Category Archives: Media Criticism

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Vegas Massacre

37 Comments

Yes, based at least on initial reports, it does appear to be very, very strange.

[Update later afternoon]

The Vegas shooting and the attack of the carrion crows.

Every.Single.Time.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Mass shootings are a bad way to understand gun violence.

And Nick Gillespie says that this is the time to defend the Second Amendment and less-strict gun control. Because gun control is not, and has never been, the solution.

I have a crazy idea that if you’re going to propose a policy or law in response to a tragic event, you should have to explain how it would have actually prevented that event. Everything this guy did and used was already illegal, as far as I can tell.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Puerto Rico Government

7 Comments

…is riddled with corruption and incompetence.

Yes, it is, and has been forever. We spent a lot of time there from ’98 to ’01. It was a mess long before the storms, which simply highlighted how bad it was. But that doesn’t fit the narrative of how it’s all that racist Trump’s fault that brown people are dying.

[Update a few minutes later]

People…OK, not people, partisan morons…were mocking Brock Long yesterday for his interview with Chris Wallace, when he said that this was “the most logistically challenging event the U.S. has ever seen.” Read the responses to this tweet, in which people talk about Apollo, the Berlin Airlift, the war in general…

My responses:

OK, so let’s go to the transcript. Yes, he did say that, but then (as I noted) he clarified, with Wallace’s help.

WALLACE: I want to pick up on something you just said because I have not heard this before. You say this is the most logistically challenging relief effort ever in the history of this country?

LONG: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think people have to take a step back and understand what’s happened over the course of basically the last 40 days. We — you know, FEMA has led the response of the federal government on behalf of governors from Texas to Florida to North Carolina to South Carolina to Georgia to the Virgin Islands, and the bottom line is, is that we’ve registered almost 3 million people for disaster assistance and most likely many of those were uninsured and we’ve been able to get, you know, well over a billion dollars in their hands to support.

It’s not only a logistically complex event, just getting to the islands and being able to support an island that was hit not just by one major hurricane but two within basically a 10-day period. The bottom line is, is you can only shove so much into an island pre-storm because if you pushing too much stuff, the storm may damage it. So, we had to pull back, not only equipment and staff, because we don’t want to soak up vital shelter space, we want to continue to push forward after the fact and move more equipment in.

The ports were damaged. The airports were damaged. This morning, you know, somebody was saying, we’re not seeing flights in San Juan. We are not using San Juan near to the degree we were. Our goal was to open up incident support bases and other airports and we have three of those operating so that commercial flights can come back up in San Juan. [Emphasis added]

Everything he said there was true. And, of course, part of the challenge was in dealing with the local government(s), whose responsibility it should have been to be prepared for this, but was (as was the case in Louisiana with Katrina, and wait for it) incompetent and corrupt. Am I blaming the victims? I guess, to the degree that in a democracy people get the government they deserve. And, as usual…well, OK, as usual when a Republican is in the White House…the federal government (whose responsibility this isn’t) is blamed for local incompetence and corruption. And of course, it didn’t help that the Puerto Ricans threw the Navy out of Roosevelt Roads a few years ago, which would have provided a solid logistics base even in the immediate aftermath of the storm(s).

But let’s unpack the moon landing and war comparisons.

Yes, sending men to the moon was a tremendous logistics challenge, but it was one that was planned years in advance, and on which we expended a significant percentage of a pre-entitlement federal budget for that specific purpose. The Pacific War, the invasion of Italy, the Normandy landing, all took months and years of planning as well. The closest analogy might be the Berlin Airlift, but even there we could see the Soviet blockade coming months in advance, and it was preceded by the little airlift in the spring of ’48. And even then, it took weeks to spool it up.

So, as usual (and as with the Bush administration), the most despicable thing these people do is to force me to defend Trump and his administration, but also as usual, the criticism of the federal government for things that are not its responsibility is ignorant at best, and unfair.

[Update a while later]

Puerto Rico enters the American victim derby.

[Late-morning update]

Glenn Reynolds: Puerto Rico has many problems, but Donald Trump isn’t one of them.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Left

5 Comments

…is sitting on the biggest crime ever committed by a sitting president.

As many have pointed out, this is the Democrats’ Watergate, where the president actually committed the crimes of surveillance and siccing the IRS on his political enemies (unlike Nixon, who simply attempted to). Beyond that, one of the reasons why Lynch refused to let Clinton be prosecuted is that it would have almost certainly implicated Obama as well.

[Late-morning update]

Unmasking, yet another abuse of power. It may not have been illegal per se, but it was certainly that.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Trump And The NFL

33 Comments

The politicization of everything. When the personal becomes political, when you can’t watch sportsball without politics being interjected, you are well down the road of totalitarianism. I have a crazy idea: I don’t have to choose sides. The protesting players are terrible, and Trump is terrible.

One other point: I see a lot of nonsense on Twitter and in other places that they are just “standing up for their First Amendment rights.” I find this kind of ignorance infuriating. As I tweeted repeatedly over the weekend, this has absolutely nothing to do with the First Amendment, or the Constitution at all. The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law.” Congress has made no law. The fact that Trump was Trump doesn’t change that, even though a president who understands the role of the president wouldn’t have stuck his oar in.

They have a right to protest, but they don’t have a right to make millions throwing and catching footballs. The NFL has a right to fine them, and owners have a right to can them. Freedom of expression doesn’t mean freedom from consequences for it. I’ve personally paid a heavy financial price for expressing my opinions publicly, in that I’ve essentially been blackballed by the main cost-plus space industry. I accept that as the price I have to pay for protesting the continuous waste of taxpayer funds and the continuing crippling of our space capabilities. I have no sympathy for second-rate washed-up spoiled children like Colin Kaepernick and his ilk. But I’m sure that I’ll be called a racist for that.

[Noon update]

[Update a few minutes later]

In Trump versus the NFL, we’re all losers:

Everything about the political dynamic suggests that we could be heading toward an escalation where the NFL protests now become more broadly about Trump. And, as I said up top, there’s no obvious off-ramp here. If you’re a player kneeling because the justice system is screwed up, when do you stop kneeling? Because it’s going to be screwed up for a long time. And if you’re kneeling because Trump is president, that’s got a ways to go, too.

In a perfect world, a presidential response would be something like:

The players can do what they like. We should all want the justice system to work as well as possible. We should understand that it will never be perfect, but will not wave away its failings as inconsequential. We’re all God’s children and I invite you to consider that standing during our national anthem is a symbol of how we remain united in pursuit of ever-greater liberty.

But Trump doesn’t do presidential, at least not often, and never off the cuff.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Red Team, Blue Team? Start your own team:

I’m not on the Blue Team. I’m not on the Red Team. I’m on my team.

Occasionally, I’ll exploit the Reds or Blues to advance my aims in, well, making America great again. But I refuse to surrender my individuality to be an extra in someone else’s movie. As the decades of DC failure have shown us time and again, none of these politicians consider themselves to be on my team. I’m just returning the favor.

Republican leaders will like me if I vote for them. Celebrities will like me if I buy tickets. But neither views me as an equal, just a pawn from which they extract money and power. Those days are long gone.

I look at it this way, in sports and in life: When I see the two teams battling on a football field, I’m not going to passively cheer them from the stands. Instead, I’ll head over to the basketball court to see if I can start my own game. And, to be honest, once the hoops scene gets too crowded, I’ll walk down to the baseball field and try starting a game there.

Politicians are just temp employees we hire to do our bidding. If they suck, we fire them. They aren’t gods we bow to or team owners issuing orders. We’re Americans, dammit.

Celebrities are court jesters we pay to amuse us. When they get too mouthy, we kick them out of the dining hall. That’s the beauty of capitalism.

So, if any of our so-called elites want me to join their team, no thanks. I simply have better things to do.

So do I. Yes, I blew up in comments last night. And I’ll happily do it again any time someone demands that I have to blindly support an anal orifice, whether it’s the one in the White House, or the rich BLM knee takers on the football fields.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Maxine Waters

11 Comments

Impeachment is whatever Congress says it is.

Well, pretty much, yeah. This isn’t right, though:

“Bill Clinton got impeached because he lied,” Waters declared. “Here you have a president who I can tell you and guarantee you is in collusion with the Russians, to undermine our democracy. Here you have a president who has obstructed justice, and here you have a president that lies every day.”

…Unless Trump can be accused of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” he cannot be impeached.

While Waters claimed Clinton was impeached for “lying,” he was actually impeached for perjury — lying under oath.

Actually, he was impeached for multiple counts of obstruction of justice, including not just perjury, but suborning perjury from others via bribes and physical threats to a woman’s family, for the purpose of preventing someone he’d sexually harassed from getting a fair trial.

Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Why It’s Hard To Be A Conservative On Campus

17 Comments

It’s not (contrary to what you leftists think) because they’re stupid. It’s because you are:

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of Green’s post is that, despite what he believes, most conservatives do not complain about liberal bias on American campuses because they are full of people who believe that evolution is true or that the US lost a war against Vietnam. They complain about liberal bias on American campuses because they are full of people who think conservatives are just cretins who are incapable of forming their beliefs in a rational way and have no problem saying so on a regular basis. In short, they complain about liberal bias on American campuses because they are full of ignorant fools like Green, who know next to nothing about what conservatives actually believe. Green’s lazy rant is a perfect illustration of why it’s hard to be a conservative on campus. Of course, he didn’t do it on purpose, but that doesn’t make his post any less valuable.

…This bias is a real problem that should concern everyone and deserves better than Green’s idiotic post. I’m one of a handful of openly right-wing people in academia, so I’m in a particularly good position to talk about it. In my experience, people who aren’t conservative have no idea what kind of things those who are have to deal with in academia on a daily basis, which is part of the problem. Universities worry a lot about micro-aggressions, implicit bias, etc. against women and minorities. But there is nothing “micro” or “implicit” about the hostility conservatives have to face on campus. Nobody goes around campuses saying that women and black people are stupid, but not a day goes by on campus without people saying that about conservatives. In my field, conservatives are so afraid to speak up that some of them have created secret groups, where they can say what they think without fear of reprisal. Just think for a second about how toxic the environment must be in order for things to have come to that.

This is of a piece with Haidt’s work that showed how conservatives easily understand leftists, but leftists are clueless about what conservatives believe.