WILFORD BRIMLEY VOICE: WONDERFUL THING, SUBPEENEES TARIFFS. Facing a Monday deadline to avoid tariffs, the Mexican government froze the bank accounts of the human traffickers of illegal aliens to the USA.
Archive for 2019
June 6, 2019
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Madonna Feels ‘Raped’ by Profile in NYT, ‘One of the Founding Fathers of the Patriarchy.’
The New York Times, founding father of the patriarchy? Forget it, she’s rolling.
OPEN THREAD: Go for it.
THE COMING WAR: Tech Giants Amass a Lobbying Army for an Epic Washington Battle. “Faced with the growing possibility of antitrust actions and legislation to curb their power, four of the biggest technology companies are amassing an army of lobbyists as they prepare for what could be an epic fight over their futures.”
Weird, just a week or so after my book came out.
BRUCE WON’T LIKE THIS PIECE BY KYLE SMITH: Bruce Springsteen, Accidental Patriot: How Bruce Springsteen helped reelect Ronald Reagan. “With the album’s release, the flag became the star image of the summer of 1984. Back then, hit LPs were a kind of American wallpaper: You’d see them everywhere. Everyone spent a lot of time in malls, all of the malls had record stores, and all of the record stores displayed their best-selling and most eye-catching albums. Sticking in the top ten all summer, Born in the U.S.A., featuring Springsteen’s white T-shirt and blue jeans in front of the flag’s stripes, was emblazoned on America’s retina. It was an unintended gift to Reagan’s reelection campaign. It helped make America feel good about itself, even great about itself. When, that August, America dominated in the Los Angeles Summer Games that were being boycotted by the Soviet Union and its lackeys, it was the most patriotic moment since the moon landing. For good measure, the hit movie at the time was Red Dawn. Reagan’s landslide was assured before election season even kicked off after Labor Day.”
Related (From Ed): ‘Born In the USA’ Now Fits The Conservative Message.
It’s a trenchant commentary on the failures of the Great Society and radical environmentalism.
CLOWN SHOW: Key figure that Mueller report linked to Russia was a State Department intel source. “Why special counsel Robert Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from their report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.”
LEFTIST POLITICAL VIOLENCE: VIDEO: Masked bandit tries to chain U. Washington College Republicans in room. “On Monday, a man allegedly affiliated with Antifa attempted to chain members of the University of Washington College Republicans into a room, but was chased off before he could complete the job. According to mynorthwest.com, suspect Ezra Benner ended up ‘failing miserably’ at his task.”
He should be charged with political terrorism. But don’t worry, future journalists of America have already learned their trade: “Claudia Yaw of the UW student paper The Daily took a rather interesting angle on the incident: She actually managed to turn the College Republicans into the aggressors.”
NO, MAYBE A BIT DISAPPOINTED. If We Told You Neal Stephenson Invented Bitcoin, Would You Be Surprised?
DON’T GET COCKY: Biden Beating Trump in Texas? We’ve Heard This Story Before.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: YouTube Punishes Lots of People Not Named Steven Crowder.
It’s an insufficient punishment, because Crowder and his employees can still make a living. They must be silenced. Carlos Maza must have his revenge for this grievous wound to his ego, or else #HateWins.
And now that Maza has set the house on fire because he didn’t like the drapes, he’s utterly baffled that he can’t control the spreading destruction. Now a lot of other people’s YouTube channels are being disrupted as well.
Related: Here’s how Carlos Maza answers when asked how he’d react if someone hit him with a milkshake.
As Twitchy asked earlier, does Maza’s tweet encouraging the public to “milkshake” the far-right and “humiliate them at every turn” until they “dread public organizing” run up against Twitter’s new rules? It certainly sounds like “the glorification of violence,” which is a no-no.
So veteran pollster Frank Luntz asked Maza:
The response didn’t take long:
Well, that’s not Stalinist at all.
Exit Question: How Should Facebook (and Twitter, and YouTube, and…) Decide What Speech To Allow?
TOXIC MASCULINITY UPDATE: 4 Oklahoma teens rush into burning home to rescue their 90-year-old neighbor.
ALSO, NO ONE IS STARVING IN THE UKRAINE: New York Times top editor: ‘We are in no way anti-Trump.’
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Professor Is Accused of Creating a ‘Hostile Learning Environment’ for Assigning Too Many Male Authors.
AT AMAZON, save on Major Appliances.
OLD AND BUSTED: When it Comes to WWII, Document Everything, and Never Forget.
The New Hotness? YouTube Pulls Triumph of the Will For Violating Hate Speech Policy, left-leaning film industry Website IndieWire reports:
On Wednesday YouTube revealed extensive new policies around hate speech in a move to “reduce more hateful and supremacist content from YouTube,” as the company announced in a blog post.
The policy also meant the removal of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda epic “Triumph of the Will,” which left the site hours after YouTube announced its new standards. After all, “Triumph of the Will” falls under the rubric of “videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory,” as YouTube explains one prohibited category. The movie is also regarded as one with major historical value, raising essential questions about the nature of the film medium. Does it belong in the same category as Lunikoff, a German Neo-Nazi band whose channel also got the boot?
Riefenstahl’s harrowing depiction of the Nuremberg Rallies remains an essential look at the ideological power of the moving image, and how it can be co-opted on a mass scale. Despite the film’s aims, it has been taught in universities for decades — and not because film professors hope to advance the horrific mindset of the Third Reich. The movie uses the singular power of the medium to glorify Adolf Hitler in visceral terms: From the moment the filmmaker’s camera advances through the clouds, tracking Hitler’s descent to the rising crescendo of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” it elevates the rising dictator to god-like stature. Similarly, montages of soldiers saluting their leader — and, later, children in a Hitler Youth parade — illustrate the capacity of the Third Reich to convey the deranged euphoria of subservience.
A few paragraphs down, the moral equivalence begins:
As a matter of pure formalism, the movie exists on the same continuum as Sergei Eistenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” in its capacity to galvanize a sense of national pride through the language of film. However, that deeper understanding is essential when considering these films; without it, their capacity to enchant continues to grow unchecked. North Korean media cranks out its own variations of “Triumph of the Will” on a regular basis; Fox News, in its lowest moments, has been guilty of similar charges.
Is that you, Ted Turner? Everybody has been declared guilty of similar charges. I remember a profile in the sports section of a Philadelphia paper on Cherry Hill, NJ-based NFL Films around the mid-1980s, which described their dazzling slow-motion telephoto footage of football plays and their hagiographic profiles of NFL players as being akin to Riefenstahl’s filmmaking techniques. But I missed the memo when Roger Ailes approved of mass murder. Indeed, during his reign, the network ran programming explicitly condemning revolutionary socialism in all its forms.
As Glenn wrote in timely new book, The Social Media Upheaval:
In bragging about how he manipulated the political news media, Obama foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes described them this way: “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Knowing nothing makes you easy to manipulate. Lack of relevant life experience makes you easy to manipulate. So maybe people should know more?
It’s an idea so crazy, it just might work — not least of which, for those who wish to become future curators of YouTube, wishing to avoid repeating history.
EXPENSE, AND IGNORANCE: Buildings Can Be Designed to Withstand Earthquakes. Why Doesn’t the U.S. Build More of Them?
Also, we tend to relax building codes when there hasn’t been a disaster recently, as my colleague Greg Stein has noted.
FLASHBACK: Reagan at Normandy — Americans Need to Recover the Art of the Noble Speech. I dunno, what about Trump’s inaugural address?
MADONNA AT 60: Still blaming the patriarchy.