Category Archives: Media

UPDATE II: National Review Eunuchs (‘Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”)

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Free Speech, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Intellectualism, Journalism, Media, Race, Reason

The following is from “National Review Eunuchs,” my latest column:

In an interview with Brian Sack on GBTV, columnist and author John Derbyshire inadvertently anticipated his future in commenting about the dismissal from mainstream of another iconoclast, Patrick J. Buchanan:

“MSNBC is a private company. They can hire and fire who they like. But Buchanan is a serious guy who talks in a serious way about serious issues. Yet he is out of the national conversation. That’s bad.”

Not long after, Derbyshire was dismissed from National Review, where he freelanced. The “girlie boys” of NR had taken offense to “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” a column Derbyshire published at Taki’s Magazine. …

… National Review used to be conservatism’s flagship publication. These days its ideology reflects “Modern Republicanism’s” “dime store New Deal” proclivities (Barry Goldwater’s characterization). Launching oxymoronic attacks on Obamacare for “endangering Medicare”: that’s the extent of NR’s fight to free minds and markets.

… Tons of pixels have since been spilt in response to Derbyshire’s article and subsequent dismissal. The dimwitted discourse reflects a polemical landscape from which the Derbs of this world have been uprooted. None of John’s critics can write or reason as he does. None has his “range of historical and literary allusion,” as Mark Steyn observed. John Derbyshire’s is pellucid prose at its best.

A staff writer at The Atlantic epitomizes this fluffy, unfocused, Meghan McCain-like waffle (punctuated with a lot of, “I feel”) that lands you a job at a top publication. “As someone who places a high value on both robust public discourse and the fact that racism is now taboo,” he whimpered, “I won’t even try to mediate between these two except to say that Derbyshire’s piece was wrongheaded.”

That’s it? A feeble, frightened assertion is a substitute for an argument?

Such cyber-ejaculate gushed from other similar androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome. The volume of bad writers safely ensconced in high places, and their voluminous, vapid output strengthened this conviction:

More so than enforcing conformity—ousting John was about safeguarding the future of mediocrity. …

… Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about.

The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

Conservatism once had the genius of James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Chodorov, and Felix Morley; now the brand boasts S. E. Cupp, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rich Lowry, and their editorial enablers. (Perhaps NR will recruit Jedediah [sic] Bila in place of Derb?) …

Read the complete column, “National Review Eunuchs.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

UPDATE I: “Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”

About “those androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome,” mentioned in the column on John Derbyshire’s firing. Here is a typical example. His name is Alexander Nazaryan. he writes for the New York Daily News:

“Please, Lord, tell me that this is a joke. Please, please tell me that a human being did not actually think these things and, worse yet, think to write them down.”

Reading Meghan McCain has just about inoculated me to the above form of writing (for it is not a style in any recognizable way).

It conjures the scene in Mike Judge’s genius of a satire “Idiocracy.” To be precise, the dialogue Joe Bauer, the protagonist, conducted with the “‘tarded” doctor character, who discovers Bauer doesn’t have the identifying, state tattoo (listen to it HERE):

Doctor: “And if you could just go ahead and, like, put your tattoo in that shit.”
Joe: “That’s weird. This thing has the same misprint as that magazine. What are the odds of–”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo? Tattoo? Why don’t you have this?”
Joe: “Oh, god!”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo?”
Joe: “Oh, my god.”
Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

[SNIP]

You want to slap this Nazaryan man in the face. “Settle down. Stop it man. Quit the hysterical hyperbole. Stop the overwrought outrage. Calm down and write a simple sentence countering the Derb column.”

UPDATE II: To the ladies, Jeniffer and Scherie: Saddling the state solely for the dysfunction of a segment of the population is a form of determinism. According to this formula, free will and individual agency get short shrift. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and hard-core libertarians, who are also determinist, saddle the state. “The State made me do it” is how such social determinism can be summed-up.

By the way, according to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, white, middle America is in big trouble too. It isn’t as criminal as black America, but it is shot through with illegitimacy, laziness, unemployment, family and marital disintegration, etc.

UPDATE II: Flying in Perfect Propagandist Formation

Gender, Media, Military, Propaganda

Front men for the military-media-congressional-industrial complex swooped down in elegant formation after one of their own, “a student pilot and an instructor,” crashed “a Navy fighter jet,” Friday, “into an apartment complex in Virginia Beach, Va.”

Buildings were destroyed and a few lowly civilians hurt, but it was hard to ascertain the extent of the destruction or the identity of the injured by listening to corporate cable.

Shep Smith went weak at the knees, waxing orgasmic about the cool bravery of the careless culprits. The student pilot and his instructor told a bewildered home owner, “Sorry for destroying your house.” Shep thought that having survived the crash (never mind totaling an apartment complex), these careless sorts were the epitome of cool for apologizing.

For the better part of the day, various representatives, including Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, affirmed the community’s close ties with the assorted “military bases, including Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world.”

Adm. John Harvey, “the head of U.S. Fleet Forces Command promised to conduct a complete investigation into the cause of this mishap.” At a press conference in Virginia Beach, Navy Capt. Mark Weisgerber chimed in too.

Little was heard from “the densely populated neighborhood where the plane crashed.” But, no doubt, these good folks view this kind of occurrence as part of keeping an imperiled America safe.

Needless to say, the malfunctioning media failed to float the question as to whether student pilots should be practicing over densely populated areas. The same perfect propagandist formation was galvanized after Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the accused in the massacre of 16 civilians in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, did his deed.

UPDATE I (April 7): You forget, Myron, this important distinction, also the only one that matters. This was a fighter jet that crashed into a densely populated area, not a commercial aircraft which serves the public and is vital to the public. We all accept the dangers of commercial airplanes taking off and landing in proximity to our homes. This, however, was a military maneuver. It belongs away from civilization, where it cannot harm it. If these sacred cows want to play with their taxpayer-funded toys—let them do it where they cannot harm the good, peaceable people who fund their games.

UPDATE II: In response to TD Hunt, on Facebook. I have no doubt the military employs some of our finest men— where else can real men find employers who allow them to be men, and play with the kind of “toys” men naturally enjoy? My point in the post was to dissect the military-centered response of the special interests involved—media, military, pols, and yes, a compliant public. I heard the story as it broke. The first words out of the mouths of reporters, for hours to come, was to assure us all that the brave men of the military were safe and oh-so-cool. Not a peep about The People who might have been buried in the rubble of an entire apartment complex. The same military-centered reaction kicks in covering military atrocities abroad.

Latest Act in American Vaudeville

America, Intelligence, Media, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

American life has a vaudeville quality to it. You learn to shut it out, as you would white noise.

A perennial element of the national freak show is the obscene football scene. Another, it would appear, is the “Mega Millions” lottery. This is major news in mainstream. The queues for tickets are snaking around the country’s neighborhoods.

The odds of a “Mega Millions” jackpot win are 1 in 176 million.

What does it say of those who are placing bets on these odds?

UPDATE II: Treatment of Trayvon Travesty Masks Brutal Realities Of Crime

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Race, Racism

20 Replies

Is balance so much to ask for in the Trayvon Martin case? By balance I do not mean “Fair and Balanced” a la Fox News, or Andy Cooper’s “Keeping them Honest” deal.

What I mean is this: The deceased youth, Martin, appears to have been targeted unfairly. The facts of the shooting should be reviewed impartially. But for every Trayvon victimized by an Hispanic (if this is indeed the case), thousands of whites are brutalized by a sinecured black, criminal class, members of whom never get called out for what are crimes rooted in racial hatred.

Courtesy of “Suicide of a Superpower” come the FBI’s crime figures for 2007: “Blacks committed 433,934 violent crimes against whites, eight times as many as the 55,685 that whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black-on-white, with 14,000 assaults on white women by African American males in 2007. Not one case of white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study.” (Page 243.)

Not so long ago, the slaughtering of twenty-one-year-old Channon Christian and twenty-three-year-old Hugh Christopher Newsom in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2007, was dismissed as a racially neutral, garden-variety murder and rape.

Read my description of the crime in Into the Cannibal’s Pot, and explain to me how white America can thus forsake its children by accepting the racial innocence of their defilers:

Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused “by the tearing,” or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash. White trash. (pp. 35-36)

There are quite a few like it every year. Here’s one. Here is another. And still another. Want more? You got it. The name of the black rapist and killer of an 85-year-old lady: Tyrone Dale David. Oh, but this wasn’t racial subjugation, only sexual attraction, right? Yeah, right.

Are you sending your kids to school with this deranged, raging, sick-with-racism maniac? A “black Coed Threatens to Murder ‘10,000 Whites’ and White Prof; Attacks White Student and Security.” You probably are.

An even treatment of the Trayvon travesty would recognize and dignify the reality of crime in this country, and the daily black-on-white brutality, much of it rooted in a deep racial hatred, animus nurtured by the media and the political and academic cognoscenti.

UPDATE I: In reply to a Facebook reader: The racial extravaganza—show of brute force from race hustlers—is most certainly an issue here. Thus, to encourage an examination of the facts of the case, sans hysteria, one has to discount the circus. To do that, one has to discuss the reality of crime; who, on aggregate, brutalizes who in this country. To do that, you have to dispense with the idea that blacks are habitually victimized. They are not. Then you go on to deal with the offender in this case as an atypical offender.

UPDATE II (March 24): A doff of the hat to our reader for providing information that has emerged since Zimmerman’s public vilification began. It confirms that all information has to be gathered and processed before public pronunciations are made:

Witness: Martin attacked Zimmerman: MyFoxTAMPABAY.com

“The guy on the bottom who had a red sweater on was yelling to me: ‘help, help…and I told him to stop and I was calling 911,” he said.
Trayvon Martin was in a hoodie; Zimmerman was in red.
The witness only wanted to be identified as “John,” and didn’t not want to be shown on camera.
His statements to police were instrumental, because police backed up Zimmerman’s claims, saying those screams on the 911 call are those of Zimmerman.
“When I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point,” John said.
Zimmerman says the shooting was self defense. According to information released on the Sanford city website, Zimmerman said he was going back to his SUV when he was attacked by the teen.
Sanford police say Zimmerman was bloody in his face and head, and the back of his shirt was wet and had grass stains, indicating a struggle took place before the shooting.

[Via My Fox Tampa Bay]