Good Breitbart article on the tactics of the political left

[Zinco]

www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/07/23/nolte-mens-health-wants-joe-rogan-blacklisted-for-vile-transphobia/

"We all know how this bullshit of “safetyism” works on the fascist left. You fascists accuse someone you disagree with of making you or POC’s or whoever feel “unsafe,” and suddenly expression that speech become “violence” and that physical act of violent speech must be blacklisted and canceled.

Meanwhile, according to the left, the terrorists in Black Lives Matter and Antifa who are burning, looting marauding, and toppling are not committing violence. Their actual violence is speech."

"When you accuse someone of “putting lives in danger” over a perfectly reasonable and science-based discussion about transitioning, especially when just a few years ago these arguments were treated as mainstream; when you accuse someone of “fanning the flames of hate” and being “dangerous,” that is way beyond a debate.

That is about silencing someone, about accusing them of being responsible in some way for a suicide or hate crime they had nothing to do with."

If being a GC feminist means standing alongside those rooting for the far right, for the lunatic & criminal Trump, calling the BLM demonstrators "terrorists," supporting the anonymous snatch squads in Portland,
..... then I'll stop supporting GC feminism

Would it not make sense to simply be yourself and make your own mind up, rather than having to identify as, or with, any particular alignment. You don't have to call yourself anything: a feminist; a socialist; a progressive.......cast off the labels and fixed identities.

If being a GC feminist means standing alongside those rooting for the far right, for the lunatic & criminal Trump, calling the BLM demonstrators "terrorists," supporting the anonymous snatch squads in Portland,
..... then I'll stop supporting GC feminism

How bizzare. In a nutshell the aims of GC feminism are retaining and reasserting the original intentions of the Equality Act 2010 and minimising risk to children and young people. There is zero overlap in those aims with what is going on in Portland.

I was amused by the revolt in the comments section of the Times under the Meghan and Harry articles. I think even Times readers are bored of royalty, finally. I think the kindest explanation is that the Times shares a publisher with the book and got free access.

After the Heard and Depp court case I suspect lot's of readers are more fed up of being presented with the celebrity marriage drama as news than usual.

If being a GC feminist means standing alongside those rooting for the far right, for the lunatic & criminal Trump, calling the BLM demonstrators "terrorists," supporting the anonymous snatch squads in Portland,
..... then I'll stop supporting GC feminism

Why would you have to 'stand alongside' any of that? GC feminism is about ensuring that the rights of women, as enshrined in the Equality Act, are protected. And ensuring that children are also protected from harmful stereotypes which could literally see their healthy body end up sterile and on a lifelong medical pathway.

If you are willing to throw women and children under the bus because you are worried about what supporting them might look like to other people, then that's on you 🤷‍♀️

[quote BelleHathor]Bovary kind of scary how satire is so close to reality👀, strange times indeed. Fox News will say look here and not there and the Guardian vice versa. It's all agenda driven to maintain their tribes and disinformation is a feature. I now read/view most MSM with a dose of healthy skepticism. Tim Pool on YouTube is excellent at fact checking the MSM without sugar coating and leaving out relevant facts.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=60jzmmpJhVs
m.youtube.com/watch?v=xFJ4b3u_Ca8[/quote]
Belle
Just had a quick look at the video, that's really interesting. I agree with Tim Pool's comments about social media and the move to the left. Douglas Murray makes the same point in the Madness of Crowds, in a chapter titled the Impact of tech. Tech is not neutral and Silicon Valley is dominated by a SJ paradigm. If you Google 'women killed in 2020' the results are illuminating. Those who rely on the Guardian, BBC, the NYT and CNN for their news coverage have serious gaps in their knowledge about current events. The readers of the former will have heard of George Floyd, but not David Dorn as you and I have discussed before. They are also unlikely to have seen any of Andy Ngo's footage from the 50 nights of mayhem in Portland and they have zero idea about Antifa's history of street violence and intimidation. John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes and Bret Weinstein's podcast? Doubtful. The fourth estate is in serious dereliction of its duty. And that has been the case on both sides of the Atlantic since March 2003.

If you are willing to throw women and children under the bus because you are worried about what supporting them might look like to other people, then that's on you

Precisely. Well said.

Good point about how is you read a Novara Media article or watch one of their videos, no one will ever accuse you of being the next Pol Pot or Stalin, but read a Breitbart article.....

BovaryX why March 2003?

I will stand for safeguarding children and defending the hard-won rights of women whatever labels fools try to pin on me.

What is it with the "If you support this, you must also approve that," statements? This isn't Amazon or Netflix!

Where has individuality gone? What has happened to nuance?

7Days
www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq-war-media-fail-matt-taibbi-812230/

Thanks

Good quote from the Rolling Stone article

The first rule of modern commercial media is you’re allowed to screw up, in concert. There’s no risk in being wrong within a prevailing narrative. That’s why the chief offenders kept perches or failed up. The job isn’t about getting facts right, it’s about getting narratives right, and being willing to eat errors discovered in service of pushing the right subtext.

Yes Bovary this right here : "The fourth estate is in serious dereliction of its duty" Its such a sad state of affairs, we used to have some of the best impartial journalists in the world, who would report the truth no matter who it offended/hurt it was facts over feelings. Now opinion is presented at fact. I feel sorry for the people who have that gap in knowledge as results such as Brexit/Trump/BLM rioting come as such a shock it can cause a mental health crisis. Worst still some outlets are openly inciting violence with no regard for the protesters wellbeing, how many would be burning buildings if it had been clearly reported that Antifa is designated a terrorist group by the FBI and by crossing state lines and committing a crime they face federal jail sentences?

Even my 80 odd year old mum knows Antifa is a dangerous bunch of violent thugs that turn up at everything. She's clearly turned by Brietbart despite not having any internet access. Or maybe she just understands people.

Worst still some outlets are openly inciting violence with no regard for the protesters wellbeing, how many would be burning buildings if it had been clearly reported that Antifa is designated a terrorist group by the FBI and by crossing state lines and committing a crime they face federal jail sentences?

Belle
That is an excellent point. But given the scenes in Portland, it doesn't seem like Antifa's middle class quasi paramilitary thugs are remotely worried about that. As for the outlets promoting violence, as you say they do not give a damn about the consequences because they themselves will not face any. The point made by Tim Pool in your earlier video about the rapidity with which the landscape has changed is true. I wonder how this will play out come November? I wonder if those burning buildings in Portland have considered that?

@Portnlemon

Good quote from the Rolling Stone article

The first rule of modern commercial media is you’re allowed to screw up, in concert. There’s no risk in being wrong within a prevailing narrative. That’s why the chief offenders kept perches or failed up. The job isn’t about getting facts right, it’s about getting narratives right, and being willing to eat errors discovered in service of pushing the right subtext.

The failed up crew of the Iraq war journalists cheerleaders is an indictment of the fourth estate.

So, I support the mass BLM demonstrations, not the violent minority

That’s PRECISELY the double standards I’m talking about. You claim to be ‘not left wing’ but you must have been living under a rock for the last two months if you are not aware that the organisation called BLM is a Marxist group whose ideology is informed by queer theory and critical race theory. Their stated aims include defunding he police (yes, I know precisely what that means so spare me the lecture), removing cisgendered privilege amongst others.

You will claim you don’t support all these ideas. You separate the political aims from the underlying support for oppressed minorities. In other words, you can agree with some of their sentiments but not all.

Agree with a conservative such Ben Shapiro’s views on men not being able to turn into women, on the other hand, and it’s automatically assumed you agree with his views on abortion and same-sex marriage as well. In other words agree with him on one thing and you’ve passed the event horizon into being ultra-conservative. Thus, you have to denounce everything he says.

I’m not endorsing Breitbart in any way, just to make that clear. I put it in the same category as I would the Canary. I know that Milo Whatsisname used to write for him and his views on women went out of fashion in about 1950.

BLM is an organisation that is really a pile of ideas, not particularly related, that have been thrown at the wall, and what sticks is what they talk about.

It's postmodern and anarchist, not really marxist at all. Identity politics have borrowed some of Marx's ideas about dialectic, ideas which Marx himself borrowed from Hegel. But they are not really rooted in anything other than a sort of vague idealism in ID politics which is certainly not compatible with a commitment to material reality. If you look at classical Marxist sources they are typically pretty dismissive of identity politics.

if being a GC feminist means standing alongside those rooting for the far right, for the lunatic & criminal Trump, calling the BLM demonstrators "terrorists," supporting the anonymous snatch squads in Portland,
..... then I'll stop supporting GC feminism

I'm not a gender critical feminist.

I do not support BLM- i.e the capitalised version as the people behind it are hard- line extremist Marxists.

The BLM demonstraters in Portland are terrorists, thugs, criminals and thieves. Trump is absolutely correct in calling them out. Dealing with them is not a threat to liberty- it is protecting the liberty of those who are threatened by these "protesters"

Antifa is a vicious, illiberal and intolerant movement.

"You don't need to use Breitbart. It won't help. And I wonder about the good faith of people who start these threads - I strongly suspect that at least in some cases (don't know about this particular OP) they are agents provocateurs trying to get screenshots to "prove" that MN feminists are in fact far right nuts."

Well if that was my intention, it would be a guilt by association fallacy. So as a tactic... well it would have limited value because anyone could just point out that it's a fallacy.

Having a certain agreement with one point in one particular article, doesn't mean you agree with everything ever published by Breitbart. In fact, you may still very largely disagree with it.

As for worries that people will make accusations of "extremism" if you read/link a Breitbart article, yes sure, some people will certainly think / accuse you of that. But then, these days, you only need to deny that men are women and you are already considered a "far right extremist"; the bar isn't that high these days!

For myself, I have read some of their (Breitbart) articles, and the content doesn't appear any more "extreme" to me than Fox News punditry. It's not anti-semitic conspiracy theories or white supremacy.

As for "bias", as I went into before, if you have an open bias then it's fine to give political punditry from only one side. That isn't bad journalism in itself. I would be far more concerned about the issue of bias in the mainstream media.

And although political bias can result in errors in stories, (so e.g. you ignore things that are inconvenient to the narrative you want to push), it's maybe worth pointing out that "bias" by itself doesn't count against a story. You can be heavily biased and completely correct about a story. If a left-wing paper accuses a right-wing politician of corruption, of course they may well have an agenda in play beyond just the noble cause of wanting clean politics, but that doesn't tell you whether the story is correct or not.

Yeah, an editorial slant isn't, in itself, a problem necessarily, if reporting and comment is in fact based on factual material. So a news source has to have a real commitment to that.

Where it becomes difficult is that there are always decisions around what facts are true or not, what are worth reporting, etc. You notice it most with television news because the format means that it can't cover topics in the breadth or depth of a print source, or even radio. An hour long news cast needs to pick six or seven stories, and that in itself requires discernment. What they think is important, what is part of a larger pattern, even what they think would be an illegitimate bias if they reported it will have to be considerations. And every decision is a place where they are potentially shaping the narrative rather than revealing what is happening.

The only way for journalists to guard against that is to be rigorous in questioning their own motives and those of their team, wide reading across the political spectrum, self-disapline, and a willingness to be wrong. Maybe that is why journalists used to have such a reputation as being cynics and loners and maybe even a little misanthropic - it protected them from groupthink.

Breitbart to me is notable because I think they don't only have a bias, they are happy to use outright fake news with the ultimate goal of political destabilisation. So, propaganda, rather than news. But that doesn't mean, I think, that there won't sometimes be some real insights in work found there - propaganda is most effective when it is as close to the truth as possible and it might even have an interest sometimes in revealing truths others shy away from.

Antifa is a vicious, illiberal and intolerant movement

Yes. Antifa oppose freedom of speech, they are violent proponents of the #no debate paradigm. At Berkeley, they were dressed in black paramilitary gear, wearing masks. They believe in street violence and disorder to achieve their political goals. If they had any political or historical literary at all, they might pause to consider a grim authoritarian echo from the 20th century. But that would require critical thinking. And there is zero sign Antifa practises that. Illiberal is precisely what they are. They are an existential threat to classic liberal values.

Thing is, There have been so many posts in MN feminist chat attacking the Guardian, the Labour party, Owen Jones, socialism, and BLM. There have also been posts supporting Anne Widdicombe (!), Norman Tebbit, The Daily Mail, and now Breitbart.

You can't then express horror when people imply that some views are alligned with right of centre.

Oh dear me, that's a bit of a desperate reach; the thread about Anne Widdcombe that I remember was reminiscing about the days when she had an agony column in the Guardian.

Bovary re: I wonder how this will play out come November? I wonder if those burning buildings in Portland have considered that?
I think its something between "They've accepted that their going to lose and just want to tear stuff down to try and make Trump look bad" and "They have absolutely no self awareness or experience of how real people live that they think their revolution will change minds".
I personally think Trump is heading to a landslide in November, not Reagan 1984 but some blue will flip red. Ordinary people are scared to speak out for fear of repercussions, so they will get their revenge at the ballot box. www.cato.org/publications/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share