Tag: media

He Did Not Buck the Trend

Jeremy Clarkson publicly pleads guilty, hoping for absolution. Guess what happens next!

One of the strange things I’ve noticed in recent times is that whenever an MP or a well-known person is asked to apologise for something, no matter how heartfelt or profound that apology may be, it’s never enough for the people who called for it in the first place. So I’m going to try and buck the trend this morning with an apology for the things I said in a Sun column recently about Meghan Markle. I really am sorry. All the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head. This is me putting my hands up. It’s a mea culpa with bells on.

Deep movie voiceover: he did not buck the trend.

Headlines:

  • The Sussexes’ pointed put down to Jeremy Clarkson as they reject his emailed apology for column saying he hated Meghan – as it emerges Amazon Prime ‘is set to drop the presenter’
  • Has ITV now axed Jeremy Clarkson? Channel says it has ‘no further commitments’ to Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and star after next series and postpones celebrity specials – as Amazon cancels press call for Clarkson’s Farm amid Meghan column backlash
  • Is this the real reason Amazon ‘axed’ Jeremy Clarkson?

It’s not as if someone hasn’t written a book about this very situation, after all.

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Is Elon Lying Again?

We know from first-hand experience that Elon Musk lied about permitting banned individuals to return to Twitter. So it wouldn’t be too terribly surprising if CDAN is correct and he is also failing to tell the truth about eradicating child porn from the platform.

Shortly after the celebrity CEO took over the bird site, the CEO enlisted many online influencers to boost lies about purported success at removing child porn from the site, most notably top hashtags used to advertise the stuff. I told you the celebrity CEO was lying, and that a major news organization was conducting a significant investigation exposing all of this. It was just recently published, and you should go and read it. Child porn has gotten worse on the bird site, not better, since the celebrity CEO took over.

The story is at NBC News. And while it’s worth noting that NBC doesn’t appear to have had any problem with the market in what it calls “child sexual abuse material” on Twitter until Musk bought it, that doesn’t change the fact that what he says is no longer on the platform is still on the platform.

Twitter accounts that offer to trade or sell child sexual abuse material under thinly veiled terms and hashtags have remained online for months, even after CEO Elon Musk said he would combat child exploitation on the platform.

“Priority #1,” Musk called it in a Nov. 20 tweet. He’s also criticized Twitter’s former leadership, claiming that they did little to address child sexual exploitation, and that he intended to change things.

But since that declaration, at least dozens of accounts have continued to post hundreds of tweets in aggregate using terms, abbreviations and hashtags indicating the sale of what Twitter calls child sexual exploitation material, according to a count of just a single day’s tweets. The signs and signals are well known among experts and law enforcement agencies that work to stop the spread of such material.

The tweets reviewed by NBC News offer to sell or trade content that is commonly known as child pornography or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The tweets do not show CSAM, and NBC News did not view any CSAM in the course of reporting this article.

Some tweets and accounts have been up for months and predate Musk’s takeover. They remained live on the platform as of Friday morning.

Then again, it’s possible that this is just a whack-a-mole problem that is in the process of being resolved. The question is whether Musk has actually given meaningful orders to his employees to get the job done and they’re dragging their feet or if he’s merely acting as his own PR and marketing departments. But given our success in establishing and implementing SG’s Clean Speech policy, and the ease with which spam bots can be detected and eradicated, there really isn’t any excuse for not eliminating the garbage from the platform.

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On the Nonexistence of Equality

As I have pointed out again and again, equality is a complete myth. It flat out does not exist, and has never existed, in any capacity whatsoever. And once more, those who purport to believe in the myth underline my observations.

UFC President Dana White should be held accountable for slapping his wife.

Okay, fair enough. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, but domestic abuse should not go unpunished, particularly in the case of public figures caught physically attacking other individuals in public.

White, who is UFC president, was captured on video slapping his wife during a New Year’s Eve party on vacation in Mexico. TMZ released a clip of the incident Monday, and it shows White’s wife, Anne White, slapping him across the face and Dana quickly responding by slapping his wife in the face.

Wait, what? The guy was attacked by his wife, he defended himself by responding in kind without escalating the situation, and therefore he “should be held accountable”. For what, precisely? And shouldn’t Anne White be held accountable for initiating the use of violence as well as her physical abuse of her husband?

The only reasonable conclusion one can reach here is that a) equality is nonexistent and b) the sports media is completely retarded.

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The Manufactured

It will surprise absolutely no one here to learn that evidence of Ben Shapiro’s “popularity” and “success” being entirely manufactured has surfaced.

Facebook Gives Ben Shapiro ‘Shadow-Boost’ To Make More Users See His Content

A report seems to confirm that Ben Shapiro was “shadow-boosted” by Facebook’s algorithm, meaning his content enters the feeds of people otherwise unlikely to interact with the personality. The report from Buzzfeed, which mostly erroneously focuses on claims that Facebook is somehow a safe-haven for supporters of Alex Jones and Infowars, revealed that Ben Shapiro had been pushed into the feeds of Facebook users who had not interacted with his content.

The report details changes made to a Facebook feature called In Feed Recommendations, which would insert posts into the Facebook feeds of people that they didn’t follow, but were similar to content they liked already. Buzzfeed gives the example of someone who followed the page for a specific football team, who may then see content from the NFL put into their feed.

However, the IFR was not meant to recommend political content, yet users began complaining that they were seeing posts from Ben Shapiro in their news feeds, “even though they had never engaged with that type of content”:

When the issue was flagged internally, Facebook’s content policy team warned that removing such suggestions for political content could reduce those pages’ engagement and traffic, and possibly inspire complaints from publishers. A News Feed product manager and a policy team member reiterated this argument in an August post to Facebook’s internal message board.

It is unclear who else may have been subject to the “shadow-boosting” by Facebook, as opposed to being shadow-banned, which many conservatives were subject to on Facebook and other Big Tech platforms, such as Twitter. Shapiro, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire, is a long-time critic of President Donald Trump and America First conservatives, and as such, Facebook’s actions may raise eyebrows on the right.

Facebook has been doing this for years. Much the same thing has been taking place on YouTube on behalf of Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson, among others, as well. Shapiro is perhaps unique in having been a complete fraud from the very start, when he was being pushed as a child prodigy on WorldNetDaily and through the Creators Syndicate, but it’s clear that he wasn’t the only “conservative” being mysteriously protected and promoted by Facebook.

“In the US it appears that interventions have been almost exclusively on behalf of conservative publishers,” they wrote, attributing this to political pressure or a reluctance to upset sensitive publishers and high-profile users. As BuzzFeed News reported last summer, members of Facebook’s policy team — including Kaplan — intervened on behalf of right-wing figures and publications such as Charlie Kirk, Breitbart, and Prager University, in some cases pushing for the removal of misinformation strikes against their pages or accounts.

Anyhow, the truth is inevitable. The Noticing will continue.

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Gammacaust on Gab

Remove Reply and Remove Reply and Block are two killer features that will help Gab continue to grow. @a and his team are absolutely killing it. Only retards and losers with zero reach are opposed to these new features, because it limits their ability to spam threads and their attempts to hijack the posts of others. The vast majority of users will greatly appreciate the ability to ignore the retards.

Gab has, with one fell swoop, successfully targeted its biggest weakness, which was the ability for the ill-intentioned to target and harass users on their own posts. This was extremely detrimental to Gab’s most important users, namely, those with large followings, because they are the ones who possess microphones worth hijacking.

Of course, the very retards and losers who are most affected by the fact that most users would very much like to pretend they don’t exist are now screaming “censorship”, which is literally retarded. Gab isn’t censoring anyone. This is not censorship, this is freedom, because forcing people to listen to those they don’t want to listen to is the exact opposite of freedom.

But it should surprise no one that the Gammas on Gab are viewing these new features as a Gammacaust. Now they are only guaranteed the ability to talk about others on their own posts, which means that everyone else has the ability to exclude them and go back to completely ignoring them. And there is no greater fear for the Gamma than being excluded by his social superiors. They’re apoplectic about losing their self-perceived ability to correct, condemn, and criticize people who have no interest in anything they have to say.

UPDATE: In response to the wailing and gnashing of teeth, I added the following:

Dear Self-Appointed Gab Police,

It is amusing to see how you pretend every response is an intelligent and substantive critique that merits serious contemplation on the part of the original poster. This is not even close to being the norm.

The fact is that overwhelming number of “critical” responses are posted by a) retards, b) gammas, c) fedposters, d) paid hasbara accounts, and e) bots. Most of those responses are, at best, a complete waste of time and an insult to human intelligence.

For Gab to give its users the ability to ignore the constant stream of retardery and fake comments is not censorship, it is freedom and user-empowerment. It’s not taking any power away from you, to the contrary, it is giving you and everyone else the freedom to choose how to engage with others on the platform.

If you wish to respond politely and substantively to this post, please do so, whether you agree with me or not. And if you wish to respond in a retarded and vulgar manner, you can certainly do that too.

I just don’t have to put up with that nonsense anymore, thanks to the wisdom of the Gab team.

Regards,
Vox

UPDATE: Torba weighs in with the only two cents that matter. The key being the “hands off” objective. What he’s doing is the exact opposite of censorship.

Gab’s goal has always been to be as hands off as possible with user content. Instead we want to give you the community the tools to create and shape your own experience. Freedom of association is just as important as freedom of speech.

We have a new feature today that gives you the user more control over your own content and your own experience on Gab. Users now have the ability to moderate comments under their own posts. When you post original content on your profile you are the moderator of the conversation happening under that content because it’s your content on your profile.

The comments are not removed completely from the site, they will still be in the “comments” section of someone’s profile who left the comment–but they will no longer be in the comment section under your content when you remove them.

Users also cannot moderate “quote post” replies to their content because those are new pieces of content on someone else’s page. This is a healthy balance that allows for dissent to still be discovered in quote posts and for spam to be removed from the comment section.

No one in entitled to an audience on someone else’s content. If you want to “dunk” on people’s posts with your own take you can always do so with a quote post to your own audience.

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Free Speech Was Always Fake

There is not, and there has never been, any such thing as a right to free speech or freedom of expression. And we’re seeing how false the pretense that there is again now that Elon Musk is kicking a few journalists off of Twitter.

Evil always plays by the principle of “rules for thee but not for me”. It will switch from “free speech absolutism” to “there is no place for hate speech” in a blink of an eye depending upon whom is being affected. This is why there was never any reason to permit the Enlightenment war against Christianity, and in particular, the “free speech” campaign against the Christian blasphemy laws, which was the entire purpose of that campaign from the very start.

If you don’t believe me, read A HISTORY OF THE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT by historian JB Bury, who was not only a great historian and the editor of THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY SERIES, but a strong and effective champion of Enlightenment principles.

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That Which Did Not Kill Them

Col Douglas Macgregor observes the way in which the neoclowns’ foolish Ukraine puppetry has accomplished the opposite of their primary goal, which was to weaken Russia and render it incapable of resistance to Clown World:

The opening phase of the SMO was a limited operation with a narrow purpose and restricted goals. The critical point is that Moscow never intended to do more than persuade Kiev and Washington that Moscow would fight to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, as well as the further mistreatment of Russians in Ukraine. The SMO was, however, based on invalid assumptions and was terminated. As it turned out, the limited nature of the SMO achieved the opposite of the outcome that Moscow desired, conveying the impression of weakness, rather than strength.

After concluding that the underpinning assumptions regarding Washington’s readiness to negotiate and compromise were invalid, Putin directed the STAVKA to develop new operational plans with new goals: first, to crush the Ukrainian enemy; second, to remove any doubt in Washington and European capitols that Russia will establish victory on its own terms; and, third, to create a new territorial status quo commensurate with Russia’s national security needs.

Once the new plan was submitted and approved, President Putin agreed to an economy of force operation to defend Russian territorial gains with minimal forces until the required resources, capabilities, and manpower were assembled for decisive operations. Putin also appointed a new theater commander, General Sergei Surovikin, a senior officer who understands the mission and possesses the mindset to deliver success.

The coming offensive phase of the conflict will provide a glimpse of the new Russian force that is emerging and its future capabilities. At this writing, 540,000 Russian combat forces are assembled in Southern Ukraine, Western Russia, and Belarus. The numbers continue to grow, but the numbers already include 1,000 rocket artillery systems, thousands of tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones, plus 5,000 armored fighting vehicles, including at least 1,500 tanks, hundreds of manned fixed-wing attack aircraft, helicopters, and bombers. This new force has little in common with the Russian army that intervened 9 months ago on February 24, 2022.

It is now possible to project that the new Russian armed forces that will evolve from the crucible of war in Ukraine will be designed to execute strategically decisive operations. The resulting Russian force will likely take its inspiration from the force design and operational framework recommended in Colonel General Makhmut Gareev’s work, If War Comes Tomorrow? The Contours of Future Armed Conflict. The new military establishment will consist of much larger forces-in-being that can conduct decisive operations on relatively short notice with minimal reinforcement and preparation.

Put differently, by the time the conflict ends, it appears Washington will have prompted the Russian State to build up its military power, the very opposite of the fatal weakening that Washington intended when it embarked on its course of military confrontation with Moscow.

Washington’s Carthaginian Peace Collides With Reality, Col Douglas Macgregor, 29 November 2022

With more than three times the number of troops that were utilized in the initial Special Military Operation already mobilized, it is apparent that Russia feels it is ready to finish off the NATO forces that have been opposing it for at least the last six months in the coming winter offensive. And this is a reminder to never again pay any attention to all of the military analysts and experts who told you that Russia had utilized all of its forces, was running out of ammunition in a matter of weeks, and that Ukraine was winning the war.

Think about how few people told you what was actually happening. The less attention you pay to the mainstream news – and I literally NEVER watch CNN, Fox News, Sky, or the BBC – the more accurate your perceptions and observations are likely to be. Because you simply can’t expect to account for either the quantity or the extent of their lies and misrepresentations, as evidenced when an authority inadvertently reveals the truth.

I do not believe that von der Leyen misspoke nor did she fabricate the number… If the 100,000 dead number is true, then that means Ukraine’s total casualties — i.e., killed and wounded — is approximately 400,000. In other words, Ukraine has suffered almost 40% casualties since the start of the fighting. During the 20th Century, this type of modern warfare normally saw 3 wounded soldiers for every man killed. Using that ratio we get the 400,000 number for total casualties. When the war kicked off in February, Ukraine’s total manpower for ground forces was 1,125,000.

HAS UKRAINE’S ARMY BEEN REDUCED BY ALMOST 50%? 30 November 2022

And remember, in addition to quad-decimating the Ukrainian military and forcing NATO to replace it with its own forces disguised as mercenaries, Russia hasn’t even begun to call on its allies. Imagine if North Korea and China began supplying the Russian military with manpower. The result would make the historical Mongol hordes look like a small raiding party.

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The Irrelevance of Optics

Nora Hoppe makes some astute observations concerning the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine and the very poor level of analyses on both sides of the conflict, especially in light of the Russian withdrawal from Kherson:

When people speak of the “optics not looking good“… a film set immediately comes to my mind (I have worked in the film world for many years). And that immediately tells me how some people view this operation – as spectators: it has to have a good catchy script, suspense, uninterrupted action and – heaven forbid – no lulls! It has to ultimately supply a dopamine release. It has to have a “Dirty Harry Catharsis”.

This reminds me of similar reactions to the prisoner exchange in mid-September, where some saw it as a sign of weakness to even think of releasing Azov prisoners… or when the Chinese government did not deliver a dramatic retort when Pelosi went to do her skit in Taiwan.

What is at the base of these kinds of reactions? Why such impatience? Why such concern with “appearances”? Why such a need to satiate one’s own personal sense of justice and retribution? Does it have something to do with consuming? Especially in the western world one has become an addicted consumer of not only things but “experiences” that can be lived indirectly… We have become spectators… and our world has become a spectacle.

In his powerful masterpiece, “War and Peace”, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy depicts the Battle of Borodino as the greatest example of Russian patriotism… The collective engagement of all those involved in the Battle of Borodino is what ultimately attained the end result: despite all their losses and the sacrificial need to evacuate Moscow and burn its resources – in order to save the army and Russia, the Russians, achieved a moral victory in this battle… which ultimately led to the comprehensive victory of the Russian army and the entire campaign.

“Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davýdov family and to the crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodinó, Górki, Shevárdino, and Semënovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the dressing stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space of some three acres around. Crowds of men of various arms, wounded and unwounded, with frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozháysk from the one army and back to Valúevo from the other. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry, went forward led by their officers. Others held their ground and continued to fire.” [“War and Peace” – book 10; chapter 39]

General-in-chief Mikhail I. Kutuzov’s motto of “patience and time” allowed the Russian army to be victorious when he was able to embrace, as opposed to trying to know, the contingencies of war and prepare his soldiers as best he could for such battle. He knew that, by fighting the pitched battle and adopting the strategy of attrition warfare, he could now retreat with the Russian army still intact, lead its recovery, and force the weakened French forces to move even further from their bases of supply.

Retreat is not defeat. It can be the result of a defeat, or, as in the case of Kherson, where no significant combat even took place, it can be strategic maneuver. Or, as in the case of Borodino, it can be both.

Optics are an illusion. They are transient, easily manipulated, and are not reflective of the underlying reality. Those who concern themselves first and foremost and solely with optics are inevitably media creatures whose opinions are reliably wrong and assuredly irrelevant.

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