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This is pretty damn funny, in a painful and excruciating way.
But just for fun, now just imagine it was Trump, not Trudeau. It would be all you read about on the front page of every major newspaper and all you heard for a week on every single TV channel (remember them?) and radio station.
13 comments to Can you imagine what would happen if Trump did this…
Just after he was appointed Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt accidentally said that his wife was Japanese while attending a state banquet in China. She’s Chinese. Ouch. He says, and I find it quite credible, that he’d just been talking about how he had been speaking to the Chinese Foreign Minister in Japanese, which they both speak, and the sentences got mixed up in his head. Of course it was all over the papers, and in two shakes of a cat’s tail the BBC posted the article I linked to above that says what a terrible gaffe he made. Strangely they haven’t been so fast to mention this story about Justin Trudeau, who managed to mix the two countries up twice in a few seconds. I can’t see anything about it on the BBC website. It must be because Mr Trudeau has such adorably floppy hair.
“Leonard Q. Ross” (Leo Rosten) had his immigrant character Hyman Kaplan ( The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N ) refer to this sort of thing, in his thick Yiddish accent, as “a sleeping of the tong.” 😆
(Mr. Rosten taught ESL in night school for awhile in N’Yawk. If you haven’t read of Mr. Kaplan’s wondrous remarks and observations, cure your ignorance at once. I’d try eBay.)
Its just another example of the Left protecting their own, while attacking their enemies.
As a farmer I’m currently dealing with the fallout of the Chris Packham inspired withdrawal of the rights to shoot pest birds species by Natural England. So I can’t shoot pigeons eating my crops at the moment, there may be a new licence issued at some point, but I won’t hold our breath.
The point being that Chris Packham is employed by the BBC (or at least they use his programs on their network) despite having made such public comments as ‘The uneducated shouldn’t be allowed to breed’ and ‘Stop spending money on trying to cure cancer and spend it on animal welfare instead’, among many other fairly extreme statements that issue from his Aspergers inspired mono-mania about animal rights. No one says a peep about these views, and its all fine for him to grace our airwaves. Yet if a Roger Scruton or a Toby Young are up to join some government quango, all hell breaks loose about anything they may or may not have said in the past, whether something they actually said, or taken massively out of context (as with Scruton recently).
There is no shame about this double standard, they don’t have to have any because they know that anyone with any power over them fundamentally agrees with them (being of the same mindset) so there will never be any censure.
For me, this has a slight echo of the NYT cartoon thread discussion – like a parody version of a real event. The double-standard of the media on gaffes – revelatory if done by right-wingers, trivial (when not ignorable) if done by left-wingers – is the main issue here. As a diplomatic faux pas, the gaffe is not huge, but definitely a gaffe. (As against, say, Trump dumping fish food in the tank, which was following the Japanese prime minister’s lead and so not a gaffe at all.)
Some say anyone can trip over their tongue and maybe it is not evidence that Trudeau is as thick as two short planks. To debate that, we would have to distinguish what we are discussing: is it the innate stupidity of Trudeau, or how stupid he has been (willingly) taught to be by political correctness, or is it just showing the actual Trudeau is stupid relative to the flattering MSM-fiction of woke-genius Trudeau. These are three different things. The incident is indisputable evidence for the third, but disputable as evidence for the first.
And this applies even more to
This is pretty damn funny, in a painful and excruciating way.
It is funny because Trudeau so eagerly believes and exploits the MSM fiction about himself. If it happened to that lusus naturae, an honest and humble politician, it would be more painful and less funny. And if it happened to Boris, he’d likely have the sense to get in front of the joke and own it.
Jim (April 30, 2019 at 9:31 am), I’m aware of that recent and unusually spectacular (though the beeb et al may try to ensure few unaffected Britons witness the spectacle) display of incompetence mingled with malice that you mention.
If our US readers will imagine California withdrawing all current firearms licensing arrangements at 36 hours notice and announcing that new ones will be worked out at some future time, they will have a feel for the what – and the ‘what is suspected’ – of this. I’d say it will harm the Tories with core supporters but, as with Brokenshire, one does wonder if May’s supporters now feel they have nothing to lose there – and spite to vent. But “never attribute to Tory malice what can be explained by Tory incompetence” – maybe Chris Packham et al just took them.
Except for the general double-standard point Jim made, this is OT for this thread (I think – Perry can correct if he wishes) and I think should stay that way – there will be other posts (maybe someone will write a samizdata post; I’m working on others right now). But as Jim mentioned it I just wished to express my sympathy and provide minimal background to thread readers.
“remember them?” – Perry most voters still get their news from television stations, so they are hardly unimportant.
It matters that all but one of the American television stations are controlled by the left (and even the one American station that is not controlled by the left, Fox News, has leftist on its staff – such as the utterly vile Sheppard Smith). And it matters even more that every single television station in the United Kingdom is controlled by the left – thanks to “Ofcom”.
“But Social Media on the internet” – that was indeed important in 2016, it helped Donald Trump become President Trump. Hence the WAR AGAINST FREEDOM OF SPEECH on the internet – supported by Mrs May, as well as the bosses of Facebook, Twitter, (YouTube will be next) and the financial industry as well (the banks and the “payment processors” most notably MasterCard).
I used to think that the newspapers, at least in Britain, offered an alternative to the leftist control of the electronic media – but that is no longer the case.
Perry look at the endless LIES of such newspapers as the “Daily Mail” (but really ALL the newspapers – bar the Telegraph) as pretend that the sell-out surrender “deal” of Mrs May is independence from the European Union.
And it is not “just” the European Union – you know as well as I do that the British press bash Trump all the time, and (more importantly) that most of them would support Mrs Mays’s campaign to crush Freedom of Speech (one of the many things that dishonourable person agrees with the European Union on) and-so-on.
The British press (with the exception of the Telegraph) no longer offer any real alternative to the left domination of television and (increasingly) social media.
OT-From the U.S.
“I can see Russia from my house”
Of course, that bit of mockery fodder was never actually said. And you CAN see Russia from Alaska.
But…well…you know…comedy.
OTOH, The gaffe heard around the world……
“You’re the state (citing New Hampshire) where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord…”
But…well… Rep. Michele Bachmann was from (Lake Wobegon? U.S. inside joke)Minnesota, so…
I shudder to think what gets mistranslated, or worse, literally translated,in the U.N. club house.
I know what is subjected to “journalism” and simply (willfully)DIS-comprehended, by U.S. “news interpreters”, NEVER MIND the (obvious) gaffes made by the original speakers!
CaptDMO – the Corporate Media (owned by the some of the largest business organisations) regularly even butcher interviews – editing answers (or pretending that the answers were to different questions than they actually were) in order to make anti leftists seem evil.
For the bias is always the same direction – “Woke” Big Business (and the media and internet it controls) are always pushing socialism.
It is insane – capitalists pushing socialism, but it is happening. And it may well destroy civilisation.
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All the more reason not buy live broadcast TV……
Just after he was appointed Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt accidentally said that his wife was Japanese while attending a state banquet in China. She’s Chinese. Ouch. He says, and I find it quite credible, that he’d just been talking about how he had been speaking to the Chinese Foreign Minister in Japanese, which they both speak, and the sentences got mixed up in his head. Of course it was all over the papers, and in two shakes of a cat’s tail the BBC posted the article I linked to above that says what a terrible gaffe he made. Strangely they haven’t been so fast to mention this story about Justin Trudeau, who managed to mix the two countries up twice in a few seconds. I can’t see anything about it on the BBC website. It must be because Mr Trudeau has such adorably floppy hair.
I suppose it could have been worse – he could have gone into his dressing up box to deck himself out in a traditional, perhaps a samurai, outfit.
Well, they all look alike, you know. 🙄
(Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did this on purpose just to get everyone’s mind off of the SNC-Lavalin scandal for a few days.)
“Leonard Q. Ross” (Leo Rosten) had his immigrant character Hyman Kaplan ( The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N ) refer to this sort of thing, in his thick Yiddish accent, as “a sleeping of the tong.” 😆
(Mr. Rosten taught ESL in night school for awhile in N’Yawk. If you haven’t read of Mr. Kaplan’s wondrous remarks and observations, cure your ignorance at once. I’d try eBay.)
Its just another example of the Left protecting their own, while attacking their enemies.
As a farmer I’m currently dealing with the fallout of the Chris Packham inspired withdrawal of the rights to shoot pest birds species by Natural England. So I can’t shoot pigeons eating my crops at the moment, there may be a new licence issued at some point, but I won’t hold our breath.
The point being that Chris Packham is employed by the BBC (or at least they use his programs on their network) despite having made such public comments as ‘The uneducated shouldn’t be allowed to breed’ and ‘Stop spending money on trying to cure cancer and spend it on animal welfare instead’, among many other fairly extreme statements that issue from his Aspergers inspired mono-mania about animal rights. No one says a peep about these views, and its all fine for him to grace our airwaves. Yet if a Roger Scruton or a Toby Young are up to join some government quango, all hell breaks loose about anything they may or may not have said in the past, whether something they actually said, or taken massively out of context (as with Scruton recently).
There is no shame about this double standard, they don’t have to have any because they know that anyone with any power over them fundamentally agrees with them (being of the same mindset) so there will never be any censure.
Correction — Mr. Rosten taught at a settlement house in Chicago, not New York.
For me, this has a slight echo of the NYT cartoon thread discussion – like a parody version of a real event. The double-standard of the media on gaffes – revelatory if done by right-wingers, trivial (when not ignorable) if done by left-wingers – is the main issue here. As a diplomatic faux pas, the gaffe is not huge, but definitely a gaffe. (As against, say, Trump dumping fish food in the tank, which was following the Japanese prime minister’s lead and so not a gaffe at all.)
Some say anyone can trip over their tongue and maybe it is not evidence that Trudeau is as thick as two short planks. To debate that, we would have to distinguish what we are discussing: is it the innate stupidity of Trudeau, or how stupid he has been (willingly) taught to be by political correctness, or is it just showing the actual Trudeau is stupid relative to the flattering MSM-fiction of woke-genius Trudeau. These are three different things. The incident is indisputable evidence for the third, but disputable as evidence for the first.
And this applies even more to
It is funny because Trudeau so eagerly believes and exploits the MSM fiction about himself. If it happened to that lusus naturae, an honest and humble politician, it would be more painful and less funny. And if it happened to Boris, he’d likely have the sense to get in front of the joke and own it.
Jim (April 30, 2019 at 9:31 am), I’m aware of that recent and unusually spectacular (though the beeb et al may try to ensure few unaffected Britons witness the spectacle) display of incompetence mingled with malice that you mention.
If our US readers will imagine California withdrawing all current firearms licensing arrangements at 36 hours notice and announcing that new ones will be worked out at some future time, they will have a feel for the what – and the ‘what is suspected’ – of this. I’d say it will harm the Tories with core supporters but, as with Brokenshire, one does wonder if May’s supporters now feel they have nothing to lose there – and spite to vent. But “never attribute to Tory malice what can be explained by Tory incompetence” – maybe Chris Packham et al just took them.
Except for the general double-standard point Jim made, this is OT for this thread (I think – Perry can correct if he wishes) and I think should stay that way – there will be other posts (maybe someone will write a samizdata post; I’m working on others right now). But as Jim mentioned it I just wished to express my sympathy and provide minimal background to thread readers.
“remember them?” – Perry most voters still get their news from television stations, so they are hardly unimportant.
It matters that all but one of the American television stations are controlled by the left (and even the one American station that is not controlled by the left, Fox News, has leftist on its staff – such as the utterly vile Sheppard Smith). And it matters even more that every single television station in the United Kingdom is controlled by the left – thanks to “Ofcom”.
“But Social Media on the internet” – that was indeed important in 2016, it helped Donald Trump become President Trump. Hence the WAR AGAINST FREEDOM OF SPEECH on the internet – supported by Mrs May, as well as the bosses of Facebook, Twitter, (YouTube will be next) and the financial industry as well (the banks and the “payment processors” most notably MasterCard).
I used to think that the newspapers, at least in Britain, offered an alternative to the leftist control of the electronic media – but that is no longer the case.
Perry look at the endless LIES of such newspapers as the “Daily Mail” (but really ALL the newspapers – bar the Telegraph) as pretend that the sell-out surrender “deal” of Mrs May is independence from the European Union.
And it is not “just” the European Union – you know as well as I do that the British press bash Trump all the time, and (more importantly) that most of them would support Mrs Mays’s campaign to crush Freedom of Speech (one of the many things that dishonourable person agrees with the European Union on) and-so-on.
The British press (with the exception of the Telegraph) no longer offer any real alternative to the left domination of television and (increasingly) social media.
OT-From the U.S.
“I can see Russia from my house”
Of course, that bit of mockery fodder was never actually said. And you CAN see Russia from Alaska.
But…well…you know…comedy.
OTOH, The gaffe heard around the world……
“You’re the state (citing New Hampshire) where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord…”
But…well… Rep. Michele Bachmann was from (Lake Wobegon? U.S. inside joke)Minnesota, so…
I shudder to think what gets mistranslated, or worse, literally translated,in the U.N. club house.
I know what is subjected to “journalism” and simply (willfully)DIS-comprehended, by U.S. “news interpreters”, NEVER MIND the (obvious) gaffes made by the original speakers!
He didn’t say China he said Covfefe.
CaptDMO – the Corporate Media (owned by the some of the largest business organisations) regularly even butcher interviews – editing answers (or pretending that the answers were to different questions than they actually were) in order to make anti leftists seem evil.
For the bias is always the same direction – “Woke” Big Business (and the media and internet it controls) are always pushing socialism.
It is insane – capitalists pushing socialism, but it is happening. And it may well destroy civilisation.