THE COUNTERPROTESTS BEGIN: Back the Blue rallies being held in different counties around the United States.
Archive for 2020
June 29, 2020
NO, SHE’S MERELY EXPOSING IT. Media fret: Kayleigh McEnany undermining journalism ‘credibility.’
In the Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Grueskin rapped McEnany for her tactics…His top complaint seems to be McEnany’s criticism of the media, a tactic he said she uses to pivot from questions she doesn’t like.
“Gamblers would call such an episode ‘the tell.’ McEnany demonstrated that her goal isn’t to respond directly to these questions, or even to engage in a dialogue about journalistic ethics. It is to throw up so much chaff into the media’s radar that even the most basic critique is deprived of meaning,” huffed the professor.
I’m so old, I can remember when leftists approved of deconstructionism.
OPEN THREAD: So did you get get everything you wanted?
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Seattle mayor who defended CHOP is outraged after protesters showed up at her home.
She thought they would only invade her constituents’ property — but protesting at an official’s house is straight out of Saul Alinsky’s playbook.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE CORONA KIND: Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveils ‘COVID Mountain’ prop at press conference, outdoes brother’s giant Q-Tip.
Exit quote: “This mountain represents so much death and suffering it is so bizarre to see Cuomo performing a celebratory showman’s lap.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ The Man Dies, but the Radical Chic Remains.
What is radical chic?
“Radical chic” is a term coined by journalist Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” to describe the adoption and promotion of radical political causes by celebrities, socialites, and high society. In languages such as American English, French and Italian the term has become widely used to indicate people identifying themselves as socialists or radical leftists while conducting upper-class lifestyles.
Unlike dedicated activists, revolutionaries, or dissenters, those who engage in “radical chic” remain frivolous political agitators—ideologically invested in their cause of choice only so far as it advances their social standing.
The concept has been described as “an exercise in double-tracking one’s public image: on the one hand, defining oneself through committed allegiance to a radical cause, but on the other, vitally, demonstrating this allegiance because it is the fashionable, au courant way to be seen in moneyed, name-conscious Society.”
The adulation of the rich provided 20th-century radicals the chance to become not merely heroes of the masses but icons of style. People may not remember him now, but Carlos the Jackal was quite the international celebrity. Nine books, some fictional, featured Carlos as a character, including one by Tom Clancy. That’s in addition to ten movies. Even after being captured, Carlos had no shortage of admirers.
Read the whole thing. I can’t wait until I get unplugged from 2020’s version of the Matrix, because I’m convinced that our current simulacrum was entirely programmed by Tom Wolfe shortly before his death in 2018.
SURE, OF COURSE, IT’S 2020: ‘Pandemic potential’: New swine flu strain discovered in China.
NONSENSE. THE MAYOR ASSURES ME IT’S THE SUMMER OF LOVE THERE: Seattle police chief rips CHOP shootings, violence: ‘Absolutely irresponsible.’
They’re even Biden donors! Somebody needs to ask Joe for an opinion.
Media spin: CHOP/CHAZ, which keeps actually shooting unarmed black men (and boys of 14) is “mostly peaceful.” White Democrat couple that defends its home without shooting anyone: Violent racists!
Plus, the campaign ads write themselves:
UPDATE: A friend on Facebook observes that although the wife clearly knows nothing about guns, she armed up and stood by her man. You could do worse — though please, go take some lessons now.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Oops, reportedly Benny Johnson has the wrong Mark McCloskey. The correct one is a Trump donor, though he seems to have donated to Democrats too.
THE RUBBER CHICKEN CIRCUIT WAS A FIGURE OF SPEECH – UNTIL NOW: Pilgrim’s Pride chicken nuggets might have rubber. So, almost 60,000 pounds have been recalled.
GEORGE FLOYD PROTEST CAMP KILLS ANOTHER UNARMED BLACK MALE: Latest Seattle CHOP shooting kills 16-year-old boy, critically wounds 14-year-old boy: Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said both victims were African-American. “Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said it marked the second death of an African-American victim in the area. The first death associated with the CHOP came June 20 when 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson was shot and killed. Monday marked the fourth shooting linked to the CHOP zone.”
Defund CHOP!
If you think Seattle is “fine,” do you think that black lives matter? Or are you just too stupid to foresee obvious consequences of behavior?
Related: When Black Lives Matter to Democrats, and When They Don’t.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Chicago man fatally shot 2 teens after they asked how tall he is, police say.
MASTER CLEANSE: Why social justice feels like self-help to privileged women.
Self-help has always been a woman’s game. Not that men don’t also seek to improve themselves, but the books targeted to them tend to assume an existing state of self-confidence: You’re great as you are, you could just be a little better. Men learn optimization, life hacks, the power of thinking without thinking: four-hour work weeks and other highly effective habits that are meant to help them build upon their innate perfection, like a software upgrade. Women, on the other hand, have faulty wiring that needs ripping out. Our most beloved self-help books are all about fixing something that came broken, delving into the psyche and excavating everything that’s wrong with you: Women are exhorted to work on themselves the way a weekend warrior might work on a vintage TransAm, tinkering endlessly, replacing parts, fixing one flaw only to find that the engine still won’t turn over, the real problem still buried somewhere under the hood. That you might actually get behind the wheel and drive out of the garage someday is a possibility so distant that it’s hardly worth thinking about. What matters is that whatever is wrong—with the engine, your life, the world—it’s definitely all your fault. (“YOU have to DO the work.”)
Is it socialization? Evolution? A bit of both, nature and nurture at once? Whatever the reason, women’s feelings of inadequacy have always been a gold mine for savvy salespeople, with entire industries springing up around the insecurity du jour. The trappings change as attitudes do; notice how the publications that used to sell spot-reduction techniques or cellulite creams pivoted to “wellness” in the early aughts. At the peak of its relevancy, the Gawker empire even launched its own version of the women’s lifestyle magazine with Jezebel, a supposed game changer that would deliver all the sex-celebrity-fashion fun of a Marie Claire or a Cosmopolitan, “without airbrushing.”
Ten years later, it’s clear that the game did not, in fact, change. Female self-loathing is still a major moneymaker, the only difference being that the relentless focus on women’s flaws has moved under the skin. Your problem areas are now your problematic areas; it’s your soul, not your cellulite, that needs smoothing.
* * * * * * *
Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility seminars—at which the attendees are overwhelmingly white, female, and highly educated—cost as much as $165 per person. Her keynote speaking fee is $40,000. Whatever is being sold, be it a jade vagina egg or a ticket to an anti-racist workshop, there’s a great deal of money to be made off the guilt, anxiety, and insecurities of financially secure white women.
Read the whole thing. As Glenn noted after the 2012 election, billionaire GOP supporters might want to “Buy some women’s magazines. No, really. Or at least some women’s Web sites,” since their then-current message (before DNC-MSM women’s publications added racialism into the mix) was: “There’s one way that women should think; people who don’t think that way are bad and stupid — and if you think the wrong way, women won’t like you. For $150 million, you could buy or start a lot of women’s Web sites. And I’d hardly change a thing in the formula. The nine articles on sex, shopping and exercise could stay the same. The 10th would just be the reverse of what’s there now.”
Related: Matt Taibbi: On “White Fragility.”
THE PUSHBACK GROWS:
HE’S NOT DEAD YET – HE’S GETTING BETTER: BET Awards includes the very much alive former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown in memorial. The show probably meant to pay respects to the late NFL great “Old Man” Willie Brown.
IRAN ISSUES ARREST WARRANT FOR TRUMP OVER SOLEIMANI ASSASSINATION.
And it’s DNC-MSM approved, “unexpectedly:”
No word yet if former Obama “Middle East advisor” Ben Rhodes wrote the above pro-Iran tweet.
HOUSECLEANING IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC.
I’ve recommended Home Comforts before. It’s great.
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Now fixed.
AH, GOOD TIMES, GOOD TIMES: Remember when brandishing a weapon on your property was perfectly acceptable?
An afterthought: I’m certainly no expert in Close Quarters Combat, but if you have a double-barreled shotgun and blast two shells into the sky, aren’t you pretty much screwed after that?
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Shot:
CNN’s Brian Stelter kicked off Sunday’s edition of Reliable Sources with the usual foot-stomping editorial. He asked “what is the cost of lies?” Stelter noted that those were the first words of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which dramatized the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, a year after Stelter was born. After describing “secrecy, state deception, and endemic lying” as the main themes, Stelter proceeded to compare the Soviet Union to Trump’s America.
—CNN’s Stelter Compares Trump’s America to Soviet Union: ‘What is the Cost of Lies?’, NewsBusters, today.
Chaser:
“If suddenly a true, two-party or multi-party system were to be formed in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party would still win in a real free election. Except for certain small pockets of resistance to the Communist regime, the people have been truly converted in the last 68 years.”
— CNN Moscow bureau chief Stuart Loory in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 3, 1986.* * * * * * * *
“Soviet people have become accustomed to security if nothing else. Life isn’t good here, but people don’t go hungry, homeless; a job has always been guaranteed. Now all socialist bets are off. A market economy looms, and the social contract that has held Soviet society together for 72 years no longer applies. The people seem baffled, disappointed, let down. Many don’t like the prospect of their nation becoming just another capitalist machine.”
— CNN Moscow reporter Steve Hurst on PrimeNews, May 24, 1990.* * * * * * * *
“But for the simple folk of Uzbekistan, people like Kurban Manizayov, these are mind-wrenching times. Their simple wants were nicely cared for by the communists. But now they’ve been thrust into the hurly-burly world of market capitalism, and nobody even bothered to ask if it was all right.”
— CNN Moscow reporter Steve Hurst, August 31, 1992 World News.
As collated by a round-up of lots of DNC-MSM pro-Soviet hagiography in “Better off Red?”, by the Media Research Center, in November of 2011, 20 years after the Berlin Wall fell.
And don’t get CNN founder Ted Turner started on the glories of North Korea:
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:
If, to borrow from Irving Kristol, a conservative is a leftist who just got mugged by reality, will the McCloskeys reconsider any portion of their worldview, having successfully fought off their leftist mugging last night?
UPDATE: Not Democrats?
MOSTLY PEACEFUL RIOTS: Andy Ngo Eviscerates Nadler’s Claim That Antifa’s Role in Riots Is ‘Imaginary.’
SOLVEIG GOLD: It’s About Indoctrination.
Alumni who once whispered to me that they supported academic freedom are now taking to social media to join the call for anti-racist training. I like to believe that they do not know what this means – that they do not realize they are promoting not tolerance, but indoctrination. As a liberal student once wrote to POCC about her experience with ‘cultural sensitivity training’ at Wesleyan, ‘We were told these would be honest, vulnerable conversations for us to dig deep and understand our biases. The truth was that each of us recited lines. This was not open dialogue. We all know the script.’
The left is big on indoctrination and silencing of its opponents, because it knows its ideas can’t stand up to actual scrutiny.