Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Retreat Into Apathy”

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Mark Steyn:

As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” — which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System — or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.

More important, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood — and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day — and the latest report on “the seven evils” afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames “poverty” and “individualism,” failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable. In Ontario, Christine Elliott, a candidate for the leadership of the so-called Conservative party, is praised by the media for offering a more emollient conservatism predicated on “the need to take care of vulnerable people.”

Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

And it’s an awfully hard process to reverse, once it “progresses” far enough.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

When You’ve Lost Ted Rall, Roseanne Barr

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…and Bill Maher, you’ve truly lost un-America:

Obama needs to start putting it on the line in fights against the banks, the energy companies and the healthcare industry. I never thought I’d say this, but he needs to be more like George W. Bush. Bush was all about, “You’re with us or against us.”

Obama’s more like, “You’re either with us, or you obviously need to see another picture of this adorable puppy!”

Can he win re-election without the leftist douchebag vote? The most annoying thing about Maher, of course, is that he slanders libertarians by calling himself one.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Sixty Years

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…since 1984:

The Left has tried, and still does spasmodically, to pretend that the novel is not really anti-Soviet. But 1984’s Big Brother is undoubtedly Stalin, and the figure of Goldstein is Trotsky. Orwell had lived through such murderous events as the Communists turning on the Trotskyists and anarchists in the Spanish civil war, and the Hitler-Stalin pact. It is particularly penetrating to have invented the phrase of the Two Minute Hate to describe the totalitarian mechanism for falsifying public opinion to suit the ends of power. Two Minute Hates occur all the time. Just look at the way the Left switched from supporting Israel to lambasting it, or how the Shah’s pro-American Iran converted overnight into Khomeini’s anti-American Iran.

To travel in old days in Soviet Russia and the Soviet bloc was to find oneself deep in 1984. The hopelessness of daily life was exactly as Orwell had captured it. How sinister it was too, how thoroughly Orwellian. Everyone was against everyone else; under the all-encompassing propaganda about progressiveness there was no communal or social spirit, only the Party. One of the compulsory Intourist or KGB guides once told me proudly that she had renounced her mother for failing to be a Communist. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.” Orwell’s imagination had been exactly right.

In light of contemporary events, it’s worth rereading.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Obama Surprise

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Who were the rubes? They were the rubes:

The first surprise to many Valleyites is how innately anti-entrepreneurial the new Administration has turned out to be. Candidate Obama looked like a high tech executive – smart, hip, a gadget freak – and he certainly talked pro-entrepreneur. But the reality of the last six months has been very different. One might have predicted that he would use the best tool in his economic arsenal – new company creation and the millions of new jobs those firms in turn create – to fight this recession. But President Obama has instead appeared to be almost exclusively interested in Big Business as the key to economy recovery.

By comparison, almost every move the new Administration has made regarding entrepreneurship seems to be targeting at destroying it in this country. It has left Sarbanes-Oxley intact, added ever-greater burdens on small business owners, called for increasing capital gains taxes, and is now preparing to pile on cap-and-trade, double taxation on offshore earnings, and a host of other new costs. Even Obamacare seems likely to land unfairly on small companies.

Entrepreneurship has been the single most important contributor to the economic health of this country for at least a century now – and if you were going to systematically destroy that vitality, you couldn’t come up with a better strategy than the one Washington has put in place over the last six months. Indeed, you can make the case that the sole contribution the Obama administration has made to entrepreneurship in America to date is to force all of those millions of unemployed people to desperately set up their own businesses in order to survive.

But as he points out (and it’s a long-standing truism), big business has no interest in free markets:

…you may think that the competitive challenge that big tech companies fear most is from other big tech companies. You know: Apple v. Microsoft, HP v. Dell, Cisco v. Juniper, MySpace v. Facebook. But in fact, that isn’t the case. Sure, those are dangerous competitors; but far more threatening is that clever new start-up that seems to appear out of nowhere. That’s the threat that wakes up Fortune 500 tech CEOs at 3 a.m. That little start-up not only competes with you, it can render your entire business – even your entire industry – obsolete and you don’t even see it coming. Think desktop publishing and the printing industry, the iPod and the music industry – and just look at the terror that Twitter seems to be creating at Google and Facebook these days.

Once you understand this dynamic, a lot of the paradoxical recent business behavior in high tech suddenly becomes explicable. For example, why did the big tech companies embrace such regulations as Sarbanes and stock options expensing – even though they would cost them billions of dollars with no obvious gain? And why would they support a Presidential candidate who seemed to have little understanding of, or sympathy for, market capitalism and business?

Because it was the best strategy to crush the start-ups.

And for the most part, that strategy has worked. High tech has only seen a handful of new companies go public in the last five years – compared to hundreds per year before that. Less noticed is that this means most hot new start-up companies, instead of enjoying an IPO and becoming rich enough to compete full-on against the big boys, now can only grow to a certain size then offer themselves up to be bought by the giants. What had once been hugely valuable competition has now been reduced to a farm system for acquisitive mature companies. [And a side benefit has been the near-destruction of the venture capital industry, which big business always described as ‘vulture’ capital because it drew away their most talented employees.]

Now you see why the tech world joined the Obama team early on in the campaign. Not only did Senator Obama seem like their kind of guy, but each camp saw in him the President they wanted. The entrepreneurs thought they were getting a fellow entrepreneur, and big business thought they get a confederate in taking out the competition.

The entrepreneurs were suckers, but this is going to hurt the big guys, too.

ITAR is another example of this phenomenon. It really hurts the small companies disproportionately, because the big companies, like Boeing and Lockmart have a small army of compliance people in place who know how to work the system, and the costs of whom can simply get charged against their government contracts. This is in fact a big advantage of established aerospace contractors in general — that they have ongoing cost-plus contracts against which they can charge for the bureaucracy made necessary by government regulations, whether ITAR, or simply enforcing the FAR, plus they get an IR&D budget funded by the taxpayers. This makes being a startup all the harder, and this administration looks unlikely to do anything to make it any easier.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

An Elderly Anti-Semitic Racist

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You’d almost think that Jeremiah Wright was the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum. I’ll have some more thoughts on leftist/media stereotyping at PJM later this morning.

[Update late morning]

“Socialism represents the future of the west.”

So sayeth the “right wing” Jew hater.

[Bumped]

[Update after lunch]

It just keeps getting better. The guy may have been targetting that well-known bastion of leftist politics, The Weekly Standard. And of course, none of us should be shocked to learn that he was a journalism major…

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Left’s Hatred Of Women

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Thoughts from Don Surber:

From left, the women are Katharine Harris, Carrie Prejean, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, and Michele Bachmann.

These five women are are not the only ones that American liberals ridicule without fear. They are like little boys who cannot handle a strong woman. These women dare challenge them intellectually, and so we get crude counterattacks.

So-called feminists stand on the sidelines like so many Silda Spitzers or Elizabeth Edwardses or Hillary Clintons, standing by their menfolk while the boys treat women like dirt. Heck, Mrs. Edwards even served as her husband’s attack dog against any critic — even as she knew he was sleeping with his mistress of many years.

It’s kind of ironic, because I recall back in the nineties that these same people stupidly told us that we didn’t like Hillary Clinton because we were “threatened” by a “strong woman” (hilariously ignoring our admiration of Jeanne Kirkpatrick and “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher).

He gets this wrong, though:

Letterman will get away with it because liberal misogyny is OK in America. It has the Seal of Approval of the National Organization For Women.

It’s not “liberal” misogyny. These people aren’t liberals, and it’s time we stopped allowing them to get away with slandering true liberals by calling themselves that.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Impromptus

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FAQ advice from Jay Nordlinger, on Che, what classical music to listen to, and how to be a journalist. A sample:

I wrote to a Latin America scholar — a superb one — and he said the following: “At one time, I was collecting stuff about Guevara to write a piece of my own, but the subject is so nauseating . . . as if I had to write an article explaining why the Nazis were bad.” Yet such articles are necessary: because the myth-making about Che is strong and mesmerizing. My scholar friend continued, “Are you aware of the fact that there are busts and statues of Che Guevara not just in Central Park but in Vienna and other European capitals?”

Yes, but those busts and statues can be taken down, mentally — with truthful accounts and assessments. With fantasy-puncturing. There is plenty available, for those who wish to see (to see beyond the T-shirt, that is).

My own advice: visit Che-Mart.

He also has an awesome set of classical recommendations, if you’ve never been into it that much.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Which Is Worse?

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Instapundit:

I don’t think Obama realizes — or, more frighteningly, perhaps he doesn’t care — what this spending is going to do to the economy. After all, the free market is just a rival power center. As Tim Noah says: ‘On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”

I’ll have more thoughts on this Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy tomorrow at PJM.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Glenn’s post was motivated by Megan McArdle’s thoughts on deficits, and who to blame for them:

The problem with the budget deficit is not any particular program, or even any particular tax cuts. It is not that George Bush or Obama is a bad person who does bad things. The problem with the budget deficit is that, unlike the deficits George Bush ran, the deficits projected under Obama (and beyond) are actually large enough to potentially precipitate a fiscal crisis. If our interest rates suddenly spiked up, perhaps because lenders were worried about the size of our budget deficits, we’d find ourselves in the kind of nasty fiscal jam that regularly plagues third-world countries. The difference is, no one has enough money to bail us out.

Obama is the one who will have to prevent this. Yet instead of plans, we’re getting fairy numbers from the OMB. That’s worrying, and it’s sure not George W. Bush’s fault. His OMB liked to inflate the deficit projections, so that they could take credit for a mostly imaginary reduction.

It’s almost like he wants to wreck the economy.