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.
And the didjeridoo, for which we should be thankful; forerunner of the orchestral wind section. In 60,000 years no Abo musician thought to put a few holes along the prototype or whittle improvements to the ‘mouthpiece’ so as to alter the notes and pitch. Even without a string section it would have been an improvement.
How many times do we have to talk about helicopters around here for you to get the point? Yeah, throwing leftists out of helicopters tends to make the world better, but what style of government would be able to do such a thing?
BTW, National Socialist <> Fascist. I wouldn’t want to live under either, although I’m living under that administrative state that Mussolini admired (which FDR’s administration thought was the way to go). You may or may not find https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-original-fascist/ interesting or believable.
Honestly, if I cannot edit a post that I just made, then the edit function should not even exist.
The US Supreme Court can, has, and will make monumentally shit decisions. Wickard v. Filburn (which still “good law”) is one such decision made back in 1942 under FDR’s reign of error. That decision stated that you growing tomatoes (for example) in your back yard could interfere with the interstate commerce of tomatoes into your state (since you aren’t buying some other state’s tomatoes any more) that such growing of tomatoes in your back yard are obviously controllable by federal laws.
I had to take 4 credit hours of law as a cadet, read this back in 1978 and thought “What the flying fuck?”. The water’s been coming to a boil for a while.
Again missing the point. How many helicopters do you have? How many pilots? What style of government doesn’t GAF who they toss out? You want to have a life? They don’t care. Nobody cares.
Again, logic and reason. This was clearly a BS decision long before it was “explained” to me as a teenager. I take it that at approximately the same time you were objecting to your AP history teacher regarding this as was I? No one cared that it was BS. All that mattered was that the teacher said it was logical and reasonable. Any objections were tolerated but not listened to. The only net effect was a waste of the class’s time. And as a lesson to not ask questions no matter how unreasonable. It makes people uncomfortable and thus it’s not cool. Even amongst the uncool smart kids, so where does that leave you? Just accept what you are told is the right answer, come back tomorrow and write it down on the test or no ‘A’ for you.
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.
Oh, and we mustn’t forget The Atlantic and Vanity Fair.
Still a classic.
As I said in the original thread, I can’t offhand think of another interview in which the interviewee has to correct the interviewer so many times, after almost every question. It’s one of those moments in media that revealed the aforementioned gulf to a great many people, and did so quite vividly.
Though I think the item on Scientific American – and its editor’s response to criticism – shows just how thoroughly a once-reputable institution can be captured and compromised.
This is a test to see if the comment edit option is still up-buggered.
Yes, it appears to be up-buggered.
[ Makes offering to gods at wpDiscuz. ]
It wasn’t until I got to university that I was even aware of the existence of BBC Radio 4 and its flagship Today programme (I may have heard the phrase Desert Island Discs, but had certainly never listened to it or knew where it came from).
At the time, it was a complete revelation and I became an avid listener.
What surprised me was that unlike the television news, the Prime Minister would appear live, and in person, in the radio car (a kind of mobile recording booth if I remember correctly). (Note that is not something that has happened in a long, long time now).
From there I discovered In Our Time, which I would still argue is a worthwhile digest, the News Quiz (a hit-and-miss satirical news review), and other radio comedies such as Knowing me, Knowing you with Alan Partridge, Old Harry’s Game, Cabin Pressure, The League of Gentleman and others.
I’m mentioning this because I was a regular Radio 4 listener, especially to the Today programme, for at least 20 years or more.
While quite obviously I am older now, it’s not due to my advancing years that I have come to notice the very obvious changes in tone.
Following the row over Carrie Gracie’s claims of gender pay gap discrimination, a journalist I doubt 1 in 1000 licence fee payers had heard of before 2018, the Today programme shifted its feminist editorial line into high gear. No matter how tenuous the link might be, a feminist angle on a story would be found (or simply crow-barred in) and pushed hard.
And while not especially religious myself, I was actually disgusted when Thought for the Day, a short daily slot in which a faith leader would give a brief sermon, was opened up to atheists (which in practice just meant opening up this slot to the kind of Islington dinner party chattering class that already had multiple media platforms from which to spout their waffle).
None of this was new as Rod Liddle, a former editor of Today, has been saying for years.
But the tone that at one time could only be heard coming from the Left wing comedians on the News Quiz (e.g. Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel, Jo Brand) now pervades everything with an intensity that means you can’t fail to notice it.
For a long time, Radio 4 seemed to be the only thing which, for me, made the licence fee worth paying.
Yet I doubt I’ve listened to it more than about four times in as many years and most of those by accident.
Well, it’s strange for an in-group whose status depends on publicly disdaining the values of their imagined inferiors – and on making those imagined inferiors feel unwelcome, not part of their intended audience – to then ask how it can be that their audience continues to shrink.
See also the last few paragraphs of this:
For instance.
Just noticed I mixed up this part while making my previous comment…
The 1978 thing, yes. Class was at time, same exact year as me but you were taking a law class, not history. Curious if you raised any WTF objection or would that have even more problematic as a cadet? Forgetting your specifics but was this West Point?
Testing, testing.
I grew up on Public Radio and Public Television. When I was a very young child, there were such treasures as Leonard Bernstein’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, science programs which talked about science without injecting politics, and so on. But slowly the left took over and now they are largely unwatchable and unlistenable. I still get occasional letters begging for money.
Also, under the topic of policing language…
So in order to keep spaces safe for all…
Don’t say ‘bigger’, say ‘larger’.
Don’t say ‘chigger’, say ‘mite’.
Don’t say ‘digger’, say ‘excavator’.
Well, you get the idea.
The science is in. Global warming does cause earthquakes.
The earth in CA moved, as Hurricane Hillary swept by.
Culture: the basic premise of the Left/Woke is that all cultures are equal, that we may not make any value judgements. Interestingly, none of these wokies volunteers to live in the Austin neighborhood (or other hellholes) of Chicago. The other basic premise is that if POC fail at something it is ipso facto due to racism and only racism and that thing (grammar, music notation, math) must be abolished. At what cost? Well. In Cali, every time they get extreme winds, power lines down is the number one cause of fire. This can be fixed. Do they fix it? No. They spend money on renewables and other green crap. This is incompetence writ huge. Same identical thing in Hawaii–they had big fires in 2019 and simply failed to have a plan for either notification or evacuation. The guy in charge of water dallied 5 hrs to release water to aid firefighters until the fire preventing the release. They could have shut down the grid but did not. Grand sweeping incompetence. Lots died. Entire towns burned to the ground. You cannot run an advanced economy with dolts and twits in charge.
Link needs fixing.
But the Claremont Review of Books is a great publication.
A shrubbery?
Grand sweeping incompetence.
To take it a step further even though they know it is perpetually dry on the leeward side and water comes from wells and aquifers, it rains somewhere on that island damn near if not every day, up to a couple three hundred inches/year on the windward side, unlike Oahu, there is not a single reservoir.
I suppose building one would upset Lono or the menehune. If only there was a water source they could maybe desalinate or something. Crazy talk.
So… Apropos of nothing in particular, the top advert at Insty this morning was a charter service.
For “Heavy Lift Helicopters”.
For “Heavy Lift Helicopters”.
Mi-26, for the really big jobs.
https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1693202194340696313?s=20
O/T Nasty racists given platform on UK TV.
The guy in charge of water dallied 5 hrs to release water to aid firefighters until the fire preventing the release.
Via Ace, more on this guy. He didn’t even live on Maui, among other things.
Rather like how, in the name of “green” ideology, California stopped building reservoirs and other infrastructure, abandoning the plans which were first drawn up in the 1940’s and 50’s.
From the comments:
Racism has made that black opinionizer as dumb as a bag of hammers.
Rather like how, in the name of “green” ideology, California stopped building reservoirs and other infrastructure…
Indeed, and like Hawaii, California also lacks a handy 850 mile source of water that could be desalinated.
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail
If I’m an ethnic advocate trying to consolidate the foothold of my people in China for example, and there just happens to be a moral consensus that gatherings of Chinese are morally suspect and as boring as white rice, that they need to include my people for moral legitimacy and zest, that’s more than a hammer, it’s an ethnic advocacy superweapon that’s fallen into my lap.
I don’t have to be bright enough to have persuaded the Chinese to adopt a suicidal moral consensus, just aware enough to recognize that it’s the right tool for the job, and to hammer it in at every opportunity.
What possible reason would I have for not using it? Because it’s ludicrously self-flattering and transparently self-serving? Because it seeks tangible advantages for the people I represent instead of the fulfillment of abstract principles? Because it puts the Chinese at a disadvantage where they have to prove their legitimacy to us? Those are all reasons for using the hammer again and again.
Ideally, because it would make you very unwelcome. A sensible society does not tolerate such people. If only our society were more sensible.
I’m currently watching the world athletics championships. Let’s just say the old racist probably wouldn’t have any problems with the British track team.
But that’s different.
Testy
The body positivity bozos were unavailable for comment. Lizzo hardest hit.
Gone?
On PBS, you may be thinking of his Harvard series of 6 lectures, “The Unanswered Question”, which were on PBS in 1976. They were fascinating.
On CBS in 1958-1972 (thx to wikipedia for the dates) he presented the “Young People’s Concerts”, which I remember happily.
And on Omnibus, the 1950s Sunday morning arts and humanities program hosted by Alistair Cooke on CBS, Bernstein did several programs explaining music.
Most of these have been issued on DVD and may be available through your local library. A lot of them can be found on Youtube and other sites.
It is strange that Steven Fry and his panelists did not think through the implications
The late Canadian pundit Kathy Shaidle once referred to Steven Fry as “a stupid person’s idea of a clever person”.
And the vast majority of the rest of the citizenry is fine with that. They have been thoroughly brainwashed to accept it.
Bezmenov tried to warn us.
the most likely outcome is a strongman coming in and imposing tyrannical order
Bezmenov tried to warn us.
Carleton University’s journalism programme
Carleton’s a joke. It’s the Canadian equivalent of a junior state community college.
Still a classic.
And I just sat and watched the whole thing again. Just amazing.
I was a Junior (or Cow as we called it for reasons I won’t expand unless specifically asked) at West Point taking my mandatory 4 credit hours of Law. ALL of us had to take 4 credit hours of Law as well as various other courses around the “whole man” concept (despite my being in the first class with females). That was ~45 years ago (1978/1979); the slight bit of monitoring around what USMA has been up to since then that I’ve paid attention to has not filled me with pride about that place’s recent output. From I can tell, it’s now the “woke vermin” concept; I could be wrong.
I believe that I brought up the “growing tomatoes in your back yard” analogy at the time with the additional “well, then, EVERYTHING falls under the Commerce Clause according to this decision!” My instructor was a Captain (O3) and so had as much ability to change Supreme Court decisions as I did as a cadet. If memory serves me correctly after so long, I believe that he agreed with my statement. At least he didn’t tell me to shut the fuck up; I’d remember that.
Still, the takeaway is that Supreme Court has feet of clay. Wickard v. Filburn was decided when FDR was attempting to expand the court so that the new added judges would decide things in his favor; that shitty decision was a bone thrown to him to keep the SC at the current size.
And, as it so happens, damn near any economic activity you can make appears to controlled by the Commerce Clause due to that decision.
Interestingly, it worked for me when I clicked on it.
If this is true of editors at BBC Radio 4, it goes tenfold for Labour.
Despite Keir Starmer’s best efforts to make Labour presentable for the forthcoming General Election, the breathtaking hubris that was on display in the run up to their spectacular undoing in 2019 is still very much alive and well.
I’d suggest that this is precisely what makes her unfit to be a school administrator.
To boast of abandoning reality at the drop of a hat – and by extension, coercing others to be unrealistic too – and to boast of creating a pathological environment, in which manipulative pretension and mental illness thrive – is an odd moral flex.
I think we’ll give that one a post of its own. Comments that-a-way.
Jordan Peterson has a segment (that I can’t seem to find) like this:
“How did we get here?
I moved forward a little bit and you didn’t object.
Then I waited.
Then I moved forward a little bit more and you didn’t object.
Then I waited…”
Yes. Do not want to leave the impression I, nor we as I was not the most outspoken about it (though probably the most annoyed), were told to STFU but our teacher. However she was clearly supportive of it regardless how much she tried to treat it like settled law and thus the way things should be. I saw her again at a reunion a few years back. Upon brief discussions with her at the reunion many, many things, many things not even discussed, became clear to me…or maybe clearer…regarding education.
“by out teacher” not “but our teacher”.
Whaaaat dooooes a….yel-low light mean?
A great show.