Category Archives: Media Criticism

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Just What We Need Right Now

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A new fantasy history about FDR:

Nothing to Fear claims to provide a “riveting narrative account of the personal dynamics that shaped the tumultuous early days of FDR’s presidency.” Although entertainingly written, it provides little new evidence and even less analysis. What it does offer is an account of Roosevelt’s first 100 days—what Cohen terms “the third great revolution in American history”—for readers whose faith in that revolution remains unshaken and who wish to reclaim the New Deal legacy today. Cohen’s heroes gamely overcome the “business interests” and “powerful financial interests” who try to derail or at least temper Roosevelt’s bold policies.

The result is a polemic that inadvertently raises more questions than it answers. Ray Moley, for instance, became an outspoken critic of the New Deal after leaving the administration, writing in 1939 that Roosevelt suffered from “a kind of mental autointoxication.” By 1948 he was warning about creeping statism, and by 1960 he was a full-fledged Goldwater Republican. Whatever doubts Moley had about the New Deal at the time go unmentioned in Nothing to Fear, and his recantation is the subject of just one paragraph in the epilogue. A pivotal character in American political history is thus reduced to a one-dimensional apparatchik.

Well, what do you expect from the New York Times? It took them years to admit the (Pulitzer-winning) lies and propaganda of Walter Duranty.

Media Criticism, Popular Culture

Don’t Know Much About Geography

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An amusing article about LA-based “24” producers, and tales set in DC. I find this kind of attitude among producers infuriating:

Howard Gordon, “24’s” executive producer, concedes that the show’s writing staff isn’t exactly all that knowledgeable about the lay of our land. “We’ve all been to Washington,” he says from “24’s” production offices in Los Angeles, “but none of us are Washington residents. I’m the closest thing. I’m from New York.”

The show’s chief research tool on Washington geography: “We have a big map in our office.”

If so, how to explain the crash of a passenger jet in the alleged Washington suburb of “Edgeboro, Md.”? Or that Jack is able to maintain his tail on a suspect on “New York Avenue” by driving across a very large (and utterly imaginary) park?

Gordon says the names and locales need only to be plausible, if not literally accurate, since almost all of the 11 million who watch “24” each week have no idea what’s where in the nation’s capital. “The only people who really care about this are people with too much time on their hands,” he says.

Yes, just like the only people who care about getting the science right are people “with too much time on their hands.” I guess they don’t mind being a laughingstock as long as they get laughed at all the way to the bank. And does this guy really believe that scuba diving into the White House basement from the Potomac is “plausible”?

[Update in the afternoon]

I have the same thought about this as I do about directors and producers of SF. Would it kill you, would it break the bank, to hire a consultant to review a script and say, “guys, that doesn’t make any sense, because…” They wouldn’t have to take his/her advice if they thought fixing it would really screw up the dramatic story line, but it would spare them from completely needless stupidity and cluelessness.

[Evening update]

There’s a pertinent link in comments, explaining Hollywood and verisimilitude.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Mindless

65 Comments

Here’s an article that demonstrates the vapidity of thought of those who oppose self defense on campus (and anywhere else):

In April 2007, he was a student at Virginia Tech when his girlfriend and several other people he knew there were gunned down in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Thirty-two people died, plus the gunman.

There were times when Woods thought that maybe he should get a gun.

“Then I learned pretty fast that wouldn’t solve anything,” said Woods, who is now a graduate student at UT. “The idea that somebody could stop a school shooting with a gun is impossible. It’s reactive, not preventative.”

Huh?

How did he “learn” that at all, let alone “pretty fast”? Who provided the lesson? Was it in graduate school at UT?

And what’s wrong with “reactive” as a fall back when “preventative” doesn’t work (as it clearly didn’t in Blacksburg)? Particularly when “preventative” seems to consist of putting up “unarmed victims heregun-free zone” signs?

Whatever he learned, or how fast he learned it, he didn’t learn it from these students, who disarmed a gunman up the road from his school back in 2002.

Opponents say that if guns are allowed on campus, students and faculty will live in fear of classmates and colleagues, not knowing who might pull a gun over a drunken dorm argument or a poor grade.

Note, they have difficulty finding any actual examples of this to justify their bizarre paranoia. And they don’t seem to live in fear of the psychopaths among them who ignore the “gun-free zone” signs, who are the only ones with guns under their setup.

Woods, who wore a maroon “Virginia Tech Class of 2007” T-shirt during an interview, said he hasn’t heard from any survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting who supports guns on campus.

And therefore, since he hasn’t heard of any, none must exist. Great logic, that.

He figures a classroom shooting would be too sudden to stop, even if a student or teacher had a gun.

How he “figures” that, just as how he “learned it pretty fast,” remains unexplained.

“Everything happens too quickly,” Woods said. “You either play dead or you are dead.”

Really? Tell it to this woman.

Idiot.

[Monday morning update]

If I am in possession of my faculties, I will refuse to go into a nursing home unless it is a “shall issue” nursing home. I would at least want some of the staff to be armed.

[Update after the Instalanche]

If there are any new readers here, you might want to check out the rest of the blog. I have some thoughts on the president’s south Asian speech affectations, press coverage of the Fargo floods, whether or not there is really nothing that we can do about the North Korean launch, and who controls the means of production.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Naturalistic Fallacy

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John Tierney has some thoughts on, and from Freeman Dyson, that seem appropriate to last night’s nonsense:

The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.

The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.

Like Tierney, I am firmly in Freeman’s camp.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

I’d Love To Change The World

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The old Ten Years After standard should have been the Obama campaign’s theme song, since they told us that’s what would happen if we elected them:

One popular song when I was young was from one of those one-hit-wonder bands who are all but forgotten except for one great tune. The band’s name was Ten Years After and the song was “I’d Love to Change the World.” One memorable line went like this:

Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more

I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times I sang along to that song before it dawned on me: “Hey, that ain’t right! Shouldn’t it be: tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no poor no more?”

I have no way of knowing whether or not Ten Years After advocated the abolition of wealth, or if the line was a tongue-in-cheek way of sniping at the simplicity of the argument that removing the wealthy made the poor better off. But what I did know then was that I finally understood the definition of covet. It was to want something so much that if I couldn’t have it, then I wanted to deny it to anyone else.

That’s the politics of envy in a nutshell. Unfortunately, there’s evidence that it’s an evolutionarily evolved feature of human nature, and one of the reasons that the false promises of Marxism remain attractive and enduring, despite the vast amount of empirical evidence that it not only doesn’t work, but is disastrous from a humanitarian perspective whenever it’s seriously attempted. Read the whole thing

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

More Thoughts On Ezra Klein’s Heathers

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From Mark Steyn:

…speaking as someone who gets called a racist by the left all the time, I’d always assumed, as when the mob take the tire iron to you in the back alley, that it’s all business, nothing personal: just what’s necessary to get the job done. It’s rather sad to find this is the way they talk in private, too. For what it’s worth, I don’t regard that Peretz quote as “beyond the pale”, but, if it is, why bother being a writer? I can’t see why anybody would want to enter a profession in which that passage exceeds the very narrow and strictly enforced bounds within which these subjects can be discussed.

…”[REDACTED] clearly must not have a girlfriend”? Oh, my!

Again, whenever the ever reliable “all right-wing men are secretly gay” charge raises its head – see how this thread quickly dissolves into the critical issue of whether it’s Glenn Beck or I who most enjoys wearing frilly panties (answer: it’s me; Glenn prefers a teddy) – I always assume that, too, is strictly business. It’s heartening to know that, in the echo chamber of the JournoList, they turn their lurid obsessions on their own.

I always wonder myself if these casual libels from so-called “liberals” that people who disagree with them are racists (and “haters,” and “homophobes”) are sincere, or if these are merely just one of the disingenuous cudgels to be brought to their ugly ideological street fights. But even when they form a circular slander squad, it’s still hard to know.