Tag: media

Wiki SJWs reject Breitbart

I thought it was interesting to see that Breitbart News is not considered a reliable source by Wikipedia. But Salon and Sam Harris’s blog and every other two-bit SJW site is.

Day is the Lead Editor at Castalia House, a book publishing company, where he has published the novels of such writers as [[John C. Wright (author)|John C. Wright]], [[Tom Kratman]], and Rolf Nelson.{{cite web|work=[[Breitbart.com]]|first=Allum|last=Bokhari|date=April 4, 2015|title=Hugo Awards Nominations Swept by Anti-SJW, Anti-Authoritarian Authors|url=http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/04/04/hugo-awards-nominations-swept-by-anti-sjw-anti-authoritarian-authors/}}

  
Day is the Lead Editor at Castalia House, a book publishing company, where he has published the novels of such writers as [[John C. Wright (author)|John C. Wright]], [[Tom Kratman]], and Rolf Nelson.{{cn|date=November 2015}}

The funny thing is that they left the actual text completely unsourced. So, apparently no source at all is deemed more reliable than Breitbart.

Gloating Milo is Best Milo

Nero reaches 100,000 followers on Twitter and is characteristically humble and modest about it in an article entitled “Why I’m Winning”:

Earlier today, a student newspaper called Nouse published an op-ed titled, “We Need To Talk About Milo.” It’s a long explanation of why I’m so popular, influential and successful.

I’m mortified by its appearance, obviously. That said, it’s worth reflecting on….

My career is evidence not just that free speech is effective, but that free speech combined with a lack of snobbery and class war always wins in the end. There’s no defence against the truth – especially when it’s wrapped up in a joke and has great hair.

Progressivism and social justice threw everyone out one by one, until the number of people who weren’t permitted to talk was greater than the group allowed to. I’m a direct casualty of that exclusionary attitude: a gay, matrilinearly Jewish conservative Catholic who, according to your worldview, shouldn’t exist.

Is it any wonder I found common cause with the irreverent hordes of GamerGate? It’s the gamers, of course, I have to thank for giving me a leg-up a year ago. We might not look much alike, the average gamer and me. But, when you think about it, we’re natural ideological bedfellows – and we’ve both been cast out by the people who ought to have been our defenders. So we made our own family together, as dysfunctional as it can sometimes appear.

There are few things I like better than breathtaking arrogance that is based on genuine self-confidence and ability.

Caught red-handed

This is yet another reason why we need a new Wikipedia:

A crew member from “The Hunting Ground,” a one-sided film about campus sexual assault, has been editing Wikipedia articles to make facts conform with the inaccurate representations in the film.

Edward Patrick Alva, who is listed on the film’s IMDB page as part of the camera and electrical department, has been altering Wikipedia entries for months, in violation of the website’s conflict-of-interest guidelines. Alva is the assistant editor and technical supervisor for Chain Camera Pictures, the production company associated with “The Hunting Ground” director Kirby Dick.

Wikipedia guidelines state: “Do not edit Wikipedia in your own interests or in the interests of your external relationships.” As a member of the film’s production team, Alva should not have been editing pages about the film or related to the film.

I’m only surprised that it wasn’t a Wikipedia admin. They are the real problem. But it does demonstrate the Left’s backward thinking. Rather than observing reality and acting on that basis, they act on the basis of their ideology and then attempt to modify reality accordingly.

This is why they reliably fail.

Politico admits Carson didn’t lie

Not about West Point, at any rate.

Politico‘s Kyle Cheney admitted that he fabricated a negative story about Ben Carson. At least, according to his own standards, he admitted the grievous journalistic sin.

In a story published early on Friday, Politico’s Kyle Cheney authored a piece headlined “Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point scholarship” with a subhed “Carson’s campaign on Friday conceded that a central point in his inspirational personal story did not occur as he previously described.”

There were at least five major problems with the story:

  •  The headline was completely false
  •  The subhed was also completely false
  •  The opening paragraph was false false false
  •  The substance of the piece was missing key exonerating information
  •  The article demonstrated confusion about service academy admissions and benefits

Some of the readers here were upset that I linked to a news piece without doing any due diligence concerning whether it was true or not. To them, I can only suggest that they avoid reading every single post here that contains a link, because I don’t ever do any due diligence on any link.

I am responsible for my own words. I am no more responsible for the words on a linked site than I am responsible for your comments on this one. I had no more reason to doubt that Dr. Carson said something stupid about his past than I have to doubt that he said something stupid about the Egyptian pyramids. Perhaps Politico made that up too. I don’t know because I am not the News Police.

Tom K asks why I would denigrate Dr. Carson:

I’m wishing you could explain why you would denigrate a man who is, as far as I can tell from the fact that the media hasn’t been able to trash his medical credentials, a truly inspiring black man who exercised the discipline necessary to become a fucking brain surgeon and an expert at separating conjoined twins.

Because he wants to be President of the United States of America. I wouldn’t have a word to say against him if he was content to continue being a surgeon or if he took up professional knitting. But I’d rather not see another affirmative-action anti-gun intellectually overmatched individual at the head of the US government in what are all but certain to be unusually interesting times.

Also, unlike many, I do not find inspiration in black individuals who manage to do what white people have already done. I wasn’t impressed by Herman Cain being a chairman of a regional Fed bank either. Fair or not, all accomplishments by black individuals will remain intrinsically dubious so long as affirmative action is a U.S. government policy.

Sometimes the vile hatred spewed out in the things I read on this site, posts and comments, turns my stomach. I don’t understand it. It makes no sense. What the fuck has Ben Carson ever done to hurt you? He’s got ideas you don’t like. Yeah. So? Argue the facts. Point out where he’s wrong. Hatred and contempt should be reserved for those with contemptible motives and evil goals.

Just because it doesn’t make sense to you does not mean it doesn’t make sense. Ben Carson’s motives are contemptible: he wants to rule over us despite being utterly unfit in almost every way. And Ben Carson has evil goals; he is absolutely wrong on both immigration and guns, the only two issues that matter. He absolutely merits contempt. The only reason he’s been treated with kid gloves until now is because he is a) black and b) as this campaign’s Token Black Republican Candidate, no one has been taking him seriously.

Stephen St. Onge doesn’t appear to have paid attention to previous elections:

Lots of you believed this Politico lie because you were pre-disposed to believe something bad about Carson. Which means you have typical human weaknesses. Try to overcome them.

It is admittedly possible that something legitimately disqualifying won’t surface about Carson by the time he ends his campaign. But the history of Token Black Republican Candidates strongly suggests otherwise.

Meanwhile, Phelps demonstrates that he doesn’t know what an SJW is:

Accepting any story from Politico was a serious own-goal. You get a soccer metaphor for acting like a SJW. I hope to see this embarrassment put you back onto your game.

Again, Politico is responsible for their error. Not me. If I were to stop linking to sites I know to have posted erroneous original material, I would not be able to link anywhere except Castalia House and iSteve. Phelps should give up the retarded rhetoric; also, he is fat. Sorry, no offense, but it’s true.

Meanwhile, for those who are seeking a more substantive reason to hold Ben Carson in contempt, the Token Black Republican Candidate helpfully provided it yesterday. Although perhaps I should not post this, given what I already know about the Wall Street Journal’s propensity for falsehoods:

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said Friday that he supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement negotiated by the White House – aligning himself more with the GOP’s establishment wing than with the social conservatives who have powered his campaign.

The genteel civility of the moderate

Charles C.W. Cooke defends Salon’s pedophile piece on NRO:

I’ve seen a good number of conservatives slamming this confession, often on the presumption that it represents an attempt to “mainstream” pedophilia. Respectfully, I have to disagree with this assessment.

Naturally, I am as disgusted by the urges that are referenced in the piece as the next guy, and, despite the author’s heartfelt plea for “understanding,” I find it difficult not to harbor a real animus toward him.

But I see no evidence whatsoever that Salon is endorsing or excusing child abuse, or that it is making the case that pedophilia is an “ingrained identity” and that its sufferers should therefore be free to act as they wish.

On the contrary: The piece draws attention to the fact that some people live with these abominable proclivities — “a curse of the first order” and “a massive handicap,” the author calls them — and yet manage successfully to suppress them. Whatever one might reasonably think of the man and his afflictions, to draw the opposite lesson from his admission than the one he intended seems to me unjust.

It’s fascinating to see how NRO is always willing to bend over backwards to view all statements from the other side in the best possible light, while being the first to heap anathema on any right-wing figure who dares to cross what they consider to be a line.

Derbyshire’s frank talk about blacks merited permanent banishment into utter darkness. Providing a sympathetic platform to a pedophile, well, that’s just good Christian behavior, at least according to this particular non-Christian.

(Seriously, what is with non-Christians who keep trying to lecture Christians about Christian theology. Don’t even go there; you wouldn’t tell Jews how to keep kosher, would you?)

The truth is that neither National Review nor NRO are on our side. They’re moderates and they’re down with Salon, the SJWs, the cucks, and the pedophiles.

Peak SJW

I think David French is perhaps a little optimistic here, but it is interesting to see National Review lining up against SJWs and political correctness in light of its relatively recent purgings of various contributors for their thought crimes. Perhaps the pendulum actually is swinging back:

While it’s always dangerous to predict when any particular cultural trend peaks, I’m pegging October 31, 2015, as peak PC. When universities actually post flow charts to keep your Halloween
party from being offensive, humorlessness is redefined. When students
are so fragile that the very thought of ethnic-themed Halloween costumes
leads to much-mocked YouTube “guides,” then political correctness is
losing its punch:

If you disagree — if you think that political correctness is gaining
momentum — then consider a few facts. First, the top two candidates in
the Republican race for president of the United States attained their
front-runner status by willfully, gleefully defying political
correctness at every turn. Ben Carson shot to the top of the polls when
he did the unthinkable — told the truth about guns, about Islam, about
resistance to mass shooters, and about abortion — without flinching.
It’s old news by now that Donald Trump’s supporters love him for his
anti-PC stands.

Personally, I would like to think that the tide began to turn with the publication of SJWs Always Lie, which was published just two months before the date French pegs. But whether it has or not, it is very clear that a long march through the institutions of the West to clean them of SJW intellectual corruption is required and it is not going to be quick or easy.

And speaking of not being easy, while it’s always nice to see one’s book become a category bestseller, the fact that The Return of the Great Depression, published in 2009, is presently the #1 bestseller in the following category, is not exactly cause for celebration.

  •      #1 in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Unemployment

The “Shorty Awards” scam

Don’t pay any attention to these online fraudsters. Mike Cernovich explains why:

As you can see, Sawhorse Media has an interest in having people with large social media followings promoting its contest. They use the online presence of me and others to draw attention to its popularity contest.

I received enough votes to be number 3, which means I earned my Shorty Award nomination in Healthy Living fair and square.

(Michael Cernovich was among the top three vote getters in the Healthy Living category of the Shorty Awards.)

I expected Shorty to have some integrity. I can be a controversial person and I would have had no issue with the Shorty Awards pulling my nomination before the nomination period ended.

Yet Sawhorse Media decided to commit fraud on me and my Twitter followers. The Shortys were fine with having me in their contest when I was promoting their contest. When the nomination period ended and I was no longer of use to them, they deleted my nomination and removed me from their website.

After winning enough votes for a nomination, my official Shorty Award page was 404’ed.

The Shorty Awards did not give me any reason for its actions. They simply deleted my page, pretending as if I did not win a Shorty nomination by using my considerable social media presence to promote the Shorty Awards.

The reason you haven’t hitherto seen me write anything about these “awards” is because I figured out they were some sort of weird promotional scam on the basis of their mixed nomination system. They don’t actually want to honor the real social media presences, they just want to have an excuse to give awards to conventional celebrities in order to try to attract mainstream media attention.

I have no doubt that the Ilk could have gotten me on the list, but what would be the point? They simply would have found some lame excuse to DISQUALIFY me, just as they did to my two GGinParis co-hosts, Mike and Milo.

This is my shocked face

ESPN finally gets around to shutting down Grantland:

Effective immediately we are suspending the publication of Grantland.  After careful consideration, we have decided to direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise.

Grantland distinguished itself with quality writing, smart ideas, original thinking and fun.  We are grateful to those who made it so.  Bill Simmons was passionately committed to the site and proved to be an outstanding editor with a real eye for talent.  Thanks to all the other writers, editors and staff who worked very hard to create content with an identifiable sensibility and consistent intelligence and quality. We also extend our thanks to Chris Connelly who stepped in to help us maintain the site these past five months as he returns to his prior role.

There was no way the site was ever going to make money. It made sense as a means of keeping Bill Simmons happy, but there was no reason to continue it once they fired him.

I liked the idea, but it was too full of SJWs pushing the usual nonsense to bother sifting through it for the interesting articles. I quit reading it regularly long before the Sports Guy was ejected.

Disqualify!

It’s funny how even though it repeatedly backfires on them, they keep trying and trying and trying, not only using the same tactic, but relying on exactly the same quote. Because, as you surely know, anyone who dares to make a factual observation is raciss. Ergo, disqualified!

When I point out that he was intentionally baiting a person of color with a term that has racial overtones, his answer sounds positively gleeful. “I’m calling her a half-savage because I know it’s going to offend the crap out of her,” Beale says. “She’s going to run around screaming ‘Racist! Racist!’ for the next 10 years.” A beat, and then he adds: “I don’t consider all black people to be half-savages. I mean, some people are. Here in Europe, for example, we have actual proper Africans, not African-Americans. This leads to problems, like people shitting on top of the closed toilets. They don’t know how to use indoor plumbing, OK? This is not civilized behavior.”

She seems to seriously believe I was making that up or something. Not so much.

Fed up with having to clean up messes in the public toilets, a Swiss railway company has come up with a series of graphic illustrations for visitors from Asia and the Middle East to instruct them how to sit on a toilet seat.

The pictograms, that have appeared on trains in the popular tourist destination of Mount Rigi in the Swiss Alps, instruct users to sit on toilet seats rather than to squat on them and to discard used toilet paper in the lavatory and not in the waste bin.

“It happens that guests mount the toilet seats to do their business – and sometimes they don’t know where to put the toilet paper,” said Roger Joss, director of marketing for the Mount Rigi railway at Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland.

The Swiss tourist board has also accused foreign tourists of defecating in the shower…. In March last year, Lloyds Bank’s Old Broad Street office in central
London also put up instructions telling foreign staff how to use the
loo, with details such as ‘sit on the toilet – do not stand on it’, and
‘please flush it with your hand and not your foot’.

Those of us who aren’t parochial Americans who have apparently never traveled outside their little white enclaves know that many immigrants really don’t abide by civilized standards. I have not only seen the above signs as well as the occasional shit left on the toilet seat, I once watched a pair of Africans spend 7 minutes carefully studying a roundabout before getting back in the car and going the wrong way, very nearly causing a head-on collision as they took out the floral arrangement in the center.

This is something we are supposed to believe is a good thing? A sustainable thing? A progressive thing? A desirable thing? How is the West going to help the rest of the world in the future if it becomes the rest of the world? Do SJWs just really enjoy train stations and restaurants that smell like shit?

As for Jemisin, I note that she is still doing exactly what I expected her to do. It’s already been, what, two years? It’s not my fault she’s an easily predictable half-savage, any more than it is my fault that the, shall we say, differently civilized find it difficult to master indoor plumbing and roundabouts.

The danger of comments

Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos observe that the mainstream media is increasingly unwilling to permit the public to talk back for fear that their lies and inept arguments will be exposed.

It’s no accident that so many of the loudest voices against online comments sections are also political zealots. Jessica Valenti, Arthur Chu, Tauriq Moosa, Anita Sarkeesian: all have come out against comment sections. This isn’t an accident, of course. Psychologists have long been aware that political extremists have the most negative reactions to contrary information. Combine that with a disdain for free speech, a core cultural authoritarian value, and you get a frantic rush to remove the opinions of ordinary people.

But there are also more sinister, elitist motivations. A study conducted by The Washington Post and USA Today found that readers who viewed articles with comments sections were more likely to develop a negative opinion of the news media. Curiously, this effect was seen even when commenters praised the article in question. In other words, when the opinions of journalists and the opinions or ordinary members of the public are placed close together, it leads readers to question the competence of the mainstream media. What horror!

Another study found that reading assertive, aggressive comments could actually sway the opinions of readers. “Don’t read the comments,” warned Ars Technica, “they can make you mistrust real experts.”

It’s a piece of advice that captures the war on comments sections perfectly. Having initially cheered on the death of the “gatekeepers of information,” cultural elites are now scrambling to reinstall those barriers. Too late, they have discovered that people don’t always agree with them – and now they want to push that disagreement into the wilderness of the internet.

As most of you are aware, I am very pro-comments and pro-talking back. And while I have had to go to a higher level of moderation of late due to an unfortunate incident or two, it’s always been my intention to return to unregistered commenting. Which I am doing so now.

However, I would strongly recommend continuing to comment with a registered name as any attempts to abuse the more open system will be met with an immediate response, which will include, but is not limited to, turning the registration requirement on for extended periods of time without warning. This is the last time that I will announce the status; in the future it will be simply turned on, or off, as the moderators and I see fit.

Free speech is important. So is complete anonymity. Respect and support that by refraining from trolling, from “just having fun”, from “making a point”, from “playing a role”, and just as importantly, from responding to the occasional troll.