Friday, February 11, 2022

Random Thoughts

Howdy everyone! Busy week, so I haven't had a chance to write anything. I do have some thoughts though.

● On the Joe Rogan issue, I saw something that should raise eyebrows, but the world no longer thinks. It's along the lines of Joy Behar saying she didn't want Joe Rogan canceled, she just wants people to complain about him to Spotify... to get him cancelled. Note that her dishonest formulation lets her have it both ways in her head: she's not a Nazi, she just wants people to do Nazi things at her command.

Now we have India Arie, one of the handful of artists who has tried to remove her work from Spotify to censor Joe Rogan. Arie is the one who dug through Rogan's prior tapes to find that he had used the "N" word in the past. What does this have to do with vaccine misinformation? Nothing, actually. This is personality assassination. This is how the woke work. Once you are an enemy of the people, they will research all your crimes to justify making you a nonperson. That's just par for the course though, on the left. What bothered me was this quote from her afterward: "I don't think Joe Rogan is racist."

Uh...

So why are you hanging on his use of the "N" word in the past and trying to kill him for it? Think about that. She's either saying that she doesn't think he's actually guilty of what she accused him of, but let's get him anyways... or she's saying that even if you are a good person, the use of the "N" word at some point in the past means you should be forever second class... destroyable. Both positions are truly evil. And keep in mind, these are the same people who want to forgive criminals everything in the name of justice. Maybe Joe should have killed someone instead?

● Inflation is a disaster and growing. The fact they say it's 7% means its actually much worse. The government lies about inflation to keep its budget under control because trillions of dollars (salaries and pensions) are indexed to inflation. Biden still doesn't seem to get how this is killing poor and middle class families. His press secretary even dismissed inflation as a rich concern a few months back (ridiculous) and Biden claims it's "transitory."

Interestingly, Biden's newest tactic in interviews, as demonstrated by his attack on leftist Lestor Holt who asked what transitory means, is to attack the questioner. When Trump did that, the left squealed. Now they purr.

● The Olympics are being killed in the ratings. Lowest ratings ever, by far. The (leftist) sports media is blaming this on China and suddenly learning that the Chinese oppress a Muslim minority -- something they condescendingly dismissed when the issue was raised against the NBA's hypocrisy. According to truth-fluid writers at Yahoo, the public knows this and is outraged at China. Plus, the covid restrictions are so horrible the public has just given up. Boo hoo.

The reality, I suspect, is that the Olympics have become (1) woke and (2) a festival of spoiled rich people complaining about their lack of luxury while blasting average Americans as ignorant racists. I would say the Olympics lost the public, just as the Hollywood masterbatthon of award shows lost the public, just as the leftist-pimping NBA lost the public last year, just at the woke media lost the public. The left can keep coming up with excuses, but the common element for the public walking away is wokeness and elitism. Uyghurs my ass. The public doesn't even know who they are.

I actually think a lot of our issues lately are not left versus right, but elite versus peons. I'll try to gather my thoughts on that and present them soon.

● As an aside, on elitism versus the unwashed, Elon Musk made an interesting point. Biden's infrastructure plans include 500,000 charging stations for electric cars even though only a tiny percentage (6% or something like that) of people have electric cars, and they are generally owned by the rich or corporate fleets. Why are we spending tax dollars to support those people? To support his point, Musk pointed out that Tesla has built 200,000 charging stations without federal cash. This joins a disturbing trend of using massive amounts of taxpayer cash to pay for the hobbies and self-righteousnesses of the rich and powerful.

● This Ukraine thing is making my head spin. Biden says war is coming. In fact, almost every day, there is some leaked intelligence telling us how the Russians are about to invade. Russia says it won't invade. I don't trust Russia, but ok. France and Germany want to cut a deal. They say Russia won't invade either. But of course, they are chickens. But then... Ukraine says Russia won't invade. Huh? They're the target, why would they say that? Ukraine says we are causing problems and need to tone down the rhetoric. //eyes cross I'm not a Putin person. He's a loser and a tyrant. But what is going on here? Why does it seem Biden is pushing for a war? What is his game?

4 comments:

AndrewPrice said...

By the way, here's an example of what I'm taking about with regard to the intentional blindness regarding the Olympics: LINK

1. The article reads as pretty desperate to debunk the idea that the Olympics are failing. It is not unbiased, even as it presents itself as disinterested.

2. The article makes no mention of politics or spoiled athletes. Why? Because it doesn't want to even suggest the truth - this article is meant to inoculate leftist minds. Indeed, it quotes the red herrings of covid, Chinese nastiness, time zones, and general change in viewer habits. These are the same excuses every failed woke takeover takes for crashing ratings. For example, Ms. America is basically dead after going woke, and it claimed the public's woke taste for an end to beauty pageants was the reason. Covid was the reason all the award shows failed, and why the NBA lost half its audience after it went BLM.

3. Then the article gets weird. It denies the debacle and instead claims these Olympics are a major victory... it actually suggests the Olympics are doing better than ever! ("The Games may actually be more popular than ever among Americans because of a long-developing shift from television viewing to online consumption.")

How? It says that digital viewing more than makes up for the collapse of television viewing. It even says digital audiences "might" one day exceed television audiences. Is that true? Well, the author says there's no way to know because you can't measure a digital audience ("[NBC] hasn’t been able to track all of the clicks on its Olympics content"). But if that's true, then what exactly are the author's claims based on? Wishful thinking? Moreover, NBC announced it had 2 million streamers, which is far below the number of viewers it lost, and shows it can measure them - the author is lying.

Not coincidentally, the author keeps pointing to videos online he says got two million views as proof of a massive audience ("the Games in Beijing could become the most-viewed video program in world history"). It's actually just proof of a 2 million audience.

4. The author claims digital audiences are better ("NBC has posted dozens of similar clips, all produced at little additional cost to the network — and all of them attached to advertisements, adding to NBC’s return on its investment"), but then says this might lead to a decrease in what NBC will pay to renew the Olympics ("But the next rights negotiation might not prove as lucrative if the trend continues"). That makes no sense at all if his assertion is true. Why pay less for better?

What this claims really is, is preparing people for when NBC admits its mistake and cuts its next offer in half. Always follow the money.

5. The author keeps saying that the Olympics are in no danger and implies it's because of the miracle of people rushing to online viewing (more popular than ever!), but then slides in that the reason the Olympics aren't in trouble is because NBC is contractually bound through 2032. So he doesn't know if they're in trouble with viewers or not.

6. Finally, as a dog whistle to make it clear where you should stand, he mentions one moment from the games -- a female athlete ("Kamila Valieva is the first woman to land a quad at the Olympics — and she made it look easy"). Girl power! Is this a coincidence? No. I have previously mentioned that Yahoo inadvertently proved that women's sports draw less than 10% of male sports, but the elites push them hard as the thing "everyone" is interested in and attack those who dispute that... an inconvenient truth.

ambisinistral said...

The article is just a CCP soft propaganda effort. You get what you pay for.

tryanmax said...

The left and the press excusing Biden's Trumpy behavior keeps confirming my suspicion that Dems only put him up because a) they thought the public wanted a Trump figure but, b) they totally misread what a Trump figure is because they hate Trump blindly. In other words, Biden is the actual embodiment of the psycho-senile bigot the left believed Trump to be.

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Something to stick in your brain to stew with your thoughts on elites verses peons, I think something that goes largely misunderstood by most is that elite doesn't necessarily mean rich, especially in an attention/influence economy. Granted, massive influence does tend to lead to wealth, but among the influencer class are ranks upon ranks of journalists, woke educators, and code-monkeys tweaking search algorithms. I think one can draw a rather sharp line between those who aim to be merely influential verses those who aim to be truly useful.

On the tail of that, I think there's a connection between the influencer class and spending taxpayer cash on elite hobbies. As I said, influence does tend to attract wealth, but the lesser influencers want their piece, too. So they propagandize to encourage government spending to subsidize rich toys for poor podcasters. And since they can influence whose posts go viral, they can make their numbers look greater than they are.

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I don't think Biden's war game is too hard to understand. It's as cynical as it is old. I think in some demented way, he and/or his handlers really do want to unify the country, but the only way they know how is to unify against a common enemy. It's like an addiction with them. They only way they can make themselves stop demonizing their fellow citizens is to move on to a harder drug. Of course, that won't stop them demonizing fellow citizens who call out their BS as sympathizers and traitors.

ArgentGale said...

Not much to add to your thoughts on my end, Andrew, at least not on this post. Your next one's more fitting for that. :) Tryanmax, it was mainly your comment on who the elites are that got my attention since it matches my own observations, as well as those in another online group I spend a lot of time in. That sounds about right on Ukraine, too. It really is Clown World these days, isn't it?

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