Category Archives: culture

Media Bias

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We’ve seen how Facebook openly favors liberal news outlets; now we can see the unconscious bias against conservative outlets that media moguls have.

Facebook at least has started paying lip service to (and may actually be serious about) correcting its own bias.  The company held an allegedly off-the-record meeting with a dozen or so publishing executives (allegedly because of the leaks of the meeting’s contents by participants).  BuzzFeed‘s Editor in Chief Ben Smith, though, objected to the presence of “six conservative-leaning publications among the dozen or so outlets” present.  Apparently, actual balance between conservatives and liberals is biased representation.

Mr Smith said that the number of conservative publications in attendance indicated that Facebook had bought into the idea, promoted primarily by conservatives, that mainstream outlets such as the New York Times are liberal and should be counterbalanced by right-leaning opinion outlets, said people familiar with his remarks.

As if the NYT is a bastion of conservatism and needs no counterbalance.  Or, as if liberalism itself needs no counterbalance.

Then he attacked the journalistic standards of The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet that was represented at the meeting.  Lacking coherent argument, the liberal Smith stooped to character assassination, this time of a competitor.  He’s not alone in the character assassination; Lydia Polgreen, HuffPost Editor in Chief, in a canonical example of a pot complaining about a kettle, echoed Smith’s plaint.

It’s bad enough that the NLMSM is biased.  It’s bordering on dangerous when the NLMSM can no longer discriminate bias from balance.

Misunderstood

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A 13-year-old Huntsville girl was beheaded after she witnessed her grandmother assaulted with a knife and left to die on the ground in a cemetery, court testimony revealed.

A child.

The butchers were members of the Sinaloa cartel; apparently, they were disgruntled with the grandmother’s handling of a drug delivery.  It’s also…interesting…that the thugs chose to take the child along with the grandmother to the site where murder occurred, supposedly just to remonstrate with her before “[t]he argument escalated.”

These are the beasts that the Progressive-Democrats insist are not animals, just misunderstood yout’s.

An Award, or Two

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Recall Congressman Steve Cohen’s (D, TN) performance during last week’s House hearings with Peter Strzok, during which Cohen said Strzok deserved a Purple Heart for the questions he was being asked.  This, of course, is outrageous, deprecating as it does the decoration for servicemen who are wounded or killed in combat defending the right of guys like Cohen to be stupidly insulting.

As Sean Higgins, an Air Force veteran, put it,

How do you compare someone getting wounded in combat to someone getting in trouble for message he sent?

Indeed.

Cohen, on hearing the outrage (and not before) expressed regret for his comparison.

I regret mentioning the Purple Heart medal at yesterday’s hearing. My intent was to speak metaphorically to make a broader point about attacks against the FBI and Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation into a Russian attack on our country[.]

This is nonsense.  Cohen is an experienced politician; words are his stock in trade.  He knew exactly what he was “mentioning;” it plainly was a carefully planned slur against his Republican colleagues.  Were he regretful, he would have walked back his comment before the risk of political damage from it arose.

On the other hand, both Strzok and Cohen do deserve awards.  Strzok should get an Oscar for his performance as Starring Witness with his carefully staged outrage over his being called—gently—to answer for his shameful behavior as an FBI agent pretending to investigate Hillary Clinton’s (D) email escapades and Trump-Russia collusion.

Cohen deserves an Oscar for Best Supporting Politician for his staged “outrage” over the questioning of Strzok.

Voters should remember Cohen’s acting this fall.

Hypocrisy

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Recall Samantha Bee‘s slurs against Presidential advisor and First Daughter Ivanka Trump:

You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless c—!

That’s not all.  She also showed her disdain for men—any men:

Many men were also offended by my use of the word—I do not care about that.

Then she complained about the blowback, and “resigned” herself to it.

I do think that being a part of the outrage machine is an inevitability now. That’s a reality everyone has to grapple with—not just me. The level of ferocity is something I hadn’t quite experienced up to that point….

This, of course, is nonsense.  Bee, and her fellows on the Left, are the ones inflicting the ferocity and actively boosting its level.  She, and her fellows on the Left, know this full well.

Union Politics

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Here’s what the American Federation of Teachers union “agency fees” would have been spent on absent the favorable ruling in Janus vs AFSCME, which said that public unions can no longer make non-union employees pay into union coffers as a condition of employment.  These are actual resolutions to be offered at the AFT’s convention this weekend.

Keep in mind, too, that those agency fees typically ran to 60% to 80% of member union dues—which gives an idea of how much a public union’s intake was spent on politics rather than on member matters.

  • single-payer health care
  • opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline
  • President Donald Trump’s “immediate resignation or removal”
  • denounce[ing] Mondelez for moving Nabisco cookie production to Mexico [and non-union plants]
  • urg[ing] local affiliates to pressure “employers to sell or carry only Nabisco products made in free union workplaces in their schools and on their campuses.”
  • support for “anti-war groups”
  • removal of the US’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in South Korea, which “enhances the effectiveness of a US first strike with nuclear weapons by drastically weakening any nuclear retaliation by a potential target nation such as China or North Korea”

Regarding that last, I certainly wish it were true that THAAD would drastically weaken an enemy’s second strike, especially after its first strike.  That’s secondary, though.  Primary is the lack of relationship with actual education or with enhancing a teacher’s ability to teach that these AFT resolutions have.

The union does have a couple of education-related resolutions.

  • free college
  • [urging] “school districts, colleges, and universities to offer their students diverse views about military service and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, balancing arguments for military service and ROTC training with the arguments of critics of military service, including its health risks.”

Yeah, those are serious education proposals.