Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Inequality Grows

28 Comments

…as poor ignorant atheists swamp the nation:

As far as I can see, this is bad news for everybody. Atheists and agnostics like to think of themselves as smarter than the God-bothering trailer trash on Tobacco Road, and deeply dislike the thought that they are losing the argument among the most intellectually qualified and best prepared; religious people have to be concerned for the future of religion when whole social classes are dropping away.

It is also very bad news for the poor. The rich can actually get along without much religion; one of the nice things about being rich is that money can frequently shield you from the consequences of a weak character and bad decisions. If you are rich enough, you can do very poorly in high school but Daddy will have a nice chat with the college president after which the school gets a new gym and you get a slot in the freshman class. You can be pretty sure that the college won’t flunk you out or expel you without a lot of second chances and counseling.

Oh, and if somehow you booze and flirt your way through college and don’t pick up any useful skills, don’t worry. You won’t have any student loans to repay and Daddy will make sure that you find something to do.

The poor aren’t so lucky. The poor kid who wants to get ahead actually has to achieve something. He or she has to sacrifice, defer gratification, learn useful skills, and endure the scorn of classmates who think he or she is a geek and a nerd. Some of us are able to do all that and more without the strength and focus that comes from faith in God — but most of us need all the help we can get.

I’ve been able to manage without, but I’ve noticed that a lot of people can’t. And it seems that the public schools have finally done Dewey’s job.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Me, Too

9 Comments

Conservatives want to see Paul Ryan enter the race:

Ryan is the perfect 0bama foil. He is patient and kind while Obama is brittle and testy. He is utterly genuine while Obama is phony. Ryan is the boy next door, the guy you can count on. People respond warmly to him. Paul Ryan is low-key and likable while the current WH occupant is high-strung, high-maintenance and extremely arrogant. Ryan has great intellectual credentials and has always been an authentic conservative thinker. His relative youth would contrast nicely with our hapless president’s tired, old act. I think Ryan could get out there and impress voters as a modern version of Abraham Lincoln, and, God knows, we really need a person like that, somebody who is authentic, somebody who is the real deal.

While any of the current Republican candidates would be a vast improvement over the current occupant of the White House, Ryan is the only one for which I would have any enthusiasm. Fairly or not (mostly not, as a result of the continuous media attacks on her for the past three years), Palin has too many negatives with too many people to be electable (at least this cycle), and Christie has problems in my mind on Second-Amendment issues and an unwillingness to recognize the threat of Jihadism.

There are only two down sides to Ryan. It would make it harder to campaign against Obama on his previous lack of executive experience, and the president would attempt to argue that he’s now had some (I can imagine the campaign slogan: “Obama in 2012: Partway Up The Learning Curve!”). The other is that, while he’s not irreplaceable, it would be good to seem him continue as Chairman of the Budget Committee, particularly with a Republican Senate.

[Mid-morning update]

Oh, be still my heart. George Pataki is considering getting into the race. I guess he wants to compete with Huntsman for the “Democrat in Republican clothing” Republican vote. All two percent of it.

[Early afternoon update]

Too bad. Ryan’s not running. He would have been the closest serious candidate to my own views in, perhaps, my lifetime, or at least since Goldwater.

[Update a while later]

Five reasons Ryan isn’t running.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Will The President Run Again?

3 Comments

Ed Morrissey wonders. I don’t think that the LBJ comparison is quite apt. While LBJ did think a lot of himself, he was also in pretty bad health, and likely knew that another term would kill him (he barely lasted that time period without being president). I think that Obama is far too self delusional to not run again.

On the other hand, Michael Malone has some interesting advice for the president, that he won’t take.

[Update late afternoon]

Wrong link in the second one. It’s fixed now.

Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Lies Of Rousseau’s Disciples

7 Comments

…have been laid bare in England:

The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness): you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it. What you saw were society’s victims responding to any or all of the following: bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality, etc, etc. Their crimes were simply part of the same package of callous selfishness displayed by (as one particularly bizarre equation had it) tabloid phone hackers.

What is not ludicrous and insulting to common sense in these propositions is contradictory in its own terms. There are indeed views of the human condition which hold that all species of wickedness are connected, because they are all rooted in the fact that man is a fallen creature. But somehow I doubt that the ardent liberal secularists who were piping up last week were believers in original sin or the machinations of the Devil.

The moral equivalence that they wanted to establish between looters and arsonists on the one hand, and the perpetrators of any other kind of bad behaviour you can think of on the other, was rooted in ideological, not theological, orthodoxy. The rioting gangs could not simply be what they seemed – what they so obviously were – because that would be a devastating victory for the judgment of popular opinion over the fantasies of liberalism.

There’s actually nothing “liberal” about it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Project Gunwalker

6 Comments

…and the foundation of liberty:

It all comes down to this: Is there an inalienable right to self-defense? If there is, each man has indisputable, inestimable value, value that he may rightly preserve even if the life of another man is forfeit. A man may kill another in lawful self-defense even if the policy preferences of the state would prefer his death. If a right to self-defense actually exists, it is in a very real sense the highest law of the land and all lesser laws must pay it deference. It fundamentally defines the social contract, the nature of the relationship between man and the state.

But if there is no such inalienable right, the entire nature of the social contract is changed. Each man’s worth is measured solely by his utility to the state, and as such the value of his life rides a roller coaster not unlike the stock market: dependent not only upon the preferences of the party in power but upon the whims of its political leaders and the permanent bureaucratic class. The proof of this analysis surrounds us.

We have to remove these tyrants from power as soon as possible.

Business, Economics, Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

High-Speed Trains!

5 Comments

You know who else liked them?

The Nordic landscape cries out to be traversed by rails over which express trains can speed. It is a characteristic of all Nordic vehicles to increase their speed. Ever-increasing velocity is a built-in characteristic of the rails themselves, the rails by which, in the Nordic experience of the world, the whole world is penetrated. Rails that are already in existence and those that must constantly be constructed for ever newer, ever faster vehicles on which men who experience the world Nordically may strive toward ever new goals. The Nordic soul experiences its world as a structure made up of countless thoroughfares — those already at hand and those still to be created — on land, on water, in the air, and in the stratosphere. It races like a fever through all segments of the Nordic community, a fever of speed which, infectiously, reaches out far beyond the world of the north and attacks souls who are not Nordic and for whom, at bottom, such action is contrary to their style and senseless.

Take a guess. Of course, he was militantly opposed to smoking and a vegetarian, too.

[Via Althouse]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

After The Massacre

2 Comments

An interesting interview on the state of politics in Norway:

After the publication of the report on anti-Semitism in June, the minister had the courage to state that our politicians did have a responsibility for the situation, saying that: “A jargon of slang terms which may have unintended and very grave consequences, may easily take root. Those of us who have the political responsibility must talk about this and counteract such expressions.” Unfortunately, he had forgotten his own piece of good advice — as late as the day before the shooting he met his expectant colleagues with unmistakably anti-Israeli slogans, saying to his cheering young audience: “The Palestinians must have their own state. The occupation must end, the wall must be torn down, and this must happen now!”

One of the more long-term negative consequences of this brutal terrorist act in Norway is a limitation of the freedom of speech. People have become terrified of being connected to the mass-murderer, whom the media describe as a “conservative Christian fundamentalist.” This tag is sufficient to paralyze half of the Norwegian population, where the majority of the supporters of Israel and the Jews are found. At present we observe a form of slanderous media defamation of Christians which in some cases has already acquired an eerie resemblance to classical anti-Semitism. This witch hunt, spreading like a steppe fire, has already paralyzed conservative bloggers in this country, and I fear others will also suffer before the media may end up with the classical compromise of blaming the Jews.

Well, it seems to have done its job.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The “Green Jobs” Fiasco

8 Comments

Feeding the masses on unicorn ribs:

Let me put it this way. A GOP candidate might feel a need to please creationist voters and say a few nice things about intelligent design. That is politics as usual; it gins up the base and drive the opposition insane with fury and rage. No harm, really, and no foul.

But if that same politician then proposed to base federal health policy on a hunt for the historical Garden of Eden so that we could replace Medicare by feeding old people on fruit from the Tree of Life, he would have gone from quackery-as-usual to raving incompetence. True, the Tree of Life approach polls well in GOP focus groups: no cuts to Medicare benefits, massive tax savings, no death panels, Biblical values on display. Its only flaw is that there won’t be any magic free fruit that lets us live forever, and sooner or later people will notice that and be unhappy.

Green jobs are the Democratic equivalent of Tree of Life Medicare; they scratch every itch of every important segment of the base and if they actually existed they would be an excellent policy choice. But since they are no more available to solve our jobs problem than the Tree of Life stands ready to make health care affordable, a green jobs policy boils down to a promise to feed the masses on tasty unicorn ribs from the Great Invisible Unicorn Herd that only the greens can see.

Here in particular Senator Obama as he then was would have benefited from a less gushing, more skeptical press. If his first couple of speeches on this topic had been met with the incredulous and even mocking response they deserved, he probably would not have married himself so publicly to so vain and so empty a cause.

Funny, we warned them about this a couple years ago. But they never learn.

And of course, the sensible among us knew that it would be disaster for sure when the president put an avowed communist in charge of it.

[Update a while later]

Is the global warming hysteria running out of gas?

Where is President Obama, who promised that on his accession “the rise of the oceans will start to slow and the planet begin to heal?” – surely the most fatuous declaration in the history of politics. Well, he appears to be giving speeches every second day, but none of them feature the retreating oceans or our healed planet.

In fact he’s been tooling around in a $2-million bus oblivious of the carbon costs, and there simply hasn’t been any signal that his White House is giving the great Gore crusade anything but the barest of rhetorical support. If there were any political value to ardent greensmanship, surely a President who is floundering on the economy and sinking in the polls would have grabbed that raft with a passion.

But there isn’t anymore. Perhaps the recession has tamed the imaginations of most people and their governments. In tight economic times people are naturally unwilling to engage in the comicbook fantasies of the wilder environmentalists. Perhaps Climategate gave a too-souring glimpse into the mixture of science and advocacy that has, to some extent, corrupted both. Perhaps, finally, the unctuousness, sanctimony and sputtering righteousness of the highprofile environmentalists signal to most observers that they aren’t really as certain of all this “science” as they pretend to be. Either way this long green game has lost its fundamental energies. The celebrities will find another wristband; the politicians will find a new vague distraction.

Let’s hope.