Category: media and media people

ideological culture media and media people

Cancel Culture Cancels Culture

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 26, 2019
2 Comments on Cancel Culture Cancels Culture

Cancel culture, writes Christian Britschgi of Reason, may have just “jumped the shark.”

Britschgi tells the tale of “Carson King, a 24-year-old security guard who achieved viral fame after he was spotted on ESPN’s College Gameday waving a sign that asked people to use the mobile payment app Venmo to send him beer money.” Mr. King got a huge number of responses, then decided to give it all to charity. This spurred on both Anheuser-Busch and Venmo to match the donations, and a hero was born.

Enter the shark.

I mean, legacy media.

The Des Moines Register chose to profile King, on Tuesday, with that special postmodern twist: dig up some ugly tweets by the man from back when he was a 16-year-old edgelord, saying the de rigueur racist things.

Next: apologies, backlash.

“Treating a person’s most intemperate tweets as worthy of public shame is an exercise in hypocrisy,” Britschgi not unreasonably asserts. “What’s worse is that we have graduated from using social media history as a way of divining a person’s true nature to deploying that history cynically and maliciously.”

The hypocrisy part was provided by the Register’s registered hitman, a recent hire who was himself caught on Twitter, having used the n-word and warning others never to talk to “strange gay men,” as Keith Mann regales us with on Heavy.

This is not the way civilized people behave.

Sure, don’t tweet ugly, vicious stuff in the first place. That’s a good takeaway.

But cancel culture shouldn’t cancel out cultural goodness.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags cancel culture, SJW, social justice

Accountability ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Listen to the Warm

I like publicity stunts as much as the next activist. But haven’t we had enough of the whole Greta Thunberg bit yet?

On Wednesday, the 16-year-old Swede provided testimony on an apt stage, let us grant her that — the U.S. House of Representatives’ foreign affairs subcommittee joint hearing on the global youth climate change movement.

She didn’t prepare any remarks, though. She merely “attached” the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming “as her testimony.” Her rationale? “I don’t want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists.” And “to unite behind science.”

You know, for “real action.”

It was what happened right after she demanded “real action,” though, where the stark reality of the situation became clear: a grown man in a suit, elected to Congress, asked, “Could you expand on why it’s so important to listen to the science?”

And then the non-scientist spoke . . . not very expansively.

Forget that science qua science isn’t to be “listened to,” it is to be engaged in, with conjectures, research and refutations. (There was nothing like that at the hearing.) Forget also that the science is increasingly less clear on the severity of what warming we see. Remember only that an elected official used a girl to imbue a text (the IPCC report) with moral legitimacy, dubbing it “best available ‘united science’” — the better to push an unargued-for massive coercive government intervention into the life of our civilization.

Is no adult in the room ashamed of what they are doing . . . exploiting a cute youngster to subvert rationality?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags global warming, Greta Thunberg, science, socialism, testimony

ideological culture media and media people Popular

The Fifth Century Begins

When socialists and woke scolds talk about slavery, you can almost hear the chains and smell the leather of the slaver’s whip — and not always in a good way.

Project 1619 is the New York Times effort to acknowledge 400 years of Africans in America. Thankfully, the project’s page is more coherent and forthright than Matthew Desmond’s New York Times Magazine farrago of August 14, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”

Indeed, that piece (like others in the series) is such a tangle that there is no hope to unravel it in this limited space. Just note that Desmond does his darnedest to help the enemies of liberty tie slavery into the idea of free markets, private property, and free association.*

Project 1619, on the other hand, accepts the complexity of slavery in America without being idiotically tendentious. It recognizes that the captured Africans brought to Virginia shores in August 1619 were treated as indentured servants. Unfortunately, unlike the Englishmen arriving under indentured servitude, the first Africans in Virginia lacked explicit contracts. So negotiating their way out was . . . problematic. Still, one African, arriving two years later, was soon freed and became a landowner. And it was he who was awarded another African as a slave for life, in civil court in 1655, marking the real start of chattel slavery in America.

Which is to say, slavery in America was not exclusively a matter of race.**

Why is this important? Because slavery is wrong not because racism is wrong (as wrong as that is), but because people have a right to freedom.

Could it be that socialists emphasize racism regarding slavery because they fear that focusing on freedom might scuttle their socialism?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* See my discussion of slavery yesterday.

** This becomes clear once you read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, or learn how Thomas Jefferson’s wife was related to Sally Hemings

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags freedom, New York Times, slave, slavery, socialism

Common Sense individual achievement media and media people

Hate in Plain Sight

“Classy guy,” won’t be the moniker afforded comedian Bill Maher when his time on Earth comes to an end.

“I guess I’m going to have to reevaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer,” Maher told his HBO audience regarding the death of libertarian billionaire David Koch at 79.

“As for his remains,” continued Maher, “he has asked to be cremated and have his ashes blown into a child’s lungs.”

You get the tenor of his “humor.”

“[David Koch] and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate-science deniers for decades, so f—k him!” Maher argued. “I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.”

The HBO celeb likely hoped his crass takedown of the already deceased would go viral. “I know these seem like harsh words and harsh jokes,” Maher conceded, “and I’m sure I’ll be condemned on Fox News . . .”

But perhaps not reprimanded more universally, since such political viciousness has become ubiquitous. For instance, when a questioner at the Minnesota State Fair mentioned Koch’s passing, applause erupted.

“I don’t applaud, you know, the death of somebody,” Sen. Bernie Sanders chided the crowd (to his credit). “We needn’t do that.”

Celebrating someone’s demise is sickening. Moreover, in the case of David Koch, and brother Charles, so many of the non-stop political attacks have been erroneous — condemnation for positions they do not hold, for things they have not done. Not to mention ignoring all the wonderful benefits they have provided our society.

Bill Maher is a professional punk, so I’m not shocked. But David Koch was a hero.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. Lovers of liberty lost another champion last week: Eric Dixon. For years, Eric has been a huge help to Common Sense in a myriad of important ways. He also assisted a number of other liberty-oriented and free-market groups, including U.S. Term Limits, the Cato Institute, Missouri’s Show Me Institute, the Atlas Network, the Libertarian Party, and more. A lot of people will miss Eric, not the least of whom will be me.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags conservative, David Koch, death, donor, libertarian, obituary

media and media people

Suicide?

Jeffrey Epstein, murder, death, pedophile, conspiracy, paranoia,

Some news stories serve more as inkblot tests than as first runs at history. With the Jeffrey Epstein story we find sightings, Rohrschach-like, of both Minotaurs and unicorns, depending on the viewer.

I am not seeing the sad unicorn of suicide in his story. Are you?

Of course, there’s a maze of information to wade through, and we on the outside possess only the grossest of clues about whatever insider life Epstein lived.

And speaking of clues, maybe the key to the story can be found in how it plays in the headlines.

Before:

The question that must be asked: Was Epstein running ‘honey traps’ and blackmailing the power elite?
Alex Acosta Reportedly Claimed Jeffrey Epstein ‘Belonged to Intelligence’
‘IN DANGER’ Jeffrey Epstein’s life ‘in jeopardy’ as powerful pals ‘don’t want their secrets out’, victim’s lawyer claims
Jeffrey Epstein on suicide watch after accused sex trafficker is found injured in New York jail

After:

JEFFREY EPSTEIN DEAD BY HANGING IN JAIL … Taken Off Suicide Watch
Jeffrey Epstein Dead in Suicide at Jail, Spurring Inquiries
Former MCC inmate: There’s ‘no way’ Jeffrey Epstein killed himself
Jeffrey Epstein’s jail guards were working extreme overtime shifts, source says
Jeffrey Epstein was not on suicide watch before death, official says
Epstein suicide sparks fresh round of conspiracy theories
Jeffrey Epstein’s death is a perfect storm for conspiracy theories

Who doesn’t roll their eyes, just a bit, when a news story in a major media news source confidently labels Epstein’s demise “suicide”?

Who wasn’t making jokes about Epstein’s suicide (often with pointed mention of the Clintons) before his first attempt?

Now the joke is the news media’s blithe acceptance of the official narrative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. All the stories, headlined above, can be found by searching DuckDuckGo, the safe and non-creepy search engine. No joke.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags conspiracy, death, jeffrey epstein, murder, paranoia, pedophile

media and media people meme national politics & policies Popular

Courage and Wisdom?

gun violence, gun control, law, mass shooting, 2nd Amendment, Donald Trump,

President Donald Trump responded to the weekend’s two shooting atrocities by decrying hatred and making five substantive proposals.

“They include tools to identify early warning signs in mass shooters, reducing the glorification of violence, reforming mental health laws, enacting ‘red flag’ laws to stop dangerous individuals from gaining access to firearms, and enacting the death penalty for mass murderers,” the Epoch Times summarizes.

But how useful are these?

The “early warning signs” of a criminal are often identical to grumpiness and even righteous indignation in others — “tools to identify” could easily serve as excuses for unwarranted meddling and worse.
Who would enforce lessening the “glorification of violence”? The federal government that is always at war?
Is it mental health laws that should be reformed, or the practice of putting whole generations of boys on Ritalin and worse . . . made especially ominous by the percentage of shooters on such drugs?
Denying “dangerous individuals . . . access to firearms” remains problematic under any semblance of due process and the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle.
Since “death by cop” is often one of the apparent goals of many would-be shooters, how much of a deterrent could death by sterile procedure actually be?

But if you are looking for even worse reactions, look beyond Trump. The Democrats took the occasion to raise funds.

And complain to the New York Times, which “changed a headline on its front page because it presented Trump in a neutral light,” reports independent journalist Tim Poole. “This was in response to far left activists and Democrats expressing shock and outrage and demanding everyone cancel their subscriptions to NYT over it.”

Ideological bias or old-fashioned market pressure?

If it is in tragedy that we find our greatest tests of courage and wisdom, the weekend’s shootings show a lot of political and media failure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing