Defense of Truth

Without any sense whatsoever of his own irony, Imgur user WildYucatanMan wanted to do the world a service and make a handy dandy infographic to "help" people distinguish between the various editorial orientations of popular online sources.  Here's his take on the media outlet scene: If you get lost in the weeds of his content, you might be tempted to note the ostensible effort toward balance and some kind of rationale for placing outlets along spectra according to ideology and journalistic depth.  And while arguing with WildYucatanMan's judgment about which outlets are obviously in the wrong place is certainly also fair game, it's missing the ironic point entirely. This infographic is not the ANTIDOTE for fake news, it's the PRIME EXAMPLE of why fake news is a problem to begin with! Did you notice that there's no one signing his/her actual name to the grid?  An anonymous source is by definition disreputable until vetted, is it not?  Even if the an...

President Trump has said some inexcusable things about women and has bragged about doing some inexcusable things to/with women.  I roundly condemn his words and actions for the repulsive and deeply offensive things they are.  I teach my girls not to give the time of day to any boys with such attitudes about women, and I teach my son never to indulge such attitudes himself. This post isn't about that. Instead, it's about why (mostly Democrat) women are protesting in massive numbers in the streets around the country today.  Do they have a right to speak their mind and protest whatever they choose?  Absolutely!  And just what is it they're upset enough to travel and march together about? Here's a short video outlining their reasons, from their own publicity materials (sorry, Blogger won't let me embed video directly from a non Youtube url...grr): https://www.facebook.com/womensmarchonwash/videos/1407285932618015/ 1. I want to feel safe at scho...

I remember having to sit in a required course taught by an English professor, on the theory and history of Empire.  As a first reading, he assigned a post-911 State of the Union speech by Bush, and then had us listen to the most recent one for comparison, since it was right about that time in January.  He was right to note that these kinds of inauguration and SOTU speeches for a sort of genre unto themselves that historians and scholars of rhetoric like to review and appreciate the nuances of.  Genres are funny things--over time and by weight of example they gather sets of conventional rules that each instance variously obeys and flouts, thereby growing and redefining the genre itself. However, as he was asking us what we thought about the most recent one, I kept my comments to myself for fear I'd have to defend them publicly (which I wasn't fully prepared for a the time).  I've always suffered from Voltaire's famous "esprit d'escalier" where the stea...

An FB post from a friend claiming this video as an Econ and Politics 101 primer prompts my point-by-point rebuttal below: Reich is the king of cherry-picked half-truth and the twice-spun straw-man argument, even when he's accurate on his facts (which he's not always--that part often turns out to be "selective" too, and usually missing proper contextualization). Conservatives think that leaving more earnings in the hands of the earners makes sense, so yes, low taxes. Conservatives think that regulation should be done from the local level up, not from the federal level down, so yes, fewer regulations. But low wages has NEVER been part of the Conservative economic argument, instead the argument is that when employers are free to let the market choose the wages, wages tend to settle HIGHER. TX and KS are 25 and 26 for average income in 2014, CA was 3 , that much is true (although 25-26 are NOT bottom of the barrel, by any stretch). But, now ask how that tra...

Quick post today.  A friend with good intentions posted a list of 10 things we can do to combat hate published by the Southern Poverty Law Center , or SPLC  here .  It's got some good suggestions for empowering people when something truly racist or bigoted happens in their communities.  However, while failing miserably to maintain a veneer of objective neutrality, it let slip the following belly-laugh-inspiring list of criteria exposing its massive leftist leaning, apparently with complete blindness to its own hypocrisy: Though their views may be couched in code words, members of hate groups typically share these extremist views: • They want to limit the rights of certain groups. • They want to divide society along racial, ethnic or religious lines. • They believe in conspiracies. • They try to silence any opposition. • They are antigovernment and fundamentalist. By their own definition, even with the most charitable reading of the criteria, the SPL...

Living in a swing state has its ups and downs--no pun intended.  But swings work best when the ropes aren't twisted.  Here's how to untwist the latest national ads targeted to Ohio and the like. The children!  Hillary cares about the children!  Children are our future.  They're innocent.  They need protection, and if you're on the fence about who to vote for, this is Clinton's play to make you think she's the person to do it.  She's been working at it her whole life, apparently.  We have footage of her talking about making sure the future's bright for all children, all the while implying that her political opponent is not.  Well, if he's not anti-children, then at least he's a racist xenophobe who doesn't want success in life for "all" children like Hillary does. Does this stuff actually convince anybody?  There's no content in this ad, only branding.  There's no concrete ideas on  how to protect children and give the...

A couple of articles I've read recently, as well as a number of "conservative" friends vowing to go third party on the grounds that Trump is an immoral candidate unworthy of support, or on the grounds that "voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil" have pushed me more toward full support of Trump's candidacy than ever. I can't, of course, endorse the man.  Final judgment doesn't belong to me, but I also can't turn off what I observe.  If what he claims about himself is true, his moral compass is nowhere near aligned with mine, and his dubious sense of right makes me fear what he would do when it got coupled with the unmitigated might of the executive branch. I can't, of course, endorse the political ideals.  His positions on all the conservative ideals I hold dear and essential to the maintenance of liberty in this great land and upon the whole earth are nowhere near solid enough in substance, grounded enough in pri...