Finding your backbone

So apparently White House reporters now started to ask difficult questions from the President. Like why he was lying during Trump's presidency. (Sorry for the belayed post, life and all takes precedence.)

 Which is all nice and everything, however, where were these very same reporters in 2002 when a different president (who was then looking like an absolute dolt, but compared to this one he was an intellectual giant) was lying about the reasons of a war of aggression - you know, something international law recognizes as a war crime. Only a comedian had enough balls to say uncomfortable things in front of the president.

There has been a really pathological interplay between politicians and the journalists who were supposed to keep them on their toes: in exchange for access, they agreed not to ask them difficult questions. This abandonment of their duty, this perversion of everything what journalism stands for had a major role in the rise of Trump.

So I guess congratulations, Huffpost reporter, you are awesome, but don't suck your own dick just yet. Your whole profession has failed in their one role that mattered (and no, it was not "make money for investors"). You are about fourty years too late.

 

When negative stereotypes are OK

 This has really been bothering me for a while. You keep reading how stereotypes are bad (even good ones), now D&D has done the right thing (depending on your point of view) and removed negative race ability score modifiers  (whatever they might be -but what is important to be more inclusive and not to hurt our Orc and  goblin player's feelings)…

But every time you read an article about abuse -physical or mental- it is almost guaranteed the photos will show a female victim and a male abuser.

Just do a search:

This article has links to further articles which all show female victims, and if shown, male perpetrators. IKEA? But of course!

The Guardian is  obviously following this trend -how could they not? Psychology Today?  Of course Always… 

Foundations? Obviously

There was one exception I found in this non-representative search. One.

This article does not even try… it flat out uses the male pronoun.

Why is this a problem? Well, apart from the usual "stereotyping hurts, it is bad, you should not do it" any time it comes up with anyone who is not white and male (but any time you complain when it is about white males, you get the "you are such a snowflake" comments), it does help pushing a false narrative of male perpetrators and female victims. (Even when it is about male victims, it is somehow the Patriarchy's fault...) This has real-world consequences on how society relates to male victims (or men accused of being perpetrators) - as it was  many times discussed even on these pages. 

But apparently this does not really ring the alarm bells the same way as stereotyping Orcs or Sand People does. 

Depp and Heard again - #believeallwomen and the hypocrisy of reporting

I know. It is a bit tiring to talk about these two: this mess of a trial did bring out a lot of dirty laundry apart from the whole domestic violence issue which makes you really re-evaluate what you feel about the rich and privileged. In short: not good. They are frankly disgusting, and it is obscene how much money they waste on menial, stupid things. But bear with me; this Depp vs Heard situation is a perfect demonstration of what is wrong with today's so-called progressives.

Variety came out with an article discussing whether Depp's career survives this trial, and there were a couple of issues I could not help but notice.

Let's forget the fact that the author only took look at this mess from one perspective: Amber Heard's. We can't even entertain the notion that perhaps Depp may be innocent, and the woman is lying. In fact, all the people who are quoted are staunchly on the side of Heard.

But the real interesting part comes when Allred is quoted. You know, when people say #believeinallwomen was never about believing whatever women said? Well, this is what Allred has to say about this

“I look forward to the day where it doesn’t take 10 or 20 women for one women to be believed, but I’m still not sure if that’s going to be enough,” Allred says. “We’ll have to see how far we’ve really come in 2020. As much as we think we’re progressive, culturally, there is still a lot of bias against women – especially if she makes any accusation against a man, and especially if that man is a celebrity.”

So I guess no. It does mean that progress is when a woman accuses someone we automatically believe her, no trial necessary.

This is an interesting take in light of all the insistences to the contrary; I suspect this really is what these progressive fourth wave feminists truly believe. (But now desperately deny. Allred did not get the memo, apparently.)

The article is problematic from another angle as well. Nowhere is it discussed that Depp lost tremendous amount of money and a lot of opportunities due to mere accusations, had petitions to cancel his contract as a Dior celebrity, and overall his reputation took a deep dive, while Heard is still a Human Rights Champion for the Stand Up for Human Rights campaign by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ambassador, and also is a L'Oreal spokesperson.

The sheer double standards of this does not occur for the author. It seems like the media is creating a reality independent of facts -a reality, that is more real than facts are, nevertheless. 

Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, the issue of domestic violence, and the motte-and-bailey fallacy at work

It is interesting how even the wokest papers change their tones without acknowledging how they jumped the gun in the past.

It seems like in the Depp-Heard soap opera it was the woman who was abusive, not the man -hardly the stereotype The Guardian likes to discuss, but something unsurprising if you read a little bit about domestic violence in peer reviewed papers.

In the past they were quite happy to condemn Depp as a wife-beater based on hearsay. (There are a lot of articles which take his guilt -or any other men's guilt in domestic violence or rape cases- as a fact; you can search for them for your heart's desire. Start with Mattess Girl if you want to see something really surreal -and people are still defending her.)

#Believeallwomen, right? Oh, wait, now it is a right-wing trap. We never said that. Exept we still do… And yes, I do understand that a couple of people's statements cannot be used to indict a whole group -fourth wave feminists, in this case- except if the group in question does not actually stand up against these individuals. When that does not happen you may start to think that these statements do reflect on the group as a whole. Normally the most vocal fourth wave feminists do not actually disavow outrageous statements made in the name of feminism.

 

It is the perfect example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy: make an outrageous, indefensible claim, and then fall back to an uncontroversial one, claiming you never thought otherwise. (This is when the whole "we did not say that, and we are not responsible for what others have said" routine comes into play.)

The truth remains: somehow lately the Guardian talks about how difficult it is to determine who is telling the truth in these cases (when it is not blaming the victim, of course), while, as mentioned, they were quite ready to declare guilt previously based on hearsay. It is unfortunate for the paper that in this particular case it is really not that hard to determine potential guilt from the evidence presented... it is not merely he-said-she-said: Depp has testimonies, CCTV evidence and doctor's statements at his disposal, and Heard seemed to be quite irrational during her testimonies, going as far as to seemingly fabricating stories of past abuse by Depp.

Now that the evidence is weighted against Heard, now it is suddenly difficult to determine who the guilty party is. Now we do not believe the victim (Depp in this case), possibly because he has a penis and we only believe what women say, since women, as we all know, never lie about these matters. (They do not lie especially when they have something to gain from lying as we know, for example during divorce proceedings… Women are like that. Honest to the fault.) The same thing was going on in the Hungarian News portal, Index.hu. From the absolute certainly of Depp's guilt we arrived to the "well, they both are abusers, it was a toxic relationship" in a couple of weeks. The narrative changes subtly but the overall message does not.

Nice. I guess we can count this as progress.

New York Times: Europe Said It Was Pandemic-Ready. Pride Was Its Downfall

So the New York Times published a deep article about how Europe, as one single entity, has failed in its response to the pandemic.

I mean what the actual fuck. Is this what goes as journalism these days? Simply bunch together a whole range of countries regardless of how successful they were in responding to the pandemic, and make sweeping generalizations based on three?

Europe is apparently Britain, France and Italy. That's it. The rest is inconsequential -after all, they do not support our narrative, so we can safely ignore them. Even Germany only got a cursory mention, even though their response was not good, but it was not the unadulterated shitfest the UK managed to do.

The fact that many European countries (mostly the Eastern members of the EU -figure that) DID respond successfully, is completely forgotten.

Journalism these days are on the level of high school papers. And you wonder why people do not trust these papers any more, turn to 'alternative' sources. At least the Karens railing against wearking masks on Facebook are a bit more entertaining than this elitist crap. Not since 2002 do I trust anything the NYT writes, because they showed their colors publishing the obvious lies about Saddam's WMDs to trump up support for the war, but this article was just insultingly stupid.

The racist fish

So apparently even the statue of a fish with boobs is racist.
This perfectly fits into the present trend of vandalizing statues of people of old for being something they were not - like our friend, poor Cervantes. And even when the ire of the activists turns on a genuine racist -like Churchill- we still are faced with the fact that they absolutely have no clue who this bird really was, and why he was a racist. (Let's just ignore the fact he did not get a statute for being a racist.)

So we have a wave of statute-toppling by activists who are absurdly ignorant on what they are actually doing in the name of fighting colonization and racism. Poor fish-girl is the low point of this activism, I think - you can't get lower than that I think.
Let's ignore the whole complex issue of colonialism, slavery and whatnot - after all, nuances are not something we like. We want black and white, binary answers.

But this leads to a real slippery slope. Us judging everyone by today's standards means we will have to remove statues and the works of every single person until the last decade or so from public spaces and the public domain. Not to mention twenty years from now everything that survived the purge will be destroyed since it is safe to bet that tomorrow's standards will be different from today's.

Orban and his special powers - the lack of journalistic integrity

This is going to be a difficult post for me because I do not wish to defend Orban and his government. I believe they are the very worst of the cleptocratic elite Hungary's political establisment bred over the last thirty years. Their rule is cementing a new, robber baron class in place, making the country even more nepotistic as it was before. A place where I am less and less keen to live in.

Anyhow. During the COVID-19 pandemic they voted some emergency powers for themselves, which were supposed to temporary, but they did not give an automatic expiry date. This sent everyone into panic; the screaming about dictatorships have predictably started. This situation is actually quite similar to the original dictators in the Roman sense -emergency powers granted for a person during times of emergencies, which were returned to the state once the emergency passed - so they might have had a point in this regard, but not in the sense we understand dictators today. (Do not get me wrong: Hungary really is not a well-functioning democracy. Neither is the US, but this is a different conversation.)

And now that the restrictions imposed on the country have been gradually eased, these emergency poweres were willingly surrendered, causing a serious confusion and a need to interpret this from the "Orban Is A Dictator" narrative. By large no mention is made in the usual suspects: Guardian, The Independent, WaPo, and the rest. But some do try to spin it in a new way to keep up their narrative.

Apparently it is a ploy to win by losing, and not actually doing what they said they would.

Now, Orban and his cronies are definitely corrupt assholes with autocratic tendencies. However it is quite clear even to them that grabbing power using the pandemic as an excuse would be a mistake -as it can be seen from their efforts to curtail the spread of the virus. As soon as they voted more powers for themselves, the usual accusations started - clearly it would be a step over the line to make these powers permanent. However, they do not need for such a ham-fisted attempt to grab power. They already have their cake and they can also eat it, too. They are firmly entrenched in power, and they can claim to have a democracy at the same time - the best of both words. Any dictatorial power grab would make them less than desirable company for the people they depend upon: multinationals and Western politicians. No matter how they suck up to Putin they do understand that it is not actually where their future lies. But it seems to be too nuanced for journalists out for some sensational headline I guess.