F**king Mondays: Pass The Sick Bucket Please
Russell Brand's wankery was on full display this past weekend.
It occurred to me that we’ve used “F**k/F**king” as a headline two days in a row, after having a long discussion on the podcast about trying not to swear. My apologies to our more sensitive readers for this. In our defense, we did run a poll for the headline of this column, and the results came in overwhelmingly for the R-rated choice — so it’s basically your fault!
Anyway, here’s your weekly dose of “F**king Mondays”!:
Don’t mess with Chris Rock
I haven’t watched all of Chris Rock’s live Netflix standup, but I did see the clips of him eviscerating Will Smith for assaulting him at the Oscars last year. It was utterly brutal and a reminder to never cross swords with a comedian. Rock waited almost a year to get his revenge for the slap heard across the world, and it was a dish served at sub zero temperatures. Warning, this clip is definitely NSFW:
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Was Smith justified in slapping Rock? Did Rock go too far in his comedy special? It’s a horrible situation, particularly given the extraordinary talents and achievements of both men.
Russell Brand, wanker
I wrote a long essay last week on Russell Brand’s infuriating interview with Joe Rogan and his idiotic take on the Ukraine/Russia war. Brand then went on Bill Maher’s show to further his image as a know-nothing blowhard by attempting to “both sides” the media. MSNBC’s John Heilemann wasn’t having any of it and was then subjected to a masterclass in evasive bullshit:
You’ll notice every example Brand uses to equate MSNBC/CNN with Fox News are ludicrous. Joe Rogan’s shameful, medically irresponsible promotion of Ivermectin to treat Covid was correctly called out by mainstream media outlets. Some CNN anchors did fail to note that Ivermectin is used for humans and isn’t just a “horse dewormer”. However, given the medicine was originally created for horses and the conspiracy theory was driving Americans to order the animal version of it (creating terrifying shortages for veterinarians, ranchers and farmers) you can see why the network refused to apologize for it. Does Brand really believe this is akin to Fox News promoting deranged conspiracy theories about Hugo Chavez funded voting machines putting Joe Biden in the White House? Similarly, Rachel Maddow’s claim in March of 2021 that if you took the Covid vaccines you wouldn’t get the disease was not the fake news Brand wanted his fans to believe. Here’s what Maddow actually said:
The CDC reported new data that shows that under real world conditions, not just in a lab, not just extrapolating from tiny numbers of test subjects but looking at thousands of front line health workers and essential workers who have gotten vaccinated and who have since been doing their jobs and living in a real world, not only are the vaccines for those folks, thousands of them, keeping those people from getting sick from COVID themselves, those vaccines are also highly effective at preventing those people from getting infected, even with non-symptomatic infection. And if you are not infected, you can`t give it to anybody else.
And I know this sounds like an incremental piece of news, but sit on this for a second enough to absorb what this means, right? What this means is that we can get there with vaccines. We can end this thing.
It means that instead of a vaccine being able -- excuse me, it means instead of the virus being able to hop from person to person to person to person, spreading and spreading, sickening some of them but not all of them, and the ones it doesn`t sicken don`t know they have it and they give it to mere poem because they didn`t recognize, right? Instead of the virus being able to hop from person to person to person, potentially mutating and becoming more virulent and drug resistant along the way, now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.
Maddow’s understanding of how vaccines work was certainly flawed, but there is absolutely no evidence she was willfully misleading her audience. Brand’s assertion that the vaccine “hadn’t been clinically trialed for transmission” was correct, but Maddow had not claimed they were either. In reality, Maddow was simply extrapolating from CDC director Rochelle Walensky’s suggestion that vaccinate people do not become infected or transmit the virus to others. The CDC later corrected Walensky’s statement to better reflect the agency’s uncertainty on the issue of transmission.
Brand basically took right wing conspiracy theories at face value and didn’t look any further lest the evidence contradicted his narrative that “both sides” are the same. Brand wouldn’t even discuss the topic at hand, which was the extraordinary tranche of text messages revealed in court showing interactions between Fox News executives and hosts that laid bare deliberate attempts to deceive and mislead their audience on the 2020 election. Given Brand’s lucrative business selling conspiracy theories on far right cesspit Rumble this isn’t really surprising.
Perhaps most infuriating about Brand’s appearance on Bill Maher was that he seemed completely incapable of listening to anyone else’s opinion. As with all narcissistic, charismatic guru types, this is probably because more than anything else, he just likes to hear his own voice.
Pass the sick bucket, please.
Banter on The Banter
A reader pens a thoughtful response to my defense of the mainstream media article:
I've been following Matt Taibbi since the Bush Jr administration, as he was one of the few voices not buying the bullshit about WMD, the Iraq War, etc. There were others, but they quickly got the boot (Jesse Ventura, Phil Donohue come to mind). I continued following him on his outstanding journalism during the financial crisis of 2008, and enjoyed his books "Griftopia" and "I Can't Breath" which covered Eric Garner and was praised by NYT for it's coverage of systemic racism.
In late 2020 I realized I hadn't heard much from him lately, and googled only to discover Substack which brought me here, and why I spend close to $4,000/year on various subscriptions.
I immediately read his most recent book "Hate Inc" which was published on Substack serialized [1] and it's central premise resonated with me, as I too started to feel like the shows I watched were sliding into the FOX News model, dropping all pretense of impartiality in favor of ratings from emotional outrage.
As for the Munk Debate in question, for starters, I pity anyone going against Douglas Murray in any debate. I suspect had he decided the other side, he could have delivered the same result. I felt embarrassed for Gladwell who I respect and Goldberg. They each were in previous Munk debates and I don't remember them coming off this disorganized and outmatched, but again, they weren't going up against Murray who could probably beat in a debate on whether I love my mother.
I will offer two critiques to your critique Ben.
1) Regarding the Russian Collusion, Taibbi is closer to the truth than the MSM was. I watched god-knows how many hours of Rachel Maddow convincing me that any day now Trump and his cronies were going down. It may be "Mandela syndrome" but I recall countless headlines of the NYTs setting me up for the glorious prospect of Trump being jailed for treason.
And it never happened. Nothing happened at all.
You say "There was a huge amount of evidence tying Trump’s campaign to the Kremlin, along with Trump’s business dealings with Russia over the years."
But nothing happened.
We spent millions of dollars on the investigation, millions of man hours pursuing every lead, we had the full might of the justice department, and we nothing happened.
I felt duped. I feel duped. You can tell me we have all this evidence, and it's the same thing I kept hearing for 3+ years.... so if we have all this evidence, why did nothing happen? Why did the final Mueller Report turn out to be a complete dissapointment.
2) Had Murray and Taibbi been more knowledgeable, they could have pressed the claim that the MSM got Covid wrong. Goldberg was 100% incorrect when she made the argument that if you listened to her (NYT) you would have been better off. That is demonstrably false.
The MSM was horribly wrong on Covid, and never once apologized or attempted to examine how they were lead astray. It's likely you aren't even aware of how wrong they are, but lets take a quick lap down memory lane:
"A year and a half after Sweden decided not to lock down, its COVID-19 death rate is up to 10 times higher than its neighbors"
https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-strategy-failed-higher-death-rate-2021-8
Sweden actually has the lowest all-cause mortality in the world of the 37 nations tracked by mortality.org. Lower than all her neighbors.
Even when this was true (briefly), the media never acknowledged that all of the Nordic countries returned kids immediately to school in spring 2020, had among the shortest closures in the world, and had the lowest masking rates in the world.
_________________________
Welcome to Iowa, a state that doesn't care if you live or die
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/10/iowa-lift-all-restrictions/
Right after this article published cases dropped in Iowa, identically to neighboring states. Additionally neighboring "doing it right" state Illinois has higher excess deaths
________________________
Georgia's experiment in Human Sacrifice
Nothing happened. Same outcome as "doing it right" states
_________________________
Germany Master Class in Science
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/21/germanys-coronavirus-response-masterful-science-communication.html
Germany went on to have one of the worst outcomes in Europe, again, worse than Sweden
____________
My response:
Thanks for the thoughtful response Michael. To answer your points:
1) I think Taibbi is partially correct in his critique of the MSM as it relates to Russiagate, but overall his reporting on it was incredibly misleading. As Goldberg pointed out there was far too much excitement and anticipation that something would happen to Trump after the Mueller investigation. This obviously turned out to be wishful thinking. However, the media didn't botch the story itself and for the most part accurately laid out the extremely worrying links between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin. It is worth noting Trump was terrified he would be impeached, so liberals weren't the only ones who thought the legal system would work. I can't for the life of me understand why anyone thinks Trump was exonerated. He wasn't and the evidence points to an incredibly suspicious relationship with Putin and the Kremlin.
2) The MSM and pretty much everyone has been wrong about Covid at one point or another. This isn't because journalists are untrustworthy or that they were engaged in a coverup -- it's because we were dealing a novel coronavirus that no one really understood. The scientific consensus on masks/vaccines/lockdowns has changed over time and the data shows covid effected different populations in many different ways. At The Banter we did our best to report on what the scientific consensus was at that specific time. It was (and is) the best we can do and the MSM broadly took that approach too. There was no conspiracy and no pre-ordained narrative, unlike the contrarians who almost always failed to subject their theories to scrutiny or challenge.
The MSM have mechanisms in place to rigorously fact check reporting and I can assure you every CNN/MSNBC/WaPo/NYT journalist had to run their stories through a team of very careful editors. Much of what Taibbi puts out now would never make it through any reputable editor's fact checking. There's a reason no one bothered to respond to his Twitter Files expose -- he omitted crucial context and made egregiously false statements about what was being said. You just had to read them to see how dishonest he was being.
As for Murray, I find him interesting and am often challenged by his arguments. In this case though, he showed himself to be a pompous arse putting up one straw man argument after another. He even had the gall to accuse the other side of doing the same. It was an extraordinary display. I mean no serious journalist went anywhere near the Hunter Biden laptop story when it first came out, and for damn good reason. It had red flags all over it at time when right wing conspiracy theories were rampant on social media. The story was properly fact checked, found to be legit, then reported on. Murray bizarrely admitted this, proving Goldberg and Gladwell's point. So yeah, he's a great debater, but when you sift through the elegant rhetoric you find a big pile of bullshit.
You can read the original article here.
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Ben
His thoughtful response may be thoughtful, but it's still bullshit. Absence of a conviction does not mean the evidence goes away.
"Getting COVID wrong" is anything he wants it mean.
Better correct this sentence : ‘Maddow's understanding of how vaccines work was certainly flawed, but there is absolutely evidence she was willfully misleading her audience.’…. I guess you are missing a very important NO as in NO EVIDENCE