Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.
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Tara Reade, the woman who accused Joe Biden of having sexually assaulted her when she worked for him as a Congressional aide, has “defected” to Russia.
I first noticed her direction of travel when I saw a tweet by her in praise of Vladlen Tatarsky. Plenty of people had concerns about his killing without gushing over him in the way she did. I cannot find that tweet now. It was there. Perhaps she deleted it when she read the replies. At any rate, she has now gone fully Putinite. And her accusation against Joe Biden should still be taken seriously by the authorities. Note that “taken seriously” does not mean “automatically believed”. #BelieveWomen is a literally prejudiced sentiment on a moral par with #BelieveWhitePeople. Nor does it mean “automatically disbelieved”. As a woman and a Putinite, Tara Reade’s report of a crime being committed against her should be taken seriously, because as an anything whatsoever anyone whatsoever should have their report of a crime taken seriously. The gross disproportion between the way the media lined up not merely to cover but to profess their unquestioning belief in Christine Blasey Ford’s unevidenced accusation of sexual assault against Justice Brett Kavanaugh yet refused to even look at Reade’s considerably more detailed accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden will never be anything other than a disgrace. May 31st, 2023 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The mainstream press is 99.9 percent captured. The “gatekeepers of the news” have become stenographers of virtually every dubious or false public health narrative. Nobody (who really matters in the Big Picture) is challenging the never-ending lies, manipulated data and false narratives. If this lack of skepticism persists, it seems almost a certainty that all the important organizations in the world will continue to be led by people who either aren’t intelligent enough to challenge false narratives or know the narratives are false and simply don’t care. May 26th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
For some reason, it turns out that if someone suggests that there is something wrong with a white family having white offspring in front of a gazillion people, you are supposed to enthusiastically nod along and pass on your congratulations. Naively, I failed to comply and recklessly set out on a voyage of light-hearted piss-taking, asking immature questions such as ‘does everything have to be viewed through the prism of race, sexuality and culture?’. Turns out the answer is: YES! And what’s more, your skin colour dictates the type of questions you’re allowed to ask. – Paul Cox, writing “You’re White – You Can’t Write About This” Local Newspaper Tells Comedian. And apropos that, the other day commenter Ferox made this remark: My view has always been (and I have argued it here on this site) that if you need to know the color (or demographic trait in general) of the speaker before you know if you are offended or not, then the hate is coming from you – not from the speaker. What you hate is not what was said but the person saying it. – Ferox, making a not unrelated point. May 24th, 2023 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
This first-person account by Jim Newell of Slate is being widely quoted: “A Brief, Concerning Conversation With Dianne Feinstein”
Senator Feinstein, who is 89, appears to have forgotten that she was in hospital with shingles for two and a half months. The left wing journalist Mehdi Hasan tweets,
He is right, but Feinstein’s is not the only photograph that could be placed below that downward-pointing finger. May 17th, 2023 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
My spellcheck pulsates in impotent frustration, but I don’t care. An Equater is a person who equates. In this context, which I get to decide because it is my post, an Equater is a person who is not content to compare something bad done by a liberal democratic government to the very much worse things done by despotic governments in order to shame the former into better behaviour, but who insists on going from comparison all the way to equation. Since the death of Her Late Majesty, there have been many occasions when the British police reverted from their recent tendency to exceed their legal powers while stamping down on those who say rude things about illegal aliens or the LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flag, in order to return to their traditional role of exceeding their legal powers while stamping down on people who say rude things about the monarchy. Or even on those who film other people saying rude things about the monarchy: in this tweet, a documentary filmmaker called Rich Felgate writes, “Yesterday I got arrested whilst filming a @JustStop_Oil supporter holding a banner on the pavement near the coronation route. I’m a filmmaker and had my @BECTU press accreditation visible around my neck. Police deemed this to be “conspiracy to commit a public nuisance”. That is bad. Dammit, it almost looks similar to what you would expect to see in a communist country. Similar, much too similar for comfort, but no one with any respect for the millions murdered by communism would say “identical”. Meet Dr Charlotte Proudman: May 8th, 2023 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Myers clearly regards Bridgen’s claim that the mRNA vaccines may be doing more harm than good to be nonsense, but in fact it is well-supported by evidence. For instance, British Medical Journal Editor Dr. Peter Doshi along with Dr. Joseph Fraiman and colleagues examined the data from the vaccine clinical trials and found that, compared to controls, the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of 10.1 events per 10,000 vaccinated for Pfizer and 15.1 events per 10,000 vaccinated for Moderna. When combined, the mRNA vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated, or 1 in 800. Note that the adverse events they looked at included those from COVID-19 itself, meaning the findings imply that among trial participants the vaccines were doing more harm than good. Similarly, Dr. Kevin Bardosh and colleagues – hailing from the Universities of Harvard, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Edinburgh and Washington, among others – found that for every COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented by boosters in previously uninfected young adults, 18 to 98 serious adverse events occurred, including 1.5 to 4.6 cases of booster-associated myocarditis in males. That’s more harm than good, at least for healthy young adults. Nice fisking, read the whole thing. May 5th, 2023 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
However, what followed was an extraordinary one-sided item. Newsnight’s presenter, Victoria Derbyshire, proceeded to hold a three-way discussion between herself, a Just Stop Oil activist, Indigo Rumbelow, and, er, Rupert Read, formerly of Extinction Rebellion. Read now leads an embryonic organisation called the Climate Majority Project, whose web page suggests it has a strikingly similar outlook to Extinction Rebellion. There were obvious questions to ask Rumbelow: namely, who do you think you are, thinking you have the right to ruin a sporting event that is enjoyed by millions, either as participants or spectators? And why target a running event, which is surely all about doing something of which you ought to approve: getting about on foot? There were questions to be asked of Extinction Rebellion, too – given that it has offered to ‘police’ the event. Are climate pressure groups now operating as a kind of protection racket, to which we are also supposed to go and negotiate before we are allowed to go about our day-to-day business? None of these questions got asked. Rather, Newsnight first ran a short video in which it asserted that ‘violence’ was being shown towards climate protesters; it illustrated this partly with a police officer doing his job and arresting a member of a mob vandalising a building with red paint. April 23rd, 2023 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I don’t know where to start. How much will the leaked information help the Russians and harm the Ukrainians? How much of it was not already common knowledge? How did Teixeira come to have access to information that neither his relatively low rank nor his role as an IT person justified him seeing? What about the role of the media? The New York Times tracked the leaker down then told the US government. Very 1950s. If this were happening in the UK, I would not dare to ask the following for fear of prosecution, but since it is happening in the US and my tiny rivulet of speculation cannot possibly make any difference to the tsunami already crossing the world: which was he, or which was he more, a leaker, a whistleblower, a patsy for someone higher up, a braggart wanting to impress people online, a hero exposing US government lies, a traitor sending Ukrainians and fellow US servicemen to their deaths? April 16th, 2023 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was going to put this into a comment on Patrick Crozier’s excellent item about Gary Lineker, the UK former footballer, and now TV show presenter (and enthusiastic Tweeter). But as the comment was chunky I am taking the liberty of putting it here. On social media I come across the argument that Lineker hosts a sports programme, not a current affairs show about politics, so he’s not causing a problem by taking heated positions on a private twitter account. There are several problems with this line of reasoning. Football these days is, alas, political. Maybe it always has been – even George Orwell disliked international games because he thought it stoked rather than reduced national ill feeling. Today, footballers have “taken the knee” over the Black Lives Matter eruptions, for example, or spoken about the Qatar World Cup and the row about maltreatment of stadium construction workers. There is a new UK government regulator of football (dealing with issues such as the finances of the game), and that is bound to be a political issue that a pundit like Lineker will want to talk about. Four years after Russia annexed Crimea, Lineker and the rest were in Russia to commentate on the World Cup of 2018. The footballing body, FIFA, was the centre of a massive corruption scandal. Brexit affected European football, such as because of the UK’s exit from the Single Market and the consequent impact on free movement and labour market contracts. And so on. Why mention all this? Because it will not do for Lineker to say his role has nothing to do with politics so it’s okay to slag off the UK government or whatever on A or B, particularly in harsh language. That is why his principal, if not sole employer – the BBC – is entitled to ask him to tone it down on social media, or at least issue some small disclaimer along the lines “my views aren’t necessarily shared by the BBC” sort. The BBC is paid for by a tax known as the licence fee. In its charter, it has to uphold impartiality as part of the bargain, although in reality this is very hard to achieve consistently (which is why I think the fee needs to go). For those who aren’t in such a role, or who have an independent income, they are freer to upset, provoke and delight anyone with equal measure. (This is also a reason why protecting savings from inflation is good precisely because it makes independent sources of income easier.) But where a certain stance comes with the day job, then a contract of employment/service is entitled to contain some form of words about certain pronouncements. For Lineker, unfortunately, the “beautiful game” is no longer just about men (now women) kicking a bag of air around. Final point: It is not as if Lineker, in condemning UK policy on illegal migrants, was adopting a particularly brave or original stance. His views are standard “liberal” boilerplate. I cannot imagine Lineker saying “Net Zero is BS”, or “All Lives Matter” or “Brussels is out of control” or “gender is not a social construct”. Go on Gary, prove me wrong. March 11th, 2023 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a bit of a kerfuffle here in England. National hero, sports presenter and self-appointed moral authority Gary Lineker reacted to government plans to reduce illegal immigration by posting a tweet which could be construed to suggest that he thought they – that’s the government not the illegal immigrants – were a bunch of Nazis. His employers – the sinister British Broadcasting Corporation – have suspended him. His colleagues have walked out in solidarity which means that today’s edition of Match of the Day – a football highlights show which Lineker presents – will be very odd indeed. Some thoughts:
March 11th, 2023 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
“What was most alarming was the alacrity with which the broadcast news media fell into line – with boundless enthusiasm – as they were given a key role in the day-to-day dissemination of government authority.” – Janet Daley, Sunday Telegraph (£). She was writing about the BBC’s conduct during the and after the lockdowns. One of the many reasons why I regard the past few years of “Conservative” government is wasted is its failure to remove the BBC licence fee, and convert the Corporation into a privately financed operation, with some of its operations broken up. The Tories just aren’t strategically minded in removing embedded Establishment sources of opposition and building the groundwork for this. (Even Margaret Thatcher never quite pulled the trigger.) March 6th, 2023 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
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