Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
So last week something very unfair was done to President Obama. Someone captured this video clip of Him speaking about Fox News’ representation of poor people…
…which makes Him look like a strutting martinet, a tinpot dictator ready to clamp down and start controlling how His country’s media presents ideas not to His liking. It also makes Him look like a bit of a nitwit.
What’s unfair is, that’s the general impression here on Planet Earth. But Obama wasn’t speaking on Earth, He was speaking on the Way Hard Fringe Kooky Lefty-Left Butt-Hurt Hatey-Hate planet, where censoring Fox News makes all sorts of sense. Everybody knows it, on that planet. “Everybody” knows just all sorts of things on that planet.
As Megyn Kelly pointed out, President Obama has a very long history of doing this — blaming the reporting, specifically Fox, when He finds that a not-quite-adequate number of His fellow citizens agree with Him about something. She also points out (at about 3:30 here) that this continued carping is “beneath the dignity of the office” of POTUS.
All of which is quite true. On Planet Earth. Again, it’s unfair: Where His Holiness was speaking, different rules apply, both policy and cultural. They’re in their very own orbit, and it seems nothing is beneath the dignity of anything over there.
But logic is universal. That’s the wonderful thing about it. People living in this or that place may not want it to apply, but it still does. So with that in mind, I’m more fascinated with this thing from the first clip (about 0:28):
…It is a constant menu. They will find…(pause)…like…folks who make Me mad. I don’t know where they find them, right? They’re all, like, I don’t wanna work, I just want a free Obamaphone. Or, whatever.
And, and that becomes an entire narrative. Right? That, that gets worked up. Uh, and and you and very rarely do you hear an interview of of a waitress, which is much more typical, who is raising a couple of kids and is doing everything right, but still can’t pay the bills. Um, and so…
Bold emphasis is mine. Well you can see it’s the verbal medium, so obviously that’s true. But it’s also obvious that when I put the emphasis on “narrative” I’m merely acting on the desires of the speaker. He wishes to discuss narratives. His complaint is about narratives. Nowhere, in any rendition of this particular speech I have heard, does He complain about lying, or failure to adequately check-out some story that turned out to be a falsehood before broadcasting it.
So proceeding to the other thing I put in bold, the “more typical” thing — we need to figure out what President Obama means by this, since His entire complaint seems to be relying on some meaning He has in mind for this term. President Obama is complaining about some standard that has not been met, that Fox News has failed to meet. Let’s use logic. There are exactly two possibilities. Literal and figurative:
1. President Obama has access to statistical information that definitively proves there are more waitresses raising two kids, who are doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills, than there are lazy people who don’t wanna work and want a free Obamaphone or whatever.
2. President Obama is applying the informal definition of the word “typical.” He is complaining that the factual information finding its way to Him, by way of Fox News, contradicts His preconceived notions and this makes Him uncomfortable.
adjective
having the distinctive qualities of a particular type of person or thing.
“a typical day”characteristic of a particular person or thing.
“he brushed the incident aside with typical good humor”informal: showing the characteristics expected of or popularly associated with a particular person, situation, or thing.
““Typical woman!” John said disapprovingly”
The Google definition associates this use of “typical” with sexism and prejudice. Which fits, when you think about it a bit. Prejudice is prejudging, something that is necessary when you have a complaint about information someone has brought to you, that the “narrative” is not as “typical” as something else. Means you must have picked the something-else, first, somehow, and are experiencing pique over this contradiction that was introduced afterward. The learning is making you cringe.
Even “John,” with his sexist prejudgments about “typical” women, isn’t guilty of this. Not as far as we can see, anyway. We’d have to wait and see how he responds, should he find out about a woman who doesn’t fit the mold. But we know more than that now about President Obama.
Here on Earth, that carries some particularly dire implications. Especially about our nation’s Commander in Chief, upon whom the rest of us are relying to be able to absorb information at certain key moments. Information about reality. We do not rely on our Commander in Chief to erect these prejudgments, and then protect them from information about reality that arrives later, like a little boy protecting a sandcastle against a rising tide. We’re relying on Him to protect something else more important.
What President Obama is doing with this complaint, is something typical of the college-adjunct-prof crowd, or more broadly, of those who are sometimes referred to as being “educated above their hat size”: He’s pitching it in the waste bucket, because it conflicts. The conflict is of His making, it is not the product of Fox News; it arises because President Obama has some narratives of His own.
It also seems to have eluded Obama’s notice that here on Planet Earth, “waitress working hard to raise two kids” is not mutually-exclusive from “don’t wanna work, want an Obamaphone or whatever.” Not to disparage the noble waitressing profession, but it’s possible for one person to belong to both groups, and the overlap may be significant. Here again, the literal, statistically-driven version of “typical” doesn’t work. If you were to go door-to-door in the poor neighborhoods, conducting a survey about “Are you a waitress who does everything right and still can’t pay the bills while you’re raising two kids, or do you not want to work and want an Obamaphone or whatever,” you wouldn’t be able to complete it. Well you could I suppose. It would be another one of those bits of faux-research that end up saying whatever the researchers wanted them to say; which, ironically, is exactly what Obama is doing. Point is, it wouldn’t be an objective measurement because the objective measurement isn’t there to be taken.
So this is another unfair thing that was done to President Obama: The cat got let out of the bag. We got to see, here on Earth, how decisions get made over on that other weird planet. How they reach the conclusion first, then do the learning. Ready, fire, aim! And as they do this learning which is way too late for it to have an effect on anything, they react. Emotionally. Using a purely binary approach, of “I approve of this” and “I don’t approve of that.”
Oh, now and then we do see that here on Earth. Quite often, in fact. It usually has to involve liberal democrats, some sort of a committee, or a committee of liberal democrats.
But we think of it as a bureaucratic disgrace. Especially when it costs us something, personally. Over there on the weird strange planet, it’s the way things are done. “Everybody knows”…well…pretty much everything. No learning needed.
Now that He’s been made the victim of this very unfair thing, I’d sure like to know how my country’s president makes decisions about everything else. I think I have a right to know. Does Barack Obama have what it takes to actually learn anything? I mean, things that don’t tickle His fancy?
Does He have what it takes to say something like “Golly, I didn’t know that, that makes Me want to re-think a few things”? Here on Earth, we have to say that quite often. Part of being an adult is, you have to say that on most days about three or four times before the kids even climb out of bed to pour their cereal.
And, it would be quite a kick in the gut to find one of those kids in charge of the whole country — who cannot, will not, receive unwelcome information, who rushes to gutterball the information instead. But then again, President Obama has been in the public eye for a long time now, and I’ve had a lot of chances to see Him do this “Vector Change of Flawed Grownups,” the directional shift of the repentant, but learning. The thing the grownups do several times before the Cinnamon Toasty-Oh’s hit the bowl.
I’ve not yet seen it happen. I’ve noticed, instead, little bits of evidence suggesting we have a man-child from Planet Nitwit in charge of it all.
And what’s particularly impactful about this clip that emerged last week is, it sounds like final confirmation of it. Like a confession. When our Learner In Chief learns things He doesn’t want to learn, He just blames the messenger. And then He brags about it. To approving guffaws over on Planet Lefty Liberal Hatey-Hate Seldom-Correct But Never-in-Doubt.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
NO!, you see, his entire campaign, Resume, CV, appointments, dictats, coverage, and puppet masters, have simply been taken out of context!
- CaptDMO | 05/17/2015 @ 06:45Oh, wait….
I wonder how much damage can be done by the machine that he figureheads can be done before
construction of his Presidential library funding initiative charitable foundation begins?
Ah, tricky. Jeb Bush just did something like “Golly, I didn’t know that, that makes Me want to re-think a few things”?, and now he’s dead to you, right? That sort of thing does feed the whole “Can never rethink anything” dynamic we see with so many of our Politicians……
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 05/17/2015 @ 17:05It’s the difference between “re-think[ing] a few things” to produce a better outcome, vs. “re-think[ing] a few things” to establish and re-vitalize narratives. When it’s always the same people doing the re-think, and it’s always the same people who never have to re-think anything, and I don’t see any re-thinking actually being done, when we have some problems. Suggests there’s no actual re-thinking happening at all. Maybe there isn’t much thinking in the first place.
- mkfreeberg | 05/17/2015 @ 17:39I don’t like the answer you are proposing, so we have to keep on doing it this way because ‘we care, and we are smart.’
How did we get to a place where no one is competent enough to hold responsible ? It is as if the entire bureaucracy would fall apart if anyone got fired for not doing their job. It may be concentrated in the democratic party but too many republicans do exactly the same thing.
Nothing humans do works without accountability. Accountability has become anathema. “In its early years, the intellectual and moral rot that liberalism represents may not be reflected, in obvious ways, in the physical world. But over time, the inevitable consequences of liberalism become apparent.”
I hate to use the word ‘liberalism’ in that way but it is indicative of what it has become. In its earlier incarnation, balanced with a working view of the real world, it was something mostly admirable. Today, Feh.
- Theo | 05/17/2015 @ 21:12