Images | Commentary | Digital Scrapbook
Related:
RIP applies to both
Related:
Oops, hold it!
Related:
Harry was abused as a child. Callous disregard for his humanity.
These people are all Democrats. We live in the age stupid.
They are aided and abetted in the fakery by our corrupt media and corrupt and politicized Washington bureaucracy.
The transformation from phony “objectivity” to open one-party orthodoxy hasn’t been an improvement
Matt Taibbi:
“…Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?
Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.
Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:
— Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty
— Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor
— Biden’s historic victory for America
The most Soviet of the recent efforts didn’t have a classically Soviet headline. “Comedians are struggling to parody Biden. Let’s hope this doesn’t last,” read the Washington Post opinion piece by Richard Zoglin, arguing that Biden is the first president in generations who might be “impervious to impressionists.” Zoglin contended Biden is “impregnable” to parody, his voice being too “devoid of obvious quirks,” his manner too “muted and self-effacing” to offer comedians much to work with. He was talking about this person:
Forget that the “impregnable to parody” pol spent the last campaign year jamming fingers in the sternums of voters, challenging them to pushup contests, calling them “lying dog-faced pony soldiers,” and forgetting what state he was in. Biden, on the day Zoglin ran his piece, couldn’t remember the name of his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and referred to the Department of Defense as “that outfit over there”…
…More than 70 years ago, George Orwell explored the intention behind the dystopian determination to deprive the individual of his true self. Emptied of all his former ideals, meanings, and priorities, he would become an empty vessel for totalitarian dogmas: “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
Intellectual subversives have left American youth with no ideal that cannot be dismantled. And the young are angry—at their parents, who failed to empower them with deeply rooted values; at their semiliterate and confused school teachers, who beg for respect and try to win it by teaching children to respect nothing; at their college professors who, having forsaken their commitment to education, assist political efforts “for a peaceful and just society.” Professors fail to provide knowledge or to teach critical thinking; instead, they urge students to scorn outmoded beliefs and send them off to adult life with a farewell message that life is meaningless. Losers—in a morphological sense of the word, for they are as lost as have been their “dislocated” peers in the past—the young are famished for new principles to fill the yawning hollowness. They are perfect material for political demagogues.
“A sacred place cannot be empty,” affirms a Russian proverb. To the new “progressive” creed the rebels must hold on for dear life: Aside for allowing them to redirect their accumulated anger toward newly defined enemies, it offers a brand-new core identity, an illusion of values, and a sense of belonging. Revolutionary activity is highly addictive, and unlike other narcotics, the perpetual pursuit of visionary ideals provides a never-ending sense of exhilaration, backed by the promise of an impending grand triumph…”
Dominic Green:
“…If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable.
He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.
It doesn’t matter whether Biden means what he says, any more that it matters whether Meghan Markle told the truth when she implied that her son was denied a prince’s title because he might have dark skin. It’s the feelings that matter: feelings of security, empathy and contentment, and especially the feeling that Nietzsche correctly foresaw as the root feeling of modern life, resentment.
The result is the rule of sentiment over thought and symbols over reality. The Biden administration didn’t invent the moral and humanitarian disaster at the southern border. But it has produced a new crisis by altering the laws to satisfy sentiment.
It feels cruel to return unaccompanied minors, as the Trump administration did, and to hold them in prison-like conditions, as both the Obama and Trump administrations did. But the fact is, Biden’s policies have fostered a greater cruelty.
Biden has created new incentives for human trafficking and the worse kinds of child exploitation. The result is a surge in border crossings that even a professional euphemist like secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas calls ‘overwhelming’, and the spectacle of would-be illegal immigrants kneeling at the border while wearing t-shirts reading ‘Biden let us in’.
This is what Biden gets for taking a knee as a craven genuflection to BLM. This is what he gets for accusing Donald Trump of being a racist and sadist for caging unaccompanied minors — even though Biden was vice president when the cages were built, and even though Biden now presides over a greater influx. And this is what we get: a theater of the sentiments, in which the actors and audience are so jaded that their senses and check books can only be stimulated by that reliable and obscene soap-opera trick, putting children’s lives in the balance.
Asked if the word ‘crisis’ applied, the President’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Psaki, refuses to call it anything at all — because she would feel bad, and we would feel bad, and Biden would look bad, if we called it for what it is. It is easier for the administration to resent the Mexican children for putting us in this moral bind, and resent the Republicans, who aren’t short of their own resentments when it comes to immigration, for making hay with it.
The fact is that this is a crisis. It reflects the corrupt failure of Washington DC and the cold self-interest of corporations who want cheap labor, unions who don’t want it, and, in the middle, the upper-middle-class donors who dislike foreigners who don’t speak English, but need them to bus their tables, do their lawns and wipe their children’s backsides.
Given the complexities of the facts and the appeal of a flight into sentiment, it’s no wonder that this week the administration and media did direct us to pity the children. Meghan and Harry, that is.
Jennifer Psaki commends Meghan and Harry for the ‘courage’ it took to sit down with Oprah and make unsubstantiated allegations against his family. Their kind of fact-light, sentiment-heavy self-promotion and self-therapy was, Psaki told us, one of the areas that Biden is ‘committed to in the future’.
Biden’s increasingly vague routines of empathy are the symbolic face and velvet glove of a bureaucracy of the sentiments whose offices run from government to the media.
Biden is very old. After him, the gloves will be off and the face will be hardened with more than Botox. We’ll get this decayed form of democracy good and hard, and we’ll be told it should feel good. And that’s a fact…”
DeSantis has a good record on Covid. One the rest of the nation should follow. Florida is open for business.
Democrats need the Covid boogeyman to further their political agenda. They will stretch it out as long as they can.
That’s a great headline!
We live in the age of stupid.
And of course, the classic David Burge response to crazy lefty’s:
Related:
“Does Biden know about all the open states?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted.
“…In a primetime address on the pandemic’s first anniversary, President Biden told Americans that if they do their part there’s a possibility they can gather with friends and family members for barbecues by Independence Day.
But in a nation deeply divided over how people should conduct their lives amidst COVID-19, the president’s remarks quickly came under scrutiny amid the ongoing debate between advocates of a more robust nanny state versus those who are eager to return to pre-Covid normalcy.
“This is a free people, this is a free country, how dare you tell us who we can spend the Fourth of July with,” conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News program not long after Biden had concluded his speech…”
In other words, he's promising something by JULY that we're already doing today. And the CDC guidance is already too restrictive by an order of magnitude. But I guess we're supposed to be grateful for any crumbs of liberty offered by his beneficent hand.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 12, 2021
Tucker Carlson speaks truth to power. pic.twitter.com/6vCYinHOfx
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 10, 2021