Reading this long column by James Pinkerton the other day got me thinking about how strange things seem today, compared to not so long ago. Pinkerton used to be on TV a lot when I bothered watching cable news. He would be the libertarian, as well as contrarian, guy on the panel of a current affairs show. That was the standard model for current events programming. They would rustle up some columnists and have them talk about issues presented by a moderator. Maybe they would add some shouting to punch it up a bit.
That seems like a long time ago for the simple reason it seems so quaint and innocent. When a guy like Cal Thomas or Bob Novak moved to TV, they brought with them a long history of opinion writing. You knew where they were coming from most of the time. They still wrote columns for newspapers and they had seen a lot of politicians come and go, thus giving their opinions a salty flavor. Even the lefty chat show guys were old newspaper men, who had seen and heard it all.
The point being is that even though the news was biased and the balance on the chat shows tilted to the Left, you knew where everyone stood. Bill Press, for example, was crazy as an outhouse rat, but his opinions were his own. When he got into a heated argument with his conservative co-host, you knew it was a bit of an act, but it was also a fight they had had a thousand times over beers at their favorite DC watering hole. The point here is the news has always been biased, but it was on the level, for the most part.
This election has made clear that the mass media is anything but on the level. It’s not just biased, it is manufactured bullshit cooked up by schemers in league with members of the ruling class. The Michelle Fields hoax is a great example. Fields, according to her bio, has never actually worked as a reporter. She popped out of college a few years ago, wiggled her ass at the right guy and got cast as a “journalist” on-line and on TV. She’s too young to have opinions worth having so she may as well be an actress, hired to play a role.
That’s pretty much what she is, as she is willing to have whatever opinion you will pay her to have, even if it is the opposite of what she said yesterday. Fields is by no means an oddity. The Wikieaks dump revealed that Louise Mensche has been secretly working for Hillary Clinton. Mensch has been passing herself off as a conservative and crusader against political correctness. It turns out that it was all an act. As the linked new piece notes, immediately after the truth was made public, she was on Twitter playing a new role.
It’s not just the TV tarts pulling this stuff. CNBC has a guy they kit out as the avuncular professor names John Harwood. It turns out he was in cahoots with the Clinton camp to rig the news in their favor. Hilariously, CNN was giving Clinton the debate questions in advance so she could not just prepare for them, but prepare how to act surprised by the question. That’s so typical of how the Clintons operate. Somewhere, in Hillary’s things, is the fourth nail intended for the Crucifixion.
Of course, none of this is being covered by the main news outlets. As I write this, the New York Times has a couple of stories about a rumor about the rumors of rumors of Trump being rude to a woman on their front page. Nothing about the Wikileaks stuff. The Post has the same made up story about Trump and a story about how vexed the Clinton camp is over their e-mails being released.The official newspaper of the Imperial Capital cannot be bothered to cover the biggest scandal since Watergate. It’s as if it never happened.
This is just another aspect of the tsunami of bullshit that is the major media today. It’s not that they color the news or that they make up stories. The actors posing as a journalists on TV can be written off as grifters working the system so they can land lucrative TV gigs. There’s no excusing what appears to be an organized and coordinated attempt by major media to suppress the news. If you want to know about Wikileaks, you have to go to the alternative media or read through the database of released documents on your own.
It is one thing when the news is slanted. People adjust to the bias. We are in a strange age in that the mass media is entirely made up. None of of it is on the level. It’s layers and layers of manufactured stories, crowding out real news, to the point where it is impossible to take any of it at face value. You can’t even be sure the people in the stories are real. The Clinton campaign is planting child actors in crowds, posing as adorable local kids, to ask questions. Our public life is now less authentic than professional wrestling.
Is this the result of the breakdown of pubic trust? Are we just seeing the logical result of a ruling class that no longer has any trust in the people whom it rules? Maybe this is just the natural end of a mass media age. No one knows, as this is the first time one has existed. Maybe in the fullness of time, we’ll know that mass media cultures always decay into a liar’s ball, where nothing is on the level, nothing is what appears to be and the only thing you can know is no one can be believed. Perhaps this is what Hell is like.
Pingback: The media’s way off kilter
This is probably the best piece I’ve read in and on 2016, thanks for writing it and for making it so easy to share on FB
Nothing new about the media making stuff up out of whole cloth. A reporter for our local paper did it with a story involving my Dad in 1955. It was a feel good human interest story. But it was bucksnort. No surprise that they are still doing it.
Pingback: How strange things seem today | IowaDawg Musings & More
A sustainable republic restrains democracy by limiting suffrage. Unlimited suffrage requires that the most important task of a ruling party is in educating the mob to value it’s rulers properly. Democratic rulers therefore have a higher propaganda bar to meet than Stalinist oligarchs and for a time they meet it. Eventually their unrestrained cleverness and lack of actual real feedback makes them quite as stupid as the masses of people that they have formed and so despise.
Jonathon Gruber,Ben Rhodes,Susan Rice,Valarie Jarrett,all are poster children for what you said,James. Regarding universal suffrage,well,it’s given us the witchs’ cauldron we’re drowning in,but what’s the solution? Any attempt at disenfranchisement will be met with a shitstorm from the harpy brigades.
Please excuse my french, but the solution starts with: “Because Fuck You Thats Why”
And the sooner it does the sooner we reclaim our country from the ruling party out to destroy us.
Hear Hear! Well said James.
Indeed, Lenin’s useful idiots. Or in our time, cultural marxist cannon fodder.
I’d term it more along the lines of unrestrained treason and cunning. There was a great elder gentleman who passed this year, had a fine little blog he devoted to salient witty observations of life, he said something that really made a lot of sense:
“You know why the left will ultimately lose? Because their war is against human nature. Humans are tribal beings; they need a sense of identity, of belonging. The leftist agenda is so anti-human, it cannot survive without a big government to impose it. Nationalism, on the other hand, continues to spring up despite all the establishment’s attempts to eradicate it.” -old rebel
We are seeing something even more interesting, I think. it’s the crowd sourcing of news. You have people pouring through pictures of the crowds before the Boston bombing. You have Cernovich with a phone and Periscope covering the Bernie protests outside of the Democratic convention.
the Reddit /r/TheDonald has been going through all of the Wikileaks emails. They write a summary to each email, complete with the link to the actual email in the database. Someone going through the emails at 4-chan found Podestra’s password to his icloud account. He’d never changed it, so they hacked in and downloaded his current emails. (One supposedly shows CO in play from internal polling). I’m not condoning the hack, of course, but we are starting to see more and more stories coming from citizens. There are attempts to build new social media, that will not be censored in the way that Twitter and Facebook are now.
This sort of thing she will not allow in the near future. Today is probably the golden age of the free availability of incriminating Cloud People information. Think of it as the digital version of the discovery and early implementation of RADAR in the physical world, where the RADAR operators knew a lot about the position and movement of their targets, and the targets had little understanding of how closely they were being tracked.
Thoreau, they better hurry up with giving the control of the web to the UN scum, if they want to inhibit the free exchange of information on a level they enjoyed pre internet, looks like things are going to get pretty sporty. HRC’s non existent private State Department Emails just surfaced. All 22,000 “bleached & sanitized” emails. Complete with unbleachable screen shot of who has them and when the release is planned:
Anonymous: All 33K deleted emails will be released Nov 1: Will be complete undoing of Democratic Party
http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2016/10/anonymous-all-33k-deleted-emails-will.html
Some call that crowd sourcing the great awakening, some call it an insurgency. It’s grass roots in any case. That is a great and wonderful thing. The open source “insurgent” nature of crowd sourcing is iterative and is always levels ahead of the powers that be efforts to defend itself from the sanitizing effects of the truth.
At some point stopping open source “media”, because it really is but alternative media, becomes impossible because the elites simply don’t have enough fingers to stop the leaks in the dike.
I doubt the e-mails will undo the Democrat Party. They simply confirm what we already know or suspect, so there is no new movement in how things are. It has “undoing” power only to the extent that those with their fingers in their ears shouting “la-la-la-la-la” will pull their fingers out and pay attention. Not going to happen. The reason that the Left’s attack on Trump appears to be working is that there is nothing really new there either (he is the person everyone expects him to be), but the new, more creepy “frame” of his behavior is getting some apathetic (women) Hillary sympathizers off the schneid.
Dutch what kind of thinking is that I ask you? This isn’t about Trump, it is about the truth of how despised we the people are, how these sonofabitches believe we are serfs and slaves here to serve them or be exterminated like insects if we have the gall to not worship their almighty arrogance.
Are you a slave and don’t realize it?
I haven’t seen a photo of John Podesta in years. Looking at him — yikes — does he have AIDS? He’s got that bad
greyish pallor and is so thin, Sort of reminds me of Steve Jobs. No one’s that thin these days unless they’re dying of something. No wonder he’s meaner than a snake! The Podesta Group is a huge DC lobbying affair; also consulting on how to best your opponents for a fat fee. Lots of inside baseball nuggets when you look at their website. I think all these people hate Trump b/c he actually builds things that stand upright and are useful. The Cloud People are just that insubstantial, like clouds, and try to create thick fog making it hard to see clearly.
It isn’t human, it is a portrait of a political reptile in that photo.
You know, apparently I’ve slipped over to the dark side, but I find no reason to condemn the hack. This is war. All’s fair. No war was ever won without covert gathering of vital intel. I don’t like what war requires, that honor and integrity must be redefined or temporarily set aside. But when the enemy is a force that has never had honor or integrity, then the fight for values to be restored usually means using the enemy’s tactics against them. War is not just hell, it’s always the revealing of everything that hell represents.
War is evil but it is often the lesser evil. George Orwell
I fear we’ve crossed the event horizon with regards to societal trust. Hillary may squeeze it out, but the public can’t unsee what the media (or the Clintons and their cling-ons) has done. A prudent person would carefully consider what comes next. And prepare for it.
Never going to be within our timeline a vast majority of people who for what reasons they hold to, who look outside the narratives and brainwashing. Even in the run up, and during the American revolution there never was at any time much more than a tiny percentage of people on the side of the Patriots. But it doesn’t require a vast majority either to see the facts and reason out effective change. All it requires is a tireless minority. Case in point, you yourself are a perceptive and insightful commentor. You or I are not alone in speaking out against the ruling class. Even your avatar speaks of a tireless minority from history who never gave up, who was one of the most effective revolutionary’s who existed. Sam Adam’s was a desperately wanted fugitive rebel who had a bounty on his head for treason to the crown and a multitude of other charges, a thoroughly reviled man by the ruling political class of the day. A veritable thorn in their side. It was the main purpose why the British Army acted on Concord. They where attempting to confiscate a cache of powder the Patriots had stored, but moved, in Lexington, and to arrest Sam Adam’s among others who where last reported stirring up trouble at Concord.
Lot of men who ended up fighting the Brits in the war of independence had fought for the Brits during the French Indian War. If it wasn’t for them, men of Rogers Rangers, the French would have been next to possible to beat.
It was those men later who proved, through winning guerrilla fights against the brits in the Carolina’s and upstate NY, to the French the smart money was on supporting the American’s.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Funny thing about technology (and I spend most of my professional life immersed in it) is that what brings speed and efficiency also tends to reduce resilience. In politics that can be the worst of both worlds. People complain the Senate gets nothing done, but it was intended to be a firebreak against popular furors translating into legislation. Now communications technology allows much vaster number of people to plan, coordinate and execute on a scale never before seen. And “counter” technology allows these squirming things to see the light of day (Wikileaks). There is the story of the Clintons in a nutshell. Actually the avatar is no accident. I’m a distant relative (though if your family came with Winthrops, we’re all related). And ironically, my many times removed paternal grandfather was a militia office stuck at Fort Edward while Webb dithered on relieving Fort William Henry. But later, he served as militia officer in the Revolution at the ripe age of 56, his son in the New York Line. Ditto on the maternal side, all were colonial militia officers, and sons were enlisted in the militia or New York Line. “The Patriot” was not a flight of fancy. I think this was more a phenomenon on the frontier (Orange and Albany counties were the frontier, Last of the Mohicans style) in those days and most has been career militia and bore little love for the British. In the more settled areas, there seemed to be more ambivalence since trade with and protection by the Crown mattered more. The frontier was also heavily settled by Scots-Irish (my mothers side) who arrived indentured and with a genetic capacity to hold and nurse grievances for long periods of time.
Still I fear we are in a bad place and the Spidey sense won’t shut off.
‘Put your faith in God, boys. And keep your powder dry”
Each day, there are four news stories — Trump said/did something mean against women/immigrants/minorities; a cop somewhere shot a minority person or was shot by a minority person; Mrs. Clinton said something extraordinarily perceptive; climate change caused something bad to happen. Now and then a foreign event will sneak in, but only if the event can be linked to one of the basic four.
In the Matrix everything is scripted.
TV media is called “programming” for a reason.
What is required is to discern between the narrative and crisis as a means, and why it is there are these shiny objects presented to distract from the essential truths and how those truths matter.
That is how you win.
Three,maybe four yrs ago,I saw an exchange between Michelle Malkin and Juan Williams,where he referred to her as “Just a blogger”. I believe they were discussing the IRS scandal,which -real journalists- determined was a big nothingburger. Au contraire. Time and events have proven blogs are where the truth lives. What has surprised me the most about this administration is that they did not take more overt action to shut down sites such as this,aside from the Army of Trolls and DDOS attacks. I guess allowing IP control to go into the ether was another part of Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge” plan.
Too late for them to stop the message. Once a ground swell of people whom have had enough begins to become a plurality, it is motive power and audacity that is unstoppable. Those with the passion of freedom find alternatives. That kind of resistance to tyranny is open source, very difficult to repress, never mind eradicate. Countless people in history with courage and fortitude have risked everything to spread the message, in fact in spite of the risks.
History is replete with defiance to a political class who have attempted to quell freedom of expression of dirt people and existentially failed.
There is enough of those brave souls in this country that the message can never be extinguished, even with the use of force and violence. And if anything, that will backfire, and create more people each day that decide what have they really have to loose but everything to gain, by defying the sonofabitches.
I think the weirdest thing about trying to talk politics with my early boomer father is the level of trust he places in institutions. Of COURSE the NYT is credible. I mean they might LEAN left, but they’re still going to fulfill their basic duty to provide good faith reporting. Most millennials, even left wing ones are inherently cynical. He’s not.
It’s very difficult to get him to consider anything that doesn’t come through one of his approved outlets, which in an era of media blackouts, really limits discussion. (Why am I talking politics with my Yankee Democrat father in a solidly blue state? Because I’m a glutton for punishment.)
You might try reminding him how much we mistrusted the media and elites in the 60s and 70s. We knew they lied to us then. Why would he think they suddenly stopped lying? We know they lied about the Tet offensive. They’ve been lying ever since.
Distrust authority!
The sixties revolt was overplayed. Remember, the most popular haircut in the sixties was the crew cut. My father was not the distrust authority kind of boomer. He was the get married young and work in advertising kind. Sigh. If he were part of the hippie counterculture it might be easier since at least they come from a position of mild rebellion.
Yankee Girl’s Election Law #1A — Do not discuss politics with anyone face to face unless you are certain that you approve of how they will vote. I have found that arguments just motivate the individual to actually go vote. Bad idea. (apologies for split infinitive)
Heinlein saw this a long time ago. In the wonderful subtext of many of his stories (especially ‘Stranger’) he pointed out the need to have professional standards and watchdogs on the press and media.
What would a ‘Fair Witness’ make of this election?
Scamming the worker bees for free shekels goes back a lot further than RAH.
Heinlein also had insightful advice how dirt people effectively fight a tyrannical class of oligarchs who have gone too far.
Unfortunately, the American population that he had in mind was the pre-TV, home schooled or little one room schoolhouse, self-reliant ‘Greatest Generation’. Not the selfie fixated, trigger warnings, gluten free jerk-offs that have seen ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ five times.
Fighting should be the last resort, fixing the schools and the media monopoly should be the first.
Think about what you said there for a second John, if your assumptions are correct, how then can you fix things peacefully either? That requires resolve, focus, determination, and a belief system of something better than what is happening to us. There are people who exist with those virtues.
Regardless, your resistance is futile mindset has an uncanny similarity of the product of the very thing you accuse everyone of being.
Instead of pointing out the detractions, you might get more traction pointing out the positive character of millions of your fellow American’s who face the truth both methods will probably be required if some miracle doesn’t take place.
Let you in a little secret, there are over 300, million people in this country, not everyone is a sheeple no matter how pessimistic you think the prospect of correcting our problems may seem.
It started with Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein took down the evil ogre Nixon. Since then everyone in the msm wants to be them, to be worshipped and idolized as they are to this day. If it means selling your soul, to them that’s a no brainer, easily worth being on TV and getting invited to all the right parties. They probably all went for the Standard Introductory Package: http://www.necronomi.com/projects/666/
I refuse to use the legacy names of those two fish wraps. Instead I call them what they really are…The blogs of Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim. They’re little more than print versions of that web site that Michael Huffington’s ex wife sold to Yahoo.
What’s that the Russians used to say? “There’s no truth (pravda) in the news (izvestia); there’s no news in the truth”? Except that the samizdat is electronic now, we’re in a Soviet media culture. The American elite is betting this can be done without an actual gulag to send dissidents to. It’s one hell of a gamble if you think about it — this, in the most heavily armed nation in the world! Either they’re way dumber than we think they are — and they’re at near-cabbage level already — or the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than we suspect. Either way, not good.
The old-line journalists you speak of all came up from being reporters. Working the city desk is where you learn what police, politicians, and everybody else is like. You develop a good BS detector because if you get the story wrong your editor will chew you out. Since the Watergate days of the early 70’s we have young skulls full of mush going to so-called J-schools to get a diploma and then go to TV or some other media in NYC of DC to help “make a difference” which just means make the world over. Reporting a story and being sure the facts are correct? That’s not the job they learned.
There is nothing surprising about the Mensch reveal, this is something I figured out 15 years ago during the Bush II years, the “Right” media is basically Liberals who are pro-War Zionists, the Clinton family are personal friends of the Bush family since the Iran-Contra shenanigans. our (((Elite))) wanted Hillary in 2008 was the perfect successor for Dubya in 2008 but they had something better with the Magic Mulatto.
I have to tell you it made me sick to my stomach to see ‘W’ palling around with BJ at all the Charity Fundraising events and doing photo ops with him. Just sickening. Such good friends! It’s all just a big game to them.
There is no basic difference worth a bucket of warm spit between the cultural marxist light of the cucks and the left. What is also disgusting is us dirt people been played for suckers far longer than most of us knew, and are discovering the rancid extent of the arrogance of the political class much to our cold anger, because now they aren’t even trying to hide what we think doesn’t matter, that dirt peoples lives don’t matter.
They told us the truth when the erection prince called us the bitter clingers, and the barren vagina called us a basket of incorrigible Deplorable’s.
Clinging on to sanity, and incorrigible in the sense do we want with a world gone mad, because of what a class of psychopaths running our government have done.
Yesterday, I explained to my husband the theory that GHW Bush was chosen to be Reagan’s VP, with the idea he would step in if Reagan were assassinated. And I told him about the Bushes actually being friends with the Hinckleys. It does not follow that Bush tried to assassinate Reagan (husband thought he’d have done a better job of it.) It does indicate that there’s a lot of things that don’t get covered.
John Nolte tweeted the other day that it was a strange world, where you consider Infowars to be more reliable than the NYT. I think it’s true at this point.
The moist hands of B41 were all over the instant grounding of the Cruz campaign, too. if you can still find it, check out those photos of Cruz’s father in the NE (online is clearer). The man supposedly i.d. as Raphael is not him IMO, but the fellow in the plaid shirt in profile against the white building is sure a dead ringer. Same posture and wavy hair. Ted could indignantly assert that that was not his father (circled in red by the Enquirer) in the picture, but risked having people examine the WHOLE picture, and so he folded. Immediately. If he had stayed in, questions would also be raised about where everyone was on November 22, 1963. “Wouldn’t be prudent” to continue the campaign as GHWB probably said;-) I could just die thinking of the hours I spent in 1992 campaigning for that loser. Drove miles in the rain to the Akron-Canton Airport to see AF1 come in for a few minutes on its way to his Texas home to vote. The President came there b/c a big Repub donor, ‘Tim’ Timken, made a hangar available. SIgh.
Lot of comintern moles and red diaper babies running around if you give it a good think.
Something never added up with McCain. At times he sure behaves and does things like he is a Manchurian Candidate. Kane, HRC’s VP pick, the guy is a whose who of South American bag man for HRC and her red diaper baby associations and the marxist shit stirring done down there in a couple of country’s that she and obama wanted to keep from becoming constitutional republics. Take obama for an example, now there is a born in the wool red diaper progeny. His and his mothers associations. Malcolm X, Castro, Che, all meeting up in Hawaii, spending two weeks together in a hotel just prior to the cuban revolution. Always thought obama possessed an uncanny resemblance to Malcolm X.
Frank Marshal Davis, Bernadine Dorn, William Ayers, Valerie Jarret, and probably 95% of his regimes brain trust are offspring of one marxist or islamist decendent.
Agree, Doug. I went to school in the 50s-60s w/ these clowns who proudly wore their red diapers on the outside of their clothing. McCain was a shitty pilot and got into the Academy b/c father and grandfather were Navy bigwigs. My husband was in the Navy during the late 60s and had stories of how McCain crashed his plane into another ship. This was before he was shot down! I did feel sorry for his parents who were at Pearl Harbor during this time, his dad as CINCPAC. When John was released from NVN prison he quickly dumped his wife, who had waited patiently and faithfully
for his release and took up with the beer heiress, who promptly picked up the tab for his many political runs. Talk about a MCP creep;-)
There has always been something not right with the guy. Look at his voting record through his career, the guy is a sneaky treasonous corruptocrat, what was that little snafu he was involved in, the something 5 was it. And the operatives controlling him and his “presidential” run in 08. They were literally political handlers, who where directly responsible for the smear and slander campaign and undermining Governor Palin.
Keating Five. Arizona S & L went bust. Senators were petitioning regulators. I think even OH Sen John Glenn was involved. Keating was a big wig in AZ, wanted to borrow $ for construction. The Senators were attempting to render a constituent service.
Yes that, rendering unselfish service to their constituency, aka as bagged in a racketeering skim operation red handed and walked.
Didn’t the huge MIC debt run-up follow that little incident?
If they had a picture of a war mongering for profit crook, next to neocon in the dictionary, McCains face would be in it.
How many men have died, how much treasure has been strip mined from our great country, because of these scalawags?
Good comparison with professional wrestling, zman. In the late 50s, the 60s , and the early 70s, professional wrestling was highly entertaining. Well choreographed, smoothly performed by talented, athletic showman. Now wrestling is so badly done it is a wonder it still exists. Moves telegraphed days ahead and so poorly executed my 4 year old grandson can see they are fake. Performers actually turning to see where the camera is, and you can see it done. Empty headed screaming, women with big artificial chests. Now days why would anyone listen to Clinton when it is so obvious she is a fake? As for Hell, the Book makes it clear everything there is on the up and up.
It has always been this way. The difference is that there is absolutely no balance remaining whatsoever in the legacy media. Since Rhodesia was brought up yesterday I’ll continue on it. Around the time UDI was declared there were some protests in Salisbury by some blacks. By the time the British press got down to cover it everything had calmed down; it was business as usual. Literally. At lunch time the African store workers and clerks would go into whatever nearby park and eat a bag lunch and take a nap. The British–no, English, not classy enough to call British–“journalists” took a few pictures and what appeared in the London newspapers was breathless reporting of the protests accompanied by pictures of “bodies lie in Cecil Square”. The lack of context made it look as if there had been a massacre. Fast forward to the 1980’s and Mugabe actually murders 20,000 Ndbele near Bulawayo. Did you ever hear about it? Of course not.
“As I write this, the New York Times has a couple of stories about a rumor about the rumors of rumors of Trump being rude to a woman on their front page. Nothing about the Wikileaks stuff.”
Look, I often disagree with the NY Times editorial policy, but by my count there have been at least 30 articles on Wikileaks in just the last week. You can read them on-line. Some have questioned their accuracy, and some have faulted Trump for uncritically using them, but the most damaging ones have been reported, and many a story has begun with something like “Emails released by Wikileaks show contradictions between x said by Clinton in public and y said by Clinton in private.” The paper plainly favors Clinton over Trump (as do I), but the stories are there, with more thoroughness and detail than in most news outlets.
I agree with you that figuring out the truth is not easy, and it is childish to simply put one’s trust in a small group of news sources. But I am old enough to remember Vice President Agnew’s attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism,” and understand the impulse to blame the messenger.
When observing a man pushing a woman out of the path of a bus and another man pushing a woman into the path of a bus, I suspect, if the latter is a Democrat, you would swear that you just saw two men pushing women.
Since I only know that as a quote from the late, great Bill Buckley, thank you.
Do you think blaming the messenger is OK when you know that the messenger is lying? Or that hating people who carry water for the liars is justifiable, and that disposing of them whenever the chance arises in order to save the republic is worthy of praise?
I share your feelings of being in some kind of hellish Twilight Zone when it is literally impossible to believe anything being presented in the media as anything other than spin or outright lies of commission or omission. The even more dispiriting thing about this year is learning that so many outlets on the “right” are stuffed full of liars as well. The thing that really tore it for me this year happened when the primaries were still taking place. My wife is fairly apolitical and she wanted to turn on the news one Saturday just to get an idea as to what was going on with the election. We turned on Fox at the time and sat there for nearly two hours listening to talking heads trying to push the spin that Trump was ahead because he was a celebrity and people like celebrity and for good measure “What Does it Say About America” that people were so easily bamboozled by celebrity. In all that time there was not even the briefest mention of immigration which was Trump’s main issue at the time. I just sat there getting angrier and angrier about how my wife and I were being openly lied to. And lies I’m convinced they were. There’s no doubt that the media is filled with pretty vapid persons, but I simply can’t believe that they were so completely stupid as to be unable to see that part of Trump’s appeal at the time came from his talking about immigration. The narrative simply required that immigration be studiously avoided in discussions and that narrative was going to be spun and supported no matter how much blatant in-your-face lying was required.
That isn’t “the right” that is lying to you. They are all the same grab bag of whores like Michelle Fields.
Totally agree. The scare quotes are essential.
I believe people are starting to understand that Fox is not an arm of the Right, as Limbaugh is, to cite an example. Fox merely saw a wide underserved set of viewers that were willing to tune in, and they cashed in. This election cycle revealed their true colors. Fox is as much an arm of the MSM as are CNN and MSNBC. Trump represents as much of a threat to their cozy media empire as he does to all the others.
Of late I am struggling to keep from drowning in frustration. I’m solution oriented so I am driven to problem solve. I’ve seen the outcome – we are deep into the Matrix, where everything is an illusion, but recognizing this is not enough for me. I’ve typed 100,000 words desperate to find the way out by ferreting under and defining the cause. Having worked in the photography end of advertising, I can see clearly the beginning of the slow-bake that has conditioned us over time to this point where we now expect to be lied to.
On all levels, from my personal war with a lying psychopath, that has taken me on a deep study and quest to understand the twisted mind and, amazingly, how the world is compelled to enable such, to watching the same process unfold on a grander scale in religion and politics, the conclusion is the same. In a lying age – the world prefers the lie.
Someone toss an old gal a life ring, will ya?
http://bagsallpacked.blogspot.com/2016/10/when-anything-goes.html
I don’t think the world prefers the lie. They have been lied to so much that they distrust even those who tell them the truth and when the truth is staring them in the face they can’t see it.
Many can’t see the truth and others be they skeptics or cynics (a matter of degree?) have a healthy caution about believing their lying eyes and ears.
Meema, I pray for you if you are facing a personal battle with a lying psychopath. The rest of the world, well, has just devolved into a cesspool that I liken to the Wild West days. But in those days where the law was scant, and men carried, it was a deadly thing to insult, cheat or rob another. Civilized society has become so “civilized” that the tables are turned 180 and everything favors the criminal, the weirdo, the crazed all in the name of “fairness.”
Another drawback to modern society is that Darwin’s law is not allowed to function. Those that should perish due to their own stupidity are coddled while the innocent are murdered in the womb.
We will get to the problem solving soon enough. Take care of yourself and God Bless You.
Thank you, dear, I appreciate that. I am indeed fighting a psychopath. The frustration comes from seeing others, who have been greatly harmed by the lies, refuse to speak up. They will tell their stories, rant and rave and wave their arms but, push come to shove, their willingness to stop this person from harming others fizzles into incomplete sentences. Frankly, I see this personal experience as a analogy to what is going on world-wide in real time. It is a tribulation but that doesn’t mean I am not being blessed in the process. It’s all a matter of perspective. For one thing, I can smell the stench of a scam through the TeeVee screen. 😉
Sociopaths are charming. That’s why people believe them. I spent some time reading shrink4men.com. The psychiatrist deals with men that are dealing with sociopathic women, but I think the advice is good for both sexes. Wish you luck because it’s a terrible thing to deal with.
Speaking only from personal experience here – I have witnessed over and over, supposedly bright, intelligent, experienced people (psychologists/attorneys) believe the lie. Perhaps it is simply that our lie detectors are miscalibrated, but I have seen it too many times that choosing the lie is simply more expedient, in the short term, and so the choice is voluntary.
I don’t see all that much distrust, other than small pockets of discerning folks – like those who read this blog. To trust or not to trust depends directly on the common sense quotient. Call me a cynic, if you will, but I’ve noticed a great dearth of common sense – globally. And so the Nigerian Prince scam remains live and well. People want to believe they are going to get a million dollars for their generosity helping a poor dying prince fulfill his last wishes.
Does that not make you want to run off into the desert?
People will spend 10 times more energy defending monsters, instead of trying to figure out what really happened. That instinctive reaction is what is so frustrating.
The genius is making as many people as possible vested in the lie. They have captured about the maximum that they can do though the carrot (job security, generous benefits, EBT and welfare), and are now ready to wield the stick to the “deplorables” who refuse to submit.
Yes, overwhelmed by competing claims til they turn off all the noise. Not stupid, but lied to.
Pinkerton’s essay is pretty damn good. As is yours.
When you ask “Are we just seeing the logical result of a ruling class that no longer has any trust in the people whom it rules?,” I would amend that to read “respect” instead of “trust.” They have absolutely no respect and it is because they no the Administrative State will cover their ass while they do their dirty deeds, and the MSM will tell us all is well. Never mind. Move along.
So, my friends, until the revolution and we get some of these MOFO’s swinging from the rafters, BOHICA! No respect. Like Rodney Dangerfield, only we are Rodney Deplorables.
LP, it is the law of the lowest common denominator which is the dynamic that is in serious trouble, that is the structure of how power works presently in the political class. Look at the Clinton crime syndicate. Their way of crime is their power, it is rampant, it is politics almost as low as it gets. Toot toot! All aboard! Next stop Banana Republic.
I believe as I think you intrinsically understand what will bring the ruling class down, is a preference cascade of withdrawal of consent? Trust and consent are inextricably linked in this. The bastards still need consent of the governed to operate, we aren’t at rock bottom yet as a republic.
That I see as the crisis of the political class’s own making we are witnessing in the form of Donald Trump as The Great Fuck You. Trump is the defacto form of revolt of the dirt people. He is really just the natural expression of the dirt people balancing the equation. If Trump is disposed, how they do it doesn’t matter, because even assassinating Trump wouldn’t get rid of the political class’s problem: The dirt people. In all probability it will be their total undoing. They can’t stop the message now. And being hanged on their own petards is a just and richly deserved dish of comeuppence.
All the ruling class is doing is lashing out in desperation at this point. To me it is futile thrashings of a failed state. But they are dangerous as desperate oligarchy’s do desperate things to retain power. After Trump, that are going to have to channel their inner Stalin’s and Mao’s to even attempt to retain the power they have squandered and violated.
It doesn’t take a majority, just a determined plurality to reject and defy the “legitimacy” of the ruling class to destroy it’s appearance of legitimacy.
They are facing a crisis of legitimacy and it’s becoming a runaway train.
That is why dirt peoples consent, or withdrawal of consent in this case, is the most powerful weapon ever devised.
Power of Will of The Governed is still an idea that hasn’t been as corrupted as some would say.
Seriously are you reading Barnhardt or just channelling her?
Seriously are you a one of Lenin’s useful dupes or just channeling your cognitive dissonance?
Kayfabe
Seriously, are you already one of the $9.25 an hour manlets trolling for Her, or just auditioning?
Don’t be absurd the bobblehead would finish us all, she has made that crystal clear.
Oh and bobble head said during the debate that her great plan for dealing with ISIS is to arm the Kurds. This ia another of her world’s worst ideas.
My experience of journalists first hand was, when I worked with them, that they really didn’t know a great deal. They were passably good at stringing words together (though the unsung sub-editors still has work to do on what the lower hacks churned out) and at least one editor I knew thought that international news was more important than local news. I can recall one edition of our main paper where the US ‘invasion’ of Grenada would have been the front-page headline (though absolutely f*ck all to do with where I lived and worked in the UK) if another more local big event the same day hadn’t forced that supposed shock, horror story down the page.
My take was that in the 70s, 80s and even 90s the media I knew close up wasn’t biased: they were in it because sitting at typewriter was better than working stacking shelves or digging coal, and paid well enough. But my observations were they didn’t know a lot more than anyone else.
By the time I left working in newspapers, it was increasingly obvious that the old line, ‘a journalist can either go to war zones and risk life and limb to report, or sit in the office and type up press releases. Both jobs pay the same’ was becoming more and more relevant. The fact that many of the British newspaper journalists I knew were all rabid members of a left-wing trade union when virtually all of the old, entrenched trades union who inhabited the production side of newspapers had gone, told me a lot. The hacks were resolute champions of the working people in their own eyes, even if they had little knowledge of the local population which was reading their output less and less, every year.
It is easy then for me to see how, as the job was attracting increasing numbers of young ‘writers’ to replace the old, cynical and hard-bitten newspapermen — I knew of one editor who would start all editorial meetings by putting a bottle of whisky on the table — and thus these young turks could have all sorts of deeply felt if uneducated and ill-informed passions about so much they knew so little about. Bias then had to be the next step to follow ignorance, but I had left it all behind by the time these passions became so rampant.
Which would explain why I don’t read newspapers any more and avoid watching TV news if i can help it.
We have today in 2016 the chance to burn the fucker down to the ground and salt the earth. That chance is called Donald Trump and that is why the media is in hyperdrive spinning out one whopper of lies after another. I guarantee you one thing: the MSM will trot out one bogus lie after another every single fucking day between now and the election. Why hell, you could even have a fucking video of Obama swinging his boner in front of women and the MSM reaction is a retarded blank stare. BURN THE DISTRICT OF CORRUPTION TO THE GROUND.
From one Doug to another, you probably would appreciate what this guy has to say along those lines in this worthy screed, it’s a dandy:
https://outlandersystemsblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/10/fuck-you/
Great link! Thanks! Kind of sums it all up, doesn’t it?
Oh ya it sums it up, you put it into high context brother. Hey, Mike is a real gentleman, been around quite awhile contributed many good things to other people blogs. Always a careful observation-ist. He isn’t one to resort to hyperbole or permit his passion to fly free. For Mike to write that, I’d guess he is pretty pissed off and has every right to be. He ain’t alone.
What a magnificent rant! Wonderful, and NOT TO BE MISSED!
The only surprise about the Tet Offensive in late January 1968 was how the politicos in North Viet Nam had set up the Viet Cong in the south for their complete and utter destruction by US forces.
According to the media ‘back in world’, the US forces had been completely surprised and had suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of enemy forces. Nonsense, we fully expected the attacks and handily destroyed almost 100% of the Viet Cong and its infrastructure in the south.
Walter Cronkite, ‘the most trusted man in America” counseled us on CBS News that”
“…it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” That’s new speak for surrender.
We drug-addled, snot-blowing, commode-hugging, baby-raping, blood-sucking murderous losers trickling back to the states a few hundred at a time could not be trusted to tell the truth, so our testimony to the contrary meant nothing.
With one exception; our current Secretary of State, John Kerry, a veteran himself, testified about our conduct in the war that: “They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
This was almost 50 years ago and I suspect that it wasn’t a recent development even then.
Even back then you were a deplorable. Kerry “I fought in Vietnam,” well, he was Brahmin.
I guess no one ever asked if he was a neutral “observer” to all these atrocities. Was he a war correspondent? All he did was observe but he didn’t report until much later and of course it had to be in front of Congress. But he did report the splinters in his ass to qualify for some medals. As an officer, wouldn’t that be “dereliction of duty” to observe all those things and not do anything about them? /sarc
Nice and Yes. This. Let’s be clear, Kerry “testified” on the street in from of the building that holds Congress. He did not sit in a Congressional hearing. The tapes still exist.
And yes, as an officer he was obliged to report all that he has “seen” at the time he saw it. Otherwise it was dereliction of duty.
So, Kerry at the jump is either a liar or a traitor.