Category: media and media people

Times Misfires

Time to revise the Times’s motto? Should “all the news that’s fit to print” read “misprint” instead?

Maybe, after the New York Times’s latest editorial snafu, charging the NRA with hypocrisy for banning arms-bearing at its April convention.

According to the editorial, “none of” the attendees were allowed to “come armed with guns that can actually shoot. After all the N.R.A. propaganda about how ‘good guys with guns’ are needed to be on guard across American life … the weekend’s gathering of disarmed conventioneers seems the ultimate in hypocrisy.… So far, there has been none of the familiar complaint about infringing supposedly sacrosanct Second Amendment.…”

But after first hitting print, the text has changed. It was too quickly and conspicuously confirmed that “anyone with a permit valid in Tennessee can ‘come armed [to the convention] with guns that actually shoot,” that “the NRA had no problem with gun owners with the proper gun permits bringing their weapons inside.”

So the Times editorial was edited after initial publication, nixing the reference to “the ultimate in hypocrisy.” The revised online editorial now merely professes dismay that guns won’t be allowed in one of the convention venues … but doesn’t mention that this is because of the policy of that particular venue, not the NRA’s.

The editorial still complains that nobody is complaining about alleged Second Amendment infringement no longer attributable to the NRA. Whose alleged hypocrisy was the Times’s original point.

It’s like somebody’s shooting at random and just hoping to hit something.

This is Common Sense. (I mean this, not the Times editorial, is Common Sense.) I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags media, media bias, New York Times, Second Amendment rights

media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

Humble Hillary Heads Off

Hillary Clinton, collage, photomontage, illustration, editorial, election, presidential, campaign, poverty, accomplishments, election

Hillary Clinton announced, yesterday, that she wants to be the next president of these United States. She made it official via an Internet video, which starts off with all kinds of normal, regular folks expressing their hopes and plans for 2015.

The small boy singing about “little tiny fishes” steals the show.

After a minute and a half of innocence-by-association, Hillary Clinton comes on to say that she, too, has big plans: “I’m running for president.”

Mrs. Clinton continues: “Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.”

She should know, what with her family’s struggles after leaving the White House in 2000 — multiple mortgages on multiple multi-million-dollar domiciles. I’m sure we all relate to that.

“Everyday Americans need a champion and I want to be that champion,” she states, “so you can do more than just get by, you can get ahead and stay ahead.”

Apparently, without Hillary at the helm of our Leviathan federal government, all we can do is “just get by.” Barely. Never “get ahead” and “stay ahead.”

“Because when families are strong,” intones Clinton, “America is strong.”

Yes, the woman who wrote It Takes a Village now extols family strength.

“So I’m hitting the road to earn your vote,” she pledges. “Because it’s your time.”

Or so says this Everywoman, a former first lady, U. S. Senator, presidential candidate, Secretary of State, and savvy cattle futures trader.

Hillary Clinton has had a long career in government. It will be interesting to see what she runs on — what she identifies as accomplishments — as opposed to what she runs away from.

Or deletes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016, propaganda

Common Sense folly media and media people responsibility

Who Are the Bigots Now?

political, editorial, collage, photomontage, illustration, gender, rape, Rolling Stone, women's studies, campus, violence

“Why did Rolling Stone … so massively screw up” in “falsely accusing a University of Virginia frat of gang-raping a freshman girl?” asks Alex Griswold of The Daily Caller. “[I]f you work for liberal magazine The New Republic, the answer is that they were too right-wing.”

Most of my online friends are with Griswold, excoriating and ridiculing TNR’s Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig’s questionable analysis of the piece in question. Before I pile on, let me just say what is right about her analysis in “Rolling Stone’s Rape Article Failed Because It Used Rightwing Tactics to Make a Leftist Point…”

She ably summarizes a world view.

“The left tends to view oppression as something that operates within systems, sometimes in clearly identifiable structural biases” while the “right,” she insists, “tends to understand politics on the individual level,” which she imputes to “a general obsession with the capital‑i Individual.”

That, she thinks, is why “the right” pokes at “specific details of high-profile cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.” If the leftist critique doesn’t apply there, she thinks “rightwingers” hope, they thereby disprove the left’s systemic oppression thesis.

Note how she just assumes the accuracy of the left’s approach; she just ignores how often lefty journalists get actual “big-picture” stats wrong. For example, on the subject of “rape culture,” they routinely suppress discussion of accurate stats on false rape charges by women against men.

Worse yet, she honestly does not see how her “leftwing” media comrades have prejudged coverage of recent race-based and rape-involved cases, doing injustice to individuals.

Is this mere media bias?

No. It’s the very definition of prejudice. It’s bigotry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ethics, feminism, journalism, journalistic ethics, journalists

Common Sense folly media and media people national politics & policies

Cruz Country

The cultural differences between left and right may be stronger than the political.

When Sen. Ted Cruz answered a question about his musical taste posed by a CBS news correspondent, and he announced that his preference switched after 2001, 9/11, the leftosphere fell of its rocker and into convulsions.

Why?

He said he switched from listening to classic rock to country, and did so because the country music culture responded to the 9/11 atrocity so much better than did rock-and-roll culture.

Confession: my musical tastes lean toward classic rock. But there’s no way I would get upset about a politician’s musical choices — unless he started listening to Wagner while reviving an interest in National Socialism.

But boy, on the left there was a lot of outrage and indignation. At least, Matt Welch of Reason quoted a good spattering of it, and I found more on Twitter and elsewhere. On Slate? Snark. A YouTuber tubed Cruz’s change as “pandering.” And in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait identified Cruz’s professed change-of-taste “an incredible testament to his personal willpower.”

Huh?

You may or may not like country music, or appreciate the last 30 years of it, or its origins, or its commercialization, or the twang, but that stuff’s really not that important.

A conservative found political reasons to change his listening habits. Wow. A matter of self-definition? Whatever. It neither builds up nor undermines his philosophy or program.

Though certainly Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe” provides more than a cultural context for understanding much of what happens in Washington.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, media, politics

Common Sense crime and punishment folly general freedom media and media people too much government

At Least We’re Not Turkey

Post author By CS Admin
Post date March 13, 2015
No Comments on At Least We’re Not Turkey

Whenever I feel discouraged by the steady drumbeat of domestic assaults on liberty — from Obamacare to parents being accused of “child neglect” for letting their kids return from a playground by themselves — I try to remind myself:

Things Could Be Worse.

World history provides plenty of support for this dictum, but so does a glance at the newspaper. Like the story of how a single satiric Instagram post “could end up sending a former Miss Turkey to jail.”

An Istanbul prosecutor has been threatening to imprison Merve Büyüksaraç for up to two years for the heinous deed of insulting an official. Last summer she excerpted a satirical piece called “The Master’s Poem” that originally appeared in the magazine Uykusuz. Uykusuz has a habit of mocking Turkish politicians, including President Erdoğan.

“I shared it because it was funny to me,” she says. “I did not intend to insult Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.” Regardless of her motive, her post should not have put her at legal risk.

Buyuksarac is popular on social media — 15,000 followers on Instagram, double that on Twitter — a presence that makes her a target. The Turkish government doesn’t care whether she is an ardent dissident. They obviously just want to intimidate others with a readership who are inclined to ruffle the feathers of the powerful even a little.

So yes, things could be worse. Lots worse. They could also be a lot better. That’s what we have to fight for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, free speech, Internet, ObamaCare, tyranny

general freedom ideological culture media and media people too much government

Herd Immunity

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave cautious support for the anti-vaxxer cause a few years ago. No scandal.

But only now that Republican politicians Chris Christie and Rand Paul have talked about the risks of (as well as of parental rights and responsibility regarding) childhood vaccination has the issue of mandatory vaccination finally hit big.

Ronald Bailey offers a more modest proposal. “Vaccination is arguably the greatest public health triumph of the past century,” he begins. But he argues not for mandating vaccines, but for social pressure: “person-to-person shaming and shunning.”

That is one traditional (and less politically extreme) way to solve such problems.

But what is that problem, at base? Those who fear a negative personal effect from vaccination (and there are some, though the “autism” charge appears to be bogus) become “free riders,” as economists like to put it. They gain a de facto immunity without having to pay — either in money or in the small risk that vaccination does demonstrate.

This particular free rider benefit depends on the concept of “herd immunity.” That’s the conjectured level of protection for individuals who lack biological immunity by the overwhelming presence of vaccinated people in a population who are immune. (The disease can’t spread because it hits too many dead ends in healthy hosts.)

As has been often noted the last few days, though the anti-vaxxer trend has mainly tended to “infect” (as a “meme”) urban populations of left-leaning folks — epitomized by Hollywooders Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey — the new backlash against anti-vaxxer rights has come strongest from the left-leaning media.

The Republican “offenders” provide cover?

Apparently, those of the Democratic herd think they have immunity … to criticism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.