All hail the return of Truth
Ann Althouse discusses an article in The New Yorker by Susan B. Glasser about Biden’s inaugural address, entitled “Joe Biden’s Love Letter to the Truth.”
I’m glad that Atlhouse reads these things so I don’t have to. But that title alone – which apparently is unironic – is a marvel, is it not? Even when I was a Democrat, I would not have seen that as descriptive of Joe Biden’s relationship to truth, and things have only gone downhill with Joe from there.
The next four years of press vis a vis Biden are going to be a lovefest, but certainly not a truthfest. It’s not an easy thing to watch, but here we are. I don’t see how most Democrats can fail to notice the fulsome and gushingly over-the-top bias of what’s going on, but I’ll wager most of them will succeed in failing to do so, or will manage to rationalize the hypocrisy in some way.
It’s that old 2 + 2 = 5 thing again. There is really no limit to the amount of self-deception people can and will engage in if it fits their politics and is in accord with the expressed viewpoints of those around them.
One more observation on this subject: remember, in the olden days of the USSR, what one of the press propaganda organs was called? Sure you do: Pravda. It’s still in operation, but from 1912 to 1991 it was the the official newspaper of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.
The meaning of the word “Pravda” is “truth”:
Pravda (Russian: “Truth”) is a Russian broadsheet newspaper, formerly the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most influential papers in the country with a circulation of 11 million.
At the time when the paper was founded [1903], the name “Pravda” already had a clear historical connotation, since the law code of the Medieval Kievan Rus’ was known as Russkaya Pravda; in this context, “Pravda” meant “Justice” rather than “Truth”, “Russkaya Pravda” being “Russian Justice”…
As the names of the main Communist newspaper and the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda and Izvestia, meant “the truth” and “the news” respectively, a popular saying was “there’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia”. However, though not highly appreciated as an objective and unbiased news source, Pravda was regarded – both by Soviet citizens and by the outside world – as a government mouthpiece and therefore a reliable reflection of the Soviet government’s positions on various issues. The publication of an article in Pravda could be taken as indication of a change in Soviet policy or the result of a power struggle in the Soviet leadership, and Western Sovietologists were regularly reading Pravda and paying attention to the most minute details and nuances.
So in the USSR people knew what a lie Pravda was, and although I would wager that some of the people there were true believers and thought that Pravda was some sort of “love letter to the truth,” I would guess they constituted a smaller percentage of population than the number of people in the US who currently believe what is printed in papers such as the WaPo and the NY Times and periodicals such as The New Yorker. At least the Soviets were not hiding the truth that Pravda was an official party organ and published the party line. Our organs of “truth” prefer to bathe in the pretense of their own objectivity.
[NOTE: Polls indicate that trust in media has fallen. But it’s still surprisingly high, IMHO.]
I suppose that trust in media will remain surprisingly high among people who do not permit themselves to be exposed to any alternative sources. I suppose I should include those people who are shielded from other sources; e.g., students.
I like to analogize the legacy and social media marching in lockstep as an ancient Greek phalanx designed to prevent any penetration. Those who dared try were likely to be destroyed. Now, of course, it is all virtual, but the concept seems analogous.
“As the names of the main Communist newspaper and the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda and Izvestia, meant “the truth” and “the news” respectively, a popular saying was “there’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia”. ” – NYT story cited in the Wikipedia article.
I’ve always seen that as “there’s no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestia”.
Which makes more sense if you are saying it in Russian.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/there-is-no-pravda-in-izvestia
The rest of that article, from 2008, points out that the media are, and have been, biased and truth-less for many years, but accelerated their post-factual movement after Obama’s election.
Seems about right to me.
If I may borrow Mary McCarthy’s notorious slam of Lillian Hellman…
Everything the mainstream media says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.
The most reliable method of approaching the MSM is to assume the exact opposite of whatever they’re reporting is the truth, and to maintain that position unless and until, you have some sort of objective verification for the event or incident as they reported it. You won’t always be right: despite my snark, the MSM doesn’t always lie, but you will be more often right than wrong.
AesopFan:
Yes, in the past I’ve heard the quote given in different ways. I just decided to cut and paste that article, though, and let people duke it out in the comments 🙂 .
A good post on the historical trajectory of post-factual “journalism.”
https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting
The New York Times and other elite media outlets have openly embraced advocacy over reporting.
Martin Gurri Winter 2021
And today RedState is on the case with the heuristic examples.
https://townhall.com/columnists/bradslager/2021/01/22/in-shockingly-timely-fashion-this-biden-term-already-has-the-press-altering-their-definition-of-the-truth-n2583555
Susan B. Gasbag is the spouse of NYT slither-scribe Peter Baker.
Wiki has an entry on “Uncle Joe”:
__________________________________________________
Uncle Joe may refer to:
* Joe Biden (born 1942), current President of the United States, sometimes nicknamed “Uncle Joe” in the press
…
* Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), Soviet leader, called “Uncle Joe” by Western media
__________________________________________________
We’re in good hands with Uncle Joe! The media tells us so.
Commenter at Althouse
ICYMI, that quote comes from this event August 08, 2019:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/truth-over-facts-biden-fumbles-during-iowa-speech
“Everybody knows who Donald Trump is. Even his supporters know who he is. We got to let him know who we are. We choose unity over division. We choose science over fiction. We choose truth over facts.”
Orwellian newspeak on steroids.
Lots of good comments, reprising some of the old standard quotations and examples, but this was the winner, IMO.
An article in today’s paper was about Fauci and how relieved he was to be able to follow the science now. He said it was nice to be able to acknowledge what they don’t know and to quit giving out up beat messages. (Dr. Doom and Gloom.) He also derided the Trump administration for mentioning HCL as a possible therapeutic. I used to watch the daily Covid briefings and I never got the message that things were rosy. I did see conflicting info when different principals weren’t in agreement. I didn’t see anyone admit they didn’t know the answers, and maybe Trump was the reason, because he didn’t want to cause panic among the population. I do agree that there is much the experts don’t know – some of it willful blindness. However, I find their seeming inertia on finding therapeutics (HCL, Ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, etc.) and getting them out to the population as being medical malpractice. I also, think their total neglect of investigating possible protective supplements (Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Quercetin, Glutathione/NAC, Zinc, and Melatonin) is unforgivable as well.
The medical community’s practice of doing nothing until a patient has pneumonia seems to me to have contributed greatly to the death toll. Social distancing and hand washing are reasonably well understood as protective measures. Masks, not so much. The studies on masks seem to be all over the place. Yet, the “scientists” swear by them. IMO, there is more evidence of the supplements being protective than there is for masks.
The poo bahs of public health wring their hands about overwhelming their hospitals, yet they will do nothing to use therapeutics to treat outpatients that would keep them out of the hospital.
Now the MSM will gladly promote every utterance of the Biden* administration as gospel. Wait until we see the climate change propaganda. There won’t be any mention that there is a mountain of evidence that climate change is not a crisis.
I read our local rag because it has some relatively unbiased local coverage and the sports scores are (I hope) accurate. But their national news all comes from the AP – all biased. And their editorial page is 95% progressive. To read the editorials is a bit like talking to someone from a different planet. Their point of view seems to see a world that I don’t recognize. Critical thinking is required.
BTW, loved Ann’s illustration of how she got “red-pilled” in high school, before the term even existed for “suddenly realizing that the world was different than I had always thought it was.”
All good neologisms capture in a single word some concept that had previously remained stuck in nebulous and unwieldy phrasing, if it had been articulated at all.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/red-pill
Of course, there is probably an old German word for it, since they can stick the entire phrase into one term.
One of the U.S.A.’s counters to Pravda and similar news operations was the Voice Of America (VOA) created in 1942 under FDR. It was (is?) able to broadcast short wave radio over long distances into communist block nations.
There is an intriguing Biden Admin day-one event described in this article over at Am. Thinker.
Apparently, it took the Trump admin. 3 years to oust the left wing Amanda Bennett as head of VOA, because of recalcitrant GOP senators, and replace her with Michael Pack. But only hours into the Biden admin. Pack and his associates were fired.
So signing 17 executive orders and the firing of Michael Pack of VOA were of utmost importance and urgency. Very curious.
I think Fauci is an institutional politician who has remained in office due to that skill. If justice and sense prevailed, he’d be out on his ass by now.
What we’re learning is that our word-merchant class is largely composed of garbage people (and Anthony Fauci is garbage).
I concur.
Fauci is indeed Garbage.
Oldflyer said, “I like to analogize the legacy and social media marching in lockstep as an ancient Greek phalanx designed to prevent any penetration. Those who dared try were likely to be destroyed.”
That reminded me that the Roman army defeated the ancient Greek/Macedonian phalanx in several battles (most notably at Cynoscephalae in 197 BC) by forming smaller units called maniples and by encouraging subordinate commanders to take the initiative when any part of the phalanx began to waver or crack. In addition, the phalanx could basically move in only one direction; it could not readily “drive in reverse gear,” so to speak. At Cynoscephalae, an enterprising Roman tribune led about 20 maniples of legionaries behind the back of the Macedonian center and left wing (fitting symbolism, no?), and attacked the phalanx from the rear. The Macedonians broke and fled.
It seems to me that the Roman model might be applicable in dealing with the current legacy and social media. At the very least, we should stop thinking of the media phalanx as impenetrable or irresistible.
A good 12-minute comparison of the Roman legion and the Greek phalanx can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gI65iIxbXI&ab_channel=KingsandGenerals
The description of Roman tactics at Cynoscephalae begins at 9:36, if you want to skip ahead.
“To read the editorials is a bit like talking to someone from a different planet. Their point of view seems to see a world that I don’t recognize. ” – J J
That’s probably because they only see the world from one point of view: what promotes the Democrat or progressive or hard-core Leftist agenda (close, but not quite identical yet).
Thus, printing “news reports” about things that are objectively untrue is the default operating parameter on the left, not an aberration.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/01/22/why-got-cnn-slapped-down-over-fake-news-story-about-trump-covid-vaccine-distribut-n2583539
And something that is “factual” (or can reasonably be considered so) is emphasized when it helps their cause, and ignored when it does not.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/01/21/cnns-covid-death-count-is-gone-n2583502
There are lies of commission and omission.
What the news media tells us is usually biased, and so is what they don’t.
There are news posts in which every word is objectively true, and yet the article as a whole is false.
No one has ever said “there are truths of commission and omission.”
Although I agree that, if you are wise, you don’t always tell everyone everything you know, even if it’s true.
And then, there are times when telling actual right-down-to-it lies is just what has to be done.
Another Althouse commenter quoted Churchill’s WW2 aphorism, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,” and some discussion ensued.
Wikipedia sources the quote here:
Discussion of Operation Overlord with Stalin at the Teheran Conference November 30, 1943; in Winston Churchill: The Second World War, Volume V : Closing the Ring (1952), Chapter 21 (Teheran: The Crux), p. 338.
So, I pulled that book from my library* and looked it up: the context is the Allied conference which included planning for “Operation Overlord,” a three-nation offensive against Nazi Germany.
As Churchill writes:
Although the British Prime Minister certainly did not give media interviews revealing every detail of his war effort’s activities and plans, and kept up the necessary dissimulations to guard his military strategy and tactics, I do not at all believe that Churchill equated operational deception of the declared and actively hostile enemy forces to be in any way equivalent to promulgating lies in the press, of either omission or commission, to deceive his political opponents, and allies, about everyday life and political agendas.
Stalin, obviously, was okay with that.
The Democrats and their media are, apparently, also okay with that, perhaps because they look on normal political controversies as existential battles in a cosmic war of control over the universality of human existence.
Conservatives just don’t operate from that viewpoint at the mundane every-day level, although serious religious believers will sometimes project the Eternal war of Good and Evil onto the earthly plane.
Note that I do not except “Republican officials and press” from practicing propagandistic deception if it suits their political purposes, but it’s not part of the rank-and-file operating system on the right, as it appears to be on the left.
*on the subject of neologisms:
I almost wrote “meatspace library” to make it clear I was consulting a printed book, not an online facsimile, but I don’t really like that term, and the alternative “brick and mortar” still doesn’t seem quite right to this bibliophile.
Any suggestions?
In conservative blog comments when someone compared the NYT or WaPo to Pravda I would respond jokingly “Unfair, Pravda was more objective”. I still say that but it is no longer a joke.
The Return of Truth (and Unity) requires that you simply forget everything the Democrats said and did for the last four years, or more.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2021/01/22/filibuster-flashback-n2583511
“Flashback: Tom Cotton Reminds Democrats of Their Previous Opposition to Eliminating Filibuster”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/01/22/with-the-firing-of-nlrb-general-counsel-bidens-unity-pledge-is-already-over-n2583547
(quoting Kim Strassel in the WSJ)
Remember: when Republicans try to fire agency officials or employees for any cause, even deserved, it’s an attack on democracy; when Democrats do the same, it’s just common sense.
C’mon, man.
Is there in Truth no Beauty?
Is there in Unity no Truth?
https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2021/01/22/bidens-heartfelt-appeal-for-unity-likely-to-be-unavailing-n2583525
Politicians always sound “heartfelt,” especially when they are lying — it’s their tradecraft.
That Barone can be so easily misled is punditry at its lowest ebb.
If he is just pretending to believe Biden is sincere, that is — ahem — lying.
TommyJay: we need a Radio Free America. Seriously. And I’m saying that as a Cold War-era RFE/RL alum. Pissed off the Sovs royally that they couldn’t control the narrative.
AesopFan: ink and paper.
“So signing 17 executive orders and the firing of Michael Pack of VOA were of utmost importance and urgency. Very curious.” – TommyJay
Too many of Trump’s successes are being undone, because they didn’t have long enough to take hold (last-minute actions that should have been done at least by the end of last year), or that were easy to do (see firing NLRB lawyer above).
It looks like an “urgent” operation, but the Democrats have had all of these actions planned, and the Executive Orders drafted, since November 4, 2020, or earlier.
That’s a tactic the Republicans are woefully inept at, as a number of people noted in January 2017 and subsequently.
“AesopFan: ink and paper.” – Hubert
Thanks – just couldn’t bring that to mind (a mind is a terrible thing to lose; have you seen one lying around I could borrow?)
And second the motion for Radio Free America.
That’s what Rush Limbaugh was all about.
Watch for new FCC rules about “hateful” speech on the airwaves.
FWIW, here is the current (undated) state of the art in Great Britain. You can already get into serious trouble for saying the wrong things.
http://www.communityradiotoolkit.net/on-air/regulation/
“Wiki has an entry on “Uncle Joe”:” – huxley
The only Joe the Left dislikes is McCarthy.
Gee, I wonder why.
Reading through the post on the VOA “massacre,” to borrow the Left’s favorite phrase when one of their minions is ousted, it looks like two things are showing:
(1) Trump’s administration was hobbled from the beginning not only by Democrats but by Republicans;
(2) what I said above, phrased in the Franklin formulation: “Firing opponents is always legal in the first person” – when WE do it.
It’s only reprehensible damage to democracy when YOU do it.
Also: if an appointee has to be confirmed by the Senate to take a post, then any firing ought to require Senate confirmation as well.
Showalter’s analysis of the firings seems plausible to me: it scratched several itches on the Left with one move.
“I don’t see how most Democrats can fail to notice the fulsome and gushingly over-the-top bias of what’s going on, but I’ll wager most of them will succeed in failing to do so, or will manage to rationalize the hypocrisy in some way.” neo
Rationalization is not needed. The MSM’s fulsome and gushingly over-the-top praise evokes a tribalistic ‘yeah for our team’ dynamic. ‘Truth’ lies within tribal consensus. On the left, notice how intolerant of individual divergence from tribal consensus on ideology they are, only thoughts that support and advance the ideological agenda are acceptable.
@AesopFan:
Do you have AlanBrooke’s War Diaries parked alongside Churchill’s Second World War?
Two very different men. Both very necessary complements. How both of them managed to not pop a cap in the other’s head, one can only wonder.
Only one of whom said ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’
AesopFan: “Watch for new FCC rules about ‘hateful’ speech on the airwaves.” Oh, I’m sure they’re coming. The Sovs jammed RFE/RL for decades, until well into the reign of Gorbo. Today’s totalitarians would just drone-strike the transmitters.
True fact: the old Russian SFSR criminal code had two articles–Article 70 and Article 190-1–against “slandering Soviet reality”. And of course there was good old Article 58 (“Anti-Soviet Propaganda”), the one that landed Solzhenitsyn and millions of others in the gulag. Seems like we’re headed in the same direction in this country, under the rubric of “misinformation”.
Regarding Solzhenitsyn’s remarks about how zeks were the only really free people in the USSR, I’ve always liked Chapter 18–“Oh, Wonder-Working Steed”–from “The First Circle”:
https://bit.ly/366zEoR
Describes an encounter between a zek engineer with nothing to lose and Viktor Abakumov, the Minister of State Security under Stalin.
(By the way: paper and ink works better than the other way around.)
Regarding no truth in Pravda/no news in Izvestiya versus no news in Pravda/no truth in Izvestiya- I’ve heard it both ways. IIRC, Neo has also used it both ways.
I simply cannot comprehend Americans who readily and willfully admire political leaders. To my interpretation of our government structure it is an anti-American trait, yet it seems like the vast majority of our fellow citizens want to admire politicians.
I can understand why many folks dislike Trump (although I also see much Trump hatred as unwarranted or unbased in reality), but I cannot understand how anyone admires Joseph Biden or Kamala Harris. Or Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi or, or, or… When we learn more than basic, cursory facts of any politician most all are instantly revealed to be self-serving cretins. Yet people keep hopping on the bandwagon.
As Billie Holiday so insightfully wrote in 1939, “So the Bible says, yet it still is news…”
So glad that you read Atlhouse so I don’t have to.
Neo-
In my dealings with people of the left. Truth is basically irrelevant. FEELINGS are by far the most important feature. And it really is not close. Truth doesnt even take a back seat at this point. Its being dragged behind the car
Remember when Joe Biden said during the campaign,
“We choose science over fiction. We choose truth over facts.”?
Was it a gaffe, and/or something that was supposed to stay behind closed doors? What could it mean?
I had that kicking around in my head when I stumbled across the same verbiage in a British police drama TV show called “Line of Duty.” Truth versus facts is essentially the topic of Season 4, with the opening episode entitled “In the Shadow of the Truth.”
To summarize from the show, the truth derives from articles of faith or strong convictions. At one point the SIO (senior investigative officer) is encouraged by her boss to pursue the confirmation of her bias on the case. The boss says:
“There’s a lot of evidence pro and con, a lot of facts. You’ve got what it takes to cut through all that. There’s facts … and then there’s the truth. I know you won’t let me down.
You see, struggling with all those evidentiary facts takes so much effort and can be confusing. “Letting me down” would constitute embarrassing the police department by admitting that severe mistakes were made and reversing course. Better to convict an innocent man.
It isn’t quite the caliber of “A Man For All Seasons,” but it’s decent. Plus you get Irish actor Adrian Dunbar uttering a variety of “Tedisms” a few of which the actor came up with.
“I know that, fella, that’s why I’m asking the organ grinder and not her monkey”
“I didn’t just float up the Lagan on a bubble!!!” A Lagan is a lagoon, I think.
Ahh, the “Lagan” is a river that runs through Belfast.
Left and Right, this stuff becomes confusing when folks focus one or two issues, probably been that way forever. I have nice conservative women friends who are thrilled to see a woman V.P. because she is a woman and that means a lot to them. I have a few friends who were staunch Republicans, active in the party who did not like Trump and they have bought into the media message for years and continue to buy into it. And then there are my good friends who were moderate Dems who are thrilled with this new stuff and eat it up like a fat man at a hot dog contest. Meanwhile I have some friends who were very dedicated Democrats who are completely feed up with the way the election turned out, lawyer type folks who like the law, and now they have moved over to the right with a lot of appreciation for what actually accomplished between making real dumb statements to irritate normal folks.
I suspect the economy will start to play a big part in the true feelings people have, if the new guys increase Social Security and some other government benefits then they will solidify their gains with old conservatives because it’s the economy but at the same time if prices of fuel double and working class folks pay twice as much to make it to work every day then there will be actual factual consequences of the feel good stuff. I don’t know.
The next two years when there are a lot of people who voted for the Democrats who don’t have all of their magic wishes com true and they decide to burn down a few more blue cities then we might see some change back to the right, because of factual stuff and not magic Tinkerbell stuff. I don’t know.
@Hubert:
That Abakumov / Zek exchange is hilarious.
Abakumov’s sticky end was rather ironic. Almost lost his life for not stitching up the Usual Suspects in the Doctors’ Plot and then did lose it for actually stitching up the Leningrad Party.
I simply cannot comprehend Americans who readily and willfully admire political leaders.
I had some admiration for Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Some for Rudolph Giuliani. Some for Rick Santorum. Some for Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker. Here and there you can locate a politician who made a salutary difference. Jimmy Carter had some good impulses.
Seems like we’re headed in the same [censorship] direction in this country, under the rubric of “misinformation”. — Hubert
Don’t forget that the overarching concern here is safety. Misinformation is just one type of unsafe speech. Discussing the efficacy of cloth masks, for example, could kill people and could be construed to be a form of domestic terrorism.
The most expansive definition of unsafe speech is anything that creators of “safe spaces” would find upsetting. Offensive = unsafe, and lots of people are offended most of the time now.
I thought postmodernism had banished truth, but lefties still use the word a lot. They seem to think that truth is still a real thing, but only for their own views and opinions.
Art+Deco,
“Jimmy Carter had some good impulses.”
Really? Perhaps I’ve forgotten, name two please.
Comedy; Billy Beer and the Killer Rabbit
As coincidence would have it, I read Your Heart Belongs To Me by Dean Koontz today. This is a quote from the book, “The hatred of truth is the taproot of violence. Keep in mind the roots of violence: Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance…the taproot…the killer’s ultimate and truest motivation…is the hatred of truth…the hatred of truth is a vice. From it comes pride and an enthusiasm for disorder.”
@Eva Marie:
There’s a lot of truth in what you have quoted. However, there’s another angle on Truth in our fallen human state:
Some Truths are unbearable; we will do anything to anyone in order not to have to face them directly. Sometimes this means that we commit personal (quickly) or societal (more slowly, but just as surely) suicide rather than face them. Some other times we kill, maim, or otherwise the bearer or even perhaps the signifier of some Truth we’d rather not have intrude.
Truth is a lovely abstract virtue. But there is never any guarantee that it will set you free.
I might be missing something, but strikes me that rebasing one’s late stage civilization on the noble pursuit of Truth could turn out not quite as intended.
And if this sounds like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor getting qualified applause from a Comment Troll with Girard on the Brain, then guilty as charged. Ain’t that the Truth.
Having said that, I’m not averse to bringing Truth to the Left in the same way that Vlad III brought it to the Turks. Fundamentals FTW 😛
AesopFan — maybe hardcopy or paperback?
that would still be recognized by folks of a certain age.
“AesopFan — maybe hardcopy or paperback?” – R2L
Good suggestion.
Even younger readers of the Kindle Age know that computers produce hardcopy printouts.
Zaphod on January 22, 2021 at 6:08 pm said:
Only one of whom said ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’
* * *
Churchill did get the last word over the British, who fired him after he saved their country and most of the world.
However, his revolving bust in the White House Oval Office is making my head spin.
I have added Lord Alanbrooke’s War Diaries to my wishlist.
“good old Article 58 (“Anti-Soviet Propaganda”), the one that landed Solzhenitsyn and millions of others in the gulag. Seems like we’re headed in the same direction in this country, under the rubric of “misinformation”.” – Hubert
Counting the days until quoting Solzhenitsyn will get you landed in the Cancellation Camps — which is already the case for actually quoting Martin Luther King.
Zaphod: yes, being a high-ranking Chekist was a risky business. Lot of turnover in the house on the embankment. One day you’re Minister of State Security; the next day the newspapers contain a cryptic announcement that you’ve been transferred to (say) the ministry for inland water transport; and the day after that you’re camp dust (at best) or something crumpled in the corner of a room in the basement of the Lubyanka. Your family too. That’s the system John Brennan voted for just before embarking on his career at CIA. It appears he was a good fit.
AesopFan: quoting the wrong people, or the right people in a disapproved way, probably won’t land you in a cancellation camp (yet), but it might get you on a watch list. Depends on how vicious and insecure the new administration is. Early indications = pretty vicious and insecure. I recently attended a webinar featuring William Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection Foundation and Amy Peikoff of Parler. The topic was “surviving the big tech purge”. Jacobson said that governments aren’t very good at a lot of things, but one thing they are very good at is spying and surveillance. He warned that privacy tools and practices are ineffective in the face of determined scrutiny by the state. It would be prudent to assume he’s right about that and that it has been true for a long time. Writing about the rise of the national security state in the U.S. during and after WWII, 20th-century military historian Walter Millis referred matter-of-factly to the FBI as “a secret police”. That was in 1956, in a popular Book of the Month Club selection that probably would have been on June Cleaver’s nightstand.
“Walter Millis referred matter-of-factly to the FBI as “a secret police”. That was in 1956, in a popular Book of the Month Club selection that probably would have been on June Cleaver’s nightstand.” – Hubert
People back then were smarter than we give them credit for.
If only they had kept it up.
And if only the people “defending conservatism” had been less like Bill Buckley and more like the regular folks they despised then as much as they do now.
On the subject of truth, media, and politics, attention should be paid to the NeverTrumpers now pretending to be bothered by Biden’s opening flurry of EOs. Rather than take the honest and honorable approach of acknowledging everything Biden’s doing was either predicted or predictable and they preferred it to Trump, they largely seem to be lying to themselves and everyone else about being “surprised” or “disappointed” in what’s happening.
Andrew Sullivan would be example #1, tweeting out his dismay at Biden’s promotion of Critical Race Theory after stridently clamoring for the defeat of Critical Race Theory opponent Donald Trump.
To me, it demonstrates the difference between the Communists and our current elite. Communists had/have an intellectual superstructure to explain and justify their actions. As massively flawed as it was, that superstructure allowed Communists to still behave somewhat rationally. They had actual reasons for what they did and when Pravda changed its tune, it was because a conscious decision was made to do so.
America’s elites don’t have any of that. There’s no actual text or philosophy or ideology governing them. They just think they should run things because people like them should run things.
Mike
Sullivan, the Pearl-clutching Homo Never Saw It Coming.
Puhleeeaseeee… How much can a Koala Bear?
Errr… I’d rather not know, if it’s all the same.
There is an old saying that hypocrits are people that lie to themselves and, naturally, they believe these lies.
However, I find their seeming inertia on finding therapeutics (HCL, Ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, etc.) and getting them out to the population as being medical malpractice. I also, think their total neglect of investigating possible protective supplements (Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Quercetin, Glutathione/NAC, Zinc, and Melatonin) is unforgivable as well.
This is all part of the Great Awakening.
Where humanity wakes up to their slave status in the matrix. Medical tyranny has been ongoing for a long time now. People just weren’t aware of it or rationalized it away, the same thing with Dark State shenanigans and Republican problems.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191016091334/https://tarbaby.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/
Being suppressed for using Solzhenitsyn’s words has already happened.
Really? Perhaps I’ve forgotten, name two please.
An interest in deregulating the price of petroleum and its derivatives, an interest in busting up the cartel governing air travel, an interest in scraping away the regulatory barnacles governing the trucking industry, an interest in assembling the crazy quilt of federal agencies into some sort of orderly arrangement, an interest in improving the performance of the civil service (which ran aground on Congress’ subservience to public employee unions), and an interest in simplifying the tax code (which ran aground on Congress’ crooked patron-client relationships). Also, after various feints had failed, he appointed Paul Volcker to run the Federal Reserve. (Alas, he wouldn’t stick by him; Reagan did).
they largely seem to be lying to themselves and everyone else about being “surprised” or “disappointed” in what’s happening.
NB, Andrew Sullivan is an idiosyncratic character who has since his arrival here in 1985 generally favored the Democratic Party. (Henry Fairlie, the other British expat on the patronage of Martin Peretz, could be described in similar terms). Some exceptions: he was stupefied by the venom directed at Robert Bork, thought Bill Clinton contemptible, and was friendly to George W Bush (preferring him to Earth Tones Gore) until the point it was clear that GWB wasn’t signing on to any project of instituting homosexual pseudogamy. He’s not a NeverTrumper, just has a set of priorities orthagonal to the common-and-garden battle lines in American politics.
As for the residue of NeverTrumpers, they’re all on the spectrum which runs from ‘shill’ to ‘vain fool’. The ones who could change their minds in response to new data did so at some point in the last six years. The ones left are the dregs. They’re like a bank’s non-performing loans. You thought in 2014 they were an asset, then you realized in some quarter of 2018 that they were worth nothing.
Mona Charen (to take one example) advised us that in order to foster a return to ‘civility’ and ‘decency’ we had to cast a ballot for Hunter Biden’s Big Guy. That’s when you figured out that the Ethics and Public Policy Center had for six years been paying a salary to a woman whose adult skill set consisted in sum of putting coherent sentences together and turning them in on time to her editors. Something can be coherent without being intelligent. What’s interesting about Charen is that long ago she marched through an elite college and a competitive law school, but never practiced law. She went into PR work where you write speeches for dignitaries and the like. I have known women like this. They have a certain quantum of ‘g’, but it is inaccessible to them unless they are trying to please a professor and work within a scaffolding he’d designed.
Back in the early days of the ‘net, when I was a far-more active participant, I had a standard sig line that was appended to every comment I made.
“The truth as I perceive it to be.
Your perception may be different.”
I could expend on that, but I doubt I need to here.
“He’s not a NeverTrumper, just has a set of priorities orthagonal to the common-and-garden battle lines in American politics.”
Sullivan does have priorities that don’t neatly fit the U.S. political discourse, though he’s clearly considered to be on the conservative side of that discourse by everyone else, but he is definitely a NeverTrumper. Here’s his tweet from August 9, 2019.
“Voting for Joe Biden feels like voting for some things we’ve lost and have one last chance to regain. Normalcy, generosity, civility, experience.”
https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1159907696646250496?lang=en
The NeverTrump giveaway there is the complete disregard for the job Trump was actually doing as President (and this was BEFORE the pandemic) and the invocation of “experience” without any concern for Biden’s actual record as a politician/legislator/leader. And of course, there’s the willful blindness to the abnormality, ungenerosity, and incivility of Trump’s critics.
NeverTrump isn’t a label that can be applied to every Right-ish or even Left-ish critic of The Donald. It’s largely appropriate only to those who have ignored or abandoned previously held beliefs and values in their hatred of Trump. Getting back to Sullivan specifically, he’s always criticized stuff like Critical Race Theory but Trump’s fight against CRT and the 99.99999999% certainty that a Biden win would empower CRT supporters meant less than nothing Sullivan.
Here’s the key line from Sullivan’s most recent BS on the subject:
“But Joe Biden has also shown this week that his other ambitions are much more radical.”
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/bidens-culture-war-aggression-fc4
He’s not saying “Yes, I knew electing Biden would open the flood gates to all this bad stuff but I still prefer it to Trump’s mean tweets.” He’s trying to imply that all this bad stuff was inconceivable until it just surprisingly happened.
Mike
The SWJs quest for Ultimate retributive Justice gets a 10 minute working over: the young have been told that Maoist Briganding with fill their lives with meaning.
Douglas Murray gives his advice in the last three minutes of this 10 minute video interview segment.
But almost ANYTHING else that hierarchy gaming and calculating when “right to speak” is warranted games and give yourself to the miracles we can do, start doing it, in place of the retribution/privilege game, pursue your genuine dreams — not these potted platitudinous mawking tribal banal obsessions.
Indeed.
Douglas Murray gives his advice in the last three minutes of this 10 minute video interview segment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocp1woOLABg
AesopFan: “People back then were smarter than we give them credit for. If only they had kept it up.”
You can say that again, except I always thought people “back then” were plenty smart. My parents were of that generation. They came of age during the Depression and WWII and understood how the world worked, what made the United States special, and the fragility of freedom. They were also superbly educated (in public schools). They did their bit. It was succeeding generations–very much including mine–that lost the plot and screwed things up. And here we are.
More Douglas Murray:
https://uncommonknowledgehoover.podbean.com/e/douglas-murray-and-his-continuing-fight-against-the-madness-of-crowds/
}}} certainly not a truthfest.
More of a “Truthifest”.
With Joe Biden, Truthiness will prevail!!
}}} Of course, there is probably an old German word for it, since they can stick the entire phrase into one term.
True, but they do it by creating a run-on word from all the other words involved. Like the French do with sentences, to make a 4672 word sentence…
Flamenwerfer == flame + thrower
Blitzkrieg == lightning + war
Schadenfreude == damage + joy
😉