Why has the last week seen the national media break out into a frenzy over the specter of white racism? (See below for examples.)
Perhaps it goes back to the February 27th oral arguments at the Supreme Court over whether or not to bid adieu to Title 5 of the Voting Rights Act after 48 years. Justice Scalia's question about the "perpetuation of racial entitlement," about how quickly we glide from a world where affirmative action can't be ended because the beneficiaries are too weak to one where they are too strong, definitely got the press's goat. Scalia suggested that the Supreme Court is the only institution left in America with the independence and the moral backbone to say Enough Time Has Passed.
Since then, we've seen the prestige press push bizarre stories, like the current top story in the Washington Post this evening about the "mysterious" murder of a black politician in Mississippi that was actually solved last month (Spoiler Alert! Another black male killed him.)
This is not to say that it's an organized conspiracy. The stories are way too stupid for that. It's more like an immune system response: throw everything and anything and see what sticks. Maybe the Oberlin assault blanket or the white racist deli or black-on-black Mississippi crime can get Justice Kennedy to decide, "I'm just not ... comfortable with sunsetting the VRA. What will Georgetown think?"
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Google "UT Austin bleach bomb"...
Right before the affirmative action case there were a bunch of vague anecdotes about "people of color" being hit with bleach bombs...
There was never any firm description of the suspects, IIRC most of the "incidents" were from the previous summer, and they never caught anyone.
http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2013/03/09/in-a-rising-economy-politicians-look-for-credit
It's unfair to to snipe at Kennedy. He voted against the health care redistribution act aka Mexicare or Negrocare, depending on where you live. It's Roberts who seems to acutely worry about what Georgetown thinks, probably because he's still young enough to enjoy invitations to cocktail parties, whereas old geezers like Kennedy need to be in bed with a cup of warm milk and a melatonin tablet before eight.
Doesn't all this crying wolf about white racism risk giving an increasing majority of whites a persecution complex?
This is not to say that it's an organized conspiracy.
Isn't it? The Journo-list revelations showed us that it is very much an organized conspiracy.
Anonydroid at 4:43 AM said: Doesn't all this crying wolf about white racism risk giving an increasing majority of whites a persecution complex?
Hunsdon: As the crowd loses interest, the barker has to up his spiel. In other words, yes, "core Americans" (to use Steve's phrase) will eventually wake up and look around and say, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Doesn't make sense. If there's a huge amount of KKK activity in OH that's a reason to (as opposed to not to) eliminate the oversight of Southern states.
If I was an opponent of the VRA I'd go all over the Northern states and start 'seeing' pointed white hoods.
I suspect it is the last dying gasp of the old print media.
Unless Obama puts them on life support (officially declares them part of the Administration) they will be gone in five years.
I suspect it is the last dying gasp of the old print media.
Unless Obama puts them on life support (officially declares them part of the Administration) they will be gone in five years.
Did you ever stop to think that it might be the Chinese and the Russians who are already propping up the old dinosaurs of print media so that old media can continue to force America to examine ad-nausea internal issues so Russia and China can get on with exploiting the rest of the world?
What's so depressing is how well this half-baked propaganda still works, that in the age of the internet and a wide range alternative news outlets, the same collection of companies acting in lockstep can still steer public perception wherever they want, almost effortlessly. The culture-space is saturated with the output of the semi-literate, historically ignorant products of journalism schools making sure the mouth-breathing masses get just the right information they need so that they don't hurt themselves or others.
It seems to me that these kind of stories indicate that public attitudes are changing and that that is good news.
In the eighties none of this sort of story was needed. Everyone knew that newspapers were good and white men were bad. But increasingly this narrative is attacked and the press grows more desperate in its counter attacks.
Just three years ago I mentioned casually that blacks committed rape at nearly tens time the rate of whites. My girl friend at the time was outrage that I could say such a thing. I looked it up and it was seven times. Today she accepts this statistic. It's me she rejects.
Albertosaurus
The only people I've seen benefiting from Obamacare are white college kids and the sickly kids of middle class white, as the Medicaid expansion hasn't happened yet (and won't), but it is trivially easy to squeeze a little more out of the health insurance plans of over 40 whites with good health insurance. As for the sickly kids, those parents have gotten good at milking the system when they can't get on Medicaid due to income requirements and this is another instance.
To add fuel to 2Degrees' smoldering:
My PBS station carries a ½ hour BBC newscast late at night. Last week it ran the story of three Birmingham (Eng.) men convicted of terror plotting. Despite the three having names like Naseer, Khalid, and Ali and being trained in Pakistan, the newsreader refused to say “muslim” and only once said “islam” - and that referred to innocent charities that the men supposedly bilked
Let’s be clear here. Unlike some crimes where the perp's race/ethnicity isn’t mentioned because it’s supposedly irrelevant, here their differentness was the motivating factor. And still the press ties its hands.
I suspect it is the last dying gasp of the old print media.
Unless Obama puts them on life support (officially declares them part of the Administration) they will be gone in five years.
I'm surprised they didn't become copyright fascists like the motion picture and recording industry monopolies.
A Man with a Sense of Humor Versus a PC Automaton
From the Oberlin Microaggressions site:
'After I got into the RideLine van, they picked up another group of students, who were white. As they got into the van, the RideLine employee (a white man) sitting in the passenger seat remarked, “Why’d you call RideLine? Afraid that the KKK is going to get you?"'
The Obie is of course horrified at this exposurre to a normal human being:
"I am saddened that a RideLine employee made me feel unsafe on campus. If we don’t feel safe walking or taking transportation services, where can we feel safe?"
Safety is, of course, a very hard thing to come by at Oberlin these days. To this Obie I would recommend the use of a safety blanket. It is warm, cuddly, and carries connotations of childhood and security. But take care not to hold it near the Afrikan Heritage House. That could spark the kind of mass hysteria that (white male) transportation employees poke fun at.
Speaking of agendas...
it seems GOP tried to win over Hispanics with easy home loans and construction jobs. Didn't work out.
it seems GOP tried to win Jews over Jews by remaking the Middle East--invasion of Iraq--and making it friendlier to Israel. Didn't work out. Yep, that seems to me the main motive as to why gentiles in the GOP went ahead with Iraq Invasion. They thought it might please Jews so much--keep in mind even liberal Jews were for the invasion--that many Jews would finally come over to the GOP.
Boy, what a disaster that turned out to be.
Iraq War was to GOP what WWI was to Tsar Nicholas.
"I suspect it is the last dying gasp of the old print media."
But online liberal news is full of that stuff too.
With google and other such companies having so much money and gained such a monopoly, liberal media control and influence may be bigger in the future.
While internet has all sorts of voices, 95% of Americans get their news from 'mainstream' online sources and that means Google news, yahoo news, etc.
The WAPost draws more reasonable commenters than the NYT. Wonder why as both have become rags.
"The culture-space is saturated with the output of the semi-literate, historically ignorant products of journalism schools making sure the mouth-breathing masses get just the right information they need so that they don't hurt themselves or others."
What's really amazing is that it's not just Journolist that should have put an end to these "rag writers" but their twitter accounts, which show them for who they really are.
Conservatives or anti-progs just don't have the personality characteristics that drive them to protests in the street--hbd in action.
Of course, conservatives do have families and are raising kids, not much time for street protests.
so Russia and China can get on with exploiting the rest of the world?
Cui bono is not evidence.
Did you ever stop to think that it might be the Chinese and the Russians who are already propping up the old dinosaurs of print media so that old media can continue to force America to examine ad-nausea internal issues so Russia and China can get on with exploiting the rest of the world?
The Chinese and Russians are propping up the old dinosaurs of print media? I didn't think that Sidney Harman was Russian or Chinese.
you wrote:
"This is not to say that it's an organized conspiracy. The stories are way too stupid for that. It's more like an immune system response...."
I guess my "it's not a conspiracy; it's an ecosystem" mantra finally got through your skull....Maybe some day you will really understand what politics is.
someone wrote:
carol said...
"so Russia and China can get on with exploiting the rest of the world?"
and someone responded:
"Cui bono is not evidence."
My response: the world is full of situations with incomplete evidence. But we still have to make decisions based on what evidence we do have. The legal system has this very idea built into its foundation. Grow up.
Sometimes I think the Moon-lit Washington Times is a better rag than the Washington Post.
KKKrazy Glue keeps the 'leftist' coalition together.
Ye Olde Printe Media is only the most obvious tip of the iceberg. with a few new and truly revolutionary exceptions, the media itself is a huge flatulent dinosaur. They are nothing but overpaid dumb-as-bricks aging metrosexuals still POed at Nixon and Reagan. The media mavins are still hip as ever, but their own kids are nothing but Internet nerdy-nerd-nerds.
It's always seemed as if the "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" strategy is the everyday working strategy of the establishment left (i.e., the Democratic party and the media).
I caught on to the game back when I started watching cable news in the late 90s (I no longer watch news of any kind). The standard operating procedure of cable news shows circa 1998 was to have a Democrat, a tag team of Democrats, or panel of Democrats hurl one accusation after another at a single Republican. If the Republican succeeded in refuting one accusation, the Democrats would immediately hurl a completely different accusation at him/her.
They would keep going and going and going until they found something that caused the Republican to stumble. Then whatever caused the to Republican would become the focus of narrative for the next news cycle.
It was pretty transparent 15 years ago, and the basic principle hasn't changed much since then.
Meant to say "whatever caused the Republican to stumble" would become the new narrative for an entire news cycle (or more if it inflicted enough damage to the R's).
Gotta do a better job of proof reading my comments before posting!
The establishment left's "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" strategy should be called the "Land Shark strategy," after the 1970s era Saturday Night Live "Land Shark" skit (which I became aware of thanks to the 1990s era "Best of Saturday Night Live" reruns that I'd often stumble upon when I'd get home drunk at 2:00 AM).
Democrats and the media used the same strategy against George W. Bush for years, but they couldn't really get anything to stick during Bush's first term.
Obviously, the iSteve community isn't fond of Bush. No doubt, people here could come up with a laundry list of complaints about the Bush presidency (as could I). But the fact remains that Bush withstood the media and Democrats' daily attacks pretty well for four years.
Then Katrina hit New Orleans, and the bottom fell out of the Bush administration -- after the media hyperventilated over black people cannibalizing each other in the Super Dome, Bush was photographed looking down at the damage during his infamous "fly by," Kanye West said that Bush didn't care about black people, and Bush said "helluva job, Brownie."
It was all over after that. But people forget just how many supposedly career-ending narratives Bush weathered during his first term (and just how all over the place those attacks were):
Bush's trashing of the environment caused shark attack crisis during the "summer of the shark" in 2001...
Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance...
Bush was going to rush into war in Afghanistan because he was a stupid cowboy from Texas whose reptilian brain wanted revenge...
Bush was dragging his feet and hadn't acted swiftly or aggressively enough to give those Afghans an old fashioned whuppin' courtesy of Uncle Sam...
Bush lied: there were never any WMD in Iraq...
Bush had caches of confiscated Iraqi WMD in warehouses, but he let them get smuggled away...
Iraq was a failure because Bush didn't send enough troops to get the job done...
Bush's Iraq "surge" would fail because...
Sorry for the bad link.
Land Shark.
More Land Shark.
Gotta do a better job of proofreading comments and of checking links.
Gotta quit posting comments while eating & drinking as well.
Also, should probably try to quit being a drunk idiot. But that one will have to wait.
They would keep going and going and going until they found something that caused the Republican to stumble. Then whatever caused the to Republican would become the focus of narrative for the next news cycle.
-
And if he doesn't stumble, don't invite him back.
Anonymous said...
KKKrazy Glue keeps the 'leftist' coalition together.
Thanks, I'm going to steal that.
Steve, OT,
Did you hear of or listen to the Adam Carollo beat down of Gavin Newsom this week on the comic's podcast? "What's WRONG with black and Hipanics?" he challenged him.
Newsom was awful, Corolla great (even IF he didn't go as far as I'd have liked him to--he's as un-pc as a white guy can get. By "as far as" I simply mean he seems to think that nurture matters a lot more than I do...)
http://tunein.com/topic/?TopicId=45050896
http://tunein.com/radio/The-Adam-Carolla-Show-p60678/#
A long long time ago (1979 to be exact)
Tony Kendahl here, investigative reporter for WMET news, the metrosexual ... metropolitan news station. I am here to interview Steve Tasks, entreprenuer and visionary in the exciting (yawwwwwwwn) new field of home computers!
TONY: Before we start the cameras rolling, let's make a little room in this garage of your parents.
STEVE: I own it. They gave it to me so I can pursue my business interests.
TONY: I see. Now you said something about a HOME computer. I take it that large thing covered by an orange tarp is the computer?
STEVE: No, that's a '48 Packard. This is the home computer.
TONY: That white plastic box? It doesn't even look like a computer. Where's the reel-to-reel tape drive? Where's the thunder and lightning? Where's the huge mouth with jagged teeth, belching steam and screaming orders in German?
STEVE: (tries hard not to laugh) That little box is a computer, small enough to fit on a table. It may not have the capacity of a mainframe, but it is still truly a computer, and given the state of technology, will get smaller but even more powerful year after year....
CRASH
STEVE: You klutz, you knocked over my miniatures wargame.
TONY: Sorry. Uh ... I was just practicing some of my disco dance moves. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?
STEVE: Why should I? It's just another fad.
TONY: Never mind. This place is quite cluttered. We need to make some room for the camera dolly and the film crew. You can start by moving these boxes out of the way.
TONY: These posters. Please take them down. Particularly that Nuclear Power poster, considering what happened at Three Mile Island. How can anyone other than Hitler like nuclear power anyway?
STEVE: (grudgingly) OK....
TONY: And what's this? Star Wars? That's a fascist movie for kids. Twenty-year-olds are going to see this broadcast, ones who have seen modern classics such as The Goodbye Girl, The Turning Point, Julia. These are the movies young people will still be talking about in 2000.
STEVE: (yawning) Whatever you say....
TONY: How about we pre-record this part of this interview, and start with some personal info. You're Steve Tasks, 18-year old boy wonder, proud founder of Grape Computers, the next Edison, and all that....
STEVE: Excuse me, I have to open a window. (Opens window) It was getting stuffy here, and pardon me but you have some strong aftershave. It smells like a dentist's office.
TONY: It's cologne not aftershave. Essence d'Eau Mille Rivieres de Savon. It's supposed to smell like amber and ambergris, not a dentist's office. Anyway, you're an 18-year-old...
STEVE: 15, not 18.
TONY: You're fifteen? Why aren't you in school, doing what a fifteen year old should? Weight-lifting, basketball, scuba-diving, archery, polo, kicking the twelve-year-olds in the teeth?
STEVE: I graduated already, from a special gifted school, and already attended college for a year, then dropped out to pursue my real passion in life: microcomputers. There's a huge untapped market in the general public, and with prices competitive with typical family pastimes...
TONY: I see. It's still very expensive and hobbyist-oriented.
STEVE: The hobbyists are a start, a wedge. Once the industry matures, the price will drop even further,
[to be continued]
WHAT THE MEDIA IS LIKE - PART 2
TONY: And you'll see last year's home computers in the dumpsters, just like all these Pong games from a few years back, and other old fads.
STEVE: Not quite. There will be backward compatibility, at least for a while.
TONY: Backward what?
STEVE: Older computers will be able to run new software, and the newer machines run old software. But eventually it will all be so cheap that...
TONY: You lost me there. What is software? A new condom?
STEVE: A collective term for programs that run on computers, which are the hardware.
TONY: Uhhhh ... what is that ugly little box over there? It looks like Franco, or Batista, or Pinochet.
STEVE: That is a disk drive. It has a floppy disk spinning in it, and it stores programs and data. It's like a record player, but it can write as well as read.
TONY: You mean a turntable. Can I see the dick ... disk inside it?
STEVE: (tries not to laugh) This is a floppy disk. It's like a magnetic tape you will find in a cassette or 8-track, but in the shape of a disk.
TONY: Why is it called a disk if it's so squaaaaaaaare?
STEVE: That is just the covering. A very thin disk rotates inside it, like this. Mr. Kendahl! You got your fingerprints all over the disk surface, and I won't be able to use it.
TONY: Sorry. And please call me Tony.
STEVE: OK, Tony. You might as well keep that disk, it set me back $25 or so.
TONY: If you feel so bad, I'll write you a check for it. I make about that much a minute. Here ..... CRASH ....
STEVE: You knocked over my picture of Charles Babbage.
TONY: I was wondering who he is. He looks like Victorian capitalist slumlord Thomas Gradgrind III.
STEVE: He invented the computer, at least a mechanical one possible before modern electronics. He called it the Difference Engine.
TONY: Really? They had computers back then?
STEVE: The idea goes back all the way to ancient Greece...
TONY: (Yawnyawnyawn stretch) Arrargh! My hair got caught in your garage door opener, you dumb Ay-rab. Why can't your ceilings be normal sized...
STEVE: Here are the garden shears.
TONY: Noooooo! I had a maxi-afro done at Pinky la Rue Blanchette's in Paris!
STEVE: The garage door opener is trying to open, and your hair is caught in the gears. Would you rather be scalped? (snip snip)
TONY: My hair! My precious golden-blond hair! You'll pay for this you nerdy pot-head! Call my lawyers!
STEVE: And your gold earring fell into my $26,000 prototype miniboard, shorting everything out! I should be suing you, coke-head!
TONY: OK, fuhgetabboutit. Camera crew, time to pack up everything. Call up Paris and book an emergency hair appointment. Warm up my Lear jet. Summon my maids and servants at the mansion.
A few hours later, with his film editing crew...
TONY: Gawd, what a freak. He's just like Dr. Spock from Star Bores, or is it Star Dreck? Never mind. I can use this footage. We'll air it and make it look like Rocky Nelson. He's the Neo-Nazi who wouldn't give me an interview. Dub Colonel Klink onto it, and presto, instant disco journalism!
The media loves images.
Women love fiction. Liberals tend to love fiction.
Images stick in the mind. Pictures in the minds-eye probably last a lot longer than intellectual arguments. "Well, it doesn't matter what the facts are. If it isn't so it should be so!" (I think Margaret Mead said something to that effect.)
So the thing about the real KKK is that, even though it only lasted 5 years (it ended in 1869, probably because it had achieved its objectives), few images, once contemplated, are as lasting, the white robes at night in burning cross light... there's just something sinister about it that sticks in the mind. Works both ways I suppose. Was deliberate imagery then and is deliberate imagery now by those who want to see Klansmen everywhere.
I keep thinking about this KKK hysteria (the last known lynching was in 1968, 45 years ago), while about 500 blacks are killed each year by OTHER blacks just in the south side of Chicago alone. The boogyman dies hard.
"Images stick in the mind. Pictures in the minds-eye probably last a lot longer than intellectual arguments. 'Well, it doesn't matter what the facts are. If it isn't so it should be so!' (I think Margaret Mead said something to that effect.) So the thing about the real KKK is that, even though it only lasted 5 years (it ended in 1869, probably because it had achieved its objectives), few images, once contemplated, are as lasting, the white robes at night in burning cross light... there's just something sinister about it that sticks in the mind."
The KKK was meant to be horror-istic. Its members often moved around at night. And the white sheets were supposed to stand for the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers.
So, even long after the Civil War, some white southerners kept alive the spirit of the fallen warriors of the Old South as vengeful ghosts spreading terror through the night. They were like redneck ninja jihad warriors.
So, I suppose there's a kind of logic to liberals seeing KKK everywhere. The idea of the southern-warrior-that-never-dies began with the very myth of the KKK itself. Though liberals hate the KKK, they ironically seem to be channeling the same myth: the vengeful white warrior that never dies and always comes back to haunt you.
KKK wanted to scare their enemies this way, and maybe they sort of succeeded. There's hardly any KKK anymore, but so many liberals are spooked by it--though more so with white liberals in the North than with actual blacks in the South, who are too busy laughing and beating up whitey.
The KKK was meant to be horror-istic. Its members often moved around at night. And the white sheets were supposed to stand for the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers.
The same could apply to the Nazis, particularly their more extreme and ritualistic elements (i.e. the SS). The black uniforms, runes, pseudo-pagan and pseudo-Satanic trappings, wands and staves, flagpoles, totem animals such as wolves and eagles. There was a lot of spook-value there, not so much ghosts, but werewolves and vampires. The clean-cut civilized monocled Prussian morphing into the wild hairy hungry Romantic beast with huge fangs. Most of this imagery is from German and northwest European mythology, but a certain amount must be from Jewish myth too, and by design. It make sense; scare the living daylights out of the Jews as the first stage of terrorizing them. And as with the KKK and American liberals, it worked too well.
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