Category: [Media]

Bondi

Well, YESTERDAY was a fucking day, wasn’t it? I felt too nauseous at the whole thing to write about it yesterday, today I’m just angry. Because so many people just had to do this sort of thing:

This was just one clump of responses I found trailing one post on Twatter, and there would be worse, because OBVIOUSLY this was a Muslim man who specifically targeted Westfields at Bondi cos Bondi is the Jewish capital of city, apparently, and Westfields is Jewish-owned, apparently, so OBVIOUSLY this was some sort of revenge against Israel for the Gaza bullshit because obviously everyone at Bondi Westfield was Jewish…? And if they weren’t all Jewish, he could magically pick out all the ones that were…?

There were, of course, a handful of people who insisted with equal strength that he wasn’t Muslim, but they were outweighed by the ones insisting he must be. So Muslim, in fact, that I had someone in my Twitter replies telling me he was specifically Palestinian, not just any old Muslim. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that suggesting, as I did on Twitter, that maybe people should wait for actual information to be released before engaging in pre-emptive racism might be considered unacceptable advice? Yeah… amazing how many people did, in fact, take offence to me saying this… Weird, though, how all the people who KNEW he was Muslim, and indeed KNEW where in the Middle East he specifically originated, refused to tell me exactly who he was when I asked them. I mean, they KNEW so much about him, you’d think they’d have known that too and would’ve been willing to share the information…

And then there was this:

Then…

Oh. Then…

OH. Slight problem with all of this, though.

It wasn’t Benjamin Cohen.

The police had already announced the attacker was thought to be 40 years old (at this point they hadn’t identified him publicly but were sure that he was someone known to them). The Benjamin Cohen in question is apparently only in his 20s. And looks nothing like the man in the CCTV footage. Why might these two Twitterers be so determined to pin the blame on a Jewish guy? Well, Syrian Girl is evidently an antisemitic conspiracy theorist peddling all manner of bullshit, with her only positive point being that her hatred of Jews necessarily encompasses that cunt Avi Yemini (who she also tweeted about saying how he looked like the guy in the video), while Cossack is slightly more complicated…

This man was allegedly 33 when this photo was taken. Usually I think I’m aging well as I approach 50 myself, but if I ever have doubts I’ll just look at this…

Semyon or Simeon Boikov is a pro-Putin disinformation spreader who’s been hiding in the Russian consulate at Woollahra for a couple of years now (that’s where he’s waving from in the above picture which I got via the SMH) for attacking an old guy at a pro-Ukrainian rally; he’s also an antivaxxer and sovereign citizen type, and if he’s not an actual Nazi he is at the very least a sympathiser who would have a vested interest in naming a JOOOOOOOOOO as the attacker in this case. (Avi Yemini and him aren’t friends either, funnily enough.)

As for why the Channel 7 news report decided to base itself around “information” from demonstrable right-wing shitheads like these two… well, I suppose we’ll have to ask Kerry Stokes one day when he’s not busy having to pick up after Bruce Lehrmann. I’ll give them some credit for deleting the news story, unlike their sources, but I don’t think that’ll save them from the defamation lawsuit Ben Cohen would surely be entitled to aim at them.

Anyway, the ACTUAL killer appears to be someone called Joel Cauchi, a guy from Queensland who was SO Islamic evidently that his first victim appears to have been a security guard from Pakistan. OH THE FUCKING IRONY. (One of his other victims was the daughter of John Singleton, who I think is a bit of a cunt—he recently came back to prominence with that incomprehensible ad “apologising” to Ben Roberts-Smith—but ye gods this is not what anyone would wish for him, surely.) This news will, I’m sure, make no difference to the cookers on Twitter, including the psychotics I’ve already seen claiming the whole thing is a false flag to bring about the NWO, and the ones saying it doesn’t matter if he wasn’t a Muslim cos it was still “Muslim-style”, to say nothing of the fucking American ammosexuals going off about how this proves we need guns (as if that wouldn’t have made the whole thing an even more wholesale massacre). Cunts, all of them.

And the champion cunt was someone on Bluesky who decided to have a go at me when I posted there something about wondering what disgusted me more, the event itself or Twatter’s reaction to it, accusing me of wanting to tone police people’s responses. As if HE weren’t trying to police my reaction to the fucking thing, I mean CLEARLY how DARE I be offended by racists exploiting an unspeakable tragedy to promote their own hideous ideology. Fuck you.

I don’t know, I’m just filled with so much loathing for so many people right now, and I think I’d better just leave off with the statement released by Cauchi’s family. I wish I had the equanimity they must have, especially to have written that last part…

Candace Go-wens

That is probably the worst pun I’ve ever produced, but fortunately the occasion for it is better:

Ben Shapiro’s conservative media empire has cut ties with Candace Owens, amid a lengthy public feud between the far-right pundit and her bosses over the Israel-Hamas war.
“Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship,” Shapiro’s co-founder Jeremy Boreing tweeted on Friday morning. “The rumors are true—I am finally free,” Owens posted to her own X account. Representatives for The Daily Wire and Owens did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment. […]
Shapiro had often come to the defense of Owens’ rhetoric, but following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, the pair began a very public battle that at one point featured the Daily Wire co-founder daring his star podcaster to quit.
The feud began last November when Owens tweeted that “no government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide.” While she did not specifically mention the State of Israel, her remarks were widely condemned by her fellow conservative media figures. Soon after, Shapiro publicly called Owens’ behavior “disgraceful” and chided her “faux-sophistication” on the Israel-Hamas conflict. […]
But the Daily Wire in-fighting appeared to reach its final stage this week when Owens liked a social-media post asking conservative rabbi Shmuley Boteach whether he is “drunk on Christian blood again”—an overt reference to the antisemitic “blood libel” canard that has regained popularity on the far-right via QAnon. (Days earlier, Owens dabbled in other antisemitic tropes by suggesting there’s a Jewish “gang” in Hollywood.)

So it appears she’s been engaging in some proper antisemitism other than just not being pro-Israel. Well, as I’ve said before, Shapiro insisted on hiring her and keeping her in full knowledge of what she said about Hitler being OK; I’m wondering who finally made the call, though, cos Jeremy Dullard made the announcement and Shapiro doesn’t appear to have said anything about it. Shame it ended like this, eh? They were cunts of a feather who thoroughly deserved each other…

A right royal Tuck-up

I normally hate Youtube prank channels, but I’ll make an exception for once.

Tucker Carlson has been pranked over Kate Middleton‘s infamous edited photo.
The former Fox News anchor was duped by British YouTubers Josh & Archie into interviewing a fake Kensington Palace whistleblower, who was prepared to dish the dirt on the doctored image.
Archie Manners posed as the Prince and Princess of Wales’ former digital content creator, who claimed he had been fired for altering the Mother’s Day image so poorly it was rumbled by the public.
The former Fox News anchor was duped by British YouTubers Josh & Archie into interviewing a fake Kensington Palace whistleblower, who was prepared to dish the dirt on the doctored image.

The whole Kate Middleton business has been a bizarre story unto itself, and I’ll let Slate summarise it:

In case you need a refresher on the biggest tabloid story of the year, Middleton, the wife of heir apparent Prince William, has been out of the public eye since Christmas. The supposed reason for this absence was a scheduled abdominal surgery, which the Crown said would sideline her until Easter. The royal gossip apparatus tends to grow ravenous in silence, and the internet surged with all sorts of wild conspiracy theories speculating on the real reason Middleton had vanished. Some floated that she was going under the knife to receive a BBL; others asserted that the surgery was cover for alleged infidelity; and so on. But the story went truly nuclear this week when Middleton submitted, then quickly retracted, a cheery photo of herself and her three kids, which the Associated Press determined to be counterfeit due to some irregularities in the composition. In response, Middleton rushed out a baffling damage-control campaign, claiming that she had simply been experimenting with photo editing.

Apparently in the video Fucker begins by saying they’ve worked hard to prove the guys’ identity to make sure they weren’t pulling a prank, which was clearly a lie:

Archie Manners posed as the Prince and Princess of Wales’ former digital content creator, who claimed he had been fired for altering the Mother’s Day image so poorly it was rumbled by the public.
The Tucker Carlson Network, which streams on Twitter (now X), accepted his story after Manners and co-conspirator Josh Pieters forged Kensington Palace employment documents.
The YouTubers’ faked letter of engagement for the whistleblower included a clause stating that the palace had a right to amputate one of his limbs should he fail his probation period.
Carlson’s people did not spot the preposterous faked document and Manners was sent to a London studio with a hotline to Carlson for the interview.

Like I said, I have no time for prank channels but given who these guys were going after here I’ll overlook it. Alas, they appear to have had a change of heart when they realised just how many Twitter followers Fucker has and didn’t want to be responsible for spreading misinformation in case his viewers took them at face value. So it’s probably not actually going to air now. Can’t wait to see if Carlson owns up to being had or not, though…

Somerton AGAIN?!

I thought James Somerton’s arse had been so comprehensively handed to him after that Hbomberguy video last year that he would never have the temerity to show his face in public again (which, admittedly, he did briefly with that apology video he made, but he withdrew it so quickly it barely counts). However, it seems no one told Somerton that… cos he’s back with another apology and explanation video, full of excuses that I don’t think anyone is buying (though I am a little surprised that no one seems to be cracking jokes about who he plagiarised this from; maybe we got that out of our systems with the first apology). I offer here Mack Attack’s response to him, which is pointed and brutal and so it damn well should be; this dickhead is either delusional or else hoping the rest of us are…

Nobody tell Alan Moore…

The New York Post has outdone itself:

The thing is, of course, that not only do we not know what JTR actually looked like, WE DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO HE WAS! Who writes this bullshit? Well, per the article:

The dangerously dreamy drawings come courtesy of Jeff Leahy, a long-time Ripper enthusiast from Carmarthen, Wales, who produced a mini-series on the murderer and has spent decades studying the lore surrounding one of history’s most infamous villains.
Using Midjourney software, along with information and available photographs of the relatives of prime suspect Aaron Kosminski, Leahy was able to produce a rather astonishing portrait of the man.
“It’s astonishing to finally have an image of him. I was surprised by how striking the picture is,” Leahy told SWNS.
Kosminski was a Polish-born barber working in Whitechapel, the area of London’s East End where the murders took place in the late 1800s.
Kosminski has been named by numerous experts as the Ripper, however nobody has ever been able to prove his guilt.
“There’s never been a picture of him and this is the best we’re ever going to get,” Leahy said.

JESUS FUCK. There’s never been a picture of him and THIS ISN’T ONE EITHER, you ignorant cunt. The evidence for Kosminski is thin, in any case; you might as well have taken the drawings of William Gull in From Hell and fed those into AI and called that a picture of Jack the Ripper, cos he’s about as likely to have been Jack as Kosminski was, or indeed any of the many and varied other putative “Jacks“. This is transcendent bullshit even by the NY Post’s minimal standards, and I find the stupidity of the entire thing kind of offensive…

RIP Pitchfork

I never had much use for Pitchfork, which always struck me as the peak of tedious music hipsterdom, but the news that it’s being shuttered and absorbed into GQ is bad nonethless. As full of shit as it may have been, I still dislike people being forced out of work. Some people are, frankly, not sorry to see it go and maybe they have a point, but even so (plus GQ is an odd magazine to merge it into). And whatever its flaws, it was quite correct about some things:

Outnumbered, outdumbered

The anti-woke backlash has, if nothing, exposed a bunch of absolute numpties for what they are; all these people getting uptight about Doctor Who treating trans people like normal human beings and so forth, well, clearly they’ve never watched the fucking thing or they’d have known the show’s generally progressive tendencies over the decades. This is how I know Emily Compagno here knows bugger all about Star Trek (quite apart from getting the Vulcan salute wrong); Fox were malding about the next Star Wars film having a female director, and she said that’s why she watches Star Trek instead. You know, Star Trek, that un-woke, un-feminist TV franchise. The one whose original series admittedly had no female directors but did have a number of female writers including D.C. Fontana, some of whose episodes are among the best of the series; meanwhile, Next Gen did bring at least one female director on board (who did a bunch of episodes on that, plus some on DS9 and Voyager), and the more recent iterations of Trek have had even more female directors, like Hanelle Culpepper who’s not only female but BLACK. Political correctness gone mad, obviously. To say nothing of the multi-ethnic and multi-gender casting of the show, and the fact that Number One in “The Cage”—you know, the very first produced episode of the show—Number One, second only to the ship’s captain, was female. Emily, I’m not even a Trekkie and I know all this, which is more than I suspect you do. Fucking clown. No wonder you’re on Fox, a REAL network would never have hired you…

EDIT (a few hours later): And if you won’t hear it from me, hear it from someone who REALLY knows what he’s talking about:

Scrubstack

So the Internet villain du jour is Substack, self-described “new economic engine for culture”, largely because of the above comment. Substack has a Nazi problem, to quote the title of an article on the subject by Jonathan Katz:

At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.

This resulted in something called Substackers Against Nazis, an open letter published by dozens of Substack writers unhappy with the Nazi situation; this was in turn answered by another open letter saying the problem’s overstated that was co-signed by a number of… interesting names like Abigail Shrier, Bari Weiss, Julie Bindel, Konstantin Kisin, Matt Taibbi, Paul Kingsnorth, Peter Boghossian, Richard Dawkins, and various others I’m not familiar with (plus Ted Gioia, who I otherwise thought was and is cool from what I can see). I decided to click one of those names I didn’t recogniser and got… whatever this fuck this is:

Have you ever noticed the Substackers Against Nazis post is on a blog called The Racket by Johnathan M. Katz? It’s full of things that read as very Antisemitic to me, and it gets famous just as the Israel-Palestine Conflict is at its worst with October 7th! Forget Substackers Against Nazis, it should be called Antisemites Against Nazis! It’s also all related to The Atlantic wanting to demolish our independent platform by calling us Nazis, especially the Jews and the people who support Israel. Not that calling Jews Nazis is anything new.

Katz is Jewish himself, it should be added. Calling Jews antisemites… THAT’s something you don’t often see. Another of Katz’s critics is his self-avowed friend Ben Dreyfuss (you may know his dad), for whom the problem isn’t Nazis but the unserious liberals trying to deplatform them:

I don’t know that anything has made me more annoyed by this debate than last weekend when I saw an earnest, relatively offline, old Jewish writer make the mistake of thinking that the “Nazis on substack” open letter was using the term “Nazi” in any way that had to do with their understanding of the term. They were sad and scared and horrified! But also confused and looking for an explanation. They hadn’t seen any of the people who had killed their parents here.
I didn’t respond to them because I have a horse in this race and felt like someone who is as earnest as they and more unbiased than we should help them out. But what I would have told them is: don’t worry. They don’t mean actual nazis. They mean unreconstructed conservatives who could have any number of beliefs.
That isn’t how that dude understood the term “Substack Nazis.” That dude thought there were real popular Nazis on here putting Jews in camps.

I shouldn’t have to tell Ben this, but the Nazis didn’t start with death camps. They started with a newspaper. You know… words. Words they used to promote their ideas before taking direct action. Curious, too, that several of these “unreconstructed conservatives” would choose specifically Nazi imagery and iconography, or call themselves a “National Socialist newsletter”, if they weren’t at least Nazi-sympathetic. Just because they’re only talking about the JQ rather than personally spraying Zyklon-B at every Jewish person they see doesn’t mean they’re not Nazis. Or are they only “real” Nazis if it was before 1945 or something?

Anyway, the anti-Nazi open letter finally provoked Substack’s founders to respond, part of which response is cited in the picture up top… basically, “we don’t like Nazis either but they don’t bother us enough”. Which… was, frankly, far from the best answer they could’ve given. Business Insider is not having it, noting that, because Substack gives users the option to monetise their writing, in return for which they take some amount of what you make from doing so, they’re making money off the monetised Nazi blogs too (maybe not much, but any is too much). And The Verge were even less charitable:

I mean, maybe the problem isn’t as bad as some of the critics of the Substackers Against Nazis seem to think it is. Maybe there’s actually not a lot of Nazis on Substack, and maybe they don’t have a big audience, and maybe they don’t make much money, maybe we don’t really have much to worry about. Maybe. The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei had only a few dozen members when it was founded in 1919; by the end of 1920, NSDAP (as it was by then) membership was around two thousand. Who can say what we should or shouldn’t be worried about.

Anyway, I actually considered Substack myself as an outlet when I was considering becoming a blogger again near the end of last year. In the end I decided it wasn’t really suitable for what I wanted to do (though, ironically, a long post like this would’ve been ideal over there). And though I’m sure WordPress has issues of its own, I think I still made the right decision in the end. For once.

Somerton re-redux

Interesting interview with Hbomberguy over THAT video:

For Harry, the shocking success of his four-hour video has itself brought a few internal issues surrounding a pledge he made to give away a portion of its profits to those who had been plagiarised.
“We said we were going to give away all the ad revenue that video raised and now because ad revenue’s higher in December, the video is four hours so there are more ads, and a lot of people have watched it, it’s an order of magnitude higher than we expected it to get.”
This means that the payouts Harry and the Hbomberguy team promised have increased dramatically, and, coupled with Somerton’s reaction, things have become much more hectic.
“Now, like, taxes are involved,” Harry says. “This is a substantial amount of money to be taxed on before we give it to people. It’s actually made it harder for me to do the intended purpose of the video.
“My wonderful producer, Kat, has had to set up a database to keep track of all of the things that were stolen from just to make sure we have everything correct… This isn’t like 300 bucks, which is what we expected it to be, this is a lot more.”

Good to know that something worthwhile has come from the debacle. The REALLY unexpected outcome from the whole thing, though, is surely this:

I will indeed be DAMNED. James Somerton returned just two weeks after he was blasted off the Internet to… apologise? And to reactivate his Patreon, too, but this video is what’s drawing most of the attention. Understandably so. And… YIKES.





These last two items raise an important point. I did try and watch Somerton’s video, and he basically started by talking about, frankly, having been hospitalised since Harry’s video came out. And I couldn’t watch it beyond that point, not because that’s, you know, grim as fuck (I’m assuming he’s telling the truth about this, I find it believable and I feel the people I’ve seen questioning this point are being unnecessarily uncharitable), but because I knew what the tone of the rest of the video would be if this was how he was kicking it off. From what I can see, I don’t appear to have missed much.

You may have noted, though, that my first screenshsot was of a reupload of the video… that’s cos not only did James upload what appears to have been one of the worst Youtube apology videos ever (a truly cursed subgenre), he also removed it a few hours later. Unsurprising, given that all the comments I saw before he whacked the video were bracingly negative. Alas for him, it’s so easy to download YT videos these days, and Somerton’s well enough known now, that someone was bound to save it in case he did that. Mind you, I’m still not going to watch it. I feel somehow that even watching someone else’s save and reupload of his video is just going to encourage him…

Once more with stealing

Needless to say Hbomberguy’s now-famous plagiarism video has provoked a lot of discourse on Youtube, some of which I’ve watched, but this particular example offers a different perspective on James Somerton: where Harris looked at Somerton’s plagiarism and Todd Nathanson looked at his misinformation and lies, Courtney and Royce look at, frankly, giving him money:

This video’s more about Somerton’s business practices with his production company Telos Pictures, which seem to have been as shitty as anything else. These creators have further particular beef with him over what they consider his poor showing when it came to asexual representation (I did rather enjoy the bit where she says how they gave him a bunch of potential resources and he never plagiarised any of it), but their more obvious problem is that, frankly, they put money into Telos, a fair bit thereof, and the return rhey got from doing so was… well, bugger all.

The more I hear about this character, the less I like him, and the detail about him literally calling the cops on some of his critics for “harrassment” makes me lose that rather pointless feeling of vague sympathy for him I had after watching Todd’s video. I can’t do it. He’s brought all this shit on himself and HE FUCKING DESERVES IT. And his Fandom page that I linked previously has been updated with some new bullshit, looks like he may have engaged in catfishing and some sort of scam on Patreon and he may never have got those business degrees he started out his career with (having sold himself as a media expert before YT). I’m kind of glad I never watched any of his stuff now…