Category Archives: Propaganda

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?

UPDATED: The MEDIA Is The Message (Amanpour’s Anticlimax)

Ethics, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Middle East, Pop-Culture, Propaganda

Good journalism doesn’t assert or hypothesize; it reports the facts dispassionately, and from all sides of a dispute. Alas, I have just heard Neil Cavuto suggest, casually, to a guest on his FoxNews show, that the Egyptian police are probably embedded in the crowds and causing the commotion. The stupidity of the American media’s mindset; the need to see matters in simplistic, either/or dichotomies—this alone should disqualify them from reporting on the news. But inherent in what I’ve said is a presumption of standards. These no longer matter in journalism (and in many more fields of endeavor).

Cavuto’s sentiments, shared by the media monolith, proceed from the assumption that the Egyptian protesters are as pure as the driven snow, and that, therefore, the aggression witnessed must be the handiwork of agents provocateurs. This, even though we don’t have reliable information from all sources to determine what is unfolding on the streets of Cairo. Neil could be right. But good reporting is not a chance affair. In floating assumptions, Cavuto, like almost every other journalist reporting on Egypt, is out of line. They are helping to cement opinion in the absence of facts. Where is Michael Ware when you need him? (http://www.mickware.info/2011News/2011News.php)

Ware is probably too manly for the girls at CNN. Which brings me to that channel’s Alpha Female: the vain, posturing, preachy Anderson Cooper. Remember when this narcissist had his crew film him lugging around an injured Haitian boy? Cooper was roughed up in Egypt (a good producer should have taken him to the woodshed a long time ago). So he turned that into The Story; found a safe haven, where he hunkered down, and whiled-away the evening broadcast repeating what he had endured. Like Cavuto, Cooper also allowed himself to carelessly hypothesize—this time about the possibility of a Tiananmen-Square type occurrence the following day. Quite a few of his colleagues in the “profession” referred irresponsibly (almost wishfully) to the Tienanmen Square massacre, vis-a-vis Egypt.

The American media colors events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism, often creating reality on the ground, instead of reporting on it.

Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message. Is that still true? It is not the technology that molds the events—technology facilitates and frees information. Rather, it is the jet-setting journalist whose persona and ideology propel his pursuits.

UPDATE (Feb. 6): AMANPOUR’S ANTICLIMAX. Via Larry Auster:

Watching Christiane Amanpour on ABC this morning, it appeared this woman devoutly wished a revolution along certain lines. It had to be a world-shattering, epoch-shaping event. For this media moment, she was brought forth, along with her male counterpart, Fareed Zakaria.
However this breathless, transcendent moment got bogged down in bureaucracy. In her interview with Egyptian Vice-President Suleiman, it became apparent that Muburak would not step down before September, that the Egyptian parliament would proceed in an incremental, step-wise fashion to implement reform, and that the government was asking the crowds to disperse and go back home to their daily lives and jobs.
So much for the orgiastic climax to the days of rage and the revolution. ‘Twas not the consummation devoutly to be desired.

The point being that this is not how news is done.

UPDATE III: State of the Union: a ‘Disgusting Spectacle’ (Derb: Defeatist or Realist?)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Democrats, English, History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Politics, Propaganda, Reason, Republicans, Technology, The State, The Zeitgeist

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution required that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’ …) sensibility,” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire describes the State of the Union speech. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derb in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” a book I discussed in “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed'” (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=580).

John goes on to furnish the quotidian details of how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. “On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45).

Then there is the display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the audience, “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate” (this year it’ll be the family of the little girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter).

Derb analyzes this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and a trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.”

The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”

Prepare to puke. The antidote is “WE ARE DOOMED.”

UPDATE I (Jan 25.): Robert, have you even read “WE ARE DOOMED”? Derb is a paleo-libertarian and a bloody good writer at that.

UPDATE II (Jan. 26): Derb: Defeatist or Realist? Van Wijk: I did not know you were among the happy faced, cheery conservatives who eschew reality and insist that the band of fools plays on, as the Titanic goes down.

Almost all of Derb’s misery making factual survey of America, in We Are Doomed, is correct (bar his biological determinism, which is supposed to sunder free will, but is not convincing). In fact, it mirrors a lot of what I’ve said and written (why, I’m cited in the book vis-a-vis Robert Putnum). There is no getting out from under:

1) Crippling government debt

2) The layers of crap culture and cultural products (literally: did you know that the MOMA, or its British equivalent, stores bodily waste in hundreds of vials produced as art?)

3) Perverted intellectual and moral standards

4) Crops of affirmatively appointed leaders, in all fields of endeavor, which will be with us for decades, if not longer, because of (1) and (2), among other reasons.

What’s your problem with that (Derb’s) rational, reality based conclusion—an analysis effected over the years in these (my own) pixelated pages?

Isn’t it clear that freedom and mass society—unfettered democracy, mass immigration mainly of voracious tax consumers with a visceral hatred for the history and historical majority of this country, on and on—cannot coexist?

It does not mean that one doesn’t continue to fight (I do), but it’s a losing proposition. Talented, industrious, taxpayers—doing highly skilled work—will become less numerous and more burdened with the years. This shrinking tax-base will be working to keep the voracious racial Idiocracy, represented faithfully by the political and intellectual class, in the style to which they have become accustomed.

(As aside: My source in one of America’s most lauded corporations, brilliant in his performance and intellectual leadership, is forever being told to develop his sorry “emotional intelligence”—even given books about this crap—as he solves the most complex of technical and logical problems. Why? because the manly, forceful, algorithmic iteration of facts, without dissolving into tears and embracing the intellectually halt and lame and dysfunctional around you: that is BAD. Men like that are not dismissed, because few can replace them. But they are cornered and cowed. Wanna tell me that a society that disempowers and subdues talent will survive?)

Isn’t it idiotic to attack the messenger, Derb? In any case, I’m glad you don’t attack me for advancing a similar message for years.

UPDATE III: To the letter about his alleged taste in poetry, Derb has provided some references in the Comments sections below. What about Louis MacNeice? I’m a poetry primitive, but I quite liked MacNeice.