April 20, 2012

Stereowiping and the Zimmerman Teletravesty

According to ABC News today, this is a picture of George Zimmerman's head taken two minutes after the shooting.  I cannot, of course, vouch for its authenticity.
It was a bad day for The Narrative. And that raises broader questions.

At George Zimmerman's bond hearing, according to the New York Times:
As part of his effort to win Mr. Zimmerman’s release on bond, Mr. O’Mara challenged the prosecution’s case, going through the state’s probable cause affidavit line by line, turning the bail hearing into what appeared to be a foretaste of the trial. 
He aggressively questioned a state investigator, Dale Gilbreath, about the accusation that Mr. Zimmerman had racially profiled Mr. Martin, and he demanded to know what evidence the state had for the statement that “Zimmerman confronted Martin and a struggle ensued.” 
“Do you know who started the fight?” Mr. O’Mara asked Mr. Gilbreath. 
“Do I know?” Mr. Gilbreath said. “No.” 
Mr. O’Mara then asked Mr. Gilbreath if the state had any evidence to contradict Mr. Zimmerman’s statement to the police that he had been making his way back to his car when he was punched by Mr. Martin. ... 
Mr. Gilbreath responded, “No.”

On the other hand, the prosecution hinted that it was sandbagging evidence against Zimmerman, which seems plausible. 

Meanwhile ABC News posted online what it claims is a photo of the back of Zimmerman's head shortly after the shooting.

Now they tell us.

As I've pointed out for weeks, the Trayvon Martin story is mostly interesting for what it shows us about what's wrong with the media. 

As an individual story, Martin-Zimmerman is more or less the same depressing Stuff Happens as occurs hundreds of times per year across this huge country. The main difference, in this case, was that the press initially got wrong the race of the shooter and thought it had, for once, its Great White Defendant. 

Determining fault justly in each of these cases depends upon small details of who did what to whom first, details that shouldn't be assumed a priori to Fit the Narrative. For example, in the 2010 case of plainclothes law enforcement officers killing an 18-year-old violist while "debriefing" in a parking lot I've walked through hundreds of times, I initially smelled a rat because the official spokesman the morning after the shooting implied that the parking lot was a drug-trafficking hot spot. I knew that's not true, and that raised obvious questions about what else the cops were distorting. 

But, here's the thing: two years later, I still don't know what exactly happened in the last ten seconds of that young man's life. Unfortunate decisions were made, but I don't know the precise chain of events, much less how to allocate fault. At least, that case didn't disappear down the memory hole due to citizen activism (no thanks to the press, which showed minimal interest in challenging law enforcement's version of the story).

That the Martin-Zimmerman story was foretold so accurately a quarter of a century ago in the most famous book by the most famous journalist since Mencken only underlines that lesson: most of the journalists who have huffed and puffed this local small-time tragedy have personally read Bonfire of the Vanities. Deep down, they almost get the joke of what they're doing ... but they can't help themselves

By any objective standard, the prestige press has shamed itself by its repeated distortions of the facts to make them fit its desires for a tale of White Privilege, Innocent Black Victimization, and Stereotyping. (Of course, by controlling the narrative, there will be virtually no accountability.) As I've mentioned before, when the press decides to go all in on a race story, they seem to pick ones that unravel into travesties at a higher than random rate. This story began to fall apart the moment George Zimmerman's picture was printed.

The central mechanism that leads the press astray is its War to Wipe Out Stereotypes, to wipe clean the collective mind, to render the blank slate as blank as possible. The fundamental problem of journalism, in the minds of the more elevated sort of journalist, is that its readers can notice patterns for themselves.

We can abbreviate this War to Wipe Out Stereotypes to stereowiping. 

There are several reasons for why the prestige press is so fundamentalist in its fervor to stereowipe. The first, of course, is money: Man Bites Dog stories are more profitable than vice-versa. Another is class: "Two-Headed Calf Is Born" stories are always popular, but they're not very exalted. The press wants to have their cake and eat it, too by pretending that they are dealing with the massively important issue of white-on-black street violence or the lacrosse players raping black hookers epidemic or whatever is the latest two-headed calf story to come down the pike. The third is ideology: learning from the news is evil. The fourth is the sheer will to power.

That raises a final question about the Zimmerman Fiasco that probably can't be definitely answered, but is worth thinking about: why now? Why the frenzy to take a run-of-the-mill bit of bad news and get it so badly wrong?

I suspect Obama's re-election run plays into it in various complicated ways.

But, I suspect something that hasn't been mentioned much is a technological change brought about by cell phone videos and Youtube. The last two or three years have seen a flood of footage posted online by amateurs of Blacks Behaving Badly (much of it, indeed, posted by those behaving badly themselves). I don't see much statistical evidence that African-Americans are behaving worse than in the past, but, wow, there sure is a huge amount of video that has gotten past the national news gatekeepers to the public. If you've read a half dozen James Q. Wilson social science books since the mid-1970s, none of this behavior will come as a big surprise, although it still is pretty fascinating to watch. But if you get your world view from The News, it's hard to know whether you should believe trusted, authoritative media sources or your lying eyes.

The Trayvesty, therefore, would be media's attempt to strike back, to put the genie back in the bottle, to get the National Conversation on Race back on its well-worn tracks where it belongs.

121 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Deep down, they almost get the joke of what they're doing ... but they can't help themselves."

Not sure I agree with this statement, Steve.

Today's "journalists" are not the journalists of days gone by. They've gone to mediocre schools and bad schools, and even if they've a degree in journalism from schools which, in the past, were known as great journalism schools (Columbia and Univ. of Texas to name two), that is now meaningless considering the pap that passes as coursework.

In addition, many have "communication" majors, which...well, you know...

Journalism is dead. Reporting, fair reporting, thorough reporting, investigative reporting...all dead.

We talk a lot about IQ on this site. Think the people who pass as "journalists" are high IQ. Nope. Not_even_close.

Anonymous said...

"I suspect Obama's re-election run plays into it in various complicated ways."

I agree here, but I've decided that the MSM pundits and anchors and reporters don't even much like Obama anymore.

However, they are lost without a romance. They were teenyboppers in love with love and now that the bloom is off the rose, they know they don't love him at all, know he was never what they imagined him to be, but they loved the euphoria of BEiNG in love and remain lost without that feeling.

They also know they
can never recapture that feeling until someone else comes along to once again fulfill their fantasies. Until that someone does appear, they'll take Barry, but it will never be the same.

Anonymous said...

If they were sandbagging evidence why did they go in with such a pathetic Probable Cause Affidavit?

They run the risk of the defense convincing the judge to throw the case out because of the egregious affidavit.

Anonymous said...

I wish I could say, "iSteve is wrong; the world is not the way he portrays it in this post." But I'm not confident that he's wrong...

Anonymous said...

I don't know if I'd assume any of these 20- and 30-somethings writing copy for the Times et al. have read Bonfire of the Vanities. At best they saw the movie.

Anonymous said...

Surprisingly, the MSM (can't recall which network) is covering the gang rape of the retarded girl in South Africa. I saw an interview this morning with a female South African reporter. Seems the story was originally driven by social media and youtube and internet talk so I guess the press in South Africa felt they had to cover it.

rightsaidfred said...

Don't forget that liberalism requires a lot of posturing and demonstrating one has the correct values. What better subject than a White vigilante hunting down and killing a total innocent? Value demonstrating gold!

As for the lack of veracity, bleh. How much audience does big media lose by telling a total lie? WWE and The Onion for all pretty soon.

Anonymous said...

Great article Steve! Right on across the board.

Chief Seattle said...

The MSM is morphing the Zimmerman story into a gun-control narrative. There's a feature in the New Yorker on historical gun control that frequently references the Zimmerman case, and I've seen a couple of "Stand your ground" articles in the newspaper this week. Not so many blacks marching or fist pumping or having the talk with their kids lately.

Anonymous said...

Can the prosecution sandbag the defense? Isn't that grounds for a mistrial?

free gummerman said...

Here is a wicked conspiracy theory. Maybe some--though not all--in the media whipped up frenzy to lure black demagoguery into a trap.
Maybe some in the media really knew much more about what happened on that night than they let on but gave the impression of a 'white racist' killing a 'sweet innocent black lad' in order to whip up black rage. But just when 'black leaders' are noisiest and most obnoxious, other pieces of the puzzle are released to embarrass them.

The liberal media may be anti-conservative, they're not too crazy about black demagogues like Al Sharpton and New Black Panthers Party either.
So, this becomes a kind of win-win for the lib media.

In the first act, they put 'white racist America' on the defensive by turning the narrative into white-on-black profiling-and-violence story. And in doing so, the media whips up wild negro frenzy. But just when blacks are screaming loudest about poor poor Trayvon, the media releases information that pulls the rug out of the 'saintly black victim' narrative.

Thus, white conservatives were put on the defensive, and then, black demagogues were embarrassed. Not bad for the mostly liberal white/Jewish/gay media.

Anonymous said...

The Trayvesty has already been a huge success for the MSM blowhards who endlessly promote the Big Lie of White Privilege.

I work for da guvmint, and most of my colleagues are black (and heavily female). The juvenile, irresponsible press coverage so far has reinforced the grievances of the "permanently oppressed" people of color and helped engorge the malignant chips on their collective shoulders.

Facts don't matta. For "justice" to be done, Zimmerman needs to be found guilty just as surely as OJ needed to be found not guilty.

According to The Narrative, Whitey is always and everywhere at fault. The saintly colored folks have such a sense of their own righteousness at this point that they believe the media has been lying the whole time in order to protect Zimmerman and make Trayvon look bad, instead of the other way around.

I haven't spoken to any white MSNBC-watching liberals about the case (out of concern over my blood pressure), but my guess based on the last 5-10 years of lefty conspiracy theory lunacy is that they are possibly even more deluded than black folks at this point.

Why now? Why not? The sad truth is that The Narrative is never going to end, unless the PC equivalent of the Berlin Wall falls. Can any of us even imagine that happening?

-THRIPSHAW

don't need a weatherman to know media blows said...

"I don't see much statistical evidence that African-Americans are behaving worse than in the past, but, wow, there sure is a huge amount of video that has gotten past the national news gatekeepers to the public."

If we just look at the overall crime stats, maybe not, but the nature of black violence has gotten truly wild in the past yrs. There used to be riots and lootings on occasion, but now there's like continual low-level looting(called flash mobs)happening all over America. I think lots of dumb blacks watch it, think it's fun, and join in, and it just spreads and spreads. And the 'youtube' aspects of violence makes a lot of thugs behave like they're stars in a movie. It's not just crime for gain but as a kind of reality TV show. In many cases, blacks seem to be 'acting up', like the world is watching.

Also, section 8 housing policies spread blacks all over, and it's having some dire impact. Wall Street spread toxic derivatives all around. (Obama wants to spread the wealth around, and Wall Street wants to spread the risk around. And HUD wants to spread the Negroes around.)Anyway, these toxic Negrovatives are causing havoc in some communities that used to be peaceful when there were only few blacks. Also, as blacks spread around more and communicate more, they all be sharing the message, 'white folks be a bunch of pussyass easy targets', and so the violence gets wilder and more brazen each year. IN all these videos, blacks see punkass white victims cowering and getting haplessly beaten up by blacks who be having a grand time.
And I think the presidency of Obama made some black kids think they's got the power and they can do anything cuz one of their own is in the white house.

There's also the element of porn and sports. After yrs of black thuggery narcissism in football and basketball, an entire generation of blacks grew up thinking they should act like Mike Tyson. Ali was a punk but not really a thug in real life. But whole bunch of black athlete stars are openly thugs 24/7.
Also, the rise of interracial porn and quasi-porn pop culture emboldened black thugs even more. White women used to be the most carefully guarded treasure of white men, but white men have pretty much surrendered their rights to their own women. So, black guys see white guys as pussy and white women as their fruit. As for black girls, they be all jealous and shit and wanna beat up white bitches.

Anonymous said...

If you're paying attention to the death sentence of a convicted black murderer that was overruled by a black North Carolina judge on the grounds of racism, there's a Derbyshire element involved.

The perp, Marcus Reymond Robinson, convinced 17-year-old Erik Tornblom, who was white, to give him and his friend a ride (i.e., to be a Good Samaritan). He then pulled a gun on him, forced him to drive into an empty field, stole $27, and shot him in the head, killing him.

The judge based his ruling on the 2009 Racial Justice Act, passed by a Democratic controlled legislature and signed by a Dem governor, Bev Perdue. Republicans, who now control the NC legislature, have already tried to overturn the law, but have been vetoed by Perdue.

However, from a Dem persepctive the timing couldn't be worse. There's a governor's race in NC this year, and Obama narrowly won NC in 2008.

Anonymous said...

It won't wind up being some "mixed up accident". Even ol' Steve seemed a bit weepy eyed and desirous of assuming shared blame between Trayvon and Zimmerman. Nah.

I bet it doesn't turn out that way.

Anonymous said...

"Most Popular Cities: Detroit Nation's Least Popular, Seattle Tops List."

Both Democratic, so why the difference?

Kylie said...

"Deep down, they almost get the joke of what they're doing ... but they can't help themselves."

They're far from getting the joke or even from realizing that it is a joke.

But I agree, they can't help themselves.

Anonymous said...

Romney Trails Obama Big Time With Small Donors. President Obama ended March with a 10:1 cash advantage over Mitt Romney, powered largely by a dominant edge with small donors, a dynamic that’s cropped up throughout the campaign.

Romney can't connect with ordnary people.
Looks like the election is finished.

Anonymous said...

The trouble is, Steve, every two-bit, sh*t-assed, jumped up newspaperman who's come from a 'liberal' famil, went to a 'liberal' college' and does 'liberal' things, in his heart thinks he's some sort of tin-god Atticus Finch (mainly by sitting behind a keyboard), andboy, does he revel in his ne moment of glory when it finally comes around.
As the Italians say "Christ only passes once past your window."

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said... 4/20/12 8:36 PM

"Today's "journalists" are not the journalists of days gone by."

Walter Duranty

Anonymous said...

"Stand your ground" law

Should be "Lie on the ground*" law

*with someone on top of you smacking your head against the sidewalk

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...4/20/12 8:48 PM

"If they were sandbagging evidence why did they go in with such a pathetic Probable Cause Affidavit?

They run the risk of the defense convincing the judge to throw the case out because of the egregious affidavit."

Crazy like a fox.

Anonymous said...

What're the odds they can finish the trial and get a jury verdict on, or shortly before, the first Monday in November? It would help if they timed the riots just right.

Drunk Idiot said...

"That the Martin-Zimmerman story was foretold so accurately a quarter of a century ago in the most famous book by the most famous journalist since Mencken only underlines that lesson: most of the journalists who have huffed and puffed this local small-time tragedy have personally read Bonfire of the Vanities. Deep down, they almost get the joke of what they're doing ... but they can't help themselves."

To echo the sentiments of a couple other commenters, it's highly unlikely that most of today's journalists would have read Bonfire of the Vanities. TV news production has been dominated by 25-30 year old single girls for the last decade plus. Print journalism isn't much different -- especially in the age of downsized newsrooms, where the push is go young and female in order to make newspapers "hip" and relevant to young people (or maybe because young female journos can be hired on the cheap).

In today's media, the "old-timers" are Gen X greybeards like Jake Tapper and David Gregory, who head up political news divisions for two of the big three major networks. Tapper and Gregory would have been in their early to mid-teens (say, between freshman & junior year in high school) when Bonfire of the Vanities came out. It's highly doubtful that even those two elder statesmen read it, given how young they would have been at the time of its publication and high point of relevance in the zeitgeist.

Maybe the doddering old man who does Face the Nation on CBS would have read it, but it's a good bet that most other Mainstream Media journos haven't (and maybe haven't even heard of it, or its author).

Most have probably read plenty of chick lit though, along with lots of trendy bestsellers like the Gladwell collection, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and Dave Eggers' stuff.

Anonymous said...

I think Romney wins because of Obama's racial posturing.

Anonymous said...

The last time around, Obama had large numbers of small donors with names like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. It wouldn't be surprising if these Disney characters (and many more) renew their support in 2012 via Obama's non-existent donation screening system.

Anonymous said...

In order for the narrative to change you need a Big Event. The narrative remains the one set by the last Big Event until a new Big Event comes along. The Germans will always have to live under the shame of the Nazis until they do something Big to start a new narrative, like fight and win a war as the Good Guys. The last Big Event is still firehoses being put on civil rights activists, so that is still the narrative. You will need something like the way the Boston massacre set the narrative for the America revolution, say, a large mob of blacks killing half a dozen or more whites to count as a Big Event to change the narrative.

Anonymous said...

The so-called 10-1 cash advantage is a cash-on-hand number, not a March 2012 fund-raising number. The March numbers were $54m for Obama to $27m for Romney - in the middle of a GOP primary where Romney's opponents are also getting donations.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/20/MNU21O6TBF.DTL&type=politics

Once the primaries are settled, then we'll have a true apples-to-apples fund-raising comparison between Romney and Obama.

Anonymous said...

Romney can't connect with ordnary people.

Just off the top of my head, I'd guess that that's a reflection of the Evangelicals' dismay with Romney's coronation by the Elites [largely brought about by the Elites' complicity in the destruction of Sarah Palin].

The Evangelicals are [or have been] the masters of the $10/$15/$20 contributions [made by the millions].

W.LindsayWheeler said...

It is none of your reasons.

Journalists, from the beginning, have always been demogogues. Journalism has always been demogogery!

Paul A. Rahe notes in his book Against Throne and Altar that Needham Marchmont can be called the first journalist. But Needham Marchmont was not about "Truth-telling" but skewing the aristocracy and the church to make them look bad. He promoted his pet project and attacked the institutions of his day. As an atheist, he was filled with hate and rage.

The first journalist is also the paradigm of journalism. It is nothing but demogoguery with a pen. As the Spartans said, "There is no soothfast art in speech". One should never trust speech, especially in a country that no longer teaches virtue! What a joke.

It is the Power of the Pen to incite and to activate. That is demogoguery and journalists know they have the power. The power to bring about their ideology into reality.

alexis said...

Is it just me, or does Zimmerman look more..uh, tanned... now than in his earlier photos? If he managed to find time for a few hours in the sun between the incident and his arrest, I'd say that was as wise of a legal strategy as any.

Drunk Idiot said...

"(In) the 2010 case of plainclothes law enforcement officers killing an 18-year-old violist while "debriefing" in a parking lot I've walked through hundreds of times, I initially smelled a rat because the official spokesman the morning after the shooting implied that the parking lot was a drug-trafficking hot spot. I knew that's not true, and that raised obvious questions about what else the cops were distorting."

Speaking of Malcolm Gladwell, in his Tipping Point intro, Gladwell talks about how AIDS was spread in America by one gay French Canadian flight attendant. But he also describes a heterosexual from East St. Louis, Missouri who was an early carrier of HIV virus and who spread HIV/AIDS to his female lovers/baby mamas.

Problem is, East St. Louis isn't in Missouri. It's across the river in Illinois. And it's notorious for its astronomical levels of disfunction and urban decay, so we're not talking about some totally obscure hamlet. What's more, anybody who's ever been to St. Louis, or who's ever even seen a picture of the St. Louis arch, would know that St. Louis is on the western banks of the mighty Mississippi River -- across the river from East St. Louis Illinois.

And anybody knows even basic, 5th grade geography would know that the Mississippi River defines the borders of the states it flows through.

That may seem like a trivial oversight, but it says something about Gladwell (and his editors).

He didn't know where East St. Louis was, but rather than look it up, he apparently just assumed that it was in Missouri (a logical assumption perhaps, unless you're familiar with geography and know that anything "east" of St. Louis would have to be across the river and in another state).

Given Gladwell's position and notoriety, that's pretty sloppy. And it also raises an important question: if he's that cavalier about checking something as mundane and easy to verify as the location of East St. Louis, what other oversights is he making? Is he that careless across the board? Is he making connections and drawing conclusions using similarly sloppy research/reasoning?

Gladwell didn't deliberately get the the location of East St. Louis wrong. So he wasn't intentionally trying to peddle a false narrative. But he got something wrong that he wouldn't have gotten wrong, had he been just a bit more conscientious. And while it may seem like a minor detail (though it wouldn't be a minor detail if some blogger from SoCal incorrectly placed Newark in New York), it ultimately serves to undermine his credibility to some degree.

alexis said...


But, I suspect something that hasn't been mentioned much is a technological change brought about by cell phone videos and Youtube.

Nothing like watching Worldstar Hiphop to put things in perspective.

Alcalde Jaime Miguel Curleo said...

On "getting the joke"--in a certain insular way, I'm sure many of them are attuned to the sensationalist/messianic tendencies of the profession. But as you say, it doesn't matter if individual press men get it or not because the aggregate bias of the enterprise is moralistic fabulism. 1) Because it's just plain easier--facts are finite and take some degree of effort to obtain, but "journalism" is elastic and can be generated now at an industrial rate. 2) Most of them ain't paid very well for their level of schooling/socialization (Bonfire again) and are constantly looking for that one break to leap a few millimeters nearer to the status of a Woodward-Bernstein or Diane Sawyer/Couric, take your pick. It's not *just* ideological, it's more of a visceral thing.

btw I'm unclear on your meaning with "sandbagging" there but I've typically heard it of athletes running slow or variously underplaying either for advantage in a disjunct future scenario or just temporarily to protect themselves, not in a legal sense of walking the defense into a trap as other comments seemed to take it.

Henry Canaday said...

Another reason for what you call ‘stereowiping’ is that the vast majority of highly paid newspaper journalists, and in TV grotesquely overpaid on-air talent, are still white, while the supporting technical staff, paid decently but not lavishly, now includes a large number of blacks and Hispanics.

In TV especially, relative pay scales are the effect of brutal economics, in which moderately competent, attractive and very ambitious people climb into top spots that must be rewarded very well, as the on-air people are the ‘brand,’ no matter how silly they may seem to many people.

But how do the stars and presenters justify their often 1-percent incomes and privileges to their co-workers on a daily basis? They have to work with these people, solicit their help and generally have the same attitude toward co-workers that we all have to people we deal with on daily basis: the desire to get along and be friends.

So the stars tilt their stories in ways that favor the ethnic groups from which many of their less-favored co-workers now come. The fact that these co-workers come from the functional and well-behaving sections of their ethnic communities probably makes stereowiping more believable to the story tellers.

So it is, in a way, one of the oldest human stories: it is hardest to be honest with your friends.

Alcalde Jaime Miguel Curleo said...

However, from a Dem persepctive the timing couldn't be worse. There's a governor's race in NC this year, and Obama narrowly won NC in 2008.

That's the part that always amazes me--racial arson is one thing if you're little old Sharpton with nothing to lose, it's quite another if you're actually in command of a national party. Does Axelrod's team really think it can pull this off at that scale? How in the hell does this help in the swing states ("disproportionally" stocked with non-collegiate whites, as Mickey Kaus noted years ago)? Another triple-bank-shot that the WH brain trust feels is just easy-peasy, or they've convinced themselves as much.

John Carr said...

Can someone clarify something for me. On numerous sites reference is made to Zimmerman apologizing but I didn't hear him use that word. In Ireland we would draw a distinction between an apology, that carries with it an implicit admission of deliberate wrongdoing, and an expression of sorrow/regret that would be appropriate in the case of an honest mistake or in the case of a justifiable if unfortunate act. Does/should the same distinction apply in the case of American English or am I simply being hopelessly naive in expecting too much? After all the standard of English, not to mention the standard of evidence, in the affidavit left much to be desired.

Anonymous said...

steve, i just ran into the must vile site feminist.us. a bunch of raving anti-white chicks go crazy there. it's nuts. it seems most work at colleges or teach young kids and show off there blogs about educating white boys about "white privilege", etc. someone needs to expose these fanatics.

Anonymous said...

The comment about Seattle and Detroit both being Democratic is probably not sincere. Many conservatives including Rush Limbaugh like to attribute the urban pathologies of black inner cities to party affiliation rather than race.

We heard this during the Katrina disaster. The media needed to comment on a situation in which the viewers saw black people on their TV screens behaving badly. It looked like the white people evacuated in good order while the black people stayed behind to loot. That's a simplification of course but that was what it looked like.

So the narrative arose that it wasn't race that was the problem but rather party affiliation. You would hear Limbaugh attribute the chaos to the poor leadership of the Democratic Party. This is a cute way to get in some digs at the opposition. And you don't have to worry that the Democrats will answer back that it isn't their party's policies but rather the race of their constituents.

Don't be deceived. No one is really expected to believe that. It's just a ploy to avoid discussing race.

You hear much the same on Bill O'Reilly show. He will glibly assert that there is no race-poverty connection because blacks who have college degrees and are married before they have kids do just fine. He implies (without actually saying it) that if blacks just stayed in school longer they would be as rich as white folks. He conveniently overlooks the fact that blacks don't do well in school.

O'Reilly and the press in general need these kind of comforting arguments so that they don't have to face the really depressing reality of black behavior.

When a central city passes some point where blacks reach some level of concentration - it is doomed. Seattle is a white city. Detroit is a black city. No one anywhere has a solution for Detroit. Once blacks are in the majority things go downhill fast.

Government job programs and stimulus spending can't reverse the effects of too many blacks.

Sanford Florida, where George and Trayvon live, is approaching 50% black. The white and Hispanic residents will be nervous. They see their neighborhood slipping away from them.

24 hours to fill every day said...

There's a lot of market-driven selection here. It's rare to find a perfect, sturdy GWD but until one comes along you can still do with a fair number of Great Black Victims (see Edric Kennedy-Macfoy now across the pond). Esp. with an expansive concept of racism it's statistically no sweat to keep the press (and increasingly the police & courts) busy-looking with a stream of tidy manageable units of anti-racist justice. In multi-million conurbations there will inevitably be at least a few every week, no matter how many schoolroom sermons and "museums of tolerance" we fund. That's just the numbers game, whether we're talking hate crimes or people dying from cola overdose or Toyotas "accelerating out of control." If the newspapers encouraged people to look at those things proportionately it would sort of defeat the point of bringing them up in the first place, right?

Anonymous said...

i think Steve hits one thing on it's head about this Trayvon thing. Regular black on white violence, rape. Is so predictable and depressing it just probably doesn't sell. I know I can only read so many of those articles about blacks raping elderly women and the like. This gets the juices flowing. The left loves to use to show off their morality and we love pointing out the double standards.

Laz said...

What's "Bonfire of the Vanities"? lol. Just kidding, you may continue.

Anonymous said...

@ anon Today's "journalists" are not the journalists of days gone by
The NYT covered up the crimes of the Bolshiviks, and in the sixties, editors altered field reporters filed stories so much many didn't recognize them when they read them in the paper.
What's changed? It seems that w/ the internets we can expose their lies, but they are lying just as they have always done.

I think they have more hegemony but other than that not much has changed.

DCThrowback said...

Great work as usual Steve. Stellar read.

Wolfe's less popular but (I think) equally effective "Ambush at Ft. Bragg" worth a read to see media narrative creation in action.

Here's a good review and some further links.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure that Bonfire of the Vanities grants any kind of dumbness immunity to the reader. The last time someone brought it up at my favourite leftist site, the munchkin replied, (and I paraphrase):

'I read Bonfire of the Vanities, and all I came away with was the impression that the author really hates black people.'

Gilbert Pinfold.

Anonymous said...

The Martin/Zimmerman media narrative was part of an attempt to energize Obama's base for the election. It has been a success, at least among black folks (like the "Anonymous" above, I work with a lot of black people, many of whom fervently believe that Al Sharpton Speaks Truth to Power), and has the added benefit of allowing the gun issue to be brought up again by the Brady Bunch.
The National Geographic cable TV channel aired a program the other night on "10 Things You Don't Know About Mormons." Why now? I think you will see some energetic attempts to make Mormonism the focus of the election, unless the media can come up with a good October surprise.

peterike said...

"Romney trails Obama Big Time with Small Donors."

It's fraud, not "ordinary people." Fraud served straight up and cold, thanks to zero security checks on the website to donate to the O. Read all about it:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/04/dubious-donations-illustrated-illegal-contributor-edition.php

As to the question of "why now?" I think that's hugely important. Wasn't this whole Zimmerman story a month old before it suddenly exploded onto every media outlet simultaneously? What happened there? Who gave the marching orders? Who decided that THIS case was going to be "the one" (to borrow a phrase)?

I would not be at all surprised to learn that the White House, fearing that black voter turnout would be down significantly for the election, decided they needed to goose up the hood. So they looked around for any "white guy shoots black guy" story, thought they had a perfect case -- Zimmerman? how much whiter can you get! -- not to mention the shootee was a yout, and they put out the word that it was flood-the-zone time.

Hasn't turned out quite the way they planned (more sloppy advance work, a hallmark of Team Obama), but it's still juicing up the black vote because you can juice up the black vote with pretty much anything. But it may reverb on them badly.

In any case, I really think this whole thing was driven from the White House. It's just too coincidental that every media outlet in the country suddenly noticed it simultaneously.

Anonymous said...

I don't think you have the MSM's motivations right. I'm really don't know for sure what they are myself — even though I worked at big newspapers for 15 years (honest discussions of race were not common) — but your reasons are not convincing.

My best guess would be the smartest folks in the MSM, the ones who have looked at the evidence and still behave as they do, believe that simple honestly about even the most easily proved factual differences between groups will lead to logically defensible but morally uncomfortable things — sterilizing stupid or violent people, different laws for those of different ability — or to routine castigation of and discrimination against groups defined as less able (and even against members of those groups who are wildly able).

My guess is that they see two belief systems that can exist: "Everyone is equal and can be expected to perform thus" and "Some groups are inferior and thus deserve to be victimized at my whim." Thus they struggle to promote the first, even when the facts contradict it, and to sell the idea that the second idea is the one that humans naturally hold and that we must constantly guard against backsliding toward it. (They, of course, get nice ego boosts from appointing themselves as the guardians of our new enlightenment and occasionally sacrificing people to uphold it.)

They do not see a steady equilibrium possible for a view that accepts facts while being just: "Groups vary in a lot of ways so you shouldn't expect equal aggregate performance but members of groups vary so much that you should judge each individual you meet as an individual."

And, frankly, I'm not sure I blame anyone who doubts that's a viable candidate for a long-term opinion. It's a reasonably sophisticated take on how normal distribution works, demanding that people discard the notion that someone is X in favor of the notion that there's a differing probability that someone is X. Most people simply aren't smart enough to hold that.

As for the first commentator, who disparages the intellects of journalists, he's wrong by any reasonable standard. Journals are not as bright, in aggregate, as university physicists, but they are collectively brighter than you could possibly expect for a position that pays so little (because it's seen as an interesting and desirable job) and they are certainly brighter than they ever have been in the past (because the implosion of the industry has made it all the more selective). That's not to say that I think they apply that IQ effectively to seeing and describing the world accurately. I think the sort of person who goes into journalism is even more predisposed than average to let preconceived (and inaccurate) a priori views influence his interpretation of events, but the problem isn't stupidity.

Anonymous said...

On a tangent:

'SWPL: Humanitarian Intervention'

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4987/stuff-white-people-like-n.135-humanitarian-interve

This deserves a large audience.

rob said...

The media is nowhere close to getting the "joke." If they knew the Narrative was fictitious, they'd heavily vet stories that seem to fit the narrative too well. Instead, they take black whore drug addicts at their word; trust dim, white-hating affirmative action third raters like Guttman and Toure, or Tourey or whatever, to be honest and fair-minded. Hell, in the recent shootings in France, they couldn't predict that there was a decent chance the killer wasn't a French right-winger, or even French.

AMac said...

Thanks, Steve.

Over in "Just One Minute"'s comments, it looks like somebody ID'd DeeDee, the girlfriend Trayvon was talking to just prior to the confrontation.

I wouldn't be surprised if that part of the Crump/Sharpton/Elite Media narrative now falls apart, too.

josh said...

It is amazing how I called this thing so early in the game.One thing never discussed is the cell phone. Martin was supposedly on the cell talking to his girlfriend. Well sir,George states clearly that Martin had his hands in his waistband;he doesnt mnention a phone. Ipso fatso,there was no phone. The girl made it up,after being induced to make it up by the scum from Change.Org,the Obama lovers.The guys who gave the "Young Trayvon" pic to the press. But if there was a phone,wouldnt the police have easily been able to ID Martin with it? Surely if the police called the girl,and told her there was a dead black male resembling Martins desciption who had the phone and just called her,she would fairly quickly put 2 and 2 together and suggest a possible name. The take away from this,tho,is that we shouldnt "stereotype" blacks as violent. And lets hope George is convicted...so the blacks wont take to the streets and brutally beat,stomp,paralyze and kill random strangers who had nothing to do with the case. (NOTE: Shouldnt we take a page from the Brits and pass a law saying that anyone convicted of taking part in any riotous behavior shall lose ALL welfare benefits,for a lifetime? EBT, welfare,Foo stamps etc.?) Lastly, I do think the bluff of the riot is a bit overstated. I would think--tho i could be totally wrong--that most blacks can see what happened and know darn well Trayvon was a thug looking for trouble.Is he really worth rioting for? Or is a riot a FUN thing that young blacks cant wait to get into? Are there ANY grown-up blacks who are worried about this-knowing how violent the young generation can be?

Anonymous said...

'The Trayvesty' good one Sailer!

Chris said...

Congrats on your neologism, Steve. How many have you come up with so far?

From Google search results:

"Jason swallowed, choking down his fury. 'I hate him.' He knelt... stereowiping his eyes with his hand, refusing to cry. His mom knelt beside him and put her arm around his shoulder. 'We can fix it.'"

Ah, yes, we can fix it.

josh said...

As a Catholic,I have to say theres something a bit weirdly religous about that pic.

Chris said...

It won't wind up being some "mixed up accident". Even ol' Steve seemed a bit weepy eyed and desirous of assuming shared blame between Trayvon and Zimmerman. Nah.

What do you think of the Wagist analysis suggesting two confrontations. Seems plausible to me and just adds to the sense that Zimmerman made some poor choices, even if he didn't attack Martin. As a friend of mine keeps pointing out to me, if Zimmerman was "stalking" Martin, Martin probably had a right of retaliation under the stand your ground law.

Anonymous said...

here's some guardian guy claiming greek mathematicians are africans (blacks) .. wtf


"The second story involves one of the few black mathematicians whom white mathematicians acknowledge as great – or, I should say, "black American mathematicians", since obviously Euclid, Eratosthenes and other African mathematicians outshone Europe's brightest stars for millennia. His name was David Blackwell."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/12/black-mathematicians-john-derbyshire-fields-medal

so bizzare

Anonymous said...

Steve. . . I was curious how the liberals would react to the photo of Zimmerman's bloody head so I went to feministing and found a link to www.talkleft.com which has a great analysis. .. Amazingly it is very pro Zimmerman. Check it out.
PatinOK

Anonymous said...

"The last two or three years have seen a flood of footage posted online by amateurs of Blacks Behaving Badly (much of it, indeed, posted by those behaving badly themselves). I don't see much statistical evidence that African-Americans are behaving worse than in the past, but, wow, there sure is a huge amount of video that has gotten past the national news gatekeepers to the public. "

Whites of today forget that the purpose of Jim Crow was to protect whites from blacks behaving badly. The purpose of the so-called Civil Rights Movement was to redistribute white wealth in the public sector to blacks. If blacks were able to create sufficient taxable wealth, they could build their own communities from the ground up, but since they can't, they insist on settling close to whites so they can demand housing, public services, government jobs, and welfare. And with federally mandated integration came skyrocketing rates of black on white violence in schools, on streets, in shopping venues, and on public transportation.

Motor City Madman said...

This is OT, but the talk of Trayvon riots motivated a couple of us to do a little urban archealogy. Check out this army video from the 1967 Detroit riots. At about 9:00 into the film you see an aerial view of a high school (Southwestern High / Foch Jr. High) from a Bell Huey. The army is deployed across the street (Fairview St.) from the high school on the football field. The school is bounded by Fairview, Goethe, Beniteau and Charlevoix so you can find it on a map. The chopper flies above Fairview and circles above the school so you can get a good look at how the neighborhood was in 1967. Now take a look at the neighborhood in 2012 using google maps street level. Google 3076 Fairview St. to see the school today, and take a walk around the block up Fairview to Goethe, then Beniteau. The neighborhood has been sterilized.

Back to the Army video, go to 13:00 and the chopper is flying over Tyme Furniture, a burnt store on Grand River Avenue at Lysander St. Grand River is the large diagonal street running in front of Tyme Furniture that makes it a triangular block. Go to Google Maps again at 4506 Grand River Avenue. You can't even walk around that triangular block these days because Lysander St. doesn't intersect Grand River anymore. There's an empty field there. In fact there is an empty field everywhere! The neighborhood has vanished along with Lysander St.

The disappearance of Detroit is on a scale unprecedented in human history.

Snippet said...

The answer to the question, "Why now?" is simply, "Opportunity knocked."

Or so they thought....

Liberals hate armed citizens and the growing popularity of conealed carry laws is infuriating to them.

Their disappointment that more innocent people are not being killed is palpable. As is their disappointment that welfare reform didn't result in massive increases in poverty.

They thought they finally had that incident that could be spotlighted to prove how horrible these laws are and exploited to the hilt.

First glitch: Whitey McWhiterthansnow turned to be a latino. Awwwkward. The invention of the new race "White Latino" (Is our president a "White Black"?) confused, rather than salvaged the narrative.

Chicago said...

The samizdat of the internet prevented the media from confecting another Emmett Till legend. Plus, the facts themselves weren't as neat a fit as would have been preferred. They'll keep trying until they can get a good one though. The whole episode leaves a very bad taste as it shows the extensive propaganda apparatus that went into action: the constant hyping and around-the-clock reportage, the inflammatory rabble-rousing, the goading of the idiot college students to march, the black churches who had hoodie Sundays along with their liberal white counterparts who jumped on the bandwagon, the race hustlers who tap-danced their way into the spotlight, the splicing of the tape, the sheer dishonesty of it all is just a mind-blower. It shows that campaigns like this aren't just spontaneous occurrences but are cynical manipulations of the public.

Conatus said...

James Q. Wilson said,
"Black men commit murders at a rate about eight times greater than that for white men."

It needs to be re-emphasized that James Q. Wilson used victim reports to confirm his crime stat numbers. His numbers are from a neutral, individual, disinterested source.

Are these statistical disparities the result of police bias? Do the police target more blacks and therefore arrest more blacks? Professor Wilson would say, no, they are not. Why? Because the more recent numbers are confirmed by the reports of victims, not police. Using the results of the National Crime Victimization Survey, which measures the response merely of victims of crime, Wilson says, "Regardless of whether the victim is black or white, there are no significant differences between victim reports and police arrests."

G Joubert said...

According to The Narrative, Whitey is always and everywhere at fault. The saintly colored folks have such a sense of their own righteousness at this point that they believe the media has been lying the whole time in order to protect Zimmerman and make Trayvon look bad, instead of the other way around.

You must've missed the part about 200 years of slavery followed by 100 years of Jim Crow. Those are the wrongs attempting to be righted in the modern era, however ham-handedly.

jody said...

"If you're paying attention to the death sentence of a convicted black murderer that was overruled by a black North Carolina judge on the grounds of racism"

i saw the story, but i didn't know who the judge was.

north carolina is a great state and i enjoyed living there. beverley perdue is not that well liked, and probably will not be re-elected.

Anonymous said...

Anon claims Romney trails with small donors. I wonder if those small donors are illegal withdrawals from stolen credit card numbers and or overseas donors?

Also, why are you not looking at the doggie scandals?

If dogs could vote I am sure Obama would promise to stop eating them :-)

Carol said...

I see cable TV news only at the gym, and I had to crack up how hispanic Zimmerman looked at his hearing! Did his lawyer have him put on some brown makeup? LOL! How's this "white hispanic" thing gonna fly?

Nicole said...

"The Trayvesty, therefore, would be media's attempt to strike back, to put the genie back in the bottle, to get the National Conversation on Race back on its well-worn tracks where it belongs."

I was thinking this. I think the flash mobs in particular are causing concern about random black violence among otherwise liberal whites, and I think there is fear among the media/elites/etc. that such whites (and other non-blacks) will begin to understand and even sympathize with some of those redneck/flyover territory views (self-defense and so one).

Carol said...

"Deep down, they almost get the joke of what they're doing ... but they can't help themselves."

Ya know, I've come to the conclusion that upon learning the supposedly black-and-white moral struggles of the recent past, like civil rights and the Vietnam war, people try to convince themselves they were or would have been firmly on the "right" side had they been there.

In reality, most people were confused or ambivalent, and always will be in such times.

Anonymous said...

My favorite examples of "stereowiping" always come from black websites themselves. They try, but they just can't seem to get it done.

That's why I like going to sites like NewsOne when stories like this happen. You get to read articles like this:

http://newsone.com/2003634/zimmerman-bail/

The story itself is bad enough, but the comments are great. Half of the comments are people complaining that the media portrays blacks as violent. The other half are black people threatening to beat up any white people who have the nerve to disagree with them.

It's really amazing. It happens pretty much every single time on sites like this. But nobody seems to connect the dots and realize WHY people might think blacks are more violent.

TontoBubbaGoldstein said...

"Trayvesty"....Sweet! I'm just waiting for Martin's cache of burglary tools to show up. Probably next to the Skittles and Tea that he presumably placed somewhere before jumping Zimmerman...

Steve Sailer said...

"In Ireland we would draw a distinction between an apology, that carries with it an implicit admission of deliberate wrongdoing, and an expression of sorrow/regret that would be appropriate in the case of an honest mistake or in the case of a justifiable if unfortunate act. Does/should the same distinction apply in the case of American English or am I simply being hopelessly naive in expecting too much?"

You are expecting too much from Americans' command of English. Grasping subtle distinctions between near-synonyms is for tea-drinkers.

Auntie Analogue said...

If you'd like to know about the intelligence of Media-Pravda's goons, George Orwell nailed it: "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question."

Precisely, "assumed" - which is exactly how Media-Pravda's servile obsequious drones go on expecting people to go on swallowing and parroting Media-Pravda's (and indeed our ruling political & public sector unions class's)Multi-Culti-Diversity Fairytal Narrative.

These scribblers are not lacking in intelligence, they'e merely lacking in spine sufficient to face facts and to call a spade a spade, instead of avoiding calling a spade anything except a spade by endless deployment of euphemisms and evasions and diversions (such as the West is responsible for resurgent Islamic jihadism and sharia-creep, and whites' innate and ineradcable racism is responsible for all the evils that blacks and Third Worlders inflict upon themselve and others). Not one genuine boat-rocker, let alone a single genuine reformer, in the whole diseased off-course vessel of Media-Pravda (or in Big Central Control Of Micromanaging Everything Into Compliance Government either).


By the way, long before he wrote 'The Bonfire Of The Vanities' Tom Wolfe nailed the white/Western Civilization surrender to fear of even the threat of black (and now Moslem and Mexican immigrant) violence in his incisively prescient 'Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers.' What has been our Media-Pravda's and Big Nanny State's response to constantly ramped-up NAM Mau-Mauing threat-blackmail? You guessed it: based on the Eloi ruling class's sterile nonsense (of which "stereowiping" is but one tiny facet) that all problems flow from economics but never from culture or from innate racial-cultural shortcomings, the response has been nothing more than to continue to shake-down the productive middle class to throw more money (that has not yet been earned and that comes now from Chinese credit and at Moslem whim) at social engineering "solutions" that solve nothing and only worsen and further strengthen the NAM menace's power, that only hasten the decline of the West.

Anonymous said...

Romney can't connect with ordnary people.
Looks like the election is finished.


considering he's a Likud stooge where is the problem?

Anonymous said...

@Steve Sailer:

What is the original source of the skittles and ice tea story? If it was from testimony, who would have provided it? If it was from material evidence, is it plausible that Martin still had both in his pockets after a struggle? However implausible, was it in any of the police reports?

Anonymous said...

"Is it just me, or does Zimmerman look more..uh, tanned"

It's just you.

Anonymous said...

I have a different little angle concerning the media rage myself:

Zimmerman was a neighborhood voluntary "watchman", who had a gun license. It was a gated-community, but not a particularily wealthy one. He was not employed by the development, as 4 shifts of security at merely $10.00 per hour would cost $240 per day. $1680 a week for mere labor, with insurance for one armed guard, a little subdivision would probably have to invest at least $2000-a-week to afford one (I bet thats a far lowball estimate also, the insurance for a carry permit probably makes that higher). Thats an extra $20 if the place has 50 houses each week. $80 on your rent in a four week month, and $100 in a five week month. Homes are still to expensive now.

I think this is a precedental kind of "shaming" that some high up in the food chain in the MSM would like to inflict upon the public's mind.

Note to middle class from MSM: Unless your development is from a non-CRA bank, that disavows Sec 8 and HUD from getting its foot in the door before ground was broke on the first house, and you cant afford 24/7 armed paid security guards: we dont intend for you to be able to shield yourself from diversity. In fact, we intend for you to recieve its blessing.

Volunteering half-hispanic whites abetted by gun permits and enabled to use the guns via "stand your ground laws" if challenged, is not something the elites want whites to be able to do. If Zimmerman had a security guard's uniform, and shot the kid for suckerpunching him, the media would have had a much harder time convincing even the left-leaning of the public.


Further note to lower middle and middle class whites in little gated developments that we disagree with the legality of (you need to be rich); Dont you even think about getting together, building a little corrugated metal building about subdivided by a few rooms, and getting a stay-at-home-mom or two teaching certificates so you can build little 100-student Christian day schools, so that an aggregation of homeshool friendly moms can teach your kids in middle class developments, that furhter shield your kids from diversity. Only the wealthy or other religions should be able to do that (Cough....Muslim, Cough....Jewish). You Christians are supposed to send your kids to have their lives enriched at the same school D'Quique (pronounced "De-Quick") attends. Thats racist, anti-semitic, xenophobic, misogynist, class-biased, bigoted, heteronomitive, fascistic, authoritarianism, and several other bad things if you even think about doing so.


Thats what I think that deep down, some of the white establishment journalist are offended by the most. Honest. They wouldn't care to know Trayvon Mathews and wouldn't enjoy one minute of a hour's conversation with him. Hell, if they were given the temporary power to bring him back from the dead like Jesus did for Lazarus, they wouldn't do it if they could keep it secret.

The photojournalism alone (Mathews kiddie pic used almost exclusively, vs. the tattooed, gold toothed 6 foot 2 inch wanna-be tough-guy-hot-town-balla he presented himself as vs. a old mug shot of Zimmerman, before he became the preppy-looking-volunteer type.

Anonymous said...

"i think Steve hits one thing on it's head about this Trayvon thing. Regular black on white violence, rape. Is so predictable and depressing it just probably doesn't sell."

I disagree. If white lynchings of blacks and white pogroms against Jews happened all the time in the US, do you think the media would say, "it's just another dog bites man story, and so we'll ignore it"?

Trayvon story was favored by media not because it's a 'man bites dog' story but because liberals wanna believe it is the 'dog bites man' story based on their fantasies of PC imbibed from PBS propaganda and public education.

It's like this. If media were to cover African wildlife...

Media Reality: Lion King the movie.

Real Reality(ignored by media): http://youtu.be/10QFwZdloGQ

Anonymous said...

"Can someone clarify something for me. On numerous sites reference is made to Zimmerman apologizing but I didn't hear him use that word. In Ireland we would draw a distinction between an apology,'


GZ said he was sorry for their loss of a son. That was not an apology for having shot the son, but yes, you'd never know it by the headline writers and by the use of the word "apology" which, admittedly, is used sloppily by us Americans.

One can be sorry w/out "apologizing".

Anonymous said...

"Anon claims Romney trails with small donors. I wonder if those small donors are illegal withdrawals from stolen credit card numbers and or overseas donors?"

Obama's been the presumptive Dem nominee for 3.5 years. Romney's been the presumptive GOP nominee for about, what, 27 minutes? Sheesh, give him some time.

Republicans used to outperform Democrats among small donors by about 2-1. The George W. Bush years - 2 amnesty putsches, the housing bubble, the wars (which really started hurting him around 2006), the Dubai ports scandal, Harriet Miers, more and more tax cuts for the rich - seems to have done it in.

But if Romney gets it right he'll regain that advantage. Republicans voters are hungry for a victory.

Anonymous said...

Looks like whimmerman shot down some comments.

Anonymous said...

"He conveniently overlooks the fact that blacks don't do well in school.

"O'Reilly and the press in general need these kind of comforting arguments so that they don't have to face the really depressing reality of black behavior."

People who went to college in the Sixties and after, unless they are hard science majors, still believe in the blank slate.

O'Reilly is one of those, a believer that culture and parenting are the greatest shapers of achieving or lack of achieving.

If you pinned him down, like most people of his ilk, he'd surely say that he knows that people have different talents, differing IQs, but he believes that all people can achieve if only they are surrounded by a culture that fosters achievement. He often points out frequently that we've spent a fortune on anti-poverty programs, and he's the only one I've ever seen on tv who has pointed out that studies have shown that Head Start results in only temporary gains; thus, yes, he does bang the drum of parental responsibility and he does point out the futility of government programs, but I suspect the harsher truths of HBD haven't occurred to him.

Matthew said...

Steve, you really should post something on the murderer in NC whose death sentence was just commuted under the state's Racial Justice Act. Black murderer. Black judge who commuted his sentence. The Derbyshirean element of a white teenager trying to be the good Samaritan to two black thugs. A Racial Justice Act passed by Dem politicians that freed him based not on proof of discrimination in his particular case, but based on alleged statistical data.

There's a political angle, too, as it could potentially effect the election outcomes in NC, Florida, and Virginia - all of which went Obama in 2008.

You should also read the comments at the CNN website, where the commenters are being particularly blunt.

Anonymous said...

For those interested in both the media coverage of the GZ/TM incident and in analyses of the whole thing, visit The WAgist and The Last Refuge.

These guys ought to go to work for the defense.

Anonymous said...

Thats racist, anti-semitic, xenophobic, misogynist, class-biased, bigoted, heteronomitive, fascistic, authoritarianism, and several other bad things if you even think about doing so.

And illiberal.

Mind you, modern liberals themselves have no shortage of illiberal fascistoid tendencies when their beliefs are challenged ...

Anonymous said...

"Is it just me, or does Zimmerman look more..uh, tanned"
maybe the media whitened him?

Alcalde Jaime Miguel Curleo said...

Interesting about that Newsone link is their headline relying on "epic fail" from the suburban white geek lexicon.

Anonymous said...

you're killing it today, stevo. Knocking it out the park. I like it that you finally have addressed a WHY question concerning The Narrative. It's nice to have it pointed out. But at some point, we have to go deeper, no?

Here is my rebuttal: culture and and status-seeking behavior and money and fear are the drivers of the media adherence to The Narrative.

Journos calculate and triangulate and calibrate in order to march in line with The Narrative. Culture is the guide that leads the way. That culture was born of elite college educations. That culture was molded by self-interest, primarily. Those who have wish to keep it, and they have the power to manipulate society by manipulating the culture.

They do it by use of their monies to pay for academics, activists and writers to create a critical of ideology, ideology favorable to themselves, rich people. Over the decades, they funded academics, activists and writers whose personal leanings were toward a social-left orientation, as opposed to an economic left orientation. These social leftists were fed by plutocrats via philanthropical foundations, e.g., ford, rockefeller and getty foundations. See Dr Roelofs' THE MASK OF PLURALISM.

Also, those at the top were pro-pluralism/multiculti because such had the effect of weakening middle class unity, and thus allowing those at the top to have their way.

Such pseudoleftism, social leftism, was adopted by the rich, and of course many of those in the middle adopt the stances of the rich in order to attain a higher social status.

Also, the media is owned and funded by those at the top. Hence, the pro-pluralism approach is de rigeur in part because if you fail to toe the line (not tow the line!), you will be put in a bad way, as they used to say.

So high salaries for media management make people fear for their jobs if they fail to be pro-pluralist.

DCS said...

The case for 2nd degree murder has a bigger hole than the one in Titanic. The case is a dog, but the special prosecutor was merely playing to the liberal hamster class and race baiters like Sharpton, Spike Lee and Jesse Jackson. Who could have guessed that Obama would make an ass of himself by opening his mouth? What would his teleprompter do?

Anonymous said...

Wow - it's becoming increasingly difficult on these threads to get the phrase "Scots-Irish"* past Komment Kontrol.

Makes one wonder what percentage of all submitted comments actually make it through to the blog itself.





*Apparently we're supposed to employ all sorts of bizarre euphemisms for the Scots-Irish, such as "liberal", "Walter Duranty", "Pravda" and "George Orwell"?!?

The expository & stylistic sands keep shifting so quickly around here that I can't keep it all straight anymore.

Anonymous said...

The really ominous undertow in this series of comments is that the MSM may decide to knowingly tell major lies in the service of the Narrative.

If circumstances conspire to prove them wrong,in a manner that cannot be glossed over, they can always issue a "correction", and sometimes a meaningless "apology". By then, the damage is done, anyway. The art of this is to keep doing it in such a skillful manner that credibility is not destroyed.

Do the Zimmermans really have the resources to sue them? Who does?

Goebbels understood all of this 80 years ago; but he would still have been impressed.

Anon.

Anonymous said...


The Trayvon-Zimmerman fight must have been similar. Pitiful.


Your negro sexual fetishism truly is pitful, Andrei. Give it a rest. No one needs to hear it.

Anonymous said...

"As a friend of mine keeps pointing out to me, if Zimmerman was "stalking" Martin, Martin probably had a right of retaliation under the stand your ground law."


We're in big trouble in this country if, having your suspicions aroused about a stranger on your street, you can't follow at a distance for a bit without that being called "stalking."

BTW, that is not the definition of stalking in my state.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

In order for the narrative to change you need a Big Event. The narrative remains the one set by the last Big Event until a new Big Event comes along."

Some events seem to punch a hole in the narrative, but only for a brief time. Immediately after the Rodney King Riots in LA, news outlets inadvertantly gave voice to whites saying exactly what a lot of whites really think - why the hell are black people so violent and dangerous? They quickly regrouped and put a stop to any such unapproved thoughts.

A similar thing happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with all the footage of BBBs in New Orleans, a lot of people had their eyes opened. I don't think this was the intention of the news media. It was just the case that they necessarily thrive on the images they can broadcast, and they had nothing else to show.

The internet, of course, is beginning to challenge the lock that the establishment media has on "the narrative".

Anonymous said...

Overeem isn't good. He's a cheater. He got caught for steroids recently.

AMac said...

The recent revelations about DeeDee brought up an angle I hadn't considered. That the Crump/Sharpton playbook is to get (1) an arrest and (2) a trial. While a "guilty" verdict would be nice, an acquittal will do.

Because clearing the "probable cause" hurdle opens the way for the Martin family's lawyers to bring a civil suit on Wrongful Death grounds. A la Goldman family in the OJ Simpson case. For deep-pockets defendants, let's nominate the town of Sanford and the community association. Ka-ching!

So... is this just the fevered musings of some right-wing-bloggers? Or is there something to this scenario?

To my knowledge, the mainstream media hasn't uttered a peep about the potential use of this strategy by their teammates. Assuming this is a possible motivator of Crump, Sharpton, et al.: Thanks, Mainstream Media!

Anonymous said...

"Overeem isn't good. He's a cheater. He got caught for steroids recently."

Not really cuz steroid use is so prevalent in sports, big and small. So, he was doing what almost everyone's doing. Chael Sonnen almost beat the invincible Anderson Silva but it turned out he used banned drugs too.

Kylie said...

"Most have probably read plenty of chick lit though, along with lots of trendy bestsellers like the Gladwell collection."

Are you saying the Gladwell collection isn't chick lit?

"I think the sort of person who goes into journalism is even more predisposed than average to let preconceived (and inaccurate) a priori views influence his interpretation of events, but the problem isn't stupidity."

Sure it is. Because political correctness makes you stupid.

AMac said...

Here's the link to The Conservative Treehouse's post, claiming that DeeDee's contribution to the Team Trayvon Narrative is falling to pieces. If this guy is right, and the stage has now been set for a civil wrongful death lawsuit, it may not matter much. Truth gets its boots on, but so what, it's already payday.

Anonymous said...

"Overeem isn't good. He's a cheater. He got caught for steroids recently"

The fact remains that the champions in the fast growing sport of Mixed Martial Arts are disproportionately black. The 2 most dominant champions in the UFC are both black: Anderson Silva of Brazil and Jon Jones of the USA.

Actually, in just a few hours Jon Jones will defend his Light Heavyweight title against his toughest challenger yet, former champion Rashad Evans who is also black.

Anonymous said...

On riots:

IMHO that's a road that ends badly for the MSM and black rioters in any area that hasn't disarmed itself. America 1992 is not America 2006 (Katrina) and that is not America 2012. Gun sales are through the roof, so who's buying these guns? Brady and the rest of the pro - be a victim crowd would have you think that one guy is buying 20 guns and sitting on them. Repeatedly.

While LA, Philly, Detroit, chicago, Portland, Oakland and the rest riot, I imagine there will be a different story if blacks try that shit in white areas where there is an armed populace. Not that the MsM would spin it as anything other than noble negors being gunned down for being IWB (innocent while black), but seeing people fighting back is going to be an eye opener for your typical SWPL who just had his head kicked around by Danfernee and the other youfs.

Svigor said...

The central mechanism that leads the press astray is its War to Wipe Out Stereotypes, to wipe clean the collective mind, to render the blank slate as blank as possible. The fundamental problem of journalism, in the minds of the more elevated sort of journalist, is that its readers can notice patterns for themselves.

Stereotypes the press isn't warring against, but rather, tacitly supporting:

White hillbillies (too many to list)
WASPs (too many to list)
Men
Italians
Arabs (though this one took a hit on 9/11)
East Asians
The independent and self-reliant (survivalist wackos, militia terrorists, etc.)
Russians, Serbs

It's more like the Who-whom War Against Western Civilization, Stereotype Readjustment Campaign.

The first, of course, is money: Man Bites Dog stories are more profitable than vice-versa.

You can say "Man Bites Dog" on the air. That's the litmus test. Can you say "Blacks commit 6x more violent crime than Whites" on the air? No. Ergo, it's not a "Man Bites Dog" statement.

Svigor said...

"As a friend of mine keeps pointing out to me, if Zimmerman was "stalking" Martin, Martin probably had a right of retaliation under the stand your ground law."

Your friend should lay off the dope. He's dumb enough without it.

Svigor said...

Okay, I flubbed the grammer on the "Man Bites Dog" point. But it's obvious. Anyone can whip out the stats on Man-on-Dog crime vs. Dog-on-Man crime, and no one will blink an eye. You can't do that for race. The Color of Crime is controversial. "You can't say that!"

Svigor said...

Wow, those CNN comments are good. It's like they've all been through race realism 101, or something.

Beecher Asbury said...

Where is Truth on this post? He was playing a leading role in the other iSteve Trayvon posts, but I haven't seen him on this one. I'd like to see his take on that bloody photo.

AMac said...

One of Half Sigma's commenters discusses the Who? Whom? pathos of the kulak with the starring role:
.

Posted by: PA | April 21, 2012 at 09:23 PM

One thing in particular must be extremely hard on Zimmerman. By all appearances, he was a sincere liberal who reached out to help blacks. Being a race realist or racist in his position would at least grant you the psychological comfort of understanding that you are unjustly persecuted by evil men. But Zimmerman is being crucified by his heroes, the liberal establishment, all the way up to the president, whom he doubtlessly admired.

He may be like small-time Communists who were falsely accused of counterrevolutionary sabotage in Moscow show trials. That's gotta hurt.

Svigor said...

Is Klitschko still champ? Shouldn't one of those Black studs go knock him out for a few mil?

A lot of YKWs seem to have a homo-crush on Black athletes.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, Mr. Anon Journo. I spent too much time as a TA correcting JO101 papers at a major private institution with an accredited journalism program to buy the "smart journo" meme. Noun and verb agreement was downright Kennedyesque.

My constant refrain has been thus: if you're a Wealthy East Coast Scots-Irish, you send your intelligent progeny to Harvard or Yale to be doctors, lawyers or corporate robber barons; you send your less intellectually-gifted children to journalism school.

Svigor said...

You must've missed the part about 200 years of slavery followed by 100 years of Jim Crow. Those are the wrongs attempting to be righted in the modern era, however ham-handedly.

That isn't consistent with the facts:

Segregation: big gov't trampling Freedom of Association in the name of...
Integration: big gov't trampling Freedom of Association in the name of...

More power is what the gov't is after here. Apparently they don't give a shit whose ox is being gored, as long as they get a pretext for more and more power.

Truth said...

My take on that bloody photo is the same measured, logical take as I have had on the rest of the Trey-Mart threads:

It indicates that there was some sort of trauma to the back of his head. Nothing more, nothing less.

Anonymous said...

"The disappearance of Detroit is on a scale unprecedented in human history."

The urbanist Spiro Kostof compared it to the fall of Rome (the city, not the empire) in the 500s, after the aqueducts were cut. It doesn't take long for for unoccupied buildings (unless well built) to burn or collapse.

Cennbeorc

Anonymous said...

I would like a response to the following, please. I'm a late-twenty-something guy; I'm not a racist, having been raised like most others in my cohort to treat all individuals equally courteously. Jim Crow was a long time ago, and nobody I know has any relation to any of that.

Say I follow the Trayvon Martin case, see how the narrators attempt to portray the flawed human personality that was Martin as a purified martyr, a saintly soul totally blameless and comprehensively victimized by his murderous assailant. The one was blameless; the other was incarnate evil. It later turns out, despite the narrators' good-natured deceitfulness, that the facts were more complicated, more earthy less ethereal. Now say I'm concurrently reading a history of America, say I'm reading a history of the 1960s, say Nixonland. In that book I recognize the same Manichean narrative: good vs. evil. White politicians in the 1960s who criticized black behavior are condemned by history, etc.
Here's my point: as a twenty-something guy who wasn't around in the 60s, the experience of the Trayvon case is going to affect my reading of Nixonland. I can't help it. I'm going to guess that the urban riots of the 1960s maybe had two human parties, despite the official narrative--that whites and blacks were complicit to various extents and not that whites were the bad guys full stop. Now I'm not going to question the Civil Rights Act or anything like that. It's unreal to me how African Americans were effectively forbidden to vote until two decades before I was born. But, for example, I'm going to pause before I dismiss Nixon as a racist for campaigning on the issues of law and order.

helene edwards said...

the pro - be a victim crowd would have you think that one guy is buying 20 guns and sitting on them. Repeatedly.

OK, but I do have an Italian friend who owned one gun in 1996 and has eight now.

OklahomaRichard said...

Why the odd details in Zimmerman's "Sorry" statement.

The "sorry about the loss of your son" made sense. But then to me he got kind of off topic and irrelevant and I thought maybe he was winging it or nervous, because then he said he had thought Trayvon was just a bit younger than Zimmerman himself, and Zimmerman had not known Trayvon was unarmed.

The statement was puzzling. If you are in a fight for your life, you will not care if your opponent is a bit younger than yourself or if he's a juvenile or if he's eighty-five. And if your opponent is attempting to crack open your skull against the cement, you'll do what you must to make him stop, regardless of his being armed or not. "Oh, you're not armed? Then by all means crack open my head like a hard-boiled egg."

Turns out, Trayvon's parents had been interviewed on a morning show and said they would like to know from Zimmerman if he knew Trayvon was a minor and unarmed.

So Zimmerman specifically answered the questions that the parents said they wanted answered. He "went there" because the parents said they wanted him to go there.

Anonymous said...

Zimmerman has blood on his head and media has egg on its face.

Anonymous said...

"It's fucking c---" ??

Now, it's fucking cool.

Anonymous said...

"My take on that bloody photo is the same measured, logical take as I have had on the rest of the Trey-Mart threads:"

How do we know the immodest TRUTH's comments are measured and logical? Because he says they are. That's how. Hey, that's good enough for me...

(Now there will undoubtedly be his silly, obnoxious reply).

Truth said...

"How do we know the immodest TRUTH's comments are measured and logical? Because he says they are. That's how. Hey, that's good enough for me...

(Now there will undoubtedly be his silly, obnoxious reply)."

Was Socrates immodest? Plato? Confucius?...

Anonymous said...

http://youtu.be/hioSFBCYZUI

Libyans vs blacks.

Rachelle said...

4/25/12 NY Post article reveals Zimmerman has black roots.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/george_zimmerman_prelude_to_shooting_KnrkzId9fbXMspvRx3Q4hJ