Monday, September 30, 2019

The Stupid Burns in a Screaming Conflagration

I'm opposed to capital punishment, but this made me reconsider.

First, of course, the prattle about "superpower."  People keep using this word, I do not think it means what they think it means.  If you could only have "an innate sense of right and wrong" by being born on Krypton or exposed to Z-rays, then humanity would be doomed.  I'm not even sure what a sense of right and wrong is, to be honest, but it appears to be a normal part of the human endowment.  But the reference is basically empty blather, because people disagree widely about what is right and wrong, and even when they agree they don't always act on it.  Acting on what one believes to be right is not universal, but it's not a superpower either, any more than athletic ability, artistic ability, or (redundantly) singing or dancing superbly.  These are all human abilities, and they are distributed on something like a continuum: individuals have more or less of them, it's rarely if ever either/or.

Second, Sanders has not been right about everything.  To give just one example, he parrots the lies of US propaganda against the legally elected, legitimate government of Venezuela, though he stops short of endorsing military action to bring the regime change about.  There are actually quite a few people who've been better on such matters than Sanders has been, and even they are not perfect.

Now, I agree with Sanders on most issues.  I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primaries, defend him against centrist Dems' false accusations, and will vote for him in the 2020 primaries.  I've made some small donations to his campaign this year.  If he wins the nomination, I will vote for him in the general election as well.  It is possible to support and vote for a politician without indulging in ridiculous fantasies about him or her.  On the contrary, uncritical and delusional support and adulation for politicians or other public figures have a lot to do with the problems we have now.

Friday, September 20, 2019

Pure Journalism

Another quickie.  I just finished reading Kevin M. Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015).  It's a fun, informative read, and here's another passage that I wanted to pass along.

In 1954, President Eisenhower signed a bill adding "under God" the Pledge of Allegiance.  Though he was enthusiastic about the new law, he chose not to make a photo op of the signing.  Members of Congress, however, did, with a rally on the Capitol steps.
CBS broadcast the event live on television, with Walter Cronkite leading the coverage of what he called “a stirring event.” “‘New glory for Old Glory’—a wonderful idea,” he said. “Maybe if we all remember to display our flags today and every special day, we will remember more clearly the traditions of freedom on which our country is founded.”
This tickled me, because I see so much complaint about today's news media mixing reporting with propaganda.  Cronkite himself is largely remembered as a role model, except for the one time he expressed doubt about the US invasion of Vietnam.  Not, of course, because he objected to the war itself, but because we weren't "winning" it.  Yet here Cronkite gushed, and nobody seems to have cared.  I bet that it wasn't the only time.

I speculate that the reason this was okay, but complaining that we weren't winning in Vietnam was "editorializing," is that in this case he was supporting US policy, whereas on Vietnam he was criticizing it.  Make sense?

Saturday, September 14, 2019

Will Charlie Brown Get to Kick the Football This Time?

The move is still in progress, but it means I'll be driving a lot.  Yesterday I caught most of NPR's The 1A, and I noticed something again that had been lurking in my mind for a while.  The 1A's anchor asked one his pundit-guests if Donald Trump was going to follow through on something -- the rumored $15 billion for Iran, or the ban on flavored vaping, something like that.  I don't remember the answer, because it occurred to me what a stupid question it was, that it would have been stupid even before Trump became Oligarch-in-Chief, and that a lot of time is wasted on such questions in the news media. 

In Trump's case it's always a tossup whether he'll remember to do what he says he will anyway, so it seems especially useless to ask such a question about him.  But the trouble is bigger than one senescent, blustering buffoon.  The mission of news coverage, it seems to me is to report what has happened, not to "predict" what might.  That's not just because media fortunetelling is usually wrong, remarkably so since there are a lot of pundits out there and one or two of them ought to come up with an accurate prediction just by accident.  There's also no accountability for their predictions.  Indeed, elite media get very pissy if anyone questions them about spectacular failures, like those involving the financial crash of 2008 or the 2003 invasion of Iraq or Hillary Clinton's 2016 electoral defeat.

I'm sure this sort of pointless prediction is nothing new, and I don't know whether it's more common than it used to be, but I have no doubt that it's a waste of time, especially when the standard of actual news coverage is so low.  The worst examples turn up in discussion of our endless election season, but as the question about Trump shows, it's not limited to electoral politics, and it's most wasteful when the question is basically unanswerable, as most predictive questions are.  I wonder what would happen to a pundit-guest who declined to answer such a question and declared it useless; I suppose such a person would not be invited to return, but then such a person would probably not be invited on in the first place.

As a side note, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power paid The 1A a visit earlier this week.  Power is a vile opportunist, of course, and an apologist for the crimes of the US and its clients, which is why The 1A billed her as an "idealist."  I haven't listened to the segment but will try to.

Wednesday, September 11, 2019


I'm not sure why I have resisted writing all month -- I mean, really, have you seen the news? -- but I'll try to do better.  One excuse is that I'm about to move to a new apartment at the other end of the state, after twenty-six years in the same place, and as the big day approaches my stress level increases.  But I am still alive, and I've been wasting a lot of time to keep my mind off the coming cataclysm.

Among my diversions has been Youtube, and I recently discovered what I can only describe as the Beavis and Butthead of Classical Violin: Brett and Eddy, two Chinese-Australian violinists, who have gained millions of viewers as they trash their own field and, indeed, the world.  They have a line of "merch" and their slogan is Practice practice practice but given the amount of time they must spend before the camera and editing the results, I wonder how much practicing they actually do. 

Why Beavis and Butthead?  Because that's their sensibility, down to Brett pulling his hoodie over his head.  Maybe not in this one, which I post for the sensibility.  Despite my personal lust for geekboys, I have to admit, I rarely make it all the way through their videos; this is one of the shorter ones, though it's still kind of excruciating.

This one is actually entertaining, because their guest is more engaging than they are.

So... that is probably it for September, unless I surprise myself very pleasantly.  But I'll be back.