1st June 2022
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31st May 2022
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30th May 2022
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30th May 2022
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30th May 2022
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Anonymous activists seem to be surfacing in news reports with ever-greater frequencies. Activists are involved in a wide array of issues, but having just written about the widespread adoption of ESG scores, I am struck by the repeated references to activists who are promoting ESG.
For example, The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “BlackRock’s offices around the world have been frequented by activists who blast the firm for being slow to act on green issues.”
BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager overseeing some $7 trillion—is one of numerous large companies to have openly adopted the ESG paradigm after being pressured by activists. Who are these activists? How do they manage to be so persuasive? What makes them voices to be heeded?
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29th May 2022
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29th May 2022
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28th May 2022
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28th May 2022
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27th May 2022
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27th May 2022
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27th May 2022
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A Los Angeles Times columnist expected the Texas elementary school shooter to be a “white supremacist” and was disappointed to learn he was a Latino.
“When I heard that a gunman had killed multiple schoolchildren in a predominantly Latino town in Texas, I immediately thought: white supremacist,” Gustavo Arellano wrote in a Wednesday column. “How could I not?”
Arellano said his “stomach dropped” when he learned the mass shooting was in fact carried out by an 18-year-old Latino named Salvador Rolando Ramos. In an attempt to explain why a “Latino-on-Latino mass school shooting” would take place, Arellano blamed the tragedy on Ramos’s assimilation into American culture.
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26th May 2022
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26th May 2022
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26th May 2022
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25th May 2022
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25th May 2022
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24th May 2022
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24th May 2022
Scott Johnson at Power Line.
In 1930 William Empson elaborated Seven Types of Ambiguity for the literary crowd. The Biden administration is adapting the concept to give us Seven Types of Confusion. We can itemize the confusion that derives from gratuitous fabrication. We also have the confusion related to the persistent assertion of the thing which is not so, as Swift puts it in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels. We continue with the confusion that descends with advanced age.
President Biden has rendered the official American policy of strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan into another type of confusion. Following up on the confusion we documented in “Walk right back” yesterday morning, Biden reiterated our continuing commitment to the official policy even though he himself had contradicted it in his Tokyo press conference. The White House has posted the transcript here. Unlike Professor Empson, he could not explain — deepening the confusion.
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23rd May 2022
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23rd May 2022
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During the 2016 Democratic primary Hillary Clinton began to enthusiastically deploy identitarian arguments against Bernie Sanders. Her media surrogates derided his supporters as straight white “brocialists”. Bernie Bros were guilty of “mansplaining” anti-capitalism to the nation’s minorities and aspiring young girlbosses. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?”, Clinton asked on the stump.
In turn, Bernie supporters came to regard identity politics as a tool wielded by Democratic elites to deflect from their critiques of American capitalism and empire. One often heard variations of the joke that what the DNC really wanted was Cruise missiles painted with rainbow flags. Years later, that joke was made grimly literal in the viral “woke CIA” ad, in which an agency analyst announced “I am a woman of colour, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder”. By that point, the only people around to laugh at it were conservatives and various marginal Twitter anons.
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22nd May 2022
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21st May 2022
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21st May 2022
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The Times is just once instance of the vicious cycle in news media. Radical technological changes have disrupted traditional funding models, making traditional types of reporting too unprofitable to sustain. Newsroom staffing has been slashed by one-quarter since 2008, with those left standing horrified they’ll be next.
This creates newsrooms full of anxiety, with many reporters trying to leverage sensationalism on social media. While reporters 20 years ago might have tried to bury – or at least hide – the biases that informed their reporting, now they brag about those biases on Twitter in the purity-spiral battle to prove who’s the wokest.
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20th May 2022
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19th May 2022
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19th May 2022
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18th May 2022
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18th May 2022
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18th May 2022
Scott Johnson at Power Line.
We have reached a grim milestone in grim milestones. A Google search on the term “grim milestone” now returns more than 6,000,000 results. It is a “grim milestone” in the unstoppable progress of a brain-killing media cliché.
The “grim milestones” retailed by the media always seem to have a political twist and the political twist always seems to be detrimental to Republicans. If it can’t be given a detrimental twist detrimental to Republicans, the “grim milestone” is likely to go unrecognized if possible.
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18th May 2022
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Yet if the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that monocausal explanations are almost always misguided and, as a consequence, almost always ending up harming the vulnerable. As the Black Lives Matter movement mobilised following the murder of George Floyd, America descended into anarchy, fuelled by riots and slogans about systemic racism. When activists demanded that police departments be defunded, local stations were not exactly closed down, but they were intimidated to the point that many stopped serving in black neighbourhoods. The consequences of this swiftly became evident: in the same year that BLM fever seized the country, at least 8,600 black lives were lost to homicide, an increase of more than 1,000 on the year before. Thrown into a frenzy by their overzealous conviction that white racism is the root cause of all evil, BLM turned a blind eye to the large number of black Americans who were being killed, or who found themselves forced to live in neighbourhoods terrorised by gangs.
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17th May 2022
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17th May 2022
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16th May 2022
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15th May 2022
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15th May 2022
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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was a Great Pacific Garbage Patch, did you? Obviously you haven’t been keeping up with the Narrative.
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14th May 2022
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14th May 2022
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13th May 2022
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13th May 2022
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12th May 2022
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11th May 2022
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11th May 2022
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10th May 2022
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