Category Archives: Media

Chile Is No Haiti

Foreign Aid, Media, Nationhood, Race, The West

Does anyone not a moron dispute the fact that Chile has coped reasonably well with what was “one of the most powerful earthquakes in history”? If to judge by the number of opprobrious pieces the malfunctioning media, activist Anderson Cooper in the lead, ran about the little looting there was in Chile—they have been hoping that Chile, who’s been subjected to aftershocks as strong as Haiti’s main event, would fare as poorly as did the Africa of the Western Hemisphere.

But Cooper will have to reserve his fashionable T shirts for another time. The death toll in Chile has been revised down from about 800 to 452. Troops and firefighters have galvanized. Chilean telethons are being conducted, lo, without George Clooney, and Chileans are flying patriotic slogans such as “Chile Helps Chile.”

The country’s economy is quite good and the GDP per-capita decent.

I suspect that at bottom, the following blog title reflects what Cooper, the Alpha female at CNN, would have liked to have said and proven:

“Chile Earthquake Proves White People Loot Too.”

Chile’s ethnic groups: “white and white-Amerindian 95.4%, Mapuche 4%, other indigenous groups 0.6% (2002 census)”

Updated: ‘The Shangri-La of Socratic Disinterest’

Canada, English, Intelligence, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Rex Murphy, easily Canada’s finest political writer, has furnished us with the best description of the Bill O’Reilly Show: the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest.

I would imagine that to practice the Socratic Method, a man must possess a curious mind and be less of an egotist, attributes the intellectually incurious Mr. O’Reilly lacks.

In any case, “the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest” is a wonderful turn of phrase.

Update: I see we’ve been visited by one of the many fans of the big-government, interventionist neoconservative Bill O’Reilly. Did I miss that lot! This from “DUMB AND DIRTY NEOCON ARTISTS”:

Like any leftist, neocons support the meddlesome expansion of the “Managerial State” at home. Somewhat at odds with many liberals, the neocons want to take the same intrusive crusade abroad. This is what defines Bush’s neoconservative administration: social engineering both at home and abroad.

Updated: 'The Shangri-La of Socratic Disinterest'

Canada, English, Intelligence, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Rex Murphy, easily Canada’s finest political writer, has furnished us with the best description of the Bill O’Reilly Show: the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest.

I would imagine that to practice the Socratic Method, a man must possess a curious mind and be less of an egotist, attributes the intellectually incurious Mr. O’Reilly lacks.

In any case, “the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest” is a wonderful turn of phrase.

Update: I see we’ve been visited by one of the many fans of the big-government, interventionist neoconservative Bill O’Reilly. Did I miss that lot! This from “DUMB AND DIRTY NEOCON ARTISTS”:

Like any leftist, neocons support the meddlesome expansion of the “Managerial State” at home. Somewhat at odds with many liberals, the neocons want to take the same intrusive crusade abroad. This is what defines Bush’s neoconservative administration: social engineering both at home and abroad.

Update II: Coulter’s Message To Tea Party

Ann Coulter, Conservatism, Liberty, Media, Private Property, Republicans, Taxation

GET BEHIND REPUBLICANS. “I get angry at people who act like there is no difference between the parties. That’s insane,” insists Republican Party booster Ann Coulter.

She instructs the tea party to get behind this or the other Republican—Bill Brady in this instance—if they are for “prayer in schools, against abortion and gay marriage.”

Tucker Carlson mentioned a poll that shows tea-party minded individuals (you and me) don’t give a tinker’s toss about these conservative fetishes. Sounds about right.

Coulter clearly doesn’t get what the Tea Party groundswell is all about. Most wealthy, silver spoon-in-the-mouth establishment types don’t get it. After all, their incomes are guaranteed, irrespective of the coming hyperinflation, by a population stupid enough to mistake their message for a message of freedom.

Update I (Feb. 27): Good will runs eternal for Ann Coulter. She takes that to the bank.

There is a scene in “Dangerous Liaisons” where the protagonist, a lying schemer, is “booed and disgraced by the audience at the opera.” No longer welcome in polite society, she retreats to her boudoir never to emerge again.

If American society had an ounce of moral fiber, this would be the fate of Ann Couter and the other LETHAL WEAPONS of the NEOCON variety—the blood-lusting vampires of the Republican War Machine, whose bitch-hot war talk helped send gullible young men to their deaths.

Update II: Daniel Hannan:

“The American patriots didn’t see themselves as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their own minds, all they were asking for was what they had always assumed to be their birthright as freeborn Englishmen.

Part of that birthright was liberty from unjust, arbitrary or punitive taxation. The proposition that taxes ought not to be levied except by elected representatives would have been every bit as popular in Great Britain in 1773 as in America. …

The American Revolution, in other words, was inspired by British political philosophy and – more to the point – by British political practice. American patriots saw themselves as part of a continuing British tradition, stretching back through the Glorious Revolution, back through the agitations of Pym and Hampden, back even through the Great Charter to the folkright of Anglo-Saxon common law.”

[SNIP]

IT’S ALL ABOUT PROPERTY RIGHTS, Ms. Coulter, not fetuses or matrimonial vows.