Monthly Archives: August 2019

Obliviously Dishonest

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Portland’s city government ran a survey of the residents therein to see if the government folks could understand the major problem facing those residents in the eyes of the residents.  Homelessness was the biggie, with 88% of respondents saying so.

Respondents also had decidedly mixed views of the city’s future.

…45% of respondents said they felt positively about the city’s future, while an equal number declaring [sic] their pessimism.

On the matter of race, there’s this:

Asked to react to the statement that Portland is “making progress on becoming a city where a person’s outcomes are not based on their race,” 40% of respondents agreed with its sentiment and an equal number disagreed. Black residents were most likely to disagree.

But here’s the money quote, and it throws the whole thing into a cocked hat.

Results likely would have been more unflattering if officials did not weight the survey responses based on the race of respondents. Responses from the 12% of survey takers who declined to state their race were disregarded. Those people were “more likely to feel negatively about the future of Portland,” according to the survey report. They were also more likely to name safety and trust in government as city challenges.

45% of a carefully selected subset of respondents.  Forty per cent of a carefully selected subset of respondents.

Hmm….

What we have here is city government deliberately skewing the results by throwing out responses it didn’t like or thought it wouldn’t like.  On top of that, they did the skewing right out in the open, which shows pretty conclusively their achievement of the near impossible: they’re simultaneously oblivious and dishonest.

This is the Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) influence.

 

h/t The Great Adventure at Ricochet

“Journalists”

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The NLMSM is getting their own tactics, on occasion, used against them.

And they’re squalling like stuck pigs.

Last week, a New York Times editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was demoted after 10-year-old tweets mocking Jews and American Indians resurfaced and were widely covered by conservative outlets.

But, but—no fair! [emphasis added]

“But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for—or as a warning not to pursue—coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” wrote reporters Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel.

Here, though, are a couple of examples of “news media scrutinizing people in positions of power” (I’m omitting the NLMSM’s conspiracy-peddling here):

[A] CNN crew showed up on an elderly woman’s lawn in Florida to publicly shame her for unknowingly sharing a “Russian-coordinated event” on her Facebook page. Consequently, the woman received waves of violent threats, abuse, and harassment online.

And

[T]he Daily Beast reporter Kevin Poulsen doxed a black forklift operator from New York who doctored a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Naming the man would have been entirely legitimate.  Doxing, however, goes a bridge—a deliberate bridge—too far. Doxing someone publishes his address, his personal contact data, where he works, the names and place of work of his wife, and the names of his children—and it often includes where those children go to school.

But the screaming from pseudo-journalists is this: don’t you dare do to us what we do to you. You cannot hold us to our own standards. We’re special, and these are special tools.

Can there be any further question of the fundamental dishonesty of the press, or of the NYT in particular?

No, Mssrs Peters and Vogel. You’re not that special, and neither are the public’s tool of discourse and criticism.  You are that disgusting, though.  And Wright-Piersanti?  Look for him to be quietly repromoted in a bit.

 

h/t Grim’s Hall

Brazilian Forest Fires

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Deutsche Welle‘s Loveday Wright wondered about the Amazon forest fires in northern Brazil:  Can international pressure help put them out?

Not when the Brazilian government, for good or ill, exposes them to fire by allowing clear-cutting in favor of agriculture.

But more importantly, not when climatistas openly lie about the extent and level of destruction of the fires.

Several of the most widely shared images aren’t actually from this month’s fires.
Some are old photographs of the Amazon, and some aren’t even from the area at all.

For instance:

Although [a fire image] shows a fire in the Amazon, it’s actually a stock photo taken in the 1980s by a photographer from National Geographic….

And

An image of a burned rabbit has been shared over 1000 times, but is actually from fires in Malibu, California.
One of those who shared it also posted a picture of a monkey crying over her sick baby, which is actually from Jalabur in India in 2018, by Avinash Lodhi.

And not when national politicians celebrating trading on their celebrity openly repeat the lies.

French president Emmanuel Macron and Leonardo DiCaprio were among those to share a photograph showing a wall of flame rising up from a swathe of rainforest.
Although it shows a fire in the Amazon, it’s actually a stock photo taken in the 1980s by a photographer from National Geographic….

While there are legitimate images of the real fires in the Brazilian Amazon, the lies and manufactured hysteria about climate! climate! climate! eliminate all credibility about global warming, and they hinder legitimate efforts to deal with the legitimate fires and other local ecological problems and their actual causes.

Red Flag Laws, Again

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Now The Wall Street Journal is beating the drum for red flag laws that would authorize seizure of weapons from anyone, and anyone associated with that one, that Government, or a Government-appointed/approved body deems a threat.

Consider one of the three cute anecdotes the WSJ cited via its drumbeat.

Police were tipped off by school officials that a 14-year-old boy had praised mass shootings. He used campus computers to search firearms and terms like “white power.” Taken to a psychiatrist, the student said he was joking.
The boy’s father owned a rifle and a pistol. A short-term red-flag order was obtained, and the two firearms were relinquished. After a hearing a one-year order was issued. [In all three anecdotes cited, the outcome was a “one-year order.”]

The WSJ right wondered whether

the father whose guns were handed over suggest[ed] that he was unable or unwilling to secure them from his 14-year-old son?

Then the Editors dismissed this trivial concern.  I ask, though, what happened to the father’s Second Amendment rights? I answer with dismay: they seem to have been trampled without a fare-thee-well. His firearms were taken for no better reason than that someone associated with him was deemed maybe a threat sometime in the future. The boy’s claim that he was joking seems to have been dismissed just as out of hand.

There are larger problems, though, than just a few carefully selected anecdotes.  What about false positives? Where will the wrongly accused—whether mistakenly or maliciously—go to get his reputation back?

What about false negatives? Now the true threat is both warned and angrified—and in the same household, perhaps, as the one who accused him.

With true due process, how can the system act quickly enough to forestall an imminent threat?

The WSJ‘s Editors closed their piece with—perhaps—a glimmer of understanding:

…red-flag laws are no panacea for mass shootings. But…if reasonably drafted, they appear to be a step forward: gun control for the dangerous and unstable.

But then they demonstrate their fatal misunderstanding.  Red flag laws cannot be reasonably drafted, not only for the reasons above but for the WSJ‘s rationalization of that step forward: the laws focus on the tools a dangerous and unstable person might use and not on the dangerous and unstable person.

No system is perfect, certainly, but no system should be put in place that threatens the liberty and fundamental rights of all of us because a tiny per centage of us are bent on mayhem, especially when that system is so badly flawed as the one proposed here.

The energy being pumped into this euphemism for an assault on our 2nd Amendment should be focused instead on finding ways to deal specifically with those tiny few dangerous and unstable persons.

Identity Politics

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In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal ironically headlined We Liberals Need Self-Criticism, Ioannis Gatsiounis, a writer who reports on race and politics, called for an end to Progressive-Democrats’ (whom he thinks are “liberal”) practice of identity:

[S]top obsessing over identity.

But in the very next sentence, he went right back to identity politics:

We can and should support policies that benefit disadvantaged groups, from criminal-justice reform to a higher minimum wage and affordable health care.

Pick one: either liberals Progressive-Democrats should stop obsessing over identity—stop singling out some groups of Americans for special treatment—or they should continue singling out some groups of Americans for special treatment—continue their identity politics.

Unfortunately, the 21st century segregation of identity politics is at the core of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s ideology.