Category Archives: Propaganda

Loughner, Language, and The Big Lie

Education, English, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Government, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

The following is from my new WND.COM column, “Loughner, Language, and The Big Lie”:

“… Jared Lee Loughner was both fixated on his representative’s imagined failings, and preoccupied with language and its misuse. These elements combined and then combusted in his head.

As a writer who really loves the English language, I am intrigued by the intrusive, persistent thoughts about grammar and illiteracy to have plagued Loughner.

You see, as I mourn the senseless slaughter of my countrymen, I also grieve – with almost every book I pick up or Internet tract I read – the bastardization of the language.

Given time, the nation’s mental-health mavens will confuse matters. They will likely assert, without any science, that misfiring neurotransmitters in the man’s brain brought us to this point. It would appear, however, that what pushed Loughner into an abyss was the inability to “read” the world around him.

Words are symbols. They are used as agreed-upon conventions to make sense of the world. For Loughner, these constructs no longer corresponded to the things they are supposed to describe.

The magazine Mother Jones interviewed Bryce Tierney, a close friend of Loughner. Tierney confirmed “the fascination Loughner had with semantics and how the world is really nothing – [an] illusion.” In addition, Loughner, said his pal, liked to insist (credibly) that government was “f—ing us over.”

Perhaps, then, it was not speech per se that inflamed Loughner’s febrile passions, but, rather, Orwellian speech; lies that belie reality.

The Big Lies. …”

Read the complete column, “Loughner, Language, and The Big Lie.”

UPDATE II: “Inside [John Esposito’s] Islam”

Islam, Israel, Jihad, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Pseudoscience

Very little was said about sample size, data-collection methods and other crucial methodological matters during the screening, on PBS, of the documentary “Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think.”

“We have the missing answers and statistics, gathered, parsed, and analyzed not by pundits but by professional researchers”: So goes a declamation on the website touting the program. This sounds a lot like advertising. You do learn that these stellar social scientists relied on the interview to collect this definitive information (which concludes that Muslims the world over are moderates). The interview is one of the least reliable tools in the social sciences. The questions asked and showcased, moreover, were most definitely leading questions. The answers people tend to give to loaded questions are usually bogus.

Other than Georgetown University Professor John Esposito, an A-list Islam apologist, “Inside Islam” introduced the viewer to emphatic, invested presenters of a one-sided view of the West as oblivious to Muslim opinion and aspirations.

I guess they had a valid point with respect to American foreign policy. You have to possess Olympian vanity to invade Muslim countries as America has done, with so little knowledge of the history of the people, the region and the outcome of prior such faith-based democratic missionizing.

However, the efforts of Dalia Mogahed, Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies (also an Obama appointee), to sanitize Islam became quite ridiculous when she contended that her faith specifies a series of inalienable rights designed to protect the individual against the state.

Come again? More than a religion, Islam is a fully developed political system.

Mogahed was commandeering the language of the American Bill of Rights to ingratiate Islam on her audience. What has happened to the social sciences? In my days you ruled out activists.

In the same spirit of “scientific” detachment, another self-styled social scientist, who spoke at length on “Inside Islam,” ventured that Israel was a piece of the West left behind in Muslim lands; a sore reminder of this occupation. Our impartial researcher was voicing the radical opinions of the Helen-Thomas School of Thought.

My old Afrikaner lecturers—the ones who drilled me in statistics—would have barred both Mogahed and her colleague from designing or partaking in a study for fear of biasing the results.

There is a good chapter on the death of the social sciences in “WE ARE DOOMED.”

The social sciences are most certainly doomed.

UPDATE I (Jan. 1): Stephen raises an interesting point about pathological sexual repression. Sexual deprivation accounts for the accepted practice of rampant homosexuality among heterosexual Muslims prior to marriage.

UPDATE II: Actually, Mercer (Who Eats Nails For Breakfast) had softened momentarily to the excuse-making, psychologizing, school of thought on Islam. Larry Auster keeps us focused: “It’s because they’re sexually repressed–no, it’s because they lack democracy–no, it’s because they marry their cousins–no, it’s because they were ‘left behind’–no, it’s because of Israeli cruelty–no, it’s because of … Anything But Islam.”

Putin Prosecution Backed By Pitchfork Mob

Criminal Injustice, Democracy, Individual Rights, Law, Propaganda, Russia

The criticism leveled at Russian justice by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for the prosecution and subsequent conviction on theft and money laundering of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. As the Russians rightly countered, the sentences Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev received pale compared to comparable prosecutions by American justice:

Take Bernard Madoff in the United States. He got a life sentence and no-one blinked – Putin told reporters who asked him about the case during a trip to Paris to negotiate new gas pipeline and auto manufacturing deals.

You can’t argue with that come-back.

Nevertheless, the trial of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky looks a lot like a politically motivated show trial, ordered, ostensibly “by the Kremlin to punish Khodorkovsky for financing Russia’s beleaguered opposition.”

Dimitri Simes, “president of the Nixon Center, a foreign policy research organization,” takes a nuanced look at Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

“He started as a tycoon. He was a very ruthless tycoon. He took a lot of government property, paying very little, and actually using government loans, which he never repaid, to become very wealthy.
He was, politically, very ambitious. He wasn’t just supporting opposition parties, but he was entertaining the possibility of becoming prime minister himself, curtailing Putin’s power.
Having said that, once he was arrested, he proved to be a man of courage, determination, eloquence. The government wasn’t able to break him. And when he was arrested first time in 2003, I really liked Khodorkovsky personally, and I was sorry for him, but, politically, I had mixed feelings, because he was threatening the government in a very ruthless way, using the money he got illegally to mount a political challenge.
What they are doing to him now is totally beyond the pale. It is not just selective justice. It’s really no justice at all.”

Says Anna Vassilieva, “head of the Russian studies program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies”:

“What does it tell me and tells all of us is that the power belongs to someone who exercises strength, not justice, not pardon, as we were hoping until the most recent phrase that Putin announced.
What we see is history repeating itself. Russian rulers are afraid to make compromises. And, obviously, allowing Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev free would be a sort of a compromise that no one can afford, because they know they will lose the trust.
We have to remember that — the trust of the population — we have to remember that the highest ratings Putin and Medvedev enjoyed were during August 2008, during the war with Georgia. And there was no chance that they would exercise the opportunity to compromise.”

[SNIP]

Let’s remember this: Be it in the US or in Russia, the masses are foursquarely behind their governments when it comes to the zealous, over-prosecution of the rich. Putin has the support of the pitchfork-wielding Russian folks. That’s democracy in action.

My, but the convicted has such beautiful, refined features.

UPDATED: The Founding Fathers Deconstructed (MT, Saint Or Sadist?)

Africa, America, Christianity, Colonialism, Founding Fathers, History, Intelligence, Morality, Propaganda

From today’s WND.COM column, “The Founding Fathers deconstructed”:

“The idea that the founders were flawed, sinful men like you and me is current among a hefty majority of Americans, conservative too. It is wrong. Quite the reverse. The founders were nothing like us. Not even close. I say this not as an idealist but as a realist.

” … Judging from their works and their written words, the American Founding Fathers were immeasurably better than just about anyone on earth today. That goes for that gnarled, somewhat stupid sadist Mother Teresa, whom Christopher Hitchens nailed in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. And it applies to the moral role models selected for us annually, courtesy of CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

The founders are matchless today both morally and intellectually – their actions bespeak a willingness to forsake fortunes and risk lives for liberty, a concept and cause alien to contemporary Americans, who are, mostly, bereft of both the mental and moral gravitas necessary to grasp it. … ”

The complete column is: “The Founding Fathers deconstructed.”

The Second Edition of Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society (the print edition can be purchased here) is now also available on Kindle.

UPDATE (Dec. 3): MT, SAINT OF SADIST? Just as I thought I had written an uncontroversial column, Rod writes to write me off as a writer, a human being, etc.:

He quotes my column: Judging from their works and their written words, the American Founding Fathers were immeasurably better than just about anyone on earth today. That goes for that gnarled, somewhat stupid sadist Mother Teresa, whom Christopher Hitchens nailed in ‘The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.'”

First sentence quite good – second one horribly bad. Are you an atheist like Hitchens? Why would you appeal to such a God-hater as any kind of authority on the likes of Mother Teresa. And I wouldn’t think you should need reminding, but Mother Teresa is now outside the scope of your “… immeasurably better than just about anyone on earth today” – since she died 3 years ago. I can’t argue you observation of “gnarled”, or even “somewhat stupid” – but “sadist”; do you get that from Hitchens, or is this you own “somewhat stupid” idea. You had my rapt attention, and your article was making great sense – until you brought in Mother Teresa, out of the blue, I mean the “wild blue, way up yonder” out of the blue. …
I’ve been reading you for years on WND, and must say you are an excellent writer, and appear to have a brilliant mind. But you really lost it with this one. Hitchens book title is bad enough, then you pile on further insult with your “Hitchens nailed [her]” comment – are you trying to be more vulgar and disgusting that the somewhat stupid atheist, or are you just being stupid yourself.
One last thing – beauty is (truly) only skin deep. Yet you include your picture in the article – I suppose so we can all see how ‘beautiful’ you are on the outside. But in God’s economy, I daresay Mother Teresa is far more beautiful – one of the most beautiful in my lifetime. Her beauty radiates from within, just as your ugly heart is coming to the light through your vulgar words.
I guess you’ve concluded by now that you’ve lost a long-time fan.

Mother Teresa is held up as a universal paragon of goodness in it purest form. Hence the reference to her in the column. As someone who prefers facts to blind faith, indeed I do think Hitchesn—who hung out in Calcutta with Mother, and did his homework well—nailed this sister’s act (as in “detect and expose”).

More later (the parrots are demanding birdie bread with calls of “mommy, mommy”).

Later: If I am supposed to discard the facts because they were dredged up by an atheist (CH), I suggest that my reader question his adulation for a woman (MT) worshiped by former White House communications director Anita Dunn.

“My favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa,” said the lizard-tongued Dunn.

I am absolutely sure that I share no heroes with Dunn. Picture a Venn diagram. There is no overlap between my mental/intellectual universe and Dunn’s.

The facts, as illustrated by Hitchen, show that MT preferred “providence to planning” in her facilities and was far from humane to the poor she took in. Hitchen quotes, among others, a doctor, the editor of the acclaimed “Lancet,” who was alarmed at the intentional neglect of proper diagnosis and pain management at a MT operation. On Mother’s orders, lavish, well-appointed homes that were donated to her cause were stripped bare of decent mattresses or creature comforts. The heat turned off. Volunteers got TB.

As a matter of theology, MT insisted that the poor be left to suffer horrible pain (while she was always airlifted to receive medical care in the best western facilities). Salvation through suffering for the poor, but not for Mother. Hypocrite?

MT, moreover, had a sizable fortune, enough money to outfit many clinics in Bengal (or wherever she operated). But she pursued “suffering and subjection” for her charges and for those working for her. If a dying man got an aspirin from her, he was lucky. Her palliative philosophy was in direct opposition to that of the Hospice movement.

Unforgivable. “Hell’s Angel.”

Myron, Mother T. had close ties to a lot of very corrupt governments, so she was hardly the epitome of private charity. Her motto seemed to have been: “money has no smell.”