Tag Archives: Fidel Castro

Bernie Sanders and the Brutal Bros

24 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Collectivism, Leftism, Tyranny, Uncategorized

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Some of Bernie Sanders’ most devoted fans have an unfortunate brutalitarian streak. The violent strain of so-called Bernie Bros aren’t as isolated as one might hope. First, of course, there was James Hodgkinson, the BB who attempted to assassinate Republican members of Congress at a congressional baseball game practice, seriously injuring Rep. Steve Scalise. Now, campaign field organizers for Sanders in Iowa and South Carolina have been captured on film proposing gulags, re-education camps, sentencing billionaires to hard labor, and shooting or beheading those opposed to Sanders’ policies. And much more. And they say this in all seriousness. What nice people have been assigned positions of responsibility within the Sanders campaign organization! Watch it for yourself at the link above.

Should we be surprised? No: these are advocates of forced collectivism, and if their favorable perspective on coercive power wasn’t enough of a tip-off, recent history suggests that many among them are truly ready and willing to do violence. The brutal and murderous history of collectivist regimes the world over demonstrates the tendency well enough. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and too many other leftist tyrants left bodies strewn in their wake as they sought to enforce their ideology. It’s no coincidence that the American Left holds the murderous Che Guevara in such high esteem. Black Lives Matter and Antifa have both perpetrated violent acts, and members of the Leftist media have openly advocated physical attacks on their political opponents. And then we have these Bernie Bros.

I feel compelled to review a bit of background on Bernie Sanders, the batty old communist who has managed to convince large numbers of poorly educated “intellectuals” that he knows the path to utopia. The nicer ones imagine that he’s a man of the people, though he hasn’t worked a day in his life at anything except agitation and rent seeking. He is an inveterate public mooch. His life history as a politician and as a person is rather unflattering.

I’ve used this Iowahawk (David Burge) quote about Sanders before:

“Who better to get America back to work than a guy who was actually fired from a Vermont hippie commune for being too lazy.”

Apparently, Barack Obama is not a Bernie Bro:

“Obama has told people in private that Sanders is both temperamentally and politically unfit to beat Trump in the 2020 general election, these people say. Among his concerns are Sanders’ strident form of politics and confrontational manners where he was known not to seek compromise during his long years in the US senate.”

And say what you will about Hillary Clinton, but her opinion of Sanders comports with much of what we know about The Bern:

“He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done.”

At least the Bernie Bros have taken their masks off before getting too far. Give Leftists power and they all will.

Fake News and Fake Virtue

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Free Speech, Propaganda

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Suddenly, since the election, “fake news” has become all the rage. Not that it’s a new phenomenon. All of us have come across it on social media. Most of us think we know it when we see it, and the recent election probably sensitized a great many of us to its cheap seduction. Some of it is satire, some is sincerely-held conspiracy theory, some is cooked-up, milli-penny click bait, and some of it is intended to drive an agenda.

Those forms of “fake news” are only the most obvious. I believe, for example, that the dangers of positively fake news are no greater than those posed by omission or demotion of news. It was rather obvious during the recent election campaign that news networks often ignored important stories that did not favor their own points of view. And since the death of the tyrant Fidel Castro, we’ve heard pronouncements that he was a “great leader” from a variety of sources who should know better; we’ve heard very little from them about his oppressive and murderous regime.

News as reported, and not reported, is often manipulated or mischaracterized to suit particular agendas. Reporters have their sources, and sources usually have agendas and stratagems in mind, which include rewarding reporters to get the coverage they desire. The manipulation even extends to news about science: grant-hungry and media-savvy members of the scientific community, and the pop-science community, know how to leverage it to their advantage.

Given the universal human capacity for bias, Roger Simon asks, only half in jest, whether all news is fake news. You can rely on so-called fact-checkers in an attempt to verify stories you find suspicious, but choose your fact checkers wisely because they are no better than the biases they bring to their duties. Let’s face it: facts are not always as clear-cut as we’d like. Simon makes his advisory on bias in reporting in the context of Mark Zuckerberg’s new-found passion to identify “fake news” and purveyors of “fake news”, and potentially to ban them from Facebook. No doubt his concern stems from accusations from angry Hillary Clinton supporters that Facebook failed to control the flow of “fake news” during the presidential campaign. He wants users to “flag” fake stories, but he knows that won’t always yield definitive conclusions. Simon quotes the Wall Street Journal:

“Facebook is turning to outside groups for help in fact-checking… It is also exploring a product that would label stories as false if they have been flagged as such by third-parties or users, and then show warnings to users who read or share the articles.

‘The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically,’ [Zuckerberg] wrote. ‘We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible.’“

Well, that’s a relief! But what kind of chilling effect might be inflicted when the fact priests assign their marks? And what kind of fact-check/flagging escalation might be engendered among users? In the end, users and third-party “authorities” have biases. You can’t take any proscriptive action that will please them all. Better for hosts to keep their fingers off the scale, avoid censorship, and let users please themselves!

Zuckerberg should know better than to think that “facts” are always easily discerned, that “fake” news is solely the province of crank blogs and flakey “new media” organizations, or that “fake news” has any political affiliation. Consider the following examples offered by A. Barton Hinkle at Reason.com:

“The [New York] Times’ record for disseminating agitprop dates back at least to the early 1930s, when Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for his reporting that denied the existence of famines in Soviet Russia—during a period when millions were dying of starvation.

More recently, The Times has given the nation the Jayson Blair fabrications—which it followed up with the infamous 2004 story, ‘Memos on Bush Are Fake But Accurate, Typist Says.’ It followed that up four years later with a story implying that GOP presidential candidate John McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist. (The lobbyist sued, and reached a settlement with the paper.)

Over the years other pillars of the media also have fallen on their faces. NBC News had to confess that it rigged GM trucks with incendiary devices for an explosive Dateline segment. The Washington Post gave up a Pulitzer after learning that Janet Cooke’s reporting about an 8-year-old heroin addict was false. In 1998 the Cincinnati Enquirer renounced its own series alleging dark doings by the Chiquita banana company. That same year, CNN retracted its story alleging ‘that the U.S. military used nerve gas in a mission to kill American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War.’ The San Jose Mercury News had to denounce its own series alleging that the CIA was to blame for the crack cocaine epidemic. Rolling Stone just got hit with a big libel judgment for its now-retracted story about a rape at U.Va. And so on.“

Retractions are good, of course, but they aren’t always forthcoming, and they often receive little notice after the big splash of an initial report. The damage cannot be fully undone. Yet no one proposes to censor “the paper of record” or, with the exception of Fox News, the major television networks.

Edward Morrissey, writing at The Week, notes that the Trump election represented such a total breakdown in the accepted political wisdom that the identification of scapegoats was inevitable:

“Over the past week, the consensus Unified Theory from the media is this: Blame fake news. This explanation started with BuzzFeed’s analysis of Facebook over the past three months, which claimed that the top 20 best-performing ‘fake news’ articles got more engagement than the top 20 ‘mainstream news’ stories. …

There are also serious problems with the evidence BuzzFeed presents. As Timothy Carney points out at the Washington Examiner, the “real news” that Silverman uses for comparison are, in many cases, opinion pieces from liberal columnists. The top ‘real’ stories — which BuzzFeed presented in a graphic to compare against the top ‘fake’ stories — consist of four anti-Trump opinion pieces and a racy exposé of Melania Trump’s nude modeling from two decades ago.“

In Reason, Scott Shackford considers a proposed list of “fake news” sources compiled by a communications professor. Shackford says:

“… [Professor] Zimdars’ list is awful. It includes not just fake or parody sites; it includes sites with heavily ideological slants like Breitbart, LewRockwell.com, Liberty Unyielding, and Red State. These are not “fake news” sites. They are blogs that—much like Reason—have a mix of opinion and news content designed to advance a particular point of view. Red State has linked to pieces from Reason on multiple occasions, and years ago I wrote a guest commentary for Breitbart attempting to make a conservative case to support gay marriage recognition.“

Warren Meyer rightfully identifies the “fake news” outrage as an exercise in idealogical speech suppression, much like the left’s cavalier use of the term “hate speech”:

“The reason it is such a dangerous term for free speech is that there is no useful definition of hate speech, meaning that in practice it often comes to mean, ‘confrontational speech that I disagree with.’“

Worries about “fake” news are one thing, but perhaps we should be just as concerned about the “scourge of dumb news“, and the way it often supplants emphasis on more serious developments. Did the fracas over the Hamilton cast’s treatment of Mike Pence distract the media, and the public, from stories about Donald Trump’s potential conflicts of interest around the globe, which broke at about the same time? Here are some other examples of “dumb” news offered by Noah Rothman, the author of the last link:

“Colin Kaepernick, the Black Lives Matter movement, college-age adults devolving into their childlike selves, or pretentious celebrities politicizing otherwise apolitical events; for the right, these and other similar stories masquerade as and suffice for intellectual stimulation and political engagement. The left is similarly plagued by mock controversies. The faces printed on American currency notes, minority representation in film adaptations of comic books, and astrophysicists insensitive enough to announce feats of human engineering while wearing shirts with cartoon depictions of scantily clad women on them. This isn’t politics but, for many, it’s close enough.“

Okay, so what? We all choose news sources we prefer or discern to be reliable, interesting, or entertaining, and that’s wonderful. No one should presume to question the degree to which news and entertainment ought to intersect. I do not want protection from “fake news”, “dumb news”, or any news source that I prefer, least of all from the government. After all, if there is any entity that might wish to “control the narrative” it’s the government, or anyone who stands to gain from it’s power to coerce.

Statists Can’t Imagine Liberty

04 Sunday Jan 2015

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Imagine all the people, living for today AND tomorrow, free to do whatever the hell they want, creating, trading, investing, growing, playing, praying, partying. But any human initiative to improve upon the harsh conditions of the natural world is apparently offensive to the nihilistic sensibilities of those on the Left (as are a host of other freedoms). That attitude is often expressed by gentry leftists, already living quite comfortably, without recognition that the statist policies they advocate would render the same conditions unattainable for most others and probably unsustainable for themselves. The hypocrisy is glaring. Here are links to a few recent articles and posts illustrating the duplicity of the Left.

Jonah Goldberg has some fun with a recent piece on the many double standards of the Left. According to Don Boudreaux, this piece is flawed only in Goldberg’s use of the term “liberal” rather than the more accurate “statist”:

“If you work from the dogmatic assumption that liberalism is morally infallible and that liberals are, by definition, pitted against sinister and — more importantly — powerful forces, then it’s easy to explain away what seem like double standards. Any lapse, error, or transgression by conservatives is evidence of their real nature, while similar lapses, errors, and transgressions by liberals are trivial when balanced against the fact that their hearts are in the right place. Despite controlling the commanding heights of the culture — journalism, Hollywood, the arts, academia, and vast swaths of the corporate America they denounce — liberals have convinced themselves they are pitted against deeply entrenched powerful forces and that being a liberal is somehow brave. Obama, the twice-elected president of the United States, to this day speaks as if he’s some kind of underdog.”

To digress briefly, Boudreaux elaborates on the true meaning of liberalism here.

This essay by Walter Russell Mead, “The Liberal Retreat,” describes the state of the leftist agenda after six years of the Obama Administration. It is written from more of a conservative point of view than my preferred libertarian position, but it is very much on-target in its assertion that the “body politic” is not buying into the leftist agenda. We are post-“peak Left”:

“Shell-shocked liberals are beginning to grasp some inconvenient truths. No gun massacre is horrible enough to change Americans’ ideas about gun control. No UN Climate Report will get a climate treaty through the U.S. Senate. No combination of anecdotal and statistical evidence will persuade Americans to end their longtime practice of giving police officers extremely wide discretion in the use of force. No ‘name and shame’ report, however graphic, from the Senate Intelligence Committee staff will change the minds of the consistent majority of Americans who tell pollsters that they believe that torture is justifiable under at least some circumstances. No feminist campaign will convince enough voters that the presumption of innocence should not apply to those accused of rape.”

It is a point of no small irony that many on the Left express apprehension about the prospect of normalized relations between the U.S. and Cuba. Heaven forbid that this process might introduce the fruits of capitalism to Cuban shores. Here’s an interesting (and disturbing) take on Castro’s Hipster Apologists:

“Flickering across my computer screen, elements of the left were uniting with elements of the right, insisting that Cuba remain in the cold, a museum of the Cold War isolated from both the glories and evils of American culture. One lefty tweeter even complained that an invasion of icky American tourists would undermine ‘family values’ in Cuba.”

American universities are hotbeds of egalitarian philosophy as well as identity politics. Here’s a good example of the consequences of this sort of leftist mind freeze in an opinion piece by an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, W. Lee Hansen, on an initiative to use grading quotas at the school:

“I would argue to the contrary that many students will suffer academically if they receive the artificial boost of higher grades than they actually earned just because they happen to be in a ‘targeted group.’ Students need accurate feedback on how they’re doing, not inflated grades that boost their egos.

I would also argue that the university’s reputation will be diminished by these efforts at equalizing grades between groups. Pressures to eliminate grading gaps will lead to the ‘dumbing down’ of courses and, even more likely, grade inflation for targeted minority students. This pretend solution won’t make the university better for anyone.”

Any university making use of grading quotas deserves scorn. It’s sad that a great institution like Wisconsin-Madison would stoop to such a practice. Then again, egalitarian philosophy and identity politics deserve scorn. These are ideas that ultimately breed envy, hatred and social failure.