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Fri, 05 Nov 2021
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Russian Plane Carrying 65 Passengers Crashes Outside Moscow

Saratov plane crash

A Russian passenger plane has crashed after leaving Moscow's Domodedovo airport with 71 people on board.


The Saratov Airlines jet vanished minutes after take-off and crashed near the village of Argunovo, about 80km (50 miles) south-east of Moscow.

All those on board are thought to have died, officials told Russian media.


TV

Why the media just can't handle Jordan Peterson

Jordan B Peterson
© unknown
Jordan B. Peterson
Watching the mainstream press try to interview University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson, one thing becomes exceedingly clear: they literally can't even.

While the above expression makes my inner grammar Nazi cry, it is possibly the best description of the predictable sequence of befuddled expressions, desperate strawmen, and whiffed shots fired at Peterson from a growing list of increasingly cautious media personalities.

Cathy Newman's interrogation of the professor has garnered over five million views, and if one were to judge its contents solely on the consequent collection of memes, pundit reactions, and response/splice videos, one would conclude that Dr. Peterson spent 30 minutes deriding and verbally dominating his interviewer, banging his fists on the table and shouting like right-wing cherry bomb Alex Jones - but that's not Dr. Peterson's style.

Instead, the quiet Canadian spent a half-hour discussing free speech, the gender pay gap, and Pepe the frog in such a calm and reasonable manner that even his use of the occasional swear word sounded as though someone swapped "golly gee" out of his script at the last moment.

The interview became a sort of fulcrum for the broader media narrative surrounding Peterson: articles before the interview tried to cast him as a nerdier Milo Yiannopoulos; those since have been notably cautious about casting him as anything.

People familiar with the New Testament might recall a passage from the book of Matthew that details a series of exchanges between Jesus and the Pharisees that concludes with this memorable phrase: "And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions."

Peterson, fond of incorporating biblical themes into his teaching, has almost backed the media into such a corner. In fact, the most recent interviews and articles regard him with a strange blend of cautious hostility and grudging respect.

Quenelle

Oscar-winning film director blasts #MeToo: 'This witch hunt is poisoning our society'

Michael Haneke
© Jean-Paul Pelissier / Reuters
Film director Michael Haneke
Celebrities criticizing the #MeToo movement have been joined by another big personality from the movie industry. Oscar-winning Austrian film director Michael Haneke called it a "witch hunt" that "poisons" the social climate.

"I regard this hysteria of rash judgments that is spreading at the moment as absolutely disgusting," director and screenwriter Haneke said in an interview with the Austrian daily Kurier.

"People are just being finished off in the media, [their] lives and careers are being ruined," he said. "Any kind of rape or [sexual] coercion should be punished," he stressed, but what bothers him about the ongoing debate around allegations of sexual abuse targeting celebrities is its "totally unperceived malignance, the blind rage that is not based on facts."

Star of David

Israeli 'Democracy': Illegal settlers attempt to abduct Palestinian boys in West Bank

Israel settlers Palestinian
© Wisam Hashlamoun/Apaimages
Israeli forces stand in front of Jewish settlers who are harassing Palestinians in the West Bank
Israeli settlers have attempted to abduct two Palestinian children in the village of Madma to the south of the West Bank city of Nablus, Quds Press has reported.

A member of the village council Talaat Ziyadeh said that a group of settlers descended from the illegal settlement of Yitzhar, raided the village and chased two Palestinian children yesterday.

He said that these children are shepherds and they were feeding their goats on the outskirts of the village when the settlers attempted to abduct them.

Comment: These illegal settlers attempted to abduct children and what did the world's 'most moral' army do? They provided back-up in order to help these twisted individuals. The New Arab reports that both seem to be re-grouping in order to continue terrorizing this village:
The villagers are fearful of another attack as settlers and Israeli forces remain in the area south of the village, it was reported.

The area surrounding the northern West Bank city of Nablus has one of the highest concentrations of Israeli settlements and has often been a flashpoint for violence.

Yitzhar settlers are especially notorious for their fanaticism and violent acts against Palestinians, having routinely destroyed Palestinian olive groves and vandalised Palestinian property.



Info

Jordan Peterson: A man hated for speaking plain common sense

Jordan Peterson
© Toronto Star via Getty Images
Just imagine that somebody told you that men and women are biologically different, that people ought to take responsibility for their own lives, and modern life often seems hollow and meaningless.

Imagine that this person went on to say that young men often lack a sense of initiative, too many university courses have fallen victim to trendy dogmas, and free speech sometimes means telling people what they don't want to hear.

Would you shudder in horror? Would you rush onto social media to condemn him as a dangerous lunatic? Or would you, perhaps, nod in agreement at what seemed like plain common-sense?

Bizarro Earth

'You cannot be a virgin, you are white': Rapist gets 11yrs in jail for rape

gavel
© Chris Ryan / Getty Images
A court in England has convicted a man of raping a teenager while holding a sharpened piece of wood to her throat. Ahmed Abdoule, 33-year-old Somali national, was sentenced by Hull Crown court to 11 years in prison.

The court heard how the victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, cried and pleaded to be spared during her ordeal. Like most rape victims, she knew Abdoule prior to the attack, which took place at his home in east Hull. Abdoule locked her inside, then forced her upstairs using a sharpened piece of wood as a weapon before carrying out the assault. Abdoule reportedly told the victim, "my country would love you."

2 + 2 = 4

Why there's no evidence of a murder wave targeting gay Americans

gay pride flag

"Why Are Murders Of Gay And Bi Men Up A Staggering 400 Percent?" asks the headline atop Michelangelo Signorile's new HuffPost column, shared at least 13,000 times so far "Hint: This Alarming Surge Has Taken Place Since Donald Trump Became President," adds HuffPost unsubtly in a tweet promoting the column.

If your response was to wonder first whether such murders are in fact skyrocketing, yours is the right instinct.

Comment: Beyond Islamophobia: The Truth About Salafism and Jihadism


Newspaper

How to spot a hit piece

jordan peterson
© How to: Academy
We've shown in previous analyses that the media's coverage of Jordan Peterson has been biased. But articles about him this week in Mic and The Guardian illustrate a distinct case of dishonorable journalism. What do we mean by dishonorable? Broadly, this is when a news outlet reports disparaging and unsubstantiated opinions about a person, but presents them as facts. It often includes attacking a person's character rather than his or her arguments or actions.

Specifically, in the case of Mic and The Guardian, dishonorable coverage meant:
  • Accusations against Peterson were made without sufficient evidence or well-reasoned arguments to back them up.
  • Facts and quotes were cherry-picked and taken out of context.
  • His arguments were oversimplified or misrepresented.
  • The distortion in the articles mostly supported the point of view that Peterson is a dangerous right-winger who is fighting to preserve old-fashioned social structures.
These distortions are illustrated by our overall integrity ratings of 14 and 17 percent for The Guardian and Mic, respectively (Click here for an in-depth look at our spin, slant and logic ratings). In other words, the articles were not objective, balanced or well-reasoned. Furthermore, they contained factual inaccuracies and misleading data.

Comment: It's not just Peterson that gets the spin treatment in the media. The methods describes are all too common in mainstream media reports. Pretty much anything that even sounds like it to gets close to the 'truth' of the matter is turned into something else. Often a mix of truth and lies - makes the disinformation pill a lot easier to swallow. See also:


Bomb

Europeans are losing the place they call home

Migrants in Sweden
© atranswe / Flickr.com - BY-SA 2.0
Migrants in Sweden
I have travelled to the places where migrants continue to land and the places where they keep ending up. Everywhere I have gone I have come to the same conclusion: our continent is in the process of self-murder.

Amid the day-to-day distraction of life and politics, it is easy to forget this biggest event of our time. All pale into insignificance besides the story of the loss by Europeans of the only place we had to call home.

Whenever this country does have a debate about immigration it is minuscule. It tends to focus on Calais. The British public sees footage of people sitting in makeshift tents or hurling missiles into the roads to slow the trucks down so they can board them and break into Britain.

Comment: It's true many are economic migrants, however the West's illegal wars in the Middle East and irrational immigration and failed 'multicultural' policies have amplified the problem to catastrophic levels, and a backlash is bubbling: Also check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Weapons of Mass Migration: Interview with Michael Springmann on Europe's Migrant Crisis


Briefcase

The myth of cure-all female corporate boards: Not a guarantee companies will do better or act more humane

boardroom
© Postmedia News
Bill C-25 would force businesses to open their diversity policies to shareholders or explain why they don’t.
Female dominance on corporate boards is no guarantee that companies will perform better or more humanely

The Liberals are looking at an amendment to diversity-themed Bill C-25 that would force businesses to open their diversity policies to shareholders or explain why they don't ("comply or explain"). At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, "Companies should have a formal policy on gender diversity and make the recruitment of women candidates a priority."

Earnest leftie that he is, Trudeau attributes women's imbalance on business boards - at present they are at 14 per cent, up from 11 per cent in 2015 - to bias alone, therefore a problem requiring state intervention to redress.

Trudeau should watch the now infamous interview (more than six million views at last count, three of them mine) between Jordan Peterson and BBC's Channel 4 reporter Cathy Newman, another earnest leftie, who can't get her head around the notion that bias isn't tenable as a unitary explanation for gender disparity at corporate summits.

Comment: See also: Five Feminist Lies We Take For Granted