Why does PJ Media hate that Starbucks racial training video so much?

Here's the video, which I think is good:



PJ Media's Jim Treacher surrounds it with snark that assumes you think just like him:

Do you want to see a preview of the training video? You're curious, aren't you? It's gotta be exactly what you're expecting it to be, right?

Right.

[VIDEO]

We'll now take a quick break so you can get all that cringing out of your system.

[15-20 MINUTES LATER]

Done? Whew. Yeah, all the money in the world can't buy common sense, but it can buy a guest appearance by rapper and activist Common.

I am cringing at something. I'm cringing at that style of internet writing. It's like somebody figured out how to look — in text alone — like a super-casual asshole and now it's just standard internet writing. So tiresome! I feel as though I'm constantly being poked in the ribs and expected to laugh at all kinds of mundane things, like an earnest expression of the desire to make all customers in a coffeeshop feel welcome.

"Sudden Althouse."

I think rhhardin put his finger on something real yesterday, in that "proper focus is the truth" post, where the discussion turned to whether the Daily Caller writer Jim Treacher is "thin-skinned." A commenter named mr said:

Treacher can be witheringly funny, but he is also famously thin-skinned. He simply cannot allow anyone to say anything critical about him in a comment section without jumping in to insult the commenter.

And pm317 immediately added: "Althouse is famously thin-skinned." Then rhhardin — who's been commenting (enigmatically, interestingly, wisely, and weirdly) for at least 10 years — said:

There's also "sudden Althouse."

It's not thin-skinned exactly.

It appears as an out-of-the-blue defense in some thicket where the game is not apparent.

My sudden response to that was "You must enjoy being a spectator at this hard-to-see game, you weirdo." But the truth — to properly focus on the truth — is that he figured something out. I have an instinct — somewhat like the more conventional urge to defend the underdog — to make an out-of-the-blue defense in some thicket where the game is not apparent.

"The proper focus is the truth."

Said Jim Treacher in the comments to my post "What did the Charlie Hebdo terrorists say to Sigolène Vinson, the woman whose life they spared?," which is about his post "New York Times Reports On Muslim Proselytizing During Charlie Hebdo Attack, Then Deletes It."

My post calls attention to a third version of the NYT story, which lets us see that the first version was based on a quote from Vinson to the French radio website RFI, which Vinson now disowns. The Times did its own interview with Vinson and seems to have been trying to get the story straight. It doesn't say that RFI misquoted her, only that she disputes the quote and says something else now. Times readers are left to speculate on their own.

What did the Charlie Hebdo terrorists say to Sigolène Vinson, the woman whose life they spared?

Jim Treacher, at The Daily Caller, has a piece titled "New York Times Reports On Muslim Proselytizing During Charlie Hebdo Attack, Then Deletes It." He notes that earlier the Times had quoted Vinson saying she was told "I’m not going to kill you because you’re a woman, we don’t kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself." And now the article only has her saying "Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you... You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right."

I go over to the NYT site and search for the name Sigolène Vinson. It appears only in one article, apparently the same article that Treacher is talking about, "Recounting a Bustling Office at Charlie Hebdo, Then a ‘Vision of Horror.'" What it says now is:

Sigolène Vinson...  disputed a quotation attributed to her and carried on the website of the French radio service RFI stating that the gunman had told her she should convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover herself. Instead, she told The New York Times in an interview, the gunman told her: “Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you.” He spoke in a steady voice, she said, with a calm look in his eyes, saying: “ ‘You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right.’ ” Then she said he turned to his partner, who was still shooting, and shouted: “We don’t shoot women! We don’t shoot women! We don’t shoot women!”

So is this a case of NYT censorship of something deemed unfit to print? In the current version, it certainly looks as though what happened was: 1. The NYT relied on the French radio report, 2. The NYT sought its own interview and deleted the disputed quote immediately while rewriting the paragraph, and 3. The NYT published an improved paragraph that included the French radio version, the fact that Vinson denies saying that, and the original reporting of a new attempt by Vinson to say what she was told.

Now, what do you do with that — criticize the NYT for suppressing the Islam-related material? I don't think that's the right focus, at least once the third version of the text has appeared. The proper focus is the mind of Sigolène Vinson, who went through an unfathomably traumatic experience, and who has been telling her story while the murderers she faced remain at large and while the terrorist mission — of unknown dimension and ferocity — rages on, without perceptible end. She must feel like a marked woman. I suspect — and the NYT gives me all the material I need to suspect — that the quote from the French radio was accurate, but that after seeing it made public, she got very scared and desperate to censor the part about religion. The new quote is stripped of references to Islam and to the subordination of women and refurbished into a quote stating the widely shared traditional value against killing women in a military operation.

Treacher's attack on the NYT is extremely harsh, by the way. He assumes he knows the motive of the editor who changed the text:

Because you’re one of America’s moral, ethical, and intellectual betters, and you don’t want it to be true. Your reporter hastily left that inconvenient truth in her story by accident, so you airbrushed it out, without any acknowledgment, to preserve the narrative. You turned it into, “Hey, maybe these guys aren’t so bad after all. They didn’t kill the women, right? Let’s not be too hasty.”

Because that’s your job.

The New York Times is garbage. 

UPDATE: Jim Treacher responds in the comments to this post and has a new post at The Daily Caller acknowledging the new version of the story in the NYT. This is too complicated to respond to in an update to this post, so I'm working on a new post.

ADDED: Here's the new post: "The proper focus is the truth."

What's wrong with that charming Italian PSA that tries to teach the good but obvious lesson men don't hit women?

This is viral, with over 7 million views in 3 days:



I got the link from Instapundit, who presents it like this:

JIM TREACHER: What Happens When You Try To Get A Bunch Of Little Boys To Slap A Little Girl In The Face? “SPOILER: They won’t do it. And if that surprises you for some reason, apparently you’re the target audience for this Italian PSA.”

Neither Treacher nor Instapundit (or, I think, any of their commenters) mentions what troubled me. Before these little boys are ordered by the unseen voice to slap the girl, they are directed to "caress" her, and they do. The girl never speaks. She's simply delivered to the presence of the boy for admiration, and the boys comply, which is easy enough, since a very pretty girl has been chosen for this performance. The girl is never asked: Do you want this little boy to caress you?

And I'm not only complaining about the silence of the girl, the absence of consent to the caress. I don't like the sexualization of the boys. Why is the boy expected to act like an adult — a stereotypical adult male heterosexual — and want to caress a female because she is beautiful? Why is the off-screen voice ordering a boy to do sexual things to a little girl?

Oh — you may want to say — but it's only a "caress." A mother might caress a baby. 

No. A boy finds himself on camera and is asked to step up to the role of an adult in the relations between the sexes. He is invited to do to a girl the things that a man does to a woman, and he draws the line at hitting. Good for him! Mere children know that this is wrong, so you grown men should be ashamed if you don't know any better. That's the message here.

By the way, Treacher and Instapundit seem to miss even that message. The ad-makers weren't trying to get the boys to hit the girl, nor did they mean to surprise us. The idea was: Everyone — even a child — knows this is wrong, so anyone who thinks this is what men do is way outside of the norm.

I'm thinking that Treacher and Instapundit were too quick to find another example of anti-male propaganda.

Mashed-up mascara'd Olbermann.

Ha.

"It’s interesting to watch Katie Couric drop her pretense of impartiality..."

"... as with JournoList, it’s nice to have solid confirmation of what we’ve long suspected."

Oh, ridiculous. In private, who didn't have a laugh at the names of Sarah and Bristol Palin's kids? I bet the Palin family members themselves laugh about it. "Solid confirmation"?! Spare me.

Are we going to read The Daily Caller — which is supposed to be the conservative answer to The Huffington Post?

What entitles a website to be perceived as important from Day 1? Arianna Huffington pulled it off, though I certainly resisted it at first. The success of HuffPo presumably created the opening for a conservative counterpart, but who can simply announce that they've got it?  And didn't Pajamas Media already do that?

Howard Kurtz tells us about this Tucker Carlson project, The Daily Caller, which begins today:

[Carlson's] $3 million in funding comes from Wyoming financier Foster Friess, a big-time GOP donor.

But Carlson insists this won't be a right-wing site: "I don't feel guilty about or ashamed in any way of saying we'll cover the people in power," he says, dismissing the capital's Republicans as "totally powerless."

"Our goal is not to get Republicans elected. Our goal is to explain what your government is doing. We're not going to suck up to people in power, the way so many have. There's been an enormous amount of throne-sniffing," he says, a sly grin beneath the mop of brown hair. It's disgusting."...

The focus will be on the White House and Congress; early stories will examine Medicare fraud and wasteful stimulus projects, along with a Carlson piece on the latest White House party-crasher, Carlos Allen....

So I go to the website and here's the teaser for the top story:

That's what you decided to throw in my face on the morning of your first day?! I guess I'm way out of your target audience. Jeesh. That's lurid. And Carlos Allen means nothing to me. You've got an unknown black man posing with 3 breast-wielders, for no obviously apparent reason, making me reflexively assume you're trying to attract childish men and... uh... racists?

And the whole look of the place is old-fashioned and tabloid. HuffPo had a really great aesthetic from the start. Why did they make it look like that? Everyone on the staff must be design-blind. Or there's just something impossible about using Wyoming financier money to hire a great graphic designer.

Much as I like Jim Treacher — who has a blog over there — his logo is so atrocious I feel like...



... well, let's just say it makes the Pajamas Media bathrobe look chic.

Why is Ta-Nehisi Coates shouting an obscenity at me?

He writes:

Ta-Nahesi Coates. Fuckin' Althouse. My name's at the top of the blog and I still can't get Ann's respect.

The link on "Fuckin' Althouse" goes to this post of mine:

Hey! That's sexism against Sarah Palin!

When Glenn Beck says it.

My post links to Coates calling out Glenn Beck for sounding like a sexist. It's phrased to imply that Coates probably wouldn't call out a liberal for sexism, but now that there's an opportunity to slam Beck, he's up for defending Palin. Now, explain what set Coates off in this new post where he curses me. Maybe he didn't understand my post and thinks I didn't realize I was reading his blog (since I didn't use his name in my post — I just linked). I'm not really sure. Perhaps he's so ready to hate me that he didn't pick up my bloggerly comic concision. But — wow! — there he is on The Atlantic website spewing an obscenity at me for...  nothing.

As if to cover up his brutishness, he combed through my comments section and found something offensive that one person said. He quotes someone named "grapp" — with no available profile— who said "I might respect Ta-Nehisi Coates more if he has less of a jackass ghetto name and was more of a serious thinker." Grapp — who claims to be a black woman — wrote at the end of a long thread, and 2 of the 4 comments left on the thread take Grapp to task. Nevertheless, Coates goes on to say "She'd respect me more if I "has less of a jackass ghetto name." He says he finds the comment hilarious — presumably because of the typo/grammar error. Because of the way he began his post by weirdly accusing me of some sort of disrespect related to his name, he's cued his commenters to trash me, which they basically do.

I guess to be like him I should select the nastiest comment to make him look even worse than he made himself look. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to quote a sensible commenter there:

Come on, TNC, just a couple of days ago you rightfully chided people for talking at strawmen, and here you're writing as if Althouse herself, and not a commenter, made the crack about the name. It looks as if a number of the commenters here have not realized it wasn't Althouse herself who wrote it. The commenter is not the blogger.

There's no rule that says a blogger has to police her comment section and delete offensive posts; some like an open comments policy and some like a moderated comments policy. Althouse has an open comments policy and as a direct result attracts some odious commenters as well as some very good ones.

Come on, Ta-Nehisi Coates. A very serious apology is in order.

ADDED: Now, I see that the problem was that I had a tag for his name and I misspelled it. That brought an obscenity... and a connection to a commenter who took a racial point of view. What a jerk.

IN THE COMMENTS:  AC245 said:

I was curious to see how many other places on the net misspelled his name in the same way (as "Nahesi") that Althouse did.

1. Salon's Glenn Greenwald has it spelled that way on his blogroll.

2. Here's a post by "Bitch Ph.D." praising him as wise.

3. Mark Hemmingway has a post on The Corner mentioning Coates, Obama, and hip-hop.

4. This post on Pandagon "corrects" Coates that one cannot be both a feminist and a PUMA.

5. It's also spelled "Nahesi" on the blogroll of The New Yorker.

6. There's a post by Enchanting Juno who says "Ta-Nahesi Coates - who may just be my favorite blogger of all time..."

And that's when I got bored, after browsing through just the first 3 pages of the over 20,000 Bing results for "Nahesi".

I didn't go through any of the 256 instances of "fuckin'" on ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com that Bing found, so it's possible that he's also hurled the vulgarity he graced Althouse with at every other person on the internet who's dared to dis him by unintentionally misspelling his name when linking to his blog. But for some reason, I rather doubt it.

The New Yorker, eh? Ha ha. Apparently, the topic of sexism is like the topic of having your name misspelled for Coates. (AC245 provides links for his 6 items. Go inside if you want that.)

And grapp came back and said:

Althouse, I apologize for leaving a comment that caused Ta-Nehisi Coates to cuss you out.

Yes, I am a black woman. Really. Moreover, I'm heartily sick of names that no one can pronounce, and fed up of people in the community who get angry cuz they seem to think that ALL blacks automatically know how to pronounce the crazy names.

Coates has demonstrated to you why I have no respect for him as a thinker. Ah, there I go, marching out of lockstep again!

And:

I had a typo with 'has' which should've been 'had', I think. Coates, that great mental giant, seems to think that a typo is worth crowing over. Lame.

I assume he found it funny because it gave you the appearance of speaking like a stereotypical black person while you were making fun of his name for being stereotypically black. It's like correcting spelling while making a spelling error.

AND: My own first name is also hard to spell, even as it is easy to spell.

IN THE COMMENTS, PART 2: Susan said:

I'm a TNC reader, but what a weird issue for him to flip out over, given that his grammar and spelling are atrocious.

[Link.]

[Link]

Jim Treacher said:

Ann, I can't believe you showed such fuckin' disrespect to Ta-Tasilly Coat.

"OMG, can you believe Obama changed his mind about going to Copenhagen after all this stuff came out? It's like sprinting to board your ship at the last minute, and it's the Titanic."

"You're the Titanic. You are."

Jim Treacher has a dialogue with the global warming evangelist who lives in his head.