“I stayed up last night… Not so much to welcome the new year, but to make sure the old one leaves…”
– Ben David, in the comments to the previous post.
Still, hope springs eternal in the human breast. 2024, here we come.
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January 1st, 2024 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
This post is reposted from a source I do not trust (Double Down News) by a person I do not trust (Dr Susan Michie, adviser to the SAGE committee and literal communist) on a topic (the Israel-Hamas war) where AI-generated fakery is rampant. Remember the six-fingered Palestinian child? Closer examination give yet more causes for doubt – the bizarrely elongated finger on the left hand of the soldier second from the left, the way that, perhaps in compensation, the right hand of the rightmost man seems to have no fingers at all. There is something wrong about the bipod of his rifle, too. The angle of the windows on the left of the picture looks off. The flame coming out of the window is too neatly defined. But what interests me is that I thought “AI-generated” before I looked closely enough to see any of that. Possibly the thing that tipped me off, if I am right at all, was that all the elements of the alleged photograph looked exposed to the same degree, when one would think that the glow of the flames would dominate. Even that form of words, which I got from my husband, is more explanatory than whatever it was that screamed “fake” to me. That said, this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer. December 30th, 2023 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Anglis adhuc mundum regit, sed id necessario OK non est. Tempus est vim suam cohibere?”, writes Michele Gazzola in the Guardian.
December 27th, 2023 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 25th, 2023 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Taking a Christmas break from my customary snarkiness, I mean this without irony. I would like to make one of those motivational posters with an inspirational quotation or slogan on it. The slogan would express an idea that I already believe strongly, only I have not yet found the best way to express it. The starting point is a slogan that has many variants, but the version I saw first and like best is:
Knowing my audience, I shall link to the demotivational version as well. It’s a quote from B.J. Novak, who was probably a ray of sunshine until he played the temp in the American version of The Office. So, the slogan for which I reach is similar to that one (the motivational version, not Novak’s), but is about acceptance rather than love. Something like:
Then what? I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure if it’s even a good idea to mention the consequences of the other person saying “no”. I suppose I could say “better to be aware they do not accept you than to be deceived by them feigning acceptance out of fear, which will probably lead to them stabbing you in the back whenever they get the chance”, but that one’s a bit of a downer to put on a poster. The point I really want to make is that true acceptance cannot be had if the person being asked to do the accepting does not have the option to say “no”. The reason I seek a more pithy way to express this sentiment than anything I have come up so far is that, as I said a few years back in a post called “To knock on the door is better than booting it in”, “Like some warrior cultures of old, the grievance culture holds getting what you want by asking or peaceably trading to be fit only for slaves. The superior person does not ask for what they want; they demand it.” This attitude is culturally dominant in both senses. I can see why this disastrous misapprehension arose. There are circumstances where the only moral course is to demand one’s just rights as rights, with not the slightest hint of pleading. But there can be no right to be accepted, just as there can be no right to be loved. December 24th, 2023 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
The word “disaster” has its origins in astrology. It means “ill-starred”. But the people killed on 21st December 1988 were not killed by bad weather, human error, or an unfortunate conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. They were murdered.
December 22nd, 2023 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The video linked to in the tweet starts with a clip of Horowitz talking to a San Francisco State University student whose back is facing us. Horowitz says,
The video then cuts to Horowitz talking straight to camera. He says,
Horowitz, who, in case anyone is unclear on this point, is not actually trying to raise money to murder Jews but to warn how commonplace support for the murder of Jews has become at American universities, proceeds to politely stop various young people who are walking along the paths in the SFSU campus and solicit their support for terrorism against Jews. There is no obfuscation about “Zionists” or “Israelis”; Horowitz says “Jews” throughout and is abundantly clear that he is talking about physical violence. In the sequence starting at 1:02 he says, “Attack, blow things up … blow shit up … all we have a rockets and suicide bombers”. The SFSU students are fine with that. I can sympathise with Rebecca Levin who said in the replies,
I, also, would really like this not to be true. It would be a good thing for Horowitz to release the full videos. Deceptive editing is on my mind right now. Remember the way that George Eaton of the New Statesman was nice as pie when he went to interview Sir Roger Scruton and then maliciously edited Scruton’s words to make it seem that Scruton believed that each Chinese person is “a sort of replica of the next one”, when what Scruton had actually said was how frightening it was that the Chinese Government was trying to force each Chinese person into being a replica of the next one? Remember how Eaton posted a picture of himself swigging champagne to celebrate how he had got Scruton fired from an unpaid government role?
Well, that same George Eaton is celebrating again now. He has just been made Senior Politics Editor of the New Statesman. Deceptive editing does happen and is no bar to a successful career in journalism. At least… not if the journalist is left wing, a protection that Mr Horowitz does not have. Like Rebecca Levin, if Mr Horowitz’s video were to be revealed to be deceptively edited, the moment of annoyance I would feel of seeing left wingers gloat at the “gotcha” would be far, far outweighed by the relief of knowing that it was not really the case that 28 out of 35 San Francisco State University students Horowitz spoke to expressed support for killing Jews and 17 out of 35 students Horowitz approached pledged money to kill Jews. But, even though I would like to see the full unedited videos, it is difficult to see how the girl with the black bag could claim to have misunderstood Horowitz when he told her at 0:36 that he was raising money to strike Jews “around the world, in France, in Germany, in Britain, wherever they are”. Conceivably he could have edited out her horrified objections to this proposed terrorism, but could he really have made her appear to say, as she does say at 1:14, “Because it’s like, part of their religion. Like, they wanted to take over”? She then pledges him $30. Given that the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, three of the top universities in the United States, found it tricky to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews was against the rules of their respective universities, I suppose we should not be surprised that San Francisco State University (“SF State prepares its students to become productive, ethical, active citizens with a global perspective”) wants to follow their lead. Is contributing money that one has been explicitly assured (0:55) will be used to blow up “cafe’s, hospitals, Jewish schools, Jewish buses, synagogues, that kind of thing” legal in the United States? Whether it is or not, is there any good reason why the anonymity of sweetie with the black bag and the others who openly put their support, and in many cases their money, down for some Jew-killing should be preserved? December 22nd, 2023 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Times reports,
(Archived here.) This was one of December 14th, 2023 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a Telegraph article ostensibly about the pro-Hamas protests, Jordan Peterson describes the emerging new system:
December 14th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just lovable Grandpa Jeremy, the one who wanted to see a “kinder, gentler politics”, having a friendly chat with a band who talk about “the Resistance” in Palestine and named themselves after the trademark form of mutilation and torture carried out by the IRA. At 3:22 Corbyn asks the lads to explain why they have joined his campaign called “Music for a ceasefire” (I’m sure that slogan will resonate with young people who go to music festivals), and the one on the right says, “It’s mad that we have to even take a stance on people being blown up”, and the guy in the knitted tricolour gimp mask nods along. * Added later: Regarding the choice of “Kneecap” as name of a hip-hop band from Belfast, commenter John said, “Presumably they will be touring universities with their South African support act The Necklaces and middle eastern special guests The Gay Free-Fallers.” December 9th, 2023 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Burge explains all:
I am confident David Burge, a.k.a. Iowahawk, will forgive me if I put the text of his tweet below in case something happens to it:
The context is that Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were all asked by New York State Representative Elise Stefanik whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment under the rules of their respective universities, and all three were, like, “Ooh, that’s a tricky one.” You can see the video of their responses in in this tweet from Nicky Clark. As reported by the Times of Israel:
Calling for genocide is OK at Harvard so long as you don’t do any actual genociding within the precincts of the University.
I would hate you to think that these illustrious universities did not care about harassment. Why, MIT has its own Institute Discrimination & Harassment Response Office, which is hard at work producing pronoun stickers. Harvard is so focussed on combatting aggressive speech that it will even investigate cases where the aggression is unconscious: “Harvard to interrogate profs accused of ‘microaggressions’”. You see, the whole point about microaggressions is that the microagressors do not know they are committing them, so they have to be educated. In contrast those who call for genocide know exactly what they are doing, so there is no need for the University to bother them. And I don’t know why everyone is making such a fuss about protests at the University of Pennsylvania. All that UPenn faculty members like Distinguished Professor of Political Science Anne Norton want is for more of its students and staff to feel “joyful and empowered” like UPenn student Tara Tarawneh did when she saw “the joyful and powerful images that came from the glorious October 7th”. See how happy and supportive everyone at that rally was. That’s because they knew Penn was a safe environment for them. December 8th, 2023 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was relieved to see this article by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian: “Whatever your view of the Israel-Hamas war, rape is rape. To trivialise it is to diminish ourselves”. At least some on the Left have not lost their humanity. Midway through the article, Ms Hinsliff wrote the following:
That point – that murdered women cannot speak – seems to have escaped “feminist” Briahna Joy Gray, who was National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. In a tweet quoted by tech writer Antonio García Martínez, she starts by saying, ‘“Believe all women” was always an absurd overreach: woman should be heard, claims should be investigated, but evidence is required. The same is true of the allegations out of Israel”‘, which would have been common sense if she had stopped there, but then she brightly adds, “But also, this isn’t a “believe women” scenario bc no female victims have offered testimony.”
Briahna’s Joy Gray’s next tweet is also… memorable. She says,
That “uncorroborated” was revealing. One eyewitness account of the rape of a woman is not enough for Briahna Joy Gray, if that witness is a man and a “Zionist”. How many such witnesses would be enough to substantiate an accusation of rape in her eyes? Four? And what did Gray mean by “*men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms.”? Judging from the two newspaper front pages she includes in her tweet, she is referring to (and casually libelling) Yoni Saadon who witnessed from hiding a woman being gang-raped and murdered on October 7th, and said how he was haunted by her face which he described as “the face of an angel”. One of the better points feminists made repeatedly over the years was that victims of rape, and victims of other violent crimes, do not always react in ways that make them the type of witness who sways juries. Sometimes they cope with the horror of what they experienced by distancing themselves from it, which makes their account come across as lacking appropriate emotion. Sometimes the opposite happens and when the time comes to give their testimony their memories come spurting out as series of flash images, vivid but unstructured. Perhaps their vocabulary choice is not as good as Briahna Joy Gray’s would be in like circumstances, which, because I don’t wish to sink to her level, I pray she never experiences. Astonishing as it may seem to her, all these factors can apply to males as well. Astonishing as it may seem to her, for a man to watch, powerless to stop it, the rape and murder of a woman is a traumatic experience. Gray has has spent years denouncing the type of juror who dismisses a woman’s testimony because of superficial factors such as these, and then turns round and says that she can deduce in mere seconds that a man is lying – and that he is a “fetishist” – because the image that stuck in his head was the horrifying contrast between the woman’s beauty and the horrible thing being done to her. December 5th, 2023 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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