Ah, those clever literary intellectuals!
For quite a while now I’ve been impressed by the fact that leading literary lights, for all their creativity and art, can be very dim bulbs indeed when dealing with certain other aspects of human endeavor.
I suppose that shouldn’t be so hard to understand. After all, there’s no reason to presume that, just because people can write well, they are also especially savvy about practical matters in the real world. On the other hand, good writers of fiction—and, to a lesser extent, poetry—need to be keen observers of the human mind and heart. As for literary criticism, that’s an endeavor that ought to require a discerning and perceptive intellect.
One would think so. But there’s a long history of literary “useful idiots,” people whose critical faculties seem to stop where their art ends. For every Emile Zola, there’s a Harold Pinter.
I was reminded of all of this recently when reading the book Partisans by David Laskin. It’s mostly a glorified gossip sheet about the group of writers who were connected to the influential journal Partisan Review during its formative decades, the 30s and 40s. Partisans follows their closely intertwined lives from then through the 60s and beyond; they were an especially active group, however, in their earlier years (and yes, that activity included playing an almost endless game of musical beds).
Included were such luminaries as Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Dwight Macdonald, writers who were exceptionally well-known in their day but who are far less famous now. The following describes their initial reaction to World War II, according to Laskin:
They didn’t, at least at first, consider it their war at all, but rather a hopeless conflict between two systems they despised: capitalism and fascism. OF course, they conceded that facism was worse than capitalism, but they believed that if American joined the war against fascism, it was doomed to become fascist itself. As a number of prominent PR writers declared in an open letter published in the magazine, “Our entry into the war, under the slogan of ‘Stop Hitler’, would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here.”
Plus ca change, plus c’est la méªme chose, non?
Some of these writers changed their minds about World War II after Pearl Harbor and the all-important entry of the Soviet Union to the Allied side, making it all right for good Leftists to advocate fighting Hitler. But prior to that, the suggestion of these incredibly intelligent and sophisticated writers was this:
The correct response to the world crisis was “not war but revolution”: a revolution of oppressed soldiers on both sides against their imperialist warlord masters.
So here we have some of the most popular antiwar positions of the Left, hardly changed from then till now, and very clearly a factor in the opposition to the Vietnam War along the way. The idea that our internal enemy—our own government—is more to be feared than any external threat. The idea of the soldier as exploited dupe of evil overlords. And, to a lesser extent, the idea on the part of the most strongly Leftist that a worldwide revolution of the oppressed would be possible, and that what would follow would somehow be better than what preceded it.
As author Raskin writes, they “were naive, even delusional.”
From whence springs such deep stupidity in such smart people? Milan Kundera—another writer, but one who has actually had personal experience with regimes that are truly politically oppressive, having lived in Communist Czechoslovakia—might say, the trouble is at least partly “imagology.” He contrasts “imagology” with “reality” in his book Immortality:
…imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat.
Writers, on the other hand, tend to live very much in their heads—dealing with thoughts, moving words around, creating images. They are also used to being thought (and thinking themselves to be) among the smartest people on the block. In addition, American writers for the most part have had no real experience of living under other forms of government, and so they are free to imagine that our government is as oppressive (or even more so) than others they’ve only read about. And writers also put great stock in what they read, which in some cases is more real to them than their actual experience (and, if the shattered lives of many of the writers in Partisans are any indication, often far more pleasant).
And so the reality of how people actually live under different systems of government, and what action might be needed to deal with oppressive ones in the real world, is not something with which we should expect writers to be all that conversant. And yet writers have the advantage of being highly articulate—of sounding knowledgeable even when they are not—and of having an easy way, via their works and fame, of reaching the public with their thoughts and opinions.
I really like the direction you are going in this.
Some writers likely know their theories are bunk, yet nevertheless sell out the truth in trade for career success. It’s important, for their careers, they be thought of as “smarter than thou.” Their fantasy theories do perform the critical function of making the writers look “smarter than thou” (and also look stylishly edgy).
I read an article, maybe 18 months ago, about the importance of social networking to modern day American artists. A talented modern American artist – if his/her social networking skills are limited – is likely to be ignored in favor of mediocrities who understand the political game. The art world is more like a subjective episode of Survivor, and less like an objective judge of artistic skill. The death, in the art world, of belief in objective standards, only hastens the “Survivor” effect.
Anyway, something like this could easily be the case in a writer’s world in which few believe in, or are able to identify, objective talent. Subjectivity would then neccessarily rule the day. Whether or not you are perceived as “smarter than thou” might easily be more important than any objective writing talent you possess.
Hmm. With the following proclamation, I announce the beginning of my career as a major American writer:
.
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.
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…………..”Bush sucks!”
“To write good history is the noblest work of Man.”
—John Dickson Carr
When I first read this some twenty-odd years ago, I thought it hyperbole. I do not think so now.
Carr was a writer of detective stories with a strong interest in history. He “solved” a mystery from the time of the Restoration and cast it in the form of a modern ‘analytic’ detective story (The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, out of print but available). I’m satisfied that a prosecutor today could get an indictment on the evidence. In another story, he introduced a fictional character who had been thrown out of some historical society for doing just that!
Carr was uneven; his best mysteries are among the most clever written but he couldn’t cover a weak story the way Christie or Marsh could. He was a member of the Detection Club along with Christie and Sayers, who both praised him in print.
In his later years, he turned to historical fiction and historical mysteries, introducing colorful elements like the Bow Street Runners and the Blind Judge. I suspect he wanted to pique readers’ interest.
The assertive ignorance of history that people show even to what they saw in their own lives convinces me now that Carr was right, that we need to actively learn, remember, and recount what has gone before, and that those who do it well are keeping us alive as individuals and as a civilization.
This resonates with the foundation thesis of Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles, that our identity as a civilization or nation is forged from our knowledge of our history. (Amazon just showed me a price under $24 for the hardcover; hint, hint). “Who controls the past controls the future.”
Greetings:
Nicely written. I came to a similar conclusion many years ago after watching Celebrity Week on Jeopardy (the TV game show).
Serious writers are seldom worth the bother. Genre writers, on the other hand, depend on entertaining their readers. I like being entertained, and if I’m having a good time it’s easy to overlook whatever little political stupidies might slip in now and then.
If a writer is good enough, I will overlook small historical or technical mistakes. If their mistakes are too obvious, I put the book down. If they make blatantly obvious mistakes in more than one book, I put the author down. Like a dog.
😉
I second gcotharns sentiments: This is a good blarticle, Neo.
I dunno–since you moved, I think your insights and writing have really taken off.
I am fascinated by how often the ‘elites’ turn out to have feet of clay and heads to match!
One of the best observers of the passing scene, Groucho Marks, said, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” And so it is.
One must realize and understand the disaster of the First World War and the horrid Depression that followed to get to the core of the polarizing forces that impacted writers of that time, good and bad, profound and comfortable. The very widespread anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-Black, anti almost everything on the one hand, and the feigned delight in shades of Pink to deep Red on the other grew out of that confusion. Remember, Henry Ford had a signed picture of Hitler on his office wall in Michigan while FDR was struggling to get the Nation back on its feet and The Daily Worker was a very popular newspaper. But the Nation was shocked into reality by Pearl Harbor and responded as only America could. The irony for our time is that more Americans died on 9/11 than did at Pearl Harbor, and the irony is that the realization of the real struggle for today remains confused and disjointed.
Writer: The correct response to the world crisis was “not war but revolution”: a revolution of oppressed soldiers on both sides against their imperialist warlord masters.
Not a Writer: The people in the Nazi’s army have never heard of you.
Writer: What do I care?
Many writers are irresistibly drawn to the great mythological cliche of our times- our worst enemy is our own government – the inevitable conspiracy theory found in every other movie or suspense novel. It makes good script. You can develope it in a million ways. It satisifies the adolescent urge to “get the man.” It fits the meme of your fellow writers and editors. No one will complain obut the outright absurdity, impossibility and gross bias of your plot.
It always works!
Substitute “intelligence analyst” for “writer” and you’ve identified a core problem in the intelligence community as well.
General rule: The more suicides and suicide attempts in a literary work, the less the writer has to say.
Might want to really work on a good metaphor or simile for Bush Sucks, maybe work in the word ‘teat’. Just a thought.
I have always entertained a lively suspician that the best writers, of genre fiction or the high-toned kind really need to have spent a good few years doing something – anything! other than writing and to not be bound up exclusively with a coterie of writers once established as such.
Keeps one in touch with reality, you know… the real world, with variuously well-adjusted people in it, instead of an incestuously self-reverential clique.
On the other hand, creating your own reality in words can be pretty entrancing. I am currently writing a long complicated trilogy about the German colonies in 19th century Texas – much of it is set in the town of Fredericksburg. I have taken a great deal of trouble to work from an original town plat and an 1850s census in describing where peoples’ and business werehouses were, and working from contemporary sketches and descriptions of them.
It is really disconcerting to visit and walk around Fredericksburg today with my 19th-century version in my mind – especially when I encounter the one or two buildings which have been preserved just as they were. “Oh! here is the Arlheger place – exactly where I put it and looking exactly as I described!”
A very good post along the same lines:
http://doctor-horsefeathers.com/archives2/000705.php#comments
Writers, as any other creative types, belong to a rather skewed sample of humans – their very creativity is a symptom of psychological disorder known as infantile regression. Lack of common sense and tendency to confuse reality with fantasy is their most frequent trait. For me the best example is Franz Kafka. In his imagination and fiction his home country – Austro-Hungary – always is portrayed as a very repressive totalitarian state. In historical reality, though, it was one of the most liberal, enlightened and free societies of his time, where Einstein, Freud and a lot of other geniuses found the best conditions of self-realization.
The intellectuals pretty much danced to the Soviet party tune. It was fashionable to be a militant anti-fascist in the days of the Spanish Civil War and the Popular front, but when Uncle Joe signed that pact with Hitler everyone suddenly became a pacifist. When WWII finally did break out in ’39 the party line was this was an intra-fascist war and no business of the Soviets — or the intellectuals. There was, after all, no *real* difference between the Western democracies and Nazi Germany, since Naziism was just an extreme form of capitalism. (This is, btw, where that particular meme came from — the Nazis always called themselves socialists). Only when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union did it become okay to support the war again. Folk singer Pete Seeger is a good example — he was against war, all war, until June of ’41, then suddenly changed his tune and that November wrote very pro-war “Sinking of the Reuben James.” For the intellectuals the defining moral event of WWII was not Pearl Harbor but the invasion of Russia.
As my Old Dad sometimes reminded me, “for a smart kid, you’re dumber than sh*t,” and he was right. It’s the human condition. Even the smartest of us believe and act on the stupidest stuff.
Writing is a solitary, insular pursuit. No wonder writers seek out members of their tribe for socializing, and affect the beliefs of the tribe. Hemingway’s crowd affected the hard bitten cynicsim of the disillusioned ex pat. A later generation played at communism. A later still, beat niks. And so it goes.
I’m with W.F. Buckley. Id rather be governed by the first 200 names in the phone book than the Harvard faculty.
Sergey – I also wonder how many of today’s writers and thinkers can look around them and see fascism on the march. Their reaction to 9/11 is a perfect example: they were less concerned with an external enemy attacking us than with the possibility that government would become repressive and the unenlightened general public would try to take revenge on innocent Muslims. Their assumption seems to be that America and Americans have always failed to live up to their principles and always will.
I don’t know about infantilism. this reminds me more of the disillusioned adolescent – who, encountering the adult world, suddenly discovers that grownups are all “hypocrites.” Some people learn that this is the way of the world. Others never get over it.
Neo – I think you hit on an important point. To an intellectual, ideas are more real than reality. To the extent that reality does not conform to his or her ideas – reality is wrong. Ultimately, I think that’s the source of your writers’ discontent – they can imagine things that the real world refuses to deliver.
Very nicely done, NeoNeo. I work with a society of psychoanalysts in a very liberal city. They are hardly different in this respect from the writers you (and your articulate group of commenters) assess so well.
My experience is that while they do fine work in a one with one clinical setting, when they extrapolate their supposedly more sophisticated psychological knowledge to larger issues, they sound just like your garden variety Blue State liberal, dressed up in portentious jargon.
“Some people learn that this is the way of the world. Others never get over it.”
Bugs, this is one the best known to me definitions of infantilism – when adult person still posessed psyhology of disgruntled adolescent.
One Orwell’s quote due here: “Only intellectual can be so stupid”. That is, so disengaged from reality. And lots of non-literary intellectuals are no better – from Noam Chomsky to Bertrand Russell. Mired in abstract theory and ideology and naive like babies in real world affairs.
It seems that their main occupation is pointing out how society fails to live up to its proclaimed ideals. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure whether they do this because a) they really believe we can live up to our ideals 100% but fail to do so because we’re lazy, greedy or dishonest, or b) they don’t really believe we can live up to our ideals but make an issue of our “failure” to do so in order score political points and undermine confidence. Could be it’s both – who knows?
Anyway, I hope they all go to Activist Heaven when they die.
Yeah, Bugs, and I hope Activist Heaven is a different place than the rest of us go. I think it would be mighty difficult to have to put up with those folks for eternity.
Yeah, they all love ‘the common man’, but they have nothing but contempt for common men.
Why do they all want to save me from ‘fascism’ if they hate me, my beliefs and my middleclass-ness?
They support us blighted ‘proles’ in the same way leftists ‘support the troops’….
Furthermore, as Neo touched on, in their private lives, they are just execrable human beings. I can’t stand to be lectured to about war and morality by privileged atheist weirdos with a few wives and several mistresses!
Sergey is right–if your find-and-replace ‘fascism’ with ‘growing up’, it becomes clear what they want to save themselves from.
A lot of the bad thinking in our world is common to “word people” in general, not just writers/intellectuals per se. People whose professional lives revolve wholly or almost wholly around words and images–lawyers, advertising designers, etc–often tend to implicitly believe that the words/images are reality itself.
This has a lot to do with the increasing assaults on free speech. To a farmer, a machinist, or an electrical engineer, the difference between *words* and *actions* is pretty clear. To a word person, though, words *are* actions.
I’m a writer, and I’m married to one and several of my friends are either full-time or part-time writers or artists. The rest are academics. So I’m at least a farm-team intellectual, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time puzzling over why I’m the only conservative in the bunch.
I’ve identified three reasons.
1.) The Freudian Explanation — intellectual “nerdy” kids get picked on, and kids who are picked on take up solitary pursuits. Either way, they wind up identifying with the outsider, and often this continues into adult life. See Ted Rall — he pretty much admits he hates Bush because he was beat up in high school, which if you think about it is amazingly pathetic.
2.) The Herd Explanation — for whatever reason, most “intellectuals” of the past century have been liberal/leftist. This means that there’s a selection bias. Conservatives with brains go into the sciences or business because they loathe the “intellectual” milieu, while liberals are drawn to it even if they really aren’t all that bright. Over time the self-selection has become more and more extreme.
3.) The Power Explanation — being an “intellectual” is based on being smart. On knowing stuff and thinking about stuff. They tend to be attracted, naturally, to political ideologies which privilege the intellect. Marxism claimed to be “scientific” and as much as said that intellectuals would be running things, and its modern descendants continue that trend. Liberalism is government of the people, by and for the intellectuals. What’s not to like, if you think you’re an intellectual yourself?
Needless to say, there’s overlap among the three, and people can be motivated by more than one. If you grow up alienated and join the intellectual herd, they reinforce one another. Then taste the prospect of unearned power by simple virtue of being an intellectual — that’s hard for anyone to resist.
Intellectuals “wind up identifying with the outsider.”
This is interesting in that American pop culture at large venerates outsiders. Reagan and his supporters in the media recognized this and successfully marketed the previously oxymoronic concept of the “rebel conservative.”
As a result, many American conservatives now cling jealously to the notion that they are outside the mainstream, often without acknowledging the irony. The myth of a ruthlessly liberal academia and media are part of this pose.
Traditionally, conservatives have argued that their values represented the mainstream and, rightly so, as they originated in a free country among free people and, therefore, represented triumph in the free market of ideas.
That’s been foresaken for the idea that some sort of unspoken inchoate conspiracy is holding down conservatives in the academia and media. It’s virtually impossible to have a conversation with an American conservative these days without them clearing their throat with “I know it’s not popular to say, or I know you won’t hear this in the media, or, I know it’s politically incorrect…” as if the unpopularity of conservative ideas somehow adds, rather than diminishes, their credibility.
I would certainly agree that historically, liberals have identified with outsiders. But since the 1980s, American conservatives have had spectacular success in using the mainstream corporate media they largely own to portray themselves as the put-upon victims of an undeserving majority.
The emergence of the Internet, including certainly sites like this, are helping melt away this myth, but it remains one of the most frequently repeated memes within the mainstream media.
Neo,
Very interesting post. I think you hit on many interesting points. I especially can relate to the statements by Kundera. While what he said applies more to those on the extreme left, I think that it also can apply to those on the extreme right, though not as much or in quite the same way.
I too have long thought that much of the problem with many of the leftist intellectuals, be they writers, professors or ‘activists’ is that they have no grounding in simple reality. By that I mean what Kundera refers to when he says about his grandmother, ” …she knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of…”
I suspect that this lack of ‘real skills, the skills that are needed to survive on a most basic level cause a deep seated feeling of inadequacy. This inadequacy and the accompanying denial & self loathing that often seems to come with it, I suspect causes many so called intellectuals to compensate. The embrace the abstract generalizations over the reality of their own eyes. (Sorry, but I can’t resist playing the shrink here, though it is better left to professionals like yourself)
I also agree with Gray’s comment when he said ,“Furthermore, as Neo touched on, in their private lives, they are just execrable human beings.” That has also been my observation of many, though not all such folks. Witness behavior from Arthur Miller’s treatment of his son Daniel to Ted Kennedy’s dealing with the tragedy at Chappaquiddick. They embrace these abstract ideas about humankind to compensate for their own lack of humanity.
I remember back in ’79, I was hitch-hiking from Great Falls Montana, to Seattle. I was outside of Spokane on a hot afternoon trying to catch a ride when a freshly graduated from medical school student (Yale undergrad) stopped to pick me up. He was going to Seattle to begin his residency. Our conversation eventually turned to politics. He was a strident leftist. He knew all about the poor and downtrodden. You see, he had worked at a clinic in Harlem one summer. I found it amusing that his one summer ‘down amongst ’em’ had made him clear of conscience so as to enable him to go on to what I am sure would be a lucrative career in time. I also thought it funny that he came from an upper middle-class family, his dad being a contractor who made much money helping to construct ICBM silos. Though at the time, I was one of those poor, my views were not valid. I let him have his say since I needed the ride. I suspect many that the lefty activists preach to do the same, for similar reasons.
Later, in the 80’s in bush Alaska I would see Legal Services lawyers from the national office in DC come to spend two months in rural Alaska. By the end of that time, they were experts in native culture and ways, just ask them. Their arrogance and condescension knowing no limits, they proceeded to tell folks who had lived there for years, decades, some who were even born there, how things really were. Thinking that they were so superior, they never noticed that they were being manipulated by folks who were not nearly the bumpkins that the lawyers assumed they were. We used to joke about how once they had been to a fish camp and shown how to cut up a salmon, they were instant experts. A friend of mine and I nick-named them LSH’s (last sensitive honkies).
I noticed that often when such folks got around real working people that they would all of a sudden use profanity and use it to excess and try and act hyper-macho. Trying, no doubt to act like they fit in. Sometimes I found it embarrassing, for them.
Finding the real world somewhat uncomfortable, they a prefer the ‘imagology’ Kundera refers to, even over the evidence of their own eyes. I also suspect that many of these folks lack the courage to face reality when it conflicts with their imagology.
One of the reasons I have more respect for someone like Emma Goldman is because after spending two years in the Soviet ‘worker’s paradise’ after being deported in 1919 during the Palmer raids, Emma Goldman and her companion, Alexander Berkman left Russia in December of ’21. Why? Because as was stated in an “American Experience” program about her life, “she did something that many of us find damned hard to do. She realizes she’s been a fool. She realizes she’s been wrong. She’s realized she’s made an error. Not just a casual error, but an error of huge awful magnitude to support the Bolsheviks. And she turns and she accepts that. She accepts it totally… Revealing the truth about the Bolshevik regime became a crusade for Goldman and Berkman. Their old enemies on the Right praised their analysis of a revolution gone wrong. Old comrades on the Left condemned them.”
You don’t see too many on the left today saying anything like that, about the aftermath of Vietnam, the success of the surge, or anything else.
Those interested in this subject might also wish to peruse the comments at Bookworm Room over this same subject.
Link
JB: As a result, many American conservatives now cling jealously to the notion that they are outside the mainstream, often without acknowledging the irony. The myth of a ruthlessly liberal academia and media are part of this pose.
Let’s unpack a little of JB’s comment here:
– First, note the sloppiness typical of so much “liberal” thought in the reference to the so-called “mainstream” — what “mainstream” would that be, exactly? Mainstream media? Mainstream academia? Mainstream culterati? Mainstream middle class? “… historically, liberals have identified with outsiders” — and what “outsiders” would those be? The Masses? the middle class? the Common Man? — those “outsiders”? Or are those the people or groups of people that conservatives identify with? Any clues, Jackie?
– Second, let’s pause for a chuckle over the chutzpah of referring to the “ruthlessly” (!) liberal bias of academia and the elite media as a “myth”. The bias has been amply demonstrated with studies showing the percentages of academics and mainstream media employees who self-identify as liberals and/or as Democratic Party supporters (I’ll give it to you as an exercise to look them up, Jackie, if you really think the bias is a myth).
What this means, obviously, is that the simplistic “mainstream”/”outsider” dichotomy JB is working with is too crude to be useful — but we could start to get somewhere if we distinguished between a cultural elite, that, for a number of historic reasons, has come to dominate academia and the mainstream media primarily, and everybody else. This would help explain a number of things that Jackie finds puzzling, including the simple fact that conservatives manifestly are out of a “mainstream” as defined by the culturati, while still representing large numbers of the actual populace. The emergence of the Internet, then, rather than “melting away” any myth, has actually been a significant factor in changing that situation, and in eroding the dominance that the liberal elites have so long enjoyed. And that, more than any other single factor, is what accounts for so much of the sound and fury emanating from the slowly shrinking ranks of the liberal left these days.
By the way, there’s something particularly enjoyable about Jackie’s observation that it’s “… as if the unpopularity of conservative ideas somehow adds, rather than diminishes, their credibility”. In the first place, as we’ve seen, it isn’t that conservative ideas are “unpopular” generally, but rather that they arouse such hostile “passionate intensity” among the besieged liberal elite, and, of course, among their easily lead herd of followers. Which herd is what makes his observation humorous — like so many of the type, he really does seem to think that the credibility of ideas is measured in terms of their popularity, but you don’t often see so clear an expression of that sort of sheep-like sentiment. Why, if JB were a politician, it would almost qualify as a gaffe*!
(*”a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth”, Michael Kinsley)
Sally: Great comments.
I’ve noticed the Left is obssessed about popularity.
And that they love to claim being in the majority on whatever issue they’re prattling about.
How many times have we seen them refer to conservatives as 32%ers.. as if the legitimacy of our ideas is a function of Bush’s approval rating.
One would think that a group of people who purport to be oh-so-concerned about the protection of minorities by a majority wouldnt appear to be a state of almost bloodlust when they find themnselves in the positiion of majority (or perceive themselves to be)
Great post, great comments — tho I’d have expected somebody else to note Robert Nozick’s
There is also the historical, fairy tale myth issue of the “just underdog”. In most stories, including Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, the hero is the underdog. With American supremacy, there is no “imagology” for the problems of the strongest, best, but still imperfect leading country.
There’s even something sort of End of History like about the whole world feeling that America can’t be beaten. But its imperfections seem to mean it deserves to be somehow punished…
(These are more current thoughts than the 20s & 30s silly delusional socialism junk.)
Christianity, and its sins of fornication & adultery, is also a focus of ire because fidelity is against freedom and the feelings of the moment.
I just read a Brooklyn Arden leftist post about how Barack Obama can heal America and bring us together again — with no mention of the pro-life / pro-abortion culture war.
America will stay divided until the pro-abortion folk have, thru generational success at population limitation, become a consistently losing voter block.
The sexual promiscuity is part of the core disfunctional desire to pretend that fantasy is real. Real happiness can only come thru sexual faithfulness.
Sally, good comments busting out Jack. He is clearly wrong on one point:
Whenever anyone says: “This might not be Politically correct, but”
You can guarantee the next thing they say will be boilerplate politically correct leftism–witness that Bill Maher’s show “Politically Incorrect” is in lockstep with politically correct Hollymediawood leftist ideas!
Now to Tim P’s point:
And she turns and she accepts that. She accepts it totally… Revealing the truth about the Bolshevik regime became a crusade for Goldman and Berkman. Their old enemies on the Right praised their analysis of a revolution gone wrong. Old comrades on the Left condemned them.”
You don’t see too many on the left today saying anything like that, about the aftermath of Vietnam, the success of the surge, or anything else.
Like Neo. That’s what makes this blog so interesting to me.
Emma Goldman and her companion, Alexander Berkman left Russia in December of ‘21. Why? Because as was stated in an “American Experience” program about her life, “she did something that many of us find damned hard to do. She realizes she’s been a fool.
Paleoneocon?
It fascinates me ‘cuz I’m not a Neocon. I’m just a ‘con’. I never went through a liberal phase.
In Highschool, I was in ‘Gifter Classes’ (God help me, I traded those in for JROTC after a year). My ‘mentor’ had me read Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. After reading them, I realized these aren’t good people!
I realized that they loved their ideas more than people and they didn’t care that their ideas, if follwed as written, led to mass graves.
My Dad told me: “You’re wise to realize that–the people preaching equality, peace and love will be the first to shove you to your knees and put a bullet through your head.”
I’ll never forget that:
‘socialized medicine’ is you being eaten by rats in a dirty bed.
‘Social Justice’ is a bullet through your head.
‘Sustainable economy’ is using your faeces to fertilize your meager garden.
“Social Progress” is political indoctrination.
‘Political Correctness’ is censorship.
“Leftism” is Tuol Sleng http://www.tuolsleng.com/history.php
Gray: you remind me of something that was told to me when I was a kid that has never left my memory.
I was in 5th Grade… 1985. Miss Malabarbra ..
For some reason she was really somber one day. and she looked at everyone in the class and said
“Pay attention to me…. when you all are older , everything that is wrong in the country is going to be blamed on one group of people… white males”
Me not being aware of politics at such a young age, I’m not sure where she was on the political spectrum though I would guess she’s a Leftist. That was like the only time she was political with us.. I think I was one of the first people in high school to point out the new phenomena of Political Correctness.
American universities were purged of communists, as was the news media, in the 1940s and 50s, with many “fellow travelers” and others swept up in the blacklisting and witch hunts.
It’s difficult to assess with any precision what degree of chilling effect that had on America’s free marketplace of ideas, but we can be sure it was significant.
By comparison, there has never been any kind of purge, or blacklist or chilling whatsoever either in the American news media or universities. It just hasn’t happened. Sure, there will always be the odd incident of unfair tenure–be it for political leanings, sexual favors, cash or what have you–but there has never at any time in American history been a purge of conservatives within either the media or academia.
To the extent that anyone buys into the idea that academia is stacked with liberals, they really ought to be asking themselves why conservatives can’t succeed academically.
As it happens, I attended a university that was unabashedly right-wing and Christian. (Pepperdine). There was no hesitation by the school administration nor most faculty to present their right-wing Christian worldview to students, nor, even to censor other views in media they controlled such as the student newspaper.
I don’t think that’s the healthiest intellectual environment but I, like most other students there, freely chose to attend and have no compunctions about acknowledging that the founders and administrators of Pepperdine have every right to stunt their intellectual environment by insisting on a right-wing Christian bias.
The question I would ask the resentful conservatives here is, why aren’t there more Pepperdines? Why is it the rare exception?
The same goes for the news media.
America is thriving with tens of thousands or more millionaires and hundreds or more billionaires. Many of these are conservatives. Why can’t they create a successful conservative media?
Conservatives claim they are rational, intelligent, capable and so on. If that’s the case, why have they failed to produce a successful news media?
My view is that conservatives have produced a successful news media and have used it very effectively to promote their political causes.
What they have failed to do is to eliminate all liberal viewpoints from media.
So it is that the New York Post is a thriving–albeit subsidized–newspaper presenting unabashedly right wing views, competing with the New York Times for readers, advertisers and so on.
Why does it fail? There is no conspiracy, no HUAC, no COINTELPRO or dirty tricks campaign preventing Rupert Murdoch’s from beating out newspapers like the New York Times.
The problem is, there is simply no mass conservative readership for a major metropolitan daily newspaper. Nor is there a significant conservative viewership for TV news.
On most issues, most Americans skew liberal.
That doesn’t mean they are right, or that conservatives should be silent or shamed. It simply is the only rational explanation for why a free, wealthy, free-thinking country like the U.S. cannot has failed to produce news media that satisfies conservatives.
What planet has Mr. Black been visiting? His return to Earth must have had some residual distortion of reality and history effects.
Perhaps the conservatives so put upon, so victimized by American academia will send their children elsewhere to be educated.
I’m a product of American academia, but an unexemplary one, as I was a mediocre student. I’d never blame that on my right-wing professors, though. The opportunities were there for me and I simply failed to grasp them with any vigor.
American academia is the envy of people around the world and continues to draw the elite from every corner of the planet.
It’s just pathetic that conservatives keep whining resentfully that America’s university system is some kind of cesspool of morons or miscreants or “execrable” people. Anti-intellectualism is a hallmark of all totalitarians.
Okay, “Jack” — let’s go through it again, shall we?
You apparently believe that McCarthyism completely swept all leftists out of American society. Do you have any proof of this? Try an experiment: go to a college campus, pick a faculty member at random, and ask what party they support. Odds are about 9 in 10 you’ll find a liberal.
Your claim about media is somewhat muddled and incoherent. You say that there aren’t any liberals in media and anyway the media are liberal because everyone agrees with them except the people who don’t because they’re all a bunch of rich conservatives. Or something like that.
Again, try the experiment: go to a national media organization and ask around. Again, 9 in 10 chance you’ll be talking to a liberal.
Now, you seem to think that the “only rational explanation” for the lack of conservative media is the lack of conservatives in America. How do you account for the fact that a conservative got elected, then re-elected, President? Surely enough people to deliver an Electoral victory, then a popular one would be enough to support some national media, yes? Unless, as we’ve been discussing, the people in the media profession are generally biased, creating a hostile atmosphere for conservatives and discouraging them from entering the field.
Gray claims Noam Chomsky’s ideas “led to mass graves.”
Any examples, Gray, or are you just making it up as you go along?
“You apparently believe that McCarthyism completely swept all leftists out of American society.”
I neither said that, nor meant it Tri. Go back and read what I wrote.
I wrote: “It’s difficult to assess what chilling effect that had.”
My point was simply that there was never a purge of any kind undertaken against conservatives or rightists or fascists.
Tri suggests I go to the “national” media and start asking around about people’s political affiliation.
That wouldn’t really prove anyting about whether or not the press itself is biased, only what their background is.
Consider the Wall Street Journal: it’s editorial board and columnists are among the most rigidly conservative commentators in America. Yet the paper’s reporters take the same angles as their counterparts in Wapo and NYT.
I’d love to hear Tri’s explanation of how that happens. Does that mean the newspaper–owned and operated by avowed conservatives–won’t hire conservative reporters?
Then there’s the empires of Murdoch, Black, Sinclair and so many others.
Tri seems to think these people are somehow liberal. That if I went to their national media, I’d find nothing but a pack of liberals.
Sorry Tri. The data are in: conservatives have more than their fair share of representation in the media. They complain merely because the top of the profession–as recognized by readers and publisher alike–doesn’t parrot GOP talking points the way Fox does.
Note as well the proliferation of right-wing sites like this one that ban all liberals.
I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until I get blocked. A lot of conservatives hate it when someone intrudes on their little bubble of presumption and cant.
Gray claims Noam Chomsky’s ideas “led to mass graves.”
Any examples, Gray, or are you just making it up as you go along?
Here are some good Chomsky quotes:
““The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.”
Property belongs to the masses!
“Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.”
Into the fields with the bourgeoisie!
“The free market is fine for the third world and its growing counterpart at home. Mothers with dependent children can be sternly lectured on the need for self-reliance, but not dependent executives and investors, please. For them, the welfare state must flourish.”
Into the Fields with The Rich!
“”Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in the classic formulation. Now, it has long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time.”
Down with modern industrial civilization! Everyone into the fields!
“We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”
We’ll follow those ‘good ideas’ into the killing fields….
Catch that smell? That smell of overturned earth and Year Zero? Smell the bodies of the ‘rich’ and ‘class traitors’ rotting in the rice paddies?
“Tri suggests I go to the “national” media and start asking around about people’s political affiliation.
That wouldn’t really prove anyting about whether or not the press itself is biased, only what their background is.”
It’s still pretty left:
“If newsrooms have moved slightly rightward, the research shows, however, that journalists are still more liberal than their audiences. According to 2002 Gallup data in “The American Journalist,” only 17% of the public characterized themselves as leaning leftward, and 41% identified themselves as tilting to the right. In other words, journalists are still more than twice as likely to lean leftward than the population overall.”
http://www.journalism.org/node/2304
The data are in: conservatives have more than their fair share of representation in the media.
Bzzzzzt! You lose. Thank you for playing, please try again.
Neo, what do you think of this? I don’t have access to the Congressional Record, but if this is accurate, it’s mind-blowing:
Communist goals in 1963
Noted in U.S. Congressional Record on January 10, 1963, and quoted in “The Naked Communist” by Cleon Skousen.
Current Communist Goals:
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.”
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use [“]united force[“] to solve economic, political or social problems.
So now we have Gray quoting himself in attempt to put words in Chomsky’s mouth. How pathetic and transparent is that?
Chomsky isn’t a communist and never has been.
His critique of capitalism, some of which is reflected in the quotes cherry picked by Gray, is that it is unevenly applied and often used as ideological camouflage for kleptocracy.
Chomsky has never advocated the replacement of capitalism with communism, nor a violent revolution to overthrow capitalism.
And as for press bias, here’s what the link Gray himself provides actually says:
“In the most recent survey, 40% of journalists described themselves as being on the left side of the political spectrum (31% said they were “a little to the left” and 9% “pretty far to the left”). But that number was down notably, seven percentage points from 1992, when 47% said they leaned leftward.”
Well whaddya know there Gray?
Your own stats say only a tiny minority of journalists say they are “pretty far to the left.” A larger minority say they are a LITTLE to the left.
More important, the number of journalists who are “a little to the left” is outnumbered by “middle of the roaders” and insignificantly larger than the number who indentify themselves as “leaning toward the political right.
From the book review Gray cites:
“The percentage of “middle of the roaders” moved up slightly to 33% in 2002 from 30% in 1992. And the number of journalists identifying themselves leaning toward the political right also inched up to 25% from 22% a decade earlier (20% “a little to the right” and 5% “pretty far to the right”).”
Moreover, the political disposition of journalists does nothing to demonstrate that their reporting is itself biased. If you think for a nanosecond that reporters significantly deny the will of publishers, you’re in dire need of a reality check. Only a tiny percentage of top journalists are talented enough to write whatever they like. The vast majority of scribes follow the template set by the editor, passed down from the managing editor from the publisher and owner.
Sorry Gray, looks like you reached for the buzzer before reading the material you cited. Maybe that’s why you dropped out of the Chomsky course as well. Seems you’re in the habit of criticizing things you don’t know about.
And…
Strictly for the purpose of discussion, suppose I concede that there is a liberal media bias–that still leaves Gray and others here to answer the question of how that happened.
Were conservatives purged from media companies?
Nope.
Do newspapers and TV stations have a loyalty to liberal principles oath that employees are required to take?
Nope.
Are conservatives banned from starting their own Murdoch-like media megalith empires?
Nope.
Do the top mainstream newspapers refuse to hire openly conservative commentators?
Nope.
Then why can’t conservatives produce a news media that they find satisfactory?
I note that just this month, the New York Times hired Bill Kristol as a regular columnist.
Come to thing of it Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and every single one of their ilk hires unabashedly conservative columnists.
Here’s some homework for you, Gray. Go to The Drudge Report and look at all the columnists listed there. Virtually all of them are card carrying members of the mainstream media. Then ask yourself why MOST of them, not some, not a few, but MOST, are unabashed conservatives.
Then get back to me about why you think a liberally biased media prefers to put unabashed conservatives in the most coveted, influential, politically measurable positions.
JB: Then why can’t conservatives produce a news media that they find satisfactory?
I note that just this month, the New York Times hired Bill Kristol as a regular columnist.
Well, you’re beginning to get it, JB — even the New York Times is starting to realize that its survival may depend, ironically, upon “diversifying” its political viewpoints. The Times, they are a-changin’, huh? Whether it’s IN time enough to save it remains to be seen, of course, but it’s nice to note that the dominant liberal media in general might be slowly coming to the realization that there are alternative viewpoints, and that their mission might be to reflect them rather than convert them. These things take time, though — as in, generations.
As to why cultural elites form and cohere in the first place, that’s a little more complicated, but it has to do with achieving a dominant and controlling position in training centers that feed the elite in the first place, which is what the left managed to do in higher education after the traumatic events of the sixties. For now, they remain completely ensconced there, and their skew on the rest of the culture remains significant, even as it slowly erodes. Eventually, however, as the Boomers retire and/or die, I think there are encouraging signs that some real “diversity” of ideas will be achieved in academia as well.
What might a media not dominated by a cultural elite look like? Well, have a listen to talk radio. Or, even better, continue to read political blogs like this one. If you act like a common troll, of course, you might find yourself banned from commenting, but not from reading. And hey! You can always start your own blog for free, and then you can hardly fail to attract that vast audience hungry for yet more left-lib pablum. Can you?
Jack:
You trot out the two common arguments trying to “prove” that mass media aren’t liberal-dominated. First, that they’re owned by big corporations/rich people, and therefore must be conservative; and second, that some papers publish conservative editorials.
First point: since when are rich people conservative? The wealthiest people in America donate heavily to the Democratic party. In the last election the Democrat candidate was a billionaire. Being rich is not a guarantee of political affiliation. As to corporations — they have no politics, but they do know which side their bread is buttered on. They support whoever’s likely to win.
Second point: editorial page opinions and news reporting have almost no connection. The editorials are the work of an entirely separate group of people at most papers. If the Wall Street Journal publishes conservative editorials, that doesn’t change the fact that most journalists are liberals. Nor does it change the fact that the journalists most people see and hear from are liberals.
Come on, Jack: do you think we’re stupid? Or do you actually believe that people in the media aren’t biased? How else do you explain the fawning coverage of Democrat candidates, the game of hide-the-party when a Democrat official does something wrong, and the mass of unexamined assumptions that colors all reporting?
Tri: Great point using the WSJ example.
I’ve heard many people say the WSJ News Journalists (as opposed to the Editorial board) are just as Left wing and if not, then even more, than any other newsroom/staff in general.
I can tell a life story of one extraordinaire political changer – my own parental grandmother – as illustration how Leftist mind works. She as a very young teenager witnessed in Kiev pogroms instigated by Tzar political police (Okhranka). So she joined to Zionist armed group of Jewish self-defence. Later this militia joined to Bolshevik underground, where she turned to be talented agitator and propagandist among industrial proletariat. After revolution and civil war she was send to Red Professure Institute which prepared cadres of new Communist elite. She became a prominent Arabic scholar, historian and specialist on medieval Caliphate and Ottoman empire and also did important, often secret political assignments in Komintern, preparing would-be Communist leaders for Central Asia and Middle East, indoctrinating them in Marxist orthodoxy and tactics of underground resistance. She was instrumental in creating Kurdish Workers Party which exists now as terrorist organization in Turkey and Iraq. But many of her Syrian and Iraqi students were slaughtered when Baath came to power in Iraq and Syria. She was both a serious scholar and a fanatical Bolshevik, later Stalinist; most of her comrades perished in purges during Big Terror, but she survived due readiness to embrace any changes in Party Line. But destalinisation was a moral catastrophe to her, and I could witness this transformation. She has brilliant trained memory, vast knowledge of political history of the most brutal Asian tyrannies, but never applied her analitical skills and methology of historical analysis to the society in which she lived. There was a firewall in her mind preventing her from doing so – a survival mechanism imposed by years of life in terroristic totalitarian state. But after her Party demolished her Idol, this firewall came down, and she began to analyse, very professionally and honestly, the surrounding reality. At her seventies she understood how she fooled herself most of her life, and I still am amazed by her courage and willpower. For my own political development this was very formative transformation. Her analogues of Soviet politics with politics of medieval Persia were really insightful.
Strictly for the purpose of discussion, suppose I concede that there is a liberal media bias—that still leaves Gray and others here to answer the question of how that happened.
From the article:
“There was a little shift to the right, not a great one,” says Indiana University journalism professor David Weaver, who co-authored the book with colleagues Randal A. Beam, Bonnie J. Brownlee, Paul S. Voakes, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit.
While there are many theories for the discrepancy in the politics of journalists versus the public, Weaver believes it has a great deal to do with the kind of people attracted to the media profession. “I think journalists in general tend to be social reformers,” he says, adding that he believes this reform impulse is basically liberal.”
From my experience, journalists are the stupidest, most credulous and least curious people on earth–and they “want to make a difference”.
Sorry about your reading comprehension….
Anti-intellectualism is a hallmark of all totalitarians.
No wonder you didn’t do well in your classes.
Conservatives dislike conceited people, Jack, which you exemplify quite well.
Y hit the nail on the head. To a liberal, two things are certain: he is morally superior to regular people and he is smarter than regular people. Sadly, though, he also feels justified in bragging about it on every possible occasion. It’s as if the quality of his arguments are higher than anyone else’s simply because he (the obviously-so-intelligent one) is making them. And he doesn’t seem to have the social skills to know how people react to his presumption of superiority.
So Y is correct – it’s not the intellectual’s vocation we object to, it’s the intellectual’s attitude toward his “lesser” fellow citizens. Fortunately for us, in our system of government a smart person’s vote is worth no more than a dumb person’s vote.
Orwell wrote: I do not fear dictatorship of proletariat – it is impossible. What I really fear is dictatorship of intelligentia.
Timothy Noah writes in the Sunday New York Times on 1/13/08: “Just about the only place the neoconservative movement can’t locate Hitler is Nazi Germany. As late as 1944, the founding-neocon-to-be, Irving Kristol, publicly dismissed the “near hysterical insistence upon the pressing military danger,” Jacob Heilbrunn reports in his new book, “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.” While the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers, Kristol, then a 24-year-old Trotskyist, held fast to his conviction that the Allies were no different from the Axis in their imperialism. Kristol took this view because he was “indulging in an abstract crusade for a better world.””
Plus ca change, etc., eh, Neo?
Consider talk radio.
It’s dominated by conservatives.
Rush Limbaugh has by far the biggest listnership of any talker ever and has maintained it for more than a decade.
Newspapers?
Half or more of major newspaper columnists are conservative.
Newsweek has featured the work of Charles Krauthammer and George Will for decades. Time just hired Karl Rove to write for them.
Virtually every journalist of a political bent wants to be a columnist because columnists get to write more or less whatever they want and have a lower burden of substantiation. Columnists, especially those at major papers or magazienes, are the stars of journalism–and half or more of them are conservatives. How does that happen?
Why then do America’s biggest, most influential newspapers and magazines chose conservatives for so many of these highly coveted positions?
They do so because the conservative reader wants opinion. Liberals want news. Papers that are going to survive in the extremely competitive market have no choice but to recognize that.
Moreover, conservatives prefer unopposed opionionating. Thus millions tune into Rush Limbaugh to here him give, exclusively, his side of the story. While millions of liberals tune into PBS, where the News Hour’s liberal commentator always faces a conservative opponent given equal time.
Where is Bill O’Reilly’s opponent? Why does Brit Hume get to control the mike and shift back and forth from reporter, to commentator to MC of a “Capital Gang” stacked with conservatives?
Talkradio and its offspring Fox-style TalkTV are overwhelmingly conservative because they feed the American rightist’s insatiable need for easy-to-assemble ideological ammunition.
The straight news–for example, news reports showing Iran as the biggest beneficiary of the invasion of Iraq, or more evidence for evolution, or the failure to capture bin Laden, or a sinking economy–leaves many conservatives feeling besieged.
They just can’t find the ammunition they seek for their arguments in fact-based news, so they rely on commentary, like Rush Limbaugh. It’s no surprise that Rush Limbaugh portrays himself as an alternative to straight news reporting, not as an alternative to liberal talk radio, or liberal newspaper columnists. That pretty much says it all.
Why else would there be such a perceived ideological gap between news reports and commentary?
The average American is well smart enough to see right through ideological bias. Most are politically mature enough as well to understand that bias is in the very nature of journalism and that political hedging of whatever kind is hardly significant within the bigger picture.
Why do so many conservatives think that while they’re smart enough to see through the bias, the average American isn’t?
My view is that major media have a range of institutional biases, some of which fall to the conservative side, others to the liberal. By far the biggest influence on newspapers is the desires of their readers. They give readers what they demand, or they fail. It’s a free, competitive industry, just ask Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black or Sun Young Moon.
On foreign policy, the U.S. media skew to the right. For example, virtually every major daily newspaper supported the invasion of Iraq and wildly overplayed the inconclusive evidence of WMD. We now know just how closely Judith Miller was parroting the Bush-Cheney line on WMDs and we can all agree, I’m sure, that the constant exaggerations and distortions favoring the administration’s positions helped persuade Americans to support the invasion.
Some assert that major dailies like the NY Times turned Americans against the war, but the facts show that it’s the other way around.
The NY Times leadership, including most notably columnist Tom Friedman, were enthusiastic supporters of the war in Iraq at the outset, and only started to oppose it after it the loss of American soldiers’ lives started to turn ordinary Americans against the war.
You can be sure that should the American public start supporting the war again, the NY Times and the others will follow suit.
Sally: The New York Times has employed conservative columnists for decades. Former Nixon speechwriter William Safire filled was among the most distinguished for many a year. No, the Times isn’t changing, your just not paying enough attention.
Gray: The book you cite uses figures to demonstrate clearly that the gap betwen journalists who identify themselves as liberals and those who say they are conservative is insignificant.
They then SPECULATE with no substantiation whatsoever about why that small gap exists. If you want to admit that you find that speculative assertion persuasive, go ahead, but at least acknowledge that you don’t really expect others to be persuaded by it.
Many liberals are equally certain that the media is biased in favor of conservatives. I tell them the same thing I say here: there are plenty of outlets for every stripe of legitimate political opinion in America. There is no conspiracy.
Yet another sanctimious screed from the Left… riddled with narcissism.
They do so because the conservative reader wants opinion. Liberals want news.
Begging the question:
Fowler defines “begging the question” as the “fallacy of
founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as
the conclusion itself.”
“Question” here does not mean “a sentence in interrogative form”.
Rather, it means “the point at issue, the thing that the person is
trying to prove”. The phrase is elucidated by William Fulke in
“Heskins parleamant repealed” (1579): “O shameless beggar, that
craveth no less than the whole controversy to be given him!” The
OED’s first citation for “to beg the question” is from 1581.
Common varieties of begging the question are paraphrase of the
statement to be proved (“Telepathy cannot exist because direct
transfer of thought between individuals is impossible”), and
arguing in a circle (“The Bible must be true, because God wouldn’t
lie to us; we know God is trustworthy, because it says so in the
Bible”). Fowler gives two examples of non-circular question-begging:
“that fox-hunting is not cruel, since the fox enjoys the fun, and
that one must keep servants, since all respectable people do so”.
Gowers notes that single words, such as “reactionary” and
“victimization”, can be used in a question-begging way.
Gray: The sentence you quoted is the one that compelled me to reply.
The arrogance of the Left is really a beauty to behold.. the shameless audacity in it.
I love when they come up with studies like “Conservatives show signs of mental illness” or “conservatives don’t read books” etc…
Well Gray, perhaps you have a better explanation for why Rush Limbaugh dominates talkradio and conservatives make up at least half of newspaper columnists, but, in your view, conservatives can’t get a fair shake in straight news reporting.
Is it some kind of conspiracy?
I think the free market explains what’s going on here much better than any conspiracy theory.
Newspapers and talkradio give audiences what they want.
For conservatives, that means commentary, most of it unopposed.
Note as well the proliferation of Web sites like this one, which bans all liberals.
I’m “sneaking” in liberal comments here, but it’s only a matter of time before I’m banned, because conservatives can’t stand to here liberals contradict them.
Sergey…sounds like your grandmother had a great deal of intellectual integrity. You should write a longer blog post about her.
>Well Gray, perhaps you have a better explanation for why Rush Limbaugh dominates talkradio and conservatives make up at least half of newspaper columnists, but, in your view, conservatives can’t get a fair shake in straight news reporting.
Obviously something is wrong if half of opinion writers are conservative… they should be none , right?
Well Gray, perhaps you have a better explanation for why Rush Limbaugh dominates talkradio
‘Cuz no one wanted local AM talk radio before The Maha Rushi (PBUH) figured out how to syndicate his show and make it lucrative. Limbaugh (PBUH) ‘dominates talk radio’ ‘cuz he built it!
and conservatives make up at least half of newspaper columnists,
I dunno if it is ‘half’–and further you’d have to look at markets numbers….
but, in your view, conservatives can’t get a fair shake in straight news reporting.
I never said that–not too many conservatives are interested in becoming journalistas. Journalism is a lefty gig….
I’m “sneaking” in liberal comments here, but it’s only a matter of time before I’m banned, because conservatives can’t stand to here liberals contradict them.
More Begging the Question.
I’m “sneaking” in liberal comments here, but it’s only a matter of time before I’m banned, because conservatives can’t stand to here liberals contradict them.
Why “sneak” in the comments then?
Maybe because Jackie-boy, begging for his blog martyrdom, is just an old troll at a new IP address? Same sort of trollish behavior, certainly: cherry pick a point you can sneer about, ignore anything you can’t answer, jeer, change the subject, highjack threads, move the goalposts, and never forget to jeer and sneer for all you’re worth.
Whatever. For anyone interested, it’s worth pointing out that elites don’t need conspiracies to sustain them, but even elites can have a hard time sustaining their worldview as events increasingly undermine it — as we’re seeing with our current coastal liberal elites, and as their poor, lost followers like Jackie here, reduced to obsessive-compulsive trolling on blogs that question their liberal faith, illustrate so well.
Elites get that way in America primarily on merit. That’s one of the things that makes it such a great country!
I don’t necessarily agree that there’s any kind of liberal elite ruling over academia. But if there were, it would most likely be because conservatives failed to make the grade.
JB:
“They (conservatives) just can’t find the ammunition they seek for their arguments in fact-based news,”
Um, yes. You know, fact based assertions such as Bush stealing both elections or that he lied us into an “illegal, immoral war for oil”, or that Bush is spying on Americans, or that the administration “outed” a covert CIA operative or that the firing of 8 US attorneys was “unprecedented” or that there’s an actual mad-made global climate crisis afoot..you know, those “facts”.
McLovin:
“I don’t necessarily agree that there’s any kind of liberal elite ruling over academia. But if there were, it would most likely be because conservatives failed to make the grade.”
What you mean to say is that conservatives are too busy working in their respective fields turning out quality work and reaping great profit for their efforts. Thats what really sets you guys off. Being successful in general instead of hiding behind big government regulations, unions and ivy covered institutions. I understand the resentment.
“Bush stealing both elections.”
Some fringe-left commentators may have suggested this, but I’ve yet to read a single news report asserting this. Are you just making this stuff up Harry, or do you recall any examples? Again, this was never asserted in the news columns of any major metro daily or major newscast that I’m aware of. It just wouldn’t fly, and you seem smart enough to know that.
`He lied us into an “illegal, immoral war for oil.”
Some mainstream liberal commentators have alleged that Bush mislead the public and there is some evidence to back up that claim. We can have an honest debate about it. We can also have a reasonable debate about the war’s legality and whether or not it was for oil. But, again, these allegations simply haven’t been made in news columns. Perhaps you can provide some examples to prove me wrong, but I seriously doubt it.
“Bush is spying on Americans.”
Unwarranted wire-tapping approved and ordered by the Bush administration is simply a fact with overwhelming evidence. But is evidence really necessary when the Bush administration has admitted it and, even, argued that it’s necessary?
You may chose to call this something other than spying, but it clearly fits within the definition.
“The administration “outed” a covert CIA operative.”
Here again the facts speak for themselves. Something compelled Libby to lie about what he said and did in that regard. Something prevented Rove and others from saying what they knew, even though their reticence meant sympathetic reporters like Matt Cooper and Judith Miller were jailed.
We can have a reasonable debate about whether outing Plame was a necessary move to win a propaganda war, or even a simple accident or oversight, but you can’t rationally argue that she wasn’t outed, nor that the administration wasn’t involved in outing her.
“Or that the firing of 8 US attorneys was “unprecedented.”
The scope and timing of the firings were unprecedented. Most, if not all, news reports I read were clear that other presidents had dismissed attorneys and that some had even been accused of impropriety in doing so.
“Actual man-made global warming crisis.”
The news I read on the subject is all framed as a manmade climate change THREAT. Evidence is mounting, but we all know that proof is elusive. The alarm comes because if and when such a link is proven, it could well be too late.
Thanks Harry, for giving a clearcut demonstration of the Conservative Victimhood Complex.
You feel under assualt by factual reporting and crave unupposed conservative opinion as the only balm..
McLovin, please- We conservatives neither own, nor express a victimhood complex. We have no need of it. Neither do we feel the need to engage ourselves in wild conspiracy theories about stolen elections, “outed” CIA officers, or capitalist driven impending climate disasters. Has the “corporate” press came out and labeled all these items in exactly that way? No. But you have so many people who believe they are true, it couldnt be the result of a conservative media monolith.
As for myself feeling under assault by “factual reporting”, I dont see how thats possible since the media is all on my side could I?
Elites get that way in America primarily on merit.
Striking comedy writers, look out. You’ve got c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n, as Howard Cosell used to say.
Where to start, where to start…
Perhaps with the obvious disconnect between what made someone a member of the elite, and what they subsequently pontificate on.
A case in point: la Streisand. High school graduate, now holding forth on all manner of geopolitical issues. The list of others in that category in Hollywood is too long to recite. They’re famous, which in our culture makes them part of the elite, but if movies and film recording hadn’t been invented, they’d be working the drive-up window.
Then, of course, there are the Kennedys. The patriarch was a crook, by all accounts, who made a pile on bootlegging and stock manipulation. (George Soros nods in appreciation, having made his money through currency manipulation.) I was about to say that memberfs of the Kennedy members have acquitted themselves well, but actually in some cases it was a jury who acquitted them, so they don’t really get credit for that.
I don’t necessarily agree that there’s any kind of liberal elite ruling over academia. But if there were, it would most likely be because conservatives failed to make the grade.
Rubbish. For example, in my case, I left academia for two reasons: 1) the persistent irritating left-wing crap, which not only made for a noxious atmosphere but also burnt time in unproductive symbolic exercises, and 2) an offer from industry at a considerable multiple of my academic salary.
Arguably, academia tends to concentrate losers against a gradient. I’ve never regretted leaving, while my friends in academia to a man (person? Nah. Man.) regret staying.
The problem with academia is that academics invariably proceed from undergraduate education to postgraduate (usually including post-doctoral work in the case of serious subjects, e.g., not humanities or social sciences, which are a joke) and thence to a faculty position. The typical professor – of which I was an example – has never worked outside academia, and so has an arrested adolescent perspective on the world.
Consulting for industry rapidly dissipiates that perspective, but those in humanities – the most leftwing-infested portion of academia – never do that.
But the most compelling aspect is that an academic department is, in essence, a collective. Making even small decisions requires essentially unanimous agreement from everyone – a recipe for frustration for individualists (who are likely to be conservatives), who, not surprisingly, tend to leave.
So don’t kid yourself about conservatives not making the grade.
The bottom line is that Leftists judges people on perceived intentions.
The arrogance of the Left has already been demostrated on this very thread.
They see themselves as good and virtious people because they “care” about the things they pretend to care about.
So because they derive their value from that, they see people who oppose their agenda as acting with malice and thus the left views their opponents as immoral and evil.
And it shows… it shows in the way they speak of conservaives with such contempt and how they refuse to even engage in any debates on the merits. The Left thinks opposing viewpoints are evil thus delegimiate.
And so you see why they engage in ad hominem attacks or worse, with such glee and very little restraint.
When and where does Striesand “hold forth?”
In academia?
Nope.
In the media as a columnist or journalist?
Nope.
Sure, she gets attention because it sells papers. But to suggest that she is exemplary of a liberal media or academic elite is case-closing evidence of how desperately without substance Occam’s complaints about academic victimhood are.
The Kennedys? Please. They indeed represent a family dynasty but are in no way representative of anything broader than their own family, whose closest parallels are with the Bushes.
Lastly, Occam makes my case by admitting that he left academia completly of his own volition for a better pay check and an environment more conducive to his particular political views.
No purge, no coercion, just Occam opting out for greener pastures.
I suspect his case is not at all uncommon. I don’t think conservatives are INCAPABLE of making the grade–that wasn’t my point at all. Rather, it’s that for whatever reason–including those cited by Occam–they don’t.
Whose fault is that?
OB:
“I was about to say that memberfs of the Kennedy members have acquitted themselves well, but actually in some cases it was a jury who acquitted them, so they don’t really get credit for that.”
LOL! I love that!
So…Streisand and the Kennedys are not part of the American elite? I’m with you there, 100% in fact, but most people would disagree.
I don’t think conservatives are INCAPABLE of making the grade—that wasn’t my point at all. Rather, it’s that for whatever reason—including those cited by Occam—they don’t.
Pardon me, but in English the phrase “conservatives failed to make the grade” admits of only one interpretation, and it’s one that does not comport well with “not doing so out of their own volition.”
Lastly, Occam makes my case by admitting that he left academia completly of his own volition for a better pay check and an environment more conducive to his particular political views.
No purge, no coercion, just Occam opting out for greener pastures.
Kind of a “separate but equal” deal? Ever hear of a hostile environment? I was pleased to leave, for the cited reasons, but conservative friends in academia who don’t want to leave are pretty miserable putting up with the atmosphere.
An orthodox Jew invited to a spare rib barbecue and regaled with Jewish jokes might choose of his own volition to leave too. No purge, no coerciion, just seeking out an environment more conducive to his religious views.
“Conservative friends in academia who don’t want to leave are pretty miserable putting up with the atmosphere.”
Don’t you ever tire of their whining? What do they want? Why do they feel so entitled to have their views accepted? Why do they feel so they have a right to complain just because liberals challenge their assumptions?
There are scores of unabashedly conservative universities across America. Why can’t these whining academics find their way to them?
And just to make it even clearer, my view isn’t that conservatives are incapable of academic achievement. I see no evidence that conservatives, on average, are any more or less intelligent than liberals. Political views track other factors, not so much intelligence. Still, conservatives themselves insist vehemently that they underperform academically, either that, or there is some sort of conspiracy holding them down. And where’s the evidence for that?
Conservatives do however lead the way in self-pity and whining. When will they at long last tire of whinging about the fact that some people disagree with them? When will they at long last face the reality that America is a free country where their views entitle them to zip, nada. They have to earn their way in the media or academia. And the failure to do so is just that, failure.
Got views other people don’t like? Defend them. Stop whining!
And it’s more than a little hilarious that Occam admits that he considers his political views in the same light as religious tradition.
Don’t you ever tire of their whining? What do they want?
Yep, sometimes I do. Of course, I also have no time for feminists and minorities whining about hostile environments, either.
I should point out that they are bleating about this publicly, but rather privately to me. Their colleagues in general have little idea of their true convictions. They keep their heads down and their mouths shut so as to avoid professional repercussions.
Why do they feel so entitled to have their views accepted? Why do they feel so they have a right to complain just because liberals challenge their assumptions?
In fairness, they don’t expect their views to be accepted. And liberals don’t challenge their assumptions; they use social pressure to enforce orthodoxy, and one against many is tough – particularly when one anticipates working with the same people for the next few decades. As indicated above, to the best of theri ability, they try to stay below the radar.
It’s kind of like arguing with one’s wife: a confrontation best avoided, because there’s no upside, and lots of downside. Bear in mind that funding, manuscript , and tenure decisions are generally made anonymously, so making enemies unnecessarily is not a good strategy.
McL: And just to make it even clearer, my view isn’t that conservatives are incapable of academic achievement.
Or, we could make it still more clear, and say liberals are stupid.
And that’s the only kind of thing he has to say. Lovey is just a classic troll and is so a waste of time.
Here’s a clear Leftist sample of opinion as news:
“Unwarranted wire-tapping approved and ordered by the Bush administration is simply a fact with overwhelming evidence. But is evidence really necessary when the Bush administration has admitted it and, even, argued that it’s necessary?”
Fact: wire-tapping was approved (as it was by Clinton).
Leftist Opinion: Bush’s wire-tappping is Unwarranted.
Leftist mush: “Unwarranted wire-tapping … is simply a fact”.
The Leftist often adds a subjective analysis onto a fact and calls them both, together, a “fact”. Which it never is.
Stop terrorism opinion: wire-tapping is necessary.
The Liberal Fascists enforce PC crapola in the University — see Larry Summers, fired for speaking the truth.
(It is a fact that more men than women score 800 on the SAT math exams.)
Tom Grey – Liberty Dad : And how about the way they kept calling the program the “Domestic eavesdropping”, when it was international!
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
-Robert Heinlein
RAH was a smart writer, a graduate of Annapolis, politician, silver miner, inventor (the water bed).
People STILL ideas from him.
“People STILL steal ideas from him.”
PIMF