Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

The media tells us who they fear

Posted: January 12, 2011 by datechguy in culture, media
Tags: , , , , ,

One of Rush Limbaugh’s favorite lines about the media and the democrats is they will tell you who they fear by their reactions.

One of the reason’s why the media has no problem “calling out” the Tea Party without evidence and why they have no problem going after the Catholic Church is not only do they disagree with their positions, but they understand and no they actually have no physical reason to fear them.

At No Paesran via Glenn we see the difference between reporting on people you fear vs people you don’t. First the shooting in Arizona and the Conservatives in Le Monde:

The shooting in which a Democrat was seriously wounded in Arizona has appalled the American Left, which denounces the “poisoned rhetoric” of the ultraconservatives…

He continues illustrating the comparative nonsense within the paper itself and their willingness to post blames, Yet not two weeks after the attack in Alexandra against Coptic Christians that was international news (prompting a rare positive reaction) we have this story out of Egypt:

An off-duty policeman has opened fire on a train in Egypt, killing a Christian man, but it is unclear whether the attack was sectarian.

At least another five people were reported to have been injured in the shooting on a train between Assiut and Cairo.

Officials said at least four of those hurt were Coptic Christians.

That’s just the fact but note how the story ends:

The BBC’s Jon Leyne reports from Cairo that it is difficult to see how the gunmen would have known he could target Christians by boarding the train.

Here you have the media making it a point to say it’s hard to see a direct religious connection the lack of evidence to make a connection to radical Islam vs the Coptic.

Although he approves of that last statement No Paesran’s head spins:

It is unclear whether the attack was sectarian! We learn that “Officials said at least four of those hurt [there were five wounded altogether] were Coptic Christians” and we learn that “Witnesses said hundreds of Christians later clashed with police outside the hospital where the wounded were taken” and we are reminded that “Tensions between Muslims and Christians in Egypt have been high following a bomb attack on a Coptic church in Alexandria at the new year that killed 23 people.” But! It is unclear whether the attack was sectarian!

All of this speaks volumes. I think it’s not just bias, I think it is the knowledge that if the BBC suggests islamic violence they may have to deal with repercussions personally.

Restraint is easy when your skin is at stake.

The Ultimate in counter programing

Posted: December 31, 2010 by datechguy in blogs, culture, media, oddities
Tags: , , , , , , ,

While the rest of us on the right pick apart Colman McCarthy over this Washington Post column Robert Stacy McCain decides in a brilliant bit of counter programing to tackle the issue that has sadly been ignored, namely the best tactics to ahem; stimulate the economy of the movie industry:

The question of what it takes nowadays to get people to go to the multiplex and pay $9 to see a movie they can catch a few months later on HBO or Netflix is a perplexing question for Hollywood. But when a chick says to her boyfriend, “Hey, you want to go see a ballet movie?” it’s kinda helpful if she can follow that up with, “You know, the one with the Natalie Portman lesbian scene.”

He then follows up 20 paragraphs on the cultural history of the “lesbian scene” in print and film including this gem:

It would be a worthwhile project for some “cultural studies” grad student to go through the 1971-79 Penthouse archives and count how many girl-on-girl pictorials they published. And you could probably get a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do that research.

The irony of course being that you likely could get a grant from the NEH for such research and this is precisely the type of scholarship that our Mr. McCarthy would prefer our kids in college study as opposed to ROTC and the like.

This is usually the hit starved season for bloggers but Stacy knows that the phrase “natalie portman lesbian scene” will generate hits for years to come in search engines not yet invented to shore up his slow days. Why comment on the news of the day when you can make a long-term investment that will guarantee you hits and page views forever?

Update: Nothing like an Instalanche to start the new year, between the 63 (so far) at my party and this it’s quite a start. Don’t forget to tune into WCRN AM 830 tonight at 9:30 for DaTechGuy on DaRadio with DaScienceGuy and Barbara Espinosa of American Freedom. And remember two weeks from tonight Glenn will be my guest on the show (Jan 15 9 p.m. ) Mark that on the calendar! Listen live here. And if you are a business or a blogger looking for hits, you can’t do better than that for a draw.

A side thought about the military and the left

Posted: December 31, 2010 by datechguy in Afghanistan war, culture, media, opinion/news, war
Tags: , , , , , ,

As I been reading the continuing commentary on the Washington Post piece that has really got the attention of bloggers and readers from the daily pundit

“DADT as the reason for ROTC’s banning was always a sham. Now the mask is finally off. The elite professoriat doesn’t hate ROTC because of DADT, they hate ROTC because they just can’t stand “the warrior ethic”. That’s code for courage, honor, and duty, ethics all anathema to Leftist indoctrinators. They prefer us supine, afraid, and dependent on them.”

an opinion I share to Vodkapundit

“See there, Mr. U.S. Marine Captain — McCarthy doesn’t hate you. Why, he thinks you’re every bit as respectable as a Taliban.

who adds a graphic that says it all to this post at Ace of Spades HQ that compares the course requirement for ROTC at Sienna College and woman and gender studies at Columbia guess which one is more challenging academically?

While all of these are first-rate there is a thought that hit me this morning that hasn’t been touched on. Namely that the McCarthy’s of the world actually bring about the results they claim to deplore.

Consider; our media tends to reflect the views of people like McCarthy and the movies and media we put out there tend to show our troops in a very poor light, particularly over the last 40 years that has been exported as American Cultural and elite opinion to foes all over the world that the Saddam’s, Bin Ladin’s and Chavez’s et/al have bought into. It is precisely believe they have bought into the weakness of American culture and the people opposition to the military and the troops as uneducated rabble that they have been bold enough to make war figuring we can’t defeat them or oppose them.

Hundreds of thousands of idiotic and fanatical followers of these fools have learned the hard way that this is not true (in fact it was the last thing they ever learned), yet their fanatical leaders who are not hiding in caves manage to convince them that America will simply roll over. Why don’t they believe the evidence of the empty chairs where their predecessors have been? Because men like McCarthy promote the idea of a military unwanted and supported, because our media is so focused on the number of our casualties in war that they ignored the losses of our foes that dwarf ours.

These men are the enablers of the very wars they claim to oppose, and even more ironically are only able to be such enablers because our military is precisely NOT like the Taliban or any of these guys.

The secret here is that the McCarthy’s on the left’s position is really less about their hatred of the military, but more about convincing themselves of their own moral superiority. They can’t match the courage or the honor or the sacrifice of these men and women so they denigrate them in a vain attempt to convince themselves that it is their words and good wishes, dare I say it their faith in their own love for their fellow-man that outweighs the works of the military in risking their own lives to save others.

That’s liberalism in a nutshell belief and good intention trump works and results every time.

Update: Oh Brother!

Hitler could have been waited out. He might have been overthrown by his own government. Who knows? To have 50 million people killed: Hitler would have died within 10 years no matter what he did.

Oh and Lincoln was wrong to fight the civil war too. Moe Lane nails it:

Whichever editor approved this Washington Post article should be ashamed of him- or herself. I do not expect shame, but it’s long past time that we started telling these people when they’ve done something foul.

He certainly has the right to free speech but did he have the right to a Washington Post op-ed?

Professor Volokh takes on the “ick factor”

Posted: December 13, 2010 by datechguy in culture, the courts
Tags: , , ,

Way back in the early days of the Blog I talked about Gay Marriage and Richard Cohen’s self=righteous hit piece:

Personally on a religious level I can’t support gay marriage but this is not a valid argument for a non-religious person. On a non-religious level it seems to me you can not rationally say that gay marriage is ok and should be legal without also allowing either polygamy and incest between consenting adults. Both have a longer and more accepted cultural history worldwide.

And PLEASE don’t give me the “ick” factor argument about these other things being accepted. Ick is just an argument about culture. It is the same argument that one would have heard concerning gay marriage less that 20 years ago. It is particularly galling when gay people are subject to state sponsored murder in places like Iran and ick is invoked beside Islam.

Via Glenn we have Eugene Volokh being a lawyer with some interesting items in the news has expanded on this bigtime:

(1) Should it be illegal, and, if so, exactly why? Is it just because it’s immoral? Because legalizing incest would, by making a future sexual relationship more speakable and legitimate, potentially affect the family relationship even while the child is underage (the view to which I tentatively incline)? Because it involves a heightened risk of birth defects (a view I’m skeptical about, given that we don’t criminalize sex by carriers of genes that make serious hereditary disease much more likely than incest does)?

(2) Given Lawrence v. Texas — and similar pre–Lawrence decisions in several states, applying their state constitutions — what exactly is the basis for outlawing incest? Is it that bans on gay sex are irrational but bans on adult incest are rational, and rationality is all that’s required for regulations of adult sex? Is it that bans on gay sex don’t pass strict scrutiny (or some such demanding test) but bans on adult incest do? Is it that Lawrence rested on the fact that bans on gay sex largely foreclose all personally meaningful sexual relationships for those who are purely homosexual in orientation, whereas incest bans only foreclose a few possible sexual partners?

Go and read his whole point but let me say that a Judge named Antonin Gregory Scalia saw this coming a mile away as did an awful lot of us. When I made the argument saying that you can’t logically ban polygamy while allowing gay marriage in a discussion on Center of Mass podcast this year my host insisted that it was totally different.

I’ve talked about the ick factor in the past. And let me quote myself one more time:

This is a republic. If the people who support gay marriage can move enough of the public in the individual states or on a national level to support it in an actual vote then the more power to them. That is how a republic works. With the media’s help they are well on their way to doing so, but let the people vote for it and if you win, you win. If your argument holds water it should be capable of doing so and you should be able to make that argument stick.

Take out the word gay marriage and enter anything you want instead and the argument holds. The fact that a respected lawyer is actually making the case tells me this is already coming down the pike. And let me leave you with some John Nolte in terms of changing the culture with the help of the media:

And this is how cinematic propaganda works. Whether the filmmaker’s motivations are good or evil, the idea is to get decent and thoughtful people to start second guessing themselves as they’re enveloped in the dark and held captive by the powerful sound and fury of the moving picture. First we’re led to identify and sympathize with a particular character, then that character does something designed to challenge our belief structure

None of this is a bug. It’s a feature.

Older Entries
Newer Entries