When is a juicy cinematic corruption scandal not a juicy cinematic corruption scandal? — 29 Comments
It’s all about narrative, if it doesn’t fit the narrative, it will not be reported, or written so as to minimize party affiliation.
And as Don Surber used to say, Name That Party!
Dig a little deeper. It’s not just the hypocrisy, it’s that the hypocrisy is telling.
Q: Why is it that no Republican sin is too small while no Democratic felony is too great?
A: Because Republicans are evil and must be defeated at all costs.
This is the mantra that Eric keeps pushing against in his comments here. This is the cultural landscape that the left has been permitted to establish and the real battle for the American future.
Turn it around: When is a scandal a scandal? When a Republican can be nailed on something.
It’s brainwashing all the way down.
There are no “scandals”. A “scandal” is a Biblical Term that refers to a stumbling block that gets in the way of truth, goodness, justice, love.
The propagandist Dems have never had a “scandal” that involved a Dem. Even for Clinton, the “scandal” was the evil Rs bent on impeachment for something that was “only” sex (i.e. not a scandal).
These people have you, me, us wrapped around their fingers.
No word they utter, not even words we “think” we know the meaning of, can be trusted. No…Word. None.
They don’t get to define anymore. I refuse to grant them that power.
On the contrary, when they talk, about anything, it is a lie…and that is truly scandalous.
Every Dem is a walking talking scandal and offense to humanity.
One of the most famous lines of dialog in movie history is “Round up the usual suspects!”
A Democrat does not qualify as a “usual suspect”.
I wonder if Glenn Reynolds’ columns in USA Today are having an influence on readers who get most of their information from the MSM? He’s been doing them on a regular (weekly?) basis for about a year now, I think. Anyway, a foot in the door.
Glenn Reynolds’ column in USA Today observes, “It’s almost as if “what’s news” is just a synonym for “what advances the narrative chosen by the Democratic Party.”
It’s almost? Far too little, too late.
Geoffrey Britain,
You are absolutely correct to point this out. Even Glenn Reynolds, whose non-leftist bonafides are without question, beats around the bush with soft irony rather than declarative judgment. It shows how we as a culture, and by that I mean even those not on the left, have sub-consciously bought into the leftist Gramscian meme. This is why Breitbart was such a breath of fresh air.
“We have met the enemy and he is us!”
T: “Because Republicans are evil and must be defeated at all costs.”
When going inside your competitors’ heads as part of formulating your activist strategy, consider the subtle but important difference in these 2 variations:
Republicans are evil, and therefore must be defeated at all costs.
Republicans must be defeated at all costs, and therefore are evil.
Here in flyover country, we have no interest in this NJ bridge deal.
We don’t care!
When you see a member of the Leftist alliance, a person should have the same feeling as if a known child molestor asked for custody of your kid.
It’s called emotional armor and is designed as a survival mechanism. For most people, though, they override this instinct and attempt to use logick to judge the Left. That only works for a minimum percentage of the human species. For most people, instinct was better programming for them.
In my little domain in flyover country I just want to be left alone to live my life the way I want to.
Got a .357 on an L frame with a 6 inch barrel, and I got dead aim. It will all come down to blood, dust, and who will crawl out of the rubble.
Eric – You have hit on it. Dems operate on the 2nd, not the first; and they are not the same!
It’s about power, sadism, control and (philosophical) hedonism for them and that is it.
Every Dem, without exception, is in some measure a degraded monster.
And before anyone thinks I’m being extreme….tell me what the mean is; and No, because every Dem is in actual fact a degraded monster does not mean Rs are not or are therefore good. Rs may or may not be. That is up to the individual case. But without doubt every Dem is. If they were not, they would not be Dems. In principle and ontologically every Dem is at best a sociopath,
Parker, how is your practice on moving targets such as a tire going down a hill?
I think we’ll see more running zombies than frozen ones.
Any American that gets caught selling weapons to a terrorist Islamic groups should be front page news. And in almost every case it would be, except here it was being done by a Democratic politician.
Even though Democrats are in the business of frantically covering for and in some cases endorsing Muslim terrorists, any evidence directly linking the two must be kept from the low information public at all costs. I’m not saying Yee was a closet Muslim terrorist, but by doing business with the Filipino Muslims, you can at least infer he had no problem with what they were up to or what they believed in as long as they paid him.
If this had been a Republican city councilman, or even a registered Republican voter, or even someone somebody once claimed they saw at a Tea Party event, it would be the story of the year with editorial headlines blaring, “Republicans/Tea Party in bed with Muslim terrorists–Bush was behind 9/11!”.
I’m not naive enough to think that Republicans don’t occasionally engage in illegal deals to make money, but I would think they would draw the line at arming Muslim terrorists.
Hussein armed AQ in Libya. That’s what Benghazi was about.
Hear that lately? When the leader is corrupt and insane, everyone else including the Lees start thinking, “if he can do it, I can do it”.
Reynolds is a lawyer. As a lawyer he understands litigation the Left can do. He has seen M Stein’s fate.
So libel or slander needs to be cushioned using ambiguous phrasing. This is the Leftist alliance we are speaking of. Do not underestimate the Left.
Mike:
I’m tired of arguing with you on that—I’ve done it many times before. Suffice to say I continue to disagree strongly, and I think that the existence of many changers is proof that I’m right.
I was a “degraded monster” until 2002-3, and then magically changed? Or maybe you think I still am a degraded monster?
Above @7:57 Eric restates my “Republicans are evil” comment as a fool v. knave question:
Here are two responses, one to each side of the question:
The first, liberals are fools for believing that all Republicans are evil:
Note: I think that the Federalist article is especially noteworthy for several reasons. I highly recommend it.
Follow up:
Actually the one death wish that Guy Benson actually cites over at Hot Air falls more into the knave category, too. I cited it based upon the headline that there are probably generic death threats (die because you’re evil); shoulda read it first.
These death threats are a laugh. The serious pros don’t do dumb things like issue threats in advance. What would be the point. If they could do, they would have.
The fantasy Fs that’s part of the Leftist religion (you can be part of a religion even if you aren’t the preacher or the god), need to get more virgin sacrifices if they want their Messiah to lower the sea levels and equip them with divine miracles. For those death wishes, that is.
Mike might wish to make more use of the chain of command responsibility, where most of the responsibility is at the top but the people who Obey Orders aren’t guiltless wonderland innocent children.
That principle would cut away a lot of the innocence argument. Since it is Mike’s own argument, I won’t make it for him.
Re Mike and Neo’s exchange.
Since I am one of those who has been prominent in aiming the worldview and interpretive principles of the modern left, the now Democrat mainstream, back toward them, and coming up with some rather unsettling, and even dehumanizing implied reductions, it seems only right that I explain – again – part of what I have been doing.
First, although I do not deny anthropological or psychological evidence that there may be some evolved or inherited differences in human moral sensibilities; I am not taking that as the critical point in analyzing moral status.
Second, the implications I was drawing regarding the modern left were meant, to some degree, to be eye-openers for some who were mindlessly mouthing received secular wisdom, as well as to be philosophical lines drawn in the sand between “us and them”.
Third, and here is the tricky part: although I do not subscribe to a hyper-Calvinist [and colloquial] notion of the total depravity of ALL mankind, it seems clear enough to me from even undisputed archeo-anthropological findings, that the human organism across races and ideologies, and sans some kind of moral formation and principle-based behavioral inhibition, which includes the intellect will tend to act under a variety of circumstances like “devils”.
In fact, and to allude to a text many here have mentioned, even the best people seem to act at times like the characters in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.
The current cultural question in dispute is whether there is objectively anything more to man in relation to reality, other than what is reducible to a locus of appetition, a congerie of appetites, and “its” ultimately pointless welling of brute fact urges; which, as part of a background field (monism assumed), form the sum and substance of our real (non delusional) existence.
In my view, there is. In the view of the radical postmodernist, there is not. And it seems to me that people morally separate on the basis of how comfortable they are with the conclusion that there is not.
This is not the place to systematically lay out the antinomies involved in extreme relativism, subjective idealism, and moral nihilism. But I suspect that anyone who is dissatisfied with the doctrine of a moral universe which is in principle the product of an ultimately unintelligible reality, whether they be they cradle “liberals” on the one hand or some kind of natural rights (religious or not) proponents on the other, will find themselves generally inhabiting the same moral universe.
Ultimately that is a universe of rational men where reason – like, but over and against the nihilist’s turtles – “goes all the way down”; and not that of self-created monsters who have with a wild-eyed rictus grin thrown themselves backwards, to paraphrase Golding*, into the entropic darkness.
And it was a drone camera whose video corrected the false impression left by a CNN en Espaé±ol report that there was somehow an equivalency in the size of competing demonstrations on Saturday in Caracas, Venezuela. As Daniel Duquenal of Venezuela News and Views complained, the CNN en Espaé±ol report by Guillermo Arduino gave only closeup shots of competing Chavista and opposition demonstrations. However, the drone eye in the sky revealed the vast panoply of the opposition demonstration that seemed to number in the hundreds of thousands.
In both the US and Venezuela- just as it happened in Saddam’s Iraq- CNN should be renamed GNN: Government News Network.
T,
Fool v Knave, Neo’s favored theme, is one framing. I’m thinking more in terms of Devotee (up to Zealot) v Adversary.
The framing doesn’t change the intrinsic meanings, but the way of thinking about the subject does.
Profs Corbin and Parks’ Federalist piece, and almost all the talk on the subject from people of the Right and on Neo’s blog, is descriptive and diagnostic.
Description and diagnosis are necessary parts of the planning process, but at the some point, they need to transition to actionable problem-solving prescription that can transition to laying the groundwork for effective activist activity.
How to proselytize and convert devotees, who are more representative of the critical mass needed to sway the body politic, to a Neo-type changer?
How to compete asymmetrically with the more-powerful activist adversary?
In tune with Neo’s response to Mike, the two types are not the same, and the prescriptive approaches to either should not be the same besides whatever crossover may be necessary.
Lando Calrissian:
That wasn’t part of the deal! You said the wookiee and Leia would stay under my protection!
Corbin and Parks:
Be grateful for the mercy of the Administration’s almighty hand in allowing any departure from imperial Obamacare policy—and pray that we don’t homogenize you any further.
Neo’s interaction with Mike above, Apr 2/ 08:07 am, is important because we have to be as knowledgeable as possible when we give opinions. I believe it is clear that Neo’s change epiphany was based on a triggering event that sent her in a search to fill in suddenly obvious gaps in her knowledge and, during that search, coming into contact with information she hadn’t come across earlier in life. The playwright Mamet’s change was similarly based on an expanded awareness of and contact with conservative thought, as was that of Evan Sayet. They all had alert minds and generous spirits, so when they recognized the Truth, they thirsted for more of it. These personal odysseys have to be recognized and cheered on, especially since they are often emotionally shattering experiences and the voyagers need courage and determination to go through with their search. YAY!!
I recently followed a link to a post from 2013 by a blogger named Martel, that starts: “One of the biggest problems I see when observing conservatives/libertarians dealing with leftists is that all too often we don’t know who we’re dealing with. Sure, we know they’re wrong, but we don’t necessarily understand the reasons for their error. Therefore, our attacks are imprecise and often backfire. We insult when we should tread softly or coddle when we should go for the throat. We confront issues head-on when it would be more prudent to dance around them, but sometimes we try to yell around the elephant in the living room. We argue Principle to a cut-throat union boss or self-interest to an idealistic young hipster. This post addresses that.”
He posits three basic kinds of Leftist and examines them in some detail:
The Anointed
The Entitled
The Benighted
It’s really great. Of course, you can go further into more nuanced divisions from these three, but Martel’s post is an outstanding overview map of the territory:
Like Eric says, we need to be effective with our efforts. I believe that part of that effectiveness is in the knowledge that Conservatism can be exhilarating and liberating, and that that includes the need to be cheerfully welcoming to all who find their way out of the Leftist wilderness.
It’s all about narrative, if it doesn’t fit the narrative, it will not be reported, or written so as to minimize party affiliation.
And as Don Surber used to say, Name That Party!
Dig a little deeper. It’s not just the hypocrisy, it’s that the hypocrisy is telling.
Q: Why is it that no Republican sin is too small while no Democratic felony is too great?
A: Because Republicans are evil and must be defeated at all costs.
This is the mantra that Eric keeps pushing against in his comments here. This is the cultural landscape that the left has been permitted to establish and the real battle for the American future.
Turn it around: When is a scandal a scandal? When a Republican can be nailed on something.
It’s brainwashing all the way down.
There are no “scandals”. A “scandal” is a Biblical Term that refers to a stumbling block that gets in the way of truth, goodness, justice, love.
The propagandist Dems have never had a “scandal” that involved a Dem. Even for Clinton, the “scandal” was the evil Rs bent on impeachment for something that was “only” sex (i.e. not a scandal).
These people have you, me, us wrapped around their fingers.
No word they utter, not even words we “think” we know the meaning of, can be trusted. No…Word. None.
They don’t get to define anymore. I refuse to grant them that power.
On the contrary, when they talk, about anything, it is a lie…and that is truly scandalous.
Every Dem is a walking talking scandal and offense to humanity.
One of the most famous lines of dialog in movie history is “Round up the usual suspects!”
A Democrat does not qualify as a “usual suspect”.
I wonder if Glenn Reynolds’ columns in USA Today are having an influence on readers who get most of their information from the MSM? He’s been doing them on a regular (weekly?) basis for about a year now, I think. Anyway, a foot in the door.
Glenn Reynolds’ column in USA Today observes, “It’s almost as if “what’s news” is just a synonym for “what advances the narrative chosen by the Democratic Party.”
It’s almost? Far too little, too late.
Geoffrey Britain,
You are absolutely correct to point this out. Even Glenn Reynolds, whose non-leftist bonafides are without question, beats around the bush with soft irony rather than declarative judgment. It shows how we as a culture, and by that I mean even those not on the left, have sub-consciously bought into the leftist Gramscian meme. This is why Breitbart was such a breath of fresh air.
“We have met the enemy and he is us!”
T: “Because Republicans are evil and must be defeated at all costs.”
When going inside your competitors’ heads as part of formulating your activist strategy, consider the subtle but important difference in these 2 variations:
Here in flyover country, we have no interest in this NJ bridge deal.
We don’t care!
When you see a member of the Leftist alliance, a person should have the same feeling as if a known child molestor asked for custody of your kid.
It’s called emotional armor and is designed as a survival mechanism. For most people, though, they override this instinct and attempt to use logick to judge the Left. That only works for a minimum percentage of the human species. For most people, instinct was better programming for them.
In my little domain in flyover country I just want to be left alone to live my life the way I want to.
99 year blues: http://tinyurl.com/3azuhxq
Got a .357 on an L frame with a 6 inch barrel, and I got dead aim. It will all come down to blood, dust, and who will crawl out of the rubble.
Eric – You have hit on it. Dems operate on the 2nd, not the first; and they are not the same!
It’s about power, sadism, control and (philosophical) hedonism for them and that is it.
Every Dem, without exception, is in some measure a degraded monster.
And before anyone thinks I’m being extreme….tell me what the mean is; and No, because every Dem is in actual fact a degraded monster does not mean Rs are not or are therefore good. Rs may or may not be. That is up to the individual case. But without doubt every Dem is. If they were not, they would not be Dems. In principle and ontologically every Dem is at best a sociopath,
Parker, how is your practice on moving targets such as a tire going down a hill?
I think we’ll see more running zombies than frozen ones.
Any American that gets caught selling weapons to a terrorist Islamic groups should be front page news. And in almost every case it would be, except here it was being done by a Democratic politician.
Even though Democrats are in the business of frantically covering for and in some cases endorsing Muslim terrorists, any evidence directly linking the two must be kept from the low information public at all costs. I’m not saying Yee was a closet Muslim terrorist, but by doing business with the Filipino Muslims, you can at least infer he had no problem with what they were up to or what they believed in as long as they paid him.
If this had been a Republican city councilman, or even a registered Republican voter, or even someone somebody once claimed they saw at a Tea Party event, it would be the story of the year with editorial headlines blaring, “Republicans/Tea Party in bed with Muslim terrorists–Bush was behind 9/11!”.
I’m not naive enough to think that Republicans don’t occasionally engage in illegal deals to make money, but I would think they would draw the line at arming Muslim terrorists.
Hussein armed AQ in Libya. That’s what Benghazi was about.
Hear that lately? When the leader is corrupt and insane, everyone else including the Lees start thinking, “if he can do it, I can do it”.
Reynolds is a lawyer. As a lawyer he understands litigation the Left can do. He has seen M Stein’s fate.
So libel or slander needs to be cushioned using ambiguous phrasing. This is the Leftist alliance we are speaking of. Do not underestimate the Left.
Mike:
I’m tired of arguing with you on that—I’ve done it many times before. Suffice to say I continue to disagree strongly, and I think that the existence of many changers is proof that I’m right.
I was a “degraded monster” until 2002-3, and then magically changed? Or maybe you think I still am a degraded monster?
Above @7:57 Eric restates my “Republicans are evil” comment as a fool v. knave question:
Here are two responses, one to each side of the question:
The first, liberals are fools for believing that all Republicans are evil:
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/01/anti-obamacare-cancer-patient-attacked-by-reid-now-receiving-death-wishes-from-liberals/
The second, that liberals are knaves who only seek their own ends and change the narrative to accommodate their goal:
http://thefederalist.com/2014/03/30/what-happens-when-the-facts-dont-fit-the-progressive-script/
Note: I think that the Federalist article is especially noteworthy for several reasons. I highly recommend it.
Follow up:
Actually the one death wish that Guy Benson actually cites over at Hot Air falls more into the knave category, too. I cited it based upon the headline that there are probably generic death threats (die because you’re evil); shoulda read it first.
These death threats are a laugh. The serious pros don’t do dumb things like issue threats in advance. What would be the point. If they could do, they would have.
The fantasy Fs that’s part of the Leftist religion (you can be part of a religion even if you aren’t the preacher or the god), need to get more virgin sacrifices if they want their Messiah to lower the sea levels and equip them with divine miracles. For those death wishes, that is.
Mike might wish to make more use of the chain of command responsibility, where most of the responsibility is at the top but the people who Obey Orders aren’t guiltless wonderland innocent children.
That principle would cut away a lot of the innocence argument. Since it is Mike’s own argument, I won’t make it for him.
Re Mike and Neo’s exchange.
Since I am one of those who has been prominent in aiming the worldview and interpretive principles of the modern left, the now Democrat mainstream, back toward them, and coming up with some rather unsettling, and even dehumanizing implied reductions, it seems only right that I explain – again – part of what I have been doing.
First, although I do not deny anthropological or psychological evidence that there may be some evolved or inherited differences in human moral sensibilities; I am not taking that as the critical point in analyzing moral status.
Second, the implications I was drawing regarding the modern left were meant, to some degree, to be eye-openers for some who were mindlessly mouthing received secular wisdom, as well as to be philosophical lines drawn in the sand between “us and them”.
Third, and here is the tricky part: although I do not subscribe to a hyper-Calvinist [and colloquial] notion of the total depravity of ALL mankind, it seems clear enough to me from even undisputed archeo-anthropological findings, that the human organism across races and ideologies, and sans some kind of moral formation and principle-based behavioral inhibition, which includes the intellect will tend to act under a variety of circumstances like “devils”.
In fact, and to allude to a text many here have mentioned, even the best people seem to act at times like the characters in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.
The current cultural question in dispute is whether there is objectively anything more to man in relation to reality, other than what is reducible to a locus of appetition, a congerie of appetites, and “its” ultimately pointless welling of brute fact urges; which, as part of a background field (monism assumed), form the sum and substance of our real (non delusional) existence.
In my view, there is. In the view of the radical postmodernist, there is not. And it seems to me that people morally separate on the basis of how comfortable they are with the conclusion that there is not.
This is not the place to systematically lay out the antinomies involved in extreme relativism, subjective idealism, and moral nihilism. But I suspect that anyone who is dissatisfied with the doctrine of a moral universe which is in principle the product of an ultimately unintelligible reality, whether they be they cradle “liberals” on the one hand or some kind of natural rights (religious or not) proponents on the other, will find themselves generally inhabiting the same moral universe.
Ultimately that is a universe of rational men where reason – like, but over and against the nihilist’s turtles – “goes all the way down”; and not that of self-created monsters who have with a wild-eyed rictus grin thrown themselves backwards, to paraphrase Golding*, into the entropic darkness.
[* “Darkness Visible”]
CNN doesn’t massage, hide, and distort the news just in the US.Drone Camera Corrects CNN Espaé±ol Report on Caracas Demonstrations.
In both the US and Venezuela- just as it happened in Saddam’s Iraq- CNN should be renamed GNN: Government News Network.
T,
Fool v Knave, Neo’s favored theme, is one framing. I’m thinking more in terms of Devotee (up to Zealot) v Adversary.
The framing doesn’t change the intrinsic meanings, but the way of thinking about the subject does.
Profs Corbin and Parks’ Federalist piece, and almost all the talk on the subject from people of the Right and on Neo’s blog, is descriptive and diagnostic.
Description and diagnosis are necessary parts of the planning process, but at the some point, they need to transition to actionable problem-solving prescription that can transition to laying the groundwork for effective activist activity.
How to proselytize and convert devotees, who are more representative of the critical mass needed to sway the body politic, to a Neo-type changer?
How to compete asymmetrically with the more-powerful activist adversary?
In tune with Neo’s response to Mike, the two types are not the same, and the prescriptive approaches to either should not be the same besides whatever crossover may be necessary.
Lando Calrissian:
Corbin and Parks:
Neo’s interaction with Mike above, Apr 2/ 08:07 am, is important because we have to be as knowledgeable as possible when we give opinions. I believe it is clear that Neo’s change epiphany was based on a triggering event that sent her in a search to fill in suddenly obvious gaps in her knowledge and, during that search, coming into contact with information she hadn’t come across earlier in life. The playwright Mamet’s change was similarly based on an expanded awareness of and contact with conservative thought, as was that of Evan Sayet. They all had alert minds and generous spirits, so when they recognized the Truth, they thirsted for more of it. These personal odysseys have to be recognized and cheered on, especially since they are often emotionally shattering experiences and the voyagers need courage and determination to go through with their search. YAY!!
I recently followed a link to a post from 2013 by a blogger named Martel, that starts: “One of the biggest problems I see when observing conservatives/libertarians dealing with leftists is that all too often we don’t know who we’re dealing with. Sure, we know they’re wrong, but we don’t necessarily understand the reasons for their error. Therefore, our attacks are imprecise and often backfire. We insult when we should tread softly or coddle when we should go for the throat. We confront issues head-on when it would be more prudent to dance around them, but sometimes we try to yell around the elephant in the living room. We argue Principle to a cut-throat union boss or self-interest to an idealistic young hipster. This post addresses that.”
He posits three basic kinds of Leftist and examines them in some detail:
The Anointed
The Entitled
The Benighted
It’s really great. Of course, you can go further into more nuanced divisions from these three, but Martel’s post is an outstanding overview map of the territory:
http://alphaisassumed.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/they-are-not-what-they-are/
Like Eric says, we need to be effective with our efforts. I believe that part of that effectiveness is in the knowledge that Conservatism can be exhilarating and liberating, and that that includes the need to be cheerfully welcoming to all who find their way out of the Leftist wilderness.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-scalzi-is-rapist.html
Guess which one Scalzi fits under best.
And how many people obey his Word, how many are like him on their little safety subcommittee, and how many others are loyal and obedient followers?
Neo:
“I was a “degraded monster” until 2002-3, and then magically changed? Or maybe you think I still am a degraded monster?”
We need proof. Please post a video of yourself burning your degraded monster membership card, tote bag and complimentary coffee mug. 😉
That’s called a devil’s proof.