Tag: media

When evidence is not “evidence”

The media’s “fact-checkers” are no more reliable, or credible, than the very media whose reputation they are attempting to restore.

It’s important to remember that Band’s email was sent privately, with little expectation it would be aired publicly. On the one hand, that might indicate he would be more open about possible conflicts. But he was also feuding with Chelsea Clinton and so might have been inclined to exaggerate or embellish his concerns.

Even the email, at face value, does not justify the hyperbolic news coverage. There was no reference to foundation monies, just “resources.”

At the same time, the foundation, the family and the wedding planner deny the claim made in the email. This was a major social event with 450 guests, something that has to run on clockwork — at great cost. The wedding planner paid the bills and submitted one bill to the Clinton family.

We can’t really award Pinocchios here, since no specific person repeated this allegation. But we can fault the news reporting — and label this as a claim lacking any evidence. Readers (or their friends) who viewed this as the “last straw” about Clinton corruption need to be more careful consumers of the news.

No Evidence

In other words, documentary evidence is not evidence because “money” is a subset of “resources”. That’s an attempted bait-and-switch almost worthy of Richard Dawkins and midwit atheists who claim that documentary evidence and eyewitness evidence is not evidence because it is not scientific evidence.

Almost.

This demonstrates why the media’s rhetoric is so often ineffective. In this case, it is pseudo-dialectic based on a foundation of pedantry and deception.

Doesn’t anyone know how to play this game?

Steve Sailer busts the Other Vox:

From Vox, an article about factchecking that starts with an un-factchecked falsehood:

Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don’t care.
A new study explains the psychological power — and hard limits — of fact-checking journalism.
   
During the campaign — and into his presidency — Donald Trump repeatedly exaggerated and distorted crime statistics. “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed,” he asserted in his dark speech at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. But the data here is unambiguous: FBI statistics show crime has been going down for decades. 

Uh, the liberal Brennan Center estimated back in April 2017 that the homicide rate (the most reliable crime rate) was nationally 19% higher in 2016 than in 2014 and up 29% in the 30 biggest cities.

Media “fact-checking” is a perfect example of pseudo-dialectic. It’s framed in the style of dialectic, and pretends to be an objective appeal to the truth, but it is actually nothing more than disguised rhetoric meant to manipulate the emotions of the reader. Which, of course, is why it is almost entirely ineffective. The “hard limits” are the result of their “facts” being incongruous with observable reality and the truth as the target perceives it.

The problem most people have in understanding the difference between rhetoric and dialectic, let alone grasping the concept of pseudo-dialectic, is that they are philosophically monolingual. Consider, for example, Jagi Lamplighter’s typically dialectic disdain for rhetoric.

The problem with Rhetoric is…it cannot stand up against reality. It is only useful for persuading sheep. Worse, when a person is persuaded by rhetoric, he will change his mind as soon as someone comes along with snazzier rhetoric.

The advantage of dialectic is when someone is persuaded by reason, they stay persuaded.

Vox is a bright and brave man with brilliant ideas. He is so smart that much of what he understands, most people cannot follow—and that is a harsh and lonely way to live.

But that doesn’t mean that he can’t use his brilliance to learn how to present real arguments in a simple and concise manner that the masses can grasp.

This rhetoric nonsense is beneath him.

But one might as reasonably claim that this Chinese nonsense is beneath the English speaker, even when speaking to a Chinese-speaking audience. Jagi’s faith in my ability to not only leap the IQ communications gap, but successfully reason with emotion-driven non-thinkers, is probably more flattering than she knows, but I can assure her, neither I nor anyone else in the course of human history has ever been sufficiently brilliant for that.

Remember, dialectic is a form of rhetoric. That sweet reason dialectic speakers value so highly is merely a subset of the art of persuasion, and moreover, it is not the only legitimate form. Rhetoric is not about truth and falsehood per se, but rather emotional content that can point towards the truth with falsehood as readily as it points towards falsehood with the truth. And, as I noted above, the more rhetoric points towards the recognized truth, the more effective it tends to be.

Here we go again

The pollsters are making a few “honest mistakes of their own. Again.

Most national pollsters are back churning out biased and misleading poll numbers after recovering from their shock over President Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, according to The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group analysis.

“I do know inherently there is a Democratic bias in the polls. And most of them will deny it” says Raghavan Mayur, an independent pollster who is president of TechnoMetrica, which leads the polling operations at Investor’s Business Daily.

A national financial news organization, IBD was one of the few polling organizations to predict a Trump victory, and it has accurately called the last four presidential elections.

“Typically, the mainstream media and the major polling companies will never admit their bias to you,” Mayur said. “This is like an alcoholic not admitting to using alcohol. They are in denial.”

Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell agreed with Mayur, saying “there was a couple of days of shock. And then they moved on because what they could not do is to get to the bottom of their own polling bias.”

In other words, they’re undercounting likely Trump supporters by 6 to 9 percent. Keep this in mind when the 2018 election cycle begins.

An “honest mistake”

Strange, is it not, how these “honest mistakes” never seem to be made in favor of any Republican politician or right-wing public figure?

Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times should be tossed because the paper made “an honest mistake” when it said she incited a 2011 shooting that severely wounded Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six people, a lawyer for the Gray Lady said on Friday.

“There was an honest mistake in posting the editorial,” lawyer David Schultz told Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff.

Last week, Palin sued the Times over a June 14th editorial that stated there was a “direct” link between one of Palin’s PAC ads and the shooting by Jared Lee Loughner. But there’s no evidence he ever saw the ad, which placed Gifford’s district in stylized crosshairs. The Times issued a correction.

On Friday, Palin’s lawyers argued that the Times knew the story was false. “It was literally acknowledged the same day in another story in their paper,” said Kenneth Turkel.

I’m only surprised that lightning didn’t strike lawyer David Schultz dead on the spot. And when you’re chiefly known for #FakeNews and hit pieces, it probably doesn’t bode well for your chances of selling the innocent mistake narrative.

Daily Meme Wars

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UPDATE: 1,115 people have signed up for the #MemeWar. Join the party, we’re having fun!

After talking to a couple of people who follow me on Twitter and somehow didn’t realize I’d published a book, let alone 15, I’ve been thinking about how it might be possible to increase the general awareness of Castalia’s catalog while simultaneously expanding our collective meme war capabilities. Nearly 10,000 of you are on the New Release mailing list, but I’m not willing to use that for anything but announcing new ebook releases once or twice a month. We don’t even email announcements of new print or audiobook editions, although we probably should.

But I was thinking that by putting out a Meme of the Day, which everyone on the MemeWar email list could then put up on their blog, Gab, or Twitter that day, we might be able to effectively set things trending on a regular basis. The Meme of the Day would be “sponsored” by one of our books, which might or might not be related.

Today’s MOTD. Do feel free to spread the love.


We’re reaching levels of #FakeNews that were not previously believed to even be possible. #CNNMemeWar #CNNBlackmail

And yes, I know an address shows up when you subscribe. No worries.

Don’t get cocky, kid

A single engagement is not the war. And the campaign isn’t even over yet. That being said, James Delingpole explains why the Right is winning the #CNNBlackmail battle on Breitbart.

Why and how did we win? Partly by using the enemy’s tactics against them; partly by exploiting a few strengths of our own.

Here are some of them:


“Sorry. Not interested”

Being on the left is all about grievance, victimhood and — usually feigned — moral outrage. This was the card CNN tried playing in response to the original Trump wrestling gif. They invited us to believe that Trump’s tweet encouraged “violence against reporters.” We responded in the best way possible: by ignoring it. This may have been what infuriated CNN into making their massive tactical error of hunting down and trying to destroy the alleged creator of the gif. Had CNN shrugged its shoulders and ignored the wrestler gif, it would not be writhing in such abject humiliation now.

Jokes

The left has lots of comedians, but it can’t do jokes: look at John Oliver, who, despite his lucrative gift of being able to persuade liberal studio audiences to make laugh-type noises, has never said anything genuinely funny in his life. This is because progressives are ideologically incapable of humor. We discuss this in more detail on my Delingpole podcast next week on a Special Youth Edition featuring a clever 18-year-old kid who understands the internet and memes and stuff. The reason the right is winning the internet war, he explains, is because our memes are much wittier than their memes. And the reason for that is that the left can’t do humor because they’re afraid it might hurt someone’s feelings.

Point And Swarm; Isolate And Shriek

As Vox Day explains in his invaluable SJW Attack Survival Guide, these are classic techniques used by the regressive left. Now the tables have been turned, and we are learning to use their methods against them. CNN got so panicked after the backlash hit, it had to ban all its staff from using Twitter because whatever they did or said only seemed to make things worse. SJWs can dish it, but they really can’t take it.

Thar’s magic in them memes. But don’t rest on your laurels. Meme harder. Retweet more. CNN is only in retreat, it has not yet been finished off and dragged by its heels around the White House grounds by the God-Emperor.

The GamerGate playbook

I, for one, have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. GamerGate? What is this playbook of which you speak so highly?

The Anti-CNN Harassment Campaign Is Using the GamerGate Playbook

This time the target isn’t video game reviewers. It’s families of reporters. And many of the same characters from the first time are back for Round 2.

KATHERINE CROSS

For Twitter users, the #CNNBlackmail flap has been hard to miss. Angry Trump supporters, furious that the network “forced” the originator of the Trump-wrestling-CNN GIF to apologize even though it didn’t, fixated on a single line in the story posted to CNN’s KFILE: “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should [his remorsefulness] change.” Cue the angry mobs that targeted not just the reporter of the story with death threats, but his wife and parents.

But for me, this all looked depressingly familiar. A mostly far-right swarm of Twitter users caterwauling about free speech, memes, and ethics in journalism? We’ve been here before.
Many of the same tactics and major players that made names for themselves in GamerGate—from Mike Cernovich to Weev—are being used to push a wide-scale harassment campaign against CNN.

In August of 2014 Eron Gjoni, the ex-boyfriend of Zoë Quinn, a game developer, posted a lengthy screed in which he falsely accused her of illicitly securing favorable reviews for her game. This touched off a tidal wave of abuse directed at her. At first, it all seemed like so many of the seasonal storms of harassment that women in tech are subjected to. Critic Anita Sarkeesian, veteran game developer Jennifer Hepler, and tech evangelist Adria Richards all had their turns as the monster-of-the-week for reactionary internet trolls heaping rape/death threats and slander upon them.

But the abuse around Quinn rapidly metastasized into something larger that attacked several people at once, and brought old targets like Sarkeesian back to the fore (she was eventually forced to flee her own home after detailed, specific threats were made). Using the fig-leaf provided by the false accusation about reviews, the attackers conjured a scandal about gaming journalism to justify their fixation on the female game developers and feminist critics they so hated. They called it #GamerGate.

This movement lasted for months, and constituted a new form of both online harassment and right-wing activism. Though GamerGate putatively drew its adherents from across the political spectrum, they would constellate around hatred of “political correctness” and feminism, and ally themselves with conservative and extreme-right voices.

Terrible stuff indeed. I, for one, denounce this mob intimidation being directed at hard-working journalists who are guilty of nothing more than reporting the news to the American public. I mean, what sort of monster concocts dreadfully dank memes like the one below? (clears throat, adjusts bow tie) Truly reprehensible!

SJWs always lie (TV edition)

They always lie, even in areas where you didn’t know lying was possible:

If I mistakenly write “NBC Nitely News,” you can probably still tell what program I’m talking about. Nielsen’s automated system can’t, however, and a report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal details how networks are taking advantage of that fact to disguise airings that underperform with viewers.

It’s described as a common practice in the world of TV ratings, where programs with higher ratings can charge advertisers more to run commercials. When an episode performs poorly with viewers, the networks often intentionally misspell the show title in their report to Nielsen, according to the Journal. This fools the system into separating that airing out as a different show and keeping it from affecting the correctly-spelled show’s average overall rating.

The report says the practice was initially used sparingly — for instance, when a broadcast would go up against a major sporting event. But it has now grown fairly common, with NBC misspelling the title of “NBC Nightly News” 14 times since the current TV season began last fall. At one point, that reportedly included an entire week of broadcasts.

Competitors ABC and CBS allegedly followed suit, with ABC reportedly submitting “Wrld News Tonite” on seven occasions over the same time period. CBS reportedly misspelled the name of its evening newscast as “CBS Evening Nws” a total of 12 times. (CBS is the parent company of CNET.)

Translation: the ratings of the failing TV companies are collapsing even faster than the official numbers indicate. So keep in mind that when you’re reading books, playing games or pirating video instead of watching it on TV or at the theatre, you are helping bring down the media enemy.

CNN: silenced

Ivan Throne has been tracking all of the CNN social media accounts.

Ivan Throne‏ @DarkTriadMan
#CNNBlackmail is still #1 on Twitter and @CNN has silenced every single one of their correspondents on Twitter.


TexitMachine‏ @BrowningMachine
Note @KFILE’s last tweet was 2hrs ago. Right about when @CNN’s in-house lawyer came in after 4th and went “HOLY SHIT WHAT HAVE YOU DONE??”

Sounds as if someone is trying to come up with an organization-wide strategy. Want to bet they don’t get it right?

Especially in light of new information that indicates CNN ID’d the wrong guy, and the original creator of the meme is a Mexican man.