Question authority—including the press
The press keeps telling us they’re Speaking Truth to Power. But they forgot to consider that they are Power, and that they often don’t Speak the Truth.
So maybe the public would turn on them someday:
A media that taught us to mock authority and culture was unprepared for the day when the audience would mock their authority and their culture.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) May 29, 2018
When he refused to consider the words of his fool, Lear became the fool.
For the MSM and all too many of the current left-of-center political class (and supporters), the only fools (and knaves—and deplorables) are Trump and those who support him.
In other words, the MSM and most of the Left do not have an OODA loop.
And apparently don’t feel they need one.
Who was it who said, “First time tragedy; second time farce”?
Meanwhile more than half of CNN Int’s time tonight was taken up with Roseanne. They never have time to correct their own mistakes.
Journolists are Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, and congruent. They are the propaganda arm of the Church and Democrat Party.
re: Barr
Interesting, there were apes (slavers) and humans (simian derivatives?) living on Planet of the Apes. There were brown and black apes. Were there white apes? Diversity was an issue. It seems that the black apes were militants, and the brown apes were leaders and intellectuals, while the humans were sustained or aborted under a Pro-Choice religious/moral philosophy (i.e. life deemed profitable or unworthy).
We are blessed to have these 2 examples of exemplary, concise writing from Neo and Wretchard.
Both hilarious and true.
Ditto Wretchard.
Last year [John] Cleese, a Liberal Democrat supporter, lamented the state of modern England, bemoaning a decline in traditional middle-class values, which he says has been replaced by ‘a yob culture’.
https://www.amren.com/news/2011/09/london_is_no_lo/
Yet I wonder whether Cleese can connect any dots between his work with Monty Python which relentlessly ridiculed “traditional middle-class values.”
What culture is likely to emerge after the traditional values have been beaten into the ground?
In the article Cleese also complains London is no longer an English city since all the immigrants moved in.
I love Python and John Cleese’s work overall, but there is something short-sighted here.
“In writing about what I was discovering,” [Susan Sontag] now realizes, “I assumed the preeminence of the canonical treasures of the past. The transgressions I was applauding seemed altogether salutary, given what I took to be the unimpaired strength of the old taboos.” But in fact, those taboos were like a house eaten up by termites, ready to collapse at the first push.
“What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand) was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large,” Sontag writes in 1996. “Barbarism is one name for what was taking over. Let’s use Nietzsche’s term: we had entered, really entered, the age of nihilism.”
–http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/95896/susan-sontag
Sontag had worked to broaden acceptance of art to include less serious work such as camp. Too late she realized she had helped undermine the high canonical art she loved and aspired to.
It was easy to poke fun at square middle-class folks listening to classical music or keeping up with Book-of-the-Month-Club literature, but at least they were trying. Then when the elitist intellectuals and the cool hipsters made enough fun of them, it was easy for the middle-class to throw all that aside and follow the path of least resistance.
YAY, wrechardthecat! I shall send him a box of mice!
“Speaking truth to power”.
Speaking codswallop, actually.
As it is wont to do (unfortunately).
But the empire strikes back—at least in this case:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5784335/New-York-Times-writer-trolls-Prescot-Journalists-article-labels-town-casualty-austerity.html
Ah, the NYT. It should really stick to lying about what it knows best: Trump and Israel….
Vonnegut got a number of cheap laughs that way. To epater, or better skewer, the bourgeois, is great sport. And the notion of a socially striving matron enthusing over “Beet-hoven” is kind of funny when you are college age and have just completed a number of humanities courses, and can name 4 or 5 expressionist painters, and explain (or repeat what you have been told about) pointillism.
I suppose the prosperous owner of a tool and die shop also looks pretty comical when he takes his wife out on Lake Michigan on his motorboat, to a comfortable New England legacy money socialite, as he sails off “The Cape”.
I’m convinced that Roseanne was commenting on VJ’s appearance as to having a somewhat scrunched up face and large forehead that reminded her of the makeup in the Planet of the Apes movies. I’m sure she was not meaning to make a racial comment. Unfortunately, as so many do, she tweeted before reflecting on what she’d written and how it might be interpreted.
In this day of political double standards any comment by any conservative (she isn’t one but she plays one on TV) that can possibly be interpreted as bigoted will be deemed so. And, no amount of explaining or apologizing will suffice because everyone (meaning liberals and the press) knows that it’s just the real bigotry of conservatives that accidentally slipped out.
What a sad commentary on our times it is that so few conservatives are willing to give Roseanne the benefit of the doubt. I have not heard one single person comment anywhere that she might not have meant to make a racist comment but was just making a joke about VJ’s looks as so many have done to Trump and his family.
As I’ve said to my wife of 50 years many times “If something I’ve said can be interpreted two ways and one of them makes you mad or sad then I meant the other one.”
The authority that was said to be mocked my the media were the ones that didn’t cling to more so-called progressive and modern trains of thought.
A bit more Sontag.
I’m not proud I read this obit-memoir piece from the London Review of Books written by a lesbian Stanford lit prof who played “forty-something slave girl from San Francisco” to Sontag’s “big lady she-cat in the sun.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/terry-castle/desperately-seeking-susan
Meow-rr!
But it was alternately fun and horrifying.
I didn’t realize Sontag wrote novels, much less expected to be considered “an essential modern novelist.”
Good luck with that.
In order to speak Truth to Power, first you have to be talking to entities with a higher social power and resources than you. The press has this status.
You also then have to speak the truth, which some people have problems with.
When a powerful media propaganda arm of deception claims that they are speaking “truth to power”… that is in itself one giant disinformation joke. They speak to the weak masses, the ones that don’t have the power or the resources to verify things. If there is a way, there is no will. When there is a will, there is no convenient option or gateway.
The job of propaganda arms is to speak to the weak and powerless, for that is how one makes the case of manipulating weaker people with stronger entities.
Hugh Hewitt the MSNBC house n..r er Conservative is able to get NBC deep state operatives to come on his radio program. Thursdays is Chuck Todd and today he was decrying that NBC is known to be fake news by all conservatives. He said we (i.e the NBC operatives) are all sincerely trying to be objective and to do our job fairly but it is the evil Right especially the President who are poisoning the political water.
The lack of self-awareness by these people is truly worthy of a paper in a journal on delusion.
During the interview the President’s tweet that the Comey firing did not have anything to do with the Russia investigation came out and both of them got in a dudgeon because they know Donald Trump’s motives better than he does.
ymarsakar Says:
May 31st, 2018 at 1:45 am
In order to speak Truth to Power, first you have to be talking to entities with a higher social power and resources than you. The press has this status.
You also then have to speak the truth, which some people have problems with.
* * *
Nice description of the inversion of the Claim of the Press.