Tag: media

An interview with Bono

I wish the media would do more significant interviews of this sort with artists, writers, and politicians. It’s a bit of a swan song for both interviewer and interviewee, and it actually provides genuine insight into the man, who is more interesting than one would have imagined from his public posturings:

Performers are very insecure people. Gavin Friday, his line to me years and years ago was “Insecurity is your best security for a performer.” A performer needs to know what is going on in the room and feel the room, and you don’t feel the room if you are normal, if you’re whole. If you have any great sense of self, you wouldn’t be that vulnerable to either the opinions of others or the love and the applause and the approval of others.

The whole event enriched the album, though – talk about an experience.

But isn’t that great? I thought Experience would be more contemplative, and it has got that side, but the heart of the album is the spunk and the punk and the drive of it. There is a sort of youthfulness about it. A lot of the tempos are up. And it has some of the funniest lines, I think. “Dinosaur wonders why he still walks the Earth.” I mean, I started that line about myself.

Being a dinosaur?

Yeah, of course, but then I started to think about it in terms of what is going on around the world. And I thought, “Gosh, democracy, the thing that I have grown up with all my life . . . that’s what’s really facing an extinction event.”

In an interview that you and I did in 2005, you said this: “Our definition of art is breaking open the breastbone, for sure. Just open-heart surgery. I wish there were an easier way, but people want blood, and I am one of them.”

Life and death and art . . . all of them bloody businesses.

How did your faith get you through all of this?

The person who wrote best about love in the Christian era was Paul of Tarsus, who became Saint Paul. He was a tough fucker. He is a superintellectual guy, but he is fierce and he has, of course, the Damascene experience. He goes off and lives as a tentmaker. He starts to preach, and he writes this ode to love, which everybody knows from his letter to the Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind. . . . Love bears all things, love believes all things” – you hear it at a lot of weddings. How do you write these things when you are at your lowest ebb? ‘Cause I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t deepen myself. I am looking to somebody like Paul, who was in prison and writing these love letters and thinking, “How does that happen? It is amazing.”

Now, it doesn’t cure him of all, of what he thinks of women or gay people or whatever else, but within his context he has an amazingly transcendent view of love. And I do believe that the darkness is where we learn to see. That is when we see ourselves clearer – when there is no light.

You asked me about my faith. I had a sense of suffocation. I am a singer, and everything I do comes from air. Stamina, it comes from air. And in this process, I felt I was suffocating. That was the most frightening thing that could happen to me because I am in pain. Ask Ali. She said I wouldn’t notice if I had a knife sticking out of my back. I would be like, “Huh, what is that?” But this time last year, I felt very alone and very frightened and not able to speak and not able to even explain my fear because I was kind of . . .

When you felt like you were suffocating?

Yeah. But, you know, people have had so much worse to deal with, so that is another reason not to talk about it. You demean all the people who, you know, never made it through that or couldn’t get health care!

Do you feel like you lucked out?

Lucked out? I am the fucking luckiest man on Earth. I didn’t think that I had a fear of a fast exit. I thought it would be inconvenient ’cause I have a few albums to make and kids to see grow up and this beautiful woman and my friends and all of that. But I was not that guy. And then suddenly you are that guy. And you think, “I don’t want to leave here. There’s so much more to do.” And I’m blessed. Grace and some really clever people got me through, and my faith is strong.

I read the Psalms of David all the time. They are amazing. He is the first bluesman, shouting at God, “Why did this happen to me?” But there’s honesty in that too. . . . And, of course, he looked like Elvis. If you look at Michelangelo’s sculpture, don’t you think David looks like Elvis?

Never forget that you can always learn from those who are intelligent and successful, even when you disagree with them. In fact, you can often learn more important things from those with whom you disagree, simply because their perspective is so fundamentally different than your own.

Auto-deleted or banned?

Regardless of the reason, the Twitter account of Julian Assange has disappeared:

The official Twitter account of controversial Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — @JulianAssange — isn’t showing up.

Instead, anyone trying to reach it gets this message: Sorry that page doesn’t exist.

It wasn’t clear whether the account was suspended or deleted by Twitter or Assange himself — or why or for how long. Twitter wasn’t commenting.

The official Wikileaks Twitter account was still live but wasn’t mentioning the Assange account.

An account purporting to be an alternative Assange account was claiming Twitter had deleted his official one ahead of a blockbuster story he’s preparing to break. There was no confirmation that Assange was authoring that alternative account — and that account has now been suspended by Twitter.

But did it do so of the account owner’s volition or not? That is the question. The one thing that is clear is that Assange’s account wasn’t perma-suspended like mine. But as to whether it was Twitter or Assange who deleted the account, we can’t know until one of them accepts or rejects responsibility. My assumption is that Assange deleted it himself, because Twitter seems to prefer the softer approach of permanent suspensions to outright bans.

Over the target

Mike Cernovich did an AMA this week and not only did the SJWs came out in droves to try to attack him, but their counterparts in the media immediately leaped to try to set the Narrative about it in textbook SJW fashion.

Right–wing Pizzagate peddler, conspiracy theorist blowhard, and attention–seeker Mike Cernovich held an AMA on Reddit on Friday. But it didn’t really go anywhere because Cernovich spent most of the time dodging questions and responding with questions of his own rather than providing anyone with any real answers. Which is the opposite of what an AMA is supposed to be.

Anyone familiar with Cernovich—who most recently went after MSNBC contributor Sam Seder over a joke tweet and briefly got him fired—won’t be surprised by any of this. Any exposure for Cernovich, who claims he is a “journalist” and is peddling his book, “Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions and Live Life on Your Terms,” is a good thing and helps those donations continue to flow.

If you’re not really familiar with Cernovich’s “work,” all you need to know is that he authored blog posts like, “When in Doubt, Whip it Out,” and not even Alex Jones can really stand him. Some of Cernovich’s best work can be seen here.

On Reddit, the AMA’s first question pretty much set the tone for the entire thing: “Mike, buddy, big fan, long time listener – my question – how do you wake up every morning and resist the urge to swallow a bullet knowing that your lasting memory on this planet will amount to nothing more than a fecal stain on humanity?” a Redditor named MrZissman asked.

Cernovich attacked the question with an eagerness that quickly waned as the session dragged on. “I sleep like a champ and wake up energized every day. How’s your life going?”

This is somehow supposed to be news? Look at the headlines of these articles, and remember, they are about a freaking Reddit AMA.

Mike Cernovich Hounded on Rape Allegation in Reddit AMA
– Daily Beast

Mike Cernovich’s Reddit AMA Backfires Spectacularly
– Splinter

Mike Cernovich Did A Reddit AMA And Got Relentlessly Dunked On
– Digg

Alt-Right Troll Mike Cernovich Gets Ass Handed to Him in Reddit AMA
– SF Weekly

Mike Cernovich’s AMA Went About As Well As You’d Expect
– NY Mag

How does an AMA backfire? How is “SJWs falsely accuse people they don’t like and call them names” supposed to be significant or noteworthy in any way? And how long will it be before we see this sort of “story” appear in the Jeff Bezos blog?

All these attacks actually accomplished was to demonstrate two things we already knew:

  1. Mike Cernovich is too big to ignore
  2. SJWs always lie

Storm is the New Pizza

Q is hereby confirmed to be legitimate; the mainstream media is going into full attack mode:

A new conspiracy theory called “The Storm” has taken the grimiest parts of the internet by, well, storm. Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.

As most terrible things do, this story begins with a post on /pol/, a sub-board of the more-or-less-anonymous, anything-goes website 4chan. Over the last few years, /pol/ — which technically stands for “politically incorrect” — has slowly but surely become a top contender for the ever-coveted title of the most upsetting community online. It’s the sort of place where neo-Nazis and people who believe women shouldn’t have basic human rights used to meet before we started verifying them on Twitter and electing them to public office. And as of late, it’s expanded its ranks to include fringe members of all shapes and sizes.

On October 28, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages in a /pol/ thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” (assumedly in reference to that creepy Trump quote from early October). Q claimed to be a high-level government insider with Q clearance (hence the name) tasked with posting intel drops — which he, for some reason, called “crumbs” — straight to 4chan in order to covertly inform the public about POTUS’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state. It was, in short, absolutely insane.

Also, Jimmy Saville was selflessly devoted to children, Dennis Hastert just loved wrestling with high school boys, John Podesta merely has the same highly refined tastes in office decor that his brother does for the home, and Harvey Weinstein happens to be highly attractive to young actresses due to his influence in Hollywood.

As for those absurd rumors about Kevin Spacey and Marion Zimmer Bradley, they are absolutely insane.

I’m always mystified by the claims that Pizzagate has been “debunked” because an actor showed up at the restaurant in DC and fired a single shot at the floor. It’s a bizarre pseudo-argument that doesn’t even rise to the level of logical fallacy; they might as legitimately claim that Pizzagate has been debunked because Adrian Peterson had a 100-yard rushing game for the Arizona Cardinals.

One thing I learned from editing The Last Closet is that where there is such sulfuric smoke, there is almost certainly considerably more fire than anyone ever imagines.

Why can how be so?

The media finds it hard to grasp the obvious fact that people simply don’t believe them anymore:

The critics loved “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” — The Times’s Manohla Dargis raved about it, and she wasn’t alone. Rotten Tomatoes, aggregating critics’ reviews, rated the latest chapter in the saga 93 percent fresh. But fans? Not so much. At least if you go by Rotten Tomatoes, which says moviegoers posting on its site rated the film 56 percent fresh.

But wait! CinemaScore, which conducts exit polls at theaters (that is, it talks to actual, live human beings), says moviegoers gave “The Last Jedi” a solid A. And the box office was stratospheric: $450 million worldwide in one weekend, making it the second biggest opening ever.

What’s going on? There are several theories:

1) It’s straight-up trolling. Deadline.com pointed out that nothing prevents the same person from repeatedly logging onto Rotten Tomatoes and dragging down the audience score. (And one Facebook user claims to have done just that.)

2) The adventures of Rey and company (including the villainous Snoke) were genuinely disappointing. As the Hollywood Reporter noted, fans hoped that the writer-director Rian Johnson’s follow-up to “The Force Awakens” would explain, among other mysteries, who Rey’s parents are, and the answer (nobody special) wasn’t very satisfying.

3) It’s a function of how the internet has affected fandom. Vanity Fair argues that the web fosters the kind of scrutiny that few films can withstand.

On Facebook, we asked what you thought of the movie and what explains the divide between fans and critics. More than 800 responses suggested that perhaps the Rotten Tomatoes fan rating wasn’t so far off. A lot of you really did not like “The Last Jedi.”

The truth is that post-GamerGate, only idiots and SJWs pay any attention to what the critics, who are at best converged and at worst corrupted and in the direct pay of the content-producing corporations, say anymore. And in this particular case, the movie not only sucked, but betrayed multiple generations of fans.

UPDATE: After 4 days, TLJ is already underperforming TFA by $46.5 million and 19.2 percent. By comparison, Attack of the Clones outperformed The Phantom Menace by $25 million and 26.4 percent. That means that despite the massive numbers, in terms of expectations it is a box office bomb. If the fall-off picks up pace, and based on the media’s defensiveness I suspect it will, TLJ will take in less than two-thirds of what TFA did.

President of ESPN resigns

Their executives being on drugs would explain a lot of ESPN’s crazy decisions these last few years. Then again, perhaps what the evil creatures of Disney force their minions to do to keep their jobs requires a considerable amount of self-medication:

ESPN President John Skipper announced Monday he is resigning from the network due to a substance addiction problem.

“I have struggled for many years with a substance addiction. I have decided that the most important thing I can do right now is to take care of my problem,” Skipper said in a statement.

Skipper said he and the company have “mutually agreed” it was appropriate for him to resign. “I come to this public disclosure with embarrassment, trepidation and a feeling of having let others I care about down,” Skipper’s statement continued. “As I deal with this issue and what it means to me and my family, I ask for appropriate privacy and a little understanding.”

Of course, it is not impossible that this is related to the rumored storm in the works, as yesterday’s shut down of the Atlanta airport allegedly was.

All your hashtag are belong to us

The Guardian whines as GamerGate continues to resonate:

That was fast. In this #MeToo moment, feminism has been coopted by both people who don’t understand it and by people who oppose it. Worse: it’s now being used against people who are feminists and allies.

The most recent example comes from Mike Cernovich, the alt-right conspiracy theorist who led the way on the Pizzagate hoax that claimed senior Democrats were involved in a child abuse ring in the basement of a Washington DC restaurant. That whole ruckus should’ve given MSNBC pause when he went after one of their regulars.

Cernovich recently orchestrated a campaign to pressure MSNBC to fire contributor Sam Seder over a joke he made in a 2009 tweet. The network did fire him – only to then rehire him after a backlash against their decision.

If you have ever been exposed to jokes before, you’d know the tweet was sarcastic. It mocked people whose defense of Roman Polanski from child rape accusations rested on the fact that he was a ‘great artist’. It was an anti-rapist rape joke, like the kind that Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer and even Jay Leno later told about Bill Cosby.

We’re now at the point where people are being canned for jokes, by people who don’t get the jokes, don’t get feminism, don’t get that maybe there should be some proportion in this thing, and don’t get that right-wing men with a public record of misogyny might not be your best guides through all this.

Even if Seder’s joke was bad and made in the wrong spirit (which, just to be clear, it wasn’t), if we’re going to fire everyone who has made a non-feminist remark we’re pretty much going to clear all the offices everywhere of almost every man and quite a few women.

That’s why people who’ve been thinking about gender politics and women’s rights should be in charge of this moment. We need to be led through this by people who’ve experienced harassment and denigration and discrediting. People who’ve spent years listening to others and who have been thinking about the dynamics, ethics and consequences of these things before.

Yeah, so, about that… SJWs have never been able to learn that anything that cuts their opponents can, and will, be turned around and weaponized against them.

 

SJW journalism in action

The Other McCain observes how Democratic activists with bylines showcase the Three Laws of Social Justice:

It’s not a “crackpot conspiracy theory” to believe Crist is a closet case, and that his marriages were merely camouflage. This kind of gossip has long been widespread in Florida political circles. But this wasn’t why Tea Party conservatives hated Crist in 2009, when the then-Republican governor of Florida dishonestly secured the endorsement of both the state party chairman and the National Republican Senatorial Committee 15 months ahead of the 2010 GOP Senate primary. With Tea Party backing, Marco Rubio surged ahead to beat Crist, who eventually became a Democrat. (And the exposure of corruption of the state GOP apparatus sent some people to prison.) When Joy Reid started gay-baiting Crist in 2007, however, Crist was seen as a “rising star” in the GOP, and smearing him as a closet homosexual was obviously an attempt by Reid — then as now a partisan Democrat — to sabotage the career of a Republican.

The issue is not whether Joy Reid is a “homophobe” any more than the issue is whether Crist is gay. Indeed, I have argued that much of what is condemned as “homophobia” is neither wrong nor harmful. The real issue is that Reid is dishonest — a Democrat Party hack, masquerading as a journalist — and that she is an unscrupulous hypocrite, willing to do whatever she can to hurt Republicans, even if it means acting in direct contradiction to her own party’s alleged “principles.”

(In fact, Democrats have no principle other than the pursuit of power.) Furthermore, Reid’s behavior illustrates Vox Day’s Three Laws of SJWs:

  1. SJWs always lie.
  2. SJWs always double down.
  3. SJWs always project.

For more detail, well, you know where to find them.

Truth teller in a world of lies

James Delingpole observes that the God-Emperor is playing both the media and the European political elite like puppets in his ongoing defense of Western Civilization:

It might seem a stretch to argue that Trump’s recent trio of trolling retweets of Muslims-behaving-badly videos have much to do with this noble mission.

But cometh the man, cometh the hour. President Trump is no ordinary leader and he most certainly does not play by the conventional rules.

A key facet of his modus operandi is the way he manages to bypass a generally hostile media and speak directly to his constituency – essentially ordinary people who’ve had just about enough of politically correct nonsense – using social media.

Straight laced conservatives deplore this. They think it’s undignified. Even that it trivializes the presidential office and undermines Trump’s mission.

On the contrary, as Vox Day persuasively demonstrates in his new book SJWs Always Double Down, Trump wields Twitter like a cross between a surgeon’s scalpel and a theater commander’s Daisycutter bomb.

So, cut to the chase, what was Trump doing with these tweets?

First, let’s just establish what he was NOT doing:

Winning the hearts and minds of radical Muslims; making liberals love and respect him more; getting nice coverage in the Guardian and the New York Times; persuading Never Trumpers that they might have misjudged him; winning over Theresa May and the rest of the faux-Conservative political class.

No. Trump doesn’t give a damn for any of these people. (And who can blame him?)

Instead he was sending a message to the people he cares about: all those ordinary people out there, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and beyond, who are shocked, appalled, scared by the way their countries are slowly (or quite quickly in the case of some countries, Sweden, for example) surrendering to Islam; who feel betrayed by the pusillanimity of their political leaders and let down by the failure of most of their media to report on the rapes and the sexual grooming and the violence being committed disproportionately by Muslims, both immigrants and home-grown radicals; who feel unable to speak – except in embarrassed whispers – about their fears about being stabbed or machine-gunned or blown up or mown down by yet another jihadist simply for the crime of going about their daily, Western life; who bitterly resent being tarred as Islamophobic or xenophobic or uncaring when all they want is to be allowed to live their life in peace in a country whose traditions, laws and cultural values remain the ones they grew up with and which make their homeland worth living in.

These are the people Trump was reaching out to with those tweets.

As for the rest – all those politicians and media types and cry bully activist groups – they just fell into Trump’s trap.

Trump wanted them to react in the way they did. It was part of his strategy. If you don’t understand why – if you’re one of those “sophisticated” analysts who persists in persuading yourself that Trump is just an idiot, in the way the same people used to say about Ronald Reagan – then, again, I recommend you spend time reading Vox Day’s book.

But if you want the short version, ask yourself this: how do you think most ordinary people – the ones outside the politically correct politics/media bubble – responded when they saw the president’s tweets?

Did they go

a) “I heard some people on the BBC tell me that Britain First are far right and far right is, like, the worst thing ever. So by retweeting them Donald Trump was literally endorsing fascism!”

or

b) “Trump gets it. Why don’t the other politicians get it?”

I suspect it’s mainly the latter.

Mainly? Most certainly! For me, one of the most significant aspects of Trump’s much-protested retweets is that he has clearly learned that playing go-along-to-get-along will be fatal for him. He’s not trying to please Theresa May. He’s not trying to please Jean-Claude Juncker. He’s not trying to please any of the sex criminals in the media, either in the US or the UK.

Why should he? He is the champion of the people, the vox populi, and he is standing up for them against the modern-day, self-appointed Optimates. We can only hope that he will treat them in much the same way Sulla treated his political opponents.

Democratic Party activists with bylines

The mainstream media can’t possibly deny its partisan bias anymore, not that they were doing so credibly anyhow.

This week, The New York Times editorial board took over the paper’s opinion Twitter account, which has around 650,000 followers, “to urge the Senate to reject a tax bill that hurts the middle class & the nation’s fiscal health.” By urging the Senate, it meant sending out the phone number of moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins and imploring followers to call her. In others words, the board was indistinguishable from any of the well-funded partisan groups it whines about in editorials all the time.

NYT Opinion✔@nytopinion
Contact @SenatorCollins, (202) 224-2523, particularly if you live in Maine, and ask her to oppose the Senate tax bill because it would repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate, driving up the cost of health insurance. #thetaxbillhurts
4:19 PM – Nov 29, 2017

Then again, the editors at The New York Times have more pressing denials to make these days. Such as the perception that they are little more than a depraved collection of sex criminals, sexual harassers, and unattractive whores using sex for advancement.