Category Archives: Propaganda

UPDATE III: Media Meltdown (Neurotic Nation)

Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Journalism, Media, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Technology

Partial meltdown, full meltdown, core meltdown: The operative word for the malfunctioning media is “meltdown.” Nuclear meltdown. There is no grand conspiracy, as suggested by Glenn Beck, in mainstream media’s coverage of the earthquake in Japan, only unadorned stupidity. Most media members have not been schooled in the craft of old-fashioned journalism, but in activism. To them, every news story becomes, reflexively, a cause; a reason to promote “awareness,” rather than tell the whole story without zeroing-in on appealing aspects of it. That so many of these outlets settled on the identical front-page lede is indicative of the unanimity in their thinking, of group-think. But, if you suggested to CNN’s Alpha Female Anderson Cooper that an exclusive focus on an angle in a story is itself evidence of bias, you’d just confuse this saccharine simpleton.

To be fair to the next newspapers, they show more fidelity to the truth by referring to “blasts” and “explosions,” rather than end-of-days scenarios:

USAToday: “Explosion rocks Japan nuclear plant”
BBC: “New blast at Japan nuclear plant”
The Washington Times: “Radiation leaks are feared following third a third explosion rocked one of Japan’s three crippled nuclear reactors.”

The following, however, is standard fare:

PBS: “Post-Quake Japan Faces Nuclear Threat”
NYT: “Japan Faces Potential Nuclear Disaster as Radiation Levels Rise”
Spiegel Online: “Fukushima Marks the End of the Nuclear Era”

Buried inside one NYT report was a less overheated tidbit: “To date, even during the four-day crisis in Japan that amounts to the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, workers had managed to avoid a breach of a containment vessel and had limited releases of radioactive steam to relatively low levels.”

As a consequence, we have not seen nearly enough footage of how impressively the Japanese people are coping; how stoical and courageous they appear in interviews. When CNN’s international correspondent alluded to “scenes of hardship,” the camera cut to a shelter. The images were heartbreaking, to be sure. But, unlike those taken during Katrina, they gave hope. One saw rows of neatly laid-out mats. The elderly were lying down and were snugly tucked in clean blankets. Kids, faces covered with masks, were sweeping the floors industriously.

In other footage, rows of people snaked around the neighborhood as they waited to purchase food and water. No looting and no stealing had been reported. Interviewed, the queuing individuals were grief-struck, but they held it together. To me, this is remarkable. Nobody was screaming for government aid, either.

I’d like to know more about how well the Japanese rescuers are doing. Or how supplies are holding up. But, I guess we are, to an extent, at the mercies of the one-track minded media collective.

Oh yes, I’ve seen quite a few interviews with American experts on the ground … in the USA. “It’s way past Three Mile Island already,’ said physicist Frank von Hippel. ‘The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion.'”

Where exactly was Professor von Hippel situated? At Princeton, New Jersey.

Far fewer have been the interviews with Japanese men and women at ground zero.

UPDATE I (March 15): Some sanity (via Steve Horwitz on Facebook).

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UPDATE II (March 16): “Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl.” Apparently “the sales of Geiger counters and potassium iodide supplements that can block some radiation have surged nationwide since Friday, fueled by concerns among some Americans that radiation released from Japanese nuclear plants could spread to the United States.” (Seattle Time)

I’m speechless. Doesn’t happen often. I consider myself on the ball when it comes to health hazards. Come six months, and the dentist and I have our perennial quibble. He wants to X-ray me, I say, “Unless you find something untoward during the exam, your full, refundable, set of X-rays is an event that comes around only every five years.

I wash fruit and veg, down to the berry and the grape, with soapy water; have done so for decades, in order to reduce the ingestion of pesticides. I’m the Howard Hughes of hygiene; I don’t go anywhere without my wet ones. But what I hear from the media and the masses about radiation wafting over from Japan is pure insanity. I don’t heed a word. It’s a shame that America’s journalists get to award themselves for heroism and journalism. These people are stupid sickos. I read at Larry Auster’s that liberals are crazy because they are slaves to tolerance. No; their state of apoplexy comes from their irrationality.

UPDATE III (March 16): Ann Coulter issues a “glowing report on radiation”: “Although it is hardly a settled scientific fact that excess radiation is a health benefit, there’s certainly evidence that it decreases the risk of some cancers – and there are plenty of scientists willing to say so. But Jenny McCarthy’s vaccine theories get more press than Harvard physics professors’ studies on the potential benefits of radiation. (And they say conservatives are anti-science!)”

UPDATED: The Tyrant’s Intellectual (& Non-Egghead) Enablers

Celebrity, Critique, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Intellectualism, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist, Uncategorized

Much has been made of the American singers who sang for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Nothing has been said of the intelligentsia that has sung his praise. There is a big difference between singing for your supper and singing songs of praise for this, and other, odious characters. Paul A. Rahe at The Chronicle of Higher Education dissects “The Intellectual as Courtier.” (Here, with thanks to my Canadian friend, Dr. Grant Havers.)

“If, in The Washington Post, one were to describe the elder Qaddafi as ‘a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat,’ if one were to call him ‘flexible and pragmatic,’ if one were to go on to suggest that ‘Libya under Qaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally,’ one would be apt—and with good reason—to be compared with Leni Riefenstahl, as Benjamin Barber was by Ken Silverstein at Harper’s Magazine.

Worse criticism would justifiably be in store for the intellectual sycophant who chose to write on the eve of the Libyan uprising, as Barber did at The Huffington Post, that Qaddafi ‘is not detested in the way that Mubarak has been detested and rules by means other than fear,’ especially if he were to add, ‘His son Seif, with a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the London School of Economics and two forthcoming books focused on liberalism in the developing world, has pioneered a gradualist approach to civil society in Libya, insisting along the way that he would accept no office that wasn’t subject to popular elections. No dynasty likely there.'”

READ ON.

[SNIP]

Because of their wide reach, Peggy Noonan (and her ilk)—while no intellectual— serves as a greater court courtesan than does the academic sycophant. As I chronicled in “LETHAL WEAPONS: NEOCON GROUPIES,” Noonan has gone as far as to conflate President Bush “with a Higher Power – Peggy believes God speaks through George W. Bush. From his furrows to his genitals, her high-flown linguistic banalities have lovingly depicted her man’s every inch. (See “He’s Got Two of ‘Em.”)

There are other culprits, of course.

UPDATE: Myron: You’re the funniest ever here on “nuance.” Why not cross-post this and other posts to the Facebook page, where the blog posts appear automatically? You’ll spice up the place in no time.

UPDATED: Wonder Woman In The Work Force (Beware The WASPs)

Affirmative Action, Feminism, Gender, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Race, Racism

Distaff America’s claims of disadvantage can be easily dispelled: “If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. The fact that the wily entrepreneur doesn’t ditch men in favor of women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.” [“Barack Against The Boys“] Yet the White House has preferred to perpetrate the myth, starting with a pay equity act the president signed at the beginning of his interminable term, and now with a new report affirming that “the earnings gap between men and women” is a result of all sorts of discrimination. HERE.

Scholarly reams have been written disputing this phony calculus, as it omits vital variables: How long the woman has been in the work force, her age, experience and education; or whether her career has been put on hold to marry and mother. Just as women are more likely than men to have had an interrupted career trajectory, so too are they more inclined to enter lower-paying professions: education instead of engineering, for example.

UPDATE: BEWARE THE WASPS. It was interesting to observe the neoconservative programmed response to the news about a “Texas college scholarship that targets only white male students.” I am referring to the obligatory PC huffing and puffing of Greg Gutfeld and his crew, last night, as to the “low-life racists” who would dare dream-up such a scheme.

Tucker Carlson, a kind of paleoconservative, chimed in with a full-throated denunciation, but, at least, pointed out the obvious: how is this scholarship different to the affirmative action programs that have infested every nook and cranny of the American labor force, public and private, for decades?

The thing that makes these gilded, neocon elites mere retread left-liberals is the fact that they mock the brute fact that poor white men are extremely marginalized in the workforce. The data abound. They ignore the Frank Riccis of the country. In my forthcoming book, I cite, among other sources, sociologist Frederick R. Lynch’s “Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action”(1991).

But in case you need a reminder of the jeering contempt the neoconservative faction of the left-liberal establishment has for the plight of white (poor) males in American society, watch last night’s “Red Eye” segment (it’s generally very amusing, by the way).

Naturally, this element of the establishment has never bothered to expose Saint Bill Gates’ “No-WASP Scholarship” fund.

Babes In Nosebags

Democracy, Feminism, Gender, Islam, Middle East, Propaganda

Has anyone spotted women in secular attire among the crowds of protesters in Egypt? I’ve seen one or two in the footage (via the Guardian). More often than not, when one does see women on the streets, they’re wearing the traditional nosebag. I understand that the self-celebrating media wants us all to slobber in unison over the protests. Fine. Whatever floats the people’s boat. (The conditions of my slobber were stipulated in “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn.”) Still, I’d like to know how representative are the images transmitted from the Egyptian street, and whether the presence everywhere of women in these nosebags correlates with their mistreatment.

Feminist Phyllis Chesler has a photo essay featuring Cairo University graduates in 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004. I can see what she means when she observes that “the female graduates in 1959 and 1978 had bare arms, wore short sleeved blouses, dresses, or pants, and were both bare-faced and bare-headed. By 1995, we see a smattering of headscarves—and by 2004 we see a plurality of female university graduates in serious hijab: Tight, and draping the shoulders.”

Chesler equates the trends with “a regression really, in terms of women’s rights.”

A June, 2010 Pew opinion survey of Egyptians confirms that Egyptian society is thoroughly Islamized:

Fifty nine percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics….Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion…When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

I agree that the demos must have its say. But must we American prance about like fools pretending that there are no concerns about popular rule in Egypt?