Tag: mainstream media

‘Fact-Checkers’ Rush to ‘Correct’ Grieving Parents

America’s leading “fact-checkers” describe themselves as “independent.” But watching their energetic defenses of President Joe Biden’s politically damaging behavior reveals they are taking a side. In the first 100 days, I found PolitiFact evaluated Biden’s critics eight times more often than they “fact-checked” the president.

It was truly shocking when Biden was caught on video checking his watch at Dover Air Force Base on Aug. 29 as the caskets of American soldiers were unloaded into vans. Both Snopes and USA Today felt the urgent, throbbing need to claim that the grieving family members who complained were wrong.

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How ‘Black Fungus’ Became the Sniffles: The Evolution of the Delta Plague

It shuttered entire economies and put the brakes on lifting pre-existing restrictions. It was so devious and unprecedented that many governments were forced to make vaccination mandatory. Health passes and double-masking became the norm due to its unrivaled threat to public wellbeing. 

We are of course referring to the Delta strain, which is often confused with the common cold because they share the same symptoms. Does that make you feel slightly upset? That’s a Delta symptom so you should probably get tested. 

It would require several large tomes to cover all aspects of this extraordinarily oversold health threat. Instead, we will examine its media-fueled rise to virus stardom, and also the mutation’s Achilles’ Heel: “almost no evidence or data backing any of this.” 

The Indian strain: a six-month-old mutation that appeared just in time

First identified in India in October 2020, the underappreciated “Indian” strain finally received the attention it deserved after the World Health Organization (WHO) listed B.1.617.2 as a “variant of interest” on April 4, 2021. 

It was a curiously timed upgrade for a mutation that had already been in circulation for six months. By mid-April, it was begrudgingly accepted that the UK variant, which had provoked border closures and draconian restrictions across the globe, was not linked to more severe illness and did not lead to higher rates of death. 

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NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response

The guests for NPR’s just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, “Free Speech is Killing Us”; P.E. Moskowitz, author of “The Case Against Free Speech”; Susan Benesch, director of the “Dangerous Speech Project”; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as “wrong.”

That’s about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

I always liked Brooke Gladstone, but this episode of On The Media was shockingly dishonest. The show was a compendium of every neo-authoritarian argument for speech control one finds on Twitter, beginning with the blanket labeling of censorship critics as “speech absolutists” (most are not) and continuing with shameless revisions of the history of episodes like the ACLU’s mid-seventies defense of Nazi marchers at Skokie, Illinois.

The essence of arguments made by all of NPR’s guests is that the modern conception of speech rights is based upon John Stuart Mill’s outdated conception of harm, which they summarized as saying, “My freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of speech rights accordingly.

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Research Resources You Should Know About

Did you know there’s a searchable archive of the last 12 years of TV news? Or that every moment of all of the major news network’s broadcasts from the week of 9/11 are available for free online? Well, you do now! Go forth and research!

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One Year On… Navalny Poison Pulp Fiction – Surprisingly – Provides a Real Conclusion

There is no doubt Navalny is an asset for Western intelligence agencies assigned to subvert Russia from within with his scripted media antics.

The hallmark of a shoddy, pulp fiction story is it quickly fades from memory. It’s a bit like lots of other made-for-fast-consumption experiences: fast-food, trashy news, infotainment, drugs, or indeed propaganda stunts. It’s sold brashly with gaudy packaging but the intended substance is lacking. Hence, in a short period, the experience and memory vanish leaving a disappointing void.

The alleged poisoning of Russian blogger and political gadfly Alexei Navalny is a case in point. It was one year ago that he dramatically fell ill while on a flight from Siberia. He was rushed to hospital where the Russian doctors stabilized his condition. The medics found nothing extraneous in his body fluids and suggested he was suffering from a medical reaction. Two days later, Navalny was permitted by the Russian government to be flown on a private airplane for treatment in Germany. Within days, the Berlin authorities were claiming he had been poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok. (After body samples had been analyzed at a Bundeswehr military laboratory!)

This was the same nerve poison that was allegedly used by Kremlin assassins against Russian traitor-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in March 2018. Remember the Western media kerfuffle over that drama, the diplomatic expulsions and sanctions? Where have all the expressions of concern about that obscure incident gone? Indeed, where are the Skripals now? The British authorities like a conjuror refuse to disclose the whereabouts of the disappeared. The silence is beyond bizarre.

As with the Skripal case, there then followed a torrent of accusations from Western governments and media claiming that Navalny had likewise been the victim of an assassination plot by the Kremlin. There were grave demands for Moscow to conduct a criminal investigation into the alleged poisoning of Navalny.

One year on, Western governments and media have stopped playing to the gallery with unsubstantiated claims about Navalny. Even the blogger himself, who is now serving three years in a Russian jail for financial corruption, has stopped talking about it. Last year, while allegedly convalescing in Germany for five months in violation of his probation terms for an earlier suspended conviction by a Russian court, Navalny made sensational claims that President Vladimir Putin had personally ordered his assassination. Western media indulged and amplified the slander. Then he returned to Russia in January, whereupon the Russian prison authorities detained him and converted his suspended sentence into jail time. Rightly so, too.

Laughably, the prisoner has been free to give interviews to prominent Western media outlets. So much for him being “persecuted in a penal colony”!

Last week, he wrote an opinion piece for the British Guardian and this week gave an interview to the New York Times. Strangely, however, he barely mentions the purported assassination plot that Putin had allegedly ordered. That shows, inadvertently, that not even Navalny has any conviction in peddling the preposterous story.

The contradiction and absurdities in the Navalny saga, as with the Skripal “prequel”, are legion. A detailed account of official communications from the Russian foreign ministry demonstrates how the German authorities have refused to follow basic standards of informational exchange with Moscow on the provenance of claims made by Navalny that have been amplified by Berlin and other Western governments. That refusal, like the British one over the Skripal affair, is a shocking dereliction of diplomatic standards and due process.

As with so many other anti-Russian tropes – from election meddling to cyber attacks – there is an absolute dearth of evidence provided to back up accusations. The accusations are recklessly repeated over and over and thereby take on the appearance of being established facts (The Big Lie technique of Josef Goebbels no less). When in fact the claims are always fiction.

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NBC contributor becomes spokesperson for controversial group accused of ‘normalizing pedophilia’

NBC contributor Noah Berlatsky is now he Communications Director for Prostasia, a not-for-profit group that is reportedly attempting to legitimize pedophilia under the guise of helping children. As part of his work with the group, he has written about legitimizing “trans children,” conducted interviews about the positive impact of pornography on children, and how the best way to help children who are trafficked into the sex trade is to “decriminalize the sex industry.“

Prostasia offers pedophiles a MAP Support Club, which “is a peer support chat for minor attracted people who are fundamentally against child sexual abuse and committed to never harm children, and is a safe space to have peer support in times of trouble.” This group is for people who are aged 13 and up.

Prostasia bills itself as “a new kind of child protection organization” that has a different approach to protecting children than the current methods of social work and law enforcement, saying that these approaches “are less effective than they should be, because they are driven by emotion rather than evidence.”

That is one that involves embracing those that are self-identified pedophiles. The idea is that with support, these “minor attracted persons” can be “committed to never offending.” Timothy N. Fury, writing for Prostasia, says that for pedophiles,

“The most common struggle is not with child sexual abuse images,” and that many of these people are looking “for recommendations on where to get professional help.” While Fury writes that “Some minor-attracted people do struggle with viewing sexually harmful images, and they are provided with the support needed to stop.”

And for Fury, this is personal; “…these people are not the majority of us,” he writes. “No, the majority of us struggle with basic mental health issues—some diagnosed, some not—and just need a place to talk about things they feel they can never talk to friends and family members about. Many of these minor attracted people are children themselves.” Fury’s piece is just one in defense of pedophilia as a predilection.

Berlatsky previously wrote that “Pedophiles are essentially a stigmatized group.”

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Slouching Towards Totalitaria: The Groupthink Psychodemic, Part III

The Asch Conformity Test was a series of trials carried out at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, aimed at discerning how susceptible people might be to peer pressure, and how far this was likely to influence them in the things they believed or claimed to believe. It has often been noted that human beings fear nothing — not even hunger or thirst — more than being cast outside their own tribe, and these tests, also called the Asch Paradigm, comprised a series of studies directed by Solomon Asch to examine whether individuals would yield to or defy a majority group, and study the impact their responses had on their opinions, beliefs and actions. The results show a strong propensity in a minority of humans to follow the herd regardless of facts or even personal understandings. Asch found a strong pattern of yielding towards an erring majority opinion in more than a third of his test subjects, with three-quarters being prepared to concur with the majority’s  ‘blunders’ to some degree — in other words, consensus was more persuasive that truth. Doubt creeps in when we are outnumbered, pressing us to trust the majority. 

Asch’s verdict: ‘That intelligent, well-meaning, young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern.’ 

Some subjects, though suspecting something was wrong, lacked the confidence to go against the crowd. Some knew the others were wrong but went along so as not to seem ‘out of step’. Further trials over subsequent years discovered that, if one or more of the actors concurred with the subject’s opinion, the number of instances where the subjects answered with the majority was reduced dramatically. The bigger the group, the more likelihood of conformity. The level of conformity was dramatically reduced in experiments in which the answers were written rather than spoken publicly. 

This is why it has been so vital to the Covid deception that contrary views are excluded from public debates. Just one dissenting voice can liberate even a hesitant person to ignore the majority and speak the truth as he sees it. In a mass society, even a few dissenters can turn a general convocation around. That is why the authorities seek to blacken the reputations of dissenters, why journaliars demonise truth-tellers as ‘far right conspiracy theorists’, and so forth. It is also why PC ideas have proved so powerful in bullying the majority to remain silent on issues when certain perspective are defined as taboo. All goes to demonstrate Irving Janis’s third rule of groupthink: Its captives immediately move to marginalise ‘wrongthinkers’.

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Warmongers Keep Raging About The Phrase ‘Ending The Forever Wars’ And We Should Laugh At Them

In the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal influential promoters of western militarism have been absolutely fuming about the popular idea of ending the forever wars, and their tantrums are not even trying to disguise it as something else. They’re literally using that phrase, “ending the forever wars”, and then saying it’s a bad thing.

I mean, what a bizarre hill to die on. War is the very worst thing in the world, and forever is the very worst amount of time they could go on for, yet they’re openly condemning the “doctrine of ending the forever wars”. How warped does your sense of reality have to be to even think this is a view anyone who isn’t paid by defense contractors could possibly be sympathetic to?

Yet they are indeed trying. Citing the chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal as though every single day of the twenty-year occupation has not been far worse, career-long warmongers are trying to spin “ending the forever wars” as a disdainful slogan that everyone should reject.

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