OPEN THREAD: Be here now.
December 18, 2024
JUSTINE BATEMAN SAYS THE LAST EIGHT YEARS OF CANCEL CULTURE HAVE BEEN “UNBEARABLE:”
“I don’t remember a time in my career where there was an absence of criticism of me,” Bateman said. “So I’ve always been, there’s always been somebody, at least one person, and I say that sarcastically, like more than one person, who’s got a problem with me or something about my presence pushes their buttons or they don’t like that I haven’t done anything to my face. I mean, so any quote blowback I would be getting from anything I’m saying now is in the same bin. In other words, it’s no different now than it’s ever been. So I don’t care. And all I’m saying now is I’m glad that that mob mentality momentum is over because the last eight years, and most acutely last four years, were f*cking unbearable. Unbearable. I never wanna go through anything like that again in my life. I truly don’t. It was the most un-American situation I’ve ever been in. And I’m 58, I think, I’m 58, you know?”
“To say that people can’t say, can’t ask questions, can’t say what they think, can’t ask that there be some research on this or that. It was absolutely awful. It was just like revenge of the hall monitors. It was the f*cking Debbie Downers, the Party Poopers.”
MEGYN KELLY, HOST: Yeah, totally agree.
JUSTINE BATEMAN: To say that people can’t say, can’t ask questions, can’t say what they think, can’t ask that there be some research on this or that. It was absolutely awful. It was just like revenge of the hall monitors. It was the f*cking Debbie Downers, the Party Poopers. And one of the things, you know, the social media video critiques that I’m doing. I mean, I’m not doing that many anymore ’cause it’s, you don’t have as many, you know, people getting all crazy about it. But I will do it for subscribers for a Christmas present, for if they want a Christmas present for someone, they could like send me their mom’s or their sisters or whatever’s, <laugh>, you know, I mean, it’s a good Christmas present. Right. And I’ll do a critique for them.
Bateman’s critiques of leftist meltdowns worked both because of the unexpected source, and the contrast between conservatives’ views after losing a presidential election, which boil down to “Well, that sucked, but we’ll get ’em next time,” compared with the left’s performative apocalyptic meltdowns whenever they lose. (At least since 2000, which the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger once compared to 9/11):
For activist and professional Democrats, the most ignominious day in their collective political lives occurred a year earlier—the Florida presidential recount. The 2000 election ended only when the Supreme Court resolved it in favor of George Bush. Republican and independent voters moved on, but many Democrats never did; they were now being governed by an illegitimate president. The chances that any Bush policies would retain their support were minimal, with or without 9/11.
Bush himself would be declared first Hitler, and then an unperson by the left until late September of this year, when, with an increasingly fevered tone, Kamala supporters such as Liz Cheney began to beg him to endorse her.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Axiom Space revises space station assembly plans. “Axiom Space is revising the assembly sequence for its commercial space station, a move it says will allow it to get to a free-flying station sooner.”
MARK FELTON: Building Band of Brothers’ ‘Fake’ German Tanks (Video).
INSIDE DISNEY’S CYNICAL, SOUL-SUCKING REMAKE MACHINE:
This week’s Mufasa was directed by Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning maestro of Moonlight, who has been tied up in its production for the last four years. There’s a Hercules coming from Guy Ritchie – Aladdin was also one of his – as well as a photorealistic Bambi, to which at one point Women Talking’s Sarah Polley was attached. (She stepped down in March; the gig’s still up for grabs.) The Greatest Showman’s Michael Gracey is on Tangled. Hip-hop multi-hyphenate Questlove is tackling The Aristocats. Robin Hood, Moana, Lilo & Stitch: the IP cupboard raid continues apace.
But that could all change – or at least pause sheepishly for a bit – in the light of one impending release. Disney’s Snow White, coming to cinemas in March, will offer a contemporary spin on the studio’s 1937 legacy-making masterpiece. But exactly how contemporary appears to have been the cause of much backstage panic.
Since it was initially filmed in early 2022, three rounds of reshoots have ensued. These were reportedly to revise the dwarf characters completely – the original human actors, of diverse races and statures, have now been replaced by unsettling CG avatars – as well as make the new version of Snow White more likeable, both by toning down her girlboss braggadocio and expanding the more sympathetic childhood flashback scenes. The budget is said to have ballooned to approximately $250 million.
Rachel Zegler, the star of West Side Story, has also proven a controversial choice as lead, partly for her Colombian heritage (a nonwhite Snow White feels deliberately agitational in a way other racially diverse casting picks have not), and partly for her unfortunate tendency to poke fun at the original film during interviews.
On its release, the trick the film has to pull off is the same one as always: recapturing the vibes of the original film while smoothing over its less PC features. (Hence the lack of underage smoking and boozing in Pinocchio and the crow no-show in Dumbo.) But the unique problem presented by Snow White is the solutions are just as problematic as the problems. Is casting no shorter actors more or less progressive than casting seven, albeit in stereotypical roles? Perhaps this is why Disney took so long to revisit Snow White in the first place: it’s certainly why the thing has taken so long to come out.
The question we’re left with isn’t why does Disney keeps remaking their films – it’s because they still pay – but what will happen once they’ve remade them all. There are arguably only seven left in the canon that would make sense as live-action/CG hybrids: The Sword in the Stone, Oliver & Company, Pocahontas, Tarzan, The Princess and the Frog, Frozen and Encanto. (With the
best will in the world, they’re not doing Chicken Little.)
And the likeliest answer can also be found in 1944. They’ll wait a few years, then do it again.
Hopefully future remakes won’t have as many down votes as Snow White currently has: Disney’s Woke ‘Snow White’ Trailer Nears 1.4 Million Downvotes.
WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF VIOLENCE? Shock poll: 41 percent of young voters find killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO acceptable.
A poll found 41 percent of adults under 30 consider the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson acceptable, more than the 40 percent in that demographic who consider it unacceptable.
Anger over health insurance companies has been in the spotlight after Thompson was fatally shot Dec. 4 in New York City.
Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old, was arrested last week in Pennsylvania and faces charges in Thompson’s killing.
The survey from Emerson College Polling found 68 percent of all respondents found the actions of the person who shot and killed Thompson unacceptable.
But a startling 24 percent of those aged 18-29 found it “somewhat acceptable,” and 17 percent of that group found it completely acceptable.
Since Thompson was shot, first in the back and then again as he fell to the ground, a number of social media posts from people saying they do not have sympathy for his death have gained popularity.
Spencer Kimball, the executive director of Emerson College Polling, said 22 percent of Democrats said they found the killing acceptable, compared to 16 percent of independents and 12 percent of Republicans. He said the overall findings underscored “shifting societal attitudes among the youngest electorate and within party lines.”
And then there’s the violent rhetoric emanating out of lefty-dominated BlueSky: Jesse Singal: Bluesky Has a Death Threat Problem.
On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.
There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.
But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.
The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and The Economist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”
But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.
Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”
“Honestly?” responded one user. “[G]un.” Another user then replied, lamenting the absence of technology that would allow them to shoot me via the internet:
Anyway, I joined nonetheless. I figured these messages were coming from a small group of disturbed people. There’s no lack of disturbed people on X—albeit ones who usually have very different politics—and I really did want an alternative to X.
When I arrived, I was bombarded with messages from people telling me to kill myself, or expressing their opinion that I should be killed. When a Change.org petition signed by 25,000 people failed to get me booted off the platform—likely due to my having never come close to violating any rule—the anger only spread further.
The 21st century – and the party of tolerance for diversity – is not turning out as I had hoped.
FROM A MAD GENIUS: Relearning to Write — with Tomatoes – Part one.
WOULD YOU WANT TO KNOW? Simple Blood Test To Detect Dementia Before Symptoms Appear.
READER FAVORITE: Alpha Grillers Instant Read Meat Thermometer for Cooking Grill and BBQ Griddle.#CommissionEarned
THIS DOESN’T SURPRISE ME: In new study, team sports improve executive function in kids.
ED MORRISSEY: How Very Meta: Journalists Leaking to Journalists in ABC News Meltdown.
Want to know why Americans trust the media less than Congress and used-car salespeople? Greta Van Susteren highlighted one key manner of manipulation reporters and news orgs employ, even when reporting on the news industry itself.
Late yesterday, the New York Post reported that “Furious George” Stephanopoulos felt humiliated and betrayed by ABC News for shelling out $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s defamation claim. As John wrote last night, Stephanopoulos has made himself scarce on social media for the last few weeks as this percolated between the lawyers. In retrospect, ABC’s decision to have David Muir moderate the debate rather than Stephanopoulos might have been a hint that they had lost confidence in Stephanopoulos’ judgment — although Muir turned out to be a disaster anyway.
Now, this kind of story is why we use the “Too Good to Check” label. Of course we want people who falsify the news to feel “humiliated” as a result. But if Stephanopoulos has gone silent and ABC’s only offering press releases, how do we know that Stephanopouls feels humiliated and betrayed? Because several people inside ABC News want us to know it — although they don’t want to put their names to it.
* * * * * * * *
This is exactly how mainstream media orgs — and yes, even the NY Post falls into that category, as much as we enjoy their work otherwise — use Anonymice to manipulate readers and promote bogus narratives. Media orgs insist that anonymous sourcing is critical to their ability to report on malfeasance by people in power, and that may well be the case, but … how exactly does that apply to this story? Or for that matter, practically any story published these days on the basis of Anonymice?
Back in 2003 Virginia Postrel explored “Press Pathologies:”
Each national press corps seems to have its own pathology. For the American press, it’s the giant campaign swing, as applicable in military campaigns as in electoral contests. First the front-runner can’t lose. Then he’s a total disaster. Ditto the U.S. military in Iraq. The audience, reporters seem to believe, will reward drama.
The British press corps serves its market, in turn, by passing on every rumor someone tells a reporter in a bar. The result are lots of juicy stories, some of them true. As a former U.S. news editor told her editors after 9/11, when asked why her paper wasn’t getting the great stories in the British press, “They’re great stories. But they aren’t true.”
The fever swamp dreams the DNC-MSM conjured up in the wake of Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 in an effort to sink his presidency have rendered so much of their output as radioactive. Though it is fun in the wake of his second victory to see them devouring themselves.
BATTLE OF THE BULGE: 80th Anniversary.
SO AT THE RANGE THE OTHER DAY, I SHOT THIS Smith & Wesson 9mm folding carbine. I’ve never owned a pistol-caliber carbine, unless you count my grandfather’s WWII M1 Carbine, made by IBM. But this one has gotten a lot of buzz, so I put a box of ammo through it.
Thoughts: Easy to handle and shoot. Pretty accurate at the short ranges I was shooting at the indoor range (I shot at 10 and 25 meters). Stock has two holders for spare magazines. It comes with one 17 round and two 23 round magazines, so fully loaded you’ve got 63 rounds to hand. Removing a mag from the holder in the stock was a bit awkward at first — the release is like a rocker switch, and you press down on the side that’s above the magazine you’re not trying to remove. Easy once you know, but not intuitive. Each round put a puff of smoke in my face so that I smelled noticeably like cordite in my car afterward. The stock is one-size-fits-all (it looks like it should telescope, but it doesn’t.), and it was a bit short for me, something I didn’t notice at first, but was definitely noticing by the end.
As a 9mm carbine, it uses pistol-caliber ammo, which is cheaper. But the big appeal, of course, is that it folds. With the stock folded it’s short enough to keep in a backpack, and it’s safe because it can’t fire in that position. (As the linked review says: “The design offers a couple of advantages: It’s perfectly safe when folded because the action cannot go into battery, and the bore is easily accessed for cleaning.”) I guess the appeal is that you could keep it as a “truck gun” (or a “trunk gun”). That’s not something I typically carry, but some people do. I don’t like to leave a gun in my car as it’s just something someone might steal. At best I’m out the price of the gun, and if it’s a fully loaded and ready-to-rock gun then it’s likely dangerous in the hands of whoever would steal it. Under circumstances of civil disorder I might do differently, but if things reach the point that I have to go strapped against rioting mobs, I think I’d either carry an M4 or just stay home.
Still a cool little gun, uses relatively cheap ammo, usefully accurate out to 100 meters or so, and not terribly expensive.
I HOPE HIS PLUS-ONE IS THE CHAINSAW: Argentinian President Javier Milei plans to attend Trump inauguration.
PUSHBACK WORKS:
DOGE is here & this is the first test. https://t.co/lS8kPsWeXv
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 18, 2024
So keep pushing.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Drone Scare (But Were Afraid to Look up and See).
VIP members asked for longer essays and I’ve been happy to oblige.
READER FAVORITE: 1,500 Sq.Ft Energy Star Dehumidifier for Basement with Drain Hose. #CommissionEarned
BEWARE THE PINK CLOUD [VIP]: You Didn’t Think It Was Going to Be That Easy.
THIS IS MY PRIME CARRY GUN: Guns We Love: Sig Sauer P365 9mm Review.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teens are doing less homework, earning higher grades. “Test scores are down for ‘Covid kids,’ but grades are up.”
KILL THE BILL: Johnson’s Massive CR Extends Censorship Entity’s Life.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Callaway Golf 300 Pro Laser Rangefinder. #CommissionEarned
KILL THE BILL:
There are two provisions buried in the CR that Congress is trying to slip by.
A pay increase for members of Congress from $174,000 to $243,000 per year.
Also, members of Congress are receiving an opt out from being required to use Obamacare pic.twitter.com/kWvwAgx0GD
— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) December 18, 2024
However much contempt you have for Congress, it isn’t enough.