Category: ideological culture

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Accountability ideological culture media and media people

Fake News Friday

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Thirty-three years past 1984, we’re living in an Orwellian world of “fake news.”

In November, the Washington Post informed readers that a “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during [the] election,” proclaiming a conclusion reached by “independent researchers.” The Post story noted, “There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump . . .”

In his review for the New Yorker entitled, “The Propaganda About Russian Propaganda,” Adrian Chen skewered the Post. An obvious problem? One group of researchers cited in the Post article, ProporNot.com, compiled a list of so-called fake news websites so broad that, “Simply exhibiting a pattern of beliefs outside the political mainstream is enough to risk being labelled a Russian propagandist.”

At The Intercept, Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald also slammed the Post exposé. Fretting about the enormous and uncritical reach of the article,* they noted that it was “rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations, and fundamentally shaped by shoddy, slothful journalistic tactics.”

The problem with “respected” mainstream media outlets performing drive-by journalism is the same as with the fake news they decry: real people might believe things that aren’t true.

For instance, a recent poll found most Democrats think “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president.” That’s a position devoid of any evidence. Likewise, 72 percent of Republicans still tell pollsters they remain unconvinced President Obama was born in the U.S.

What to do? Back to the basics: let’s gather and analyze the news with healthy amounts of skepticism and a mega-dose of Common Sense.

I’ll help. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* In a follow-up piece taking the Washington Post to task for what proved to be a false report on Russian hacking into the nation’s electric grid, Glenn Greenwald argues that, “[W]hile these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post . . .”

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Common Sense folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture meme national politics & policies

Funny how that happened…

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Funny how none of the progressive “achievements”happened before capitalism made them possible.

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capitalism, progressivism, progressive, politics, child labor, 8 hour work day, living wage, achievements, accomplishment, meme, illustration

 

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general freedom ideological culture meme nannyism national politics & policies

A Childlike Faith. . .

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SOCIALISM…

The childlike faith that a powerful, ever-growingGovernment couldn’t possibly pose a threat to freedom.

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture meme nannyism national politics & policies

“The Good Kind of Socialism”

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Don’t worry…

Bernie only wants “the good kind of socialism.”

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Bernie Sanders, The good kind of socialism, presidential race, progressivism, progressive, socialist, education, meme, cartoon, illustration, Jim Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

 

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Accountability education and schooling general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Parents in Context

education, parents, children, Virginia, freedom

Consider the intersection of freedom and decontextualized fragments.

The specific “decontextualized fragments” in question appear in great and not-so-great works of literature, assigned in public schools for young adults to read: a graphic rape scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved; racial slurs in Huckleberry Finn; sex, violence.

“Virginia regulators are drafting rules that would require school districts to red-flag objectionable teaching material and make it easier for parents to control what books their children see in the classroom,” reports the Washington Post.

Those regulations won’t be finalized for a year or more (because government bureaucracies are painfully slow). Yet an “earlier version of the language released on a state website drew hundreds of comments from the public,” the Post informs.

“Most parents were supportive of the change. . . .”

Teachers? Against.

Stafford County Public Schools literacy coordinator Sarah Crain worries about literature being wrongly labeled “sexually explicit.” To “reduce a book or a work down to something that is a mere decontextualized fragment of the work,” she argues, “actually impedes the ability for teachers and parents to have informed conversations.”

What about freedom?

Well, public schools aren’t primarily about freedom.

Teachers have a job to do; students follow instruction.

And it is pretty easy to see one reason for the opposition by “the professionals”: the new rules would entail more work.

Nonetheless, parents and their kids deserve as much choice as can be provided. And in every context.

Here, freedom means acknowledging the right of parents to decide. Not experts. Parents.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Original photo credit: wealhtheow on Flickr

 

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general freedom ideological culture individual achievement too much government

The Pattern Here

Thomas, Sowell, intellectual, race, Common Sense

Thomas Sowell, who retired from his syndicated column last week, may be the greatest public intellectual of our time.

Though he is “an original,” an iconoclast, his work is best seen as the carrying on of a tradition. Or two.

Consider his most famous research area: race. An African-American, Sowell is the age’s most persuasive dissident to the dominant strains of racial advocacy. He brought much common sense to a subject beset with unhinged passion.*

And yet even here he was obviously drawing on traditions that, if not well known, were firmly established.†

One of Sowell’s most important contributions, in books such as A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed, is his distinction between two very different ways of looking at the social world:

  • the “constrained vision” . . . . of most conservatives and classical liberals; and
  • the “unconstrained vision” . . . of so many socialists, anarchists and progressives.

For many conservatives, this is Sowell at his best. But is it original? A few of my readers could probably lecture me on its origins in a famous essay by F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False.”‡

Over at the Foundation for Economic Education, David R. Henderson addresses the one area where I tend to disagree with Sowell: foreign policy. Henderson gently calls out Sowell’s apparent credulity regarding the dishonesty of our war party leaders. Sure, Henderson writes, “[t]here are downsides to distrust. . . . But there are upsides too.”

Mourning the loss of trust in presidents, Sowell blames it on presidents lying to us in recent decades. But, as Henderson notes, “war presidents” lying to us about war is not new — providing examples.

Pity that Sowell, of all people, does not see the pattern here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* See Sowell’s Ethnic America: A History, Race and Culture: A World View, and The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective; but also popular argumentation, such as Pink and Brown People and Black Rednecks and White Liberals. And then there is the important Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?

† Economists W. H. Hutt and Gary Becker, at the very least, provided the background for Sowell’s research with their respective books The Economics of the Colour Bar and The Economics of Discrimination.

‡ See F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order. In another essay, Hayek provides Sowell with the seed of Knowledge and Decisions.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

Democracy — Oh, My!

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The President-elect has had some difficulty booking celebrity acts for his inauguration. And instead of taking this as a cue to trim down on celebratory excess, his team has extended the guest performer list to include New York’s world-famous chorus line dancers, the Rockettes.

The leggy, sequined showgirls might seem a perfect fit for the President-elect’s celebration — more, say, than a ballet troupe, or a string quartet — but one among the Rockettes protested.  Being a part of a performing team might seem a dream job, but not for Phoebe Pearl. She was, she wrote on Instagram, “overwhelmed with emotion,” and not in a good way. She felt “embarrassed and disappointed” that the gig “has been decided” for her.

She feels . . . coerced.

Dan Avery, writing before Christmas, characterizes the contract as a matter of “force.”

Welcome, Ms. Pearl, to the world that most American workers already know.

But the silliness reached high pitch with actor George Takei, who tweeted: “The members of the Rockettes and the Mormon Tabernacle are like all of us: Forced to go along with something horrible they didn’t choose.”

Democracy — oh, my!

Most people have had to put up with democratic results they did not like. Are Democrats only now understanding this?

To a degree, I sympathize. Which is why I want limits placed on government. Perhaps Democrats should have thought of this every time they cheered as their elected candidates increased presidential power. Did they not realize that someday they might lose?

And if you want a right of refusal, make sure it is in your contract.

The Rockette does not have a leg to stand on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

The Truth About Gun Control

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Confucius said that our first task is to “rectify the language.”

That amounts to word control, but we probably should not take that too literally. We cannot “control the language.” Instead, we should take caution: error often rests upon improper word choice.

Take as an example not word control, but . . .

Gun control.

Which, Thomas Sowell reminds us, isn’t what it seems to be. “The fatal fallacy of gun-control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns,” Sowell wrote on the first day of winter. “What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims.”

A new wisdom? No. Sowell, in 2016, is disabusing The New York Times for its inanities regarding the bearing of arms. In 1925, H. L. Mencken took on The Nation.

Gun control, Mencken wrote, “would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men.”

Sowell argues that, no matter how irrational spree and mass murderers may seem, they “are usually rational enough to attack schools, churches, and other places where there is far less likelihood of someone being on the scene who is armed.”

Mencken noted that the gunman of his day “has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation’s proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.”

Maybe, following Confucius*, we should call laws against concealed carry not “gun control” but “citizen disarmament.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Confucius” is the Western name for Kong Qui (551-479 B.C.E.), the great Chinese sage. He was often referred to by the honorific Kong Fuzi, meaning “Grand Master Kong,” which Jesuit missionaries to China in the 16th-century Latinized to “Confucius.”

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies political challengers responsibility too much government

Whack the Bob

pendulum, noose, politics, left, right, change, Republicans, Democrats

It’s a truism in politics: the pendulum swings. Now, around the world, we see a deep swing rightward:

  • Brexit, and the collapse of Britain’s Labour Party;
  • Donald Trump, and the routing of the Democrats;
  • German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s turnaround on Muslim refugee acceptance; and,
  • in France, the rise of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported on events in Poland. There, the Law and Justice Party is not only making sweeping changes of a pro-family, religious conservative nature, it has also grown in popularity.

Fearing an anti-intellectual “neo-Dark Age,” the Post finds cause for that worry in the fact that the Poles are downplaying evolutionary science in government school curricula.*

Before the big freak out, note the why of this: the dominant progressive-left paradigm has proven itself incapable of dealing with the challenges of the present age — most being caused by their own policies. Worse yet, those on the vanguard left have become moral scolds and petty language tyrants.

Yes, political correctness is one of the big offenders, here.

So, of course there’s a backlash.

But, turnabout being fair play, if the move to the “right” goes too far — as it probably will — we can expect another swing leftward.

Isn’t it time to give that pendulum bob a whack, to initiate something like an equilibrium position? Many of today’s problems are caused by partisans trying to force their kind of change down others’ throats. There is an alternative: limit government, setting it to just a few tasks, letting society evolve naturally, without forced central planning.

That would be “evolutionary,” and thus neither rightist nor revolutionary-left. Call it neo-Enlightenment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Poland’s new government has become scary, by reducing transparency, limiting press access, purging the government news network of anti-rightist journalists, hiking subsidies to traditional families and the elderly, shelving the gay marriage issue and allowing local governments to cut back on granting public protest permits. Not all of these are equally frightening, of course. Why should any government be allowed to maintain a government-run news agency? (Ideological purges come with the territory.)

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ideological culture individual achievement national politics & policies

Ditch Your Male Doctor

woman, female, doctor, gender, medicine, illsutration

It’s the Christmas season, so wait to do this until the New Year, but . . . be sure to fire your male doctor.

He’s a quack.

At least, that seems to be the gist of James Hamblin’s “Evidence of the Superiority of Female Doctors,” a report in The Atlantic on a new Harvard School of Public Health study.

“Patients cared for by female physicians,” Hamblin writes, “had lower 30-day mortality than did patients treated by male physicians.” The rate for female physicians was 11.07 percent and for males 11.49 percent.

Though a “modest” difference, it’s still “clinically meaningful.”

The study (conducted by an all-male team) tracked more than 1.5 million Medicare patients treated by nearly 60,000 general internists.

“If male physicians were as adept as females, some 32,000 fewer Americans would die every year — among Medicare patients alone,” concludes Hamblin. “[T]hese numbers may be what it takes to spur equal (or better) compensation and opportunity for female physicians.”

NBC News played the equal pay angle as well: “Many hope the new study pushes hospitals to promote and pay women equally.”

Still, in a poignant moment of concern for the lesser sex, correspondent Kristen Dahlgren advised, “Maybe not a reason to ditch your male doctor, but there might be lessons to learn from his female colleagues.”

Indeed, the study explained that “physician sex by itself does not determine patient outcomes,” arguing instead that “differences in practice patterns between male and female physicians” must be investigated.

Smart.

The other thing, of course, is that every doctor, male or female, is an individual — not merely an XX- or XY-chromosome carbon copy.

Sex isn’t everything.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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