THE THING IS, people don’t want social media to perfectly reflect reality.
Archive for 2015
November 17, 2015
EVERYTHING THAT’S WRONG WITH THE MSM IN A SINGLE ARTICLE:
Why Won’t People Just Call Ben Carson the Idiot He Clearly Is?
Come on. The guy is as dumb as a bag of rocks. How does he get away with it? Because our society craves his narrative.
Followed five paragraphs in with this moment of cognitive dissonance:
Carson gets a pass because our society craves his narrative. He was a successful neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is also a successful author, and his rags-to-riches story is an inspiration for many. America loves narratives like Carson’s because they remove complexity from the world. Life becomes incredibly simple because all of its problems can be solved through determination, hard work, and an unwavering belief in God.
And we wonder why we get the presidential candidates we get, when an article appears in one of the two successor publications to the Washington Post’s Newsweek, the one that’s edited by a man whose chief claim to fame is a book called “Wingnuts,” that derides “a successful neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital” as a man who is “as dumb as a bag of rocks.”
Earlier this month, an article at the Daily Beast posited that the Internet is “broken:”
The Internet has quietly cemented its economy on saying the most extreme thing imaginable as loud as possible, and that economy is seeping into the dialogue of life and politics.
And here’s the thing: The people publishing stuff like this know that’s what’s happening. They know how to fix it. But they’re waiting in line, first, for the lottery that is the Era of the New Media Payday.
You’re not going nuts. The Internet is getting objectively deliberately confrontational and subjectively worse. But there’s a way to fix it.
Here’s how to see the promise of a consumer-focused Internet fulfilled—one that feels like an open town hall for good ideas and not a persistent paddlin’ for literally doing nothing while you sleep.
Stop measuring success by how many people click on your stuff. Start measuring success by how many people appreciate it.
Fair enough — but when will the Daily Beast take its own advice?
BECAUSE EQUALITY IS ONLY FOR A SELECT FEW, SILLY! Robyn Urback: Why, exactly, is it OK to discriminate against men’s groups on campus?
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Democrats put their fate in Obama’s hands — and the Islamic State’s. “Are Democrats going to circle the wagons once again for the White House, just as they did on the deeply flawed Iran deal? If so, they are gambling with the lives of Americans and with their own political future. Essentially, they are betting that the Islamic State won’t follow up on Paris, even though the president projects passivity and weakness — even defiance to suggestions that his approach has not made us safer. While the president may be so cut off from reality that he does not appreciate the enormity of his national security failure or the impression of weakness and unseriousness he is projecting, Democratic elected officials and candidates have no excuse.”
Well, when you’re reading in The New Yorker — The New Yorker! — that none of the Democrats has a strategy for ISIS, things look bad.
FLASHBACK: New York Times Reports On Muslim Proselytizing During Charlie Hebdo Attack, Then Deletes It.
Heck, John Kerry did exactly that in real time today.
REMINDER: Amazon carries shooting supplies.
BRYAN CRANSTON’S PRO–TRUMBO MUMBO-JUMBO: Cranston, formerly the star of Breaking Bad, promoting his new film portraying Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (he of the legendary cranial and moral inversions during the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression pact) performs a few historical loop-the-loops of his own, as Brent Bozell and Tim Graham write:
At the Daily Beast, Marlow Stern interviewed Cranston and announced the Hollywood Ten that he belonged to was a “fraternity of communist sympathizers crucified by the House Un-American Activities Committee for their political beliefs.”
Perhaps it was Stern who prompted Cranston to descend into the inanity that the Soviet communists were fascists, not communists: “This communist regime under Stalin was unbelievably cruel and vicious. But the truth is they weren’t communists. Stalin wasn’t a communist. He was a fascist dictator. But the name ‘communism’ stuck to that.”
And with this, Communism apologists come full circle. Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote last year:
Stalin championed the idea that all of his political opponents should be dubbed fascists, including many of his fellow Bolsheviks, such as Leon Trotsky (whom Stalin had assassinated), and much of the Red Army’s officer corps (whom he had executed), and countless Ukrainians (whom he had liquidated). Stalin insisted that even mentioning the man-made – i.e., Stalin-made — Ukranian famine was evidence you were an agent of the Nazis.
Under Stalin’s “theory of social fascism,” any socialist, social-democratic, or progressive group or party not loyal to him had to be called fascist. Hence, for a while Moscow insisted that FDR and even Norman Thomas (head of the Socialist Party of America) were fascists.
Ultimately, Communist propagandists and their allied intellectuals would reflexively blame fascism for everything, regardless of the facts. That’s what prompted George Orwell to remark that “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
I’m not at all sure that Stalin would have appreciated being described as a “fascist,” but I’ll bet he would have approved the secular taqiyya behind it, to borrow the phrase from Roger Simon’s post earlier today on Mr. Obama’s obfuscations to dilute attacks against another totalitarian religion.
LIFE IN 2015: The Microcomplaint: Nothing Too Small to Whine About.
SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “It must be incredibly frustrating as an Islamic terrorist not to have your views and motives taken seriously by the societies you terrorize, even after you have explicitly and repeatedly stated them,” self-described “Iraqi born writer & founder of the Global Secular Humanist Movement” Faisal Saeed Al Mutar notes:
Even worse, those on the regressive left, in their endless capacity for masochism and self-loathing, have attempted to shift blame inwardly on themselves, denying the terrorists even the satisfaction of claiming responsibility.
It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch:
“We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Wait, what? Yes we did…”
“No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”
“WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans, blasphemers, and disbelievers.”
“No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.”
“Huh!? Who are you to tell us we’re not true Muslims!? Islam is literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It is our very reason for being.”
“Nope. We created you. We installed a social and economic system that alienates and disenfranchises you, and that’s why you did this. We’re sorry.”
“What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians – disenfranchisement doesn’t even enter into it!”
“Listen, it’s our fault. We don’t blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out.”
“Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull this off, and we’re not going to let you take it away from us.”
“No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame.”
“OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?”
Or as Mark Steyn writes, “‘Why do they hate us?’ was never the right question. ‘Why do they despise us?’ is a better one.”
DEEP THINKING FROM IAN McKELLEN ON THE SYRIAN REFUGEES FLOODING EUROPE: The veteran actor (Lord of the Rings, X-Men) spoke yesterday with Larry King in his post-CNN retirement home at a streaming video site called Ora TV, founded by King and New York Times financier Carlos Slim:
Sir Ian McKellen comments on the influx of Syrian refugees into Western nations. McKellen says these people should ‘be looked after’ until they can return to their home country and that we should trust authorities to weed out any individual who poses a threat.
Umm, do most of them want to go home? I wasn’t aware they viewed Europe as a big temporary vacation spot while the unpleasantness back home sorts itself out – and it doesn’t sound like Angela Merkel views the refugees as temporary guests, either.
And second, has McKellen asked the refugees for their thoughts on homosexuality and gay marriage?
Is it true that when you stay at hotels you tear out the Bible page that condemns homosexuality?
Ian McKellen: I do, absolutely. I’m not proudly defacing the book, but it’s a choice between removing that page and throwing away the whole Bible. And I’m not really the first: I got delivered a package of 40 of those pages — Leviticus 18:22 — that had been torn out by a married couple I know. They put them on a bit of string so that I could hang it up in the bathroom.
Well, everyone has their own way of responding to publications whose writing they disagree with.
GERMANY’S HANNOVER SOCCER STADIUM EVACUATED 90 MINUTES BEFORE GAME: The London Telegraph on “What we know:”
- Police say there was a “serious”, “concrete” threat of an explosive attack during the game
- Angela Merkel and several senior German officials planned to attend the match in a show of solidarity with France. The French anthem was also to be played.
- There are unconfirmed reports that an ambulance filled with explosives was discovered outside the stadium.
- The players from both teams were taken to undisclosed locations
- Citizens have been asked to remain in their homes
Plus in a later update at the Telegraph: “One suspicious device was found outside of the stadium in Hannover. Now there are reports that another device has been found, inside of Hannover’s train system.”
Update: “Interior minister: Despite reports, no explosives were found in an ambulance at Hannover Stadium in Germany amid security situation,” NBC tweets.
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ROGER SIMON: If You Like Your Islam, You Can Keep Your Islam:
[Obama’s] not a Muslim himself. He claims to be a Christian (in the Reverend Wright tradition) and is actually a post-modern agnostic who almost never goes to church, except for political purposes. But he is a Muslim by emotion, by childhood attachment to his days in an Indonesian madrassa when his father, and later his mother, abandoned him. The morning cry of the muezzin, he has told us, is the most moving sound on Earth to him. It undoubtedly reassured him.
Unfortunately, what soothed Barack as a youth turns out to be a death scream of Seventh Century tribalism for the rest of us. He can’t countenance that, so he has to disconnect the carnage of ISIS, etc. from the ideology that drives it. It can’t be that the Islamic State is Islamic. That would mean there is something wrong with him. But it is. Indeed it is an orthodox form of Islam with roots going back to the Medina Koran.
Most Muslims know this (and Obama undoubtedly knows it too on some level); so when these Muslims hear the president deny that ISIS is Islamic, they know he is lying and dismiss what he is saying. He isn’t fooling anybody except his liberal/progressive clientele at home. It’s a form of taqiyya for local consumption — permissible lying in defense of the faith — one he doesn’t actually believe, but identifies with.
Read the whole thing.
OOF — KERRY IN PARIS TODAY: CHARLIE HEBDO ATTACK HAD ‘RATIONALE’ TO ‘AGGRIEVE ONE PARTICULAR SENSE OF WRONG:’
“In the last days, obviously, that has been particularly put to the test. There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration.”
So — second look at sending James Taylor to Paris in place of Kerry?
AND THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT POINT: College Pays Off, on Average. Your Results May Vary.
Of course, it’s not exactly like a lottery ticket, because the distribution of the rewards isn’t random. Not every college graduate is entered in the “investment banker” or “Silicon Valley software engineer” draws. The high salaries for those jobs pull up the average earnings of college graduates, which can make a college degree look like a more lucrative bet than it actually is if you’re unlikely to get one of those top-end jobs.
The working paper’s model suggests that the increasing variance, or risk, in the earnings of college graduates means that people who enroll in college are embarking on a search process in which they discover what their likely earnings are. As they realize that they’re more likely to end up in the bottom tier of college graduates, people become more likely to drop out. Others don’t don’t drop out, but graduate and then end up in jobs that don’t require a college diploma.
This model implies that the gains from pushing marginal students into college are likely to be small, for both the students and for society; those students are more likely to drop out or graduate but reap little or no wage premium for their degree.
Of course, this is just one study, and one model. But it raises the question that I asked a few weeks ago: What, exactly, are we getting for all the money we’re spending on college? “Helping students pay for college” sounds like a fine public policy goal. “Helping people to spend years of their lives taking on debt just to find out that they’re unlikely to get a high-paying job” … considerably less so.
That’s why we need to give colleges skin in the game.
A WORLD THAT WAS A LOT LIKE MIDDLE EARTH: In a Tooth, DNA From Some Very Old Cousins, the Denisovans. “Some of the DNA in the Denisova 8 tooth hints at an even older interbreeding. While most of the genetic material in the tooth bears a close kinship with Neanderthals, some of it seems only distantly related to Neanderthal or human DNA. One possible explanation, Dr. Paabo said in an interview, is that Denisovans interbred with another hominin species that lived somewhere in Asia. It is conceivable that this hominin was a species already known from fossil discoveries, such as Homo erectus. But it could also be a distantly related species whose bones have never been found.”
KEVIN DRUM IN MOTHER JONES: Liberals Should Knock Off the Mockery Over Calls to Limit Syrian Refugees.
Here’s the thing: to the average person, it seems perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of admitting Syrian refugees to the country. We know that ISIS would like to attack the US. We know that ISIS probably has the wherewithal to infiltrate a few of its people into the flood of refugees. And most voters have no idea how easy it is to get past US screening. They probably figure it’s pretty easy.
So it doesn’t seem xenophobic or crazy to call for an end to accepting Syrian refugees. It seems like simple common sense. After all, things changed after Paris.
Mocking Republicans over this—as liberals spent much of yesterday doing on my Twitter stream—seems absurdly out of touch to a lot of people. Not just wingnut tea partiers, either, but plenty of ordinary centrists too. It makes them wonder if Democrats seriously see no problem here? Do they care at all about national security? Are they really that detached from reality?
Or at least, that committed to virtue-signalling above all. . . .
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FROM MY VERY SMART UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE COLLEAGUE, Vejas Liulevicius, and the Great Courses people, A History Of Eastern Europe in 24 30-minute lectures. He’s done a number of these lecture series, and they’ve all gone over well with InstaPundit readers, so enjoy!