Tom Roche
Shared posts
Fresh From the Fringe, Part 1
Tom Rocheamusing-enough set of very-brief excerpts from standup sets: Novellie is the best, Wall gets points for going musical
Wikipedia: From Democratized Knowledge to Left-Establishment Propaganda, w/ co-Founder Larry Sanger. Plus: Joe Rogan on FBI in Jan 6 | SYSTEM UPDATE #121
Tom Roche(Note that, while the {Joe Rogan, Jim Gaffigan, FBI, 6 Jan 2020} imbroglio gets mentioned at top and bottom of episode, it got bumped--Greenwald (== GG) says he will cover it in the {next, 2 Aug 2023} SUGG episode.)
EXCELLENT takedown of Wikipedia as US deepstate propaganda, including
+ interview with Wikipedia (== W) cofounder Larry Sanger (unfortunately late in episode, apparently due to "technical difficulties)
+ Google links:
+ Google gives Wikimedia Foundation (W parent org) money
+ Google boosts Wikipedia pages to top of its search results
+ W history: how it became an empire tool
+ W alternatives, esp [EncycloSearch](https://encyclosearch.org)
+ W policy on "reliable" vs "questionable" sources
+ how W smears empire and establishment critics, esp Grayzone and Max Blumenthal (as well as GG)
Unfortunately,
- this episode does not much discuss Wikipedia deepstate hires, notably [former CEO Katherine Maher](https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-loving-founder-and-wikimedia-foundations-regime-change-operative-ceo/) (archived [here](http://web.archive.org/web/20230616075747/https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-loving-founder-and-wikimedia-foundations-regime-change-operative-ceo/))
- in this episode, GG exhibits a too-usual tendency to go all-the-way with universal quantifiers, saying (IIRC) that nothing on Wikipedia can be trusted. This unfortunately overlooks W's /real/ utility for deepstate/establishment propaganda: slipstreaming. ~99% of W content /is/ trustworthy, if you're looking for (e.g.) the regnal dates of a Chinese emperor, or the mass (or lack thereof) of a fundamental particle, or how 2 biological species in the same genus are diffrentiated, or when a particular band recorded a particular album--and lots more. Wikipedia is weaponized only WRT content about which the {empire, establishment, 1%} cares to propagandize, which is a tiny--but /extremely/ important--fraction of the whole. As a result, my guess is lotsa folks come to trust W on most topics, and so fail to critically evaluate its content, and are thus vulnerable to slipstreamed {dis, mis, mal} information.
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Spreading Rock Dust on Farmland Has Potential to Draw Down Huge Sums of Carbon Dioxide
Tom Rocheinteresting, but only does gross benefit (i.e., spread volcanic dust on cropland -> move GTs CO2 from atmosphere to pedosphere) not net benefit (subtracting, e.g., energy/CO2 costs of [pulverizing rock, transportation to cropland)
Adding volcanic rock dust to cropland could help the world reach a key carbon removal goal, a new study finds.
Eurosummer Bullying 2023
Tom Rocheamusing Nick+Ciarán
Americans come to Europe and Nick and Ciaran, as 100% Europeans* and eurovibe experts, set them in their place.
*No, Nick is not American
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Bonus - Live from Montreal: T*barnak!
Tom RocheIMHO amusing listen: surprisingly little content matches the Toronto show exactly (and what /does/ gives insight into what Da Boyz (esp Will) find especially funny). Plus, Matt seems much more sh!tfaced in this show than the previous, and goes off several times.
These shows were both a lot of fun, so we’re just releasing this one as a subscriber bonus. The structure is 70% the same as Toronto, but the riffs are like 70% different? Consider this like our version of a Dead bootleg.
I kind of want to make a website like Fugazi has where for a one time $5 membership fee you get access to the raw unedited recordings of every live show we’ve ever done, all in one convenient player/directory. I know people are hot & cold on the live shows but would there be any interest in something like this? Also if you’re like a web design person and would like to help on such a project, hit us up.
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Oil, food, trade and people; BRICS play long game
Tom Rocheexcellent
UK Telegraph; Ukraine running out of men. NATO, all resources towards Melitopol
Tom Rocheexcellent
8/25/23: Chaos At GOP Debate Climate Change Question, UAW Worker Interview w/ Max Alvarez, Spencer Snyder Asks New YorkersThird Party Candidates?
Tom Roche1st 2 segments (KB+SE, Max Alvarez interview) very good ... but skip final/3rd segment (starts 50:14) which is just a voxpop and not a particularly good one.
This week we discuss the GOP debate climate change question turning the stage into chaos, Max Alvarez interviews a rank and file UAW member, Spencer Snyder hits the streets of New York to ask people their opinion on Third Party Candidates. (Note on UAW Worker interview) "This conversation was recorded on Aug 17, before voting on the UPS tentative agreement concluded on Aug 22.")
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How Both Parties Work for ‘Tyranny, Inc.’
Tom RocheEXCELLENT interview
Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here:
After claims of fraud in the 2020 election and the rise of Trump’s pseudo-populist wing of the GOP, Sohrab Ahmari wrote Tyranny, Inc. In the book, the journalist and founding editor of Compact magazine gives a tour of our political economy from the point of view of ordinary people who faced private tyranny and paid the price for it.
Private being the key word.
Ahmari, even as a conservative columnist for the NY Post, can sometimes sound more leftist than some Congressional progressives.
“Conservatives are quite used to thinking of government as the only potential source of coercion,” Ahmari tells us, “so the fact that a segment of the right was suddenly alert to what big tech could do to you, seemed to me an opening to say, ‘Hey, let me show you other kinds of private coercion which are less visible, but all the more insidious.’”
Sohrab Ahmari’s in-depth reporting and bipartisan critiques emerge as some mix of conservative populism and Marxist theory. It’s a fascinating perspective that, in a world ruled by tech censorship and private coercion, is increasingly rare to hear anywhere other else than on Useful Idiots.
Watch the full interview to hear his response to Jacobin excluding him from a left-right coalition because of his cultural views, Oliver Anthony’s controversial country song, the actual difference between his critique of capitalism and the leftist one, and the unprecedented support by the US so-called left of the military industrial complex and the Ukraine proxy war.
Plus, watch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: NATO Pinky Swears that it's a "Defensive Alliance."
And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Wilson every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.
Watch the full interview here:
761 - The Table of Failure (8/24/23)
Tom Rochetop-notch banter from da boyz
We discuss the first 2024 GOP Primary Debate: Losers Edition. Plus: Rudy’s downward spiral, Trump on Tucker, Prigozhin’s plane crash, and more of the alt-right losers trying to ingratiate themselves into actual politics.
NYC: Will & Hesse will be hosting a special Movie Mindset 35mm print screening of Howard Hawks’ RIO BRAVO on Saturday, September 2nd at the Roxy Theater! Tix here: https://www.roxycinemanewyork.com/screenings/rio-bravo/
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The Newsmakers with Rachel Parris
Tom Rocheamusing fake interviews
The first of our satirical specials this summer. The Newsmakers is an interview show where host Rachel Parris will deliver her views on the week's news and then talk to the people at the centre of those stories, from journalists to MPs to yacht-attacking orcas - all of whom are fictional, and played by comedians. Presented by Rachel Parris Guests: Rosie Holt Sam Pamphilion Michael Spicer Bilal Zafar Nim Odedra Additional material: Gareth Gwynn & Robin Morgan Recorded and edited by David Thomas Producer: Ed Morrish A Lead Mojo production for BBC Radio 4
The AMOC: tipping this century, or not?
Tom Rocheyet another of the already-in-view, highly-foreseeable [global climate tipping points](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/abc5a69e-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/abc5a69e-en) that we==humanity collectively should be working to avoid
A few weeks ago, a study by Copenhagen University researchers Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen concluded that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely to pass a tipping point already this century, most probably around mid-century. Given the catastrophic consequences of an AMOC breakdown, the study made quite a few headlines but also met some skepticism. Now that the dust has settled, here some thoughts on the criticisms that have been raised about this study.
I’ve seen two main arguments there.
1. Do the data used really describe changes in AMOC?
We have direct AMOC measurements only since 2004, a time span too short for this type of study. So the Ditlevsens used sea surface temperatures (SST) in a region between the tip of Greenland and Britain as an indicator, based on Caesar et al. 2018 (PDF; I’m a coauthor on that paper). The basic idea starts with the observation that this region is far warmer than what is normal for that latitude, because the AMOC delivers a huge amount of heat into the area. The following chart which I made 25 years ago illustrates this.
If the AMOC weakens, this region will cool. And in fact it is cooling – it’s the only region on Earth which has cooled since preindustrial times. This is commonly referred to as ‘warming hole’ or ‘cold blob’.
We argued in Caesar et al. that the sea surface temperature there in winter is a good index of AMOC strength, based on a high-resolution climate model. (Not in summer when the ocean is covered by a shallow surface mixed layer heated by the sun and highly dependent on weather conditions.) We checked this across other climate models and found that our AMOC index (i.e. based on SST in the ‘cold blob’ region) and the actual AMOC slowdown correlated highly there (correlation coefficient R=0.95).
There are some other indicators, either using measured ocean salinities or using various types of proxy data from sediment cores, e.g. sediment grain sizes at the ocean bottom as indicators of flow speed of the deep southward AMOC branch. The key point to me is: these different indicators provide rather consistent AMOC reconstructions, as we showed in Caesar et al. 2021. The sediment data go back further in time but are likely not as reliable and don’t reach up to the present.
For recent decades there are potentially better approaches like ocean state estimates, and those are also consistent with the SST fingerprint – but these don’t go back far enough in time for the Ditlevsen type of study. The next graph shows a comparison of different reconstructions for the relevant time period used in the Ditlevsen study.
Reconstructions based on salinity may also be good but they depend on precipitation, a notoriously variable quantity so it is rather doubtful whether analysing variance of salinity is doing any better than the SST signal.
The argument has been made that the ‘cold blob’ might not be caused by an AMOC decline but by heat loss at the ocean surface. That’s easy to check: if that were the case, then cooling in the area would be linked to increased heat loss at the surface. But if the AMOC is the culprit, then less heat should be lost, as a cooler ocean surface due to reduced ocean heat transport will lose less heat. The reanalysis data show the latter is the case.
This was shown by Halldór Björnsson of the Icelandic weather service and presented at the Arctic Circle conference 2016. I discussed this here in 2016 and also in my 2018 RealClimate article “If you doubt that the AMOC has weakened, read this”, together with possible other alternative explanations of the ‘cold blob’. We have recently repeated Halldór’s analysis at PIK and got the same results.
My conclusion: for the past century or so the SST data are probably the best AMOC indicator we have, and I don’t see concrete evidence suggesting that it’s unreliable.
2. The Ditlevsen study assumes that the AMOC follows a quadratic curve when approaching the tipping point.
That’s a more technical criticism. Their assumption follows from Stommel’s 1961 simple model of the AMOC tipping point. It results from the basic idea that (a) AMOC changes are proportional to density changes, and (b) the density change results from a balance between freshwater input and AMOC salt transport to the deep water formation (i.e. ‘cold blob’) region. Combined, these two assumptions lead to a quadratic equation.
These are very plausible basic assumptions, albeit using a linear equation of state, but we all know you can linearize things around a given point to get a first-order estimate. The argument that this is “too simple” doesn’t mean it’s wrong; rather this is correct at least to first order.
In a 1996 study I compared the results of a quadratic box model response to a fully-fledged 3D primitive equation ocean circulation model with nonlinear equation of state, the MOM model of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton. It looks like this.
You can’t get a much better fit than that. A similar quadratic shape has also been found by Henk Dijkstra’s group at Utrecht University in a state-of-the-art global climate model, the CESM model (yet to be published). I have not seen any concrete evidence by the critics suggesting the shape may not be quadratic; that seems to be a purely hypothetical possibility. Also, if it is not exactly quadratic, the stated uncertainty range will be larger but it doesn’t fundamentally change the result.
What does it all mean?
An AMOC collapse would be a massive, planetary-scale disaster. Some of the consequences: Cooling and increased storminess in northwestern Europe, major additional sea level rise especially along the American Atlantic coast, a southward shift of tropical rainfall belts (causing drought in some regions and flooding in others), reduced ocean carbon dioxide uptake, greatly reduced oxygen supply to the deep ocean, likely ecosystem collapse in the northern Atlantic, and others. Check out the OECD report Climate Tipping Points which is well worth reading, and the maps below. You really want to prevent this from happening.
We know from paleoclimatic data that there have been a number of drastic, rapid climate changes with focal point in the North Atlantic due to abrupt AMOC changes, apparently after the AMOC passed a tipping point. They are known as Heinrich events and Dansgaard-Oeschger events, see my review in Nature (pdf).
The point: it is a risk we should keep to an absolute minimum.
In other words: we are talking about risk analysis and disaster prevention. This is not about being 100% sure that the AMOC will pass its tipping point this century; it is that we’d like to be 100% sure that it won’t. Even if there were just (say) a 40% chance that the Ditlevsen study is correct in the tipping point being reached between 2025 and 2095, that’s a major change to the previous IPCC assessment that the risk is less than 10%. Even a <10% chance as of IPCC (for which there is only “medium confidence” that it’s so small) is in my view a massive concern. That concern has increased greatly with the Ditlevsen study – that is the point, and not whether it’s 100% correct and certain.
Would you live in a village below a dammed lake if you’re told there is a one in ten chance that one day the dam will break and much of the village will be washed away? Would you say: “Not to worry, that’s 90 % chance it won’t happen?” Or would you demand action by the authorities to reduce the risk? What if a new study appears, experienced scientists, reputable journal, that says it is nearly certain that the dam will break, the question is only when? Would you demand immediate attention to mitigate this danger, or would you say: “Oh well, some have questioned whether the assumptions of this study are entirely correct. Let’s just assume it is wrong”?
For the AMOC (and other climate tipping points), the only action we can take to minimise the risk is to get out of fossil fuels and stop deforestation as fast as possible. One major assumption of the Ditlevsen study is that global warming continues as in past decades. That is in our hands – or more precisely, that of our governments and powerful corporations. In 2022, the G20 governments alone subsidised fossil fuel use with 1.4 trillion dollars, up by 475% above the previous year. They aren’t trying to end fossil fuels.
Yet, as soon as we reach zero emissions, global warming will stop within years, and the sooner this happens the smaller the risk of passing tipping points. It also minimises lots of other losses, damages and human suffering from “regular” global warming impacts, which are already happening all around us even without passing major climate tipping points.
Links
For more on this, see my long TwiX thread with many images from relevant studies.
What is happening in the Atlantic Ocean to the AMOC?
If you doubt that the AMOC has weakened, read this
AMOC slowdown: Connecting the dots
And for even more, just enter “AMOC” into the search field of this blog!
The post The AMOC: tipping this century, or not? first appeared on RealClimate.
Living Colour, Opinions on Blur & Claud
Tom Rochegood Blur and Claud reviews, but Living Colour tribute marred-if-not-ruined by waaay overlong discussion claiming (falsely, as I remember the 1990s) that the reason why black kids just didn't feel comfortable listening to "white" rock music was ... white supremacy. When in fact, it was mostly due to black self-policing: if you were black and didn't listen to hiphop or R&B, other black folks abused you for being an Oreo or a wannabe.
In the largely white landscape of ‘80s and ‘90s rock, Living Colour stood out with their electrifying riffs, genre blending sound and political lyrics. Decades later, professor and author Kimberly Mack talks with hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot about her recent book on Living Colour’s impact on rock music and culture as a whole. The hosts also review new albums from Blur and Claud.
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Featured Songs:
Living Colour, "Cult of Personality," Vivid, Epic, 1988
The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967
Blur, "St. Charles Square," The Ballad of Darren, Warner, 2023
Blur, "The Narcissist," The Ballad of Darren, Warner, 2023
Blur, "The Heights," The Ballad of Darren, Warner, 2023
Blur, "The Ballad," The Ballad of Darren, Warner, 2023
Claud, "A Good Thing," Supermodels, Saddest Factory, 2023
Claud, "The Moving On," Supermodels, Saddest Factory, 2023
Claud, "Crumbs," Supermodels, Saddest Factory, 2023
Claud, "Every Fucking Time," Supermodels, Saddest Factory, 2023
Claud, "Wet," Supermodels, Saddest Factory, 2023
Living Colour, "Love Rears It's Ugly Head," Time's Up, Epic, 1990
Living Colour, "Solace Of You," Time's Up, Epic, 1990
Living Colour, "Time's Up," Time's Up, Epic, 1990
Living Colour, "Pride," Time's Up, Epic, 1990
Living Colour, "This Is the Life," Time's Up, Epic, 1990
Living Colour, "Information Overload," Time's Up, Epic, 1990
RVG, "Midnight Sun," Brain Worms, Fire, 2023
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Prigozhin plane crash, domestic and external actors
Tom Rochegood survey of current etiologies, and which make most sense with current data
8/24/23: REPUBLICAN DEBATE HIGHLIGHTS Krystal and Saagar BREAK DOWN, Winners and Losers, Trump Tucker Highlights Epstein/Civil War, Kyle and Emily Panel Debates
Tom RocheGotta compare 2 postgames/reviews of the 23 Aug 2023 US Republican presidential candidate debate:
+ [System Update with Glenn Greenwald (aka /SUGG/)](https://traffic.megaphone.fm/RUMBLE5669935972.mp3) (with guest Matt Gaetz) reviews the debate very briefly, but spends much more time on candidate policy positions, and especially how those mostly-2010-ish positions fail to resonate with the 2023 Repub voter base.
- [BreakingPoints (aka /BP/)](https://traffic.megaphone.fm/BRPL4439671724.mp3) (KB+SE plus Emily Jashinsky and Kyle Kulinski) by contrast go over debate performances, polling, etc for an excruciating 76 min. Unless you /really/ want horserace, do /not/ listen on any device lacking fast-forward, playback-speed-increase, or both
5 months from the 1st actual votes (Iowa caucus and NH primary in Jan 2024), I found the SUGG episode to provide /much/ higher value-per-minute.
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Krystal and Saagar breakdown the highlights from the first GOP 2024 debate, they pick the Winners and Losers of the night, we go over the Trump and Tucker interview highlights, and we have Emily and Kyle on panel to debate whether Trump should have shown up to debate and if Vivek can actually beat Trump.
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Post-Debate Analysis Live from Milwaukee - SYSTEM UPDATE #136
Tom RocheGotta compare 2 postgames/reviews of the 23 Aug 2023 US Republican presidential candidate debate:
+ [System Update with Glenn Greenwald (aka /SUGG/)](https://traffic.megaphone.fm/RUMBLE5669935972.mp3) (with guest Matt Gaetz) reviews the debate very briefly, but spends much more time on candidate policy positions, and especially how those mostly-2010-ish positions fail to resonate with the 2023 Repub voter base.
- [BreakingPoints (aka /BP/)](https://traffic.megaphone.fm/BRPL4439671724.mp3) (KB+SE plus Emily Jashinsky and Kyle Kulinski) by contrast go over debate performances, polling, etc for an excruciating 76 min. Unless you /really/ want horserace, do /not/ listen on any device lacking fast-forward, playback-speed-increase, or both
5 months from the 1st actual votes (Iowa caucus and NH primary in Jan 2024), I found the SUGG episode to provide /much/ higher value-per-minute.
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Democracy Now! 2023-08-23 Wednesday
Tom RocheEXCELLENT 3rd main segment (counting headlines as 1st) on the 70th anniversary of the [US-UK overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#Execution_of_Operation_Ajax)
Democracy Now! 2023-08-23 Wednesday
- Headlines for August 23, 2023
- "They Fired on Us Like Rain": Saudis Accused of Killing Hundreds of Ethiopian Refugees at Border
- "It's Always About Oil": CIA & MI6 Staged Coup in Iran 70 Years Ago, Destroying Democracy in Iran
Grayzone Radio - Tuesday, August 22, 2023
Tom RocheEXCELLENT update/sitrep on NATO's proxy war on Russia, as US deepstate begins to smell defeat in Ukraine, but can't leave behind those sweeeet contracting profits, even as the bodies and amputated limbs of Ukrainians pile ever higher.
Joan Williams
Tom RocheMichael Goldfarb EXCELLENT as usual in this miniseries of 5 literary/historical/cultural essays on the US c1950-1970--but mostly the NYC area, which dominated US culture and media (hell, the world! there's a reason why the UN is in Manhattan). Short, masterful, but ... they've got issues, mostly with the concept of the series ("1960s cancel culture"). In order of presentation:
1. L'affaire Nat Turner (which I slightly remember--excepting Williams/#5, it's the least NYCish) /did/ get Styron sorta-canceled for awhile, but
- it's important to remember that, while 'Confessions of Nat Turner' got harshly criticized by the proto-identity-Left, it got boffo sales and awards (inc 1968 Pulitzer Prize)
- 12 years later (Sophie's Choice) he was very much back in public favor (not least with the very-Jewish NYC cultural elite).
Styron would have been fine, except he developed severe depression, but he turned that into even more public acclaim, even love. Sooo ... was Styron canceled? only briefly, and kinda because he "couldn't take the heat." A guy like Mailer would (and did!) have monetized it.
2. By contrast, {LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka} got /massively/ canceled from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s (which I very much remember), esp by that very-Jewish NYC cultural elite. Which, to his credit, Goldfarb (a very NYC Jew, though he grew up in Philadelphia (like Chomsky) and made his name in the UK) recognizes. But even Baraka (a lifelong "stroppy guy," occasionally violent) managed to earn a living after that in equally-Jewish East-Coast academia, and died in Newark Beth Israel, so props to the Tribe. That being said, Baraka mostly disappeared from mass view until his 2014 death (outside of regular scandals, many of which he deserved), only restricted to a small, Black-Power-friendly subculture. This is IMHO the only actual cancel of the 5.
3. By contrast with Baraka and Styron (both goyish), the very-though-he-tried-not-to-be-Jewish Norman (born Nachem) Mailer positively /profited/ from the brief notoriety he experienced after stabbing his wife (and almost killing her). Cancellation? /Hell/ no: Mailer was just one in a long line of New Yorkers (looking at /you/, Trump :-) who demonstrated that "all publicity is good publicity." Mailer was able to move /dogshit/ just because he was notorious (and only in certain circles, who then as now believed themselves arbiters of public morality, and who then as now are very wrong).
4. As when applied to Mailer, the idea that the also-very-Jewish-and-in-a-similar-way Philip Roth 'got canceled' is just hilarious. Yes, Roth got sternly-talked-to (and shrilly-yelled-at) by that insufferable (and very Jewish, but not insufferable for that reason) NYC media/culture police that exists in very similar form to this day. He also became /massively/ rich-and-famous, /plus/ he managed to avoid most of Mailer's self-owns (notably, stabbed nobody :-)
5. L'affaire Joan Williams is very different:
- hers is the only one of the these 5 cases that I knew nothing about before Goldfarb
- she's the only woman
- she "fell the least far," having barely "made it" before her ... what?
Goldfarb makes the case that Williams got done by the "Southern Academy" (/mostly/ not Jewish, but there's a surprising overrepresentation of Jews there too, going waaay back--looking at /you/, Judah P. Benjamin) more than by the NYC culture/media elite. But by his own admission Goldfarb's case is not very strong; plus, the only case he makes is for a sort of ostracism ("ignoring with intent"?), not cancellation.
Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers.
In this essay, he focuses on Joan Williams and her novel Old Powder. After her first novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award, this one failed. Did her former lover William Faulkner have something to do with it? For much of the 60s, literary fiction remained a male preserve, Joan Williams looked like being the person to break that mould, then she disappeared. Why?
Philip Roth
Tom RocheMichael Goldfarb EXCELLENT as usual in this miniseries of 5 literary/historical/cultural essays on the US c1950-1970--but mostly the NYC area, which dominated US culture and media (hell, the world! there's a reason why the UN is in Manhattan). Short, masterful, but ... they've got issues, mostly with the concept of the series ("1960s cancel culture"). In order of presentation:
1. L'affaire Nat Turner (which I slightly remember--excepting Williams/#5, it's the least NYCish) /did/ get Styron sorta-canceled for awhile, but
- it's important to remember that, while 'Confessions of Nat Turner' got harshly criticized by the proto-identity-Left, it got boffo sales and awards (inc 1968 Pulitzer Prize)
- 12 years later (Sophie's Choice) he was very much back in public favor (not least with the very-Jewish NYC cultural elite).
Styron would have been fine, except he developed severe depression, but he turned that into even more public acclaim, even love. Sooo ... was Styron canceled? only briefly, and kinda because he "couldn't take the heat." A guy like Mailer would (and did!) have monetized it.
2. By contrast, {LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka} got /massively/ canceled from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s (which I very much remember), esp by that very-Jewish NYC cultural elite. Which, to his credit, Goldfarb (a very NYC Jew, though he grew up in Philadelphia (like Chomsky) and made his name in the UK) recognizes. But even Baraka (a lifelong "stroppy guy," occasionally violent) managed to earn a living after that in equally-Jewish East-Coast academia, and died in Newark Beth Israel, so props to the Tribe. That being said, Baraka mostly disappeared from mass view until his 2014 death (outside of regular scandals, many of which he deserved), only restricted to a small, Black-Power-friendly subculture. This is IMHO the only actual cancel of the 5.
3. By contrast with Baraka and Styron (both goyish), the very-though-he-tried-not-to-be-Jewish Norman (born Nachem) Mailer positively /profited/ from the brief notoriety he experienced after stabbing his wife (and almost killing her). Cancellation? /Hell/ no: Mailer was just one in a long line of New Yorkers (looking at /you/, Trump :-) who demonstrated that "all publicity is good publicity." Mailer was able to move /dogshit/ just because he was notorious (and only in certain circles, who then as now believed themselves arbiters of public morality, and who then as now are very wrong).
4. As when applied to Mailer, the idea that the also-very-Jewish-and-in-a-similar-way Philip Roth 'got canceled' is just hilarious. Yes, Roth got sternly-talked-to (and shrilly-yelled-at) by that insufferable (and very Jewish, but not insufferable for that reason) NYC media/culture police that exists in very similar form to this day. He also became /massively/ rich-and-famous, /plus/ he managed to avoid most of Mailer's self-owns (notably, stabbed nobody :-)
5. L'affaire Joan Williams is very different:
- hers is the only one of the these 5 cases that I knew nothing about before Goldfarb
- she's the only woman
- she "fell the least far," having barely "made it" before her ... what?
Goldfarb makes the case that Williams got done by the "Southern Academy" (/mostly/ not Jewish, but there's a surprisingly overrepresentation of Jews there too, going waaay back--looking at /you/, Judah P. Benjamin) more than by the NYC culture/media elite. But by his own admission Goldfarb's case is not very strong; plus, the only case he makes is for a sort of ostracism ("ignoring with intent"?), not cancellation.
Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers.
In this essay, he focuses on Philip Roth. Roth became permanently alienated from American Jews and even his own mother asked him if he was anti-Semitic. In light of his continuous production and the miraculous late flowering of his art, from The Counterlife to The Plot Against America, it's easy to forget that Portnoy’s Complaint, despite its sales, nearly destroyed his career within his own community. It also coloured how he was seen until his death: as a misogynist who, depending on one's view, had to be forgiven because of his talent, or could not be forgiven, because of his talent. The irony is that while many Jews at the time would like to have had Portnoy's Complaint pulled from bookshops and libraries and pulped, his authorised biography, published in 2021, actually was pulled from sale and pulped because the author, Blake Bailey, was accused of sexual assault.
Norman Mailer
Tom RocheMichael Goldfarb EXCELLENT as usual in this miniseries of 5 literary/historical/cultural essays on the US c1950-1970--but mostly the NYC area, which dominated US culture and media (hell, the world! there's a reason why the UN is in Manhattan). Short, masterful, but ... they've got issues, mostly with the concept of the series ("1960s cancel culture"). In order of presentation:
1. L'affaire Nat Turner (which I slightly remember--excepting Williams/#5, it's the least NYCish) /did/ get Styron sorta-canceled for awhile, but
- it's important to remember that, while 'Confessions of Nat Turner' got harshly criticized by the proto-identity-Left, it got boffo sales and awards (inc 1968 Pulitzer Prize)
- 12 years later (Sophie's Choice) he was very much back in public favor (not least with the very-Jewish NYC cultural elite).
Styron would have been fine, except he developed severe depression, but he turned that into even more public acclaim, even love. Sooo ... was Styron canceled? only briefly, and kinda because he "couldn't take the heat." A guy like Mailer would (and did!) have monetized it.
2. By contrast, {LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka} got /massively/ canceled from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s (which I very much remember), esp by that very-Jewish NYC cultural elite. Which, to his credit, Goldfarb (a very NYC Jew, though he grew up in Philadelphia (like Chomsky) and made his name in the UK) recognizes. But even Baraka (a lifelong "stroppy guy," occasionally violent) managed to earn a living after that in equally-Jewish East-Coast academia, and died in Newark Beth Israel, so props to the Tribe. That being said, Baraka mostly disappeared from mass view until his 2014 death (outside of regular scandals, many of which he deserved), only restricted to a small, Black-Power-friendly subculture. This is IMHO the only actual cancel of the 5.
3. By contrast with Baraka and Styron (both goyish), the very-though-he-tried-not-to-be-Jewish Norman (born Nachem) Mailer positively /profited/ from the brief notoriety he experienced after stabbing his wife (and almost killing her). Cancellation? /Hell/ no: Mailer was just one in a long line of New Yorkers (looking at /you/, Trump :-) who demonstrated that "all publicity is good publicity." Mailer was able to move /dogshit/ just because he was notorious (and only in certain circles, who then as now believed themselves arbiters of public morality, and who then as now are very wrong).
4. As when applied to Mailer, the idea that the also-very-Jewish-and-in-a-similar-way Philip Roth 'got canceled' is just hilarious. Yes, Roth got sternly-talked-to (and shrilly-yelled-at) by that insufferable (and very Jewish, but not insufferable for that reason) NYC media/culture police that exists in very similar form to this day. He also became /massively/ rich-and-famous, /plus/ he managed to avoid most of Mailer's self-owns (notably, stabbed nobody :-)
5. L'affaire Joan Williams is very different:
- hers is the only one of the these 5 cases that I knew nothing about before Goldfarb
- she's the only woman
- she "fell the least far," having barely "made it" before her ... what?
Goldfarb makes the case that Williams got done by the "Southern Academy" (/mostly/ not Jewish, but there's a surprisingly overrepresentation of Jews there too, going waaay back--looking at /you/, Judah P. Benjamin) more than by the NYC culture/media elite. But by his own admission Goldfarb's case is not very strong; plus, the only case he makes is for a sort of ostracism ("ignoring with intent"?), not cancellation.
Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers.
In this essay, he focuses on Norman Mailer. His reputation as a novelist had gone down the toilet before he reinvented himself with the non-fiction novel. But there was a cost. Writers should be read and not heard was the ethos of the profession. But mass media provided authors with many different platforms to reach the public. Mailer was on all of them, courting controversy - too successfully. Mailer was a monstrous misogynist before Harvey Weinstein and #metoo. For a while his talent gave him a pass, and then it didn't.
Amiri Baraka
Tom RocheMichael Goldfarb EXCELLENT as usual in this miniseries of 5 literary/historical/cultural essays on the US c1950-1970--but mostly the NYC area, which dominated US culture and media (hell, the world! there's a reason why the UN is in Manhattan). Short, masterful, but ... they've got issues, mostly with the concept of the series ("1960s cancel culture"). In order of presentation:
1. L'affaire Nat Turner (which I slightly remember--excepting Williams/#5, it's the least NYCish) /did/ get Styron sorta-canceled for awhile, but
- it's important to remember that, while 'Confessions of Nat Turner' got harshly criticized by the proto-identity-Left, it got boffo sales and awards (inc 1968 Pulitzer Prize)
- 12 years later (Sophie's Choice) he was very much back in public favor (not least with the very-Jewish NYC cultural elite).
Styron would have been fine, except he developed severe depression, but he turned that into even more public acclaim, even love. Sooo ... was Styron canceled? only briefly, and kinda because he "couldn't take the heat." A guy like Mailer would (and did!) have monetized it.
2. By contrast, {LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka} got /massively/ canceled from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s (which I very much remember), esp by that very-Jewish NYC cultural elite. Which, to his credit, Goldfarb (a very NYC Jew, though he grew up in Philadelphia (like Chomsky) and made his name in the UK) recognizes. But even Baraka (a lifelong "stroppy guy," occasionally violent) managed to earn a living after that in equally-Jewish East-Coast academia, and died in Newark Beth Israel, so props to the Tribe. That being said, Baraka mostly disappeared from mass view until his 2014 death (outside of regular scandals, many of which he deserved), only restricted to a small, Black-Power-friendly subculture. This is IMHO the only actual cancel of the 5.
3. By contrast with Baraka and Styron (both goyish), the very-though-he-tried-not-to-be-Jewish Norman (born Nachem) Mailer positively /profited/ from the brief notoriety he experienced after stabbing his wife (and almost killing her). Cancellation? /Hell/ no: Mailer was just one in a long line of New Yorkers (looking at /you/, Trump :-) who demonstrated that "all publicity is good publicity." Mailer was able to move /dogshit/ just because he was notorious (and only in certain circles, who then as now believed themselves arbiters of public morality, and who then as now are very wrong).
4. As when applied to Mailer, the idea that the also-very-Jewish-and-in-a-similar-way Philip Roth 'got canceled' is just hilarious. Yes, Roth got sternly-talked-to (and shrilly-yelled-at) by that insufferable (and very Jewish, but not insufferable for that reason) NYC media/culture police that exists in very similar form to this day. He also became /massively/ rich-and-famous, /plus/ he managed to avoid most of Mailer's self-owns (notably, stabbed nobody :-)
5. L'affaire Joan Williams is very different:
- hers is the only one of the these 5 cases that I knew nothing about before Goldfarb
- she's the only woman
- she "fell the least far," having barely "made it" before her ... what?
Goldfarb makes the case that Williams got done by the "Southern Academy" (/mostly/ not Jewish, but there's a surprisingly overrepresentation of Jews there too, going waaay back--looking at /you/, Judah P. Benjamin) more than by the NYC culture/media elite. But by his own admission Goldfarb's case is not very strong; plus, the only case he makes is for a sort of ostracism ("ignoring with intent"?), not cancellation.
Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers.
This essay looks at Amiri Baraka previously known as LeRoi Jones. He was seen as a genuine heir to James Baldwin. A decade younger than Baldwin, Jones/Baraka arrived in Greenwich Village just as the Beat scene was reaching its zenith. He wrote poetry and award-winning off-Broadway plays that dealt with race with the greater fire and frankness the 60s demanded. Then in one public appearance, he cancelled himself with comments about the Jewish young men Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered with James Chaney in Mississippi. The story of a career ruined and a notorious evening that split the liberal coalition in New York, a fracture that continues to this day.
William Styron
Tom RocheMichael Goldfarb EXCELLENT as usual in this miniseries of 5 literary/historical/cultural essays on the US c1950-1970--but mostly the NYC area, which dominated US culture and media (hell, the world! there's a reason why the UN is in Manhattan). Short, masterful, but ... they've got issues, mostly with the concept of the series ("1960s cancel culture"). In order of presentation:
1. L'affaire Nat Turner (which I slightly remember--excepting Williams/#5, it's the least NYCish) /did/ get Styron sorta-canceled for awhile, but
- it's important to remember that, while 'Confessions of Nat Turner' got harshly criticized by the proto-identity-Left, it got boffo sales and awards (inc 1968 Pulitzer Prize)
- 12 years later (Sophie's Choice) he was very much back in public favor (not least with the very-Jewish NYC cultural elite).
Styron would have been fine, except he developed severe depression, but he turned that into even more public acclaim, even love. Sooo ... was Styron canceled? only briefly, and kinda because he "couldn't take the heat." A guy like Mailer would (and did!) have monetized it.
2. By contrast, {LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka} got /massively/ canceled from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s (which I very much remember), esp by that very-Jewish NYC cultural elite. Which, to his credit, Goldfarb (a very NYC Jew, though he grew up in Philadelphia (like Chomsky) and made his name in the UK) recognizes. But even Baraka (a lifelong "stroppy guy," occasionally violent) managed to earn a living after that in equally-Jewish East-Coast academia, and died in Newark Beth Israel, so props to the Tribe. That being said, Baraka mostly disappeared from mass view until his 2014 death (outside of regular scandals, many of which he deserved), only restricted to a small, Black-Power-friendly subculture. This is IMHO the only actual cancel of the 5.
3. By contrast with Baraka and Styron (both goyish), the very-though-he-tried-not-to-be-Jewish Norman (born Nachem) Mailer positively /profited/ from the brief notoriety he experienced after stabbing his wife (and almost killing her). Cancellation? /Hell/ no: Mailer was just one in a long line of New Yorkers (looking at /you/, Trump :-) who demonstrated that "all publicity is good publicity." Mailer was able to move /dogshit/ just because he was notorious (and only in certain circles, who then as now believed themselves arbiters of public morality, and who then as now are very wrong).
4. As when applied to Mailer, the idea that the also-very-Jewish-and-in-a-similar-way Philip Roth 'got canceled' is just hilarious. Yes, Roth got sternly-talked-to (and shrilly-yelled-at) by that insufferable (and very Jewish, but not insufferable for that reason) NYC media/culture police that exists in very similar form to this day. He also became /massively/ rich-and-famous, /plus/ he managed to avoid most of Mailer's self-owns (notably, stabbed nobody :-)
5. L'affaire Joan Williams is very different:
- hers is the only one of the these 5 cases that I knew nothing about before Goldfarb
- she's the only woman
- she "fell the least far," having barely "made it" before her ... what?
Goldfarb makes the case that Williams got done by the "Southern Academy" (/mostly/ not Jewish, but there's a surprisingly overrepresentation of Jews there too, going waaay back--looking at /you/, Judah P. Benjamin) more than by the NYC culture/media elite. But by his own admission Goldfarb's case is not very strong; plus, the only case he makes is for a sort of ostracism ("ignoring with intent"?), not cancellation.
The 1960s are celebrated for the paradigm shift in American society. This shift was reflected in art and culture as well as politics. But these great changes were not accomplished without controversy. Even in the most slow-flowing art form, literature, great controversies burst out that are now forgotten, but they anticipate what is going on with today's cancel culture. They occurred without the multiplier effect of social media but dominated not just book pages but the society at large.
Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of this cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers.
In this essay, he focuses on William Styron and his book 'The Confessions of Nat Turner' and asks can a white man write about a black revolutionary hero? Is this taking cultural appropriation too far? Styron was a southerner writing about an important event in his local history. The story was part of his culture, as well. But as a white man does he have the right to imagine the thoughts of an enslaved black man?
Biden White House to Saudi Arabia, ditch BRICS and get nuclear weapons program
Tom Rochemostly good analysis, except 1 /glaring/ hole: this ~11-min talk, largely on Mideast geopolitics and nuclear proliferation, /never even once/ mentions Israel! Perhaps because Mercouris lives in UK--but I dunno if Israel criticism is more dangerous there than Russia fairness.
8/22/23: DeSantis Debate Plan, Vivek Accuses Newsmax Of Pay To Play, Wall Street Real Estate, BRICS Plan For Dedollarization, Screen Time Impact On Kids, Mr Beast Solves World Peace, Author On Corporate Tyranny
Tom RocheAnother very-mixed-quality BP, mixture of:
- unimportant/too-soon: 1st 3 segs are just horserace
+ EXCELLENT segment#=4 (31:30-41:24) on vulture capitalists poised to buy debt-strapped commercial real estate (CRE) on-the-cheap. This is important because (as KB+SE note) 'CRE' is, in the US, (oddly) defined as basically /all/ RE /except/ single-family residential (i.e., detached houses). Hence CRE includes 'multifamily residential' (e.g., apartments, condominiums), in which ~1/3 of Americans live under the pressure of {declining maintenance, massively-increasing rents}, which will get worse as the multifamily-residential sector concentrates.
- poor analysis: seg#=5 on geoeconomy of PRC, BRICS, and dedollarization
- premature: seg#=6 is about /1/ new study on the effects of screentime on very young children. It's an important topic, but this area of academic psychology has been plagued by unreproducible results, so I wanna see confirmation before (as KB+SE do) drawing conclusions.
- {unimportant, don't care even a bit}: seg#=7 on latest Mr Beast video
+ EXCELLENT {final, seg#=8, 69:21-90:38} interview with Sohrab Ahmari on corporate power and US politics
Krystal and Saagar discuss Biden arriving in Hawaii after the Maui fires, DeSantis reveals debate strategy, Vivek accuses Newsmax of pay to play, vulture capitalists scoop up commercial real estate, China pushes BRICS to supplant US dollar, study shows screen time damaging young kids, Mr Beast world olympics video sparks controversy, and Sohrab Ahmari joins to discuss his new book on corporate tyrannical power.
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Collective west preparations for the West Germany plan
Tom RocheAnother excellent (and short) Duran piece (actually recorded 17 Aug) on the geopolitics of NATO's proxy war on Russia (aka RUW):
* NATO now pins its hopes for the USOF (the much-hyped 2023 AFU Spring Offensive) on the 82nd Brigade, newly-stocked with Challengers and Strykers
* Preparing for USOF and ultimately RUW failure, US-NATO are now preparing a backup: the "West Germany plan" (WGP):
***** The US (with help from UK in 1947 and France in 1948) divided Germany to help fight the "Cold War," waiting for a chance to retake East Germany and rollback the Warsaw Pact.
***** The WGP for Ukraine is to divide it approximately into
********* for federation with Russia: ethnically Russian areas in east and south of pre-2014-coup Ukraine. Basically everything east of the Dniepr, plus Nikolaev and Odessa oblasts
********* for EU membership: the old Polish-Austrian lands to in northwest of of pre-2014-coup Ukraine
***** The US will then await its chance to reform Ukraine on pre-2014-coup borders, presumably when it "decolonizes Russia."
* Meanwhile, economically the EU accelerates into poverty as a US vassal, dependent on expensive US raw materials instead of cheap Russian ones. EU elites attempt to conceal this from the European 99% by cultivating mass Russophobia and mass deference to the (alleged :-) intelligence of the EU-NATO 1%.
Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage
Tom RocheEXCELLENT takedown of USCFM (corporate-funded mass-oriented media) onesided Zionism. 2 pullquotes:
> [USCFM] editors also overlook obvious conflicts of interest, like when the son of the New York Times‘ then–Israel bureau chief Ethan Bronner joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ([https://fair.org/extra/covering-a-sons-war-at-the-nyt/](Extra!, 4/10)). When Times public editor Clark Hoyt ([http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/opinion/07pubed.html](Extra!, 2/6/10)) acknowledged that readers aware of the son’s role “could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father,” Times executive editor [Bill Keller rejected this advice](https://archive.nytimes.com/publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/bill-keller-takes-exception-to-too-close-to-home/), saying that having a child fighting for Israel gave Bronner “a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack,” and might “make him even more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides.” It’s hard to imagine Keller suggesting this if Bronner’s son had, say, signed up with Hamas. Isabel Kershner, the current Jerusalem correspondent for the Times, also had a son who enlisted in the IDF ([Mondoweiss, 10/27/14](https://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/another-reporters-israeli/)). Moreover, her husband, [Hirsh Goodman](http://web.archive.org/web/20210511045814/https://jerusalempressclub.com/hirsh-goodman/), has worked at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) ([FAIR.org, 5/1/12](https://fair.org/extra/new-conflict-of-interest-at-nyt-jerusalem-bureau/)), where his job was "shaping a positive image of Israel in the media. An examination of articles that Kershner has written or contributed to since 2009 reveals that she overwhelmingly relies on the INSS for think tank analysis about events in the region."
> The now-amended New York Times headline [“Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup” (7/10/14)](http://web.archive.org/web/20211023121451/https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/world/middleeast/missile-at-beachside-gaza-cafe-finds-patrons-poised-for-world-cup.html) begged the question: Who fired the missile that, as if it had a mind of its own, “found” Palestinian World Cup spectators? Similarly, the Washington Post piece [“Yet Another Palestinian Journalist Dies on the Job” (5/12/22)](http://web.archive.org/web/20221027174339/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/12/shireen-abu-akleh-israel-treatment-palestinian-journalists/) leaves the reader puzzled. How exactly did Shireen Abu Akleh—left unnamed in the title—die?
Do Palestinians deserve to be free? “A complex and controversial issue,” says ChatGPT (Twitter, 5/8/23). Do Israelis deserve to be free? “Yes, like all people.”
“This is quite something,” remarked Nadi Abusaada in a May 8 tweet. As many of us have done, the Palestinian academic found himself experimenting with the seemingly boundless powers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software. But during this activity, he uncovered something disturbing.
“I asked @OpenAI whether Palestinians deserve to be free,” he said. The natural-language processing tool responded to Abusaada’s query ambivalently:
As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions, feelings or beliefs. The question of whether Palestinians deserve to be free is a complex and controversial issue with many different perspectives and opinions….
But then he posed the same question about Israelis. This time, the chat box did not equivocate:
Yes, like all people, Israelis deserve to be free. Freedom is a fundamental human right that should be protected and guaranteed for all individuals, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or religion. It is essential that Israelis, like all people, are able to live their lives free from violence, oppression and discrimination….
“Explanation?” demanded Abusaada.
The explanation lies in the overarching attitudes of the 570 GB of data that ChatGPT scrapes from the internet. And, with news media being one of the primary sources of information that the bot is trained on, Abusaada’s experience is hardly surprising.
To say that US news skews pro-Israel raises many an eyebrow, since the public has been conditioned to believe otherwise. With outlets like NPR vilified as “National Palestinian Radio” and papers like the New York Times castigated by pro-Israel watchdogs for lending “the Palestinian narrative” undue credence (CAMERA, 10/15/13), the myth of pro-Palestine bias appears plausible.
Yet such claims have been litigated, and the verdict is plain: US corporate media lean in favor of Israel. As Abeer Al-Najjar (New Arab, 7/28/22) noted: “The framing, sourcing, selection of facts, and language choices used to report on Palestine…often reveal systematic biases which distort the Palestinian struggle.” Some trends are more ubiquitous than others, which is why it is vital that news readers become acquainted with the tropes that dominate coverage of the Israeli occupation.
1. Where Are the Palestinians?
From 1970 to 2019, the New York Times and Washington Post ran 5,739 opinion pieces about Palestinians. Just 1.4% of these were by Palestinians (+972, 10/2/20).
In 2018, 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, analyzed almost 100,000 news headlines published by five leading US publications between 1967 and 2017. The study revealed that major newspapers were four times more likely to run headlines from an Israeli government perspective, and 2.5 times more likely to cite Israeli sources over Palestinian ones. (This trend was further confirmed by Maha Nassar—+972, 10/2/20).
Owais Zaheer, an author of 416Labs’ study told the Intercept (1/12/19) that his findings call attention to “the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”
In its media resource guide, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) counseled reporters: “Former US diplomats, Israeli military analysts and non-Palestinian Middle East commentators are not replacements for Palestinian voices.”
The exclusion of Palestinian voices from corporate media reporting does not stop at sourcing. For example, contrary to its pro-Israel critics, NPR’s correspondents are rarely Palestinian or Arab, and almost all reside in West Jerusalem or Israel proper (FAIR.org, 4/2/18). Editors also overlook obvious conflicts of interest, like when the son of the New York Times‘ then–Israel bureau chief Ethan Bronner joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) (Extra!, 4/10).
When Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/6/10) acknowledged that readers aware of the son’s role “could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father,” Times executive editor Bill Keller rejected this advice, saying that having a child fighting for Israel gave Bronner “a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack,” and might “make him even more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides.” It’s hard to imagine Keller suggesting this if Bronner’s son had, say, signed up with Hamas.
Hirsh Goodman, the Israeli spin doctor married to the New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief.
Isabel Kershner, the current Jerusalem correspondent for the Times, also had a son who enlisted in the IDF (Mondoweiss, 10/27/14). Moreover, her husband, Hirsh Goodman, has worked at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (FAIR.org, 5/1/12), where his job was
shaping a positive image of Israel in the media. An examination of articles that Kershner has written or contributed to since 2009 reveals that she overwhelmingly relies on the INSS for think tank analysis about events in the region.
When establishment media outlets privilege one narrative over another, public opinion is likely to follow. Thus, the suppression of alternative viewpoints is among today’s most concerning media afflictions.
2. Turning Assaults Into ‘Clashes’
Reporting on Israel/Palestine often relies on a lexical toolbox designed for occlusion rather than clarity, “clashes” rather than “assaults.” Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 4/9/18) explains that “clash” is “a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the words of George Orwell, ‘to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.’”
The Washington Post‘s headline (4/6/18) obscures the fact that it is Israel’s “live fire” and not Palestinians’ “burning tires” that are deadly.
FAIR has documented the abuse of “clash” in the Israeli/Palestinian context time and time again: In 2018 Gaza, Israeli troops fired at unarmed protestors 100 meters away. No Israelis perished, but 30 Palestinians were murdered. That was not a “clash,” as establishment media would have you believe; that was a mass shooting (FAIR.org, 5/1/18). During the funeral for Shireen Abu Akleh, the reporter who was assassinated by Israeli gunfire, the IDF beat mourners, charged at them with horses and batons, and deployed stun grenades and tear gas. The procession was so rocked by the attacks that they nearly dropped Abu Akleh’s casket. That was not a clash, that was a senseless act of cruelty (FAIR.org, 7/2/22). This summer, when Israeli forces raided the West Bank and stood by as illegal settlers arsoned homes, farmland and vehicles, that was not a “clash”; that was colonialism (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).
The choice to use “clash”—and other comparably hazy descriptors of regional violence, like “tension,” “conflict” and “strife”—is bad journalism. Such designations lack substance, disorient readers and above all spin a spurious storyline whereby Israelis and Palestinians inflict and withstand equivalent bloodshed. (According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 3,584 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli security forces since January 19, 2009, while 196 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians during the same period.)
AMEJA’s media resource guide reminds journalists that the occupation “is not a conflict between states, but rather between Israel, which has one of the most advanced militaries in the world, and the Palestinians, who have no formal army.”
But when such a power imbalance is inadequately acknowledged, “clash” and its misleading corollaries will not sound out of place, and readers will not have the context necessary to separate the perpetrators from the victims of violence.
3. Linguistic Gymnastics
Who killed the two Palestinians? AP (8/4/23) structured its headline to conceal that information.
The passive voice—or, as William Schneider describes it, the “past exonerative” tense—is a grammatical construction that describes events without assigning responsibility. Such sentence structures pervade coverage of the Israeli occupation.
In her 2021 investigation into coverage of the first and second intifadas, Holly M. Jackson identified disproportionate use of the passive voice—i.e., “the man was bitten” rather than “the dog bit the man”—as one of the defining linguistic features of New York Times reporting on the uprisings. The Times used the passive voice to talk about Palestinians twice as often as it did Israelis, which demonstrated the paper’s “clear patterns of bias against Palestinians.”
While Jackson’s study only examined New York Times coverage during the intifadas, passive voice remains a common grammatical cop out—still permeating national newspaper headlines in recent months:
- “At Least Five Palestinians Killed in Clashes After Israeli Raid in West Bank” (New York Times, 6/19/23)
- “Two Palestinians Killed in Separate Episodes in Latest West Bank Violence” (AP, 8/4/23)
- “Israeli Forces Say Three Palestinians Killed in Occupied West Bank” (CNN, 8/7/23)
Other times, raids are miraculously carried out on their own, violence randomly erupts and missiles are inexplicably fired. The now-amended New York Times headline “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup” (7/10/14) begged the question: Who fired the missile that, as if it had a mind of its own, “found” Palestinian World Cup spectators?
Similarly, the Washington Post piece “Yet Another Palestinian Journalist Dies on the Job” (5/12/22) leaves the reader puzzled. How exactly did Shireen Abu Akleh—left unnamed in the title—die?
Headlines that omit the Israeli subject are unjustifiably exculpatory, because editors know exactly who the assailant is.
4. Newsworthy and Unnewsworthy Deaths
The New York Times (5/11/21) disguised the reality that 88% of the dead were Palestinian.
Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three-week military assault on Gaza in 2008, was carnage. According to Amnesty International and B’Tselem, the attack claimed 13 Israeli lives (four of which were killed by Israeli fire), while Palestine’s death toll was nearly 1,400—300 of which were children. Yet the media response was far from proportional.
In a 2010 study of New York Times coverage of Operation Cast Lead, Jonas Caballero found that the Times covered 431% of Israeli deaths—meaning each Israeli fatality was reported an average of four times—while reporting a mere 17% of Palestinian deaths. This means that Israeli deaths were covered at 25 times the rate Palestinian ones were.
The Times is not an outlier. FAIR’s examination (Extra!, 11–12/01) of six months’ worth of NPR Israel/Palestine broadcasting during the Second Intifada determined that 81% of Israeli fatalities were reported on, while Palestinian deaths were acknowledged just 34% of the time. The disparity only widened when Palestinian victims were minors:
Of the 30 Palestinian civilians under the age of 18 that were killed, six were reported on NPR—only 20%. By contrast, the network reported on 17 of the 19 Israeli minors who were killed, or 89%…. Apparently being a minor makes your death more newsworthy to NPR if you are Israeli, but less newsworthy if you are Palestinian.
Media also erase or downplay Palestinian deaths in the language of their headlines. When the New York Times (11/16/14) ran a story entitled “Palestinian Shot by Israeli Troops at Gaza Border” it did not seem to occur to the editor that specifying the age of the victim would be important. The Palestinian in question was a 10-year-old boy. In another headline, “More Than 30 Dead in Gaza and Israel as Fighting Quickly Escalates,” the Times (5/11/21) neatly obscures that 35 out of the “more than 30 dead” were Palestinian, while five were Israeli.
5. Sidelining International Law
A Christian Science Monitor piece (8/9/09) framed the illegal occupation of Palestinian land as being about “freedom, holiness, righteousness and redemption.”
Attempts to insulate Israel from condemnation also manifest themselves in establishment media’s reluctance to identify the country’s breaches of international law (FAIR.org, 12/8/17).
In Operation Cast Lead coverage, FAIR (Extra!, 2/09) noted that—despite the blatant illegality of Israel’s assaults on Palestine’s civilian infrastructure—international law was seldom newsworthy. By January 13, 2009, only two evening news programs (NBC Nightly News, 1/8/09, 1/11/09) had broached the legality of the Israeli military offensive. But, only one of those TV segments (Nightly News, 1/8/09) reprimanded Israel—the other (Nightly News, 1/11/09) defended the illegal use of white phosphorus, which was being deployed on refugee camps.
Meanwhile, just one daily newspaper (USA Today, 1/7/08) mentioned international law. But that single reference—embedded in an op-ed by a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy in Washington—was directed at Hamas violations, rather than Israeli ones.
When it comes to reporting on the unlawful establishment of Israeli settlements, media are no better. Colonizing occupied territories violates both Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Security Council Resolution 446, yet outlets like NPR, CNN and the New York Times have a history of concealing Israeli criminality by benevolently branding settlements as “neighborhoods” (FAIR.org, 8/1/02, 10/10/14).
Such charitable descriptions have also been extended to settlers themselves. In an October 2009 Extra! piece, Julie Hollar investigated a bevy of articles that characterized settlers as “law-abiding,” “soft-spoken,” “gentle” and “normal.” One tone-deaf Christian Science Monitor headline (8/9/09) even read: “Young Israeli Settlers Go Hippie? Far Out, Man!” As Hollar observed, “ethnic cleansing could hardly hope for a friendlier hearing.”
Even when news media have characterized settlements and settlers as engaging in unlawful colonial practices, they have done so reluctantly. In 2021, Israeli settlement expansion in Sheikh Jarrah culminated in an unlawful campaign of mass expulsion. A New York Times (5/7/21) article on the crisis waited until the 39th paragraph before suggesting that Israel was acting criminally. Similarly, while describing Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly aggressive settlement policies, Associated Press (6/18/23) buried the lead by avoiding the “illegal” designation until the middle of the piece.
It’s important to bring up the rule of law not only when Israel is actively injuring innocents or erecting colonial communities. The ceaseless maltreatment of Palestinians constitutes—according to Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch—apartheid. Apartheid is a crime against humanity, yet news media avoid acknowledging the human rights community’s consensus (FAIR.org, 7/21/23, 2/3/22, 4/26/19). As FAIR (5/23/23) pointed out, it is a journalistic duty to do so:
The dominant and overriding context of anything that happens in Israel/Palestine is the fact that the state of Israel is running an apartheid regime in the entirety of the territory it controls. Any obfuscation or equivocation of that fact serves only to downplay the severity of Israeli crimes and the US complicity in them.
6. Reversing Victim and Victimizer
As is typical, “retaliation” is used by Reuters (9/12/21) to refer to Israeli violence against Palestinians—implicitly justifying it as a response rather than an escalation.
As Gregory Shupak (FAIR.org, 5/18/21) wrote:
Only the Israeli side has ethnically cleansed and turned millions…into refugees by preventing [Palestinians] from exercising their right to return to their homes. Israel is the only side subjecting anyone to apartheid and military occupation.
Nevertheless, US media enter into fantastical rationalizations to make the Israeli aggressor appear to be the victim. Blaming Palestinians for their suffering and dispossession has become one of the prime ways to accomplish this feat.
A 2018 FAIR report (5/17/18) analyzed coverage of the deadly Great March of Return—protests that erupted in response to Israel’s illegal land, air and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip. The ongoing siege bans the import of raw materials and significantly curtails the movement of people and goods. The International Committee of the Red Cross (6/14/10) deplores the blockade: “The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility.”
Despite the ICRC indictment, FAIR found that established media held besieged Palestinians accountable for Israel’s reign of terror following anti-blockade demonstrations. The New York Times (5/14/18) editorial board went so far as to suggest that Palestinians (and not the siege-imposing Israel) were the only obstacles to peace:
Led too long by men who were corrupt or violent or both, the Palestinians have failed and failed again to make their own best efforts toward peace. Even now, Gazans are undermining their own cause by resorting to violence, rather than keeping their protests strictly peaceful.
Casting Palestinians as incorrigible savages is also easier when US media use defensive language to excuse the bulk of Israeli violence (FAIR.org, 2/2/09, 7/10/14). FAIR (5/1/02) conducted a survey into ABC, CBS and NBC’s use of the word “retaliation”—a term that “lays responsibility for the cycle of violence at the doorstep of the party being ‘retaliated’ against, since they presumably initiated the conflict.” Of the 150 mentions of “retaliation” and its analogs between September 2000 and March 17, 2002, 79% referred to Israeli violence. Twelve percent were ambiguous, or encompassed both sides. A mere 9% framed Palestinian violence as a retaliatory response.
Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s books Bad News From Israel and More Bad News From Israel posit that television’s “Palestinian action/Israeli retaliation” trope has a “significant effect” on how the public remember events and allot blame (FAIR.org, 8/21/20). When Palestinians are consistently portrayed as the aggressive party and Israel as the defensive one, US news media are “effectively legitimizing Israeli actions.”
Coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine celebrates the efforts of Ukrainian resistance. With the anti-imperial Palestinian struggle, however, news media refuse to extend the same favor (FAIR.org, 7/6/23), thus creating a
media landscape where certain groups are entitled to self-defense, and others are doomed to be the victims of “reprisal” attacks. It tells the world that…Palestinians living under apartheid have no right to react to the almost daily raids, growing illegal settlements and ballooning settler hostility.
***
Malcolm X once declared,“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” As stories about Israel/Palestine continue to bombard our screens and daily papers, readers and journalists alike need to remain aware of the pro-Israel pitfalls that pockmark establishment news coverage. Then maybe one day we can move towards a future where ChatGPT answers “yes” when users like Abusaada ask it whether Palestinians deserve to be free.
The post Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage appeared first on FAIR.
760 - Live From Toronto: Operation Maple Thunder (8/21/23)
Tom RocheEXCELLENT
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Atlanta Officials Unveil Onerous Verification Requirements for Cop City Referendum
Tom Rochethe US Corporate Party clearly believes in nothing except keeping power. pullquotes (lightly edited):
> After organizers in Atlanta collected over 100,000 signatures for a referendum on the construction of [Cop City, officials in this CorpDem-dominated city] announced an elaborate signature verification process for the effort.
> In 2019, the Democratic Party of Georgia, joined by national Democrats, argued against signature verification requirements in a lawsuit against the Georgia secretary of state. “Signature matching laws are particularly problematic for racial and ethnic minority voters; young, first-time voters; voters with disabilities; and senior citizen voters,” the Democrats wrote
> Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens has also disparaged the effort [to vote Cop City down], saying that “we know that this is is going to be unsuccessful, if it’s done honestly.” Georgia’s [Republican attorney general], meanwhile, has called the whole effort “entirely invalid under Georgia law.” The agreement between city and state officials embodies a symbiosis between elected Republicans and Democrats on defending the construction of a $90 million facility for a police force that has responded to opposition to the planned facility with brute force.
'Culture war' is just a ploy to divide the 99% and integrate the 1%.
After organizers in Atlanta collected over 100,000 signatures for a referendum on the construction of a $90 million police training facility, city officials announced an elaborate signature verification process for the effort.
Atlanta’s Interim Municipal Clerk Vanessa Waldon outlined the city’s process for verifying the signatures needed to bring the training facility to a vote in a statement on Monday.
“In an effort to ensure that adequate resources are dedicated to this project, the City of Atlanta — through the adoption of the Atlanta City Council — has developed a step-by-step process to conduct the audit of the documents, of which the signature verification process maybe a critical element,” Waldon wrote.
The announcement came hours after activists with the Vote to Stop Cop City Coalition put a hold on their plans to submit the 104,000 signatures they have so far collected in support of a popular vote on the facility, dubbed “Cop City” by its critics.
Once referendum organizers submit their petition to the city, the clerk’s office will take the boxes of signatures to a secure vault, scan every individual page, and conduct a manual, line-by-line review of every page, comparing each signature to those in the state voter registration database, Waldon’s office wrote. “The City will not comment on the review once the verification process begins,” the statement notes.
Voting rights advocates have previously said that such signature verification practices — described as “witchcraft” by at least one expert — serve to disenfranchise voters and can result in signatures getting thrown out on the basis of perceived minute differences or aberrations. One study, for instance, showed that 97 percent of signatures rejected under Ohio’s signature-matching law were likely authentic.
“Signature matching is a Republican-style voter suppression tactic that will disenfranchise thousands of predominantly Black and working class voters,” said DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy. “It’s clear that the City of Atlanta knows that they will lose a vote over Cop City, so now they are trying to prevent it. It’s outrageous and shameful.”
In 2019, the Democratic Party of Georgia, joined by national Democrats, argued against signature verification requirements in a lawsuit against the Georgia secretary of state. “Signature matching laws are particularly problematic for racial and ethnic minority voters; young, first-time voters; voters with disabilities; and senior citizen voters,” the Democrats wrote, “all of whom are more likely to have variations in their signatures, or voters who may require assistance from others to enter a signature.”
The debate over Cop City has roiled Atlanta for more than two years. The City Council first approved the lease of what used to be the site of an old Atlanta prison farm to the Atlanta Police Foundation for a new police training facility in September 2021. At the time, the council had heard 17 hours of public comment, much of it opposed to the proposal.
The opposition intensified this year, after police shot and killed a protester, indiscriminately arrested dozens more, and tried charging three bail fund organizers with “money laundering.” A City Council hearing in June featured over 15 hours of public comment and mass protest, with more than 230 comments made against the facility, and only four in favor of it. Despite that, the council approved $67 million in taxpayer dollars for the facility at 5:30 a.m. — propelling organizers to launch the referendum effort the following day.
Under City Code, the minimum threshold for a referendum is 15 percent of registered voters from the last preceding general municipal election. Accordingly, organizers set a goal of collecting 58,203 signatures — and far surpassed it. City officials, for their part, have not stated the exact number of signatures needed.
On Monday, organizers raised concerns that the city would seek to increase the number of signatures needed for the referendum’s validation by arguing that inactive voters should be included in that 15 percent. The Atlanta Community Press Collective reported that doing so would raise the minimum threshold to “closer to 62,000.”
City Council President Doug Shipman referred The Intercept’s questions to the municipal clerk’s office, while also pointing to the law outlining the 15 percent requirement. Shipman did not respond to follow-up questions about what exactly the minimum threshold will be. The municipal clerk’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
In court, city attorneys have derided the referendum effort as “invalid” and “futile.” Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens has also disparaged the effort, saying that “we know that this is is going to be unsuccessful, if it’s done honestly.”
Georgia’s attorney general’s office, meanwhile, has called the whole effort “entirely invalid under Georgia law.”
The agreement between city and state officials embodies a symbiosis between elected Republicans and Democrats on defending the construction of a $90 million facility for a police force that has responded to opposition to the planned facility with brute force.
In January, Atlanta police shot and killed forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita. The police claimed that officers only shot after being shot at first — only for an independent autopsy to find that Tortuguita’s hands were raised during the shooting, and that police shot Tortuguita at least 57 times.
In March, police indiscriminately arrested dozens of people at a music festival organized by protesters in the Atlanta forest set to be razed for the facility. The protesters were detained and arrested on domestic terrorism charges, with probable cause citations including having muddy shoes (they were in a forest, where it had rained) or being “part of the team” because they were wearing black.
In May, Atlanta police deployed a heavy-duty police truck and hordes of riot police to arrest three individuals who had been helping to organize bail and legal support funds for protesters. The police attempted to stick “money laundering” and “charity fraud” charges to the trio. The judge presiding over the prosecution said he did not find the case to be very impressive, noting that “there’s not a lot of meat on the bones.”
Last month, a federal judge ruled that organizers have until September 23 to submit their final count of signatures for the referendum. In a statement on Monday, the coalition said it would continue to gather signatures until that date, “to leave no doubt as to the will of Atlanta voters.”
The post Atlanta Officials Unveil Onerous Verification Requirements for Cop City Referendum appeared first on The Intercept.
Maybe Banning Fascists is a Good Idea...
Tom RocheSpäti EXCELLENT as usual, particularly on German politics
Julia and Nick sit down and chat about banned parties in Germany and the recently proposed AfD ban that most likely will never happen.
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