“Saatchi Cole” is a hack who went through RyeHigh J‑school. Her portfolio is weak despite having every advantage handed to her post-graduation. Koul is subjected to racist and sexist harassment on Twitter, neither of which ills has held her career back. Now, despite an obvious lack of seniority, she’s a “senior writer” at the content farm that manages to be worse than Arianna’s.
She has a deal for a book that seems plainly insipid. (Time will tell – I quite enjoyed And the Heart Says Whatever, a clear antecedent.) It’s called The Pursuit of Misery, which threatens to be Koul’s epitaph.
The value proposition Koul presents to her gullible, dogmatic, juvenile, ahistorical downtown-progressive audience is that of aggrieved but outrageous vizmin minx. It makes even less sense in practice than as described there. Her wuvvable/outlandish persona, expressed not just on the natural home of cyberbullying but in podcasts and radio appearances, is mistaken as evidence of strong womanhood, though not the type that is “tough, cold, terse, taciturn and prone to not saying goodbye when they hang up the phone.”
To an adult who has published longer than someone like Koul has lived, her outbursts come off as an unformed youthful persona and a deep well of future regret. If and when she finally grows up, once an actual Scaachi Koul comes into existence in lieu of the avatar she’s selling now, Koul is gonna look back with sorrow and embarrassment at how she destroyed her credibility and reputation at such a young age.
Then she’ll get a third book contract and will be poached to work as editor-in-chief of whatever even more meretricious and deplorable content farm boots today’s out of contention. She’s gonna win forever, despite being an obvious liability and a source of lethal gamma rays to all in her orbit. Eternal flowers shall bloom from what should be her career graveyard. For she is the right kind of people. This spunky Indian girl – like another poseuse, she’s really just a kid from Alberta – has battled one obstacle after another to get those opportunities handed to her with a knowing smile.
Koul’s status as agente provocateuse makes her an architect of her own demise, such demise being of course a figment of my imagination. She’s already doing great and will rocket to the top of her field, though that field is not “journalism” in any viable sense.
Here I have to wonder what estimable hirsute Haligonian Heeb Craig Silverman must be thinking. (Neither hack would comment when asked.) He’s editor-in-chief of – “founding editor for” – the Canadian arm of that content farm and has credibility out the ass.
Or had. Now he’s spattered with the entrails of Koul’s goring. Running a hefty Paul Watson exposé dipped Silverman’s toes back in the life-giving waters of journalism. It’s one posting in a throng, and, as an exception, does not disprove the rule, but it was a signal to the profession that Silverman planned to somehow stay serious. That seems like a tall order with a race-baiting harridan consuming all the oxygen.
Right and wrong victims of online abuse
Motivated by principle as so few are, I deplore the use of Twitter to attack and defame. But that is Twitter’s natural function. Abuse is an ineluctable outcome of the Internet in all its forms. I should know, because I’m coming up on 25 years online. (Koul is the same age.) My archives show I battled not only my own attackers but organized cyberbullies who targetted hapless civilians. And of course it’s a fine line, but there is a line. It’s been crossed umpteen times with Koul as target, but she’s tramped all over the line too.
As I write this, downtown-progressive circles are very concerned indeed at how those intrinsically beastly “white guys” have acted towards Scaachi Koul, a saintly harp seal manquée no one should get away with clubbing. I view this as rank hypocrisy, a complete absence of principle. Koul deserves to be defended not because what happens to her is wrong, her acolytes feel, but because she’s an adorable vizmin girl with correct thought. (They ignore Koul’s unclean hands.)
Whereas when I am assaulted online, now for decades, up to and not quite including actual legally defined defamation and in one case before a packed house in an auditorium, it’s the least I have coming to me. The structures I have set up to protect myself are proof those structures need to be barraged to defeat.
Meanwhile, poor Scaachi Koul, unclubbable-harp-seal eyes welling, has to stop using Twitter for a while. Unlike Jan Wong, Koul keeps her job and her book contract.
Koul got in trouble because her boss (in effect, Craig Silverman) let her botch a call for new minority contributors to their content farm. This will have to remain an exercise, but what would happen if an ex-Muslim woman applied to cover Islam, or a gay man who believes manhood is important applied to cover “LGBT” issues, or an MTF transgendered person who knows he’s still male applied to carry out months-long enterprise reporting on transgenderism and suicide? They’re the wrong kinds of seals and they’d be culled.
Progressive young nonwhite “journalists” are not interested in minority voices. They are obsessed with designating some thought as correct, some people worthy of protection and promotion, while endorsing ostracism and outright attack of everyone else. They claim they’re losers by virtue of race and sex (“gender”), yet they themselves are bent on designating a whole new set of winners. They aren’t underdogs – in “new media,” they run the show, and Koul owes them her career.