Category: Media Assholes

Not The Same Old

Media Assholes

All this might have made a difference to me, were it not for the fact that other than the occasional Victor Davis Hanson piece, I haven’t read anything in National Review   for nearly ten years.

Audio recordings obtained by Wired reveal that Google cooperates with and funds a range of establishment conservatives in D.C. that help it fend off scrutiny and oversight from politicians. The organizations named in Wired’s report are the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the Cato Institute.
…
It looks like conservative mag National Review was taking Google cash too. To suppress conservative speech on social media. Was this something that @NRO donors & contributors knew was taking place?

I had to laugh that the once-amusing and now-hysterical Jonah Goldberg sat in the heart of all this.

But Emerald’s best shot comes near the end:

In any culture war, Rich Lowry and the gang have always been the first to stand athwart history, crying: “We surrender first!” They’ve been so weak and defeatist during the Trump years that a year’s subscription to the magazine could be marketed as an estrogen supplement.

And the proof of our disillusionment with this bunch of pantywaists lies in NatRev‘s  financial statement and vanishing subscriber list.

And an aside:  as usual, I am so far behind the curve that it appears as flat as the horizon, because I’d never heard of Emerald Robinson before the above link from Insty (thankee, Squire).  Here she is:

…and here’s something she did.

Cuts Both Ways, Assholes

Media Assholes, Politics, Resistance, Two-Minute Hate

Apparently, we conservatives are Beyond The Pale.  Saith Jennifer Rubin:

There is no way to “understand” MAGA voters, nor is there is any possibility of reaching political agreement with them. They are beyond the bounds of rational political debate.

Hey, Jen:  substitute “socialist voters” for “MAGA voters”, and you’ll have an idea of what we think of you lot.  The only thing you need to understand about us is that we hate your putrid political philosophy and your criminal voting practices.

And then some other Lenin-lickspittle chimes in with:

There is no longer any reason to try to “understand” these people. Nor should there be any compunction about doing whatever we can to read them out of American politics…

…by any means available, you mean?

Noted.

Reading Stuff

Media Assholes

You know what I miss?  Reading newspapers and periodicals.  And one of the things the Brits do better than we do is this:

When I was the house guest at Free Market Towers, the first great pleasure of the day was not that first cup of coffee — at least, not altogether the first — it was the opportunity of reading an actual (dead tree) newspaper, great huge sheets of newsprint crammed with articles, essays, news and all sorts of stuff which could satisfy a polymath like me, learning all sorts of unlikely things that I wouldn’t ordinarily glance at.  But there, pint mug of coffee in hand, was the Daily Telegraph  which has somehow managed not to become  a complete waste of paper like so many others, e.g.  New York Times and Chicago Tribune, to name but two.

Back when I lived in the Chicago ‘burbs and caught the 5:30am train into the Loop each morning, I’d stop at the little kiosk at the Arlington Heights Metra station, buy a donut, cup of coffee and the Tribune ;  and let me tell you, the 90-minute journey into town took no time at all, because the Trib back in those days was not the Lefty rag it is today, boasting as it did wonderful writers like the late Mike Royko.

Which leads me to my next point.  For an old fart like me, who likes holding paper (whether newspaper or a book) to read, what the hell am I supposed to do?  There’s not a single U.S. newspaper worth the paper it’s printed on — go on, name me one, I challenge you — so even if we did have a corner newsagent like the one in the pic, there would be absolutely no point in calling on one unless it was to stoke my already-high morning irritation level up to boiling point.

And I’m quite aware that some of the smaller local newspapers are pretty good, but I don’t want a suburban newspaper:  I want a nice big fat city newspaper whose “World News” section isn’t just Associated Press feeds or cribs of CNN.  I want London’s Sunday Times  (just for its peerless Business & Economics section) and the Daily Telegraph, tailored for the U.S.

I don’t want to get my news online anymore;  mostly, it’s complete bullshit and clearly aimed for people with the attention span of mayflies.  Just when I’m getting interested in a topic, it ends with some trite sign-off from the writer, as though a topic actually worth about a thousand words is only given two hundred.  (I don’t know if that’s the fault of the Editor — always trying to pander to the aforesaid mayflies — or of the journalist, for whom a 1,000-word article would be beyond his writing capability and might require [gasp]  both a grasp of the topic and some journalistic research to reach that target length.)

I feel like my reading ability is being stifled, and it’s deteriorating;  and I don’t know what to do about it.

Fighting Wokedom

Media Assholes

Here’s the story of the film so far.  (Have the barf bag ready, because it involves some fairly horrible characters.)

  • Duchess Caringslut appears on Oprah and says a whole bunch of ugly stuff about the British Royal Family (I know, I know, who cares, but stay with me for a moment).
  • Gasbag TV host Piers Morgan (a.k.a. the Worst Living Englishman) calls Caringslut out and says he doesn’t believe a word she said.
  • Morgan loses his job on TV breakfast show (quit, fired, whatever).
  • On some other crappy TV show, Ozzy’s wife Sharon (as though she doesn’t have enough problems) stands up for Morgan’s right to bloviate.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Morgan got in trouble not because of his skepticism, but because he dared to say it about a (semi-) Person Of Color, i.e. Caringslut, who is also A Womyn and is therefore privileged because #BelieveAllWomen #BlackLivesMatter #EndRacismNow.  So by standing up for Morgan’s right to cast doubt upon Her Sainted Narrative, Sharon is threatened with termination from her (clearly lucrative) job on the stupid TV show in which she appears.

That’s the background.  Now for the fun part.

Sharon Osbourne is one of the toughest women in the world — I mean, married to Ozzy The Prince Of Darkness for four decades, Q.E.D.  So threatening Sharon’s livelihood is like poking a black mamba with a short stick:  fraught with peril for not much gain.

So what does Sharon do?  This:

Sharon Osbourne retains powerhouse LA law firm Eisner as she ‘demands millions’ to leave The Talk amid dispute over her defense of Piers Morgan

What she has done is put a price on wokedom — because at the end of it all, this is what the whole thing is about — and has shown that the best way to combat this bullshit is to make it really expensive to indulge in it.

Ditto, by the way, for state legislatures to withhold funding from public universities who trample all over their students’ civil rights just for being conservative, for example.

But the Caringslut / Piers Morgan / Sharon Osbourne thing is a lot more entertaining.  Even if they are all just a bunch of loathsome media assholes.

Postscript:  As it happens, Duchess Caringslut did tell at least one (so far) palpable lie to Oprah:  she claimed that she’d married Prince Ginger No-Nuts a few days before the actual Royal Wedding, when that wasn’t the case at all.  So on the principle that even a blind pig can find the occasional truffle, Piers Morgan was at least partially correct in his disbelief.  The first time he’s been right about anything in years.

Much Ado Etc.

Marxists, Media Assholes

Predictably, the Left has gone batshit-crazy after last week’s fun and games in Washington D.C. — I know, I shouldn’t call it “fun and games” when someone died, but in the grand scheme of things, I think that was accidental and not an essential part of the real story.

It’s also deeply ironic that after a year of rioting and whole city centers set ablaze, all either actively or tacitly supported by the left, that a single large protest by conservatives has become somehow worse than Kristallnacht  and the result of Trump calling for a seditious overthrow of the U.S. government, to name but two examples of the overheated Leftist rhetoric we’re now seeing.

Whenever someone supported by the Left does something stupid, the Left is all about “finding the root causes of the discontent”, or else categorizing it as justified because of some (often imaginary) injustice.  So I’m going to apply the same principle here.

Trump was voted out of office not by a popular vote, but by electoral fraud.  That’s not rhetoric or an untruth, it is a fact.  So when Trump called on his supporters to fill the streets of D.C. and “peacefully protest” (his exact words) this miscarriage of our electoral process, it should have come as no surprise that the people who gave him over seventy million (legal) votes felt as aggrieved as he was (and is), and did exactly what he called for.

That some people got carried away is inexcusable, yet quite understandable.  Let us never forget that the protest vote in D.C. was “largely peaceful” (to use the Left’s own excuse for a riot) and in fact overwhelmingly peaceful — there were hundreds of thousands of people there, and if we can agree that in any crowd, ten percent of them are going to be assholes, what’s amazing is that so few of them stormed the Capitol and sat behind Nancy Pelosi’s desk, thus “desecrating” the seat of government.

All this other talk about invoking the 25th Amendment and / or impeaching Trump to remove him from office stat  is all smoke and nonsense, given that he has but three or so weeks left in office anyway, and — this is important — under the terms of the Constitution, you cannot impeach a former President.

So fuck ’em, and the fraudulent horse they rode in on.

We didn’t start the hatred, by the way;  de-personalization and demonization of the opposition has always been part and parcel of the Left’s toolkit in their drive to power.  But now that we’re in this place, our hatred for these Marxist cocksuckers is not going to die away just because they’re asking us to stop.  If anything, the rancor and hatred is only going to increase, especially when the Left starts carrying out all the actions they’ve threatened us with.