The Bookworm Beat 8/18/16 — the passing parade edition and open thread

Woman-writing-300x265Once again that this blog’s motto is proven correct. My blog’s motto is “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” The only thing wrong with the motto is that the word “liberal” is a poor substitute for a whole category of Leftists and totalitarians of all political and religious stripes. Otherwise, it’s entirely accurate — as is beautifully shown by the story of Kasim Hafeez, who was raised on a steady diet of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic conclusions. These conclusions led him to being a rabid anti-Israel activist — something that changed dramatically when he read Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. Confronted with actual facts, Hafeez did a volte face on his previous prejudice and now tours campuses as a pro-Israel activist.

Facts favor conservativism, which is why the mainstream media works so hard to hide them.

How hard does this media work to hide facts? This hard: Larry Correia minces no words when he describes how appalling the American media is when it comes to reporting the news. He sees them as engaged in a four step dance of information death:

First, is there anything we can milk from this story to bolster our worldview? Y/N

[snip]

Second, is there anything in this story which could potentially make democrats look bad? Y/N

[snip]

Third, is there anything in this story which will make republicans look stupid or evil? Y/N

[snip]

Fourth, does this event in some way affect us personally? Y/N

This algorithm explains why, when George Bush waited three days during Hurricane Katrina before making an official visit, so as not to disrupt rescue efforts, every outlet painted him as an out-of-touch racist. Meanwhile, when Obama refuses to leave the golf course, only to announce that, in the face of the worst Hurricane since Sandy, he’ll visit sometime next week, the media is utterly silent. Go here and read exactly how Correia’s questions play out in real time.

In the same vein, Ann Coulter details how the media relentlessly twists anything that a conservative says, throwing it before uninformed Americans as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when it is more often a combination of vicious lies (often leavened by gross ignorance and staggering laziness):

Last August, Trump said the following about the way he was treated at the first GOP debate: “(Megyn Kelly) starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions, and you know, you can see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her — wherever, but she was, in my opinion — she was off base.”

This was nearly identical to what Trump said about Chris Wallace a few sentences later: “There’s a big difference between Mike Wallace and Chris Wallace because I watched them last night, you know, blood pouring out of his eyes, too.”

Suddenly the words “her wherever” were being described as a clear-cut reference to Megyn’s menstrual blood! (I have it on good authority that Chris Wallace has never menstruated.)

Trump expressed shock, saying of his accusers, “They have all dirty minds — I never even thought about it … I was thinking of ears or nose.” (Accused by the same forces of something revolting, Whittaker Chambers gasped, “What kind of beasts am I dealing with?”)

The day after Trump allegedly referred to Megyn’s period, I happened to have a number of social engagements with people who hadn’t heard about the scandale. So I gave them Trump’s exact words, told them the media were in hysterics about it, and asked them to guess why.

None of them — an Obama-voter, a conservative actor and a union organizer — were able to guess the ludicrous interpretation being placed on Trump’s words. At least one was visibly angry about the accusation (probably because he was on his period). But after a few weeks of media propaganda, even he flipped and became totally convinced Trump was, in fact, referring to Megyn’s menstrual blood.

Most people are highly suggestible. That’s why companies spend billions of dollars on advertising.

It’s almost refreshing when a New York Times writer drops the charade and announces that he’s abandoned any pretense of “reporting” the news and is all in for pure advocacy aimed at destroying Donald Trump. And it’s gotten so bad that even the Rolling Stones’ hard Left partisan Matt Tabbibi is getting worried that modern American journalism is giving itself a bad name. Thus, he stops casting stones only at Fox news and starts throwing a few in the direction of his ideological fellows.

Just remember, when the Second Amendment goes, so does the First.  And you know what it’s going to look like when the First Amendment comes under the same attacks as the Second, right? It’s going to look just as it appears in Like Frank Constanza’s subtle and brilliant “We need sensible speech control.” Jonathan Swift would have appreciated satire this good.

The class divide between #NeverTrumpers and the rest of us.  On my mother’s side, both of her parents came from incredibly wealthy, upper-class European families, one Jewish, one Protestant. Although WWI and WWII destroyed the wealth, I was raised with manners that ensured I could consort with royalty, should I ever be invited to do so. On my father’s side, his mother came from a solidly upper middle class German Jewish family; his father was a charming ne’er-do-well from Romania. He always aspired to my mother’s level of class.

Put simply, I was born in a snobbish home and educated to be a snob. I was rigid, condescending, judgmental, and tied into an American class system which holds thata university degree, preferably from one of the “better” colleges , is the true measure of a person.

Real life taught me how wrong my values were. The best values are those from Judeo-Christian morality, which is not tied to wealth or education, but to a simple commitment to those values. The best people don’t come from the Ivy Leagues. Instead, they are people, no matter sex, race, religion, country of national origin, or level of education, who try to live up to Judeo-Christian morals; who are kind; who have sound common sense; who value America for her American values, rather than trying to turn her into a hierarchical European echo; and who look for those same qualities in other people — again, without regard to sex, race, religion, country of national, or level of education.

I mention all of the above because Jack Cashill nails about the class divide between those conservatives who however enthusiastically or reluctantly have come to embrace Trump and those who very enthusiastically reject him.  Of course, this doesn’t mean all Trump supporters are “good” people and all NeverTrumpers are effete snobs. It does mean, though, that if you’re going to draw a bright line between the two groups, that’s the easiest line to draw. Back in 2008, the conservative elite swallowed hard and accepted Sarah Palin. Eight years later, though, Donald Trump is a working class bridge too far (and that’s true despite his wealth and the rarefied world in which he’s always traveled).

Roger Simon expands upon one of the many reasons the mainstream media loathes Trump. The most obvious reason that the media loathes Trump, of course, is that media members, all college educated, cling to Leftist shibboleths that Trump rejects. Another reason, Simon notes, is that the Obama era has been spectacularly good for the rich (and upper echelon media figures are all rich) and spectacularly bad for the blacks and other working class, lower class and unemployed class people that the media assures us can find social and economic succor only from Democrats. Read the whole thing. It’s good.

The Black Lives Matter movement is part of a grander Leftist plan. Pastor Stephen E. Broden argues compellingly (lots of facts and analysis, the way thinking people should argue) that the Black Lives Matter is turning American blacks into pawns as part of a grand plan to turn America into a truly socialist nation. (And Venezuela’s travails tell us how that will turn out.)

This seems like an appropriate place to address something I’ve long felt about the way in which Democrats treat blacks. They encourage them in vice, not just to keep them stuck on welfare and voting Democrat. They also do it to maintain their own sense of superiority, which is the educated Leftist’s underlying justification for refusing to demand that blacks live up to the same standards of behavior as these educated, elitist Leftists do themselves.

This thought, which has been floating in my brain for awhile, crystallized when Wolf Howling reminded me of something that Martin Luther King said: “Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We’ve got to face that.” What he was telling his audience, of course, was that they had to be self-reliant and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, because the whites were not going to help them.

What occurred to me was that whites of the time liked this crime rate, even if they complained about it. That is, they weren’t only discriminating against blacks because they felt blacks to be inferior. Instead, they were encouraging criminal behavior because it proved their thesis that blacks were indeed inferior.

Democrats haven’t changed a single bit since then. You poor African Americans, they say. What would you do without us, they ask. The only thing keeping you from complete breakdown is our policies — the very same policies that encourage the breakdown of the family, the marginalization of black fathers, and the dearth of policing. America’s Leftist elites don’t just need blacks on the welfare plantation to buy black votes; they need blacks on that plantation to reinforce the whites’ own sense of superiority.

The media is desperately afraid that Donald Trump’s speeches to black Americans are letting the cat out of the bag. Because they cannot dare address the substance of his speeches, they’re castigating them as utterly meaningless because he gave them in white enclaves, rather than a black community — as if a black community, brainwashed by the Left, would give Trump the opportunity to speak. By getting the message out however he could, though, Trump put on the airways something blacks need to hear.

And what they need to hear is that conservatives respect blacks and believe that they are capable of every damn thing conservatives live in their own lives: getting educated, holding jobs, having stable marriages with children raised by both a mom and a dad, and being law abiding. It’s only the Left that assures blacks this is impossible, and then creates the political and economic circumstances that make this assurance seem like the truth.

The SJW race war invades science fiction.  Yes, SJWs will leave no stone unturned when it comes to living in perpetual attack mode. This time the target is science fiction. Larry Correia ably fisks this nonsense. I’ll simply add that the SJWs aren’t making as much progress in the computer gaming and science fiction realms as they are in other places for two reasons:  Reason number 1 is that the young men who are seriously into gaming and science fiction (and it is usually men) tend to be remarkably single-minded and don’t care much about being called out for alleged social sins. Reason number 2 is that many of these same young men pride themselves on having logical, engineer-style brains, so they’re willing to make the effort to deconstruct the illogical nonsense that powers every SJW campaign.

SJWs make their greatest headway against the gainfully employed.  Another thing about the science fiction/gaming geeks (a term I use lovingly, not disrespectfully) is that they’re either not career oriented, or they’re working with like-minded folks, or they’re young enough not to have adult obligations (mortgages, children, etc.). The SJWs count their greatest successes amongst those who have the most to lose when they’re in the SJW crosshairs. There’s no one more vulnerable than an actual adult, with an actual job, and actual adult obligations and responsibilities. The case of Judge Ruth Neely is instructive.

More to come. My computer keeps freezing up and my family keeps calling me….