The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Proving @RationalMale Right Again

Posted on | October 16, 2019 | No Comments

In Australia, there has been an uproar since Pauline Hanson of the right-populist One Nation party asserted that false accusations of domestic abuse are a problem in child-custody cases. This is relevant to proposals to reform Australia’s family court system, and Hanson’s remarks have prompted outrage from feminists and the Left generally, where the Women Never Lie Myth is sacrosanct. This mirrors the Left’s position on “rape culture,” where mere accusation is considered tantamount to proof.

The dispute over Australia’s family court system highlights something Rollo Tomassi (@RationalMale on Twitter) has noted: “Child support is the defining feature of our modern family model, since it is the replacement for marriage whether or not a wedding has occurred.”

Because of the desanctification of marriage in our secular, sexualized, feminist-dominated culture, wedding vows now come with asterisks next to them, pointing to footnotes that in essence declare, “We don’t actually mean all this stuff about ‘death do us part’ and so forth.”

Every couple now goes to the wedding altar under the threatening shadow of potential divorce, and it is generally acknowledged that divorce is a punitive procedure by which aggrieved women are authorized to obtain a sadistic revenge against their ex-husbands. Because accusations of abuse give women greater leverage in divorce proceedings, we should not be surprised that (a) such accusations are often exaggerated or even sometimes fabricated from whole cloth, and (b) anyone who expresses skepticism toward these accusations will be accused of being anti-woman, an enabler of male violence against women.

Rollo’s comment about the Child Support Model of family structure, where it is more or less assumed on the wedding day that the couple will eventually divorce, highlights how radically our society’s basic institutions have been altered. Between the startling rise in illegitimate births and the frequency of divorce, a majority of children in most Western countries will not be raised in a traditional family. This in turn has produced what Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in her book The Divorce Culture, has called the “Love Family” ideology, a mentality in which the loyalties once demanded by permanent ties of blood or marriage are replaced by an imagined system of kinship based on mere sentiment.

The problem with the celebration of “love” as a basis for social organization is that human emotions can be ephemeral, and that “love” can be so easily exploited by selfish and dishonest people. For years, I have disavowed any accusation that I am a “men’s rights activist” (MRA) because, in the first place, I reject the identity-politics formula of group “rights.” Secondly, however, I recognize that most MRAs bring a particular axe to grind against women. Many MRAs — if not a majority, certainly an influential plurality — are men who have gone through the ordeal of divorce and custody disputes which are no part of my direct experience and, I pray to God, never will be. Yet while I am not an MRA, this doesn’t mean that they have not made important points about male-female relationships, especially in regard to how divorce has become a state-sponsored instrument to punish and humiliate men. And this is such a fundamental and relatively sudden shift in our culture that most older people (I’m 60 now, and certainly qualify as such) have no idea what absolute hell many young men now face in their relationships. Statistics showing a decline in men’s willingness to commit to marriage, accompanied by a significant drop in birth rates, testify to how the institutions of marriage and fatherhood have been made into something like a medieval torture device to inflict punishment on men. No matter how much a woman may profess to “love” a man, he must take into consideration that if his relationship leads to marriage and fatherhood, he will be at risk of personal destruction if her “love” ever fades.

Quite often, it seems, women seeking divorce view child custody as a weapon to wield in an all-out war to destroy their ex-husbands. It is not enough, for such women, to be free to pursue their own lives; instead, they develop an appetite for revenge against the man they once vowed to love until “death do us part.” Those of us who have been fortunate enough to avoid such a hell-on-earth are generally horrified to watch our friends or relatives endure the ordeal of divorce. We don’t enjoy the pressure to choose sides in the kind of interminable warfare that goes on between divorcing couples, but our court system seems to enable (and indeed, to encourage) the scorched-earth tactics so commonly employed in these disputes. Pauline Hanson has provoked controversy in Australia by saying aloud what everybody actually knows, i.e., that some women will invent or exaggerate incidents of abuse in order to “win” court proceedings against their ex-husbands. This threat hovers like a shadow in every divorce involving children: If her ex tries to dispute custody, or if he doesn’t make child-support payments in a timely manner, he may find himself facing accusations of abuse, and such accusations generally amount to a “he-said/she-said” conflict, where the real matter at issue is the credibility of the accuser. Feminists tend to deny that women ever make false accusations, or else contend that false accusations are so rare that we can disregard the possibility that a woman might be lying, and therefore feminists must destroy Pauline Hanson.

It doesn’t have to be like this. There is no objective reason why men and women should view each other as eternal enemies, but unless and until we are willing to take a hard look at how public policy now offers incentives for male-female conflict — especially including divorce — we are doomed to endure the continuing destruction of our society.


 

Category: Marriage, Sex Trouble

Beto Beaten by Buttigieg in Debate

Posted on | October 16, 2019 | No Comments

 

The very first time I heard Pete Buttigieg speak — during my trip to South Carolina in March — I was impressed by him. Of course, his policy ideas are all entirely wrong, but Buttigieg’s demeanor and delivery are excellent. He combines a policy wonk’s mastery of details with a folksy Midwestern manner in a way that would certainly inspire confidence if (and this is a very important “if”) his ideas weren’t the usual “progressive” prescription of vastly expanding the power (and cost) of the centralized Welfare State. During Tuesday night’s debate on CNN, Mayor Pete delivered a scolding lecture to Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, as Professor Glenn Reynolds observes:

He made mincemeat of Beto O’Rourke, who dodged a question from Anderson Cooper on how he would enforce a ban on assault weapons. Beto was left looking flustered and trying to claim that Mayor Pete was insensitive to victims of violence, which was a bad look for him. . . .
Numerous fellow candidates criticized him for his “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15s” remarks. Between that and the drubbing that Mayor Pete administered, he had a very bad night.

We should be grateful to Buttigieg for his skill in demolishing the Great White Hope of Texas Democrats in front of a national audience.

As to the debate overall, Roger Simon summarizes it well:

If there is one thing that Tuesday night’s Democratic debate showed us — as if we didn’t know it in the first place — it’s just to what degree the media is in the tank for the Democrats. They’re not only in the tank — they built it, filled it with water up to the brim, and would turn up the temperature to boil Donald Trump alive if they could. And maybe they can.
You knew this from the outset when CNN’s lead moderator Anderson Cooper, along with his compatriots, one from the New York Times, opened the festivities with a round of leading impeachment questions, giving each candidate in turn a chance to outdo each other in bashing Trump.

This will do nothing to rescue CNN from the ratings basement, of course. There is no new audience to be gained by Trump-bashing at this point. CNN’s decision to become the “Clinton News Network” in 2016 was a strategic error, but instead of reversing course, they keep doubling down.

Meanwhile, Beto’s on MSNBC threatening again to take away your guns:


 

Category: CNN, Debates, Democrats

In The Mailbox: 10.15.19

Posted on | October 16, 2019 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Locomotive Breath: 2019 Fall Foliage Prediction Map
EBL: Feds Shooting Barred Owls To Save Spotted Owls
Twitchy: Tulsi Gabbard Smacks CNN & NYT At Debate They’re Sponsoring
Louder With Crowder: Project Veritas Confirms CNN Only Cares About Impeaching Trump

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Plant Burgers? You Wouldn’t Feed Your Dog This Rubbish
American Greatness: Ukraine, The Poorly Written Hoax Sequel, also, No, James Comey, America Doesn’t Want Your Help
American Thinker: Corrupt Senators Took Ukraine Cash, also, Destroying America’s History One Icon At A Time
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Scammer Payback News
Babalu Blog: Many Florida Hispanics Going For Trump Because Of His Strong Anti-Socialism Stance
BattleSwarm: Turkey vs. The Kurds, also, Ten Years Of Blogging
Camp of the Saints: The Old Left Is Confused & Pathetic
Cafe Hayek: Cleaned By Capitalism – It’s More Than A Wash
CDR Salamander: Syria, A Festival Of Bad Options
Da Tech Guy: Life Is Not Fair, also, Fake News & Me
Don Surber: Hunter Becomes The Prey
First Street Journal: Hold Them Accountable!
The Geller Report: 20,000 Sign Petition Demanding BBC Remove Expose On Imams Selling Little Girls For Sex, also, Two French Muslims Sentenced to 25+ Years For Jihad Attack On Notre Dame
Hogewash: They’re Not Gonna Like The New Rules, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: When Late Night TV Told An Inconvenient Truth
JustOneMinute: Tell Us What You Really Think, John Bolton
Legal Insurrection: House Republicans Back Resolution To Censure Rep. Schiff, also, #ExposeCNN Part 1 – Zucker’s Impeachment Vendetta Against The President
The PanAm Post: Correa Plotted Moreno’s Removal From Cuba & Venezuela
Power Line: Dairy Cows, Tangled Up In The Green New Deal, also, Exposed – The CNN Hatefest
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Dunks On LeBron James
Shot In The Dark: Requirements
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Poor Little Rich People & The SALT Cap
This Ain’t Hell: Changes To Special Forces Training, also, Veteran Gets Penis Transplant
Victory Girls: LeBron Sticks His Nike In His Mouth
Volokh Conspiracy: U. Louisville Students Can’t Sue Escort For Exposing Prostitution In Louisville Basketball Program
Weasel Zippers: Protesters & Antifa Harass Police, Attack Trump Supporters, also, Rutgers Professor Blames Black Female Obesity On Trump, Racism
Megan McArdle: It’s Democratic Voters, Not Candidates, Who Might Want To Reassess
Mark Steyn: Trump After Trump, also, They All Laughed

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Category: Linkagery

What Causes Misogyny?

Posted on | October 15, 2019 | No Comments

Oh, ain’t it funny how a heart
That loved you one time
Could be filled with so much anger
For you and your kind?

I hate you.
Oh, how I try to hate you.
I get bitter every time you run through my mind.
Between love and hate
There’s a little thin line,
And I’m trying to hate you right out of my mind.
— Ronnie Milsap, 1973

When modern feminism began as the “Women’s Liberation Movement” in the late 1960s, the men they hated were accused of male chauvinism, defined as “the belief that men are superior to women.” Thus, any man was a “male chauvinist pig” if he opposed the feminist movement. Within a few years, however, feminists changed their vocabulary so that their male enemies were accused of sexism, a word intended to have a meaning analogous to racism, and thus to imply a parallel between feminism and the Civil Rights movement. After a few years of slinging around that accusation, however, feminists realized that “sexism” had lost its rhetorical power, and so they upped the ante, accusing men of misogyny, defined as the hatred of women. And I plead not guilty, Your Honor.

Anyone who would accuse me of hating women is so completely wrong that, in a just world, I would be able to sue them for libel. The deliberate dishonesty of feminists in using this accusation — any man who disagrees with a feminist is automatically a woman-hater — offends me, and I suspect that many other men feel the same way. Yet feminists habitually engage in such slander, which I suspect tends to make this accusation operate like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Falsely accuse a man of “misogyny” and he’s likely to respond by calling you a bitch and then, “See? He called me a bitch! That proves he hates women!”

Nevertheless, there actually are men who hate women, and in such cases, it behooves us to ask the obvious question, “Why?” What is the root cause of the misogynist’s prejudice against women? Is it possible that some men are so badly mistreated by women that, from their individual perspective, it might seem that women deserve to be hated?

This is not merely a hypothetical question. Some women are just evil, and if a man doesn’t learn to recognize such monsters and avoid them, his experience might cause him to hate women quite generally. Did I mention that Miley Cyrus has got a new boyfriend? But I digress . . .

A bad woman can wreck a man’s life, but there is no recognition of this in feminist discourse, where men (yes, all men) are always to blame.

Do they actually believe their own rhetoric? In general, feminist discourse conveys the idea that women are so vastly superior to men that there is no female deserving of criticism, nor any male deserving of praise. It’s impossible to believe this, when you encounter stories like this:

Earlier this year, after buying his now-15-year-old daughter an AncestryDNA test, Christopher found out that he is not her biological father. His wife had an affair. (They also have a 13-year-old son, who is his biological child.)
Two and a half weeks after the discovery, he filed for divorce. We spoke about how [this] revelation has changed his family, what it’s like to parent a teen going through this, and the particular difficulties of talking about this as a man.

Cuckolded, quite literally. For 15 years, his two-timing no-good wife believed she had gotten away with her deception. Some quotes from him:

I’m into genealogy, and so myself, my ex-wife, and the grandparents are all taking the DNA tests. They had a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale back last year, and my daughter was curious about her ethnicity and so she asked us for a test. My ex said, “No, you already know who you are because everybody’s tested.” I knew she was lying, so I said, “Okay, I’ll buy you a test.” . . .
I knew my ex-wife was having affairs back then, and I couldn’t catch her. When I bought the test, my daughter went and told her mom, and then an hour and a half, two hours later, in the middle of the night, my ex gets up and she says, “I need to talk to you ’cause I had an affair. I think it was a two-year-long affair.”
The worst was to see the reaction of my daughter. She just cried and cried. It was like a nuclear bomb going off. . . .
On the day that I found out, I was like, I wanted to reject her, because I said my boundary was I will not raise another man’s child from an affair. My mom put me straight. She was like, “She’s innocent in this. Don’t blame her.” So I consider her my daughter. I just say she’s my daughter.

Your mom is wrong, sir. She took your wife’s side against you, and your willingness to go along with this charade — pretending that this child is your daughter, because that’s what your mother told you to do — is a microcosm of what’s wrong with your entire life.

Hey, chump: Wake up. It’s not your daughter’s fault that her mother is a worthless cheating whore, but it’s not your fault, either.

Except, then again, maybe it is your fault. You say you “knew” she was having affairs before your daughter was born, and yet . . . you stayed?

Parents, show this to your sons and tell them to take notes:

DO NOT BE A WOMAN’S FOOL!

When you volunteer to be a doormat, you forfeit the right to complain about the footprints on your back. If you don’t understand this — if someone has taught you that “love” requires a man to suffer mistreatment without complaint — you need to forget what you’ve been taught, because hell to the no. LEARN TO WALK AWAY!

This is an example of what Rollo Tomassi calls “one-itis.”

We must assume that this man’s ex-wife is (or once was) quite good-looking. Men seldom make fools of themselves for ugly women. Fifteen years ago, she was such a hottie that not only did she have her husband wrapped around her finger, but she had other men chasing after her, too.

You might think the chump would have wised up, but no:

[E]ven in infidelity-support groups and domestic-dispute support groups, it’s a ton of women talking and only a few men. I think it’s shameful for a man to be open about it. It’s really hard on a man’s self-esteem and ego knowing that their wife or girlfriend got pregnant by another man. Men are more quiet about it. . . .
I told my ex-wife, “If you had told me back then, we would have had a greater chance of saving the marriage.” I would have maybe worked with her, so there’s that. I might not have divorced her 15 years ago if she had come clean. Lying to me for that long — to me, that was worse.

What the absolute hell is wrong with you, sir? Why would you care about “saving the marriage” to this worthless whore?

Oh, I forgot: She’s good-looking, so therefore you lost all self-respect and made a complete fool of yourself. You deserve your fate, sir.

Parents who do not instill in their children a sense of personal dignity are setting their kids up for a life of failure as adults. Everybody must suffer some damage in life. We all have our disappointments, and when those moments come, we must be able to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and move on with our lives. You can’t go through life holding grudges and brooding over everybody who’s done you wrong. As I frequently advise young people, “Keep your enemies list short.”

However, don’t let somebody play you for a chump. If you get played, whose fault is that? There are still honest people in the world, and you could have associated yourself with them; instead you got yourself involved with a worthless cheating whore. That’s on you, buddy.

Oh, I hate you.
Each time I cry I hate you.
Little drops of anger
Fall from my eyes.
You said that you loved me.
Tell me how could this fool be so blind?
And I’m trying to hate you right out of my mind.

See, that’s what country music is all about — crying over a two-timing, no-good low-down cheating woman that done you wrong. But whose fault is it that you went and fell in love with her, fool? Go look in the mirror and you’ll see a fool staring back at you. Blame him.

No, I don’t hate women generally, but what feminists never acknowledge when they’re ranting on about “toxic masculinity,” blah blah blah, is that there are some women in this world who deserve to be hated.

Sing it one more time, Ronnie.

 

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Things Go Badly After Ivy League Author Lectures About ‘White Privilege’

Posted on | October 15, 2019 | No Comments

 

More than 25% of students at Georgia Southern University are black, which is roughly twice the black enrollment at most Ivy League schools, but it’s not because of Georgia Southern’s “diversity” program. Rather, it’s because the school in Statesboro, Georgia, is not “elite.”

Like most second-tier state universities in the South (including my alma mater JSU), Georgia Southern’s academic standards and tuition make attendance possible for students whose parents aren’t rich, and who found more fun things to do with their high-school years than competing for valedictorian honors. Trust me when I say that “white privilege” does not describe the typical student at such an institution. There are a lot of students at Georgia Southern who are the first in their families ever to go to college, and part of the effort to help them succeed is the university’s First Year Experience (FYE) program, whose stated mission is to “prepare students to become self-directed learners capable of authoring their own educational experiences.” Well, the geniuses in charge of FYE apparently decided Georgia Southern freshmen needed to learn about “white privilege,” so they assigned a novel by Jennine Capó Crucet, who majored in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University ($72,518 a year, including room and board) and is now a professor at the University of Nebraska. Then they brought Professor Crucet to campus for a lecture, and things went very badly:

Students at Georgia Southern University burned a book, written by a New York Times contributor, after a Q&A session at her lecture became heated.
Jennine Capó Crucet is a Latina author, associate professor at the University of Nebraska and graduate of Cornell University. Her novel “Make Your Home Among Strangers” was used as required reading in some FYE classes. The book follows a Hispanic girl, inspired by herself, who is accepted into a prestigious university and struggles in her new predominantly white atmosphere.
Crucet spoke at the Performing Arts Center Wednesday night and after she talked about the book, followed by some personal anecdotes, she opened the audience up to questions.
“I noticed that you made a lot of generalizations about the majority of white people being privileged,” one respondent said into the microphone. “What makes you believe that it’s okay to come to a college campus, like this, when we are supposed to be promoting diversity on this campus, which is what we’re taught. I don’t understand what the purpose of this was.”
Crucet immediately responded to the student with audible reactions from the audience.
“I came here because I was invited and I talked about white privilege because it’s a real thing that you are actually benefiting from right now in even asking this question,” Crucet said. . . .
Later that night, a video of students standing around a fire was posted on Twitter.
Carlin Blalock, a freshman music education major, walked outside of her dorm with her roommate to a crowd gathered around a fire in a grill next to the clubhouse of Eagle Village, on-campus housing. . . .
More video and images of the torn and burned books were tweeted, and Crucet tweeted again that students at GS were burning her books.

Look, I’m against book-burning, but what do you expect when you bring in someone with a $72,518-a-year Ivy League education to lecture a bunch of state university kids about “white privilege”?

And let us ask: How many white kids from South Georgia attend Cornell University? The number is probably very close to zero, because there is nothing the Ivy League despises more than white Southerners. Cornell quite likely awarded Jennine Capó Crucet all sorts of “diversity” scholarships simply because she is a Latina, but even if a white kid from South Georgia were the valedictorian of his high school, his application to Cornell would automatically be dumped in the trash can.

Don’t you think the kids at Georgia Southern know all this? It’s hardly a secret that “diversity” at Ivy League schools is enforced by a racial quota system which, among other things, involves discrimination against Asian-American students whose sin is being too smart. Keeping down the number of Asians on Ivy League campuses is necessary to “diversity” because (a) a certain number of positions in every freshman class must be set aside for children of alumni; and (b) there are hard quotas for “underrepresented minorities” (i.e., black and Hispanic students). What this means, in effect, is that Ivy League schools like Cornell systematically exclude the vast majority of qualified white kids, unless their parents happen to be alumni. If you’re a white kid, it doesn’t actually matter how smart you are or how hard you work, you are persona non grata at Cornell, unless your Daddy’s rich or an alumni (or preferably both). And that goes double if you’re a white kid from the South.

Lewis Grizzard used to tell a story about a graduate student at the University of Georgia doing a research project where the documents he needs are only available in the Harvard University library. So the guy goes up to Harvard and seeks directions from a student.

“Excuse me, sir,” the Georgia student says. “Can you tell me where the library’s at?”

“At Harvard, we don’t end our sentences with prepositions.”

“Oh, pardon my grammar,” the Georgian replies. “Can you tell me where the library’s at, asshole?”

That summarizes my attitude toward the Ivy League quite adequately, and I hope the faculty at Georgia Southern will reconsider their program of teaching about “white privilege” in Statesboro.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)



 

Category: Education, Racism

Infamous Pedophile Murdered in Prison

Posted on | October 15, 2019 | No Comments

 

Police suspect the pedophile was killed by a notorious rapist:

A jailed sex offender who once boasted: ‘I love raping women’ is the prime suspect in the murder of Britain’s most depraved paedophile Richard Huckle in prison, it was revealed today.
Huckle was stabbed to death in his cell at HMP Full Sutton with a makeshift ‘shiv’ knife and fellow inmate Paul Fitzgerald is in isolation as Humberside Police investigates.
The 33-year-old was serving at least 25 years behind bars for 191 sexual offences against children as young as six months after a trial at the Old Bailey in 2016.
Yesterday his bloodied-body was found ‘slumped’ in his top floor cell at the Category A jail near York housing many of Britain’s most notorious and violent prisoners.
Northern Irishman Paul Fitzgerald is reportedly the prime suspect and he was jailed indefinitely in 2009 for a sex attack on a female dog-walker – after he had already sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl and an elderly woman in north Wales.
Police also found a diary containing his sick sexual fantasies and on one page said: ‘I love raping women. Even if I was going to reoffend they couldn’t stop me’. . . .
Masquerading as a devout Christian, Huckle spent years targeting care homes and orphanages while teaching English and photography in Malaysia and Cambodia.
The so called ‘Gap Year’ paedophile bragged about the abuse in a twisted blog in which he awarded himself ‘PedoPoints’ for the ferocity of his sexual assaults.
He even filmed himself raping children and babies. From the age of 19 he amassed a staggering 20,000 images of child abuse that he sold for profit.
Investigators believe he would have attacked hundreds more children had he not been caught in 2014 when Australian police uncovered a network of paedophiles on the ‘dark’ web.

Pedophile stabbed to death in prison — happy Tuesday, everybody.



 

Category: Crime

The Worst Week in Media History: O’Keefe Exposes Bias of CNN’s Zucker

Posted on | October 15, 2019 | No Comments

 

First, there was Ronan Farrow’s exposé of widespread sexual harassment (and official tolerance thereof) at NBC News. Now, James O’Keefe has got undercover video confirming blatant bias at CNN:

CNN President Jeff Zucker has insisted the cable news network has to maximally focus on pushing the story of Democrats trying to impeach President Donald Trump, despite objections by staffers that the push is harming the organization’s journalistic integrity, according to undercover recordings.
“Impeachment is the story,” Zucker said during a recent 9 a.m. rundown call, according to one of the recordings, which were released on Oct. 14 by investigative journalism nonprofit Project Veritas. “You know, I know we’re going to feel a tendency to think we’re doing too much, but this is the story.”
At least some of the recordings were provided by Cary Poarch, a satellite uplink technician who works as a contractor at CNN’s Washington bureau.
“I just want them to own where they’re at,” he said of CNN. “Like, hey, if we lean left, cool, let’s just say we lean left, if we lean right, let it be known.” . . .
Several CNN employees told Poarch or other undercover reporters about their dissatisfaction with Zucker’s approach.
“There’s just nothing we can do if Zucker wants impeachment every single day to be the top story,” said Christian Sierra, media coordinator at CNN, in one of the recordings.
Sierra said he “hate[ed] how everything is like all Trump all the time now.
“Everyone at the network complains about it,” he said. “They hate covering Trump every day.”
Mike Brevna, CNN floor manager, expressed a similar sentiment in another recording.
“It’s the Trump Network, dog. It’s like, it’s everything is all Trump. They not even thinking about, they not even thinking about anybody else,” he said. “They sold themselves to the devil. It’s, it’s sad. Because there’s so much news going on out there, but they don’t cover none of it. All they do is, because of sponsors and everything.” . . .
Zucker seems to have a particular disdain for Fox News, a major competitor that is outperforming CNN in viewership ratings by more than two to one.
“I think what’s going on in America now is really, fundamentally the result of years of fake news, conspiracy nonsense from Fox News that has taken root in this country,” Zucker said during a 9 a.m. rundown call. “And I’m dead serious about this.”
It didn’t seem to be just a personal observation either.
“Fake conspiracy nonsense that Fox has spread for years is now deeply embedded in American society and at the highest levels of the Republican elected officials, as we’ve seen with [Sen.] Ron Johnson,” Zucker said. “Frankly, that is beyond destructive for America and I do not think we should be scared to say so.”
In what appeared to be another rundown call, Zucker noted that “a lot of people at CNN” were “friendly” with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
“Time to knock that off,” Zucker said. “And it’s time to call him out.”

Question: When did that happen? My hunch is that it was during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, when Graham became enraged by the obviously phony accusations of sexual misconduct Democrats used to smear the nominee. As long as Graham was perceived as a potential anti-Trump ally within the GOP, it was OK for CNN staff to be “friendly” to the South Carolina senator; but once the Kavanaugh hearings pushed Graham into the pro-Trump camp, Zucker said “knock that off.”

Almost nobody is watching CNN, as Jim Treacher notes:

If you don’t watch CNN, you’re in good company. It’s consistently the third-rated news network. Last week’s big event on CNN, that LGBTQ town hall, was watched by 1.1 million people. That’s compared to 2.5 million watching MSNBC and 3.7 million watching Fox News. Most Americans don’t get their news from cable TV, and most cable-TV news consumers avoid CNN. . . .
The network’s relentless anti-Trump drumbeat has driven people away. . . . CNN is pure propaganda for the Democratic Party, and most people aren’t interested in that.

This probably explains Zucker’s obsession with Fox News, as well as his idea that CNN’s job is to promote the impeachment of Trump. If you’re the third-place network, and the first-place network attracts mostly conservative viewers, there is a certain market logic in trying to maximize your share of the liberal audience. But that strategy was complicated for CNN by the fact that second-place MSNBC has built its “brand” around being a left-wing propaganda operation. Zucker was thus trying to compete with MSNBC for the kook-fringe Democratic Party base, and climbing aboard the impeachment bus — indeed, climbing into the driver’s seat of that bus — might have seemed to Zucker like a smart strategy. And he has failed, spectacularly so.

What next? Expect that CNN will claim to be a victim of anti-Semitism. It’s all they’ve got left: “Fox New conspiracy nonsense!”

 



 

Category: CNN

The Annual Admiral Of The Ocean Sea Appreciation Post

Posted on | October 15, 2019 | No Comments

— by Wombat-socho

Yes, it’s time again to give Christopher Columbus his due, smack down Aztec apologists, and mock the weak and ungrateful Anglos who agitate for “Indigenous Peoples Day”. I say, if they don’t like it here in New Spain, they can go back to whatever endemonised Protestant hellholes their worthless ancestors came from. In the meantime, what better way to honor Columbus than by perusing his biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, written by the eminent naval historian, Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison? Speaking of Morison, you might also enjoy The Two-Ocean War, a distillation of his excellent fifteen-volume Official History of the United States Navy During World War II down into one volume.

It’s not often that an author can kill off his main character in the opening chapters of the novel and still make it work, but that’s exactly what Neal Stephenson does in Fall: or, Dodge In Hell, a sequel to his technothriller Reamde. Bluntly stated, this is a book about death and the afterlife, in an age when people with sufficient wealth can have their brains scanned and uploaded into computer networks. As the first man to have this done, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast finds himself with a lot of time on his hands but no idea what to do with it…at first. This book works on two levels – there’s the people trying to sort out the legal, moral, and practical aspects of dealing with people who are dead, but whose minds are very much alive on a network, and there’s the people living in the afterlife Dodge has made, some of whom are none too happy with it. That section reads like a bizarre riff on Greco-Roman mythology, with echoes from subplots in Cryptonomicon lurking in the underbrush. If you liked Reamde and its characters, you’ll probably enjoy Fall.

I was looking forward to Rebecca Kuang’s The Dragon Republic with mixed anticipation and dread – on the one hand, her protagonist Rin is easy to sympathize with, but on the other hand, the fantasy milieu of a China torn by the ravages of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) is pretty horrifying, perhaps more so if you’re familiar with the history of that war. So at the beginning of the second novel, despite having obliterated the invading Mugen Federation by unleashing the Phoenix Goddess, Rin and her fellow mages/shamans (there’s effectively no difference) are hiding out, doing odd jobs for the Pirate Queen and on the run from the vengeful Empress. A good part of the novel has to do with the intervention of the technologically advanced Hesperians, who intervene on behalf of a rebel warlord whose wife was raised in Hesperia and is a fanatic worshipper of the the Hesperian god, the Maker. Rin is forced to undergo tests and examinations by the Hesperian priests, and manages to escape with some of her friends when the warlord betrays her to the Hesperians. There’s a lot of action in The Dragon Republic, since most of the book involves an ongoing rebellion against the Empress and ends with a secondary rebellion by the southern provinces against the Dragon Warlord and his Hesperian allies. All this is very entertaining, and occasionally horrific, but I for one am starting to wonder if I’m cheering for the wrong side here, since almost all of Rin’s choices seem to make things worse.

Next time around, I have a few things to say about Robert Patterson’s biography of Robert Heinlein and a few other books besides.

Hey! I have some short stories you might be interested in!




Category: Books
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