Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Space, Technology and Society

Space Aliens

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No, NASA is not hiring someone to protect the planet from them:

Though this should be abundantly clear by now—that NASA isn’t planning to launch an attack on aliens they don’t know exist—Shostak gets some colorful phone calls from those who want to believe.

“I have to say, people do call [me] and say, ‘Do you know anything about the Pentagon’s plans to defend Earth?’” he said. To be clear, Shostak does not know anything about ‘the Pentagon’s plans’ and thinks that even in some alternate reality where he did, the Pentagon wouldn’t waste time or money trying to save us. So please stop calling him.

Sigh.

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

Why Everyone Hates The Press

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Mary Katherine Ham explains:

The article ends as if to purposely reiterate how little the industry is interested in learning: “In a recent exchange with the White House press corps, then deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made hay over the retraction of a Trump-related story by CNN—an example of a news organization owning up to a mistake, as it should—and urged reporters to focus instead on a video by James O’Keefe, a right-wing provocateur whose work has been widely discredited.”

This paragraph embodies the problem. How is it that the media doesn’t realize it, too, has credibility to lose? It, too, has been repeatedly discredited—not just for one story, and not just in the eyes of angry Trump supporters. It should want to rectify that. But Warren ignores these mistakes just as the press itself often does. He gives them a giant pass on the job of understanding America in 2016 and a glancing mention of fabulist Jayson Blair. He congratulates them for doing the basics to correct a mistake, and then expects all Americans to laud the Redfords and Hoffmans while condemning the O’Keefes of the world.

The press is constantly saying this president is losing credibility without recognizing it is in the exact same predicament. New York Times editor Dean Baquet sits in his office adorned with “mock front pages…parting gifts from colleagues at the many papers where he has worked” while Trump roams his golf course properties admiring his mock Time magazine covers. These guys, and the institutions they head, have much more in common than they’d like to think. Stop admiring yourselves and deal with your problems.

I would also note that Donald Trump and Barack Obama also have a lot more in common than their admirers (and particularly the admirers of the latter) would like to admit.

Business, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Fashion Industry

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Megan Fox discusses what I’ve been ranting about for years: Why do women let gay men dictate what an attractive woman looks like?

Today’s definition of “fat” is what’s abnormal. The modern idea of feminine beauty is what is abnormal. Have you ever been to an art museum? For our entire human history men have been painting and sculpting women they found beautiful. Renoir sure liked his bigger models.

Absolutely none of them look like Kate Moss. All of them look like the normal, average woman that Hookstead doesn’t want to see in his magazines. Just admit already that your ideas of feminine beauty have been manipulated for decades by gay dudes who run fashion houses. Uncomfortable thought, isn’t it? But how else do you explain that men used to find this attractive and desirable and now it’s “fat”? Could it be that the gay kings of the fashion world remolded women into what they themselves find attractive, i.e. wide shoulders, small hips, long muscular arms — or in other words…young men?

I wonder if this is also why womens’ clothes don’t have pockets?

Business, Economics, Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Venezuela

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Remember all those left-wing pundits who drooled over Chavez?

Chavez’s untimely death from cancer in 2013 saw an outpouring of grief from the global left. The caudillo “demonstrated that it is possible to resist the neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity,” wrote British journalist Owen Jones. “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people,” said Oliver Stone, who would go on to replace Chavez with Vladimir Putin as the object of his twisted affection.

On the Venezuelan regime’s international propaganda channel, Telesur, American host Abby Martin — who used to ply her duplicitous trade at Russia Today — takes credulous viewers on Potemkin tours of supermarkets fully stocked with goods. It would be inaccurate to label the thoroughly unconvincing Martin, who combines the journalistic ethics of Walter Duranty with the charm of Ulrike Meinhof, a useful idiot. She’s just an idiot.

Brutal, but fair.

[Update a few minutes later]

Venezuela’s slide toward civil war. Unfortunately, the government confiscated the weapons (which many on the Left would love to do here, if they could pull it off). So unless we smuggle some in to them, the war won’t end well for freedom.

[Update a while later]

An AP reporter finally leaves the country:

In the early days, the shortages seemed almost whimsical. My Venezuelan friends were used to going on Miami shopping sprees. When I made trips home, they asked me to bring back perfume, leather jackets, iPhones and condoms. I usually took two near-empty suitcases to carry back the requests, plus food and toiletries for myself. As the crisis deepened, the requests became harder to fill, and traced the outlines of darker personal dramas: Medication for heart failure. Pediatric epilepsy drugs. Pills to trigger an abortion. Gas masks.

And things were still somehow getting worse. The first time I saw people line up outside the bakery near my apartment, I stopped to take photos. How crazy: A literal bread line.

Then true hunger crept into where I lived. People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings and soggy pizza crusts and eating them on the spot. That seemed like rock bottom. Until my local bakery started organizing lines each morning, not to buy bread but to eat trash.

This is the end state of socialism. They ran out of other peoples’ money.

Business, Economics, Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Demonizing School Choice

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…won’t help education:

…it’s certainly fair to note that people opposed to desegregation decided that one way to solve the problem was to get rid of public schools, allowing racists to choose a lily-white educational environment for their children. Maintaining Jim Crow is a vile motive, and it can’t be denied that that was one historical reason some people had for supporting school choice.

Only the proper answer to this is, So what? You cannot stop terrible people from promoting sound ideas for bad reasons. Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.

If you think we can’t allow school choice because Jim Crow, then it would be just as logical to oppose minimum wage and gun control, because historically, their purpose has been to control blacks.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Robert Heinlein

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Sarah Hoyt has some thoughts on the man who loved women:

While I didn’t read Heinlein for his female characters – unlike toddlers and some of my colleagues, I can identify with and enjoy the adventures of characters not exactly like me – it was freeing, mind-expanding that Heinlein had women as space explorers, making their home on the final frontier, facing down danger with his male characters, and often being the voice of reason, the voice of sanity or the voice of daring.

His women lived lives they chose and were as competent as men when they needed to be while being still, undeniably female, and not giving up any of their own unique abilities and characteristics. They were space pilots, and secret agents (and yes, they used female razzle dazzle, because in jobs you use all that you are. No, that didn’t make them inferior) homesteaders on Mars, women who could and did fight against alien invaders.

Heinlein’s women were an integral part of the human race, capable of contributing to the survival of the species by all means necessary. Sure, they wanted to have children, because a species without children doesn’t survive, but they also stood ready to fight for and protect those children, and carry humanity into the future.

I was reminded of this, recently, while listening to the Moon landing day interviews with Robert A. Heinlein, where he makes the case for having women astronauts, (just as capable as men, weigh less, etc.) but in the next breath says that all of humanity needs to go to space: men, women, and children.

It is clear he doesn’t think women should be held back, either because they’re thought inferior or out of some misguided notion they need to be protected.

But at the same time, it is equally clear that his vision of humanity — the two halves of humanity, unequal but complementary, different but equal in rights and in abilities – is one of a species that goes to the stars, both sexes, all ages.

So to my colleagues, offended by aprons and parturition, I say, that’s fine. You play on Earth and pretend there’s no difference between men and women, and try to convince us that women deserve to rule by virtue of being victims.

I too, love, love, love women. They are my favorite people. They (or at least the best ones) have always been my best friends. And, I should add, I think that Naomi in The Expanse is a classic Heinleinian woman.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Mooch

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We hardly knew ye:

Jonah had a righteous rant about this on Friday:

…the cursing is not the issue, it’s the context. I recall some conservatives defending Donald Trump’s tweets at Mika Brzezinski on the grounds that Andrew Jackson had a filthy mouth too. Okay, but he kept the blue talk out of his official statements.

The reason why the Scaramucci brouhaha is so dismaying isn’t the less-than-shocking revelation that a guy who refers to himself in the third person as “The Mooch” curses. Nor is it the suggestion that Steve Bannon is one of only a handful of men to master the art of autofellatio (there’s a Wikipedia entry on this topic that I will refrain from linking to, for the children). That bit of rhetorical excess seems the single best illustration to date of the imperative in the Age of Trump to take some statements seriously, but not literally.

No, there are two main reasons the unfolding Scaramucci clown show should arouse concern. The first is that he has no idea what he’s doing and he might just be nuts. This is the White House communications director. But he apparently doesn’t know how off-the-record interviews work. Now, for roughly 99 percent of the American public, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. But, again, he is the White House communications director. I am not ashamed of my ignorance about how to do all manner of things, from how to remove a gallbladder to how to fly a plane. But I expect these skills from surgeons and pilots.

The Mooch also doesn’t seem to grok that a public financial-disclosure form is . . . public. Nor does he know that it’s wrong for him to reach out to his FBI “buddies” in an effort to sic them on fellow members of the White House staff. Oh, and most communications professionals know that it’s probably a bad idea to explain away your stream-of-consciousness character assassinations with the fact that you didn’t appreciate the fact that journalists are scum.

Professionals? Trump don’t need no stinkin’ professionals.

[Update a few minutes later]

Call the burn unit, stat!

[Update a while later]

From what I’m hearing, Kelly canned him after he refused to accept that he wouldn’t report direct to Trump. Sounds like the new Chief of Staff is putting the hammer down. Not sure how he’ll be able to deal with the daughter and son-in-law, though.

[Update a while longer later]