polite dissent from left-liberal orthodoxy is over. It is no longer a significant voice on the Right; one could quite perhaps even argue that it is not even really conservative anymore. I can’t actually take a position on that, however, since I quit reading National Review after they fired John Derbyshire for failing to kowtow to liberal orthodoxy on race. National Review has long attempted to curry favor with the mainstream media by reading others out of the respectable Right. So it only seems just that increasingly people are not-reading National Review out of the relevant Right.

And it is more than a little ironic that Steorts is criticizing Steyn for his derogatory expressions when, after attacking Kathryn Lopez over gay marriage, he justified his attacks on her thusly:

So it is your view, Kathryn, that the action of democratically elected representatives, who are accountable to the citizens of the State of New York, is tyrannical in a way that justifies comparison to North Korea, a state in which an absolute ruler has burned people alive in a stadium. Okay. But now I want a new word for what “tyranny” used to mean.

I would like to see the reaction of a North Korean refugee to your claim.

It would also be nice if you troubled yourself to make an argument.

Update: I see that several commenters find my tone beyond the pale. With respect, I think y’all are way too sensitive. The harshest thing here is the sarcasm of “trouble yourself,” which strikes me as mild by the standards of polemical writing generally and writing at NRO (including posts by commenters) in particular. 

Hmmm, I’m noticing a hypocritical inconsistency as well as the fact that the conservative position on a certain subject tends to upset the manage editor… I know absolutely nothing about Steorts, but on the basis of these two pieces, it would not surprise me in the slightest to learn that Steorts is one of those putative “gay media conservatives” in the mold of Andrew Sullivan. Which, as we have come to learn, reliably indicate that he’s not conservative at all.

Media bias: the conclusive proof

Many people have argued over the years, in the face of the obvious evidence, that the media cannot be systematically biased to the Left because it would not make business sense to spurn more than half the population as customers. However, the recent decision by A&E to fire its biggest and most lucrative TV star because it is more concerned about catering to homosexuals than making money vividly demonstrates that politics and propaganda are more important to the media companies than making a profit:

A&E has placed Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson on indefinite hiatus following anti-gay remarks he made in a recent profile in GQ. “We are extremely disappointed to have read Phil Robertson’s comments in GQ, which are based on his own personal beliefs and are not reflected in the series Duck Dynasty,” A&E said in a statement. “His personal views in no way reflect those of A+E Networks, who have always been strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community. The network has placed Phil under hiatus from filming indefinitely.”

These are companies that never fire anyone for anti-Christian or anti-Republican remarks, but they’ll act with alacrity against anyone who says anything critical of the sexually abnormal. Notice that Alec Baldwin didn’t get fired for his many and various rants until he offended homosexuals one too many times.

And if you watch A+E, why are you supporting “strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community”?

As for the statement by the spokesman of GLAAD, I shall await with interest his next statement on Muslim theology. “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe,” GLAAD spokesperson Wilson Cruz said.

The fact is that a queer propagandist like Wilson Cruz obviously no more knows what “true Christians believe” than he knows what “true Martians believe”. The true and Biblically-based Christian belief is that self-identified homosexuals are unrepentant sinners whom God regards as abomination because they identify themselves with their sin. It is absolutely impossible to be a Christian and an unrepentant homosexual for the obvious reason that Christianity requires repentance for one’s sins.

Everyone on the planet is fallen. And no one chooses their particular flavor of temptation. But we are all responsible for our own actions, we all choose whether to give into our temptations or not, and we all choose whether to repent of those moral failures, those sins, or not.

Eco on the disappearance of the book

Umberto Eco considered a failed prophecy of Marshall McLuhan in light of recent developments in e-publishing in an article published on October 30, 2013 in L’Espresso.
At the start of the Seventies, Marshall
McLuhan announced some profound changes in our ways of thinking and
communication. One of his intuitions was that we were entering into a
global village, and in the universe of the Internet we have certainly
seen the verification of his vision. However, after analyzing the
influence of the printing press on the evolution of the culture and
our individual sensibilities in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan
announced, in Understanding Media and other works, the sunset
of alphabetic linearity and the newly arisen dominance of images. To
hypersimplify this, he anticipated that the masses “will no longer
read anymore, they will watch TV, (or the strobing lights of the
disco).”
McLuhan died
in 1980, just as we were entering the daily world of the personal
computer. (There appeared models that were more or less toys and
experimental objects at the end of the Seventies, but the mass market
began in 1981 with the IBM PC.) If McLuhan had lived
a few more years, he would
have had to admit that
even in a world apparently
dominated by images,
the personal computer was establishing a
new alphabetical civilization.
It may be true that the preschoolers of today use iPads, but all the
information we receive from the Internet, email, and SMS are based on
our knowledge of the
alphabet. Computers perfect the situation imagined in Hugo’s The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the
archdeacon Frollo, indicating first a book, and then the cathedral
seen from the window, rich with images and other visual symbols,
says: “this will kill that”. With all its
multimedia links, the computer certainly
possesses the characteristics of being the instrument of the global
village, and it has the capacity to revive again the “that” of
the Gothic cathedral, but it still
fundamentally rests upon neo-gutenbergian
principles.

To return to the alphabet, the invention of
the ebook has provided the possibility to read alphabetic texts on
screens instead of paper. And on these screens one can expect to read
yet another series of auguries predicting the disappearance of the
book and of the newspaper, (in part suggested by some declines in
sales.) One of the favorite sports of every unimaginative journalist
over the years is to ask the men of letters how they see the coming
demise of the world of print. It is not enough to argue that the book
remains of fundamental importance to the transmission and
conservation of information, or that we have scientific proof that
books printed 500 years ago have survived wonderfully while we cannot
scientifically demonstrate that the magnetized storage systems
presently in use can survive for more than ten years. (Nor can we
verify this, since computers today cannot read a floppy disk from the
Eighties.)

Now, however, there are some
disconcerting occurrences that have caught the attention of
journalists, although we have not yet grasped their significance and
their eventual consequences. In August, Jeff Bezos of Amazon bought
the Washington Post, and while announcing the decline of the daily
newspaper, Warren Buffet recently acquired some 63 local newpapers. As
Federico Rampini observed in Repubblica the other day, Buffet is a giant
of the Old Economy and he is not an innovator, but he has a rare
acuity for discerning investment opportunities. And I suspect
that other sharks of Silicon Valley are also moving against the
newspapers.
Rampini asked if the final blow will
not be Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg purchasing the New York Times.
Even if this doesn’t happen, it is clear that the digital world is
overtaking print. What about commercial calculations, political
speculations, and the desire to preserve the press as a democratic
watchdog? I don’t feel that I have a sufficient grasp on the situation to
interpret these various facts correctly. However, I think it is interesting to
consider the possibility of the reversal of another famous prophecy. Perhaps
Mao had it wrong and one must take the paper tiger seriously.

25 Best Tweets of 2013

The Right Wing News puts a list of the year’s best political tweets together and one of them turns out to be mine:

I think this is what is described as “losing your base”. Bill Ayers: “Try Obama for War Crimes”.
    — Vox Day (@voxday) June 18, 2013

I also liked Joe Rogan’s:

An institution begins the slide

I suppose there are many who will lament the first step in the demise of New York magazine. I tend to see it more as reason for good cheer:

This week’s announcement that New York magazine was becoming a biweekly was greeted, in my profession, with the sort of cheer that might herald the announcement of a sewer line backup or a mid-honeymoon appendectomy.

New York magazine is very successful. Its editor is very well regarded, and it wins lots of awards. It gets scads of Web traffic. It publishes magazine features that win the admiration of fellow journalists and has also become practically ubiquitous on social media. And, apparently, it still can’t pay the bills as a weekly publication. Hearing that New York magazine can’t make it as a weekly is, for a professional journalist, rather like being told that your teddy bear has cancer. How is that even possible?

The answer is that the circulation of print magazines is declining, while advertising revenue has taken a suicidal plunge. Companies who wanted to inform people about their firm’s activities used to have basically three choices: print media, television or radio. (OK, four if you count billboards.) These were all media companies, and they used the money corporations gave them to produce news.

What I find remarkable is how many of these institutions will glumly permit themselves to sink into oblivion without ever doing anything to significantly address the core issues. CNN is going to try to compete with every other network showing reality shows rather than make any attempt to appeal to the other half of the ideological spectrum. New York magazine has gone to a biweekly rather than attempt to broaden its appeal beyond liberals who live in New York and liberals who wish they did.

As technology gradually kills the liberal media’s ability to maintain its monopoly, it becomes ever more obvious that media was never first and foremost a business, but rather a giant propaganda machine wherein profit was an incidental bonus rather than its fundamental rationale.

Retreat and revolution

The head of CNN finally tires of being repeatedly prison-raped in the ratings every night by Fox News and throws in the towel:

After
almost a year of tinkering, CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker has
concluded that a news channel cannot subsist on news alone. So
he is planning much broader changes for the network—including a
prime-time shakeup that’s likely to make CNN traditionalists cringe.

Once,
CNN’s vanilla coverage was a point of pride. Now, the boss boasts about
the ratings for his unscripted series, and documentaries like the Sea
World-slamming film Blackfish. Zucker, in his first one-on-one interview
since taking control of CNN last January, told Capital he wants news
coverage “that is just not being so obvious.”

Instead,
he wants more of “an attitude and a take”: “We’re all regurgitating the
same information. I want people to say, ‘You know what? That was
interesting. I hadn’t thought of that,’” Zucker said. “The goal for the
next six months, is that we need more shows and less newscasts.”

Zucker—“rhymes
with hooker,” he likes to say—also expanded on comments he has made
about breaking CNN out of a mindset created by historic rivalries with
MSNBC and Fox. He wants the network to attract “viewers who are watching
places like Discovery and History and Nat Geo and A&E.”

“People
who traditionally just watch the cable news networks [are] a great
audience,” he said. “I’m not trying to alienate that audience. But the
overall cable news audience has not grown in the last 12 years, OK? So,
all we’re doing is trading [audience] share. … We also want to broaden
what people can expect from CNN.”

The 48-year-old
Zucker initially faced internal resistance to his experiments beyond the
realm of hard news, but he now has an irrefutable retort: The No. 1
show on CNN is now “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” a travel-adventure
show featuring the bad-boy celebrity chef. Zucker said that inside CNN,
his formula has finally been accepted “because people have seen the
results.”

As JartStar commented: “It will be amusing
that in another year or two CNN will have less to do with the news and
more to do with reality TV than SyFy has with science fiction”.

And
fitting. What Fox has done to CNN is exactly what Larry, Mike, Tom,
Sara, and me are going to do to the world of Pink SF. By presenting an
ideological alternative that appeals to more than half of the
prospective audience that is ignored and denigrated by the monolithic
gatekeepers, our market is far less saturated. Having lost their former
ability to keep us out of print and out of the bookstores, there is
nothing the genre publishers can do except watch helplessly as we cut
into their sales in the same way that Fox News cut into CNN’s ratings.

I
only wish Amazon permitted authors to give away Kindle Select
books on an ongoing basis. Every individual who downloads a free copy of
The Last Witchking or The Wardog’s Coin and reads it isn’t merely a potential buyer of A Throne of Bones or Quantum Mortis, he is also one more book sale lost to the gatekeepers.

They
are the dinosaurs, heavy with overhead and thin operating margins. We
are the mammals, able to write and publish a book in the time it takes
them to bring a finished book to market. That’s why we are going to win
despite their best efforts to pretend we don’t even exist.

Speaking
of which, I’m looking for translators who are interested in translating
my books in return for a share in the revenue. If you are a native
speaker of a language other than English and you want to take active part in the Blue
SF Revolution, fire me an email.

Juxtaposition

A conversation on Twitter:

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 7 Nov
If you spend all your time trying to convince people you’re just as important as somebody else, you’re really probably not.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 7 Nov
Conversely, if you spend all your time trying to convince people that somone else isn’t important, they may be.

Marko Kloos ‏@markokloos 7 Nov
@scalzi This is of course APROPOS OF NOTHING and doesn’t refer to ANY PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL we may know.

To which one can only resort to the cruel tactic of quoting Mr. Scalzi:

“All the dudebros who adamantly maintain I don’t get 50K visitors a day are totally right. #HaHaHa”

 

As it happens, Mr. Scalzi’s Whatever has averaged just under 20,000 Google pageviews per day in 2013, which figure includes the occasional spike derived from external sources. That’s not bad; I leave the question of whether it indicates a degree of importance or not up to the reader. But since we’re discussing comparisons, there is also this from Alexa this morning:


scalzi.com
111,031 Global rank
46,471 USA rank

voxday.blogspot.com 
107,993 Global rank
23,066 USA rank


It should be amusing when my number two blog also passes up what used to be such an important science fiction site next year. What is ironic about these comparisons is that it was not my intention to target Scalzi himself when I first began comparing VP to Whatever last year. The comparison was a direct response to a few rabbits from his warren who were asserting, falsely, that this blog was irrelevant and insignificant because so few people read it. Scalzi himself had always indicated that he was aware that the blog readership here was considerable, if not necessarily of a size comparable to his own.

However, in the process of setting the facts straight, Mr. Scalzi’s own dishonesty was inadvertently uncovered – 50,000 DAILY READERS – and months later he is still trying to spin the situation and salvage the illusion of his self-importance. Apparently the Participation Hugo is not enough and the mere fact of my citing verifiable statistics in correcting the false claims of others is somehow proof of his continued significance. But adding to the degree of difficulty he faces here, he is trying to do this while simultaneously pretending to not care about how the truth undermines the entire foundation of his career as a novelist.

It’s not remarkable that he’s willing to shoot for such an ambitious reinterpretation of objective reality. He is a gamma male, after all, and spin, exaggeration, and deceit are his idiom. What is remarkable is that people like Marko Kloos repeatedly fall for it. Or at least pretend to fall for it. Then again, I suppose one must keep in mind that Bernie Madoff managed to fool a lot more people a lot longer to considerably more profit than John Scalzi has.

That being said, I don’t mind coming right out and saying that I don’t think I am more important than Mr. Scalzi. In fact, in the world of SF/F, it is patently obvious that I am considerably less important than its biggest con man since L. Ron Hubbard. It will do no one any good to curry favor with me and it could even do them an amount of professional harm given the way that petty little world works. I merely believe I am a better, smarter, more substantial writer than Mr. Scalzi, and a writer with more interesting ideas…. ideas that happen to be my own.

Just not that smart

Proud, yes. Arrogant, sure. But not particularly intelligent. I also very much doubt that Obama is a pathological liar. He strikes me as more the classic example of Dunning-Kruger, thinking he is very clever when he quite clearly is not.

NBC’s Chuck Todd scored a huge interview with President Obama Thursday and opened things by immediately drilling down on the president’s relentlessly repeated lie that under ObamaCare you can keep your current  insurance plan if you like it. The full interview is even more impressive than the clips that have been going around. Even after he elicits a “sorry” from Obama, Todd keeps after the point for almost ten minutes.

Ultimately, though, Todd came away with the impression that Obama doesn’t believe he lied. And Todd is probably right, which is a little unnerving.

During his own interview on the Hugh Hewitt show Friday with guest host Carol Platt Liebau, Todd said, “You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get.” Here is Todd’s entire quote:

You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get. I mean, I think that that’s, he’s taken issue with that before with folks off the record, and I got it’s a sensitive issue, felt like he did not sit there and say he intentionally lied. He said that he wanted to, he thought he was going to be able to keep this promise. I thought what was revealing in that answer, when I asked him that direct question about this, was this a political lie that you started to believe it, was he talked about well, you know, it turns out we had trouble in crafting the law.

If Obama has convinced himself he didn’t lie, that borders on pathological.

Stupid people tell stupid lies and deny that they did so on a regular basis. Remember, this is the same guy who went off on bitter clingers while trying to convince them to vote for him. We’re not dealing with a rocket scientist here, but rather an affirmative action president.

How bad is Obamacare?

It’s so bad that the New York Times is back to acting as Obama’s personal PR agent again:

So bad that the New York Times has to issue one of its patented awful editorial board op-eds in order to try to defend the law–and the administration that has botched its implementation. The whole thing is a laugh riot from soup to nuts.

The very title of the piece–”Insurance Policies Not Worth Keeping”–signals to the reader that the Times is fully prepared to cover up, paper over, and outright ignore the fact that President Obama and his political allies repeatedly and deliberately misled the nation by promising Americans that if they liked their health care plans, they could keep them. We are told that the president “clearly misspoke” when he told Americans that they could keep their plans in all instances; for the Times, “clearly misspoke” is a euphemism for “repeatedly consistently and deliberately told the exact opposite of the truth,” given that the prevaricators in this instance were political actors the Times approves of when it comes time to hand out endorsements (and when it comes time for Times employees to go to the polls and vote).

This talk about “clearly [misspeaking]” is about as blatant a signal that the Times is ready to engage in journalistic fraud and malpractice as is the opening paragraph, which tells us that the reason news reports are focusing on the cancellation of insurance policies–and the revelation that the Obama administration and its political allies lied to the American people–is that congressional Republicans “have stoked fear and confusion.”

As though the stories of cancellations and sticker shock themselves–told straight and without any congressional Republican lobbying for the stories to be told–were not enough to make Americans fearful, and as though the unbelievably malfunctions that have been suffered by the website are not enough in order to make Americans confused and outraged.

It’s an interesting logic behind the New York Time’s aggressive PR campaign. Obama clearly said Americans could keep their health insurance policies. But now his landmark law is not permitting them to keep those policies. But the new policies are better! Therefore, we should all ignore the fact that he lied and focus on the fact that he is forcing Americans to accept better policies than the ones they would freely choose if left to their own devices.

Surely we should apply this logic to everyone’s daily food choices as well. After all, what one eats tends to determine one’s health. And sexual choices too. It doesn’t matter what you happen to prefer, not when it is eminently clear that certain forms of sexual activity are healthier than others. Forget the closet and the fat farm, Obamacare serves as precedent to fine fatties and homosexuals if they insist on continuing to engage in their expensive and socially deleterious activities.

In any event, all of this is but a temporary sideshow. We are assured by Porky that all these reports of problems are mere strategery by the political supergenius Obama, who is simply suckering in those clueless Republicans for a few weeks, just long enough to befuddle them and amaze the general public when he reveals that the Obamacare system is working more slickly than a pair of greased penguins sliding over glare ice.

Obama is a cunning and masterful politician, though. Consider how carefully he chose his words to extricate himself from a briar patch that would easily ensnare less brilliant strategerists:

“President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night
that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least
29 times.”

Or perhaps having the entire mainstream news industry running interference makes one look smarter and more successful. Who can say?

Turnabout is fair play

Some game reviewers crying because a developer played hardball:

Here’s a quote from Totalbiscuit:  Unfortunately, every day we have to sit there worrying, will some company decide to abuse the copyright claim system to destroy my livelihood today?

Another popular youtube guy, Francis, also chimed in with this: YouTube has saved my life, and it terrifies me that with this system in place, it’s possible all of this will disappear tomorrow morning.”

and this: Your dream, your livelihood, your future… everything you’re aspiring to be can go *snap* like that.  It’s terrifying.

That’s powerful stuff.   It is terrifying.  How do I know? Many video game developers live this every day of their lives.

Many of us, especially indies, have made staggering sacrifices to pursue our dreams.  Financial, mental, emotional, relationship.  Many of us pour our life energy into our creation.  We dream for success.  We dread failure.  Failure is catastrophic.

Especially indies, who rely almost exclusively – not on multi million dollar marketing budgets, but on the people who review and talk about their games.  A review by someone like Totalbiscuit can completely change the fortune of an indie developer.  And I mean completely.

First of all, having been a nationally syndicated game reviewer as well as a game developer, I am EXTREMELY dubious that any reviewer has the sort of power being described here. I suspect an amount of correlation/causation confusion. Second, while Totalbiscuit may be an excellent reviewer, (and he is clearly more conscientious than most with regards to playing through the entire game before reviewing it), it appears no wise old editor ever taught him a very important lesson concerning game reviews.

It’s one that I was taught by Chris Lombardi of Computer Gaming World when I was reviewing a very, very bad game for CGW, a game that has repeatedly made Worst Game Ever lists, and it was a lesson I never forgot.

After I emailed him the review, he called me up and said: “It’s a really funny review. It made me laugh out loud. And it isn’t publishable. Drop the ba-doom-boom stuff; it’s not professional.”

What he meant by “ba-doom-boom stuff” was lines like this: “In space, no one can hear you scream.  And when it comes to Salvation Prophecy, that might be a good thing.”  These sorts of one-liners indicate that the reviewer is sacrificing the game on the altar of a punchline. And that’s not only unfair to the game, it shows that the review has become more about showing off the reviewer’s clever wit than actually reviewing the game itself.

I don’t know if the game developer was in its rights or not to get the review taken down; that is outside my area of competence. I do know that as a general rule, I am 100 percent opposed to DMCA-related nonsense. But I also know that if reviewers are resolutely professional and play fair in their reviews, developers are unlikely to react in an unprofessional and unfair manner even when the reviews are less than flattering.