Not That Kind, You Peasants
“But why do you think this is happening?”
Turning off replies may not be the best look for a programme called Feedback https://t.co/pUKQIalSYA
— Simon Edge (@simonjedge) August 20, 2023
Update, via the comments:
Before replies were disabled, “loathing your own audience” was a suggestion offered repeatedly and with varying degrees of liveliness, along with “woke nonsense” and variations thereof. The word bubble was used more than once.
However, a handful of outliers – often academics employed as consultants and talking heads by the BBC – complained that the broadcaster is “a vehicle for Tory propaganda.” A claim that perhaps reveals more than intended.
Of course, it’s not just the BBC. It could be Channel 4. Or The Economist. Or Scientific American. Or Nature. Or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Or… well, we’ll be here all day.
The sense of there being a gulf – in assumptions and ideology – between what could broadly be called the media class and much of its supposed audience is hardly a rare experience. The impression that said gulf is growing and seemingly irretrievable is also far from uncommon.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Somewhat symbolic, I think.
LOL. Wasn’t it going the way they expected?
Well, before replies were disabled, “loathing your own audience” was a suggestion offered repeatedly and with varying degrees of liveliness, along with “woke nonsense” and variations thereof. The word bubble was used more than once.
Though a handful of outliers, often academics employed as talking heads by the BBC, complained that the broadcaster is “a vehicle for Tory propaganda.”
Previously, and somewhat related.
Also related, this, on media luminaries and their bewilderment:
Oh, there’s more.
From the comments:
That sounds like satire but one can no longer be sure.
Believe me it isn’t.
We have an ongoing misapprehension about the BBC’s funding.
Many people campaign for, usually conservative, governments to abolish the mandatory tv license fee or telly tax not realising that should this happen whoever is in power will simply replace it with an annual £4-5bn grant as part of government spending.
This would suit everyone except the general public. No problems with collection and no more bad publicity when hundreds if not thousands appear in court for non payment. Just this once it’s actually true to say women most affected. That’s why it’s going to happen.
We then won’t even have the satisfaction of not paying the license fee for a service we never use, instead we will all be paying for it via our taxes.
This goes a long way towards explaining the complete indifference of the bbc to public opinion. They know their little echo chamber (which naturally includes the majority of politicians) will continue to be lavishly funded one way or another without ever having to suffer the indignity of seeking advertising revenue.
In my personal experience, far-left loons really do think that anyone to their right is a “right-wing fascist”, not to mention a “racist” and “Christofascist”.
I am surprised at how quickly the BBC shut down their comments. I had expected it to run to the thousands of responses, but I got to the bottom in just a couple minutes of reading.
Which leads me to think they expected reinforcements, people clapping them on the back and saying the population is just too stupid to understand their high-minded wit and wisdom.
As an American conservative, I have been conditioned to expect negative portrayals of my viewpoint in almost every public venue. It must be nice to float through life in a pink cloud of clapping seals.
And yet conservatives…or whatever that word means over yonder…just Tories now? Were they ever really conservatives?…continue to support them. This is what democracy looks like when your typical citizen is an idiot.
I enjoy QI, in the way we colonials have, who think all British accents are posh. I watch clips with mingled awe and amusement at the quick-witted erudition That makes me wish I had had a better education.
It is strange that Steven Fry and his panelists did not think through the implications of what they are saying. Prison systems were designed to avoid vigilante justice, and harsher penalties like public executions or hand choppings.
In the States we have embraced de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, and now decarceration of the habitually criminal. With those two protections for the criminals removed, it is not the population who should be worried, but the criminals themselves.
There are more of us than there are of them. That becomes ever-more evident every time we see a mini-dustup like this. Or, check out the reaction to Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” song. The discontent bubbles up continually from below and our betters attempt to deal with it by labeling all of it “hate” and sneering. That approach is getting less and less effective with time – but it’s all they got.
“Culture is everything.”
I have read personal accounts from lifelong New Yorkers comparing the orderly, crime-free citizen responses to early power outages to the later outages with big crime waves.
This is like this.
Yeah. No. The criminals are now protected by the police/justice system. Vigilante justice? Hell, they’ve outlawed simple self defense. It’s quite obvious. The videos are everywhere. Defense of others is even outlawed. See Daniel Penney. The ‘population’ consists mostly of cowards who won’t even speak up, let alone stand up to being physically abused, bullied, and even killed. It is quite clear that the criminal scum can kill and kill and kill again. Should the average citizen who is willing to fight push back on the abuse, let alone kill anyone even by accident, and that’s the last criminal that they will stop. They’re done for either via incarceration or intimidation.
It is, as they say, all so tiresome.
Added (because edit gave me a warning about posting too fast): And the vast majority of the rest of the citizenry is fine with that. They have been thoroughly brainwashed to accept it.
So she thinks Radio 4 is ‘a vehicle for Tory propaganda’ *and* ‘right-wingers won’t listen’ to it?
Heh. Pretty much.
Mind-numbingly disingenuous statements which serve as justification for “We’re getting criticism from both sides so on balance you’d have to accept that we’re getting it just about right”.
Should the average citizen who is willing to fight push back on the abuse, let alone kill anyone even by accident, and that’s the last criminal that they will stop. They’re done for either via incarceration or intimidation.
Totally dependent on locale and how much public sentiment for the citizen. Remember the miscreant who tried armed robbery in Norco CA and got shot? The videos of his screaming “My arm’s shot off” and he flees the store & into the car with the rest of his armed thugs went viral, the 80 y/o store owned got nothing but kudos. And the Sikh with a stick administering the beatdown? No charges for him.
Penny may be charged (it *is* NY), but has a defense fund of millions because a lot of good citizens are outraged at the charges.
The Ruling class hasn’t gotten rid of 2A or the right of self-defense … yet … so it’s gonna take a while to stamp out our inner Rooftop Korean.
I fear that it was only public outcry that influenced the DA to not file charges.
Re the stick-wielding Sikh I’d be extremely surprised if some dime-store Benjamin Crump type doesn’t get involved with civil actions against the perpetrator, his employer, the police, the city, the state, Donald Trump and everyone short of God Almighty for letting it happen.
His life is effectively ruined, at the very least for the next several years. George Zimmerman is still treated with contempt in nominally conservative…”conservative” central FL. I got curious, had to dig around in the incarceration databases as I did not see one news story, but the man who tried to kill him by shooting at him while driving down a very busy, main street in a very safe area was given another trial, found guilty even in that one, but re-sentenced to time served and let free after only 5 years of an originally 20 year sentence. The system is a bloody clown show. There’s no real justice. There are no clear standards, even in “good” locales. So called.
The key word in your statement is, now. I think it was Instapundit who popularized the phrase, that cannot last forever, won’t.
It’s impossible that this state of affairs can go on indefinitely. This regime of anarcho-terrorism must lead to a reaction.
Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is a strongman coming in and imposing tyrannical order. But occasionally I permit myself a glimmer of hope that we can govern ourselves through representatives who are not hell-bent on the destruction of our civilization.
This is like this.
That first “This” – that the boomerang was the precursor to modern flight? Only if the Wright brothers, or Da Vinci, or anyone else trying to build a flying machine actually saw one of those things, noticed the aerodynamic properties and modeled their craft’s wings on the boomerang shape. I don’t think they did. I could be wrong, but I think birds’ wings were the European inspiration, probably the same for the Australian aboriginals. Independent observations leading to creation of tools to do the thing desired – fly. The aboriginals stopped at knocking dinner out of the air. Other groups went much further with the same ideas.
It’s also rather ironic that they explain the boomerang in those evil western colonial racist math terms in their cringey attempt at … what? Showing that we owe everything to a Stone Age society? One who most of the western inventors didn’t even know about?
I fear that it was only public outcry that influenced the DA to not file charges.
I don’t doubt that it did play a part. And THAT is what needs to happen. IMHO we’ve all gotten too complacent in monitoring the system that we take for granted “protects” us.
It will take people to push back and demand change or else.
Yeah. No. Insty’s lawyer country, at least as posts go. Glenn is. And thus high on the copeium of believing that words on paper are somehow magical. There exist plenty of examples of societies descending into anarchy and not coming back up, depending on how far off the norm of Western Civ or modernity or whatever you want to look. Or how long “never” is. I count “never” as in being in my lifetime. You do you, your children, or whenever. Beirut was once called the Paris of the Middle East. Heh. Now Paris is becoming the Beirut of France.
This. Magic spells on paper written centuries ago will not do the trick. It’s not going to change organically, nor is the change inevitable.
No, I believe Instapundit’s comment is not based on belief on magical power of words on paper. Rather, he is making an observation about societies: An increasing number of people (people who do not read blogs and political magazines) will become increasingly fed up with the dysfunction and with the people who enable that dysfunction.
Did Australia’s boomerangs pave the way for flight?
No, that is why the Wright Flyer of 1903 didn’t go in circles.
Oh, FFS. Meanwhile, back around 1950…
Journalists, is there anything they
don’tknow?I’m sure you are correct: Various early flight theorists and experimenters, going at last as far back as DaVinci, were inspired by the flight of birds (and sometimes bats.)
I’m also certain that all or virtually all of the19th Century aviation pioneers were not even aware of boomerangs, and if any were aware they were not inspired thusly in their design of gliders and airplanes.
Journalists, is there anything they
don’tknowwon’t pull out of their ass?Sir George Caley made this counter-rotating helicopter toy in 1796 (well before Nikoli Ilych Kamov thought it was a swell idea) based on a slightly earlier French (spit) design. There are even earlier European paintings showing kids playing with toys like this spinning thing.
Seeing as how Australia hadn’t had much truck with Yte European Supremacist Devils until 1770, it is indeed a pretty good bet Caley didn’t come up with his thing even in the extremely unlikely event he say a boomerang.
And so we see that despite their quick wit and elite educations, these are indeed second rate thinkers. If they were first rate they would think through the implications of their ideas and deep-six the foolish ones. Nor would they ignore evidence which undermines those ideas. But, like so many second-rate intellectuals, they value cleverness and conformity to fashionable opinion over wisdom and truth. “Dedicated Followers of Fashion”.
In a recent podcast interview, Jordan Peterson remarked that many people do not actually think: An idea pops into their heads and they embrace it, thinking that they have Had a Thought. But they do not critically examine that idea: They do not bother to look for evidence that might undermine it. They do not explore its implications and what that says about the truth or wisdom of the idea.
It is fashionable among intellectuals to think that only the hoi polloi are guilty of not thinking, but it is very frequently true of the intellectual classes as well. (And as has been remarked more than once, scientists rarely think scientifically outside their narrow fields.)
Thus the uselessness of logic and reason. The ideas that pop into their heads are generally a function of their own emotions and ideas that they have heard most often, most forcefully from others. So the influence of logic and reason on culture and public opinion…?
No. It’s not that logic and reason are useless. It’s that emotional appeals are also useful. And those who want to win should embrace both. Thus it is good for a movement to have logical people who present facts and logic, and other people who present emotional arguments.
No. In the context of broad appeal, to the masses, logic and reason are only useful when in service to persuade via emotions and group think. By themselves, they are useless. No great scientific discovery was ever accepted by the general public, even by most scientists outside the relevant domain/context..and even many inside that domain, based solely on logic and reason. The emotional element and especially peer pressure are what sells the idea. I don’t like it, but that’s just reality. I’m guilty of it myself even though I’ve been well aware of this reality most of my life.
“I have 200,000 followers, doesn’t he understand who I am!”
A hilarious encounter with some psychopathic narcissists.
There’s more than a bit of a “you peasants” attitude displayed here.
But then, I assume that nearly all “influencers” are narcissists and/or grifters.
If you wish to create an enduring structure in society, you should use logic and reason to create such a structure and then create an emotional appeal to sell that structure to those who feel more than think.
I believe that @WTP believes that has already happened with specifically different views of society than the society the US founders created. If that’s the case, I actually agree with @WTP’s view on the matter.
If only I could edit my slightly earlier comment.
I agree with the above quote. I also don’t know how to adjust the trajectory of my country.
We’d need to find some first.
RS Archer may have been correct in the link, but I think he’s otherwise not a nice person. (Nor am I, to be frank.)
And I have seen a claim that this, and other items on his Twitter account, are parodies/hoaxes/whatever you want to call them.
Today I learned that drug dealing is “black culture”.
Today I learned that drug dealing is “black culture”.
The rest of the story, but why isn’t a black person drinking boba tea cultural appropriation, and why aren’t a bunch of Taiwanese up in arms over some upstart Indonesians appropriating their culture, and why the hell would anyone drink that crap to begin with?
Australia: after 60,000 years residing there, the aboriginies did not have agriculture, domesticated animals (besides the dog), writing, actual houses, or anything. Sure, hold them up as an example for us.
Logic: The idea of the minimum wage appeals to “fairness” and in the face of this powerful emotion, the logic (and fact) that raising the min wage prices young and low-skill people out of a job does not stand a chance. That is the power of emotion. Same with “hands up don’t shoot”–it appeals to a narrative.
It is indeed possible for a civilization to fall into anarchy. Venezuela is a fine example. Unfortunately, brutal dictatorships can be very stable and persistent–Cuba for example.
It’s also rather ironic that they explain the boomerang in those evil western colonial racist math terms in their cringey attempt at … what?
Wakandaism, or in this case Abo-Wakandaism. They were doing science and technology better than the stalepales, who bricked up the starship base at Ayres Rock and stole the Abo knowledge for Isaac Newton and James Watt to take credit for. Or they were just about to have their technological breakout when they were thwarted by the stalepales.
Boomerangs – beautiful design, and what else could it come from but the proto-STEM world of country boy empiricists and tinkerers who are close observers of nature and have a lot of time to whittle their throwing stick until it’s better than their friend’s throwing stick.
By the time the evil James Cook turned up, the country boy tinkerers in the UK (and in Germany, and in China, and in Persia) weren’t all that advanced in throwing sticks but they did have centuries of experience with sailboats, windmills, water wheels, where they’re harnessing the forces of a designed shape moving through a fluid. Is that maybe worth bringing up in the history of why the Wright brothers and not the Unga-Bunga brothers developed powered flight?
I think boomerangs and windmills and airplanes are all great, but the average BBC correspondent thinks that Aboriginal country boy empiricists have something spiritual and ecological about them, while white country boy empiricists are backward racists whose barnyard wisdom, like that animals and people tend to be like their ancestors, has to be vilified and suppressed.
And are we sure we are not already in one? Under true anarchy we could at least defend ourselves. I really think people, conservative…”conservative” people looking for copes like “what cannot go on will not go on” or “cannot last forever” are in denial as to the kind of strongman/authoritarian phase that comes next. There’s no guarantee, in fact it is extremely unlike, that the expected strongman will come from the (so-called) right. That’s the Hitler/Mussolini Narrative of keeping the trains running on time BS. More likely we get a Stalin/Pol Pot/Mao/Castro/WTF authority.
Should paleontologists be up in arms over all those Tea Rex bubble tea shops?