Tag Archives: culture

How the European Left Sees Us

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s how Gordon Repinski and Holger Stark see us, as they say in so many words in their Spiegel Online piece from last Friday.

On that evening [on which Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump won the election and became President Elect Donald Trump], America experienced a revolution. The successful postwar Western model, rooted in mobility, enlightenment, and inclusion has been convulsed by this angry protest vote.

Because it couldn’t possibly be the case that the successful postwar Western model, rooted in mobility, enlightenment and inclusion has been rescued from the Progressive, cynically divisive identity politics, deliberately dependence-on-government-making Left of the President Barack Obama (D) administration.

And

It was a vote of no-confidence in globalized capitalism, an expression of America’s partition into liberal cities and backward rural areas.

Because it couldn’t possibly be a repudiation of too easily done and so too bad trade agreements and not at all a rejection of international trade.

Because rural Americans are just rubes, too stupid to keep up with their Betters of modern liberalism (read: Progressivism) in our cities.

And

The political system has experienced a delegitimization of democracy that makes it impossible to simply carry on as before. It is a delegitimization aimed primarily at the elite, Hillary Clinton first and foremost—a woman who represents this system more than any other politician.

Because elitism is a better form of democracy than actual democracy, and even a better form of democracy than American republican democracy.  Never mind that Hillary Clinton, as the exemplar of this elitist, corrupt (literally as well as metaphorically) elitism is the raison d’être for that rejection—explicitly to rescue republican democracy from that elitism.

The Violence of the Left

Posted on by
Reply

From coast to coast, demonstrators are burning flags and effigies of the president-elect while declaring that they refuse to accept Trump’s victory. But observers online are claiming that, in some cases, protesters were bused to the scenes—a telltale sign of coordination.

And

Others claimed to have found ads posted on CraigsList in which a Seattle-based non-profit was soliciting “Full-Time Activists.”

“We are looking for motivated individuals who are seeking Full-Time, Part-Time, and Permanent positions,” reads a line from the ad from Washington CAN! posted on Wednesday.

Is this the hatred of the Left, too?  Carefully organized?

The Bias of Journalists and Journalism

Posted on by
1

Howard Kurtz, that self-styled bastion of journalistic criticism who writes for Fox News has a piece out about a Trump-hostile media and “some pundits admitting they blew it.”

After producing a litany of…mistakes…made by newspapers and pseudo-journalists as they produced their erroneous analyses and predictions, though, this is all that Kurtz could conclude:

[W]e somehow decided that we knew what was best for them.

Kurtz is missing the point.  His fellow pseudo-journalists didn’t miss their predictions because they misunderstood or blew off mainstream Americans—Americans outside their New York and West Coast bubble—or because they thought they knew what was best for us.  That’s a symptom, not a cause.  His fellow pseudo-journalists misunderstood and blew us off because they’re too biased to see the truth.

And so Kurtz exposes his own bias.

I suggest that the era of the NLMSM is past.  It’s time for ordinary Americans to go elsewhere for our news and other information.  It’s time for us to use our own judgment in evaluating that news and information.

The print and broadcast sources have shown they cannot be trusted; their output has no reliable value.  Their output, at bottom, is no different than the entertainment fluff published by the National Enquirers or the Globes or the Stars of the entertainment industry.  Kurtz and his ilk just take themselves more seriously.

The Left’s Blatant Bigotry

Posted on by
Reply

…continues.  A couple of examples illustrate the shame.

Here’s Jamelle Bouie, political writer for Slate in a tweet:

I didn’t quite understand how much white people hated us, or could at least live with that hate. Now I do.

He went on:

Donald Trump did what Romney and McCain wouldn’t do. He all but cried “nigger.” And it worked.

Because “white people” disagreed with this black man.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC:

I’m thinking about President Obama too. I mean, to have the first African American President succeeded by a guy who was endorsed by the KKK…it’s a big deal.

It’s also a big deal that Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was endorsed by the California branch of the KKK, and she quietly accepted that endorsement, while Trump rejected the KKK endorsement of him.  Maddow carefully elided that news item.

And Jeff Jarvis, Professor, Director of Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at City University of New York:

I fear that journalism is irredeemably broken, a failure. My profession failed to inform the public about the fascist they are electing.

He’s right about journalism being broken.  It’s broken and untrustworthy for the blatant bias and deliberate mischaracterization he demonstrated in that second sentence.

Because those he’s decided are “uneducated and uninformed” are that because they disagree with this “journalist.”

Even Fox News‘ bastion of media criticism, Howard Kurtz, can’t bring himself to recognize this sewage as anything more than unattractive vitriol.

And then there are the Left’s rank and file, the equivalent of what no less a light than President Barack Obama has disparaged as bitter Bible-clinging, gun-toting denizens of flyover country.

Thousands of people coast-to-coast took to the streets Wednesday night to protest Donald Trump’s election, disrupting traffic, chanting anti-Trump slogans and some ending up in handcuffs.

From New England to heartland cities like Kansas City and along the West Coast, demonstrators bore flags and effigies of the president-elect, disrupting traffic and declaring that they refused to accept Trump’s victory.

These were far more than protestors, though, Fox News‘ decision to minimize their behavior as protests notwithstanding.  These were vandals who damaged private property, burned the American flag, lit fires in street intersections, shut down highways.

Because these toddlers didn’t get their way last Tuesday.

So much for binding up the wounds and coming together for the good of the nation after the election, as the Left’s own champions, Clinton and President Barack Obama, called for.  The bigots of the Left will never give up their divisiveness.  In a very Locke-ian sense, they’ve created themselves as outlaws.

The rest of the Left, hopefully the large majority of the Left, need publicly to disown these bigots among them, to separate themselves from this still too-active detritus of the Democratic Party’s past.

Freedom’s Just Another Word

Posted on by
2

…as far as the PRC is concerned.

The good citizens of Hong Kong had elections for their representatives in the city-state’s Legislative Council, and two folks who participated in protests two years ago against PRC intrusion into Hong Kong government affairs were elected.

Never mind the voice of the people.  They have none wherever the PRC can reach.

The Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress said people elected to the city’s legislature cannot retake their oaths of office if their first attempt was invalidated for being insincere, not solemn, or deliberately misread.

Naturally, the ones who decide whether an attempt was insincere, not solemn, or deliberately misread are those of the PRC’s government and their puppets allies in the Legislative Council.  And so, Yau Wai-ching and Sixtus Leung are being barred—by the PRC—from taking their oaths of office, after their first attempt was blocked by the Council’s leadership because the two were too lippy to suit them, and before a Hong Kong court could adjudicate the matter.

So much for freedom in PRC satraps.  So much for the PRC’s commitment vis-à-vis Hong Kong, made as part of Great Britain’s handover of Hong Kong.