Archive for 2024

March 10, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Just do it.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 10th, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: The Zone of Interest.

The New Hotness? The Zone of Moral Equivalence: Will Hollywood’s Relative Silence On Gaza Continue At The Oscars?

The reluctance to publicly broach what’s happening in Gaza is also highly noticeable in a year when there are multiple awards contenders that grapple with moral quandaries about war, genocide and the selective ways that history memorializes these, including Best Picture nominees “Oppenheimer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and “The Zone of Interest.” When developing awards campaigns for movies, publicists and strategists often tout the timeliness and relevance of a film (regardless of whether those labels truly apply). It’s not hard to imagine connecting each of those historical movies to the present. The connections are right in front of us.

Only “The Zone of Interest” has admirably made that connection. At the BAFTA Awards in mid-February, producer James Wilson gave one of the few acceptance speeches this season that has explicitly mentioned Gaza, drawing a direct parallel with the themes of the film. The haunting and unsettling movie depicts the daily routines of a Nazi commandant and his family, living a life of comfort and privilege while overseeing the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp literally next door to their capacious home.

“A friend wrote me after seeing the film the other day that he couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives which we choose not to look behind,” Wilson said in his acceptance speech for Best Film Not in the English Language. “Those walls aren’t new, from before or during or since the Holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen, in the same way we think about innocent people being killed in Mariupol [in Ukraine] or in Israel … or anywhere else in the world. And thank you for recognizing a film that asks us to think in those spaces.”

If “The Zone of Interest” wins the Oscar for International Feature Film as expected, hopefully Wilson and others behind the movie will choose to reiterate those sentiments. It would be a meaningful moment — and a welcome break from the silence.

Having made a massively overrated critically praised film on the Holocaust, its producer then turns around and blames the Jews for fighting back after 10/7. Vanessa Redgrave smiles.

UPDATE: Zone of Interest wins best international film Oscar; Glazer goes full Vanessa Redgrave in his acceptance speech: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has lead to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.”

MORE:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024

NEWS YOU CAN USE: You Can Thank Rich Folks For All The Clay-Colored Cars.

When a normal non-car person, like Tik Tok Science behemoth (and author and YouTuber and all around pretty cool dude) Hank Green, begins to notice automotive trends that have been in play for nearly two decades, clearly it has reached its zenith. The trend of desaturated non-metallic car paints has trickled its way down from the Lamborghinis and Audis through the Porsches and McLarens to touch your most basic Honda Civics and Toyota crossovers. This was a less noticeable trend when it was confined to the world of the upper-crust sports car, but now that seemingly every dealership in America is selling a car with zero paint flake, usually a grey or desaturated blue or green, it’s kind of hard to avoid.

Cars have increasingly trended toward greyscale color palettes over the last thirty years. Allegedly these were the inoffensive colors that second buyers preferred, and they would improve resale when you were done with your ownership experience. Long gone were the days of “resale red” and the time of greys and whites were here to stay.

Of course, there are larger trends at play here. From the prominence of “Millennial Grey” in home decor and wall paint, to black and heathered grey being the most popular shades of t-shirt. People, particularly Americans and Europeans, are trying to blend in and stay under the radar. The idea of buying a grey Lamborghini is borderline offensive to me, but “stealth wealth” was a big part of culture from the 2000s to today. And the trends that wealthy people popularize begin to trickle down to the middle class, where they become borderline universal.

For decades metallic paint was the hot shit, but after the success of Audi’s Nardo Grey, the trend has increasingly become putty-lookin’ ass whips.

Battleship gray cars is a trend that’s long been played out. Make car paint great – or at least exuberant – again!

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024

CDR SALAMANDER: Thoughts on Seablindness.

UPDATE: Link was incorrect; now fixed.

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 10th, 2024

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot: Dear readers: Please stop calling us ‘the media.’ There is no such thing.

Folks, I know a lot of you don’t like the people who work in my chosen profession, the news business. I’m aware you think we’re lazy and unfair (yes, I got your emails and tweets on this topic — a few thousand of them). Of course, I disagree with you. I know a lot of fine people in the newsgathering arts and sciences. But that’s not why I’m writing.

I’m writing because I have a request: Please stop calling us “the media.”

Yes, in some sense, we are the media. But not in the blunt way you use the phrase. It’s so imprecise and generic that it has lost any meaning. It’s — how would you put this? — lazy and unfair.

As I understand your use of this term, “the media” is essentially shorthand for anything you read, saw or heard today that you disagreed with or didn’t like. At any given moment, “the media” is biased against your candidate, your issue, your very way of life.

But, you know, the media isn’t really doing that. Some article, some news report, some guy spouting off on a CNN panel or at CrankyCrackpot.com might be. But none of those things singularly are really the media.

Fact is, there really is no such thing as “the media.” It’s an invention, a tool, an all-purpose smear by people who can’t be bothered to make distinctions.

—Paul Farhi, the Washington Post, September 23rd, 2016.

Chaser: The Media Are Getting Easier to Push Around.

—Paul Farhi, The Atlantic, today.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: Rep. Nancy Mace bashes ABC anchor for rape-shaming her over Trump support in fiery interview.

Rep. Nancy Mace scolded ABC host George Stephanopoulos and accused him of rape-shaming her during a fiery exchange about allegations against former President Donald Trump.

Stephanopoulos grilled Mace (R-SC) about how she could back Trump despite a jury finding him liable for sexual assault against advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her.

“I was raped at the age of 16. And any rape victim will tell you I’ve lived for 30 years with an incredible amount of shame over being raped,” Mace began on ABC’s “This Week.”

“It’s a shame that you will never feel, George. And I’m not going to sit here on your show and be asked a question meant to shame me about another potential rape victim. I’m not gonna do that.”

Stephanopoulos countered that “it’s actually not about shaming you,” and said he was trying to understand why she endorsed Trump despite the allegations against him.

Does George Stephanopoulos realize that he’s George Stephanopoulos? “The little guy cut his teeth managing ‘bimbo eruptions’ when Bill Clinton was running for president. His job was to destroy and discredit anyone who could make his boss look bad. (Good thing for Monica Lewinsky’s sake that her scandal broke after Georgie left.)”

Posted at 4:25 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024

SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC’s hypocrisy exposed in viral video.

In fact, Ocasio-Cortez is such a fan of aggressive protest tactics that she was even arrested in 2022 while she participated in a protest that blocked the street in front of the Supreme Court amid outrage over the court’s abortion rulings. She apparently believes that it’s perfectly fine to block traffic but unacceptable to yell at someone outside a movie theater. Huh?

This viral incident puts Ocasio-Cortez’s galling hypocrisy on full display. Hopefully, she will learn from this and realize she was wrong to defend invasive and aggressive protests. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Ocasio-Cortez to see her own inconsistency — or you might pass out.

Riots for thee, but not for me, to coin a phrase.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024

IF THIS IS A SURPRISE TO YOU, I WISH TO INFORM YOU THERE’S ALSO NO SANTA OR EASTER BUNNY.     SORRY: Like everything else in Sulzberger’s paper, the NYT bestseller list is fake.

And if this were the only issue you’d still be looking at lists of books that sold a metric ton:

They were forced to admit in court that it’s not a ranked list. It’s actually “editorial content” and they can exclude books they don’t like.

Just not all the books that sold a metric ton. But this isn’t even remotely true. The fact is that books can hit the NY Times list from laydown. That’s the books that the publisher says they ship out. (It’s routinely double what actually ships out.) Without selling a single copy.

It’s turtles all the way down. NYT bestseller lists need to achieve the same “status” the Hugo has attained these last few years. It’s all gaslighting. ALL the way down.

Posted at 1:34 pm by Sarah Hoyt on Mar 10th, 2024

MARK JUDGE: Revisiting Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.”

John F. Kennedy was such a figure—a politician, but also a war hero and a man with a genuine aura of grace, sexiness and danger. He’s the “Superman who comes to the supermarket,” a dashing and epic figure who met with shoppers while he was campaigning. Kennedy’s connection to sex, violence, art and “the dream life of the nation” made him powerful, mythic. It was archetypal, deeper than mere politics.

Over the decades such a figure has continuously reemerged in American culture and politics—much to the dismay of those who would keep him down. Two from the world of politics since Kennedy are Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Reagan, renounced as a psychopath by the left, came from the West and movies—two archetypical places. Mailer argued that when the West was settled “the expansion turned inward, became part of an agitated, overexcited, superheated dream life. The film studios threw up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed, and the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull, of a new kind of heroic life, each choosing his own archetype of a neo-renaissance man, be it Barrymore, Cagney, Flynn, Bogart, Brando or Sinatra, but it was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun.”

Then there was Obama. As a black man Obama was conversant in the dream world of the nation—the place of jazz and soul and Ralph Ellison. There was no way that Hillary Clinton, a dry and calculated politico, could compete with that. It’s important to emphasize that Mailer’s Superman isn’t a messiah. He doesn’t promise salvation. Reagan told us the government could not save us. Kennedy openly acknowledged that “we are all mortal.” Obama was treated like Jesus by the left, something he played off of but knew was a scam.

What about Trump? Trump comes from the worlds of New York business and Hollywood. He’s perceived by many Americans as a glamorous success story. That’s probably why all attempts by the left to shut him down have failed. Trump doesn’t have Kennedy’s sexiness or Obama’s soul. What he does possess is what other Supermen have—the unstoppable will to live freely despite what the mob thinks. For this he remains impossible to euthanize.

Over six decades ago, Mailer saw this: “This myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the nation’s regulators—politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, idèologues, psychoanalysts, builders, executives and endless communicators—would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not die.”

Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” — not to be confused with that time the socialist came to the supermarket: When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake. “‘When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,’ Yeltsin wrote. ‘That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.’”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024

BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: Biden Apologizes for ‘Disrespecting’ Accused Laken Riley Killer by Calling Him ‘Illegal.’

Joe Biden did an interview with Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC that aired on Saturday.

Biden made multiple delusional statements, including on illegal aliens and the murder of Laken Riley at the hands of an illegal.

He’s made some bad comments already trying to downplay her death, claiming there are thousands of “legals” who are also killed in this country—as though somehow that justified the very preventable murder by an illegal alien.

Biden apologized for calling the accused killer of Laken Riley an “illegal,” saying he should have said “undocumented.” Listen as he rushes to say that.

Biden said he wouldn’t “treat any of these people with disrespect.” “Look, they built the country,” he said.

Which is quite an interesting gaffe in and of itself:

In 2004, Diana West wrote: The importance of this crusade.

It’s possible President Bush didn’t drop Ike’s language himself. Indeed, his speechwriters might not have given him the choice. They well know that “crusade” was officially outlawed long ago. And by “crusade” I don’t mean Christendom’s medieval battles to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim rule. But, of course, neither did Gen. Eisenhower (not in his D-Day remarks, and not in his popular account of the war, “Crusade in Europe”). Neither did President Bush, for that matter, when, in the week following Sept. 11, 2001, he said that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” Speaking in terms of a cause may have steadied most Americans at home, but it drove Muslims, Europeans and political correctniks everywhere crazy. A headline in The Christian Science Monitor on Sept. 19, 2001 said it best: “Europe cringes at Bush ‘crusade’ against terrorists.”

It didn’t have to cringe long. Rather than inviting citizens of the world to join the new “crusade” against Islamic terror networks — the successor to earlier, victorious crusades against Nazism and Communism — Ari Fleischer, then the president’s spokesman, immediately expressed “regret” over unspecified “connotations” the word “crusade” might have had “for anybody, Muslim or otherwise.” In other words, America was officially sorry if anyone out there — and I mean “out there” — believed, five days after the fiery collapse of the World Trade Center, that the president of the United States was going send an army of barons to take Jerusalem for the Pope.

In 2004, the 56-year old Bush knowingly memory holed a line from of Eisenhower’s most important speech as a general for PC reasons. Twenty years later, a dissipated 81-year old Biden is forced by his handlers to make an after-the-fact PC clean-up of his own. Bush could have pushed back; Biden is too far gone, and in Biden’s case:

Hey, you know who didn’t?

UPDATE: Past performance is no guarantee of Trunalimunumaprzure:

Flash-forward to today:

“Joe” Rivers? Forget it — he’s rolling.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024

ROGER KIMBALL: The Treason of the Intellectuals & ‘the Undoing of Thought.’

“When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning.”
—Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought

“Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for re- establishing our former ignorance?”
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99)

In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des clercs. I said “famous,” but perhaps “once famous” would be more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. “La trahison des clercs” is one of those memorable phrases that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term “clerc” in “the medieval sense,” i.e., to mean “scribe,” someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are, in this sense, “clercs.” The English translation, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” sums it up neatly.

The “treason” in question was the betrayal by the “clerks” of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda’s terms, they were understood to be “all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short, in the possession of non-material advantages.” Thanks to such men, Benda wrote, “Humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:33 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024

INSIDE THE SURPRISE EFFORT TO FORCE TIKTOK’S DIVESTITURE:

“I will kill you if you f**king shut down TikTok,” a teenage boy warned to a member of Congress in a voicemail reviewed by The Spectator. “I will really really f**k you up. So don’t shut down TikTok. Bye bye!”

This week, Capitol Hill was inundated with a series of unusual callers — children, some as young as six years old. They had been enlisted by TikTok to forcibly push back against a bill that’s on track to sail through the House next week which forces the divestiture of a series of companies owned by foreign adversaries, like China in the case of the globally popular video app. TikTok is regularly accused of everything from feeding eating disorder content to girls to spying on journalists to extensively tracking user data — at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party, no less.

The aforementioned assassination threat was far from an isolated incident. That office received around a dozen; at least one other House office confirmed that they too received a threat to murder the member. “It turns out threatening to kill members is not an effective or persuasive tool,” a staffer for one of the offices noted. “In fact, it really seemed to backfire here.”

Beyond the assassination threats, offices of both parties were flooded with tens of thousands of calls, directed in part by TikTok itself, when it urged users to “stop a TikTok shutdown.” Countless kids took time out of their school days to tell their representatives that they will kill themselves if the government bans TikTok.

The mass freakout goes far to prove its critics’ point: TikTok May Be A Chinese Superweapon.

UPDATE:

TikTok does have some curious defenders though: Kellyanne Conway advocating for TikTok on Capitol Hill. “Both Conway and Club for Growth confirmed the working relationship. A spokesperson for TikTok declined to comment. Billionaire investor and Club for Growth donor Jeff Yass holds a 15 percent stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. Club for Growth leaders have been vocal opponents of moves to ban TikTok. Former President Donald Trump praised Yass as ‘fantastic’ when they were both at a Club for Growth retreat as the presumptive Republican nominee courts Yass to help his presidential campaign…It appeared to be a sudden change of heart for Trump, who, as president, tried to order TikTok removed from app stores because of its connections to China.”

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Liz Cheney, January 6 Committee Suppressed Exonerating Evidence Of Trump’s Push For National Guard.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney’s January 6 Committee suppressed evidence that President Donald Trump pushed for 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the nation’s capital, a previously hidden transcript obtained by The Federalist shows.

Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.

Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.

He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021. Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.

Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review. On top of that, committee allies began publishing critical stories and even conspiracy theories about Ornato ahead of follow-up interviews with him. Ornato was a career Secret Service official who had been detailed to the security position in the White House.

As Matt Vespa adds at Townhall, “This anti-Trump circus has many twists and turns. Trump is a moron but so crafty he orchestrated a violent takeover of the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transition of power. He’s irresponsible with state secrets but is the greatest known threat to the republic. He wanted to foment a rebellion but requested 10,000 troops to secure the Capitol. He’s a fascist who willingly left office in January of 2021.”

Emmanuel Goldstein could not be reached for comment.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2024
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