The first stage of the NRx master-plan — coaxing our “perceived enemies” into the consummation of their howling insanity — now seems to be approaching completion.
If leftist moral-political axioms were an argument, these (dazzlingly white*) guys might have one.
* Perhaps the funniest part of all this, it’s only a matter of time before they’re chaited by the all-devouring lunacy they align with.
ADDED: The New Inquiry piece helpfully fnorded (+) by laofmoonster.
Fred Reed, on the media Balkanization tide:
Though I have spent a lifetime in journalism, I do not read a newspaper, not the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor the Wall Street Journal. Nor do I have television service.
Why? Because, having worked in that restaurant, I know better than to eat there. The foregoing media are quasi-governmental organs, predictably predictable and predictably dishonest. The truth is not in them.
Within the news racket, this isn’t news. More interesting is that a large part of the intelligent population agrees. We now have a press of two tiers, the establishment media and the net, with sharply differing narratives. The internet is now primary. The bright get their news from around the web and then read the New York Times to see how the paper of record will prevaricate. People increasingly judge the media by the web, not the web by the media.
He gets it. Now how to speed it up? http://t.co/MqSiovevV0
— NIO (@NIOReaction) December 8, 2014
ADDED: Another dimension of media agony. This also relevant.
ADDED: Mass media is over.
Richard Fernandez asks a question that has been nagging at a number of people: How did this stop being a story?
The death toll from the worst Ebola outbreak on record has reached nearly 7,000 in West Africa, according to the World Health Organisation. […] The toll of 6,928 dead showed a leap of just over 1,200 since the WHO released its previous report on Wednesday, according to a Reuters news agency report. […] The UN health agency did not provide any explanation for the abrupt increase, but the figures, published on its website, appeared to include previously unreported deaths. […] … Just over 16,000 people have been diagnosed with Ebola since the outbreak was confirmed in the forests of remote southeastern Guinea in March, according to the WHO data that covered the three hardest-hit countries. …
Is it because the epidemic has remained geographically concentrated, that’s expected to hold, and Sierra Leone (where cases are “soaring” with the “country … reporting around 400 to 500 new cases each week for several weeks”) has been written off? Or is the world media scared it had begun to bore people?
Facebook is a grotesque orgy of resonating petty narcissism and vacuous self-obsession evidently doing something right:
The lion’s share of the mechanism for disseminating information from professional news gatherers to readers is now handled almost entirely by a company with a frustratingly opaque method of operation and interests that don’t necessarily dovetail with news organizations or their readers. Publications haven’t just lost control over their distribution models to a decentralized collective — they’ve effectively ceded it to a 30-year-old Harvard dropout in a gray hoodie.
There might be something that could happen on this planet that would be bad news for journalists and still worthy of criticism on that account — but for the life of me I can’t imagine it. Better the migration of information control to a repulsive socio-technical cancer like Facebook, which pretty much everybody hates already, than a continuation of the smug news-management guild presently in power. Among the best parts of this, everyone gets to hear the super-amplified journalistic squealing as their class privileges drop off the cliff into historical oblivion. The inaudible death of the buggy-whip industry was nothing like this much fun.
Joel Kotkin on the Cathedral Clerisy:
In “The New Class Conflict,” I describe this alliance as the New Clerisy, which encompasses the media, the academy and the expanding regulatory bureaucracy. This Clerisy already dominates American intellectual and cultural life and increasingly has taken virtual control of key governmental functions, as well as the educations of our young people. […] Although usually somewhat progressive by inclination, the Clerisy actually functions much like the old First Estate in France – the clergy – helping determine the theology, morals and ideals of the broader population. […] Against such established and accumulated power, even a strong November showing by the GOP may have surprisingly little effect. Indeed, even with a Republican in the White House, the Clerisy’s ability to shape perceptions, educate the young and control key regulatory agencies will not much diminish. The elevation of the Clerisy to unprecedented influence may prove this president’s most important “gift” to posterity.
Kotkin throws in some misdirection, towards “Daniel Bell [who 40 years ago] predicted … [the rise to] ‘pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.'” You can judge the credibility of this intellectual genealogy for yourself.
(Link and title stolen from Stirner.)
Bruce Charlton isn’t messing around:
As an ‘entity’ the mainstream mass media is by far the most wicked THING that has even been in existence …
Autophagy is spiraling into its cultural moment right now. The Ouroboros is our sign. It’s cybernetic mythology, self-referential looping, and auto-consuming process. There is no end to the ways the theme could be currently pursued.
Simultaneously most comic, tragic, and prominent is the reflexive perception that contemporary hegemonic power is being devoured by the media. In other words, the Cathedral is undergoing accelerated auto-cannibalization. The news is eating itself.
The Hill reports:
“I can see why a lot of folks are troubled,” Obama told a group of donors gathered at a Democratic National Committee barbecue in Purchase, N.Y. […] But the president said that current foreign policy crises across the world are not comparable to the challenges the U.S. faced during the Cold War. […] Acknowledging “the barbarity” of Islamist militants and Russia “reasserting the notion that might means right,” Obama, though, dismissed the notion that he was facing unprecedented challenges. […] “The world’s always been messy … we’re just noticing now in part because of social media,” he said, according to a White House pool report. […] “If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart” …
So the world’s supreme talking head is trying to talk us out of taking the Apocalypse Show seriously. Don’t listen to us, you’ll find it far too upsetting. If this is getting repetitive, it’s due to the pattern. Catatonia is the final prescription. We’ve clearly passed beyond irony into something altogether more twisted. The intriguing syndrome labeled Horror autotoxicus seems to be ready for political-economic application.
“Hint: it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup,” suggests Lesser Bull persuasively. Mangan fills this out, with an especially valuable link to this round-up of orchestrated obliviousness.
Does the progressive media really think it can de-realize this festival of cultural ruin with a standard inattention protocol? If so, it has to count as an extraordinary peak hubris moment. Perhaps the left is structurally incapable of preventing itself from pushing things over the brink of catastrophe. It always has to take that one additional step, and it has no sense at all of how to back down.
There have to be a lot of people in the UK right now who would be delighted to see the media establishment strung up from lamp-posts, with panic and defection rife in journalistic ranks. It’s surely not impossible that the pattern now jutting into hideous visibility in Britain will evoke a disturbing sense of recognition elsewhere, possibly throughout the Anglosphere. As far as core Cathedral operating procedures are concerned, this has to be a period of (possibly unprecedented) vulnerability. As a source of regime threatening irritability, the Rotherham syndrome is the droit du seigneur of the new nobility — even among a pitifully broken people, it pushes some deeply atavistic buttons. Lies, sexual exploitation, and foreign invasion — who’d want to be PR manager for this cocktail of native degradation?
(Any cover-up -themed T-shirt slogan suggestions in the comment thread will be very gratefully received.)
The Cathedralist War on Trolling is limbering up fast. Just a few days ago, we had this. (Paraphrased: to resist the Cathedral is trolling). Now the follow up (“Trolls are like terrorist cells” — literally).
The Duck does the integration:
1) disagreeing with progressivism is trolling
2) trolling is terrorism
therefore 3) disagreeing with progressivism is terrorism
— Duck Enlightenment (@jokeocracy) August 20, 2014
That escalated quickly.
They’re everywhere and even if one gets eliminated, there’s two more to take its place (that also applies to HYDRA). But I feel like this is the point we’re at now. That’s sad and terrible, but it’s the truth. I used to think turning comments off was *the* solution, and while I do think comments have become useless, and largely a hotbed for hate and racism, turning them off is only going to drive the poison to even more public forums like Twitter and Facebook, where a hateful or factually corrupt tweet or status update can spread like a disease across the globe and turn supposed rational human beings into muckrakers of misinformation, hate, and other dark things.
If, like this blog, you have been benighted enough to understand Internet trolls as abusive irritants, masters of disguise, satirists, or even amusing pets, you apparently need a good talking to. Farhad Manjoo writing in (surprise!) The New York Times has a lesson you need to hear. Trolling, it turns out, has a very simple explanation — it is exactly identical to a Political Incorrectness. To be a troll is in fact simply not being a progressive.
Citing Doctor Whitney Phillips, of Humboldt State University, and a troll expert (who has written a book on the subject), Manjoo illuminates the phenomenon unambiguously:
If there’s one thing the history of the Internet has taught us, it’s that trolls will be difficult to contain because they really reflect base human society in all its ugliness. Trolls find a way.
“It’s not a question of whether or not we’re winning the war on trolling, but whether we’re winning the war on misogyny, or racism, and ableism and all this other stuff,” Dr. Phillips said. “Trolling is just a symptom of those bigger problems.”
As with so very many other things, there’s no solution to trolling short of the absolute triumph of progressive across the whole of the earth. This is an argument crying out for an #AAA tag like no other I’ve ever seen. (I’d link the Twitter hashtag, but it’s deeply confusing.)
ADDED: It’s a jungle out there.
ADDED: I’ll throw in the T-shirt slogan here for free — Resistance is futile trolling