No, that isn’t a typo in the headline: the spelling ‘journolism’ or sometimes ‘journolist’, comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
Thomas J Siderio, Jr, in a photograph dated 2018, from The Philadelphia Inquirer Click to enlarge.
Why, I have to ask, is The Washington Post paying owner Jeff Bezos’ hard earned dollars to Elon Musk’s Twitter to promote an article doxing a conservative on Twitter? The image to the right is a screen capture, but if you click on it, it will take you to the original tweet.
Post writer Taylor Lorenz spent a lot of time investigating the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. LoTT’s schtick is to find the silliest things leftists put on the social media site Tik Tok, and snark them for sensible people on Twitter. Basically, LoTT is mocking people for their own exposed stupidity. My good friend Amanda Marcotte of Salon loved that LoTT was doxed, doubtlessly hoping that Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson and LoTT creator would lose her job, and her posting today is a hope that Mr Musk’s buyout of Twitter results in the whole thing being killed. Continue reading
In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.
It’s early yet, but at least thus far, the editors of The New York Times have not published an editorial attacking Elon Musk’s agreed-to purchase of Twitter, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t allowed one of their Editorial Board to opine against it.
Twitter Under Elon Musk Will Be a Scary Place
by Greg Bensinger | April 25, 2022 | 7:20 PM EDT
Twitter has never been a place for rational, nuanced speech. Expect it to get much, much worse.
The New York Times has always been a supporter of freedom of the press . . . when they were the guardians and gatekeepers of that freedom. It wasn’t that long ago when for someone to get his opinions heard beyond bullhorn range, he had to persuade an editor to give him column inches in the newspaper or air time on radio or television. It did not matter how “rational” or “nuanced” what you had to say might have been, if an editor didn’t approve, it wasn’t to be published or broadcast. Continue reading
My good friend Amanda Marcotte‘s second favorite whipping boy — Donald Trump was, is, and always will be her favorite person to hate! — Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) has been dropped by the writer as a frequent target of late. But I knew nevertheless that she’s wax apoplectic if she saw this story from The Hill:
Poll: Manchin’s popularity skyrocketed over past year
By Elizabeth Crisp | Monday, April 25, 2022 | 12:28 PM EDTSen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is among the most popular senators in the country after seeing his favorability skyrocket back home over the past year, according to an analysis of survey data released Monday.
Morning Consult found that, even as Manchin has faced backlash from progressives nationally, about 57 percent of West Virginia voters viewed him favorably in surveys conducted from January through March. His popularity jumped 17 points — more than any other senator — compared to the same period last year. Continue reading
In doing some research for a completely different project, I came across an article of mine from August 23, 2021:
Haven’t the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer noticed the numbers?
Homicides and shootings in the city have dropped significantly
Posted on August 23, 2021 | 9:05 PM EDT
We have previously noted the recent decrease in the number of homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. We noted, on July 9th, that there had been 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. If I recall correctly, that 562 number was my highest projection for the year.
But then, as of the 221st day of the year, 325 homicides had been recorded. 325 ÷ 221 days in the year, = 1.4706 homicides per day, for a projected 537 for the year. That number stayed fairly consistent, as a week later, with ‘just’ 339 homicides in 228 days, Philadelphia was seeing ‘only’ 1.4868 homicides per day, which works out to ‘just’ 543 over the course of 2021.
As of 11:59 PM on Sunday, August 22nd, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 345 homicides in the city. 345 ÷ 234 days = 1.4744 per day, or 538 projected for the year. The big news is that, over the past 31 days, a full month, if not a calendar month, there have been ‘just’ 31 homicides, ‘just’ 1.00 per day. With 131 days remaining in 2021, if that rate could be maintained, there would be ‘only’ 476 killings in Philly for the year. If The Philadelphia Inquirer has noticed that decrease, I haven’t seen it mentioned. It certainly doesn’t seem as though their Editorial Board has noticed.
There’s more at the original. But the line that caught my eye was, “We noted, on July 9th, that there had been 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year.”
And 562 it turned out to be!
Between July 9th and September 6th, which Labor Day, the homicide rate dropped to 1.4578 per day, which would have worked out to ‘only’ 532 homicides. Sadly, the killing rate increased, and by the end of the year it was back up to 1.5397 per day, and that 562 projection was realized.
Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Killadelphia Update
As of April 24, 2021, 28.11% of city’s total of 562 murders had been committed. If the same percentage applies this year, Philly would see 537 homicides. The city still has the long, hot summer ahead.
But there’s an obvious question: what if Philadelphia doesn’t have that early July through early September lull this year? During the ‘lull,’ there were still 72 murders in the city, but had the ‘lull’ of 1.2203 homicides per day not occurred, there would have been 91 people killed.
Yes, I’m something of a numbers geek, but projecting things like this will always be somewhat problematic. It is well known that homicides increase as the weather gets warmer, and decrease as it cools down again. Yet, in Philly, the pace of killings picked up in the fall; that’s how the city ‘achieved’ its record of 562 souls sent early to their eternal rewards. A couple of weeks of rain could affect the projections, as could an early, heavy snow. A heat wave might keep the gang bangers inside in the air conditioning, and not out on the streets shooting at people.
Well, the 151 number didn’t even last the morning:
152nd Homicide of 2022 already in Philadelphia this morning 7:20am @PhillyPolice report man,40, shot in back of his head inside Fisher Park off North 5th Street @FOX29philly pic.twitter.com/P1QwIoxXuc
— Steve Keeley (@KeeleyFox29) April 25, 2022
Of course, when The Philadelphia Inquirer gets around to reporting it, they’ll remove the race of the victim!
Thus far, under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, Philadelphia has seen the first and third most homicides in its history, with only Mayor Wilson Goode’s — Mayor Goode of MOVE bombing fame! — record of 500 in the crack cocaine wars of 1990 in the middle of that. But I’m guessing that 2022 will see at least a solid second-place finish for Messrs Kenney and Krasner, and Miss Outlaw.
When I spotted this article on my feed, I went to the New York Magazine original, because I prefer to cite from the original. Alas! the original is hidden behind a paywall, but it doesn’t matter, since MSN is providing it for free!
The Democratic Party Is Wasting Its Grassroots Energy
Opinion by Sam Adler-Bell | Sunday, April 24, 2022
Sam Adler-Bell, from his Twitter biography.
When I was young, my activist friends and I would often speak of something we called the movement. “This will be good for the movement,” we’d say.” Or, “They do good movement work.” He was a “movement lawyer”; she, “an artist dedicated to the movement.” I assumed this expression referred to something real: international socialism, maybe, or the trade unionism. I wasn’t sure. Surely, I thought, there must be a movement out there to which we all belonged, and to whose future victory our meager efforts — as environmentalists, labor organizers, anti-war activists — were contributing. But that wasn’t so. Later, I realized the term was more like an incantation, the expression of a wish that all this various activism might one day coalesce into something worthy of the name. For the time being, “the movement” was a linguistic gesture with no referent, a half-ironic shibboleth with which we signaled our belonging and our willingness to nurture each other’s precious illusions and beliefs. Playfully we toasted “to the movement,” unsure whether our cheeks reddened out of shame at our cynicism or our sincerity.
I’m reminded of these episodes when I contemplate the sorry state of the Democratic Party. No doubt, the Democrats’ gruesome midterm prospects are, as the social scientists say, overdetermined. Midterms tend to punish the president’s party anyway, and basically every other input is bad: Biden is unpopular, inflation soars, and Putin’s war has pushed food and fuel prices even higher. It’s a bad hand, and none of the plausible last-ditch, Manchin-approved policy interventions or executive orders seem like aces.
But surveying the landscape from a few hundred feet higher, another striking deficit looms into view: There appears almost no grassroots energy or urgency of any kind on the Democratic side. After four years of fever-pitched marching and movement-building by anti-Trump resistors, antifascists, Democratic Socialists, and Black Lives Matter militants, the sudden quiet from the country’s left flank has been deafening. Where, I find myself asking, is the movement?
By contrast, the conservative grassroots are ablaze. The parents, pundits, and propagandists behind the “critical race theory” crackdown, and now, the moral panic over LGBTQ educators, have been startlingly successful — not only at creating media spectacles, but at recruiting activists, electing school board members, and passing laws. Anti-abortion measures, meanwhile, sweep the country in anticipation of a possible repeal of Roe v. Wade. And, all along, one-term president Trump has defied political gravity, attracting crowds to his rallies and playing de facto party boss from his spray-tan Tammany Hall in Palm Beach. The right, in other words, is on the march. The left is nonexistent.
Could it possibly be that the left had nothing other than hatred for Donald Trump? Their policy was never more than Get Trump, to the point that it devolved into Trump Derangement Syndrome.
A couple paragraphs further down:
Democratic efforts to capture the energies of the 2020 BLM uprisings were similarly demoralizing for all involved. Mayors made fitful, largely self-defeating gestures at constraining their police forces, while party leaders gave a pathetic half-hug to the movement and tip-toed around its politically inconvenient slogan. The abolitionist critique — that the problem is not merely police departments, but a social order that requires them — was then metabolized by elite liberalism into a surfeit of yard signs, nonprofit donations, and various Robin DiAngeloisms of the board room. (Not to mention a $6 million house for a few of the BLM movement’s most savvy self-promoters.)
While it’s true that I concentrate most heavily on Philadelphia, 2021, the year after the evil reich-wing President Trump left office, and as all sweetness-and-light Joe Biden moved into the White House, the homicide rates skyrocketed, setting new records in Philly and jumping dramatically in other major cities, cities which have been controlled by the Democrats for decades. Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office when Harry Truman was President! The effects of the ‘defund the police’ attempts were huge increases in violent crime. While newspapers like The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer kept their reporting on such to a minimum, the more visually oriented television news media put the stories in front of viewers, and in most places residents get their news from television, not the paper.
Mr Adler-Bell’s seeming throw-away line that the problem is “a social order that requires” police departments is wholly naïve”: he seems to think if there are no police and no laws, everything will be peaches but the cream, that there will be no violence and no theft.
And the trouble is, at the moment, (when it comes to movement mobilization) the right is doing it better. Movements of the right are reaching deeper into communities, finding them in the places where they already gather, and strengthening the solidarity they already feel for one another — in many cases, channeling it toward cruelty. As Schlozman told me, “the great rediscovery” of people like Christopher Rufo and Ron DeSantis “is that parents know other parents, and right-wing parents know other right-wing parents, and they can talk to each other, and that is a great reservoir of connection to be politicized.”
Here’s where Mr Adler-Bell gets it way, way wrong. What he forgets is that parents are almost exclusively heterosexual, and while some are sympathetic to the homosexual rights movement, and even transgenderism, they almost exclusively support it for other people. Homosexuality or transgenderism is not something normal parents wish on their own children, because those things are prescriptions for a difficult life. Those with gender dysphoria are looking ahead to unnatural hormone treatments and surgical intervention which produces only a simulacrum of the opposite sex; it doesn’t turn males into real women, nor females into real men. Those who are homosexual are looking ahead to more difficulty in finding long-term mates, and the traditional expectations of middle-class life, a home with children in a suburban home just appear alien to many of them.
Then you get people like Will Thomas, the biologically male swimmer who has decided that he’s a woman named ‘Lia,’ going out and dominating women’s collegiate swimming, and demonstrating for the public at large to see that no, he isn’t really a woman. Even for very liberal parents, there may be a lot of support for Mr Thomas’ case, but it’s not something that they want for their own children!
The civic bonds on which Trumpism is built are often the inheritance of past injustice (as Gabriel Winant once provocatively put it, “Whiteness itself is a kind of inchoate associational gel …”), but they are real. And while the right builds a movement, the Democrats attempt to call one into being — by giving more and more money to insular activist NGOs that speak an alienating language to people in places where they do not frequent, among people they do not already know.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, in publisher Lisa Hughes’ ‘ant-racist’ mode, has tamped down on reporting about the violence in the city, but the public know about it anyway. When Mr Adler-Bell complains about “whiteness”, he’s forgetting one important thing: white liberals are very much part of the white community, and in some of our very liberal but nevertheless internally racially segregated cities, those white liberals can see, just as well as we evil conservatives that much of the crime and violence in the cities is not all that big a problem in the white areas. Even the Inquirer has said that the key to reducing violence in the city is greater racial integration. “Whiteness,” it seems, has an actual value
The alternative — and you’ll be just shocked to hear me say this — is the only one that has ever worked. That is, the labor movement: a movement of the left that mobilizes and draws us together on the basis of our most basic associations and material interests. As Tammi and Marvin once put it, “Ain’t nothing like the real thing.”
Here Mr Adler-Bell again misses the mark. The unionization movement has long been in decline in this country, because the nature of work has changed. We are, sad to say, no longer a nation of large industrial production, but one of financial, information technology and consumer service workers. It takes a whole day’s training to replace a clerk at Seven-Eleven, not the months or even years of training in some industrial jobs. Automobile companies, for example, no longer need trained welders, but people who can run the computers which run the welding robots.
The response to COVID-19 has exacerbated it: people working from home are difficult to unionize because they are largely setting their own working conditions.
But there’s something much more subtle happening that Mr Adler-Bell has missed. Retirement plans have gone from the defined pension benefits ideas — and I personally know of people who had really great company pension plans which all fell apart when the Pennsylvania steel industry collapsed — to individual contribution with company match 401(k) plans. 401(k) plans are great: you can take them with you if you change jobs, rolling them over to your new company’s plan, rolling them over into an individual retirement account, or sometimes just leaving them with your old company’s plan. But the key factor is that most of them make money by investing your retirement funds into stocks and bonds. All of a sudden, employers are no longer the enemy, but a company workers want to see prosper, because there’s no cutting off your own nose quite like wishing failure on a company in which you are invested! Employees and companies are no longer enemies, but partners.
401(k) plans have made us all capitalists!
Mr Adler-Bell does not like that at all! His writing “the Marxist in me” tells us that he is at least sympathetic with socialist goals, if it isn’t quite an admission that he is an out-and-out socialist, but 401(k) plans and frequent job switching and remote work are things which contribute to individualism among people, not socialism. I may have discussed my 401(k) investment options with co-workers, but my choices are mine and their choices are theirs. If my investments are out-performing one of my friends, I would tell him about it, and leave the choice up to him about whether to change his investment strategy, but those would still be individual choices, not some sort of union/worker solidarity.
Mr Adler-Bell seems stuck in the 1930s, when Walter Duranty was sending us glowing propaganda reports about that workers’ paradise, the Soviet Union. He dreams of a labor movement that never was, based on a vision of a society that doesn’t exist.
I do not normally like to reproduce photos from The Philadelphia Inquirer, due to copyright issues, but this one definitely falls within “fair use” criteria. The caption, reproduced along with the photo via screen capture, states:
Masked Sixers fans watched pregame warm-ups before the Sixers’ Monday playoff game against the Toronto Raptors, during Philadelphia’s short-lived revival of an indoor mask mandate.
Except, of course, that’s not what the photo shows at all.
The photo captures the faces of five people at the game, during pre-game warmups. Three are clearly wearing face masks, a fourth has one, but it’s tucked under his chin, while a fifth spectator doesn’t have a mask visible anywhere on his person, though it’s possible he has one available somewhere. The boy with the red mask is wearing his slightly below his nose, so it’s useless there as well.
This photo was as much propaganda as much as anything else. It was published along with this story:
Why some health experts worry that Philly’s switch on masks may backfire
Philadelphia’s mask conundrum, which saw the city reverse a new mandate days after imposing it, may undermine public confidence, experts warn.
by Tom Avril and Sarah Gantz | Saturday, April 23, 2022
As Philadelphia’s health commissioner during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Stuart H. Shapiro knows what it’s like to run a big-city health department during a crisis. The evidence keeps changing, yet the guidance has to be updated in a way that inspires public cooperation and trust.
That’s why it was smart for Philadelphia to establish clear COVID-19 benchmarks in February, spelling out what levels of cases and hospitalizations would trigger requirements such as masks and proof of vaccination, he said. But now that those metrics have been cast aside as of Thursday, Shapiro worries that the abrupt reversal may backfire.
“It’s totally confusing,” he said. “It takes away confidence in science-based criteria.”Another former health agency chief, previously skeptical of Philadelphia’s decision to become the only big city to resume an indoor masking requirement, praised its decision to replace its mask mandate with a strong recommendation to mask up.
“They did the right thing at the same time, which is to highly recommend the use of masks,” former Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen tweeted Friday. “Remember if you wear a mask to please wear a well-fitting N95 or equivalent.”
There’s more at the original.
If you look at the photo closely — and you can click on it to enlarge the image — you’ll see that of the three people actually wearing the masks that none of them are wearing N95 or equivalent masks; they’ve got cloth masks, while the gentleman wearing a mask below his chin appears to have a surgical mask.
The article is basically full of excuses as to why Philadelphia was the only major city to reimpose a mask mandate, and then cancel it four days in. But while it gives us an excuse, the real reasons are two-fold, and obvious:
On Friday, Philadelphia health commissioner Cheryl Bettigole rejected any suggestion that the quick reversal on the mask mandate could hurt the health department’s credibility.
“I very much take seriously my obligations to say things that are true to Philadelphia and to keep my promises,” Bettigole said. “I had said when I announced this that if we didn’t see hospitalizations rising that we needed to rethink this and that we shouldn’t have a mandate in that case.”
COVID hospitalizations in the city rose earlier in the week, following an increase in cases, but both numbers have since declined slightly. Everyone hopes that widespread vaccination, along with the immune response induced by prior infection, will make severe COVID a thing of the past.
Note that the last quoted sentence is not indicated as a quote from Dr Bettigole, but appears to be a political statement by the article writers.
In the past, the decisions and announcements on COVID restrictions came on Mondays. The reinstated mask mandate was announced on Monday, April 11th, the health department supposedly taking the weekend to consider data which were obvious, something I predicted on April 5th, to take effect the following Monday, April 18th. Yet the mandate was lifted on the evening of Thursday, April 21st. Whatever health data existed from the first four days of the mandate was hardly sufficient to justify changing the decision, but the information on the political aspects was right in front of their noses. That Philadelphia was the only major city to reimpose the mandate was information that they did have, as it was blared all over the city’s media outlets.
The freedom of speech comes with the freedom of other people to read or listen to, or not read or listen to, what you have said. The freedom of speech also comes with the assumed risk that those who do read or listen to your words can and just might criticize what you have written or said.
It seems, however, at least at Ohio State University, it also comes with the risk that you might be reported to the authorities.
OSU Student Faces Criticism For Saying Black People Are Superior: ‘I Full-Heartedly Believe That’
Danteé Ramos | Earthy Day, April 22, 2022 | 4:04 PM EDT
An Ohio State University (OSU) student leader is facing criticism after saying that he’d “love” to live in a world if “Black people were taught that they are superior.”
According to OSU’s student newspaper, The Lantern, On March 23, John Fuller, a junior, who was a member of the Ohio State University Undergraduate Student Government General Assembly at the time of the meeting, made comments while proposing resolutions targeting all anti-critical race theory legislation to the General Assembly.
“By taking away the teaching of one race as superior to another, that is inherently white supremacy because white people learn from birth that they are superior. There is nothing that they need to be taught in school that tells them that,” Fuller said.
“I just wanted to say that and make this very clear, the only people who are taught that they are superior to another race are White people,” Fuller said. “And I would absolutely love to live in a world where Black people were taught that they are superior.”
He added that he “full-heartedly” believes that Black people are superior.
OSU’s Undergraduate Student Government President, Jacob Chang, told the student newspaper The Lantern that Fuller’s comments were “diverging from our values.”
So, Mr Fuller was criticized for saying out loud that he “full-heartedly” believes that black people are superior. That is the risk he takes by speaking in public, and the freedom of speech of others to criticize what he said certainly exists. But then comes the money line in the story:
“The comments made during the General Assembly session is fundamentally, like, diverging from our values as the student government of Ohio State,” Chang said. “Therefore, it is our responsibility to report a case like this. I think we need to stand in solidarity with all people of color and anyone who suffers from racism, but we need to do it from a space that is unilaterally empowering everyone around them instead of like single out one group.”
OSU’s student newspaper, The Lantern, reported that after Mr Fuller made his comments, the Speaker of the student General Assembly dismissed him, and that members of the Assembly forwarded video and audio of his comments to the university’s Office of Institutional Equity.
They did? Apparently members of the Assembly believed that Mr Fuller’s comments ought not only to be disapproved, but punished as well. From The Lantern:
The resolution condemning all anti-critical race theory passed in the General Assembly, Chang said. The resolution is crucial to ensure that critical race theory is taught at public universities, but the way Fuller made it about “empowerment and another form of like supremacy” that was “inherently racist,” he said.
Chang said the next step is to hope the university takes action on the case against Fuller.
“No matter what race you are from, what background you are from, you cannot say stuff like that,” Chang said.
If you yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and that yell leads to a crushing stampede to the exits, in which people are injured, you can be held legally liable. But Mr Chang and at least some members of the student government want to see Mr Fuller somehow punished for making a statement of which they disapproved which injured no one, unless perhaps it was someone’s precious little feelings. More accurately, they would like to see Mr Fuller punished somehow for “full-heartedly” believing that black people are superior to other races.
What might such punishment entail? Neither article tells us, but it isn’t difficult to speculate. Mandatory ‘re-education’ classes to reform his beliefs? A forced statement that he doesn’t really believe what he said? Could it even lead to academic probation, suspension or expulsion? We just don’t know, but the fact that the student government wants Mr Fuller punished somehow for what he believes and said he believes is chilling. Ohio State is a public university, which would mean that the state would be taking action against a student for exercising his freedom of speech.
We have frequently noted the ridiculous lack of law enforcement in Philadelphia when it comes to illegal drug use.
Now we get Steve Keeley, a reporter for Fox 29 News:
With no police officers here at @SEPTA 30th St. Market Frankford Line,the signs of rampant drug use. So many used needles tossed off platform onto tracks. Tourists arriving by Amtrak & headed to Liberty Bell etc. this is their first impression of Philadelphia . @fox29philly pic.twitter.com/IfVqPOZfpF
— Steve Keeley (@KeeleyFox29) April 22, 2022
This means that junkies are shooting up heroin and fentanyl and who knows what else in public, on the train platform. This isn’t even the Allegheny Avenue station we’ve written about before, but 30th Street, thirteen stops away from Allegheny Avenue, near the Amtrak station and Drexel University. This isn’t Kensington, this isn’t the slums. This is near Powelton Village.
Of course, some of the junkies could have gotten on the train in Kensington, shot up while riding, and then gotten off at 30th Street, but why would they? It costs money to ride the train, and 30th Street isn’t really a neighborhood itself, but the middle of the train, trolley and Amtrak lines.
But hey, this is for what the good people of Philadelphia voted!
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