You want to know why 53% of the American public is poised to blame Republicans for going over the fiscal cliff? You want to know why 53% of the American public still blames Bush for the recession caused by the housing bubble Bush had almost nothing to do with? [Incurious, dishonest] Journalists have failed to do their jobs. Their jobs used to be to provide the information that leads to the public making informed decisions. Today their job seems to be to repeat whatever moves the Left’s agenda forward.
And they get really snippy when you prove that they’re doing it.
During the campaign, Romney joked that his job was to present a clear vision for the future and the media’s job was to prevent anyone from hearing it.
He was right.
Yes, Romney was right. But whining doesn’t fix the problem — and Romney chose to run a campaign that declared it wouldn’t take on the press openly.
In a representative republic, one of two things is required to inform the electorate: a free and unbiased news media; or a news media whose biases are openly declared, and any pretense of neutrality or objectivity factored out of the rhetorical equation.
This latter doesn’t mean, naturally, that the truth can’t be told; instead, it forces people to engage the narrative slants, not just the information reported (or omitted), in order to decide who is most committed to reporting the news and who is most committed to shaping it — and by extension, them.
Which is why I prefer the latter configuration for the news media. A free press doesn’t have to be an unbiased press, and by purposely conflating the two, the left has been able since to take it over incrementally, creating a propaganda machine that enjoys the fictitious reputation for even-handedness and neutrality.
Fewer and fewer people trust the mainstream press. But the truth is, most people continue to get their news from a mainstream outlet, and though people are quick to claim they don’t believe the legacy media is being completely straight with them, they nevertheless absorb many of the left’s tropes through sheer repetition until the biases are practically institutionalized and the parameters narrative frame artificially set.
So the question becomes, how does a free people — the vast majority of whom don’t follow politics nearly as closely as we here in our sphere of information dissemination do — circumvent a propaganda machine in league with big government and progressive activism?
Because the only thing I can come up with is an EMP strike, and that seems just a little drastic, even for me.
Thoughts?
(h/t Pablo)
– The legacy press is just doing what the public allows it to get away with. The people only care about the next EBT check.
– That will not change until the well runs completely dry.
Thoughts?
Pick a candidate that has a pair. That would do for starters.
the first thing we need is the freedom to buy cable channels not packages
let obamawhores subsidize propaganda sluts like soledad obrien and the Anderson Cooper and snoozy snoozy fareed
there’s no reason anyone else should have to
– Reality also has a bitchin’ effect on the media fantasization of things. A perfect case in point: HuffPoop, after more than a week of totally ignoring the mob scene in Cairo finally had no choice but to start reporting it when things got so bad yesterday Morrsi had to flee the palace.
– Its almost comical watching them try to find some way to shore up Onama’s failshit policies in the ME.
We now have two generations through our schools producing citizens that don’t know anything about their history or how we got to where we are (and what they do know tends to be horribly wrong), unable to think clearly and critically, steeped in collectivist propoganda, lacking a work ethic, and addicted to the new opiate of the masses (reality TV and social media).
It is very difficult to see how they are going to be educated by anything other than an apocalyptic event as the Gods of the Copybook Headings step forward once more with terror and slaughter. This isn’t the first civilization to abandon its philophical and ethical moors as its leadership becomes insular, incestuous, fat, decadent, soft and begun to get high on their own supply of propoganda that they have become little gods on earth.
Sorry, mores not moors. Despairing over the boggy wasteland got me all discombobulated.
To reach people you have to go where they live, in the existential sense. Unfortunately, Charles pretty accurately summed up where that is…
Screw cable, and the horse it rode in on. Every time we end up in a hotel, or visiting a relative who has cable, it’s the same story: 500 channels, and nothing good on.
I get by just fine without cable, thank you very much. Isn’t much I want to watch that broadcast TV, Netflix instant watch and freebie Hulu don’t have. (And precious little of what I want to watch is on broadcast TV.)
Charles: Thought you might have meant “moorings.”
The media set the frame, and the frame determines the argument.
One of the best ways to counter a frame is to simply address it; the best way to get swept away by it is to ignore it. When we allow Stephanopolous or Too-Much-Candy Cowly to moderate our debates as a supposedly disinterested moderator, we’ve lost the frame entirely.
He was seriously flawed in other ways, but what Gingrich did to those moderators was masterful. He called them out, and it worked. Sununu did the same with Loneliness O’Brien on CNN.
Every, and I mean EVERY time a reporter asks some operative a biased question, or a question designed to trap them, they need to be called on it, right then and there. What we do now (either fall into the trap or politely sidestep it) may be more noble, but it simply doesn’t work.
People know in the back of their minds that the media is biased but they won’t connect the underlying frame with the actual lies they’re buying into unless it’s brought directly to their attention at the time it happens.
Good luck getting this to happen, though. We’ve been framed as “nasty” already, and we’re afraid to confront that.
We’ve become the media’s bitch.
– That won’t do it LB, not at this stage of moral civil decay. The multiheaded monster that feeds it, political theft, cynical vote buying, and divide and conquer class/race/gender warfare has to be done in by the river running dry.
– Historically, every time a society gets seduced into the Sodom and Gammorah fantasy, thats always how it eventually ends.
Tim Groseclose: Hollywood Snubs “2016” Documentary, MSM Ignores Story
What Charles said.
I think most people just don’t care, or have given up.
Because the only thing I can come up with is an EMP strike, and that seems just a little drastic, even for me.
Doesn’t go quite far enough, as far as I can tell. It seems to me that an underlying problem is that we, of the classical liberal mindset, believe and behave according to such things as honor, duty, responsibility and the rule of law. And that is used against us by those who SAY they support such things, but really have no intention of acting within that framework – in fact they specifically break the rules when dealing with us.
It is time to write a Second Declaration of Independence, laying out the reasons why we are no longer honoring the social contract of expected behavior and obedience to the law. We are in revolt, and I am not going to “play fair” any more.
To say nothing about taking on the
ManchurianCandidateoccupant of the Oval Office good man in over his head.Being so ethical that your ethics are destroyed is completely unethical.
We don’t need to redefine any social contract, for nobody ever agreed to commit suicide.
– Ostensibly it won’t be a problem in another 17 days, or rather the ‘problem’ will take on an entire;y different meaning.
– What the hell. With our luck, citing the “number of the beast” thing, we’ll all probably win the lottery the day armageddon kicks off.
JB, is that you?
How’s your tan?
Then there are the “Just Do It” sort of responses, some of which may work and some of which may not, yet will surely have some effect on the whole.
Because the only thing I can come up with is an EMP strike, and that seems just a little drastic, even for me.
The electrical grid collapsed and the lights went out to signal the end of the corrupt society and the beginning of the the long road to rebuilding in Atlas Shrugged. I don’t think that was merely symbolic.
Which, on that note, I’m thinking of changing my sig to “Eddie Willers” to better mark where I think I’m likely to fall in this scenario.
I am not redefining the social contract – I’m telling them that since they aren’t honoring the one we were all suppose to be working under, I won’t be honoring it, either.
Our media mouthpieces are simply the evangelists of the Gods of the Market Place. I’m done working actively against them; I’ve decided instead to pop some popcorn and await the arrival of the Gods of the Copybook Headings.
They won’t even break a sweat.
Somebod, somewhere, Treacher or Kaus perhaps, suggested that all that money dumped into Karl Rove’s SuperPAC would have been better spent on an independent cable news network.
At this point, all other options involve some manner of Going Galt and/or nuking it from orbit.
– Of course that also means we could all drive our brand new Beemers into the fiery pit instead of having to walk to our fate. So theres that.
rjacobse, yes you may be right, mentally I had a picture of ships adrift.
The (prescription) drugs are sometimes interfering with my ability to think and express my thoughts clearly.
My only hope is that we get off this paltry planet. That ought to by those serious about their freedom a few thousand years. Or maybe I read to much science fiction as a kid.
– The latest from Cairo, via Al Jazzera/Reuters.
What’s cool about writing a second Declaration of Independence is that you can use the original and just change a few references and there you are, finished.
If we’re lucky, we’ll get a Sulla. More likely we’ll get a Caesar, or worse, a Pompey.
Pompey? Do you mean Pompeius the Great of Rome, or Portsmouth Football Club? Either one works as an object lesson!
How about a Cincinattus? Or am I missing something? Again.
….or Portsmouth Football Club?
– Hey there, don’t be pickin’ on my hometown. We may be a bunch of godbothering red necks, but we DID survive the great flood of ’38.
Hanna Arendt, as I recall (maybe incorrectly or misremembering), thought it notably peculiar that human beings would want off the earth. Wasn’t that in The Human Condition? This is our place, was the way I think she thought about it. But Sputnik represented something else altogether, i.e. that we would make our place, regardless of the condition in which we found ourselves. Man it’s been a long time.
Syria mixes chemical weapons into bombs.
Fuck. And fuckity-fucking fuck.
That’s Hilary Clinton’s and John Kerry’s reformer. He’s gonna reform the air in places so it can’t be breathed without death measured in minutes.
Hannah Arendt was an acute observer, but I’d turn it around and ask why wouldn’t I want to get off this planet? This is our place makes sense from a defensive standpoint if attacked, but otherwise it seems like some sort of universal caste limitation.
I think I’ve done her thought an injustice charles. I went and dug out the book (indeed, it is Human Condition — lucky guess!). So she says:
** [Prologue] In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies — the sun, the moon, and the stars. To be sure, the man-made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a time span that to us mortals. bound by earthly time, lasts from eternity to eternity. Yet, for a time it managed to stay in the skies: it dwelt and moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies as though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company.
This event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it. But, curiously enough, this joy was not triumphal: it was not pride or awe at the tremendousness of human power and mastery which filled the hearts of men, who now, when they looked up from the earth toward the skies, could behold there a thing of their own making. The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.” And this strange statement, far from being the accidental slip of some American reporter, unwittingly echoed the extraordinary line which, more than twenty years ago, had been carved on the funeral obelisk of one of Russia’s great scientists: “Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.”
Such feelings have been commonplace for some time. They show that men everywhere are by no means slow to catch up and adjust to scientific discoveries, but that, on the contrary, they have outsped them by decades. Here, as in other respects, science has realized and affirmed what men anticipated in dreams that were neither wild nor idle. What is new is only that one of this country’s most respectable newspapers finally brought to its front page what up to then had been buried in the highly non-respectable literature of science fiction (to which, unfortunately, nobody yet has paid the attention it deserves as a vehicle of mass sentiments and mass desires). The banality of the statement should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was; for although Christians have spoken of the earth as a vale of tears and philosophers have looked upon their body as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon. Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also “artificial,” toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to created life in the test tube, in the desire to mix “frozen germ plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior human beings” and “to alter [their] size, shape and function”‘ and the wish to escape the human condition, I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man’s life-span far beyond the hundred year limit.
This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth. The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order, and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientist of professional politicians. [Arendt, 1958] **
She goes on, but I think I should stop there.
Well done.
the tea party anti war arises
Mayans aren’t looking so kooky these days, are they?
And how soon can I leave? Sadly, our national wanderlust for extraplanetary endeavors seems to have peaked in ’69. I’m guessing it’ll be lots of years before anyone from this hemisphere gets to *really* look back at the green hills of earth.
* Sigh.
I used to think the moon landing would be remembered as the apex of Western Civilization. In the last decade or so, I’ve come to the conclusion that Western Civ peaked approximately half a century earlier, and that the moon landing happened in spite of decline, the last gasp before the candle guttered out, so to speak.
It’s difficult to point to any more profound Western Civ pinnacle than the moon landing, unless you mean that what happened on Cherry St., 11 Aug 1919.
I incline to the view that the bastards blew it up, damning us all, in August 1914.
To borrow from Charleton Heston.
The moon landing strikes me more as the West’s equivalent of Ming Dynasty China’s voyages to Zanzibar under Zheng He, a profound achievment made all the more remarkable by the fact that it proved fruitless.
I’ve often wondered why really smart people haven’t figured out that most of the “progress” we have achieved the last forty-five years or so is what is basically keeping us from advancing beyond the moon shots, or even replicating them.
“smart” peeps mimicking bs and being credentialed ain’t “smart”
Easy. Space exploration doesn’t feather enough nests back here on Earth.
It may be a perverse way of looking at it but Western Civilizations most consequential acheivement was its success in elevating the standard of living for all to the point that too many people forgot what it took to do that. (At this point the author’s Ambien made further attempts to formulate coherent sentences problematic.)
Hey Zeus, that’s good.
“. . . Western Civilizations most consequential acheivement was its success in elevating the standard of living for all . . .”
Read Deirdre McCloskey’s review for more of that, or listen to her talking with Russ Roberts about it (scroll down for the sketchy transcript).
I might buy into that.
The Romans achieved something similiar albeit on a much more modest scale.
For a time.
as opposed to africans, arabs, indians. ie stupid cultures. hey native americans nice train you built.
That’s probably the wrong angle to see this from, nr.
You linked a review of McCloskey earlier today, didn’t you sdferr?
You linked a review
Yep, it’s in the “Ceding” thread. Her website is a treasure, by the way.
Vielen Dank
This conjugation is different than a popular song I’ve heard. I find it worrisome.
A good book, newrouter, is Ian Morris’s
The truth of the matter is that, more often than not, the West has been at the ass-end of human civilization for the past ten thousand years.
really? nah them folks haven’t did too much lately. oh heck the buzzing pray rug.
You should know better than to trust a Teutonic twat bh.
There’s a reason people are all discombobulated at the destruction being wrought in Mali just now, and it ain’t what Mali’s done lately that has ’em worried.
Ha!
what no newton or catholic hospitals or dutch? curious bias. but of course this too happened in africa, india, china et al
I’m never quite sure how to make the laugh noises. Sometimes you want more than a heh though.
Good times.
He’s talking about the industrial revolution, which goes to Charles’s point, which in turn goes to bh’s caution to your comment.
Chauvinism is a sentiment. Appreciation is cultivation.
so there is a technological progression in the white sphere. how’s come the black, brown, yellow folk eff it up? oh back to normal broadcasting .
JoAnn Watson, Detroit City Councilwoman, Calls For Obama To Bring Detroit ‘Bacon’
Probably because technology doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but in a cultural complex.
The chinese and the romans both became mired in closed systems. Christianity offered the West and out that Confucianism didn’t offer China. Capitalism (more like fascism, but then Nietzsche saw socialism, of which fascism is a subspecies, as the culmination of capitalism rather than it’s antithesis) is now offering China a similar out as we drift into a closing system.
Something to think about as we go forward. Assuming we go forward and not backwards.
Either read the book and benefit therefrom, or don’t.
no i think many negroes are stupid by genetics or culture. see if you import alot of stupid peeps in the 1700’s they are going to be stupid 300 years hence. if you are going to do “slaves” import jews like the pharaoh did til he got all muhammed. to be honest there is a large population of black peeps who are utterly stupid. the public schools will keep them stupid. me i back away from the proggtard utopia.
no i won’t benefit from this :
because the world was changing 500 years before. just not at pace the proggtards wanted
hey ernst like gutenberg 1500?
Since Thomas Sowell can point you to the IQ tests showing that the average Northern Black had an IQ slightly higher than the average Southern White in the early twentieth century, I think we can conclusively rule out genetics in favor of culture.
It’s in the essay “Black Rednecks” if I remember.
Also, you do know that the Chinks had moveable type long before Gutenberg, right?
Sneaky yellow bastards, stealing our invention before we could invent it.
Those inscrutable bastards.
I kind of like the industrial revolution myself. Made for less dull nasty brutish and short.
see detroit, maxine waters or trayvon. stellar americans all
I think Morris can safely coexist with Moses, newrouter.
i say bs. see jews in captivity circa pharaoh
A lotta lot of blacks moved North in the twenties and brought their “cracker culture” with them. In the mean time, we’ve done everything as a society to encourage ignorance, indolence and sloth, while discouraging continence, industry and thrift.
The British underclass is as bad as our own. And until recently it was far, far paler.
Meanwhile, ours is, shall we say, lightening?
Detroit’s a shithole because government subsidizes shitty behavior, not because it’s majority black.
nah 1750? western civ was on the move in the 1200’s slow , steady, then exponentially by 1750. i see you on twitter
[get up from desk, walks to bookshelf, reaches for Sowell]
yes of course the “whiteys” are to blame
oh goody rethuglicans can point here so that demonrats look bad there. eff that
Give what Ernst is saying a thought or two, nr. No need to think up a retort for every comment in a tit for tat sort of way.
Why not? You got nothing to lose. Nothing wrong with playing around with a new idea or two. You can always go back to the same ol’, same ol’ tomorrow regardless.
The interview with Diane Schaub at the new Claremont site The American Mind is kinda interesting, particularly her thoughts on Malcolm X.
Problem with the link, sdferr.
[returns to desk, sits down, begins typing]
“As late as the First World War,” Sowell writes “white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi score lower on mental tests than black soldiers fro Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania[,]” citing H. J. Butcher, Human Intelligence: Its Nature and Assessment (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 252. Sowell further notes, “[i]n 1968 blacks from Rhode Island and Wisconsin scored higher on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test than whites from Tennessee and Kentucky[,]” citing Arthur R. Jensen, Educability and Group Differences (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 63-4.
Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), p. 23, & p. 300, n. 119.
Need I continue, or would that be a waste of my time?
Not all whiteys, just the Scotch-Irish. And not because they’re white, but because Scotc-Irish was the “thug” culture folkway that predominated throughout the antebellum South.
‘pologies: I was signed in, so that may have somethin’ to do with it. But I think you can get access from here at Powerline, then sign in to access the articles.
stupid peeps are slaves. jews say no. black folk do ebt and sect. 8.
Steely Dan – Barrytown
Thanks.
because blacks are blameless? don’t blame aunt jemina? do it oj free your chains?
mr bh,
i have a special offer on section 8 somalis you up for it?
take 300 muslims and your guilt is absolved by : proggtard inc.
sowell plays the game. nah africans are the dumb. right up there with arabs. hi hamas
oh and slovak jokes next
I’m not big into assigning collective guilt or innocence one way or the other. All I’m pointing out is what Sowell argued, which is “black culture” so-called by our multi-culti betters, is really white culture, specifically, the culture scotch-irish immigrants brought to the South when they settled there. Instead of getting all defensive, maybe try enjoying the irony of blacks criticizing other blacks for “acting white” when they’re all acting white, so to speak. It’s delish.
I could really rock your world and hit you with Reinhard Wenskus and Stammesbildung und Traditionskern and rest of ethnogenesis. Slice like a hammer it would. But I’m tired and never translated German on the fly all that well. So I’ll leave you with this thought: White folk do ebt and sect. 8 too. Now more than ever. It’s not a black or a white thing, it’s a Pinko-Red thing.
The ignorance is strong with this one.
from doing hip hop, nba, nfl, and bet. ernst culture. hi trayvon!
sowell be fitting in. bs data about low iq blacks
also name 1 black mathematician post grad?
and if you go down that road: there is no equality. ties into thermodynamics.
That and maybe an economy more or less permanently in the crapper because that’s good for government and government’s willing cooporators. And maybe also a President who likes it that way so the racist oppressor gets a taste of his own medicine, and furthermore, to make the road to serfdom more like a slide. Throw in defining deviancy down and a permissive society and a culture pretty much totally uprooted from it’s traditional moorings, and there you go.
All eminem’s fault for leading the kids astray, like a post-modern Elvis Presley or something.
do the white folks angst ernst. black “culture” sux
here’s some black “culture”
Where Masturbation and Homosexuality Do Not Exist
sowell be fitting in. bs data about low iq blacks
bs data taken from at least one* white psychologist. A psychologist, whom, moreover, is notable for adhering to the politically incorrect nature over nurture view of intelligence. I think that qualifies as a statement against interest, so to speak.
* I can’t find anything on Harold Butcher.
I kind of like Jazz.
And barbeque.
And here I’d always taken you yourself for the very pinnacle of black culture newrouter, yet you pretend to denounce it? That isn’t right man. Stand up for your beliefs.
Oh good! tag team wrestling with invincible ignorance.
Good luck. I’m going to bed.
Okay, I lied. I had to check out the Atlantic link.
So tell us, newrouter, what is it about the Aka and the Ngandu that you object to, the absence of onanism, or the absence of sodomy?
Because the only thing I can come up with is an EMP strike, and that seems just a little drastic, even for me.
I’d be glad to help. Just throwing that out there for future reference.
I pulled Woody’s string and he said, “Somebody’s poisoned the water hole!”
[…] options other than unemployment.Given the continuing misery, why did Americans re-elect Obama? Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom has a few thoughts on that subject. Speaking of economic hardship, Jeff is rattling the tip jar as an alternative to seeking shelter […]
I incline to the view that the bastards blew it up, damning us all, in August 1914.
A-yep.
The theology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is unbearable, but nailing their apocalypse to Europe’s first suicide attempt is pretty reasonable.