Matt: “This is my fourth program. I balked at first.”
“My troubles as an under-earner were of my own making.”
“Victims don’t have a choice… Having had a spiritual awakening, I get the power of conscious choice back. I see that I am never disconnected from God, myself and other people. I can feel disconnected.
“Untreated under-earning will lead me to death. It might be a quick death. For example, I was going through a stretch of exertion-exhaustion. I caught a thought recently where I said to myself, ‘I am so tired. I don’t know how to slow down. Maybe I could get into a car accident, not a bad one, just so I could stay in a hospital for a few days and then I could just rest.’ That’s the under-earning thinking.”
“Staying in the cave…is suicide. This program requires that I grow in public, that I expose myself, that I expand, and that I do it in relationship.”
“As a victim, I don’t have choice. The only antidote is entitlement. My mom abused me so somebody owes me a job or my wife owes me this or my dad wasn’t there for me, so my boss owes me. It doesn’t make sense, but the thinking is entrenched.
“When I sell myself short, I find that a lot of people are buying. There is no shortage of people who will support me in my misery. It is important that I stay close to people who are living the light of this program.”
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I drove off tonight to attend a couple of 12-step meetings back to back at the same church. I get there and the whole church is dark.
“Surely, it’s not closed for Martin Luther King Holiday?” I think.
I call the phone number of the secretary of the meeting and she’s not taking calls or messages. Why on earth is she the contact person for the meeting?
Eventually, four of us white people are huddled in a dark part of town and we’ve concluded there’s no meeting and we all think it is absurd that the church would be closed for Martin Luther King Day.
I suggest we make our own meeting outside but the women say it is too cold and so we turn around and head home.
I leave my radio off. I am sure there are important spiritual lessons I should be learning from this frustrating experience.
So I try to tune in to what I’ve learned from years in 12-Step programs. One is the teaching that God doesn’t make mistakes. He would not have me in this situation if there was not something I was to learn from it. After all, God carries around a picture of me in his wallet.
This makes me feel better.
I drive with extra care because of my frustration and annoyance and knowledge of how often I’ve experienced bad things swamping me in waves.
Just last night, I was feeling cocky and happy, and I scraped my car against the parking pillar. Very little damage was done but it was a huge reminder to me to become more present. I’ve done a lot of stupid things while cocky. I’ve said stupid things that could’ve gotten my head knocked off. I’ve offended women. I’ve made myself unwelcome around town from things I’ve proffered while feeling cocky.
I remember having a great meeting in the Valley about 15 years ago with Paul Fishbein at AVN about an exciting job and driving away feeling great, speeding at 45mph in a 25mph zone and getting a speeding ticket.
I’ve also made a great many mistakes while feeling frustrated. Sometimes, I’ve not been able to handle the frustration and I’ve lashed out at those around me. I once quit the best paying job of my life, I was making about $60,000 annually, and I got mad when my boss took down one of my blog posts and I got frustrated that he hadn’t kept a copy of it, and in my anger and frustration, I quit (in 2004) and for the next three years, I earned half as much money (while enjoying total freedom).
I’m casting my mind back to things I often heard in my childhood such as, “You can’t always get your own way.” I have a long history of feeling immense frustration and rage. If it is hysterical, it must be historical. This must be my reaction to growing up in foster care and not developing consistently loving bonds with my parents. From the chaos of my early years, I’ve learned to compensate by seeking as much control as possible, i.e., getting my own way. A lot of people have told me I’m not flexible. I’m very insistent on how things have to be done. I don’t tolerate tardy people. Feelings of rage often well up for me when someone is more than ten minutes late.
So the spiritual lessons I am supposed to get from tonight’s debacle including taking more care with details, I should’ve known the church was closed on holidays. I also need to notice when I am feeling frustration and rage and to understand that God has put me right where He wants me and my job is to learn from situation and to ask God for direction. Be aware that when I feel cocky and happy, when I feel like there are no consequences for my words and actions, I am in the up side of my bipolar cycle and it is a very dangerous place. I should be particularly careful when I’m feeling arrogant.
There are many emotional states that get me into trouble:
* Depression. I isolate, become needy, do weird things to get attention and sympathy, lose perspective, don’t care about others, make poor decisions, my focus narrows to myself and my problems.
* Arrogance. I feel like there are no consequences to the things I say and do.
* Frustration and anger. My focus narrows, and I make poor decisions, and I am not useful to others.
* Heedless and careless. Wow, this character flaw of mine is too painful to blog about. I will just note that I am getting many signals from the universe right now to take more care and to move beyond my natural laziness.
* Giddy. When I’m feeling giddy, I pop off with many comments that are inappropriate.
I am best when I am serene, when I have given up fighting anyone or anything (unless absolutely necessary). I should only fight when necessary, not out of habit or neuroses.
I am not an attractive person when I am rationalizing and justifying my behavior. I’m more approachable when I am simply in a sharing mode. I can’t share and justify. One way of thinking cancels out the other.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine a black person getting in your face – forever.
* America is a great country that we can all have our own tastes and be completely comfortable not knowing jack about other people’s tastes, while dismissing them with an air of superiority.
* Who pays any attention to the Oscars?
Who actually cares at all?
I’ve never met anyone who pays any attention to this in my entire life. Never.
Nobody I’ve ever spoken to has ever mentioned the Oscars ever in my life. Ever.
What am I missing here? I don’t get it.
Aren’t the Oscars especially really queer? Isn’t Hollywood glib and sociopathic, like a charming serial killer?
Wouldn’t you have to have the mental age of a naive 10-year-old to be taken in by the “Oscars”?
* From an interview with a director of Slow West:
“The good thing about calling the film Slow West is that all of the action has to go from right to left. All of the characters are moving physically West on the screen otherwise it feels like they’re going backwards. Once I realised that it was quite handy, and it was hard to get it wrong when I kept all of the characters moving right to left.”
In setting this principle where West is on the left, were you quite confident we would ‘feel that’ as Westward?
Yeah. When you look at a compass, West is on the left. It felt that the audience would feel the characters going right to left were going to the West. I think that if we’d started going the other way the audience would either feel they had turned around and were going backwards or that they were somehow going East.
* Ah, what the director said may explain why the movie feels a bit odd.
“In simplistic terms: Right is more positive, left more negative. Movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so. The future seems to live on the right, the past on the left.”
Movies favor rightward movement in general than leftward movement.
So a film that always goes leftwards breaks with film-making conventions.
I felt something was odd about the film but only subliminally. Now, I know why.
* I’m only about a half hour into “Slow West,” but it’s kind of like a primitive video game in that everything keeps moving from right to left across the screen as the main character treks West.
* Practically none of the acting nominees have been Chicano or Asian American, at least not since the 1980s, but nobody notices that.
* Funny how the all-white supremist academy awarded the last three best director oscars to two Mexicans and a Chinese man. And Alexandro is favorited again for this year.
* People are complaining movies are too white. Great.
Is anyone going to have the guts to complain that movies are too Jewish?
After all, if we want movies to “look like America” having 3% of the population head up 100% of the studios, looks bad.
* Will Smith was not going to get a nomination for the same reason Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg were not going to get nominated. They are movie stars, for better and worse, not actors.
Idris Elba was not going to get a nomination, because the Upper Class White people of the Academy only like movies where they feel superior to OTHER WHITE PEOPLE particularly lower class Whites, in relation to treatment of Black people as sacred objects, credit to Larry Auster. Elba plays a horrific African monster victimizing African children, no White people involved. The movie, “Beasts of No Nation,” makes Africans look very, very bad. Because well, child soldiers. So no, that movie was not going to get nominated.
Straight Outta Compton was not going to get major nominations, because it too made Black people look bad. There were no noble GoodWhites standing up for Blacks against BadWhites. Thus, the key elements of White People Crack: Status Competition, was not triggered.
Really, how hard is this to explain to Black People?
* Hollywood is a country club – “write a good script, get some A list actors…we’ll have lunch and discuss.” I mean, it’s not Harvard as far as admissions (Harvard for money & investments, yes) ..but you have to have a “wow” factor, and, know, really know, that YOU ARE IN ART SCHOOL, and yeah it’s all subjective. Your film is either great (that day) or meh..that’s the reality in the arts, any art.
Hollywood is not fair…hiccup, egalitarian….the idea of the starving artist is not a myth. Oscars are really just a love-fest of the industry, and, in no way, will “the academy” bestow any Brownie points to minority individuals, or at times, even the most breathtaking film of all time – the real deal. I mean, I’m kinda’ amused that we are all sort of swooning over “Rocky” again!
When I think about it, I always thought Ingmar Bergman, and his producer, Jorn Donner, should have won some Oscars way, way back, if Hollywood had taken ethnic groups into account – didn’t happen then; never gonna happen…just write and create amazing stuff. Stop whining…art is not fair, never was, never will be.
* “There generally aren’t any Hispanic or Asian actors to begin with, whereas there seem to be lots of black characters in movies these days”
There are a lot of Blacks in universities these days. Why are they not being awarded Nobel Prizes for Physics?
Why do Asians get more Nobel Prizes than them?
* “Leave the Blacks alone and let them have some harmless fun. You surely don’t want them sitting near you at your local art theater, yelling at the screen.”
I saw a pretentious, art house movie with some black main characters: “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” The main character was a black girl, all of about 5-years-old, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. There weren’t any black people in the audience.
* Hold up a second. Why are folks complaining? I thought that Grand Bargain was that Hollywood would cast blacks into roles like Genius Scientist, Wise Judge, Efficient Police Captain, Heroic Military Officer and in return the actual contest of rewarding people for their talent would remain free from racial bean counting.
Did I miss the memo and is the Grand Bargain no longer upheld?
* Innaritu or however his name is spelled looks a lot like my Hungarian friend Lester. The great Lubezki is a Jewish Mexican. In the U.S., there aren’t that many Jewish cinematographers. My guess is that the Jewish Americans who would make good cameramen wind up being directors. Spielberg, for example, would be a hell of a cinematographer.
For a long time, you could tell a cinematographer in Hollywood was good by how unpronounceable his name was: e.g., Vilmos Zsigmond who died on January 1. He and his pal Laslzo Kovacs got their start filming the Soviets invading their Hungary in 1956 then fled West with their film. They caught on in the late 1960s as Hollywood realized that Europeans had gotten out ahead of America in cinematography.
* Women and minorities think that they deserve a percentage of any numerically limited set. Once they get one of a set, they believe that it belongs to them. For example, one of the Supreme Court seats was given to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In women’s minds, this is now a female seat on the Supreme Court. Woe unto the president who fails to nominate a woman to that seat.
Progress consists of getting one, then another, then all of a limited set. Because reparations must be paid owing to the Original Sin of White Masculinity.
* Not giving best picture to a film in which every other word is the F-word is clearly racist and sexist. A future majority black Academy would not see anything offensive about this because it would reflect their “embodied experience”.
Seriously, the Academy needs to learn how to play the AA game a little better. You don’t have to give a black film Best Picture every year (just like you don’t make a black woman CEO of your Fortune 500 – you make her head of HR where she won’t damage your bottom line (as much)) but you should at least nominate one. Mad Max: Fury Road (not to mention Room and Brooklyn) has zero chance of actually winning Best Picture so it could have been pushed aside for Compton without disturbing the order of the universe.
* I tuned into NPR this morning and there was some black activist going on about intolerably white Oscars. She gave a long list of black actors who, according to her, deserved an Oscar this year. The host was very sympathetic, of course. I really wanted him to ask the activist this question: Who of the current Oscar nominees should be dropped to make room for black?
This is really the key question. I would really like to hear what the woman would say. But of course, this question was not asked, because neither the interviewer, nor the activist, nor anyone else in the NPR building is even capable of thinking in these terms.
* “Granted, comparing Straight Outta Compton to Love & Mercy on aesthetics is like contrasting “F*** tha Police” and “No Vaseline” to “God Only Knows” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”
You overlooked gangsta classics as ‘Lick my ***hole’; as well as ‘doublin’ up’(reference to after viewing a lesbian porn vid, the homie decides to attempt to ‘doublin’ up’ at home with comical results.
I mean, come on, Steve. These classics helped go a long way toward defining the entire gangsta misogynist aspect of rap. It was there at the foundation and can’t be overlooked.
It’s okay, it’s all good. After all, according to the NYTimes reporters covering this controversy, white people simply can’t expect to understand the black experience of everyday life.
A question of a more relevant nature: Let’s be honest. During the late 60s/early70′s with Civil Rights in vogue and all the rage, it appeared that black films or at least black actors were being either nominated or placed in more Alist budgeted films.
The parallel is with Obama. In light of Obama becoming president in 2009, during the last 8 yrs there seems to be a prevalence of black oriented films that have been nominated for major Oscar categories. When Obama is out of office, who’s to say that this spate of black films won’t decline, just as they did when the late 60s/early 70s were over?
You can say that some of these late 2000s/early 2010′s films were probably in the pipeline and perhaps to be slated for production before Obama took office, HOWEVER, with Obama the president since 2009, Hollywood decided to put its best face forward by “look at our best films, and they’re not only black directed but they’re mainly “black” oriented films and they’re winning major Oscar nominations!” Much the way that the Academy invited First Lady Michelle Obama to read aloud the best picture nomination a few yrs back.
But, once Obama leaves office next year, and then given a few years down the road, especially with a Chinese billionaire purchasing a major Hollywood studio (and we all know how much China really cares about African-Americans), who’s to say that the spate of black oriented films will simply dry up during Oscar nomination time? In other words, yes, there will always be the blaxploitation films made a la Ice Cube; Perry what’s his name; etc. but the Oscars will return as before…mostly white.
Also, it was very commendable to the NYT that they didn’t have any white writers to help on the article about Hollywood racism ’cause they’re not nominating more black films in all major categories. That they actually found three somewhat competent writers to do the story is simply amazing. ‘See? We found three black writers who more or less lived up to our standard of quality at the Times. It can be done, and we’ve come a long way since the days of Jayson Blair’ seems to be what they’re saying.
Because if African-Americans wanted to make a stink about alleged racism, why stop at just movies? How about major newspapers proclivities of not hiring very many black writers? How come the NYTimes doesn’t take the lead and hire more black writers for all their stories and not just for race-oriented news?
* Hollywood has given Best Picture noms to black films for the last few years. And the can of worms remains open.
Blacks aren’t going to see it that way. Either all or nothing, and if its nothing then obviously you’re the racist for not doing what you can to help the next generation of African-Americans diversify Hollywood and make it less institutionally racist. For every year that they don’t get a major nomination for one of their products the din will grow louder and louder. However, with Chinese owning a major studio and interested in what works globally which doesn’t usually include African-Americans per se, as well as not having a black in the White House, the noise level will be less front and center in the mainstream and relegated to the Root; World Star Hip Hop; etc. and of course trotted out during Black History Month as a way to guilt trip elite moneyed Hollywood leftists who will bow their heads and simply ignore it.
However, now that they’ve been given a taste of the big time, having a black themed film nominated in a major category for several consecutive years, they now expect it to be always that way.
Perhaps the new Jesse Owens film “RACE” will be nominated at end of ’16. This would help atone for “42″ not being nominated.
I mean, I’m surprised that Black Lives Matter, as well as African-American leaders aren’t pushing the Democrats to nominate a black candidate for president every single election cycle, otherwise they might just accuse the party of institutional racism and decide to stay home in large numbers.
* The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could just start Best Black Motion Picture, Best Black Actor, and Best Black actress categories. Then blacks would win awards every year. Or hold a whole separate ceremony at the Apollo Theater in Harlem called the Whoopies or the Stymies. The statue would be a gold African fertility figure, there could be riots and drive-by shootings on the red carpet, blacks could win all of the awards, talk smack during the award speeches, and the audience could talk, shout, jeer, and dance throughout the performance.
But giving awards to people of color is currently the Academy’s second-favorite thing in the world. Its favorite thing is giving awards for performances in movies about upper-class 1940s lesbian college professors who bravely battled both unjust banking practices and homophobia—bonus points if they were persecuted by political or religious conservatives, double bonus points if they worked in Hollywood, and triple bonus points if they existed in real life….
For example, it’s not that the Academy was trying to exclude “Creed’s” Michael B. Jordan from the best actor race. It’s just that Eddie Redmayne played a kind-of-real-life transgender European artist, and Oscar voters couldn’t possibly have taken that off the menu include someone who played a character as boring as a pretend boxer.
Steve Jobs’ story needed to be told again because the first time it had Ashton Kutcher in it. Similarly, while in a down year Hollywood would gladly have nominated “Concussion’s” Will Smith for playing real-life forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu, Bryan Cranston played an ever-so-terribly-persecuted-in-real life Hollywood Communist in “Trumbo,” and there’s no way the Academy could have overlooked a performance of that historic significance just to bring more diversity to Oscar night.
Dalton Trumbo’s story, after all, needed to be told, as did Lili Elbe’s (“The Danish Girl”). Steve Jobs’ story needed to be told again because the first time it had Ashton Kutcher in it. And it’s hardly the Academy’s fault blacks were too busy not being allowed to be screenwriters in 1950s Hollywood or that Latinos failed to adequately represent themselves in 1920s Scandinavian LGBTQ circles or that no one of Middle Eastern descent would have been believable as the half-German inventor of the iMac. (Unrelated fun fact: Steve Jobs was also half Syrian! Who knew?)
* You are too hard on these black folks.
They don’t want to win awards given by black folks, they want to win awards given by white folks.
They are not running to embrace and celebrate their blackness in black awards ceremonies, they want white folks to embrace and celebrate them.
They need daddy’s approval. And at the same time they hate that they need daddy’s approval so much. They want white daddy to love them, and at the same time they want to rub daddy’s nose in his mess (“Twelve Years a Slave”)
The only healthy black Hollywood type (and he really isn’t “Hollywood”) is Tyler Perry. He loves his people in all their craziness, laughter and love. His movies celebrate regular everyday black folks. They love him back and come to his movies in droves.
But the others–the Spike Lees, the Jada Pinkett Smiths–they are desperate for white daddy’s approval.
The reality is that the Oscars are a celebration of white culture and white sensibilities by and for white people who created a white movie industry to tell white stories to white people.
And the white nation is no more inspired by (or interested in watching) didactic black stories of white sin (Twelve Years) or black stories of black sin (Straight Outta Compton) than Chinese, Koreans, or Japanese are. Those stories are not white (or Chinese, or Korean, or Japanese) stories.
So you can encourage them to create their own black national movie awards, but it will not solve anything. It does not address their deep psychic need to be loved by white folks.
* It might be possible to fix this problem if enough Hollywood people come out as African American. Carol Channing was nominated in 1967 for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, and then announced that she was actually African American in her 2002 autobiography. This resulted in her being added retroactively to the list of African American actresses who have been nominated. Channing offered no documented evidence for her claim (no photos, birth certificates of relevant family members destroyed in a fire, etc.)
I’m sure that there are plenty of actors, directors, etc. who would be happy and proud to come forward as African American. We can do this, Hollywood!
* I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent. — Jim Watt, September 1983
* Compton was problematic. Suppose it had been nominated? Dr. Dre is in the news recently, for beating up lots of women. So there’s that. Bullet dodged. Beasts of No Nation? Heck that is a movie that all but shouts that Strom Thurmond was right. No saintly Martin Luther King (and even that will be out when the FBI tapes are released).
Will Smith? Was Will Ferrell nominated for his serious dramatic turn? What about Adam Sandler for Punchdrunk Love? The Academy does not give out Oscar nominations to actors who are big time movie stars, by and large. They prefer Aaaaacccc-torrrrrrrrrrs. Who talk about “the Work” like Jodie Foster and Dustin Hoffman.
I cannot understand why Black people are complaining. If they want awards, make movies where some Noble White Man (or Woman) helps poor, downtrodden Black people against BAD WHITES to the applause of poor, downtrodden Black people. Its that simple.
* Wow, how time flies. I still remember being irked like it was yesterday by how last year’s Oscar black-out was given immediate, high-profile coverage by even serious news outlets like PBS Newshour. And now here we are again, with the outrage even more obstreperous if anything.
Isn’t all this shock and dismay a little disingenuous in January, though? Couldn’t any reasonably intelligent person come to the conclusion by November, if not earlier, that there would be no black-directed or black-themed contenders for Best Picture? It’s like a kid throwing a tantrum at not getting his (Red Ryder) BB-gun on Christmas morning, despite repeated warnings by his parents throughout the year that such a toy was too dangerous.
Since presumably the racism of the studio system is what is preventing all these black CITIZEN KANYE’s from getting made in the first place, can’t we help a brother out and bend the rules so that a set of storyboards (representing a movie aborted by racist White-except-when-they-tell-you-their-people-are-not-really-White studio execs) can be in the running for Best Picture, Director, and Editor?
Realistically I see the solution being nomination of any and every black actor in a halfway decent role (e.g. Tyler Perry in GONE GIRL) for one of the Acting Oscars. Best Director will still remain disgustingly white and male, however- the QB position of the Academy.
* This is another example of the impotence that liberal organizations have when confronting black grievance. Evidently the capitulation of U of Missouri has led to a drop in applications and a declining campus environment.
White liberals are going to have to develop a backbone where blacks are concerned or many of the things they hold dear will crumble.
* Idiocracy needs no sequel. It’s perfect as it is. The movie was great, but “Idiocracy” is more the premise and the core idea of dysgenics than the movie itself.
The core idea of dysgenics isn’t new at all, dozens have written about it, but Idiocracy communicated it in an easily digestable mass consumption way that the mass market wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to.
Three funny Idiocracy Stories:
I asked a Biology PhD researcher that I met if she felt that intelligence is inversely correlated with fertility. She took a minute to parse through my question, and exclaimed, “Oh, like Idiocracy!!”. Even for a bio researcher immersed in genetics, the movie Idiocracy is the best way to commnicate that idea.
I overheard another highly educated woman (math masters, doing industry data science work) say that the movie Idiocracy shocked her and she walked away determined to have more kids (she went on to have three). I imagine she wouldn’t have spent two seconds listening to anyone on this forum, but ideas wrapped in entertainment are much more widely communicated. I hear a common belief that birth rates trends are completely inevitable and unalterable. The proof is that some politicians in Europe have tried some obscure tax credit program and had poor results, so case closed. But a movie like Idiocracy broaches a big issue most regular people just don’t think about and actually changes behavior. Birth rate trends are absolutely controllable.
The movie mocks broken grammar. One of the characters in Idiocracy humorously says, “Why Come” instead of “How Come”. If I google “why come” I get Idiocracy as the second link. The daughter of the woman I was dating watched the movie with us, and later started unironically saying, “Why Come”.
* The best African American actor award… it would have all the cachet of “Most Improved” in high school. The black Di Caprio, Will Smith could finally get his, also Don Cheadle and Samuel L. In a slow year, even Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames might stand a chance.
* Billions quickie review
1- you can watch the premier (free) at the Showtime website though it took me some poking around to find it BUT here it is.
2-Malin Ackerman….very good and precise with a precise hairstyle. Delivers some choice lines. She was born in Sweden.
3-Damien Lewis gives his role a menacing spergy tinge with a choirboys face. Well done!
4- Paul Giamatti the Federal prosecutor- v well done
5- This whole thing is so hi-def it is hyper real. Larger than life. Same as the script. This is hedgie porn.
6- Giamatti’s wife — not gonna spoil this for you. A guilty pleasure.
7- Ripping off Ray Dalio’s operation in Connecticut for Damien Lewis’s hedge fund headquarters. Go look up how much Dalio is worth. “He graduated from Hofstra!” (University) Actually Dalio went to LIU similarly humble.
8-All scenes take place in winter with snow outside the windows. Interesting accent.
9-Observe what the guys wear as far as hoodies and jackets….very slick!
10- A bit like a hedgie version of Mad Men.
* So, whoever the best actor winner is I wonder if he will do a Marlon Brando stunt with the American Indian, Sacheen Littlefeather, accepting not accepting the award on behalf of Brando. Littlefeather said Brando couldn’t accept the award because of the treatment of American Indians by the film industry.
* Who would be the black Meryl Streep?
* Eliminate all categories except Best Documentary. Then give the Oscar to a video from WorldStarHipHop. Do this every year. Problem solved.
* As Steve Harvey is more incompetent than Kanye West he can announce Will Smith as Best Actress in Patty.
* I’ve just invented the Bloscar. It’s a golden Jimmy Walker statue with black enameling over the entire piece. It is awarded for whatever black people did in show business in any given year.
White Man’s Burden.
* I’m tired of seeing the obligatory black person in every movie cast and every commercial.
They even had to have a black main character in the new Star Wars.
You would think 50% of judges were black women if tv’s shows were accurate.
*
Youtube: “This is the Oscar Gold “trailer” scene from American Dad. This appears in the tearjerker episode in season 3. I claim no copyrights for this. I am simply posting this for entertainment purposes.”
Comment: “The comment about Oscar Gold referred to the “American Dad” episode called “Tearjerker,” in which an evil mastermind makes the saddest movie of all time, about a Jewish mentally retarded alcoholic boy during the Holocaust whose puppy dies of cancer. The boy is Oscar Gold.”
* You are right about the USA, Dumbo. It is indeed finished and in the lifetime of some of us who are not yet seventy. How we loath those who did this to a once beautiful people, and how we despise those we warned but who would not listen, in 1964.
But you are quite wrong about France. The French will be the first to react effectively; probably no more than five years from now. None of you people seem to know the French at all: their old elite is still around and is capable of anything once aroused. Just look at the Normans and start dreaming. It won’t be pretty, but it will be effective. Actually I don’t really mean that: it will be beautiful.
Italy will survive too as will Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands, of course all of the East, Denmark, maybe even Sweden.
Germany is the big question mark. Merkel has robbed them of any excuse any longer that they don’t know what this “refugee” madness will do to them. But they are so paralysed by a wholly imaginary “guilt” that only the stupidest and the most far seeing are capable of reacting effectively. If the far seeing succeed in directing the inchoate reactions of the stupid, it will quickly get very interesting.
* I distrust people who talk of a wall that would take years and cost billions to build, while they ignore far cheaper and quicker ways to stop and reverse immigration. A verification system for potential employees is the obvious one, combined with heavy penalties for those who hire illegals. Think of how effective the US government already is at confiscating or freezing the assets of people who are even suspected of drug dealing or other illegal activities. If these powers were applied to people who hire illegals, there’d be millions of them left with no option except self-deportation. Seeing that at least 50 million foreigners legally enter the US every year anyway, the only sure way of making sure they leave again is to prevent them from working there.
* My Korean-American wife (not an FOB – grew up in the U.S.), and all of her Korean and Chinese friends from college, will use American as synonymous with white. Typical usage is when they are referring to an East Asian girlfriend of theirs and gossiping and will say, “[She] married an American guy.” All of her Korean and Chinese-American girlfriends married “American” guys. And her two East Asian-American male friends married white women.
* Hundreds of mini-skirted men marched through Amsterdam on Saturday in solidarity with the victims involved in a series of sex attacks that shook Cologne on New Year’s Eve.
* Mexico is not innocent. First, Mexico has created a social and economic system were wealth is highly concentrated and poor people are not able to adequately partake in the wealth of the world’s 10th or 11th biggest economy. Though America is often described as having great disparities of wealth, you don’t see a mass migration of our poor to other countries.
Second, the Mexican government gives out maps and instructions for how to cross the border and obtain services in the US.
Third, Mexican consulates give out ID cards like candy to facilitate illegals being able to remain.
Fourth, Mexico relies on remittances from citizens in the US which are a significant part of their economy.
So Mexico is not innocent. They facilitate this invasion.
* I want Mexico to be as stable and rich as Canada. As Helmut Kohl once advised, if I were the US President, I’d put more effort into making Argentina, Brazil and Mexico into economic powerhouses than I would in playing in the sandbox of the middle east. I want Latin Americans to have a reason to remain in Latin America. I don’t want Latin America expanding north. I am biased in favor of the English New World. Canada and the USA are special places. I don’t want them to end up like Latin America. Unfortunately it’s probably too late to save the USA.
* It should be becoming obvious enough now that as long as white people create societies that other people want to live in then given modern transport and communications white people won’t survive without walls.
* I’ve met plenty of smart Chinese in silicon valley. But even some of the smartest ones don’t seem to have a problem with things like using stolen software. This might seem petty, but they just don’t seem bothered (“everybody does it”). They are open about it. I wonder if historically much of that intelligence is buried by corruption, double-dealing, and bribery. And they sure seem to have a “big man” attitude to the effect that whatever the big man is doing must be what we all have to really concentrate on. I suppose if the big man would have you killed to inspire the others, over a long enough period, that attitude might become innate. Maybe another problem is too much intelligence goes into trying to please the big man.
* Worst to best immigrants
1) high IQ + don’t care about the public good
2) low IQ + don’t care about the public good
3) low IQ + care about the public good
4) high IQ + care about the public good
* Trump likes to build stuff.
If a border collie were running for President, he’d be in favor of spending lavishly on SDI to intercept flying saucers because catching frisbees is what he does.
* Damn, you’re good, Steve. That is why we come here: to watch you blow away the fog and reveal the solid core of each phenomenon shining dew-sparkled in the sunlight.
* I live half my time in the Dominican Republic and speak Spanish when there and find the total lack of PC refreshing. People will address others, if they don’t know their name, as ‘brownie’, ‘fatty’, ‘skinny’, ‘foreigner’ and so on without a second thought.
Adam Perkins is a Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality at Kings College, which probably means the old Institute of Psychiatry, world centre of psycho-research, where half an hour in the canteen with other researchers is better than most post-graduate courses.
Perkins has put together an interesting thesis: welfare states are shaping up dependency behaviours, generating an increasing number of employment-resistant persons, who contribute very little, soak up resources, and are likely to have more surving work-shy children.
My initial reaction was that although all persons respond to contingencies, I doubted that the relatively novel effects of welfarism (starting seriously in 1945, but pre-figured in 1911, and evident to some extent from 1870) was too recent to have detectable genetic impact.
I decided to take a closer look. The central thesis of the book is that the benefits of a generous welfare state erode work ethics, and that the longer people live under welfarism, the more they depend on those benefits, and the more likely they are to cheat to obtain them. Dependent households have more children: for every 3% increase in UK benefits the number of children born to claimants rises by 1%, mostly due to discontinuing contraception. Perkins lays great stock on the findings of Heckman, Pinto and Savelyev 2013 that childhood disadvantage promotes anti-social behaviour. He argues that welfare dependency increases the number of children likely to be brought up badly, eroding human capital from generation to generation.
Perkins, who spent quite a few years in humdrum jobs, including times in which he relied on welfare payments, drily observes that governing elites are spared the negative consequences of welfarism, and so are reluctant to deal with its shortcomings. He also notes that the current projected cap on benefits (recently postponed) is still at a level way above what the unskilled can earn in full time work, so it is to their credit that so many remain in the labour market, rather than taking the cash and staying at home.
Understandably, given his job title, Perkins concentrates on personality, not intelligence. This is a drawback, because both are relevant, and inclusion of both measures would test and probably strengthen his thesis. He describes intelligence as the horsepower of the engine of the car, and personality the steering system in charge of setting desired destinations. In a nutshell, he wants the welfare system to be amended to take account of personality (I would say also of intelligence, or simply behaviour generally).
Posted inBiology|Comments Off on The Welfare Trait
Next month sees the release of Trumbo, a biopic about Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter who was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Trumbo continued to work under a variety of pseudonyms and won two Academy Awards for his screenplays, neither of which he was able to receive. He wasn’t rehabilitated until 1960, some 13 years later.
I’ve seen Trumbo and it isn’t much good, but Bryan Cranston has been nominated for numerous awards for his portrayal of the tortured martyr, including a Bafta. People who work in the film industry are, of course, almost universally liberal, and recognising Cranston’s performance is a way of signalling their disapproval of McCarthy-ism. It’s safe to say that, among the progressive left, the House of Un-American Activities has no defenders.
Which makes it all the more ironic that McCarthyism is alive and well and being practiced by the liberal intelligentsia. Last week, I wrote about the punishment meted out to Napoleon Chagnon, the evolutionary anthropologist whose work on the indigenous population of the Amazonian rain forest challenged liberal pieties about the goodness of man in his prelapsarian state. Chagnon was essentially blacklisted by the people who control the anthropology industry. This week I want to highlight another victim of liberal McCarthy-ism — Dr Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. Like Chagnon, Perkins is a social scientist whose research findings pose a direct challenge to one of the central planks of left-wing ideology.
Over the past five years, he has accumulated a mass of evidence about the personalities of welfare claimants and concluded that individuals with aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social tendencies — what he calls the ‘employment–resistant personality profile’ — are over-represented among benefit recipients. He also found that their children are likely to share those traits, which helps explain why poverty has a tendency to be passed down from one generation to the next.
Now, none of that will surprise anyone who has spent time among the long-term unemployed or their -progeny, such as the police, social workers and teachers. You might even say it’s bleedin’ obvious. But to the progressive left, Perkins’s research is sacrilege. It runs counter to the anti-capitalist narrative that portrays the ever-expanding underclass as ‘victims’ whose only sin is to be born on the wrong side of the tracks. We’re back to the myth of the noble savage.
Perkins published his findings last November in a book called The Welfare Trait (Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99), but you won’t have heard about it or seen it reviewed in any UK newspaper anywhere because his research has been judged to be off limits by the self-appointed guardians of the academic establishment and their outriders in the media. A senior editor of Nature, one of the leading academic journals, refused to consider it for review because she regards scientific research into the personalities of the long-term unemployed as ‘unethical’, and a sociology professor whom the publishers had asked to peer-review the book refused to do so on the grounds that any book linking benefit dependency to personality must be nonsense because personality is a ‘capitalist construct’.
Colleagues with whom Perkins had collaborated in the past warned him off publication, worried about being associated with such a heretic; and a powerful American professor was so enraged by his conclusions that he lobbied for him to be banned from the conference circuit.
‘The basic liberal narrative is that there’s no connection between the individual qualities of unemployed people and their unemployment,’ Adam Perkins explained when I tracked him down on Twitter. ‘They’re just leaves being blown around by the powerful forces of the global economy.’
Perkins says that the link between personality, employability and welfare dependency has been known about for years by academics — ‘It’s old hat, really’ — but until now it’s only been discussed behind closed doors. ‘It’s fear of the political-correctness brigade that has stopped my colleagues going public — quite sensibly, as it turns out,’ he says. ‘But I felt I owed it to the taxpayers who are funding the welfare state to publish these data.’
Posted inBiology|Comments Off on STATUS ANXIETY Tell the truth about benefit claimants and the left shuts you down
In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city’s neediest children.
“The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School” (Grand Central Publishing) is Boland’s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public school teacher, and it’s riveting.
There’s nothing dry or academic here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system that seems broken beyond repair.
The book is certain to be controversial. There’s something dilettante-ish, if not cynical, about a well-off, middle-aged white man stepping ever so briefly into this maelstrom of poverty, abuse, homelessness and violence and emerging with a book deal.
What Boland has to share, however, makes his motives irrelevant.
Names and identifying details have been changed, but the school Boland calls Union Street is, according to clues and public records, the Henry Street School of International Studies on the Lower East Side. [Editor’s Note: The school is 54 percent Hispanic, 29 percent black, 14 percent Asian, and 2 percent white.]
Boland opens the book with a typical morning in freshman history class.
A teenage girl named Chantay sits on top of her desk, thong peeking out of her pants, leading a ringside gossip session. Work sheets have been distributed and ignored.
“Chantay, sit in your seat and get to work–now!” Boland says.
A calculator goes flying across the room, smashing into the blackboard. Two boys begin physically fighting over a computer. Two girls share an iPod, singing along. Another girl is immersed in a book called “Thug Life 2.”
Chantay is the one who aggravates Boland the most. If he can get control of her, he thinks, he can get control of the class.
“Chantay,” he says, louder, “sit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences.”
The classroom freezes. Then, as Boland writes, “she laughed and cocked her head up at the ceiling. Then she slid her hand down the outside of her jeans to her upper thigh, formed a long cylinder between her thumb and forefinger, and shook it . . . She looked me right in the eye and screamed, ‘SUCK MY F–KIN’ D–K, MISTER.’ ”
It was Boland’s first week.
At the time, Boland’s new school was considered a bold experiment–not a charter but an “autonomous” one, given freedom in both management and curriculum. It was endowed in part by the Gates Foundation, and the principal hired only teachers who had once lived abroad.
Boland had taught English in China. This was his favored school–advertised as the last, best hope for kids who had fallen far behind–and he was thrilled to be hired. He went home to his then-boyfriend (now-husband) and celebrated over takeout pad Thai and an expensive bottle of red wine.
“I was ready to change lives as a teacher,” he writes.
How wrong he was.
There were 30 kids in his ninth-grade class, some as old as 17. One student, Jamal, was living in a homeless shelter with his mother; most of the other students lived in public housing. There was one white kid in the whole school.
{snip}
Two weeks in and Boland was crying in the bathroom. Kids were tossing $110 textbooks out the window. They overturned desks and stormed out of classrooms. There were seventh-grade girls with tattoos and T-shirts that read, “I’m Not Easy But We Can Negotiate.” {snip}
{snip}
Here among the kids who couldn’t name continents or oceans, who scrawled, “Mr. Boland is a f*****t” on chalkboards, who listed porn among their hobbies, were a few who had a shot.
There was Nee-cole, who wore thick glasses and pigtails. She was quiet, smart, much more childlike than her peers, and Boland felt for her. He was also intrigued by a tough girl named Yvette, who showed flashes of insight and intelligence yet did all she could to hide it. “PLEASE DON’T TELL ANYONE I WROTE THIS,” she scrawled on one report.
{snip}
Boland came to actively loathe most of the student body. He resented “their poverty, their ignorance, their arrogance. Everything I was hoping, at first, to change.”
{snip}
A lifelong liberal, Boland began to feel uncomfortable with his thinking. “We can’t just explain away someone’s horrible behavior because they have had a tough upbringing,” he argued back. “It doesn’t do them–or us–any good.”
{snip}
Boland didn’t know what to believe anymore. At the end of the school year, he quit.
Boland ends his book with familiar suggestions for reform: Invest more money, recruit better teachers, retool the unions, end poverty. But there’s no public policy for fixing a broken kid from a broken home, or turning fear into resilience, or saving kids who can’t, or won’t, be saved.
Posted inBlacks, Education|Comments Off on My Year of Terror and Abuse Teaching at a NYC High School
* Baltimore’s homicide numbers were trending up before Freddie Gray (great article from 2013), while the population of the city was decreasing each year.
Indianapolis has has no serious problems with the BLM movement, and yet the blacks there are working overtime to ensure the city becomes more violent each year.
If there were no cops in Baltimore, and white people suddenly disappeared, you’d have probably 2 to 3 times the homicides (as of 12/26/2015, there had been 626 nonfatal shootings in the city, representing a 72 percent increase from 2014).
And I wouldn’t call 2015′s spike in homicides courtesy of Black Lives Matter. I’d call it a combination of Marilyn Mosby’s affirmative action incompetence as the states attorney and the Baltimore Police Department finding refuge in the few coffee shops left in the city.
Meanwhile, all six of the indicted officers will be acquitted in 2016, meaning we could conceivably see President Obama have to deal with more black riots toward the middle of the year.
Someone hit Trump’s music.
* “Experts have not pointed to a single, dominant reason…”
No dominant reasons, but they think they might have a few submissive ones. Seriously, what kind of ridiculous, high-handed writing is this? Topic aside, this article is so stylistically snooty, it makes satire beside the point. If this article could take on a human form, it would be Mrs. Howell from “Gilligan’s Island.”
I guess the moral here is when you’re trying to obscure something obvious, go highbrow and dazzle ‘em with “smart word choices.” Reading this is like watching a sitcom where a character gets caught doing something bad, then tries to get out of it by spouting pseudo-intellectual word salad: “Well, mom, the single, dominant reason I ate all of the pie was because…”
* Experts can’t explain why I have a hurt leg. I woke up yesterday feeling fine and went about my day. It was one of my better days. Today started out like any other day except in the morning someone broke in my house and bashed my leg with a baseball bat. My leg really hurts today. Nobody can figure out why.
* What’s interesting is the degree to which everything seems to all be coming to a head towards the end of Obama’s presidency.
Massive increases in murder rates, set off by the actions of Holder and Obama.
The invasion of Europe, set off by Obama’s failed policy in the Middle East.
The Dow falling by over 10%, and a wealth of dire economic data..
Temper tantrums on college campuses all over the US.
A symphony composer or screenplay writer could not have timed these things more perfectly.
* “Experts have not pointed to a single, dominant reason for this rise in homicides in Baltimore, nor have they definitively established any kind of causal link between the unrest in April after Freddie Gray’s death and the increase in killings……Freddie Gray’s death touched off protests and civil unrest.”
Unrest and protests! Love the dishonest, neutral terms for black violence and maniacal hatred in the NY Times.
Meanwhile Trump and his supporters are described by the Times as nothing but the embodiment of hatefearhatefearevilevilphobicracistetcetc…..sputter and drool!!!!!!!!!!
We, the non experts, actually know EXACTLY what caused the increase in black males murdering each other in Baltimore.
Black thugs looted as many CVS type drug stores as possible and got hold of drugs they then retailed on the street. Other black male thugs wanted in on the action and robbed and killed dealers of their drugs and money.
Then a cycle of revenge and retaliation among friends and associates of the dead and wounded led to more murders.
It’s as simple as that.
Now, pretend not to notice.
* I Googled the term ‘Ferguson effect’. What amazed me was how many articles there were insisting there was absolutely, positively, definitively, totally and completely no such thing as a “Ferguson effect’. There was an almost desperate, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” tone to them. Finally I found one article that admitted that there might, maybe, possibly, BE such a thing as a “Ferguson effect” but that it was somehow wrong to speak of or acknowledge such a thing. Finally I found an explanation for the term. It seems to just be the old “FIDO” policy (F*** it, drive on) that cops would resort to after a period of black “activism”. I.E. turn a blind eye to black criminal activity for fear of being called a “racist”. Just another version of the law of unintended consequences really.
* Fittingly enough, Dee Snyder gave Trump his blessing to use “We’re Not Gonna Take It” at his campaign rallies. Trump should make full use of it. It is a powerful anthem of pissed-off dissatisfaction.
* Trump uses “Rocket Man” and “Phantom of the Opera” at his rallies because Sir Elton and Sir Andrew own apartments in Trump Tower.
* It’s a good thing we have experts to explain these things to us. Where would society be without them?
* Lets keep in mind that this is an all black affair. There’s no jump in white homicide rates or anything like that. Whites and everyone else are the ones trying to make sense of what’s going on, what the causes might be and are expected to pick up the pieces afterward, paying the tax money for police, courts, jails, hospital treatment, physical rehab, various programs in hopes of dissuading black youth from lives of crime and so on. It goes up, it goes down, mostly the reasons given are hardly more than surmise, the good sounding guesses of the moment are later superseded by other guesses pushed by academics. One can’t go to the source and get a coherent answer out of any blacks because they themselves don’t know or care. The only thing one can get out of them is blame someone else-white, that is-or the standard formula of send more money.
It all seems cyclical; Chicago had big blowout years in ’74 and ’92. In the first ten days of this new year we had close to one hundred shootings, starting off the year with a bang. The public firing of the police chief doesn’t seem to have accomplished much in appeasing the black population. Blacks are inherently a violent breed and large numbers are always ‘going off’ for some reason. That’s just the reality. They require greater control and various barriers between them and everyone else have to be erected to prevent spillover. The ‘why’ of what they do isn’t as relevant as the fact they’re doing it. As an old timer put it to me a long time ago, ‘they is what they is, they does what they does’.
Posted inBarack Obama, Blacks, Crime|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Baltimore’s Homicide Record in 2015: a Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma
The stereotype of liberals as emotionally underdeveloped children who feel first and think later now has support from the very entity liberals have raised to divine status: SCIENCE!
Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure, with liberals showing increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, and conservatives showing increased gray matter volume in the amygdala. Here, we explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly-available voter records to 82 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did. Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli. […]
These ideological differences between political partisans have been attributed to logical, psychological, and social constraints and past scholarship has focused primarily on institutional political processes or individual policy preferences, rather than biological differences in evaluative processes. But recent work has revealed physiological correlates of the differential responses to risk and conflict by liberals and conservatives. Consistent with the previously identified attitudinal divergence, conservatives have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli than liberals. Conversely, liberals had stronger physiological responses to situations of cognitive conflict than conservatives.
The insula (shitlib predominant) and the amygdala (shitlord predominant) serve different roles in the brain, affecting human response behavior.
The insula and amygdala often function together in processing situations of risk and uncertainty [30]. The amygdala plays a critical role in orienting of attention to external cues [31] and fear conditioning [32]; however, this structure is also important for other emotional information processing and behavior [33]. Functional neuroimaging studies have shown amygdala activation in reward related processing [34], encoding of emotionally salient information [35], risk-taking [36], processing positively-valenced stimuli [37], and appetitive/aversive olfactory learning [38]. In comparison, neuroimaging studies of insular cortex have observed critical involvement of this neural structure in pain [39], interoceptive [40], emotion-related [41], cognitive [42], and social processing [43]. In particular, the insular cortex is important for representation of internal bodily cues crucial for subjective feeling states and interoceptive awareness[40], [44]. That differences in the processing of risk and uncertainty differentiate liberals and conservatives suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing ideology.
In layman’s terms, liberal brains give preference to their own feelings before any externally-generated, real world hatefacts have a chance to make an impression on them. Shitlibs are literally slaves to their FEELS. They see the world through a gauze of their emotions, like a toddler might make sense of the alien adult world that swirls around him.
Shitlibs analyze the world, and all its threats, as if refracted through a prism of their subjective feelings. Hordes of invading, antagonistic third worlders eroding civilization in White homelands? After passing through the shitlib antiWhite Feels Filter, (they can’t help themselves), this clear as day observation gets mutated into a rationale for the shitlib’s yearning need to believe all people and all races are equal in worth and compatibility with White European societies. So the shitlib sees [unassimilable orc hordes], feels [I am an antiracist GoodWhite], then thinks [White privilege prevents orc hordes from assimilating].
If shitlibs suffer from a genetically imprinted brain structuring that renders them helpless to defend their nations from invading nonWhites, then the only solution, and only escape from this intraWhite quagmire, is expulsion of shitlibs from positions of power in times of crisis. When demographic survival is at stake, shitlibs who are cognitively unable to resist throwing their White nations under the bus must receive the HARD NEXT from shitlords, like one would do to a drunk chubby girl coming onto you during 2AM garbage hour.
COMMENTS:
* So basically Libs think like women.
Posted inBiology, Brain, Politics|Comments Off on Study: Libs Really Do Suffer From A Case Of “My Feels”
Reddit: “I am a news reporter at a conservative radio station. This is part of a document my boss asked me to read.”
The Lund Talk Radio Stylebook Page 4 of 50
To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.
The enemy can be a politician — either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough. It can be the cold cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media…”
Forget any notion, however, that radio talk shows are supposed to be fair, evenhanded discussions featuring a diversity of opinions. The Fairness Doctrine, which required this, was repealed 20 years ago. So talk shows can be, and are, all about the host’s opinions, analyses and general worldview. Programmers learned long ago that benign conversations led by hosts who present all sides of an issue don’t attract large audiences.
To begin with, talk show hosts such as Charlie Sykes – one of the best in the business – are popular and powerful because they appeal to a segment of the population that feels disenfranchised and even victimized by the media. These people believe the media are predominantly staffed by and consistently reflect the views of social liberals. This view is by now so long-held and deep-rooted, it has evolved into part of virtually every conservative’s DNA.
To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.
This enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast.
Sometimes, it can even be their own station’s news director. One year, Charlie targeted me because I had instructed my midday news anchor to report the Wimbledon tennis results, even though the matches wouldn’t be telecast until much later in the day. Charlie gave out my phone number and e-mail address on the air. I was flooded with hate mail, nasty messages, and even one death threat from a federal law enforcement agent whom I knew to be a big Charlie fan.
In the talk radio business, this concept, which must be mastered to be successful, is called “differentiating” yourself from the rest of the media. It is a brilliant marketing tactic that has also helped Fox News Channel thrive. “We report, you decide” and “Fair and Balanced” are more than just savvy slogans. They are code words signaling that only Fox will report the news in a way conservatives see as objective and truthful.
Forget any notion, however, that radio talk shows are supposed to be fair, evenhanded discussions featuring a diversity of opinions. The Fairness Doctrine, which required this, was repealed 20 years ago. So talk shows can be, and are, all about the host’s opinions, analyses and general worldview. Programmers learned long ago that benign conversations led by hosts who present all sides of an issue don’t attract large audiences. That’s why Kathleen Dunn was forced out at WTMJ in the early ’90s and why Jim and Andee were replaced in the mid-’90s by Dr. Laura. Pointed and provocative are what win.
There is no way to win a disagreement with Charlie Sykes. Calls from listeners who disagree with him don’t get on the air if the show’s producer, who generally does the screening, fears they might make Charlie look bad…
One entire group that rarely gets on the air are the elderly callers – unless they have something extraordinary to say. Sadly, that doesn’t happen often. The theory is that old-sounding callers help produce old-skewing audiences. The target demo is 25 to 54, not 65 and older…
The stereotyped liberal view of the talk radio audience is that it’s a lot of angry, uneducated white men. In fact, the audience is far more diverse. Many are businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, academics, clergy, or soccer moms and dads. Talk show fans are not stupid. They will detect an obvious phony. The best hosts sincerely believe everything they say. Their passion is real. Their arguments have been carefully crafted in a manner they know will be meaningful to the audience, and that validates the views these folks were already thinking.
Yet while talk show audiences aren’t being led like lemmings to a certain conclusion, they can be carefully prodded into agreement with the Republican views of the day.
Conservative talk show hosts would receive daily talking points e-mails from the Bush White House, the Republican National Committee and, during election years, GOP campaign operations. They’re not called talking points, but that’s what they are. I know, because I received them, too. During my time at WTMJ, Charlie would generally mine the e-mails, then couch the daily message in his own words. Midday talker Jeff Wagner would be more likely to rely on them verbatim. But neither used them in their entirety, or every single day.
Charlie and Jeff would also check what other conservative talk show hosts around the country were saying. Rush Limbaugh’s Web site was checked at least once daily. Atlanta-based nationally syndicated talker Neal Boortz was another popular choice. Select conservative blogs were also perused.
A smart talk show host will, from time to time, disagree publicly with a Republican president, the Republican Party, or some conservative doctrine. (President Bush’s disastrous choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was one such example.) But these disagreements are strategically chosen to prove the host is an independent thinker, without appreciably harming the president or party. This is not to suggest that hosts don’t genuinely disagree with the conservative line at times. They do, more often than you might think. But they usually keep it to themselves.
One of the things that makes a talk show host good – especially hosts of the caliber of Sykes – is that his or her arguments seem so solid. You fundamentally disagree with the host, yet can’t refute the argument because it sounds so airtight. The host has built a strong case with lots of supporting facts.
Generally speaking, though, those facts have been selectively chosen because they support the host’s preconceived opinion, or can be interpreted to seem as if they do. In their frustration, some talk show critics accuse hosts of fabricating facts. Wrong. Hosts do gather evidence, but in a way that modifies the old Joe Friday maxim: “Just the facts that I can use to make my case, ma’am.”
Hint: The more talk show hosts squawk about something – the louder their voice, the greater their emotion, the more effusive their arguments – the more they’re worried about the issue. For example, talk show hosts eagerly participated in the 2004 Swift Boating of John Kerry because they really feared he was going to win. This is a common talk show tactic: If you lack compelling arguments in favor of your candidate or point of view, attack the other side. These attacks often rely on two key rhetorical devices, which I call You Know What Would Happen If and The Preemptive Strike.
Using the first strategy, a host will describe something a liberal has said or done that conservatives disagree with, but for which the liberal has not been widely criticized, and then say, “You know what would happen if a conservative had said (or done) that? He (or she) would have been filleted by the ‘liberal media.’ ” This is particularly effective because it’s a two-fer, simultaneously reinforcing the notion that conservatives are victims and that “liberals” are the enemy.
The second strategy, The Preemptive Strike, is used when a host knows that news reflecting poorly on conservative dogma is about to break or become more widespread. When news of the alleged massacre at Haditha first trickled out in the summer of 2006, not even Iraq War chest-thumper Charlie Sykes would defend the U.S. Marines accused of killing innocent civilians in the Iraqi village. So he spent lots of air time criticizing how the “mainstream media” was sure to sensationalize the story in the coming weeks. Charlie would kill the messengers before any message had even been delivered.
Good talk show hosts can get their listeners so lathered up that they truly can change public policy. They can inspire like-minded folks to flood the phone lines and e-mail inboxes of aldermen, county supervisors, legislators and federal lawmakers. They can inspire their followers to vote for candidates the hosts prefer. How? By pounding away on an issue or candidate, hour after hour, day after day. Hosts will extol the virtues of the favored candidate or, more likely, exploit whatever Achilles heel the other candidate might have. Influencing elections is more likely to occur at the local rather than national level, but that still gives talk radio power.
By the way, here’s a way to prognosticate elections just by listening to talk shows: Except in presidential elections, when they will always carry water for the Republican nominee, conservative hosts won’t hurt their credibility by backing candidates they think can’t win. So if they’re uncharacteristically tepid, or even silent, about a particular race, that means the Democrat has a good chance of winning. Nor will hosts spend their credibility on an issue where they know they disagree with listeners. Charlie, for example, told me just before I left TMJ that Wisconsin’s 2006 anti-gay marriage amendment was misguided. But he knew his followers would likely vote for it in droves. So he declined to speak out directly against it.
This brings us to perhaps the most ironic thing about most talk show hosts. Though they may savage politicians and others they oppose, they fear criticism or critiques of any kind. They can dish it out, but they can’t take it.
One day during a very bad snowstorm, I walked into the studio during a commercial break and suggested to Charlie that he start talking about it rather than whatever conservative topic he’d been discussing. Charlie assumed, as he usually did in such situations, that I was being critical of his topic. In reaction, he unplugged his head phones, stood up and told me that I might as well take over the show because he wasn’t going to change his topic. I was able to quickly strike a bargain before the end of the break. He agreed to take a few calls about the storm, but if it didn’t a strike a nerve with callers, he could return to his original topic.
The snowstorm was the topic of the rest of his show that day. And afterward, Charlie came to my office and admitted I’d been right. But we would go through scenarios such as this many times through the years.
Another tense moment arose when the Harley-Davidson 100th anniversary was captivating the community – and our on-air coverage – in 2003, but Charlie wanted to talk about school choice for seemingly the 100,000th time. He literally threw a fit, off the air and on, belittling other hosts, the news department and station management for devoting resources to Harley’s 100th coverage. “The Green House” newsman Phil Cianciola countered that afternoon with a joke about Charlie riding a Harley wearing loafers. Charlie complained to management about Phil and wouldn’t speak civilly about him in my presence again.
Hosts are most dangerous when someone they’ve targeted for criticism tries to return the fire. It is foolish to enter into a dispute with someone who has a 50,000-watt radio transmitter at his or her disposal and feels cornered. Oh, and calling a host names – “right-winger,” “fascist,” “radio squawker,” etc. – merely plays into his or her hands. This allows a host like Sykes to portray himself as a victim of the “left-wing spin machine,” and will leave his listeners, who also feel victimized, dying to support him. In essence, the host will mount a Hillary Rodham Clinton “vast right-wing conspiracy” attack in reverse.
A conservative emulating Hillary? Yep. A great talk show host is like a great college debater, capable of arguing either side of any issue in a logical, thorough and convincing manner. This skill ensures their continuing success regardless of which political party is in power. For example:
• In the talk show world, the line-item veto was the most effective way to control government spending when Ronald Reagan was president; it was a violation of the separation of powers after President Clinton took office.
• Perjury was a heinous crime when Clinton was accused of lying under oath about his extramarital activities. But when Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide, was charged with lying under oath, it was the prosecutor who had committed an egregious act by charging Libby with perjury.
• “Activist judges” are the scourge of the earth when they rule it is unconstitutional to deny same-sex couples the rights heterosexuals receive. But judicial activism is needed to stop the husband of a woman in a persistent vegetative state – say Terri Schiavo – from removing her feeding tube to end her suffering.
To amuse myself while listening to a talk show, I would ask myself what the host would say if the situation were reversed. What if alleged D.C. Madam client Sen. David Vitter had been a Democrat? Would the reaction of talk show hosts have been so quiet you could hear crickets chirping? Hardly.
Or what if former Rep. Mark Foley had been a Democrat? Would his pedophile-like tendencies have been excused as a “prank” or mere “overfriendly e-mails?” Not on the life of your teenage son.
Suppose Al Gore was president and ordered an invasion of Iraq without an exit strategy. Suppose this had led to the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. troops and actually made that part of the world less stable. Would talk show hosts have dismissed criticism of that war as unpatriotic? No chance.
Or imagine that John Kerry had been president during Hurricane Katrina and that his administration’s rescue and rebuilding effort had been horribly botched. Would talk show hosts have branded him a great president? Of course not.
It was Katrina, finally, that made me truly see the light. Until then, 10 years into my time at TMJ, while I might have disagreed with some stands the hosts took, I did think there were grounds for their constant criticism of the media. I had convinced myself that the national media had an intrinsic bias that was, at the very least, geographical if not ideological, to which talk radio could provide an alternative.
Then along came the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Journalists risked their lives to save others as the storm hit the Gulf Coast. Afterward, journalists endured the stench and the filth to chronicle the events for a stunned world. Then they documented the monumental government incompetence for an outraged nation. These journalists became voices for the voiceless victims, pressing government officials to get help to those who needed it.
Yet, while New Orleans residents were still screaming for help from the rooftops of their flooded homes, journalists were targeted by talk show hosts, Charlie and Wagner among them. Not the government, but journalists. Stories detailing the federal government’s obvious slowness and inefficiency were part of an “angry left” conspiracy, they said. Talk show hosts who used e-mailed talking points from the conservative spin machine proclaimed the Katrina stories were part of a liberal “media template.” The irony would have been laughable if the story wasn’t so serious.
…I had seen and helped foster the transformation of AM radio and the rise of conservative hosts. They have a power that is unlikely to decline.
Their rise was also helped by liberals whose ideology, after all, emphasizes tolerance. Their friendly toleration of talk radio merely gave the hosts more credibility. Yet an attitude of intolerance was probably worse: It made the liberals look hypocritical, giving ammunition to talk show hosts who used it with great skill.
But the key reason talk radio succeeds is because its hosts can exploit the fears and perceived victimization of a large swath of conservative-leaning listeners. And they feel victimized because many liberals and moderates have ignored or trivialized their concerns and have stereotyped these Americans as uncaring curmudgeons.
Because of that, there will always be listeners who believe that Charlie Sykes, Jeff Wagner and their compatriots are the only members of the media who truly care about them.
