Tag: media

Buzzfeed and the stolen emails

Buzzfeed apparently got their hands on some stolen emails of Milo’s, a few of which were his exchanges with me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the most noteworthy aspect of today’s “expose” on Milo.

A year and a half ago, Milo Yiannopoulos set himself a difficult task: to define the alt-right. It was five months before Hillary Clinton named the alt-right in a campaign speech, 10 months before the alt-right’s great hope became president, and 17 months before Charlottesville clinched the alt-right as a stalking horse for violent white nationalism. The movement had just begun its explosive emergence into the country’s politics and culture.

At the time, Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life.

Yiannopoulos was a useful soldier whose very public identity as a gay man (one who has now married a black man) helped defend him, his anti-political correctness crusade, and his employer from charges of bigotry.

But now Yiannopoulos had a more complicated fight on his hands. The left — and worse, some on the right — had started to condemn the new conservative energy as reactionary and racist. Yiannopoulos had to take back “alt-right,” to redefine for Breitbart’s audience a poorly understood, leaderless movement, parts of which had already started to resist the term itself….

Over the next three days, Yiannopoulos passed the article back to Yarvin and the white nationalist Saucier, the latter of whom gave line-by-line annotations. He also sent it to Vox Day, a writer who was expelled from the board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for calling a black writer an “ignorant savage,” and to Alex Marlow, the editor of Breitbart.

“Solid, fair, and fairly comprehensive,” Vox Day responded, with a few suggestions.

“Most of it is great but I don’t want to rush a major long form piece like this,” Marlow wrote back. “A few people will need to weigh in since it deals heavily with race.”

Lawsy me! Tell me if you can see why I find the reference to me to be absolutely hilarious. Also, in case you haven’t been around here since 2013, the quote attributed to me is both incomplete and incorrect. I actually called SFWA’s affirmative action pet NK Jemisin, the columnist for the The New York Times Book Review and one of only three two-straight winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in science fiction history, “an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine.”

Just to be clear.

Fake gun control converts

The media is attempting to build a false narrative around people being magically converted to gun control by the recent events in Las Vegas.

The lead guitarist of a country music band playing Route 91 Harvest festival, where a gunman murdered 58 people on Sunday night, has said the horrific experience of the attack has changed his views on gun laws in America.

“I’ve been a proponent of the [second] amendment my entire life,” Caleb Keeter posted on Twitter. “Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was.”

In the chaotic hours after the attack, which began around 10pm, the members of the Josh Abbott Band were eventually able to post a message on social media, saying that the band and crew were safe. “I’ll never unhear those gunshots; and our band [and] crew will never forget how that moment made them feel,” singer Josh Abbott wrote on Twitter. “Our hearts are with all the victims.”

But Keeter went further, describing the deadliest shooting in modern US history as a revelation. He said that members of the band’s crew have concealed handgun licenses, and legal firearms on the bus.

“They were useless,” he said. “We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think that we were part of the massacre and shoot us. A small group (or one man) laid waste to a city with dedicated, fearless police officers desperately trying to help, because of access to an insane amount of firepower. Enough is enough.”

The feeling, he wrote, “was enough for me to realize that this is completely and totally out of hand. We need gun control RIGHT. NOW,” he added. “My biggest regret is that I stubbornly didn’t realize it until my brothers on the road and myself were threatened by it.”

There are two significant problems here. First of all, the band’s concealed handguns weren’t useless for fear of the police, but because the shooter was 300 YARDS AWAY. Knives, fists, and other close-range weapons were also useless, but then, very few criminal engagements take place at a range of 300+ yards. As for the “dedicated, fearless police officers” who took 72 minutes to not engage a single shooter, the less said the better.

Second, Caleb Keeter is a liar, as proved by his own archived tweets. He always was a gun control advocate, he simply happened to be dubious about the federal government’s ability to do so effectively.

18 December 2012
The Feds can’t even balance a checkbook and we trust them to deal with gun legislation? Gotta be done at a state level, if you want it folks

18 December 2012
We’re talking about a Federal Government composed of scummy, awful people. Contact your STATE representatives if you want gun control.

6 Jan 2013
Maybe they should have psychological tests for gun purchases?

On a related note, I think this guy won Twitter today and it’s not even 9 AM Eastern.

FlyingSkillet‏ @flyinskillet
Hey @Calebkeeter the Dixie Chicks are looking for a guitar player for their Pyongyang show.

Milo back at Berkeley

There has been a lot of talk about whether Milo would return to Berkeley and whether #FreeSpeechWeek would take place there. But yes, he is back and it is on. Team Milo has even prepared a little gift for everyone for the occasion. It’s called The Antifa Handbook (PDF), and, as it happens, it is almost entirely unlike the 4GW Handbook.

Stop encouraging young writers!

A heartfelt plea from a woman writer over 40 to stop recognizing people who are not her:

A few years ago I wrote an article for the Guardian on ageism in the literary world, about the predilection of publications like Granta, the New Yorker and Buzzfeed for authors under the age of 40. The problem hasn’t gone away and on Tuesday I wrote an open letter to the Royal Society of Literature, after it called for nominations for 40 new fellows under 40.

Encouraging young writers is laudable. After all, it’s increasingly difficult to get started. Publishers’ advances are low and getting lower; arts degrees are more expensive than Stem subjects; social security is fiercely tested. Which must mean that those most able to pay for a writing course, or those most able to take time off work to write while still young, are those most likely to have money, security, contacts, confidence. There’s a correlation between setting an age bar and encouraging the already privileged.

All writers were young once, and many start writing young, but not all begin their careers as published authors at that point. Leaving aside the fact that some only decide to start writing later in life, many factors affect one’s ability to commit to writing seriously. Besides income issues, age bars can lead an organisation into worrying territory. Authors from outside the perceived cultural mainstream who do not already see their voices represented – LGBTQ writers, writers of colour – are sometimes slow to recognise the contribution they can make, or to feel like their voices will be valued.

Age is a feminist issue. Carers, delayed by years looking after children or other dependents, are mostly women; residencies that offer no childcare or require long stays are an easy way to sift female candidates out of contention. Older women are already told every day, in ways ranging from the subtle to the blatant, that they are irrelevant and should shut up. Multiply this by, say, race or gender, and the courage required to put work out is even greater. Or the potential writer might not be the carer, but the cared-for. Writers who live with a disability or ill-health may not start out until they have found a way to write with their condition – which may take longer than this 40-years-old rule allows for.

Since writing to the RSL, I’ve been sent heartrending accounts from well-published writers, several of whom specified that it wasn’t until their late 30s that they were finally able to take the time to write, making age bar of 40 not only arbitrary, but a particularly cruel irony.

Wow just wow! First, I am, of course, appalled by the writer’s unpersoning and excision from the social justice movement of so many sexualities. It’s fine to defend Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer writers, but what about those who are Genderqueer, Demisexual, Transsexual, Twospirit, Intersex, Questioning, Asexual, Allies, Pansexual, and Polyamorous? If she doesn’t support LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP in its entirety, she is clearly a bigot, a hater, and she should never be published by any socially responsible publisher.

Second, what, exactly, is the point of her article? Should we not recognize young writers at all and attempt to identify the most promising? Actually, that’s not a bad idea, since the convergence of most writing awards and institutions means that they’re only promoting callow SJW droppings anyhow.

But I suspect that she wants to make elderly female and diversity writers eligible for young author awards, never mind the fact that first-time novelists of any age are honored by awards such as the  John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. What we have here is merely a literary spin on Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Or, as in this case, an award-winning writer.

I have to admit it, I’m going to be genuinely sorry when The Guardian finally finishes burning through its once-massive endowment and goes out of business. It’s genuinely funnier than The Onion.

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.