Tag: media

Black privilege

Black privilege is when you can say things that would get white people fired and your employer doesn’t even bother to slap your wrist.

ESPN host Jemele Hill has apologized for painting the sports network in an ‘unfair light’ with her controversial remarks about President Donald Trump. She said in a statement that comments in which she called Trump a ‘white supremacist’ and ‘bigot’ were her ‘personal beliefs’, and apologized for bringing ESPN into the issue.

‘My comments on Twitter expressed my personal beliefs,’ she said in a statement she posted on Twitter on Wednesday. ‘My regret is that my comments and the public way I made them painted ESPN in an unfair light. My respect for the company and my colleagues remains unconditional.’

On Wednesday, during a White House briefing on hurricane relief, Sanders said she thought Hill’s ‘outrageous’ remarks should be a ‘fireable offense’.

Hill had tweeted on Monday that Trump is a ‘bigot’ and a ‘white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/other white supremacists.’ She also called him ‘unqualified and unfit to be president’ and said that ‘if he were not white, he would never have been elected’.

This is just the Third Law of Social Justice in action. Hill is projecting. She knows that if she wasn’t a black woman, she would never have gotten a job at ESPN.

But it’s good to know that the next time a white Christian man says something that offends someone, he has only to apologize for bringing his employer into the issue and point out that he was merely expressing his personal beliefs in order to settle the matter.

Building a new culture

Conservatives love to talk about the need to build an alternative culture.

The culture leans sharply left, and in our current, highly-polarized political climate that means conservatives in the arts tend to be treated as outsiders at best and pariahs at worst. Listen to the personal experiences of conservatives in Hollywood, for example, whether “above the line” (the stars, producers and directors) or below it (the rest of the crew), and you will understand why most keep their politics in the closet to avoid bad vibes, ostracism, and/or outright hostility. The left, of course, dismisses complaints of blacklisting and bias as paranoid whining, but they are very real indeed.

The publishing world is not exempt from this state of affairs. When conservative author Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left appeared at Number seven on The New York Times bestseller list, despite actually having outsold all fourteen of its competitors on the list, D’Souza called out the Times on Twitter: “In what alternative universe do Jeff Flake’s 7,383 book sales for this week (BookScan data) top mine at 11,651? Thanks @nytimes fake list!”

This was far from the first time conservative authors had called foul about their books’ rankings on the Times’ all-important bestseller list. Cortney O’Brien at Townhall pointed to another noteworthy recent example: Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, by co-author couple Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. A horrifying exposé of the dark(er) side of the abortion industry, the top-selling Amazon release was perceived by some as an attack on the left’s sacred cow of abortion rights. The New York Times did have the book at Number 13 on its “Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction” list, but did not place Gosnell at its deserved Number four slot among bestselling nonfiction titles.

“It’s not only an insult to the people who have bought this book,” McElhinney said “but an insult to the readers of the New York Times who buy the newspaper and think they are getting the truth about book sales across America but instead get false facts disguised as a neutral list.”

A Times spokesman insisted that the “political views of authors have no bearing on our rankings, and the notion that we would manipulate the lists to exclude books for political reasons is simply ludicrous.”

Ludicrous? The Times says its list is based on “surveys” of “a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.”

Confidential context? Best assessment? Broadly popular? This sounds suspiciously unscientific and non-transparent, and does not address the evidence of the sales figures themselves.

Guess how many times a conservative media organ has reviewed, or even mentioned, a Castalia House book? Zero.

The conservative media talks a lot about “the culture”, and complain about the Left’s behavior in relation to it, but as is so often the case, they do absolutely nothing proactive about it. Conservative billionnaires don’t invest in culture, because they’re frightened of what they consider to be a “hits-driven business”. They’d rather blow millions on politics and television ads, even though, as Instapundit noted, all the money spent on political ads in the last presidential campaign would have been better spent buying up all the women’s magazines.

The Left begins to wake up

About the potential problems posted by the Big Social Media monopolies:

We’re basically too small for Google to care about. So I wouldn’t say we’ve had any bad experiences with Google in the sense of Google trying to injure us or use its power against us. What we’ve experienced is a little different. Google is so big and so powerful that even when it’s trying to do something good, it can be dangerous and frightening.

Here’s an example.

With the events of recent months and years, Google is apparently now trying to weed out publishers that are using its money streams and architecture to publish hate speech. Certainly you’d probably be unhappy to hear that Stormfront was funded by ads run through Google. I’m not saying that’s happening. I’m just giving you a sense of what they are apparently trying to combat. Over the last several months we’ve gotten a few notifications from Google telling us that certain pages of ours were penalized for ‘violations’ of their ban for hate speech. When we looked at the pages they were talking about they were articles about white supremacist incidents. Most were tied to Dylann Roof’s mass murder in Charleston.

Now in practice all this meant was that two or three old stories about Dylann Roof could no longer run ads purchased through Google. I’d say it’s unlikely that loss to TPM amounted to even a cent a month. Totally meaningless. But here’s the catch. The way these warnings work and the way these particular warnings were worded, you get penalized enough times and then you’re blacklisted.

Now, certainly you’re figuring we could contact someone at Google and explain that we’re not publishing hate speech and racist violence. We’re reporting on it. Not really. We tried that. We got back a message from our rep not really understanding the distinction and cheerily telling us to try to operate within the no hate speech rules. And how many warnings until we’re blacklisted? Who knows?

If we were cut off, would that be Adexchange (the ads) or DoubleClick for Publishers (the road) or both? Who knows?

If the first stopped we’d lose a big chunk of money that wouldn’t put us out of business but would likely force us to retrench. If we were kicked off the road more than half of our total revenue would disappear instantly and would stay disappeared until we found a new road – i.e., a new ad serving service or technology. At a minimum that would be a devastating blow that would require us to find a totally different ad serving system, make major technical changes to the site to accommodate the new system and likely not be able to make as much from ads ever again. That’s not including some unknown period of time – certainly weeks at least – in which we went with literally no ad revenue.

Needless to say, the impact of this would be cataclysmic and could easily drive us out of business.

Now it’s never happened. And this whole scenario stems from what is at least a well-intentioned effort not to subsidize hate speech and racist groups. Again, it hasn’t happened. So in some sense the cataclysmic scenario I’m describing is as much a product of my paranoia as something Google could or might do. But when an outside player has that much power, often acts arbitrarily (even when well-intentioned) and is almost impossible to communicate with, a significant amount of paranoia is healthy and inevitable.

I give this example only to illustrate the way that Google is so powerful and so all-encompassing that it can actually do great damage unintentionally.

It’s interesting to see that the Left is beginning to get paranoid about Big Social Media, even though they’re not being targeted by it. Yet.

Go f— yourselves, Fake News

They are REALLY not going to like Senator Rock:

Kid Rock’s response to a watchdog group accusing him of violating a federal election law was classic Kid Rock — ” … go f— yourselves.”

The group Common Cause says the Detroit musician violated the law by declaring himself a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan but not registering his candidacy or reporting campaign contributions. They filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission and also asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate whether the musician —whose real name is Robert Ritchie — has violated election law.

Ritchie dismissed the allegations, issuing the following statement, “I am starting to see reports from the misinformed press and the fake news on how I am in violation of breaking campaign law. #1: I have still not officially announced my candidacy. #2: See #1 and go f— yourselves.”

I’d say he’s off to an EXCELLENT start.

Alt-Internet

Slate planned a hit piece on the Alt-Tech movement, then realized that perhaps the Alt-Right may have a point with regards to Internet censorship being an all-too-slippery slope.

However distasteful its views, the alt-right has smartly framed its battle in terms of “free speech.” This argument has currency elsewhere on the right, too. President Trump is fond of calling out Amazon, perhaps chiefly because of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said on his show earlier this month that “Google should be regulated like the public utility it is, to make sure it doesn’t further distort the free flow of information to the rest of us.” Former Trump aide and Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon has also argued that tech platforms should be regulated like utilities. Combined with Democrats making antitrust regulation a central tenet of their new policy platform, the internet’s gatekeepers could soon be put on notice as never before.

It would be hard not to spot the irony if one of the most significant threats to big tech’s monopolistic power ends up being caused by hate groups. Gab’s Sanduja believes that Apple and Google shutting out his company from their app marketplaces prevents it from accessing 70 to 75 percent of its potential U.S. market. Even if you agree with banning Gab, the power of a handful of companies to banish anyone from the internet should give you pause. And it is one reason why the arguments of alt-tech advocates may find more and more friendly ears in Silicon Valley, where many entrepreneurs increasingly worry they can’t compete.

It’s also hard not to see this conundrum as big tech’s fault from the start. In a way, the alt-right is calling out the essential tension of the major internet companies, which espouse “don’t be evil” philosophies and want to “bring the world closer together,” yet also owe their popularity (and profits) to an internet where seemingly anything goes, until they say it doesn’t. Banning Nazis may be a perfectly defensible stance, but given the inconsistent transparency and enforcement of community guidelines from tech companies, it also has the whiff of the arbitrary.

In a more plural market, Facebook and Google and GoDaddy would be just as free to boot odious ideologies—but they wouldn’t face the same accusations of speech suppression, because places like Daily Stormer would have more places to go for their social-networking and domain-hosting needs. The early ideal of the internet was that of a great commons where all kinds of diverse opinions could be shared, where people could come to understand each other and to be convinced of new, challenging ideas. That particular utopian wish list may have always been naïve, but the notion that an open internet should not be controlled by a small group of corporations beholden only to shareholders continues to hold sway for a reason. Facebook was only ever supposed to be part of the public commons; the walled garden was never meant to subsume it.

Which may be why Gab and its Free Speech Tech Alliance has gained the trust of Nazis but can also invoke the rhetoric of left-wing antitrusters—well, to a point. “If Google and Apple are straight-up corporations for their political sides, they should openly declare their discriminatory behavior. They should be proud of it,” said Gab’s Sanduja. “They should not be mendacious and talk about change and be different. Stop engaging in sophistry. Come out to us as the major SJW platforms you are.”

The funny thing was that they really wanted to talk to Gab’s Torba, not Sanduja. Because, of course, Sanduja didn’t fit the original intended Narrative of Alt-Tech being nothing but white supremacist Nazis.

Winning the rhetorical battle

This successful memetic campaign is an object lesson to every dialectic speaker tempted to show off how smart and righteous he is by sperging about someone else’s rhetorical sally.

Far-right activists are using fake Twitter accounts and images of battered women to smear anti-fascist groups in the US, an online investigation has revealed. The online campaign is using fake Antifa (an umbrella term for anti-fascist protestors) Twitter accounts to claim anti-fascists promote physically abusing women who support US President Donald Trump or white supremacy.
Researcher Eliot Higgins of website Bellingcat found evidence that the campaign is being orchestrated on internet messageboard 4Chan by far-right sympathisers.
One image shows the slogan “53% of white women voted for Trump, 53% of white women should look like this”, above a photograph of a woman with a bruised and cut face and an anti-fascist symbol. The woman pictured is actually British actress Anna Friel and the photograph was taken for a Women’s Aid anti-domestic violence campaign in 2007.
The images first started circulating on social media late on 23 August with hashtags #PunchNazis, #MakeRacistsAfraidAgain and #BashTheFash. Accounts appearing to belong to anti-fascist groups tweeted the memes, calling on activists to physically attack women who voted for Trump.

I retweeted one of the memes, which met with the following responses. First, from Antifa sympathizers crying foul, which is a sure sign of a meme’s effectiveness.

Antifa LI‏ @RefuseFascismNY
its also fake. Notice how these battered women memes are ONLY showing up on alt-righty accounts? No attribution. Just a fake logo.
Far Right Watch‏ @Far_Right_Watch
Various US based Far Right Groups are creating both fake #AntiFa accounts and memes as their latest weapon. Few are fooled.
Taz Wake‏ @tazwake
If you have to fake an account to make your point, your point is probably wrong.
Patrick‏ @TrickFreee
Here’s another Daily Stormer troll waging information warfare on the United States. Literal information warfare, no one doing anything.

Second, from dialectic-speaking spergs, who, despite more than 2,400 years of evidence to the contrary, continue to cling to the belief that “credibility” is the key to successful persuasion. Which, of course, is a little ironic, considering that the appeal to authority is a well-known logical fallacy. And it demonstrates, again, why dialectic-inclined spergs really need to learn to SHUT. THE. HELL. UP. when they happen to encounter rhetoric in the wild. You do not criticize a football coach’s play-calling by appealing to the rules of baseball. It is a category error.

Spritz‏ @Halfamish
This is fake, from 4chan. They already do enough shit that we don’t have to spread lies. That only weakens our credibility.
goth vampire daddy‏ @admirableism
you’d think having to straight up lie about the opposition would make one realize their cause is shit. and yet here we are

And third, from rhetoric speakers who grasp the brilliance of the 4chan campaign and the way that it simultaneously undermines Antifa’s rhetoric as well as reframes them in a manner that most third parties will find incredibly distasteful.

Malt‏ @maltsphere
Confirmation for top tier memeing is when BBC write an article “exposing” it as a 4chan troll. Ignoring that this is what punch a nazi means
Jay 5.1@notjayfivekille
Replying to @voxday
This is a brilliant satire of Antifa and the savagery of alt-left politics.

Remember, the most effective rhetoric communicates truth without necessarily being literally truthful in the details. It persuades through emotion, not reason, which is why it cannot be analyzed in the same way as a logical syllogism. Today’s #DailyMemeWars meme took the 4chan meme and went one level deeper, using nothing more than actual quotes from Antifa and Antifa-sympathetic media, for maximum memetic effect.
As always, we see that the Left is far better on the offensive than they are on defense. Which is why it is preferable for us to always seize the initiative and simply ignore their rhetorical attacks. The irony of people who constantly lie about their opponents complaining that they are not being portrayed accurately is significant, and is why their protests, even backed as they are by all the biggest media organs, are useless in the face of the rhetorical meme magic. And if you want to force-multiply these increasingly effective efforts, sign up for the Daily Meme Wars here.

It’s too late, liberals

White liberals are beginning to realize that Diversity doesn’t care about their ideology, but fully intends to devour them too:

I’m a white man, so you should listen to absolutely nothing I say, at least on matters of social justice. I have no standing. No way to relate. My color and gender nullify me, and it gets worse: I grew up in the suburbs. Dad made six figures. We had a backyard pool. From the 10th through 12th grades, I attended private school. So the only proper way for me to check my privilege is to realize that it blinds me to others’ struggles and should gag me during discussions about the right responses to them.
But wait. I’m gay. And I mean gay from a different, darker day. In that pool and at that school, I sometimes quaked inside, fearful of what my future held. Back then — the 1970s — gay stereotypes went unchallenged, gay jokes drew hearty laughter and exponentially more Americans were closeted than out. We conducted our lives in whispers. Then AIDS spread, and we wore scarlet letters as we marched into the public square to plead with President Ronald Reagan for help. Our rallying cry, “silence = death,” defined marginalization as well as any words could.
So where does that leave me? Who does that make me? Oppressor or oppressed? Villain or victim? And does my legitimacy hinge on the answer?
To listen to some of the guardians of purity on the left, yes….
At the beginning of this column I shared the sorts of personal details that register most strongly with those Americans who tuck each of us into some hierarchy of blessedness and affliction. So you know some important things about me, but not the most important ones: how I responded to the random challenges on my path, who I met along the way, what I learned from them, the degree of curiosity I mustered and the values that I honed as a result.
Those construct my character, and shape my voice, to be embraced or dismissed on its own merits. My gayness no more redeems me than my whiteness disqualifies me. And neither, I hope, defines me.

They rode the tiger. They used the tiger to attack their ideological enemies. Now the tiger is devouring them, and they still don’t have the discernment to identify the enemy or the courage to fight it.

Mike Cernovich, Alt Journalist

Cernovich Media is on the rise; a surprisingly respectful profile on Mike by New York Magazine:

Cernovich claims that on April 2 an anonymous source called him on Signal to tell him that former national security adviser Susan Rice had requested the disclosure of the identities of Americans — including many related to the Trump campaign and transition — in raw intelligence reports, a process known as “unmasking.” He wrote up the tip on Medium, and then watched as it took off on social media, with help from the Drudge Report, Kellyanne Conway, and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, who suggested that were the media not rigged, Cernovich would receive a Pulitzer Prize.
The press, however, didn’t give him much credit for his scoop. A single anonymous source does not typically meet the threshold for publishing news at most media outlets, for starters. And then there was the issue of taking Cernovich seriously at all, given that his earlier work included stuff like a video where a sickly muppet rendering of Clinton collapsed and rose from the dead repeatedly. So when Bloomberg View reported the same news on the morning of April 3, citing “U.S. officials familiar with the matter,” it was treated differently — with total legitimacy. The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the Washington Times, either unaware or dismissive of the fact that Cernovich was first, wrote that Bloomberg had broken the story. And when Cernovich was cited, by NBC for instance, it was typically within the context of stories that downplayed the newsworthiness of Rice’s actions — the implication being, if the Pizzagate loon is the one with the intel, perhaps the intel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
But by late July, everything had changed, both in how Cernovich perceived the Trump White House, and in how the press perceived Cernovich.
At 3:29 p.m. on July 28, Cernovich took to Twitter to report that a “source close to POTUS” informed him, “Reince has been told he’s out.” The president himself would not announce the decision until 4:49 p.m., while sitting aboard Air Force One on a tarmac in Washington. And although other reporters would go on to say they’d heard rumors of the decision before it came down, Cernovich had the advantage of operating without the barrier of an editor or publisher or any other organizational structure that might inhibit speed — but also lower the odds of a fuck-up.
“The reason that I’m so fast at what I do is — I’m not saying that I’m getting stories that nobody else has — the difference is that if a tip goes out to five people, and I know that it’s a reliable source, I just tweet it out,” he told me. “If you’re at a respectable news organization, that would be considered irresponsible. So, me, I’m just like, ‘Oh. Sounds good. This is a vetted source. I’m rocking and rolling. Let’s get out and get the conversation going.’”

Some people might be a bit torqued at the way that Mike is doing some things differently now, but you shouldn’t be. Men like him and Milo and Jack are playing a very different game than men like Stefan and me. Different rules apply. I don’t support Mike because I agree with him on everything, I support him because he’s a good man and he is a friend.

History and the limits of SJW dishonesty

Don’t bother looking for the limits of SJW stupidity or dishonesty. You will not find them. In an astonishingly inept attempt to defend the BBC and “historian” Mary Beard, one English SJW actually put forward the following defense, accompanied by a screenshot.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
I answered your question. Even though it was a straw man. No one ever said mixed race families were typical (majority) of Roman Britain.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
The BBC cartoon did not say “typical”. It merely suggested one such family as possible. Which it was.
This was the screenshot attached to the second tweet.

In fairness, the SJW was undermined by the dishonesty of the BBC, which is the more significant aspect of this little story. You see, this was how the video was described 5 days ago, before BBC “historian” Mary Beard tried to school Paul Joseph Watson and was caught bullshitting by NN Taleb. Emphasis added.
Original BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain is shown through the eyes of a typical family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while the son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion, food and entertainment.

Current BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain as seen through the eyes of one family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while his son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion.
You see, with SJWs, it’s Fake News and Fake History all the way down. You can NEVER trust anything they say. Because – all together now – SJWS ALWAYS LIE.

Breitbart is on it.

Yeah, this diversity debacle doesn’t promise to die down anytime soon:

Numerous individuals alleged to be members of Google’s management team have been caught bragging about forming blacklists to impact the careers of colleagues with different political beliefs.
In a series of screenshots from 2015 onwards provided to Breitbart News by a verified Google employee, individuals described as left-wing Google management employees can be seen discussing the ways they punish their colleagues both inside and out of the company.
“While Google appears to be doing very little to quell the hostile voices that exists inside the company, I want those hostile voices to know: I will never, ever hire hire/transfer you onto my team. Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit of technically excellent or whatever,” declared former employee Adam Fletcher in a post on Google’s internal, staff-only Google+ network: “Internal Plus.” “I will actively not work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up.”
“You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” he continued. “You might not have been aware of this, but people know, people talk. There are always social consequences.”

Nothing new to readers here, but Breitbart has considerably more reach than I do. However, Allum Bokhari’s interview with a rebel Googler, “Hal”, is illuminating:

Hal: Witch hunts are a well-known cultural problem at Google. The company is currently facing a Federal complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board in April for interfering with employees’ legal right to discuss “workplace diversity and social justice initiatives.” The complaint alleges that Senior Vice President Urs Holzle and numerous managers in his organization actively stoked up witch hunts in 2015 and 2016 intended to muzzle low-level employees who raised concerns about the company’s practices. The trial is set for November.
Several managers have openly admitted to keeping blacklists of the employees in question, and preventing them from seeking work at other companies. There have been numerous cases in which social justice activists coordinated attempts to sabotage other employees’ performance reviews for expressing a different opinion. These have been raised to the Senior VP level, with no action taken whatsoever.
Allum Bokhari: What’s it like to work in such an environment? Do you think it damages employee output?
Hal: A lot of social justice activists essentially spend all day fighting the culture war, and get nothing done. The company has made it a point to hire more people like this. The diversity gospel has been woven into nearly everything the company does, to the point where senior leaders focus on diversity first and technology second. The companywide “Google Insider” emails used to talk about cool new tech, but now they’re entirely about social justice initiatives. Likewise, the weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings used to focus on tech, but now they’re split about 50/50 between tech and identity politics signaling.
For conservative employees, this is obviously demoralizing, but it is also dangerous. Several have been driven out of the company or fired outright for sharing a dissenting view. Others have had their promotions denied or suffered other forms of deniable retaliation. Most of us just keep our heads down because we can’t afford to lose our jobs.