Month: November 2023

IBM actually not OK with Nazism!

IBM suspends ads on X after they appeared next to Nazi posts

IBM has suspended advertising on X, formerly known as Twitter, after a report said its ads were placed next to posts praising Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
The company said it was “completely unacceptable” that its content appeared in such threads on the platform.
X said it does not intentionally place brands “next to this kind of content”.
It comes as X owner Elon Musk was criticised after calling an antisemitic conspiracy theory “actual truth” when replying to a post on the platform.
The left-leaning watchdog Media Matters for America said it found ads bought by IBM and other companies next to posts including Hitler quotes, praise of Nazis and Holocaust denial.

This has, obviously, been the source of much mirth online today, given IBM’s… chequered history when it comes to these things. But nice of them to take an overt position on the correct side of history… at least until they change their minds like the ADL, who you may remember Oolong threatened to sue a couple of months ago because they were supposedly killing off his beloved X before he made some token statement and they agreed to go back to advertising on there. We’ll see how long it takes IBM and the other companies the article mentions (including Apple) to do the same.

Of course, the fact that the ADL are advertising on Musktown again doesn’t mean he actually likes them now, of course; after Jonathan Greenblatt took exception to Oolong promoting that antisemtic tweet the other day, Oolong took exception to him and his organisation:

After Musk began to face a backlash for endorsing the antisemitic tweet, he took aim more specifically at the ADL.
He wrote, without providing any evidence for these claims, “The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”

Which I suppose is what they deserve for being foolish enough to believe the prick when he said he opposed antisemitism while letting Nazis run rampant there. Meanwhile Linda Yaccarino, the whole point of whom becomes ever more mysterious and obscure, is quoted as saying this in the BBC article:

“X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board – I think that’s something we can and should all agree on,” Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino posted on Thursday.
“X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination,” she added. “There’s no place for it anywhere in the world – it’s ugly and wrong.”

I read someone on Bluesky interpreting that as really meaning Jews should stop hating white people and everyone else should stop hating Oolong in particular, which I initially thought was a bit uncharitable but only very slightly. Cos after that initial antisemitic he boosted, he decided to do it again:

Look, I’m a white person myself, as you may have noticed, being a white person is one of the things that I do on a regular basis, and… well… I don’t hate “white people”. I hate some individual white people, but not as a whole class of human beings… I just view them with a certain degree of irony and awareness that, historically, we could’ve done some things a lot better than we did (and in some cases still do). And I don’t see that just being white is an achievement or anything. Weird, though, that the only people I’ve ever read or heard say “white people are supposed to hate themselves” are white people like these ones who clearly don’t and how dare you suggest they should.

And Elon’s now actively encouraging them. He’s not just sitting back and letting “free speech” do its thing. He’s agreeing with them and thereby promoting them and pushing the message out. It only goes downhill from there. Great.

In-fight on the right!

It’s been rather pleasing over the last day or so to watch a couple of major figures on the right do what the left has always been good at, i.e. trying to tear strips off each other. Ben Shapiro has apparently been very unhappy with some of Candace Owens’ comments on the current Israel debacle:

…like that one. Incendiary stuff! And no, her boss did not like it, and this is where the discourse went:

I mean, Ben Shapiro has been unhinged for a while, Israel’s war against Palestine has just made him a bit more so than usual… but apart from that Candace has no place calling anyone unhinged; it was her, after all, who said Hitler would’ve been fine if he’d just limited his efforts to Germany. And that’s a concept that requires a special sort of fuckwit to express it seriously.

And Ben Shapiro knew that she was that special sort of fuckwit when he hired her. Which he did in 2021, two years after she said that thing about Hitler. Two years after it was known that she said it. Two years after a recording of her saying it was played at a Congressional hearing. In short, Ben Shapiro had to know that Candace had said this idiotic thing when he hired her. He must know now, cos if he didn’t at that time I’m sure he was duly informed. And he clearly hasn’t cared about that enough to, you know, get rid of her or NOT FUCKING HIRING HER TO BEGIN WITH.

Now that she’s dared to defy the official line about Israel being above reproach, though, suddenly Ben’s not happy with her (curious, though, that he’s telling her to quit rather than fire her). He was clearly OK with her being, you know, OK with Hitler if only he hadn’t presumed to conquer the rest of Europe. He’s not OK with her criticising the activities of the nation state of Israel. Apparently that bothers him more than the heinous treatment of Jews in the Third Reich. Almost like the state of Israel matters more to him than Jewish people…?

Maybe. I don’t know. But we do know he’ll only stand up for Jewish people up to a certain point:

Points to Ben for criticising Kanye’s antisemitism, but he was willing to look past it even so; Kanye being a pro-life conservative mattered more than him being a racist piece of shit who probably doesn’t think Ben is a real Jew. And when the orange cunt said this about American Jews, he agreed it was not only not even antisemitic but perfectly true.

And Ben being “Israel rather than the Jews” kind of would be in keeping with the American Christian right, which is all for Israel cos their book tells them the world has to end there, so Israel has to survive. The Jews don’t, of course, they have to convert, but Israel has to be looked after so Armageddon comes like the book insists it must. I can envisage Ben Shapiro being OK with that, maybe not so much the conversion thing, but again he’ll find a way to ignore that so he can keep in with the cool kids…

Until the crunch comes and both him and Candace realise they were never more than useful idiots for these scumbags and the Christian right they love so much hates them both and will cast them aside the minute they no longer need them. That day will hurt. And it should, because both of them will have thoroughly deserved it.

Cyberpiss

The latest tragic development in Oolong Husk’s increasing degeneration, apart from his endorsement of outright antisemitism, is his new… beer.

Cyberbeer. For fuck’s sake. What do you do, drink it while your Cybertruck is driving itself and crashing through other vehicles? I suppose at least the logo doesn’t appear to have 3 K’s hidden in it… But, being an Oolong product, not only is it preposterously expensive, it’s apparently shit:

Brian appears to be a Tesla fan, which I presume is what motivated the purchase in the first place. Let this be a lesson to him and all of us: just because someone you’re a fan of has merch available doesn’t mean you have to buy all of it…

The Colour of the Daleks?

So, apart from the actual new episodes with David Tennant, the BBC’s special event for the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who is… a colourised version of the original Dalek serial. Which I already thought was a bit “oh”, but they’ve also revealed it’s been edited down to 75 minutes—which is rather less than half the original length of the story, which was a seven-episode serial—and, well, now samples of the colour work have been released…

…And I’m now even less certain of what to think about it. I suppose at least the colour is kind of “60s”-ish, in that I’ve seen quite a lot of 60s films where the colour has that sort of visual character (I have absolutely no idea what else to call it), though I do wonder how accurate it is to whatever the actual colouring of the set would’ve been… cos even in monochrome film & TV things have to be a certain colour for it to register as a particular shade of grey on the screen. Cf. the castle in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc which was apparently some nasty pink colour in reality, or indeed the TARDIS console, which was actually a kind of green…

…which it noticeably isn’t in this picture, they apparently went for the colour it was supposed to be instead… and I find myself oddly alarmed by the TARDIS control room floor… Also, isn’t this just a rehearsal picture or some such? This shot never appears in the episode, so why did they colourise it? Indeed, they’ve done rather more than that:

See a couple of details missing from the colour photo?

…Although at least the blue floor is kind of historically “correct”, as this rather rare actual colour photo (taken during rehearsals for episode eight of “The Daleks’ Masterplan” a couple of years later) shows. Still not sure about the shade, nor indeed Barbara’s cardigan…

But the thing I’m most unsure of is that it also has a new score by Mark Ayres, and that’s something that really bothers me somehow. I’ve no doubt it’ll be perfectly fine, Ayres won’t do a poor job or anything like that… I don’t know, it just feels like it’s going rather beyond the original remit of the restoration team which was to not add anything to the episodes (unless as optional extras on the DVD releases), and I’m curious as to where this will leave the original Tristram Cary score, which I think is kind of important to the serial. (EDIT: later on Thursday I found David Graham—who I had no idea was still alive—is also redoing his Dalek voices. Somehow this doesn’t bother me at all.)

So yeah, I have reservations, and I will be buying it as soon as the blu-ray comes out. OBVIOUSLY.

If I fell…

The greatest thing on social media today has to have been the hypothetical skydiving Christian baby:

What, and I can’t stress this enough, THE FUCK

The good people of Bluesky saw this and, well, went to town on it, and I’ve collected my favourites here (keeping it behind a cut cos otherwise it’ll blow out the front page of the blog):

Continue reading “If I fell…”

49

Boo!

Hi, it’s me, birthday boy. On Friday the 15th of November 1974, at approximately quarter past five in the afternoon, your humble scribe popped into existence, and I don’t suppose I was terribly impressed about this situation. And somehow I’m still here 49 years later. Every time another birthday has rolled around since The Cerebro-Vascular Accident of June 9 2009, I find myself hopefully confused as to how I’ve made it through another year… and the longer I persist, the more confused I am about how and why. I was kind of impressed at making it to 35, having had that stroke at 34, that was big enough… and then the birthdays kept racking up, I made it through my late 30s, to 40, to my early 40s, mid-40s, into my late 40s and now on the downhill slide to my half century. I don’t understand it. Especially cos I don’t think I look too bad for nearly half a century, hairline’s not what it used to be but at least it’s still its natural colour, the white bits are generally limited to the beard, and the skin’s not too bad considering I do nothing to take care of it, or indeed of myself generally. Anyway, confused or not, here I still am.

One-Way Street

Book #13 for this year. I am well out of the habit of reading non-fiction… which, to be sure, is mostly because I’m not reading much in general (that reading slump persists) but also most of what I am reading is fiction. So a couple of considerations drove me towards this: one of my favourite Youtubers, RM Brown, did it recently for his Patreon subscriber-only thing (albeit I think he’s using the older American version, not this later one for Penguin), and I’ve owned it for nearly ten years so it’s high time that I did, probably.

Back at uni when I was doing film studies we had to get acquainted with Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, and hitherto that’s all the Benjamin I’ve read. 30 years later, I am at least now acquainted with more of his stuff—I suppose this is best described as a “greatest hits” collection—and, frankly, uncertain what to make of it. The introduction by Amit Chaudhuri was unhelpful, and I’ll confess to coming close to not finishing the thing after I’d ploughed through the title work. I’m glad I did persist, cos I did find things of value, but it was difficult and I’m not sure how worthwhile the effort actually was… is it the sort of thing that just travels at a certain height above my head or is there actually less to it than meets the eye? I don’t know. I’m sure I would’ve got a lot more out of the essays on Proust and Kafka if I were actually familiar with them both. But a lot of the rest is kind of slow-going dense abstraction, particularly in “One-Way Street” itself, a collection of aphoristic observations that I found largely impenetrable. I don’t really feel like my time was wasted as such, but equally I’m not sure how much I got out of it.

Nature is healing

Jehovah’s Witnesses have evidently returned to door-knocking after the pandemic (having limited themselves to leaving letters in the mailbox during it), as I discovered when they rudely awoke me this morning. Given that we actually have a Kingdom Hall here in Matraville, I’m kind of surprised we don’t get more of them… and I’m not sorry that we don’t. I kind of liked the mailbox phase. I did appreciate that the letters were handwritten, and I appreciated even more that they didn’t disturb me in any way…

Found footage?

As ever, there’s talk of lost Doctor Who episodes having been found, and there’s equal talk on social media of them not being found; someone claims to have spoken to the collector in the article and apparently the latter said the episodes in question are one that have been “known” about for years and not new discoveries. However, in recent times there has been another list of supposedly actual new finds, which I quote from the comments of a YT video about it:

Myth Makers 2 & 4
Smugglers 2 & 4
Highlanders 2
Space pirates 4-6
Galaxy Four 4

Now I suspect this is about as bullshit as most Doctor Who missing episode rumours, but I find it oddly believable, cos while I’m sure most Whovians would welcome the return of any of the missing 97, I don’t think any of these are really on anyone’s list of priorities for rediscovery, especially not “The Space Pirates”. We’d take those episodes, sure, but we’d rather get “Tenth Planet” episode four or “The Power of the Daleks” or “Marco Polo”. I think the fact this rumour involves such lower priority episodes actually makes it more likely… though obviously I wouldn’t actually believe it until the footage actually appeared.