Why does it make “liberals” stupid?
Ms. Garber thinks the fear that the bombers might turn out to be Muslims represents a “sad assumption” that “Americans lack the intellectual equipment and moral imagination to tell the difference between an individual and a group.” This is arbitrary, unfounded and stupid. Let’s put it this way: Americans possess the intellectual equipment and moral imagination to discern correctly the relationships between individuals and groups. In particular, the relationships between individuals and any fanatical movements or criminal conspiracies of which they are a part.
Of course, they have no problem whatsoever with the concept of evil if the people involved had been of the correct white European (not literally Caucasian) ancestry and into guns and militias and Tea Parties. Their disappointment when they were not was quite palpable. It’s only when they are politically correct non-people of that persuasion, and particularly when they are Muslim, that they become “complex.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Erin Burnett is “surprised that the bombers weren’t stereotypical Americans.”
Of course she was. Because unlike Islamic extremists, “stereotypical Americans” would have no problem whatsoever with setting down an imminent bomb with nails in it next to an eight-year-old child.
These are the morons from whom we receive our “news.”
[Monday morning update]
The futile hunt for the elusive Tea Party murderer continues:
…decent Muslims are not responsible for the atrocity perpetrated by the Tsarnaev brothers. However, it is hopelessly naive at this point to speak of a “tiny minority of extremists” hijacking the religion of a billion people. The radical elements of Islam are larger and more powerful than that. They enjoy financial and cultural support from malevolent political factions who find Islam a comfortable fit with their ideology. The same media that never stops trying to weave an intellectual web between mainstream conservatism and bloodthirsty murderers is willing to discreetly avert its gaze from the radicalization of Islam overseas, and the tentacles these radicals are working patiently to extend into the United States. Islam has a problem, and only good, outspoken Muslims can solve it. We’re not doing them any favors by soft-pedaling the magnitude of the challenge they face, or setting a low bar of expectations for their achievements.
We might have gotten a good look at one of those outspoken good Muslims last week. (It seems patronizing to refer to them as “moderate Muslims.” Moderating between what – support for terrorism and good citizenship? We shouldn’t be looking for the “moderate” region between those “extremes.”) The Tsarnaev brothers’ Uncle Ruslan – a man who must have been going through a private hell few of us can imagine, as word of his nephews’ responsibility for the Boston Marathon bombings spread – thundered that these despicable acts of murder were an insult to the honor of his family, the Chechen people, and Islam. He denounced the terrorists in no uncertain terms, calling them “losers” who sought to ruin the lives of hard-working people making an honorable place for themselves in the great “mini-world” of America. Instead of hunting for the mythical snipe and wumpus of Tea Party murderers, the Left should take a lesson from Uncle Ruslan on calling out the real extremists in our midst.
But it won’t. Doesn’t fit the preferred narrative.
One more point — from comments:
What I can’t stand is the use of so-called experts and talking heads to fill the airtime when none of them know what they’re talking about. This is the time when their audiences are at the highest, the known facts are at their fewest, and people will remember things for a long time that very often turn out to be untrue. It’s almost to the point where we should apply the “48 hour rule” to any news coverage of a major news story such as a mass shooting or terrorist bombing. Treat everything you hear or read in the media in the first 48 hours with a high degree of skepticism.
I continue to recall with amusement the “aviation expert” that Fox News had after the first plane crashed into the twin towers, assuring us that this must be pilot error of some kind, and couldn’t be a deliberate attack. As he was sagely explaining this to us, the second plane hit, live, in the background.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Yes, we “right wingers” celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday every April, because, you know, Hitler was such an individualistic, freedom-loving, tax-hating, limited-government kind of guy.
I’d like to see pressure on NPR to fire this lying, slandering hack. OK, well maybe not lying — she’s probably nutty and stupid enough to believe it.
I saw “God Bless America” the other day.. you get the feeling that the writer tried to “balance” the murder fantasy, but all that does is alienate all Americans, I feel.
It doesn’t make them stupid. They are stupid. …and evil themselves.
No matter how many times you lead them to the truth they reject it. Are. Not. Interested.
Show them irrefutable evidence and they will come up with an anecdote to dismiss it all away. Relative weights have no meaning to them.
They are not blind. They just refuse to see.
I think it’s a form of Zahavian signalling.
“Ms. Garber thinks the fear that the bombers might turn out to be Muslims represents a “sad assumption” that “Americans lack the intellectual equipment and moral imagination to tell the difference between an individual and a group.” ”
I think Ms. Garber operates under the sad assumption that she has two synapses to rub together.
She has bought into the narrative. Once that investment is made, she’ll do anything to preserve the fantasy. Because another sad assumption she makes is that it’s more important to be deemed correct as opposed to actually be correct.
I think part of the problem is that the ever so sophisticated “elites” don’t believe in the concept of evil. The very word has religious roots and therefore is the stuff of the rubes in flyover country. I’ve had online conversations with people who refuse to use the word evil to describe the mass murders of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like. If you can’t see mass murder as evil, then there’s something wrong with you. And no one must cover the Gosnell trial because, well, that’s icky and may raise uncomfortable questions about late term abortion.
Then there’s the whole Islam thing. Oprah said that Islam is the religion of peace and so did many others. So, when people who call themselves Muslims commit terror attacks like the first World Trade Center bombing, the embassy bombings in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, 9/11, the Madrid bombing, the London bombings, etc., we’re told that we can’t generalize. However, when a lone nutcase shoots up a school or theater, then all gun owners are demonized. Their discernment only seems to go in one direction.
Perhaps the real problem is that the self-proclaimed “elites” really aren’t elite at all. For all their Ivy League credentials, they’re not very bright and have caused a great deal of damage.
larry, that’s very definitely part of the problem.
Another major part is the fact that the left pays no price whatsoever by accusing the perps to be from the Right wing/Tea Party/Anti-government etc. types. So they are free to continue to do it and they do so.
If they paid a price for being wrong – say getting fired or having their show yanked – you’d see a lot more care in their reporting.
While I’d love to see some of those talking heads lose their jobs for journalistic malpractice, I’m not holding my breath. A big problem of the 24 hour news cycle is they have a lot of time to fill. Whenever a big story breaks, the known facts are few and often contradictory due to the confusion, such as the number of casualties. This is normal and expected. What I can’t stand is the use of so-called experts and talking heads to fill the airtime when none of them know what they’re talking about. This is the time when their audiences are at the highest, the known facts are at their fewest, and people will remember things for a long time that very often turn out to be untrue. It’s almost to the point where we should apply the “48 hour rule” to any news coverage of a major news story such as a mass shooting or terrorist bombing. Treat everything you hear or read in the media in the first 48 hours with a high degree of skepticism.
If there is no cost, there is no remedy. Gregg is absolutely right. Shame used to work, but no longer exists. Ridicule, which they use so well, requires a critical mass which is seldom achieved. Until they pay for it, it will not end.
If we can’t figure out how to make them pay (using ethical means) then the game is lost. I’m of the opinion that it is lost, but I’m absolutely open to suggestion. I really want to be wrong. You’d think that being wrong would occasionally break my way. Instead someone will say I’m just being negative and how dare I?
What I see is a state that is getting a tighter grip on all our throats and the assumption it can be no other way. This assumption often being expressed by the right. Anecdotes that we win here or there doesn’t change the overall trend.
I remember when starting a business just required a tax ID and a small fee. Last time I tried it, they had so many hoops to jump through I just quit. It just wasn’t worth it to me. All these little things add up and work to train us to be the states property. Anyone saying they aren’t is in denial.
I see it everywhere. I see it in computer code. Elegance and simplicity are gone. Code is two to four times the size it aught to be and doesn’t do the job it’s supposed to. It’s human nature and it’s all related. I’m sorry I’m not able to express this concept which is so clear to me. Perhaps it’s just a natural tendency for laziness and apathy but to this INTJ it seems like something more.
I continue to recall with amusement the “aviation expert” that Fox News had after the first plane crashed into the twin towers, assuring us that this must be pilot error of some kind, and couldn’t be a deliberate attack. As he was sagely explaining this to us, the second plane hit, live, in the background.
I heard the news about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center while driving to work. As a private pilot and aviation history buff, I immediately recalled the 1945 incident when a B-25 bomber, lost in fog, collided with the Empire State Building. I thought it had happened again, especially considering that the only description of the plane was that it was twin-engined. That covers everything from a Cri-Cri to a 777, so it wasn’t inconceivable that it could’ve been a private plane accident.
When I logged into my computer at work and brought up the news stories, I saw pictures of smoke billowing from one of the towers with perfectly clear, blue skies. The only way it could’ve been an accident was if the pilot had suffered a heart attack. None of it made sense until the second plane struck.
When I first heard the story, before they cut to the picture, I was thinking of the B-25 incident, too, but when I saw the clear skies, I immediately started to wonder if it had been hijacked, and the most obvious suspect in my mind was bin Laden. Which is why I was listening with amusement to the “expert,” who seemed to be clueless. When I saw the second plane hit, it crystallized in my mind, immediately, a thought in a supersaturated solution, and I knew that we were at war, and almost certainly with whom.
I had just come in from running, and my wife called me into the room to see the TV, about a minute before the second plane hit. My first words were ‘It’s a war’.
I used to leave the news channel on while I slept. I was groggy when the first plane hit. When the second plane hit my first thought is whoever did this is going to find out they’ve awakened a giant with righteous anger. It wasn’t just anger and the talking heads all looked like fools. I saw that righteous anger unify us and immediately saw others work against it. Bill Maher calling the hijackers brave forever cemented my view of him (which before that was simply a bad comic in D movies that thought much too highly of himself. Now I just see evil.)
My first thought when I heard re: the second plane (I was driving into work) was that somebody doesn’t get to be a government anymore.
Evil makes “liberals” stupid? I think if by this point in human history–especially after the past 100 years–you’re still convinced that the State is our best friend, and the more power and money we “give” it the better off we’ll all be, you’re already starting out pretty stupid to begin with.
I recently read an intriguing piece whose main thrust was that since white Americans have never been the collective victims of a different race or ethnicity (as general white folks, as opposed to Irish-Americans, Armenians, Italians, etc), they don’t have the racial group identity and self-identification shared by many other groups like Jews or blacks. So to whites, other whites don’t get automatically defended out of group solidarity.
A result of this is that American whites can identify another group of whites as “the other” and blame them for pretty much everything bad that might happen. So when American leftists instinctively assume that the “right-wing” is behind everything, it is just the same (and just as racist, in a way) as Muslims who blame everything on the Jews, and probably flows from much the same source. I’ve found that incite to be rather illuminating.
If American conservatives were made up almost entirely of blacks, hispanics, and Asians and the liberals were almost entirely white, then the nightly newscasts from the main stream media would make perfect and obvious sense as a bunch of white racists who don’t understand minorities, fear minorities, rarely socialize with minorities, and often despise minorities – because they’re different. They would likewise not make the slightest effort to understand or respect the minorities’ viewpoints or culture and mock it derisively. In such a world, nothing about the liberal media worldview would have to be changed other than the photoshop job on the faces they display in the background as they deliver their supposedly insightful comments.
Sociologically, pretty much all they’ve done is define half their own race as a despised outgroup and a “racial” minority because they haven’t had a reason to come together along conventional racial lines since they abandoned open segregation in favor of buying off their previous victims to get moral absolution. They didn’t in the slightest quit being ignorant racists, they just switched targets.
If anything underscores the uslessness and misleadingness and overall dopeyness of the contemporary usage (mainly by “liberals,” which alone should raise a warning flag) of the term “right wing” –as was recently discussed on this blog–that remark about Hitler’s birthday on National Propaganda Radio does.
And how did they manage to tie columbine into that? Its like they just rattled off a list of horrible events and claimed they were right wing because they were horrible just like right wingers.