And We Should Trust You . . . Why?

I found this cartoon over at Mostly Cajun:

And that’s pretty much how I see it. We’re not voting our way out of this. We’re, as the cliché goes, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

But Jon Stewart has the thousand words to go along with that one picture:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Postcards From the Pledge
www.thedailyshow.com
http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:360001
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice . . .

I See the Church of the MSM is Still Practicing its Faith

A while back I wrote The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation, a book review of sorts of Professor Brian Anse Patrick’s The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage. If you haven’t read my piece, the really fascinating thing that Professor Patrick determined from his research is that there is a bias in the media, but it’s not exactly a Leftist one. Certainly the majority of journalists, editors and publishers lean that way, but the bias he found and documented was what he termed administrative control bias:

The larger concept that lies behind the consistent ranking is a broad cultural level phenomenon that I will label an administrative control bias. It has profound implications. Administrative control in this usage means rational, scientific, objective social management by elite, symbol-manipulating classes, and subclasses, i.e., professionalized administrators or bureaucratic functionaries. The thing administered is often democracy itself, or a version of it at least. Here and throughout this chapter terms such as “rational,” “objective,” “professional,” and “scientific” should be read in the sense of the belief systems that they represent, i.e. rationalism, objectivism, professionalism, and scientism. Scientism is not the same as being scientific; the first is a matter of faith and ritualistic observance, the other is difficult creative work. William James made a similar distinction between institutional religion and being religious, the first being a smug and thoughtless undertaking on the part of most people, the second, a difficult undertaking affecting every aspect of a life. The term scientistic administration would pertain here. Note that we move here well beyond the notion of mere gun control and into the realm of general social control, management and regulation.

As a result of this, Professor Patrick continues, members of the media see themselves not as a check on government, but as the clergy in the Church of State:

Previous to objective journalism, baldly partisan news media were the norm; under objectivity news became a scientific tool of social progress and management. The elite press continues also to serve this function, connecting administrators and managers not only to the world they seek to administrate but also to other managers with whom they must coordinate their efforts. So in this sense social movement-based critiques have been correct in identifying a sort of pseudo-pluralism operating in the public forum, a pluralism that is in reality no more than an exclusive conversation between elite class subcomponents – but this over-class is administrative in outlook and purpose.

It’s their job to sit below the Cardinals of the Church of State and above us proles. They are the interpreters of the Text, the tellers of Truth, and it’s their job to make sure we don’t hear about anything that would interfere with the way the Church says the system should be running (as long as it’s their people in the red vestments):

Journalists acquire importance in the mass democratic system precisely because they gather, convey, and interpret the data that inform individual choices. Mere raw, inaccessible data transforms to political information that is piped to where it will do the most good. Objective, balanced coverage becomes essential, at least in pretense, lest this vital flow of information to be thought compromised, thus affecting not only the quality of rational individual decision-making, but also the legitimacy of the system.

Working from within the perspective of the mass democracy model for social action it is difficult to specify an ideal role model of journalistic coverage other than a “scientific objectivism” at work. An event (i.e., reality) causes coverage, or so the objective journalist would and often does say. Virtually all of the journalists that I have ever talked with regard coverage as mirroring reality.

They truly seem to believe this, that they have access to information to which philosophers and scientists have been denied. I spoke once to a journalist who worried out loud about “compromising” her objectivity when covering a story.

The claim being advanced here, by assumption, is that journalists can truly convey or interpret the nature of reality as opposed to the various organizational versions of events in which journalists must daily traffic. The claim is incredible and amounts to a Gnostic pretension of being “in the know” about the nature or reality, or at least the reality that matters most politically.

An ecclesiastical model most appropriately describes this elite journalistic function under mass democracy. Information is the vital substance that makes the good democracy possible. It allows, as it were, for the existence of the good society, a democratic state of grace. Information is in this sense analogous to the concept of divine grace under the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church. Divine grace was essential for the good spiritual life, the life that mattered. The clergy dispensed divine grace to the masses in the form of sacraments. They were its intermediaries, who established over time a monopoly, becoming the exclusive legitimate channel of divine grace.

Recollect that the interposition of intermediaries, the clergy, along a vital spiritual-psychological supply route was the rub of the Reformation. The clergy cloaked themselves in the mantle of spiritual authority rather than acting as its facilitators. Many elite newspapers have apparently done much the same thing, speaking and interpreting authoritatively for democracy, warranting these actions on the basis of social responsibility.

Example for today: Stephen Colbert vs. Christopher Coates.

Stephen Colbert, a TV comedian, is called before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and Border Security to “testify” in character. To perform, in other words, a comedy routine.

Google News records 1147 items on this bit of “news.”

Christopher Coates, Voting Section Chief of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division disobeys repeated orders from his superiors to respond to a subpoena to appear before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and testify about the dismissal of a voter-intimidation case by his department, invokes – and I quote“the protections of all applicable whistleblower statutes” and proceeds to tell the Commission that the Department of Justice under Barack Obama’s appointees isn’t interested in enforcing equal protection under the law. In fact, the Department of Justice is quite adamantly opposed to the idea.

Google News records 57 items on this story, none from a major news outlet with the exception of the Washington Post.

We peasants don’t need to know this, apparently. The Church has decided. The clergy has responded.

What Vapid Editorial Comments Tell Us About the UK

I ran across an editorial piece in the UK Telegraph today, What Teresa Lewis’s last meal of fried chicken and apple pie tells us about America. It’s really not worth reading, IMO.

But the comments are.

The author of the piece, Lucy Jones, makes her abhorrence for the death penalty apparent in the column, but in the comments, she goes one step farther:

I think it’s morally, absolutely, categorically wrong to take another person’s life. The details of the crime aren’t going to make a difference.

So, Lucy, if someone makes an attempt on your life, you should just lie back and think of England?

This Needs Comment

In that Epic Comment Thread I referenced earlier (as of this writing, 556 comments) Markadelphia dropped this turd:

We survived higher levels of spending before…even made it through “The Scourge of FDR” and ended up in great shape.

Unix-Jedi glommed onto this almost immediately, but I ran across something a day or two ago that I cannot find now. Still, the point stayed with me, and it was this:

The Keyneseans insist that it was the “public spending” of the war economy that brought us out of the depression and spurred the incredible growth of the post-war economy.

Not so.

They seem to neglect the fact that, after the war, the United States was the only major industrialized nation that hadn’t been smashed. We had our own sources of raw materials, unmatched manufacturing capability, and the rest of the world needed rebuilding.

Who else was there to provide the things the world needed to rebuild? America’s economy didn’t magically rebound because our government had spent a lot of money it didn’t have – that was just what had provided the manufacturing base. Without a market to sell to we’d have crashed right back down. But that market was there, and it needed what we could make.

That market isn’t there now, and the rest of the world makes everything anybody might need. We buy most of it ourselves, if you haven’t noticed.

The world is not the same as it was after WWII, and only a fool or an idiot would fail to recognize that.

I’m also going to copy a comment from that thread in its entirety, in case Echo should ever go Tango-Uniform. By reader Moshe Ben-David:

I waded through all 544 comments. Took me a couple of hours. It was truly difficult but educational. I think I will copy and paste to a document to use as a textbook example.

I have tried to explain the bizarre way that the leftist mind such as Mark’s works, but it is one thing to tell someone what it is like, yet it doesn’t do as much justice as actually seeing a leftist speak for himself and prove what I am talking about; the sheer inability to grasp the most basic concepts and facts and then put them together in any meaningful way.

I must salute DJ, Unix, GOF, and Ken for their unbelieveable patience and willingness to engage in this exercise for the benefit of others who have come here to learn. I have engaged people with graduate degrees regarding the subject of Biblical apologetics in the same patient manner with facts and logic, not for my opponent’s benefit, but for our audience.

That is the good reason Kevin has not banned him. He serves as a kind of lab rat or zoological specimen, where, instead of learning about such idiots in the abstract, we get to read him first hand and be able to say, “So THAT’s what it looks like!”

It would be fun to coin a single word that describes Mark’s condition. Ignorance can be a temporary condition that can quickly be overcome with a little education. Stupidity can be organic or physical in nature. So, what shall we call it when you encounter a human who seems to have enough cognitive ability to function in society and even seemingly pass for having reasonable intelligence and yet beneath it all engages in the grossest forms of cognitive dissonance, and worse, willful ignorance? I don’t want to call it Markism because it would be too easily confused with Marxism, even though Marxism seems to be the logical reductio ad absurdum result of Markism.

Maybe we could call it Markean “Mark – ee – an”, but I’m afraid too many would mispronounce it “Mar-keen.” How about “Markasian?”

We’ve been saying this for three years.

And he Just. Doesn’t. STOP.

Quote of the Day – Harsh Your Mellow Edition

Reader Ken left a link in the Übercomment thread yesterday to a piece over at The Market Ticker entitled The Only Part That Mattered In Obama’s Telethon. Read the whole thing, but I’m going to excerpt two parts – a lead-in and today’s QotD:

Entitlements consume, for all intents and purposes, every dollar of tax receipts in the here and now. Not tomorrow, not as growth in medical spending occurs, not in the future.

Right here, right now, today.

Note that we haven’t spent one nickel on defense yet. Nor have we paid the interest on the debt, which is quite mandatory. Nor have we funded one of our so-called “discretionary” programs, including Homeland Security, Energy, Education, HUD, Department of State, Veterans Affairs, Justice or anything else.

What President Obama told you is that The Federal Government has no plan to deal with this, not now and not in the future. It cannot even meet its own entitlement spending from the taxes it collects, leaving the entirety of the rest of the government, including national defense, to be put on the credit card.

You were told, today, that our government is insolvent.

Not “might become” insolvent if we don’t change our ways.

The United States is insolvent, right here, right now, today, and The President announced it for all who cared to listen worldwide on national television.

(Emphasis in original.)

I quoted that so that I could put this in context. It’s a comment by “Peter99” to the piece:

Although there’s nothing new in here, the beauty of this ticker, IMO, is that it succinctly and unambiguously shows that the leaders of this country, both parties, starting from when the gov’t got into the entitlement business up through today, have collectively, increment by increment, created a situation that cannot be salvaged without pretty much dismantling the system as it exists.

And, even the least discerning reader should be able to see that, no matter how it occurs, the dismantling is going to be extremely painful for everyone.

As I said, RTWT. And all the comments.

More ObaMao

I’m sure many of you have already seen this image that made the rounds of teh intarwebs recently:

I found it here, with another image you might find equally interesting.

Here’s one you probably haven’t seen, taken by a previous coworker on a trip to China back just before the Winter Olympics provided by Sarah a long time ago (my memory is failing me):

(Click the image for full 1200×1600 size.)

Sarah wrote in her email (all the way back in April):

A friend of mine brought this back from China after the Olympics — it’s not satire, it’s a genuine expression of admiration on behalf of like-minded people. When the American media was in Beijing, apparently there was an attempt to hide these souvenirs from other Americans. Kinda says it all, doesn’t it.

Can anybody translate the caption? Joe Huffman’s coworker says the caption translates as “Serve the People.”

“Serve the People”?

IT’S A COOKBOOK!!

Quote of the Day – Language Manipulation Edition

Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that words are wise men’s counters, but they are the money of fools.

That is as painfully true today as it was four centuries ago. Using words as vehicles to try to convey your meaning is very different from taking words so literally that the words use you and confuse you.

Take the simple phrase “rent control.” If you take these words literally– as if they were money in the bank– you get a complete distortion of reality.

New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, “rent control” laws do not control rent.

If you check out the facts, instead of relying on words, you will discover that “gun control” laws do not control guns, the government’s “stimulus” spending does not stimulate the economy and that many “compassionate” policies inflict cruel results, such as the destruction of the black family.

Thomas Sowell, The Money of Fools – Part I

But they mean well!