Steve Sailer: Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Malice in Blunderland.

Comments:

* Someone should do a nice excel spreadsheet for our current and recent past elites and influencers. I’d like to quickly see how many are Jewish, homosexual, liberal, etc. What percent of cultural damage is done by the sexually confused or perverted?

* The journalist cries out as he hits you.

* The poofter cries out in pain as he beats you?

* What he means by “the quality of their work had slipped” is that they were marginally less willing to libel innocent people in service of The Narrative because they thought there might actually be consequences.

* The RS article on UVA was all about exposing white male privilege of spoiled jocks.

But it seems the real sense of glib nasty entitlement prevails among Wenner and crowd.

This is all the more ironic since RS promotes the kind of trash culture that simplifies everything down to excess, thuggery, hedonism, and sex.

* Second Rule of SJWs: SJWs always double down.

Wenner’s claim that, “Believe me, I’ve suffered as much as you have,” is revealing. Nicole Eramo suffered because she was falsely accused and her defamed at a national level. Wenner suffered because in irresponsibly launching the false accusation, he has damaged his professional reputation. Somehow I fail to see the equivalence.

* Wenner controls who does and does not get into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. He has made the point of keeping many popular rock acts out of the Rock”nRoll Hall of Fame. Some got in by fans basically demanding it, as with Kiss, Rush and Neil Diamond. For some acts, that ban still stands, including Deep Purple, Yes and Bon Jovi. And inductees like Steve Miller and Diamond have complained about how crappy the HoF treats them. And all the while the HoF has been inducting acts that aren’t really rock at all like Diana Ross, Donna Summer and Run DMC. Now those are all fine musical acts, but they aren’t rock. Similar to The Narrative the HoF has tried to sell the idea rock’n’roll has been some kind of diverse multi culti melting pot. Anyone who has been to almost any rock show since the 1970s can tell you otherwise. Now perhaps some major rock figures like Clapton and Jagger have babbled on and on about The Blues (witness Jagger and Martin Scorcese making a mess of that with “Vinyl”). But really simple fact is while Elvis and then the Beatles rock may have jumped off the blues, rock is different and apart form the blues. And it’s better. And for better or worse spare Jimi Hendrix it’s mostly a white art form. Simply white people pay the freight in rock’n’roll, but that doesn’t fit The Narrative.

* In a trial, witnesses appear before a judge and jury, who assess their credibility not from an electronic image, but from their gait in entering and leaving the witness box, their smell, and everything else that an in-person meeting can convey. A trial-by-video is a way to avoid requiring busy witnesses to show up in person, disrupting their active high-income lifestyle. What court case established the legal validity of trial-by-TV? Curiously, the words “judge” and “jury” do not appear in this article.

* “I’m very, very sorry,” he said, then added quickly, “Believe me, I’ve suffered as much as you have.”

This is a tell of a sociopath: warped belief that a major catastrophe happening to someone else is properly equated with their own personal embarrassment and discomfort.

Wenner isn’t being glib or insulting on purpose; he truly does think that having his magazine’s shoddy reporting exposed and ridiculed is the exact same as someone being falsely accused of rape and being threatened and attacked and blackballed by large groups of people. He’s that selfish and messed up. It’s no wonder Wenner felt ok promoting degeneracy all those decades, or felt justified in posting a picture of a terrorist posed as a rock star on his cover. His values are all screwed up.

The Anonymous Conservative once showed how Mike Wallace was a sociopath. Wallace called the worst moment of his life as when he was sued for libel, and had to sit in court listening to the case against him. Keep in mind that this libel case occurred after Wallace had personally discovered the body of his dead son, who had fallen off a cliff.

Yet Mike Wallace considered the libel case against him much worse than his child’s accidental death and his discover of it. That’s how sociopathic he was: his own discomfort was far worse than the death of his young son.

* Jackie is a very silly, very troubled girl of the kind with a pathological need to always be At the Center of Attention. Normal people simply ignore them, which is punishment enough for that type.

I save my opprobrium for her enablers, who should have known better. The mentally ill cannot be blamed for becoming more deeply delusional when they see their delusions praised and validated by authority figures.

The Jackies of the world are harmless in the absence of enablers. Silly girly-girls who tell each other about their future careers as a TV actress and the ups and downs of their long-distance relationship with Liam Hemsworth, are pretty low on scale of stuff that ought to concern anyone. They grow up and buy lots of cats and watch soap operas.

It’s the interaction with and amplification by the far more dangerous and sophisticated delusions of the Megaphone that’s the problem.

* On the same subject, Donald Trump’s accusers are beauty queens, porn actresses, and other such members of opportunistic trades.

Bill’s (and Hill’s) are rank-and-file Democrats once working or volunteering for him.

So which of these two classes of women do Democrats expect us to believe are more credible? Sure says a lot!

* Rolling Stone looks stupid. However, the complexity of multiple law suits can result in weird things happening. I will just toss in some speculative thoughts.

1. Whatever they admit in the first case can and will be used against them in the remaining two (or maybe more).

2. They have insurance. Probably with a big deductible or retention. Probably covers legal defense costs. Probably excludes intentional acts.

3. They might not have been able to settle these. The obvious thing would be to settle em and move on. But the defendants are neither normal people nor business people. The plaintiffs … exp the Frats … probably have plenty of pro bono firepower.

4. The $10 million? You don’t sue for $10 million to win $10 million. The claimed damages are always a first step in negotiations. If she had sued for $1 million, Rolling Stone could have simply defaulted. Even if she wins $10 million, it would be appealed and then settled for less, simply to get the money before multiple years of appeals. If she gets $2 million in net cash, that would be a good settlement for her.

5. The theoretical cost of buying advertising to counteract the enormous amount of negative publicity is ridiculous.

6. Part of the Rolling Stone defense is that the article was true with respect to rape culture at UVA. Truth is an absolute defense in liable. They have the DOJ on their side in this. It’s a mess at this point, because Eramo is in a bizarre position of being in charge of fighting the non existent rape culture.

7. Other than scholarship athletes, the types of males that get into UVA tend to be nerdy. Jackie’s friends, for example. And the athletes don’t have to work up a sweat, much less violence to find sexually receptive women. As far as I can see, rape culture is pretty much drunken sex gone bad. Real rape … the kind that used to be a capital crime … involved strangers using unequivocal violence. It’s a police matter.

My take on it is that RS’s defense strategy has some legal merit. On the other hand, Weiner should have been ‘prepared’ better by his lawyers. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy that is likely to follow directions — which is one reason he looks like such an ass.

In my opinion, Rolling Stone is an anachronism, and basically useless since no one pays for music anymore. I paid some attention to their work on the financial crisis, and it was weak. They tried to stake out some ground on the leftish side, but only succeeded in terms of using more inflammatory rhetoric — but offered nothing. The best stuff was in blogs, and everything that was interesting was details. Their writers were innumerate for starters. Zero understand of elementary finance or accounting. I suppose they weren’t alone — but it was a huge story and there was plenty of material that could have been mined. The point being that all the main stream media was weak. But Rolling Stone was at ground zero and it was the biggest and best story of the last decade. They were irrelevant long before this, and they pissed away their last, big opportunity.

* It’s not just that Jackie Coakley made up her story, but that Sabrina Rubin Erdely made up virtually the entire article–not just the parts about Jackie. She relied heavily on a complete fabrication of obscene lyrics to an old campus ‘drinking song’ called “Rugby Road” as a prime illustration of the “poisonous atmosphere” against women at Virginia, using pullquotes from the fake lyrics to punctuate sections and episodes. Apparently she found them on an internet site devoted to scatological humor, which ran contests to find out who could come up with the most offensive lyrics to existing songs. These fake quotes made up a recurring theme in Rubin’s screed.

The fictional rapists? Sean Woods, who edited the Rolling Stone piece, told the Washington Post, “We did not talk to them. We could not reach them.” However, he says they “verified their existence” by talking to Jackie’s friends. “I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real. We knew who they were.” Never mind that ‘these guys’ never even existed.

Slate’s Allison Benedikt and Hanna Rosin explored why Erdely didn’t include a response from Jackie’s alleged attackers. Woods told them he’s “done talking about the story” and added: “Through our extensive reporting and fact-checking, we found Jackie to be entirely credible and courageous and we are proud to have given her disturbing story the attention it deserves.”

What may not be clear is that these SJWs really don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. “Facts” are mutable and fluid, but the Narrative remains constant and irrefutable. Facts, if they can be said to exist at all, only serve to confirm the Narrative else they are worthless and pernicious.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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