Chinese bullet trains aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
That’s true of a lot of things in China, I suspect. Including its space program.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The Continuing Insanity Of The Politically Correct Multi-Cultis
An blue-eyed blond Norwegian murders a bunch of blue-eyed blond Norwegians, and as a result of this, mosques are at risk?
Beam me up.
The Hypocrisy Of James Fallows
Thoughts, over at The American Spectator:
So let me get this straight. Even a week after Tucson, after it was absolutely clear that Palin and the right had nothing whatsoever to do with the Giffords shooting, Fallows was still saying that the very “purpose” of journalists is to connect dots and “see if there’s a pattern there,” and that “it is legitimate in our current climate to ask” if the rhetoric on the right had something to do with the shooting. But now that Rubin, VERY shortly after the Norway tragedy, doesn’t just connect nearly invisible dots but actually cites stories quoting jidahists themselves as claiming jihadist “credit” for the terrorism, Fallows says it suddenly is not only a horrible sin for Rubin to take the jihadists’ words themselves for real — these aren’t mere dots, they are what’s known as solid circumstantial evidence — but that is is a mistake bad enough that her employer should apologize to the world.
Maybe it’s not hypocrisy so much as the usual grotesque double standard among the media in the service of a leftist ideology.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related thoughts from Jim Treacher:
When something gets blown up, we’re not supposed to even suspect the terrorist is Muslim? It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it? Are you complaining to Reuters and the NYT and all those other right-wing outlets that suspected Muslim involvement? Or are you somehow confused about what the word “suspect” means? Shouldn’t you save some of your spiteful glee for anybody out there who’s still asserting that this crime was motivated by Islam, despite the evidence to the contrary?
If it’s some sort of victory to you that this freak is a Christian and a right-winger, go ahead and revel in it. As Neal Boortz pointed out: “Muslim zealots kill, Muslims celebrate and conservative Christians are angry. Christian zealots kill, liberals gloat. Odd.” Not as odd as it used to be, unfortunately.
Meanwhile, close to 100 people were murdered. I’m not going to whine that the murderer doesn’t represent all Christians, that he doesn’t speak for all right-wingers. Of course he doesn’t, just as Muslim terrorists don’t speak for all Muslims. Only the dumbest, most jaded lefty creeps are saying otherwise, and bickering about it isn’t going to bring any of those dead people back.
I hate that murdering bastard, and if it were up to me, right now he’d be rotting in Hell after death by waterboarding.
He just can’t stop being politically incorrect.
[Mid-morning update]
Apologize for what?
Anders Behring Breivik, the deranged savage who committed mass-murder in Oslo last Friday, is a severe critic of Islam. His targets, though, were not Muslims. They were his fellow Norwegians and Norway’s government. As Mark Steyn keenly observed this morning, it is patently absurd that Breivik’s attitudes about Muslims have come to dominate coverage of a horrific episode that appears to have little or nothing to do with Muslims — such that those actually killed become, as Mark puts it, “mere bit players in their own murder” while the legacy media shrieks about “Islamophobia.” As Bruce Bawer pointed out in his trenchant post this weekend (at Pajamas), we are now looking at “a double tragedy for Norway. Not only has it lost almost one hundred people, including dozens of young people, in a senseless rampage of violence. But I fear that legitimate criticism of Islam, which remains a very real threat to freedom in Norway and the West, has become profoundly discredited, in the eyes of many Norwegians, by association with this murderous lunatic.”
If we are to remain free and secure, that cannot be allowed to happen. And that starts with not apologizing for the entirely rational fear that future terrorist attacks will be fueled by Islamist ideology, just as thousands of past attacks have been. Prominent Muslims are forever making the most unfounded, most offensive pronouncements, and yet they never have to apologize. Right after 9/11, MPAC’s Salam Marayati told a Los Angeles radio interviewer, “If we are going to look at suspects, we should look at groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” Before becoming a top Obama aide and envoy, Rashad Hussain excoriated the Bush Justice Department’s prosecution of Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian as a “politically motivated” “travesty of justice” that fit a “common pattern … of politically motivated prosecutions,” by which the U.S. government exaggerates the “threat to American security” — al-Arian later pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge. CAIR has made a career of rushing to the nearest microphone to discredit the investigation of Muslims who are later found guilty of terrorism. The list goes on and on; only the words “I’m sorry, I was wrong” are never uttered — and never demanded.
No,they aren’t. At least not from the likes of James Fallows.
Trouble To The President’s Left
Bernie Sanders says that he needs some primary competition, but I found this an insightful comment:
Obama is a bland take-no-chances-unless-other-people-are-doing-the-hard-work type of guy. He’s not a leader, but just a vessel through which the left thought they could get all their pet projects passed, by endowing Obama with Absolute Moral Authority by virtue of his historic position.
But to get elected, Obama had to have a bland, beta-male personality, and that’s what’s driving the left crazy. People like Bernie knew Obama was lying to swing voters in 2008 about being a moderate; they just thought he was also lying to them about being a beta male. Now that he’s got push back from House Republicans on his and the left’s pet issues, he doesn’t have the stomach to either take on the GOP ideologically by presenting a plan of his own, or to tell his own side to pound sand and move towards a compromise deal the way Clinton did on welfare reform.
They didn’t mind Obama’s lies during the campaign — they expect people to lie, given their projection — they’re just mad at him because he lied to them.
Is The Left Right?
Claire Berlinski is suffering a little cognitive dissonance.
My brief response, without a lot of deep thought. I can’t speak for Europe, which never had anything resembling our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but I think that the biggest flaw of the Founders was in failing to recognize the apparently ductility of the Commerce Clause, which has basically rendered the 9th and 10th amendments moot. They also perhaps didn’t anticipate the degree to which the courts might come to aid and abet to that end. But at bottom, it is not a failure of freedom, but a failure to adhere to the original intent of the Constitution to limit government.
Open-Source Warfare
Zenpundit has been slogging through the Oslo terrorist’s writings, and found some interesting things (check some of the other posts as well):
…the British, too, come in for a measure of contempt, via a quotation from none other than Osama bin Laden:
“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse”. Perhaps its unsurprising that the author is something of an admirer of bin Laden’s means, if not his ends.
This came to me via an email from James (Anglosphere) Bennett, who comments:
For the past decade people concerned about the consequences of multiculturalism have warned that one of its hazards will be an inevitable response, which a short perusal of European history will quickly suggest will not be very nice. Looking at this, my thought is “well, here it is”.
And there may be more of it to come.
[Update a few minutes later]
Was he influenced by the Unabomber?
Of course, given the similarities, maybe it was Al Gore.
The Father Of Transhumanism
…has deanimated:
In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story elucidating the concept of human cryopreservation as a pathway to more sophisticated future medical technology: in effect, a form of “one-way medical time travel.” The story, “The Penultimate Trump”, was published in the March, 1948 issue of Startling Stories and definitively establishes Ettinger’s priority as the first person to have promulgated the cryonics paradigm: principally, that contemporary medico-legal definitions of death are relative, not absolute, and are critically dependent upon the sophistication of available medical technology. Thus, a person apparently dead of a heart attack in a tribal village in the Amazon Rainforest will soon become unequivocally so, whereas the same person, with the same condition, in the emergency department of large, industrialized city’s hospital, might well be resuscitated and continue a long and healthy life. Ettinger’s genius lay in realizing that criteria for death will vary not just from place-to-place, but from time-to-time. Today’s corpse may well be tomorrow’s patient.
Ettinger waited for prominent scientists or physicians to come to the same conclusion he had, and to take a position of public advocacy. By 1960, Ettinger realized that no one else seemed to have grasped an idea which, to him, had seemed obvious. Ettinger was 42 years old and undoubtedly increasingly aware of his own mortality. In what may be characterized as one of the most important midlife crisis in history, Ettinger reflected on his life and achievements, and decided it was time to take action. He summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance as a mechanism of affordable funding for the procedure, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who’s Who In America. The response was meager, and it was clear that a much longer exposition was needed. Ettinger observed that people, even the intellectually, financially and socially distinguished, would have to be educated that dying is (usually) a gradual and reversible process, and that freezing damage is so limited (even though lethal by present criteria) that its reversibility demands relatively little in future progress. Ettinger soon made an even more problematic discovery, principally that, “…a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!”
I’ve never understood the resistance, either.
Rest in peace, but not in perpetuity.
[Update early afternoon]
Adam Keiper has a link roundup over at The New Atlantis, with a promise of more to come.
[Another update a few minutes later]
This is the first time I became aware that Mike Darwin (long-time cryonics pioneer) has a blog. I’ll have to add it to the blogroll.
The Stupidity Of The “Assault-Weapons” Ban
Part 2. Bob Owens calls it “silly,” but I’m going to go with “stupid.” And in some cases, even evil (see project “Fast and Furious,” in which it becomes clear that the federal government in this administration wants to make sure that criminals can get weapons, but that law-abiding citizens can’t, and then stonewall and cover up when they get caught in the act).
I particularly enjoyed this unintended consequence.
That Actually Took Longer Than I Thought
It took almost a day for some on the left to start blaming Sarah Palin for what happened in Norway. It probably took a while for them to get over their cynical shock that it actually was a white guy this time.
I will note, though, as an aside, that like school shootings in “gun-free zones,” this was another catastrophic failure of gun control. Just a few rifles in the hands of the older kids on that island, with training, would have ended this pretty quickly. Instead, they were fish in a barrel for him.
[Saturday evening update]
Bruce Bawer:
It is chilling to read my own name in postings by this mass murderer. And it is deeply depressing to see this evil, twisted creature become the face of Islam criticism in Norway. Norwegian television journalists who in the first hours of the crisis were palpably uncomfortable about the prospect of having to talk about Islamic terrorism are now eagerly discussing the dangers of “Islamophobia” and “conservative ideology” and are drawing connections between the madness and fanaticism of Breivik and the platform of the Progress Party.
This is, as he says, doubly tragic, and a setback in the war.
Why The Boehner-Obama Talks Fell Apart
Keith Hennessey explains:
President Obama used the Gang of Six’s plan as an exit strategy. He backtracked on taxes, knowing this would force the Speaker to abandon negotiations, and knowing he could use the Republican Senators in the Gang to argue from a position of increased rhetorical strength in the ensuing debate. It’s a clever strategy but it belies the President’s public posture.
The media narrative about the president being the “only adult in the room” is now, and always was, nonsense.
[Update a while later]
The president tries to panic the markets.
Well, you have to admit, it’s one of his few talents.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A reminder, the problem isn’t the debt ceiling — it’s the debt, and the continuing unwillingness of Washington to take it seriously. The Democrats in particular insist on living in a fantasy world.
[Update a while later]
Per the above, some very worrisome thoughts:
Here’s the position I think we may be in. We’ve been negotiating with the President and The Democrats in Congress on the assumption that they’re sane. It’s okay to play hardball with these guys because eventually, whether they like it or not, reality insists upon itself and they have to cave. It’s a painful process so you expect some tantrum throwing and caterwauling, but eventually they HAVE to accept reality. Except if they’re not sane. If they want five apples and there’s only two plus two but they CAN’T ACCEPT that two plus two equals four. Orwell wasn’t just writing a parable about the eventual end point of IngSoc. He was describing what human psychology can drive Ministers to inflict upon the populace for the sake of “justice.” I’m worried they’ll pull the trigger on default as just one more “political” step in the march towards freedom from want or whatever other principle they’re operating under. They’re playing this game as if they could win, as if taxes in a downturn are a good idea with benign consequences. As if debt equivalent to GDP is survivable for the world’s anchor economy/currency, let alone sustainable.
And so maybe, just maybe, Republican strategy (what little there is of it) has badly misread the opposition. Obama tried to add 400 billion in taxes to a deal he had already agreed with Boehner at the last minute. Boehner walks out cause Obama is negotiating in bad faith and has been all along, but what if Obama is actually incapable of good faith negotiation? I think right now that it’s actually possible we won’t see a deal at all. Because the Republicans are looking at the math and at reality and saying “Okay, Democrat demands can’t be serious because they can’t possibly work” and Democrats are looking at politics and how it works and saying “We don’t have to give in cause that’s not how you win these things. You pin it on the other guy politically and then reap the political dividends.” I wasn’t around for the start of WW I, but I get the feeling I understand Kennedy’s fascination with Tuchman’s Guns of August. I’m not talking about a shooting war, but about leaders overestimating and underestimating and just plain misjudging each other in a brinksmanship scenario. In short, it could be too late to do anything when people finally wake up. The crisis may have already arrived with an economic and fiscal momentum all its own that no amount of dealing or compromise or statesmanship can stop.
They’ve been demonstrating economic lunacy for the past two and a half years (longer, really, but they didn’t have enough power to actually implement it), as things continue to deteriorate. Why would they stop now?