Politics & Stuff

[MoroccanBlue 5,385]

21 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Funnily enough Good Housekeeping 😜 had quite a decent explanation

What Black Lives Matter Means - Why Saying 'All Lives Matter' Misses the Point (goodhousekeeping.com)

But that in itself is fallacious according to statistics, which is why many are opposed to BLM and particularly this message. The narrative that all police are inherently racist and target blacks specifically because of their race. 

Last I checked, FBI statistics (United States) show police shootings towards whites are significantly higher more than blacks. We narrow it down to per capita, blacks are higher nearly 2x. Now many tend to leave the argument there to support the BLM agenda, but this in itself is a cherry picking fallacy. You look at the crime rate per capita, blacks are higher nearly 2x. 

Now when looking at the data, a proper analysis would suggest that this doesn't have to do with racist police, it has more to do with blacks being victims of their own environment.  This is the argument BLM should be pushing for in my opinion. Being victims of systemically racist upbringings such as Jim Crow, Red lining, and the crack/cocaine epidemic. This has attributed to a greater window of crime for blacks and a smaller window for success. Ice Cube in particular is doing what needs to be done. Pushing for bills that brings more money into these black cities and counties, particularly those that have been affected by the three I mentioned. This will help end racial disparity vs claiming all cops are inherently racist. 

 

Edited June 14, 2021 by MoroccanBlue

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

53 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

But that in itself is fallacious according to statistics, which is why many are opposed to BLM and particularly this message. The narrative that all police are inherently racist and target blacks specifically because of their race. 

Last I checked, FBI statistics (United States) show police shootings towards whites are significantly higher more than blacks. We narrow it down to per capita, blacks are higher nearly 2x. Now many tend to leave the argument there to support the BLM agenda, but this in itself is a cherry picking fallacy. You look at the crime rate per capita, blacks are higher nearly 2x. 

Now when looking at the data, a proper analysis would suggest that this doesn't have to do with racist police, it has more to do with blacks being victims of their own environment.  This is the argument BLM should be pushing for in my opinion. Being victims of systemically racist upbringings such as Jim Crow, Red lining, and the crack/cocaine epidemic. This has attributed to a greater window of crime for blacks and a smaller window for success. Ice Cube in particular is doing what needs to be done. Pushing for bills that brings more money into these black cities and counties, particularly those that have been affected by the three I mentioned. This will help end racial disparity vs claiming all cops are inherently racist. 

 

Well you seem to know the answer 😁. Though I would suspect most cops are racist, originally set up in the US to catch run away slaves. We did a thesis on police violence and corruption - basically they are just another gang, but incredibly well armed with a monopoly over violence. So many studies showed they were sexist racist with a bully boy mentality (though this was in the 90s) -had an uncle who was a Chief Super, responsible for over 1200 officers -hate to say it but he was one hundred per cent racist.

[MoroccanBlue 5,385]

10 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Well you seem to know the answer 😁. Though I would suspect most cops are racist, originally set up in the US to catch run away slaves. We did a thesis on police violence and corruption - basically they are just another gang, but incredibly well armed with a monopoly over violence. So many studies showed they were sexist racist with a bully boy mentality (though this was in the 90s) -had an uncle who was a Chief Super, responsible for over 1200 officers -hate to say it but he was one hundred per cent racist.

I'm not denying there are racist cops, my argument was that pushing the narrative blacks are the only ones targeted because police are inherently racist is not only incorrect, but does nothing to end racial disparity. This is why many are against BLM and retaliate with All Lives Matter. Or they are just simply racist. 

Police Reform has been an issue since the 50s, which has attributed to so many wrongful deaths. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

3 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

I'm not denying there are racist cops, my argument was that pushing the narrative blacks are the only ones targeted because police are inherently racist is not only incorrect, but does nothing to end racial disparity. This is why many are against BLM and retaliate with All Lives Matter. Or they are just simply racist. 

Police Reform has been an issue since the 50s, which has attributed to so many wrongful deaths. 

Maybe it wont end racial disparity, and its fine and dandy for us to point out 'where they are going wrong' from our arm chairs -but you can see why BLM sprung up in the US - a seemingly endless parade of black people being choked, shot in the back, kicked, maced, batoned, often when handcuffed. The US have decades of history of this, paralleled with recordings of police radio.  Raw anger, and justified - though i suppose we can be thankful that things would be a lot more inflammatory were Trump was still in office, and appealing to the lowest common denominators of his followers.

 

[MoroccanBlue 5,385]

13 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Maybe it wont end racial disparity, and its fine and dandy for us to point out 'where they are going wrong' from our arm chairs -but you can see why BLM sprung up in the US - a seemingly endless parade of black people being choked, shot in the back, kicked, maced, batoned, often when handcuffed. The US have decades of history of this, paralleled with recordings of police radio.  Raw anger, and justified - though i suppose we can be thankful that things would be a lot more inflammatory were Trump was still in office, and appealing to the lowest common denominators of his followers.

 

You can thank left wing media for making it appear as if Blacks are the only ones suffering from police brutality. Thus creating the narrative it is a race issue. Add the fact Hollywood is primarily left wing so celebrities will also push that narrative. This does nothing but instill fear in every young black person, when the data shows it isn't true. 

American's upbringing in the 1900s was systemically racist. Jim Crow, Red Lining, and that Crack/Cocaine epidemic has created hundreds of black cities and counties in the United States still suffering to this day. Again, this has shrunk the window of opportunity and increased the window of crime for these black Americans. Thus being products of their own environment. THIS for me is the true issue. 

 

[Vesper 30,232]

9 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

You can thank left wing media for making it appear as if Blacks are the only ones suffering from police brutality.

 

massive strawman

no one ever said that

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

9 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

You can thank left wing media for making it appear as if Blacks are the only ones suffering from police brutality. Thus creating the narrative it is a race issue.

Nearly every media outlet i have seen brutality by police has been a right wing publication/news outlet, coupled with inflammatory language. I do find it hilarious how billionaire tax dodging media is called 'left wing'. Brilliant Orwellian doublespeak.

 

12 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

Crack/Cocaine epidemic

Loads of evidence funded and flooded into poor areas by CIA 

[MoroccanBlue 5,385]

Just now, Vesper said:

massive strawman

no one ever said that

Please elaborate.

Again, without sounding ignorant, I asked for the true message of BLM.  Both yourself and Broadway provided me resources that implied this has been rooted by the belief black Americans where the only ones in peril. 

3 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Nearly every media outlet i have seen brutality by police has been a right wing publication/news outlet, coupled with inflammatory language. I do find it hilarious how billionaire tax dodging media is called 'left wing'. Brilliant Orwellian doublespeak.

There is a massive distinction between left and right when you compare it to the States and in the UK. 

4 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Loads of evidence funded and flooded into poor areas by CIA 

One of the many systemically racist implementations of America. 

[Vesper 30,232]

3 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

Please elaborate.

Again, without sounding ignorant, I asked for the true message of BLM.  Both yourself and Broadway provided me resources that implied this has been rooted by the belief black Americans where the only ones in peril. 

As a percentage of the population blacks are treated the worst or garner the worst outcomes (in almost every category imaginable) of any racial/ethnic group

whether is is systemic suspicion, brutality, incarceration, and/or death at the hands of law enforcement/justice system

or employment, healthcare, educational opportunities etc etc etc

we are at the bottom of the ladder

I will once again give my personal example

real life

My wife and I are in Harrods

I am dressed extremely well, came from award presentation for one of my professors

she came from the gym, and is in sweats and trainers, hair a goddamn hot mess, lol

I get followed around the store after we split up by a private detective, same as has happened a dozen plus times before in other stores, in both London, and in the US (and that is ONLY times I noticed it becuase the coppers were inept). The Birkin bag I had with me is likely half a years salary for the private copper, but because I am black, I am auto-suspect of criminality, no matter how posh, well-spoken, intelligent I may be. My blackness (and I am light skinned due to mixed race, if I was straight Nigerian black, dog help me, and triple that if I was male and not a female) trumps it all in superficial random encounters.

she is NEVER followed, because... white privilege

 

[Vesper 30,232]

the yanks are going further down the shitter

huge attempt to take over the US's largest protestant denomination and turn it into a white nationalist baby jeebus Taliban

‘Take the Ship’: Conservatives Aim to Commandeer Southern Baptists

The insurgents, some adopting a pirate motif, believe that the denomination has drifted too far to the left on issues of race, gender and the strict authority of the Bible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/12/us/southern-baptists-conservatives.html

 

Allen Nelson IV walked to the front of his small church in central Arkansas, stopped in front of the communion table with three large crosses behind him, and unfurled a giant black flag with a white skull and crossed swords.

For several years, the pastor and father of five had felt that too many of his fellow Christians were drifting unmistakably leftward on issues of race, gender and the strict authority of the Bible. The flag was a gift from a friend, energized — like Mr. Nelson — by the idea of heroically reclaiming the faith.

It was time, he believed, to “take the ship.”

“We’re fighting for the very heart of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Mr. Nelson said in an interview. “For a long time what I thought a good Southern Baptist pastor should do was to send money and trust the system. We can’t do that anymore.”

Mr. Nelson is not alone. He is part of an ultraconservative populist uprising of pastors from Louisiana to California threatening to overtake the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

Next week more than 16,000 Southern Baptist pastors and leaders will descend on Nashville for their first annual meeting of the post-Trump era. It is their most high-profile gathering in years, with attendance more than double the most recent meeting in 2019, after a pandemic cancellation last year. It caps months of vicious infighting over every cultural and political division facing the country, particularly after the murder of George Floyd.

The outcome has the potential to permanently split an already divided evangelical America. Like the Trump movement within the Republican Party, a populist groundswell within the already conservative evangelical denomination is trying to install an anti-establishment leader who could wrench the church even further to the right, while opponents contend that the church must broaden its reach to preserve its strength. For three days, thousands of delegates known as “messengers” — most of them white men — will fight over race, sex and ultimately the future of evangelical power in the United States.

The large increase in attendance this year is “not an influx of the woke,” said Tom Buck, a pastor in Texas and a leader of the upstart conservative wing, who has been fund-raising for like-minded pastors to get to Nashville to vote. “It’s an influx of the awakened to what the woke have been advancing.”

An event that has historically been compared to a family reunion may look more like a brawl. In the past several weeks, Baptists have pored over leaked bombshell letters and whistle-blower recordings, and traded accusations of racism, apostasy and sexual abuse cover-ups. Leaders have taken barbed potshots at each other. Others have headed for the door.

Russell Moore, the denomination’s influential head of ethics and public policy, left on June 1. The popular author and speaker Beth Moore, who is not related to Mr. Moore, announced in March that she is no longer a Southern Baptist, citing the “staggering” disorientation of seeing the denomination’s leaders support Donald J. Trump, and lamenting its treatment of women. Some conservatives triumphantly celebrated both departures.

Messengers will confront a series of measures likely including the propriety of women delivering sermons, the handling of sexual abuse and a denunciation of critical race theory, the concept that historical patterns of racism remain ingrained in modern American society and institutions.

Those hoping to “take the ship” maintain that piracy is nothing more than a cheeky metaphor for a dry, democratic process. Still, the swashbuckling imagery has taken hold. There are “Take the Ship” T-shirts and pirate car flags, GIFs and memes; many supporters attach a pirate flag emoji to their Twitter handles.

In Alaska, the pastor Nathaniel Jolly posted photographs to Twitter of a pirate-themed frozen yogurt shop he used to own with his wife. “Now, for the SBC!” he wrote, appending a flag emoji to the message.

Mr. Jolly, who will attend his first annual meeting, watched with alarm as public schools in his area have begun to teach what he describes as critical race theory. And he was shocked when high-profile leaders in his own denomination endorsed aspects of the sprawling racial protest movement last summer. “I think C.R.T. is one of these destructive heresies that have snuck in,” he said, referring to a passage in the New Testament book of 2 Peter about false teachers who bring “swift destruction on themselves.”

The rebellion in the Southern Baptist Convention both reflects and forecasts what is going on in broader society and the Republican Party, said Jemar Tisby, assistant director of narrative and advocacy at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.

In the wake of the racial justice protests and the ongoing disinformation about the election, there has been “a sifting” going on in the church over race and justice in particular, he said.

“The annual meeting is an opportunity for denominational leaders either to sensitively address the concerns and racism that Black people have experienced or to side with the status quo which favors white people, particularly men,” he said.

The denomination has about 14.5 million members but has been steadily shrinking for the past decade. In 2014, about 85 percent of Southern Baptists were white, 6 percent were Black and 3 percent were Latino, according to the Pew Research Center.

Southern Baptists split from their northern counterparts in 1845 in support of slavery. After the denomination repudiated its role in slavery in the 1990s, a portion of its national leaders have attempted to diversify its churches and seminaries. At its 2019 meeting, the convention affirmed that critical race theory could be an “analytical tool” useful to faithful Christians, a move that many conservatives describe as alarming. Its current president, J.D. Greear, urged Southern Baptists last summer to declare that “Black lives matter.”

Some high-profile Southern Baptists have also pushed back on some strictures against female church leadership. One of the denomination’s largest congregations, Saddleback Church in Southern California, quietly ordained three women as staff pastors in May, a move that outraged conservatives.

Conservatives have spent months drumming up turnout. The Conservative Baptist Network, an increasingly influential group founded last year, released a recent video urging Baptists to “stop the drift” by coming to Nashville. Some Baptists planned to gather at rallying sites before the big event. Outside Dallas, 1,600 people registered for Wokeness and the Gospel, a conference that warned of the perils of what organizers call “the new moralism.”

The most high-profile vote at the meeting will be the election of a new president, a race whose leading candidates are Mike Stone, a Georgia pastor who is the favorite of many conservatives, including Mr. Nelson and Mr. Jolly; Ed Litton, an Alabama pastor who has largely avoided culture war battles and has the support of the denomination’s first Black president; and Albert Mohler Jr., a lion of the denomination who helped usher in a conservative revolution decades ago and is now in the awkward position of being labeled a moderate “compromise candidate.” Mr. Stone, a onetime underdog, is considered a serious contender.

No matter which side emerges triumphant from the meeting next week, a schism looms.

“A lot of us will know if this convention is for us once it is over,” said Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, who has been leading antiracism efforts in the denomination. If Mr. Mohler or Mr. Stone wins the presidency, or if resolutions are passed that affirm racism, in his view, he will leave. Several other Black pastors have announced their departures within the past year.

Hostility over critical race theory among the Southern Baptists, which came to the foreground after Thanksgiving when seminary presidents denounced it, is interwoven with its weaponization by the G.O.P., he said.

“The litmus test now for being a Baptist is you have to denounce C.R.T. as they do?” he said. “We would be completely off our rockers to submit, give that kind of power to a white denomination, particularly on the subject of race.”

The convention has historically reflected divisions in the country. The most recent meeting, two years ago in Birmingham, Ala., focused on sexual abuse in evangelical churches. The year before, tensions were political. Mike Pence, then the country’s vice president, gave a keynote address to rally evangelical support for Mr. Trump ahead of the midterm elections.

The denomination vowed at its convention two years ago to address sexual abuse in its congregations, but many victims’ advocates have warned that little has changed. Southern Baptist leaders have also not publicly addressed an allegation of abuse at one of its most prominent megachurches, the Village Church in Texas.

In one of two fiery letters that leaked after his departure, Mr. Moore accused leaders including Mr. Stone of impeding the denomination’s attempts to root out abusers, and of “bullying and intimidation” toward survivors of sexual abuse. (Mr. Stone responded in a video statement, calling the letter “as inflammatory as it is inaccurate.”) Later, an ally of Mr. Moore released audio recordings of meetings that included Mr. Moore, Mr. Stone and others debating how to handle abuse, with another high-placed leader, Ronnie Floyd, saying his priority was not to worry about survivor reactions but rather to “preserve the base.” (In a statement, Mr. Floyd apologized and said his remarks were mischaracterized.)

Opponents of the conservative campaign are not as centrally organized, with a less targeted voter turnout operation. Last month, their preferred candidate, Mr. Litton, held question-and-answer sessions for about 30 pastors in West Virginia over takeout Chick-fil-A, and another for a similar group in Baton Rouge, La.

No matter what happens in Nashville, the conservatives are pressing on to strengthen their institutional and cultural power. Tom Ascol, who leads Founders Ministries, an influential conservative group, has been hosting regular calls with fellow pastors who are newly engaged in the fight.

Next year Founders will host a conference called Militant and Triumphant, whose website makes its ambitions plain:

“We indeed do not wage war against flesh and blood, but we do wage war.”

[Vesper 30,232]

Trump is looking like shit

Trump's suit looked as though it needed a good ironing with his jacket and pants looking distinctly creased

[Vesper 30,232]

Edited June 15, 2021 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,232]

WATCH: Woman pulls gun on Black family during mall confrontation in Washington state

https://www.rawstory.com/video-shows-woman-point-a-gun-at-a-family-during-confrontation-in-vancouver-mall/

 

[Vesper 30,232]

more evidence of the US going more and more fascist

and this poll was of readers from a centre LEFT (on the US scale of ideology) newsletter

 

On June 3, 2017, whilst employed by the military contractor Pluribus International Corporation, Reality Winner was arrested on suspicion of leaking intelligence reports to the media showing systemic and widespread Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, including direct ties to the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence agents.

 

BTW, Obama prosecuted FAR more leakers and whistle-blowers than any other US President ever, so do not think I am playing false left v right, 'Democrats are always good, Republicans only are bad' games.

[Vesper 30,232]

another RW white nationalist claim bites the dust

There never was a male fertility crisis

A new study suggests that reports of the impending infertility of the human male are greatly exaggerated.

https://bigthink.com/sex-relationships/sperm-count-decline

A new review of a famous study on declining sperm counts finds several flaws.

The old report makes unfounded assumptions, has faulty data, and tends toward panic.

The new report does not rule out that sperm counts are going down, only that this could be quite normal.

Several years ago, a meta-analysis of studies on human fertility came out warning us about the declining sperm counts of Western men. It was widely shared, and its findings were featured on the covers of popular magazines. Indeed, its findings were alarming: a nearly 60 percent decline in sperm per milliliter since 1973 with no end in sight. It was only a matter of time, the authors argued, until men were firing blanks, literally.

Well… never mind.

It turns out that the impending demise of humanity was greatly exaggerated. As the predicted infertility wave crashed upon us, there was neither a great rush of men to fertility clinics nor a sudden dearth of new babies. The only discussions about population decline focus on urbanization and the fact that people choose not to have kids rather than not being able to have them.

Now, a new analysis of the 2017 study says that lower sperm counts is nothing to be surprised by. Published in Human Fertility, its authors point to flaws in the original paper's data and interpretation. They suggest a better and smarter reanalysis.

Counting tiny things is difficult

The original 2017 report analyzed 185 studies on 43,000 men and their reproductive health. Its findings were clear: "a significant decline in sperm counts… between 1973 and 2011, driven by a 50-60 percent decline among men unselected by fertility from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand."

However, the new analysis points out flaws in the data. As many as a third of the men in the studies were of unknown age, an important factor in reproductive health. In 45 percent of cases, the year of the sample collection was unknown- a big detail to miss in a study measuring change over time. The quality controls and conditions for sample collection and analysis vary widely from study to study, which likely influenced the measured sperm counts in the samples.

Another study from 2013 also points out that the methods for determining sperm count were only standardized in the 1980s, which occurred after some of the data points were collected for the original study. It is entirely possible that the early studies gave inaccurately high sperm counts.

This is not to say that the 2017 paper is entirely useless; it had a much more rigorous methodology than previous studies on the subject, which also claimed to identify a decline in sperm counts. However, the original study had more problems.

Garbage in, garbage out

Predictable as always, the media went crazy. Discussions of the decline of masculinity took off, both in mainstream and less-than-reputable forums; concerns about the imagined feminizing traits of soy products continued to increase; and the authors of the original study were called upon to discuss the findings themselves in a number of articles.

However, as this new review points out, some of the findings of that meta-analysis are debatable at best. For example, the 2017 report suggests that "declining mean [sperm count] implies that an increasing proportion of men have sperm counts below any given threshold for sub-fertility or infertility," despite little empirical evidence that this is the case.

The WHO offers a large range for what it considers to be a healthy sperm count, from 15 to 250 million sperm per milliliter. The benefits to fertility above a count of 40 million are seen as minimal, and the original study found a mean sperm concentration of 47 million sperm per milliliter.

Healthy sperm, healthy man?

The claim that sperm count is evidence of larger health problems is also scrutinized in this new article. While it is true that many major health problems can impact reproductive health, there is little evidence that it is the "canary in the coal mine" for overall well-being. A number of studies suggest that any relation between lifestyle choices and this part of reproductive health is limited at best.

Lastly, ideas that environmental factors could be at play have been debunked since 2017. While the original paper considered the idea that pollutants, especially from plastics, could be at fault, it is now known that this kind of pollution is worse in the parts of the world that the original paper observed higher sperm counts in (i.e., non-Western nations).

There never was a male fertility crisis

 

The authors of the new review do not deny that some measurements are showing lower sperm counts, but they do question the claim that this is catastrophic or part of a larger pathological issue. They propose a new interpretation of the data. Dubbed the "Sperm Count Biovariability hypothesis," it is summarized as:

"Sperm count varies within a wide range, much of which can be considered non-pathological and species-typical. Above a critical threshold, more is not necessarily an indicator of better health or higher probability of fertility relative to less. Sperm count varies across bodies, ecologies, and time periods. Knowledge about the relationship between individual and population sperm count and life-historical and ecological factors is critical to interpreting trends in average sperm counts and their relationships to human health and fertility."

Still, the authors note that lower sperm counts "could decline due to negative environmental exposures, or that this may carry implications for men's health and fertility."

However, they disagree that the decline in absolute sperm count is necessarily a bad sign for men's health and fertility. We aren't at civilization ending catastrophe just yet.

 

Edited June 16, 2021 by Vesper

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Tucker Carlson Bizarrely Suggests Capitol Insurrection Was Orchestrated by FBI

https://news.yahoo.com/tucker-carlson-bizarrely-suggests-capitol-020456040.html

Taking his Jan. 6 denialism to another level on Tuesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested the Capitol insurrection was a false flag orchestrated by the FBI in an effort to “suppress political dissent.”

Almost since the moment that former President Donald Trump incited thousands of MAGA supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol in order to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory, Carlson has downplayed the violent riots, repeatedly insisting there was “no insurrection” and that it was nothing more than a “political protest that got out of hand.”

At the same time, the far-right Fox News star has rallied to the defense of the Capitol rioters, portraying them as largely peaceful protesters while raging against federal prosecutors for the hundreds of criminal charges filed in the wake of the insurrection. With more rioters still facing potential indictments, many have taken to cooperating with the feds to avoid or lessen jail time.

And according to Carlson, the reason why the government has “thrown the book” at some rioters and not others is because of a deep-state plot to control the political narrative.

Taking aim at Attorney General Merrick Garland for announcing a new strategy to combat domestic terrorism and violent extremism in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, Carlson said this was just further proof that the government wants to “crush anyone who leads opposition to” Biden.

After invoking Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest whataboutism argument about the Capitol riots, which featured Putin referencing Capitol rioter Ashli Babbit’s death to deflect answering a question about jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, Carlson declared that Putin raised “fair questions.”

“Who did shoot Ashli Babbitt and why don’t we know?” Carlson added. “Are anonymous federal agents now allowed to kill unarmed women who protest the regime? That’s okay now? No, it’s not okay.”

Carlson went on to claim that the government is “hiding the identity of many law enforcement officers present at the Capitol on January 6, not just the one that killed” Babbit, stating that the government’s own court filings reveal that officers violently took part in the riot.

“We know that because without fail, the government has thrown the book at most people who were present in the Capitol on January 6,” he exclaimed. “There was a nationwide dragnet to find them. Many of them are still in solitary confinement tonight.”

“But strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged,” he continued. “Look at the documents, the government calls those people unindicted coconspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?”

Using the indictment of Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell as an example, Carlson noted that the documents show two additional people listed who haven’t been charged yet but were organizers of the riot.

“The government knows who they are, but they have not charged them. Why is that? You know why,” Carlson said with a dramatic nod. “They were all certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol, on Jan. 6, according to government documents!”

Carlson would then go on to also claim that the extremist plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was an FBI plot, insisting that the government was using the same post-9/11 tactics this time around.

“If you empower the government to violate civil liberties in pursuit of a foreign terror organization, it’s just a matter of time before ambitious politicians use those same mechanisms to suppress political dissent,” he grumbled. “And that is what we are seeing now.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Edited June 16, 2021 by Vesper

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American–Style Grievance Politics Comes to British TV

Britain’s newest television channel bets that the Fox News playbook will succeed in a much stuffier media market.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/gb-news-fox-news-british/619210/

In the months leading up to the launch of Great Britain’s newest television channel, GB News, its backers insisted that it wouldn’t be a British version of Fox News. They were right in one way: Fox is a slick product with fancy studios and whizzy graphics. By contrast, when GB News went on the air Sunday night, it looked as though it had been filmed in an abandoned strip club—all dark walls and neon lights—and suffered from poorly synchronized sound. When the channel’s lead anchor, Andrew Neil, concluded an interview with the Scottish historian Neil Oliver, he said that he hoped to see Oliver again, “and I promise [you] next time we’ll get you a better microphone.” The next day, an afternoon host, Gloria De Piero, encouraged the channel’s regional reporters, standing at attention in four little onscreen boxes, to say how happy they were that the channel had launched. They couldn’t hear her. Silence reigned.

For GB News’s target audience, its scrappy, homespun nature might be part of its charm—proof that this is a plucky upstart taking on Britain’s state broadcaster, the BBC, and the long-established Sky News. GB News has been hyped as a major shift in British television, away from its tradition of staid objectivity and toward the American climate of passionate, hyper-partisan anchors and highly opinionated programming. Although Britain’s broadcasting laws—which require news channels to be impartial—will place some limits on what GB News can do, its creators clearly believe that U.S.-style grievance politics can sustain at least a low-budget, tactically neutered version of Fox. Whatever else it is, GB News is a right-wing television-news channel. Britain hasn’t had one of those before. The shift is real.

Read: The ‘global Britain’ conundrum

Early shows suggest that GB News will be the channel for the “you can’t say anything anymore” crowd—a venue where hosts regularly imply that their viewers are getting the real story that’s been kept from them by the mainstream media. (Never mind, of course, that GB News is itself part of the mainstream media.) “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda,” Neil said in the monologue that opened the programming on Sunday. “We are proud to be British. The clue is in the name … We will not come at every story with the conviction that Britain is always at fault.” To British ears, this is code for backing Brexit. (During the 2016 referendum campaign, those who expressed fears about the effects of leaving the European Union were regularly accused of “talking Britain down.”) It also echoes the rhetoric of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose favoured method of deflecting criticism is to ramble vaguely about the country’s greatness.

Leading figures at GB News, including its CEO, the former Sky News Australia boss Angelos Frangopoulos, reject the Fox comparison, but they clearly believe there is a gap in Britain’s television market. In their analysis, the BBC is too London-based, too full of college graduates, and too biased toward the “Remain” side of the EU referendum—in other words, dominated by what Americans might call “latte liberals” or the “coastal elite.” GB News will provide the antidote. It should therefore do particularly well among Britons older than 65, who are much less likely than their younger counterparts to have a college degree, much more conservative, and much more likely to have voted for Brexit. Many of them are also well-off, with household wealth swelled by decades of rising home prices. On culture, this group leans right, but on economics, the picture is more complicated. Unsurprisingly, older Britons support continued strong government spending—specifically in the form of their state pensions, which rise in line with inflation.

Opposition to fashionable liberal values—or sometimes a caricature of them—is therefore central to the new outlet’s appeal. In his opening monologue, Neil said that GB News would not be “an echo chamber for the metropolitan mindset”; the channel is proud of its 13 regional reporters. (Neil does his bit by keeping a house in rural France.) Just as Fox commentators railed against the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, a recent morning show on GB News criticized English soccer players for kneeling to protest racial injustice. The opening night made clear that “wokeness,” that nebulous bugbear, is firmly in its presenters’ sights. One late-night show will have a segment called “Uncancelled,” speaking with those who have been silenced by Britain’s allegedly suffocating left-wing consensus. Neil himself will introduce a regular “Woke Watch” bit, and the comedian Andrew Doyle will host a weekend show called Free Speech Nation. Although GB News’s target demographic has prompted unkind nicknames such as “Boomer TV,” the channel has a number of presenters in the mould of Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro—the kind of intense young conservatives who might corner you at a party and talk to you about Ayn Rand. Women older than 50 seemed mysteriously absent from the GB News shows I saw, although perhaps that’s the kind of feminist whining that will land me on “Woke Watch.”

An explicitly anti-liberal approach has two problems, however. The first is that conservative viewpoints are far better represented in the British national print media than they are in the United States: Most of the largest newspapers, including the Daily Mail, The Sun, the Daily Express, and The Daily Telegraph, publish briskly right-of-center content. As a columnist for The Telegraph, Boris Johnson disparaged gay men, Muslim women who wore burkas, and many others. As he is now prime minister, an objective onlooker would have trouble arguing that he has been canceled. Indeed, trying to find guests for “Uncancelled” who truly cannot get a hearing elsewhere would mean booking flat-earthers, extreme religious fundamentalists, or actual Nazis.

From the July/August 2021 issue: The minister of chaos

Figuring out ways to project a punky underdog resistance to polite opinion is nevertheless central to GB News’s pitch. When I spoke with Frangopoulos a few months ago, he promised that the channel would not feature the kind of incestuous political coverage in which a news conference, featuring journalists asking questions, is followed by the channel cutting back to the studio, “where the journalist then speaks to another journalist, or perhaps to other journalists, talking about what the journalist said.” Nonetheless, the launch of GB News featured plenty of journalists talking with other journalists. In fact, the opening program consisted of Neil introducing the other GB News hosts.

This reliance on talking heads is unlikely to change. The channel’s tight budget will require GB News shows to lean heavily on studio discussions or person-on-the-street interviews, rather than the expensive, edited narrative packages that Sky News and the BBC use to deliver original reporting. In this respect, GB News will be Foxy: The presenters’ personalities must do the work of holding viewers’ attention. For now, the channel does not even have much in the way of graphics, except for a news ticker at the bottom of the screen. It’s all talk. And although the mood in the first set of programs was genial rather than apoplectic, the constant barrage of opinions, arguments, and requests for viewer submissions became exhausting. After watching GB News for an hour, the tone began to remind me of hyperbolic sports coverage. Should the English team take a knee? Should anyone take a knee? Is this my knee? Do you have a knee? Tell us about your knee!

And now the weather.

In this format, the charm and rapport of the presenters is essential, and GB News has been lucky to attract several older male journalists who have fallen out of favour with established broadcasters. The former ITV newsreader Alastair Stewart left his post in January following multiple “errors of judgment” on social media, while Simon McCoy, formerly of the BBC, came out as a Brexiteer in an interview explaining why he left the corporation. The presence of these men might strike a chord with some older viewers who support Brexit—and those who worry that Britain has become an ageist, censorious place where people are punished for not understanding the current elite vocabulary on race, gender, and sexuality.

The channel, as a stand-alone company that is not reliant on taxpayer funds, can also afford to flout the conventions of serious news. The ex–Sky News host Colin Brazier’s Twitter feed, in the days before the launch, suggested that he was eager to say everything he had not been able to say at his previous employer. “If @GBNEWS ever does hour-after-hour analysing the meaning of the ‘chemistry’ and ‘body language’ of world leaders, I’m going to open a vein,” he tweeted on launch day, over a video of leaders at the G7 meeting in Cornwall. That kind of winking outrageousness contrasts sharply with the BBC’s earnest, self-protective stuffiness—a reaction to the endless complaints it faces from across the political spectrum.

Which brings us to GB News’s second problem. In Britain—again, unlike in the United States—television channels are tightly constrained in what they can air, because they have a legal duty to avoid taking sides. GB News is pushing the edges of this duty, by copying the example of the radio station LBC, based in London. LBC does not host individually balanced discussions, but argues that it provides balance across its entire daily schedule.

GB News aims to offer the same kind of “balance.” How that squares with the hard evidence of its roster of hosts, drawn from right-wing media and right-wing political parties, is open to discussion. The furthest left it reaches is to the former Labour member of Parliament Gloria De Piero, who is hardly a frothing communist. The channel’s defence of the unsayable is unlikely to extend to such cancelled opinions as “The inheritance tax should be 100 percent,” “Marxism is an unfairly maligned ideology,” and “Abolish the nuclear family.”

Read: Britain failed. Again.

At the BBC and Sky News, impartiality means that journalists refrain from sharing any political opinions. Outside pundits from both the right and the left are invited to duke it out instead. This is an approach with sharp limits—for example, when it comes to climate change, the economic impact of Brexit, or the effectiveness of coronavirus shutdowns. When all the evidence points one way, does an impartial broadcaster have a duty to air the contrary view? On pandemic-related matters, the BBC and Sky have largely ruled no: Wild and unsupported ideas about 5G and microchips in vaccines have not been given airtime.

Here, GB News’s default oppositionalism—if something supposedly can’t be said, it must therefore be worth saying—leads it into challenging terrain. Neil opened the channel by declaring that it would not indulge “fake news,” but an hour later, Dan Wootton, hired from Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, was arguing into the camera that shutdowns infringe on Britons’ “God-given” liberty and they “should be wiped from the public-health playbook forevermore.” It was a speech that U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene would have applauded. Wootton then railed against “doomsday scientists,” adding that a “15-month-long never-ending scare campaign has suitably terrified the public into supporting lockdown.”

If GB News wants to “puncture the pomposity of our elites,” as Neil said in his opening monologue, then it should acknowledge that no group fits that description more than the small number of influential shutdown skeptics employed by right-wing papers and GB News itself. Seventy-one percent of Britons support the newly announced delay in lifting the final coronavirus restrictions. As it turns out, Britons value the God-given freedom to return to the office far less than the freedom not to die of a respiratory disease.

At Sky News Australia, Frangopoulos had great success by providing daytime content that played it straight and opinion-led evening programming that veered closer to Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. GB News appears to be using the same blueprint, and critics will no doubt be accused of focusing on the most inflammatory content, instead of taking a more rounded view of the channel’s output. In fairness, the wry, welcoming tone adopted by McCoy, Brazier, and their daytime co-hosts is hard to square with some of the knee-jerk (and preemptive) criticism of the channel, such as the advertiser boycott encouraged by the Stop Funding Hate campaign. Brazier’s show, which he hosts with the Kenyan-born social-policy researcher Mercy Muroki, presented the Black Lives Matter movement as a regrettable overreach on an important subject, rather than a harbinger of the Marxist apocalypse or the start of a race war against white people.

To further rebut charges that it is copying Fox, GB News will also point to wholesome segments such as “Simon’s Good News.” On Monday afternoon, the good news began with a report on a handheld COVID-19 detector developed by a firm in Cambridge. Then we learned about community fridges and Welsh villagers joining together to buy their 200-year-old local bar. Sadly, the technical gremlins returned; the wrong video showed up on-screen.

Like the pro he is, McCoy smoothly moved on to the next item, welcoming the relaxation of restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood—itself a noteworthy sign that low-level homophobia is no longer a key culture-war weapon on the British right—and then mentioning a small dog named Midnight that had saved its owners from a house fire in Hull. “Midnight is a hero; good to see him,” McCoy said. Then he galloped on to a 51-year-old American who can sing and speak backwards. The channel played a clip of the man saying “6,666,666” backwards while driving, then reversed it to prove his aptitude. “For once, that wasn’t a technical issue,” said McCoy’s co-host, the former Brexit Party politician Alex Phillips. “He really was speaking backwards.”

So who will be the true face of GB News: Dan Wootton railing against shutdowns, or Simon McCoy praising a heroic terrier? Let’s hope it’s the latter. Political polarisation in the United States seems to have been turbocharged by a hermetic right-wing media universe built on paranoia, resentment, and mistrust of authority. As GB News matures, the channel may test how receptive Britain is to culture-war topics brought over from the U.S. Already, Brexit influencers have imported the vocabulary of the American right (snowflakes, triggered, woke) as well as the idea that “owning the libs” is a political goal in itself. In a piece for the website ConservativeHome, Donal Blaney, the founder of the Margaret Thatcher Centre, urged GB News hosts to stay strong in the face of Twitter outrage. “As these triggered snowflakes wail uncontrollably in impotent fury into their kale, lentil, and chai lattes this morning, and for months to come, all at GB News need to channel their inner Churchill.” (Side note: That drink sounds disgusting.) Perhaps GB News will bait Ofcom—the British television-news regulator—with ever more polarized content, and then pose as a cancel-culture victim if given an official rebuke. Little by little, the channel could chip away at the British principle of neutrality in broadcasting.

To achieve its goals, however, GB News needs viewers. The opening-night numbers were strong, by the standards of British rolling news. There is a big pool to be fished. Many Britons feel unrepresented by the values of the state broadcaster.

Could GB News offer an alternative to the BBC without simply becoming a right-wing propaganda channel? Yes, if it can sort out that gloomy studio lighting; yes, if it can stay within the impartiality guidelines while offering a tone different from that of the straitlaced BBC; and yes, if it can acknowledge that some minority opinions are not silenced or cancelled, but just unpopular and boring and wrong.

Edited June 16, 2021 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

Loads of advertiser pulling out of Gammon Bastard News. GB News themselves have said more than half their viewers are aged 65 and over - companies selling stairlifts, incontinence pants and erectile dysfunction would do best.

Their presenter Dan Wooton with the bleached teeth, who made a career out of judging womens tits out of 10 in The Sun is thick as pig shit. 

He also always blames wokeness for everything. As a gay man he ought to remember without 'wokeness' his arse fucking and cock sucking would still be illegal. Total prick.

[Vesper 30,232]

I'd lay £10K that this white nationalist yank House Republican's staffers had to replace 'spade' with 'ace' (Juneteenth is a celebration of the last slaves being freed in the US) https://rosendale.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=191   Who are the 14 House Republicans who voted against a Juneteenth holiday? And why? https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/16/who-14-republicans-who-voted-against-juneteenth-holiday/7722634002/

[Vesper 30,232]

20 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Loads of advertiser pulling out of Gammon Bastard News. GB News themselves have said more than half their viewers are aged 65 and over - companies selling stairlifts, incontinence pants and erectile dysfunction would do best.

Their presenter Dan Wooton with the bleached teeth, who made a career out of judging womens tits out of 10 in The Sun is thick as pig shit. 

He also always blames wokeness for everything. As a gay man he ought to remember without 'wokeness' his arse fucking and cock sucking would still be illegal. Total prick.

do those poopy pants include a prick hole?

that way the old geezer can pop 10 ED pills and not shit all over the missus whilst having oldster sex time

🤢