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Ian Birrell in the Mail on Sunday asks,
October 3rd, 2021 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you count yet again a stack of ballots, some valid but others not, what number do you get? The same as before, of course. I foresaw from the moment the Arizona audit was scheduled that the first trivial task of the auditors would be merely to count all the ballots and observe the same 10,000-odd lead for Biden as before – after all, they could hardly count the votes that went missing before reaching the count in the first place*. The point of the audit was to see whether any of the ballots that were counted were demonstrably unsafe. The media likewise foresaw these things. And both I and the media foresaw that even after all the vigorous non-cooperation of Maricopa county election officials and others, the auditors might still find more than 10,000 unsafe ballots (several times more in the event). So I foresaw the media would have a story prepared for dismissing this. (As David Burge remarked, modern journalism is about covering important stories – “with a pillow; till they stop moving”.) What I did not foresee with quite the crystal clarity that it has this morning, is that their prepared story would be to treat the utterly predictable fact of the combined safe and unsafe ballots totalling to the same numbers as before as news. And I feel slow for not foreseeing how inevitably they would do that. After all, if your long-prepared headline is “Arizona audit confirms Biden win”, what else could you write beneath it? The modern meaning of prevent makes amusingly unfortunate the over-literal translation of the old prayer, “O Lord, prevent us in all our doings”, as if Jesus’ job, like that of a modern mask Karen, was to rush around spotting anyone planning to have fun, so as to stop them before fun could even start. When it comes to our joyless media, however, I think we need to be better at preventing them (old sense – and then modern if, as so often, their plan is to lie, cheat and steal their way into power over us). P.S. (FYI, Internet Health Warning) All the other links in my post above have always behaved normally for me. September 25th, 2021 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
“YouTube suspends Rand Paul for a week over a video disputing the effectiveness of masks”, reports the New York Times. I have no strong opinion on the question, but Senator Rand Paul is also Doctor Rand Paul, so his medical opinion holds some weight. This post on Rumble takes you to the video that got him banned: “It Is Time For Unfiltered News” As Glenn Greenwald points out,
YouTube and Facebook* play a merry game. On April 16 2020, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity”, posted “An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19”. That post is as good as a soap opera; the writers are always adding new and dramatic plot twists. On February 8, 2021 at 10:00AM PT, they announced that claims that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured” would be removed. On May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT, they said, “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.” In like spirit, Dr Paul is doing no more than returning to the medical orthodoxy before last. From the Independent, Thursday 12 March 2020:
*I initially mistyped that as Facesbook, and my spellchecker, set, of course, to British spellings, suggested an amusing alternative. August 11th, 2021 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of these links will take you to an article in today’s Times by David Charter: “Texas stops teaching that Ku Klux Klan was morally wrong” “Texas stops teaching that Ku Klux Klan was morally wrong” “Texas stops teaching that Ku Klux Klan was morally wrong” “Texas stops teaching that Ku Klux Klan was morally wrong” Which link is it? It doesn’t matter*. You all guessed right. You had no need to actually read the article to predict with a high degree of accuracy what it would say. You had no need of a Times subscription to know that whatever Texas was doing would turn out to be something far less dramatic than the headline suggests. I am not going to quote the article even now. Do not feel deprived. As I find increasingly often these days, the readers’ comments are better than the stuff above the line. A commenter called Dick Marlow says,
But you already knew it would turn out be something like that. Why do they do this? I cannot even say that a clickbait headline lets down a respectable article, since the unknown subeditor has merely re-phrased Mr Charter’s very first line. The Times used to be better than this. David Charter has been known to be better than this. It’s not like they’re fooling anyone: there is a veritable flood of comments saying, no, the Texas Department of Education has not decided to take a neutral position on whether the Klan was a Bad Thing. What is the payoff for producing such obviously counter-productive propaganda? *The important question, and the one to which you will not find the answer by hovering your mouse over the link, is which of them takes you to the cute video of a sloth in a boat. July 21st, 2021 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Facebook axes team over far-right data”, says the Times.
A commenter called LucasTheCat gave me the title for this post when they responded, “This is strange for two reasons – none of the commentators listed are what I would consider to be ‘far right’ and isn’t removing the report – the same as taking the weather report out of your paper – because you don’t like the weather – or am I missing something?” By the way, the idea that Nick Clegg was released on the world deliberately is a fringe conspiracy theory that Facebook has rightly banned. The current theory is that he was accidentally leaked from an insufficiently secured British political system. July 16th, 2021 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hat tip to commenter Shlomo Maistre for this link to an important piece by Darryl Cooper, published by Glenn Greenwald on his Substack site. Who are these people? And what does “apodictic” mean? “Apodictic” means “clearly established or beyond dispute”. I first read it as “apocalyptic” and honestly that word would have worked as a political metaphor. For a worldview of basic trust in American institutions that has has held sway for more than a century, these are the end times. Glenn Greenwald is a left wing independent journalist and blogger. He first came to my attention circa 2003 when he was against the Iraq war when I and most of the people I followed were for it. To be frank the main reason I remembered his name was a silly incident when he got caught out bigging up his own reputation under a different name. That was nearly twenty years ago. I now say without irony that he is one of the journalists I most admire in the world. He used to work for the Guardian, but wanted more independence so he resigned from there in 2013 to join with two other people and found a news outlet called the Intercept. Then when the Intercept tried to stop him writing about the Hunter Biden laptop story he resigned from there and went over to Substack. Greenwald is wrong about many things. But he is that strange, old-fashioned type of person, a reporter who won’t shut up for the good of the Party. Darryl Cooper, who goes by the Twitter handle of “MartyrMade”, is a podcast host who thought he had given up Twitter. Then he got talking to a friend’s mother about Trump and the US election, and decided to crystallise the conversation in a series of thirty-five tweets that went viral. Fox News host Tucker Carlson read out most of the sequence on air. Donald Trump mentioned him by name. His current article, the one this post is about, is that Twitter thread all in one place. Here it is: Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking. Reading this from another country, I want to home in on one thing. There is much about the whole Trump phenomenon starting from his election in 2016 and ending four years later that I do not understand. I do not know the truth of every claim and counter-claim. But, like MartyrMade, I do know one thing with apodictic, apocalyptic certainty. If they – Twitter and Facebook and the Democrat-supporting media, which is most of the media in the English-speaking world including the UK, and the FBI and the CIA, who the media used to boast of holding to account but are now their bosom friends – did find evidence of election fraud, they would not tell us. They would lie and censor just like they did about the contents of Hunter’s laptop. That knowledge is not in itself proof that fraud did occur. But every belief about the world is buttressed by the unspoken certainty that if something turned up to contradict it, we would be told. When that buttress is kicked away one starts to wonder about a lot of previously unquestioned beliefs. Edit: Great minds think alike. Unknown to me, while I was typing out this post my Illuminated colleague was posting the video of Tucker Carlson reading out Darryl Cooper’s thread. July 15th, 2021 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
The above is a quote from a Times article with the title
There is more, but I have quoted the part relevant to what I want to say in this post. Almost every comment to the Times piece (those that have not been replaced with the phrase “This comment violated our policy”) sneers at the evasion. Journalists, please stop doing this “motives unclear” thing. It dos not decrease hostility towards Muslims, it increases it. They have been playing this stupid game for a long time. I often find it illuminating to link back to old Samizdata posts that share a common theme with whatever I am posting about now. Here is one from 2011: “Two contrasting articles by Michael Tomasky on spree killers”. It feels like yesterday. For one mass-murderer Mr Tomasky wrote,
For the other,
and
June 26th, 2021 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thus says the BBC’s China correspondent in a story linked from the BBC’s front page today. When Trump raised it, it was poisonous disinformation. Now Biden is raising it, the BBC is treating it with more respect. What the Bashir story revealed about how far the BBC would go should not have surprised me – but did. By contrast, the only surprising thing about this revelation is that they admit it. (So give a little credit where a very little credit is due. Others in the MSM will pretend that “new evidence now indicates what only an absurdist like Trump would believe last year”, or take the even easier line, already much used with masks, of silently implying that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.) Meanwhile, of course, ‘our’ BBC will continue to insist that just because they forge bank statements to pretend their fake news is true, that doesn’t mean that we can forge bank statements to pretend we’ve paid their licence fee. And while the beeb take the lab-leak theory seriously now that Biden does, I think that even if Biden were to come out with another gaffe-boast about having
the BBC would not become a jot less derisive of Trump’s theory about that. No experience of the failure of their reporting seems to shake the BBC’s faith in its essential excellence. May 27th, 2021 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Who reads the Daily Mail?” asks Ed West in Unherd.
May 5th, 2021 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
On the evening of the 22nd March, visitors to the main UK politics subreddit, /r/ukpolitics found a mysterious message saying that the subreddit, which has nearly 400,000 members, had been set to “private” by its own volunteer moderators. It was the beginning of a cascade. The lights are going off all over Reddit! Subreddit after subreddit was set to private in sympathy with /r/ukpolitics. Most of them dealt with topics unrelated to politics. At its peak the wave of protest closures affected subreddits collectively having tens of millions of members all over the world. To understand why this protest against Reddit by its own users gained such traction, we need to go back to the 8th of March when the Spectator published an article by its unlikeliest new writer, the radical left wing “gender critical” feminist Julie Bindel, called “The Green party’s woman problem”. It contained the lines,
That brief reference to “the Aimee Challenor case” was to have dramatic consequences. A hyperlink on the word “case” linked in turn to this Independent article dated 13 January 2019: Having parted ways with the Greens, Aimee Challenor joined the Liberal Democrats. Once again her association with the party ended as a result of child safeguarding issues related to someone with whom she lived. This time it was her fiancé Nathaniel Knight. He claims his twitter account was hacked. A point to note: these events were widely reported. Given a prompt about a person who had left both the Greens and the Lib Dems under a cloud, anyone who follows UK political news would probably be able to dig up her name in half a dozen keystrokes. Getting back to the main story, at about quarter to eleven on the morning of the 23rd, the ukpolitics subreddit reappeared. It now carried the following announcement: March 26th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today’s Daily Mail: The Mail’s Keith Griffith writes,
and
If you want to follow Mr Biden’s own advice and compare Trump to Biden on Trip Advisor, the indefatigable New York Post is one of the few US papers with clips of both. March 19th, 2021 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Second translator of Amanda Gorman’s Joe Biden inauguration poem dumped”, reports the Times.
How many African-Americans speak Catalan – at all, let alone to the level required of a professional translator? How many Americans speak Catalan? Most translation agencies insist that their translators work into their native tongue because it is very rare for anyone to gain a command of a second language equal to that of their first. Why do Ms Gorman’s US agents value the nationality of their translator above their having Catalan as their mother tongue? Even if we assume that the only reason Gorman’s agents specified “African-American” was that they have set their autocorrect with that as the replacement for “black”, there still cannot be many people who fulfil all those criteria. There are not many black Catalans. Experienced translators of any race are not likely to be young.
March 13th, 2021 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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